Articles>Usability>User Centered Design

The Foundation of a Great User Experience

I’m part of the AEC User Experience Team at Autodesk. Our goal is to design a great user experience for our customers, but just what does that mean? Our definition of user experience focuses on all the touchpoints that current or new users have with our product. For example, the downloading of software trials is often the beginning of one’s user experience with a product. If you have to fill out forms that ask for too much information, (should “cell phone number” be a required field on a trial download form?) or present you with too many obstacles, the likelihood of a positive user experience will be low. Your interactions with technical support, documentation, the product, and even other products that you use, are all aspects of the user experience.

Teaching Users to Read

This may sound a little harsh, but you'll see, when you do usability tests, that there are quite a few users who simply do not read words that you put on the screen. If you pop up an error box of any sort, they simply will not read it.

Documentation Usability: A Few Things I’ve Learned from Watching Users

Even though your customers may not read manuals, your tech support team probably does, which means someone is reading the manuals and using them to help others. But if your users find it easier to call someone, wait on hold for an agent, and then ask the agent a question rather than find the answer in the help, maybe your help materials aren’t very usable. Maybe increasing the usability of your company’s documentation could alleviate the need users feel to seek answers from another source.

Usability Spotter #5: HP Laptop Touch Pads with Scroll Zones- Absence of Tactile Cue

Summary The issue with HP laptops that have a touch pad with a scroll zone contained it (as shown in image A) is that they do not provide a tactile cue for the user to help interpret what section of the touch pad the finger is positioned at. In the absence of a tactile cue, it is difficult for the user to determine whether the finger is on touch pad or the scroll zone without looking at it, resulting in the accidental scrolling on the screen when actually the user simply wants to move the cursor. The issue and multiple solutions are discussed ahead.

Out of Box Experience: Getting it Right First Time

The out of box experience (OOBE) describes the users first interaction with a product or service. In the technology sector this first experience invariably involves plugging stuff in, installing some software and crossing your fingers in the hope that the product will work. The problem is that, in far too many cases, it doesn’t.

What is an End-User Software Engineer?

To address the challenge of developing a shared understanding of the users that participate in each scenario we have developed a set of personas that describe the work styles, characteristics and motivations that are common to particular groups of people using our products. The personas help us communicate these characteristics by humanizing them, increasing the empathy that team members have for these fictional users.

Jared Spool on User Research Methods

Adaptive Path’s Peter Merholz recently talked to the founder of User Interface Engineering Jared Spool about user research.

Persona Non Grata

Everyone is mad for personas. They’ve permeated the highest and deepest levels of organizations, and have become a standard interaction design tool. Whole projects are now built around creating them, and there’s a feeling that once you get a half dozen or so, your design problems will be solved. Presumably, your personas solve them for you. The problem is, most teams build personas from the wrong kind of user information, or worse, base them on assumptions. It’s no surprise that a Web search for personas brings up an amazing variety of persona sets, and most of them are terrible.

How Did You Get Here?

One of the most overlooked aspects of designing a Web site is how users get to it. Separate factions are often devoted to promoting, designing, and maintaining a Web site, and the lack of communication and involvement can lead to apathy or confusion. Too frequently is it assumed that visitors are knowledgeable about the company and Web site, and that they enter through the home page. False assumptions about visitor entry can plague even a well-planned, well-designed site.

Five Things to Know About Users

Over the years, we've studied the usability of hundreds of product and web site designs. We've seen designs that were incredibly effective for users and designs that fell tremendously short. One emerging pattern in our ongoing research is that design teams that know a lot about their users are more likely to produce user experiences that are usable, effective, and pleasing.

Client Centered Design

What is the difference between user centered design and usability? Until writing this column I didn't have the faintest idea.

Designing for the "Average User"

User advocacy is one of the central goals of usability. User advocacy can be defined as the process an IT professional (with an interest in user experience) goes through in re-sensitizing herself to the world of the "average user."

Making Decisions About User Research

We know that we should do user research for projects. All the user-centred design material says so, we talk about it at conferences, we put it in proposals. We just know that it is a good thing to do. But when I talk to people about their actual projects, I find that very few people actually do user research. There are many many reasons (no time, no money, already know what users need etc etc etc). I think that part of the reason it doesn’t happen is also that we don’t have good tools to tell us just how much research to do, and even when it isn’t necessary at all to do research.

Why Users Can be Hard to Design For

To know the mind of others is one of the fundamental problems of being human. Much of our energy is spent trying to do so. For web designers, knowing the mind of users is complicated by having very little interaction with them. It is possible, on some projects, to design and redesign web sites without ever talking to one user.

Usability Evaluation of a University Portal Website

This article provides a summary of a usability evaluation of a university portal website. University faculty, staff, and student users were asked to complete representative search tasks and provide feedback on the portal usability. Several user interface design issues were found to impact user performance in terms of task success and perceived task difficulty, in addition to overall satisfaction. From these results, recommendations are made for university portal design related to the default 'home' page, channel customization and configuration, and placement of user-specific functions.

Switching Between Tools in Complex Applications

Usability practice needs a procedure to identify, record, count, and highlight tool switch events for study. This paper describes one that supports the trained observers on which User-Centered Design relies to detect problems and causes, and evaluate design changes.

User-Guide-Driven Development

In my work with Bumblebee I use an approach I call 'User-Guide-Driven Development,' or UGDD for short. The mechanics of UGDD is similar to that of Test-Driven Development (TDD), but before I write the test for a feature, I write a snippet of the user guide describing the feature I am about to implement.

Using Calculators for User Engagement

Calculators can play important roles on websites. They are especially popular for financial sites, where they can help users calculate mortgage payments, retirement needs, interest earned, and so on. They also appear on other sites, where users can calculate things as varied as their BMI (body mass index), carbon footprint, life expectancy, or gas mileage.

How Little Do Users Read?

On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

Of Mice and iPods, or The Death of the Designer

Computing technologies are becoming so familiar it can feel as if they have always been here. It is strange to think that the mouse, for instance, was invented by Doug Englebart in the seventies. He must encounter a degree of incredulity when he mentions this to people. “You invented the mouse? Really? How nice. Did you also invent the pen?”

Preparing for User Research Interviews: Seven Things to Remember

Interviewing is an artful skill that is at the core of a wide variety of research methods in user-centered design, including stakeholder interviews, contextual inquiry, usability testing, and focus groups. Consequently, a researcher’s skill in conducting interviews has a direct impact on the quality and accuracy of research findings and subsequent decisions about design. Skilled interviewers can conduct interviews that uncover the most important elements of a participant’s perspective on a task or a product in a manner that does not introduce interviewer bias. Companies hire user researchers and user-centered designers because they possess this very ability.

The Kind of Documentation Users Really Want

Have you ever asked your users what kind of training materials they want, or how they prefer to learn software? This kind of information is critical to figuring out what help deliverables to produce. But really when it comes down to it, there are only so many options — printed manuals, short guides, interactive flash guides, videos, online help, live training, reference cards, context-sensitive help, workbooks and exercises, or, usually the favorite, someone to stand by their computer and answer questions whenever they need help.

Extreme User Research

What is the biggest problem I face almost every time a client hires me to do something about a web project going awry? They don't know a thing about their users. They don't have a clue, whatsoever. Unbelievable but true!

When Geolocation Gets Too Clever

Geo-redirecting -- redirecting users to different parts of your website depending on their own geographical location -- is a neat trick. It is handy when your website has different messages or product offers for users from different countries or regions. But many website owners mistakenly assume that their geolocation software works every time. It doesn't!

User Skills Improving, But Only Slightly

Users now do basic operations with confidence and perform with skill on sites they use often. But when users try new sites, well-known usability problems still cause failures.

When Products Become Easy to Use, What's Next for Writers?

People who follow the right trends will someday lead them. Such an opportunity now lies in the hands of technical writers, as the computer field moves toward standardized, graphical, easy-to-use interfaces.

How to Embed Usability and UCD Internally

Integrating usability into any organisation can be a difficult and isolating experience. Get the lowdown on how to achieve this within your organisation.

New Technical Writer: Use the Persona to Create the Most Useful Section of Your User Document

A good User Document includes sections on how to set up, use, and care for the product. However, to create a great User Document, the technical writer should use the Persona, generated in the analysis of the User/Reader, to create the topics for the most useful section of the User Document. This article describes this procedure.

Five-Second Tests: Measuring Your Site's Content Pages

On your site, the content page is the user's most frequent final destination. This page contains the information the user came to the site to find. Sites often have hundreds, if not thousands (and in some cases, millions) of these critical pages. How can design teams be confident their content pages are understandable to users? How does a team ensure they've designed content pages that communicate the essential information effectively?

Conducting Usability Studies at User Group Meetings

In this day and age, getting closer to your user base is imperative for creating user-centric documentation. This paper discusses how the Technical Publications group at Mentor Graphics tapped into their annual User Group meeting (MUG) to conduct usability studies. We cover: Convincing management of the ROI of participating in the User Group meeting; establishing relationships with meeting organizers; defining proper "protocol" for interacting with users and other meeting attendees; planning for and dealing with equipment setup; recruiting users to the usability lab; considering and acquiring incentives for usability lab participants.

Practicing Persona Development: an In-House Case Study

As Technical Communicators, many of us were initiated into this industry with the oft-cited cliche, 'know thy audience.' But what does this really mean? To what extent must we 'know' our audience in order to deliver effective information products? The critical questions are, 'what tools and means can I use to sufficiently understand the needs of my audience? Rather than relying on the directives of Engineering and Marketing, how can I discover the true needs of my audience and develop a user-centered design? And how do I hone my skills at gathering and applying this crucial data?' One of the emerging trends in Technical Communications is to develop user 'personas' as a design tool. This paper presents 'real-world' advice and 'best practices' on using the persona methodology to design information products.

The Myth of "The User"

Instead of becoming computer users, like the cheery protagonists of Star Trek, we've become the computer used, like the gloomy inhabitants of Dilbert.

Issues in Sizing UCD Projects

Sizing UCD projects presents special challenges to usability practitioners and consultants. Each project and UCD methodology comes with its own set of variables that makes it difficult to accurately estimate resource requirements and completion times.

A "Way Last Resort"?

I recently made a career transition from technical writing to usability engineering. In my new position, I have been conducting site visits with customers in the area. During a recent visit, I found an opportunity to query a user, 'Mike,' about using online Help. Join Molly on her first experience watching a user try to work with documentation, an experience both illuminating and alarming.

IDEO's "Ten Faces"

Tom Kelly's latest book 'The 10 Faces of Innovation' internal personas are used to help illustrate traits critical in building an innovation culture.The Experience Archtect is included.

Progressive Disclosure

Progressive disclosure defers advanced or rarely used features to a secondary screen, making applications easier to learn and less error-prone.

Empirical Evaluation of a Popular Cellular Phone's Menu System: Theory Meets Practice

A usability assessment entailing a paper prototype was conducted to examine menu selection theories on a small screen device by determining the effectiveness, efficiency, and user satisfaction of a popular cellular phone's menu system. Outcomes of this study suggest that users prefer a less extensive menu structure on a small screen device. The investigation also covered factors of category classification and item labeling influencing user performance in menu selection. Research findings suggest that proper modifications in these areas could significantly enhance the system's usability and demonstrate the validity of paper-prototyping which is capable of detecting significant differences in usability measures among various model designs.

Growing a Business Website: Fix the Basics First

Clear content, simple navigation, and answers to customer questions have the biggest impact on business value. Advanced technology matters much less.

Users Interleave Sites and Genres

When working on business problems, users flitter among sites, alternating visits to different service genres. No single website defines the user experience on its own.

Dimensions of Usability: Defining the Conversation, Driving the Process

Have you ever wondered if your colleagues or clients really understand usability? Too often, standards or guidelines substitute for really engaging our business, technical and design colleagues in a discussion of what usability means. By looking at usability from five dimensions, we can create a consensus around usability goals and use that definition to provide the basis for planning user centered design activities.

可用性的维度：定义会话，推动进程

你有没有怀疑过你的同事或者客户是否真的理解“可用性”？在我们和同事的在商务、技术和设计讨论中谈论‘可用性’是什么时，经常充斥着一些标准和指导方针替代品。在本文中，我们通过了解可用性的五个维度，我们便能够围绕可用性目标达成一致的看法，并开始以这个可用性的定义为基础，来计划用户中心设计的工作。

Navigation: Left is Best

Web sites and Web applications require users to select from navigational options to access subsequent content pages. An important question relates to where the first navigational choices should be located on the page. Is the navigation better placed at the top of the page, on the left or right panels? If three clicks (i.e., three navigational level selections) are required to get to the desired content, should they be grouped together at the top, left, right, or split between different locations (e.g., select from the top, with the next selection[s] from the left, top or right)?

角色设计的方法

在我们着手开始内部网（译者注：本文中提到的内部网一词，指的是企事业单位中内部网中的在线应用，不是指硬件构架）或网站设计项目时，最重要的一点是了解用户需求。只有如此才有可能确定出产品功能和特色，最后保证项目的成功；也只有如此，才有可能保证设计出来的东西可以服务于不同级别和具有不同目标的用户。

人性的界面

我们常常看到这样的新闻报道：飞机坠毁夺走了好几百人的生命，某次工业事故导致几百万英镑的损失，某新发现的系统医疗错误致使数千病患重返医院。几个月后，公布的调查结果如下：操作机器设备时的人为错误导致了这些事故。人们使用‘人为错误’一词来表达‘操作上的错误’，而经常的情况是，这些‘人为错误’ 根本就是机器设备的人机界面设计或安装上本身固有的问题。低劣的人机界面会导致使用效率降低或者容易发生错误，严重的则会造成财产和生命损失。

Beyond Usability Testing: User-Centred Design and Organisational Maturity

What lies beyond usability testing? User-centred design, based on ISO standards. We discuss this approach and the organisational maturity needed to put it into action.

The User Advocate: Interactive Prototyping, Part 1: Easy PDF Prototyping

I've often observed that once wireframing begins, it's off to the races! In the rush to launch, we sometimes forget end-users. Is there a way to ensure that they get a voice during this always-hectic phase?

An Introduction to Personas and How to Create Them

There are many ways to identify the needs of users, such as usability testing, interviewing users, discussions with business stakeholders, and conducting surveys. However one technique that has grown in popularity and acceptance is the use of personas: the development of archetypal users to direct the vision and design of a web solution.

Collaboration Sessions: How to Lead Multidisciplinary Teams, Generate Buy-In, and Create Unified Design Views in Compressed Timeframes

I have participated in, led, and suffered major website redesign efforts. Whether at process-heavy consultancies, notable product companies, or design studios, all teams experience the same points of pain: late feedback, lack of common design vision, and complaints that individuals or teams didnt have enough input.

The Human Interface

The phrase 'human error' is taken to mean 'operator error', but more often than not the disaster is inherent in the design or installation of the human interface. Bad interfaces are slow or error prone to use. Bad interfaces cost money and cost lives.

Usability and User Experience Design: The Next Decade

Predicts that usability practitioners will need new skills to cope with changes in this field.

User-Centered Deliverables: Communicating the Right Things to the Right People

As usability professionals working on the Web, it is our responsibility to make sure our clients' sites communicate effectively to their intended audience. We make recommendations about what information the audience needs, how they expect it to be presented and how they’ll need to work with it once they’ve got it. But how often do we consider our own audience, the people we need to make our recommendations happen? Does one set of documentation meet the needs of all members of an interdisciplinary team? Probably not.

Personas, Participatory Design and Product Development: An Infrastructure for Engagement

The design of commercial products that are intended to serve millions of people has been a challenge for collaborative approaches. The creation and use of fictional users, concrete representations commonly referred to as 'personas', is a relatively new interaction design technique. It is not without problems and can be used inappropriately, but based on experience and analysis it has extraordinary potential. Not only can it be a powerful tool for true participation in design, it also forces designers to consider social and political aspects of design that otherwise often go unexamined.

Afraid So: Horrible Web Monstrosities

Here they come. Nightmare web sites that, from a usability perspective, are horrid monsters. When you're tired and in a hurry, you want a web site to quickly and easily provide relevant content to you, so you can solve a problem or perform some task. Discover common hideous impediments to web usability. WARNING: Not for the faint hearted!

Toward Integrating Our Research Scope: A Sociocultural Field Methodology

Technical communicators have recently become interested in user-centered design (UCD) for designing and evaluating technical genres. Yet, a critical examination of the field methods of UCD suggests that they suffer from unintegrated scope: an undesirably limiting focus on a particular level of scope (either the macroscopic level of human activity or the mesoscopic level of goal-directed action) in their theoretical underpinnings and data collection and analysis. This focus is often paired with the assumption that this particular level of scope causally affects what happens at the other levels. Both the focus and the assumption are at odds with sociocultural theories of human activity. This article lays out the problem of unintegrated scope and examines it through critical analyses of two field methods used in UCD research. It concludes by proposing an integrated-scope research methodology for UCD research, with roots in both sociocultural theory and the central issues of technical communication.

Altruistic vs. Narcissistic Web Sites

Users are repulsed by web sites that are narcissistic, egotistic, corporate-speak, hard to understand, and difficult to use. Users are attracted to and enjoy web sites that are altruistic, user-prioritized, user-focused, easy to understand, easy to use, and full of fresh, relevant content.

Involving Customers in Developing Usability Metrics

Usability metrics are standards to measure a product against and are critical to finding out whether the product is successful in the areas that are important to its users. You can miss critical observations during a usability test if you do not use metrics to test the product. This is especially true if you are testing a product for the first time and do not know what the test will uncover. This paper describes how to find out what users want out of your product and develop usability metrics through focus group and contextual inquiry research.

Critic to Creator: Recognizing Good Design

All too often, people in our field focus so much on pointing out the egregious interaction design mistakes that make it to market, we forget to pay attention to the good design that exists. Not only does it make our profession look bad if we are always complaining, but it also makes us less effective.

Getting from Research to Personas: Harnessing the Power of Data

The usefulness of personas in defining and designing interactive products has become more widely accepted in the last few years, but a lack of published information has, unfortunately, left room for a lot of misconceptions about how personas are created, and about what information actually comprises a persona. Although space does not permit a full treatment of persona creation in this article, I hope to highlight a few essential points.

Making Use of User Research

By focusing on how a product performs in the lab without broader knowledge of the user's environment and goals, measurement alone may be misleading. To get the most value and meaning out of user feedback it is important to choose the appropriate method for conducting and analyzing user research.

The Origin of Personas

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, published in 1998, introduced the use of personas as a practical interaction design tool. Based on the single-chapter discussion in that book, personas rapidly gained popularity in the software industry due to their unusual power and effectiveness. Had personas been developed in the laboratory, the full story of how they came to be would have been published long ago, but since their use developed over many years in both my practice as a software inventor and architectural consultant and the consulting work of Cooper designers, that is not the case. Since Inmates was published, many people have asked for the history of Cooper personas, and here it is.

Perfecting Your Personas

It's easy to assemble a set of user characteristics and call it a persona, but it's not so easy to create personas that are truly effective design and communication tools. If you have begun to create your own personas, here are some tips to help you perfect them.

Usability in Practice: Company Profile of Hylotek

Which companies are actually practicing usability, and what does usability mean to them? Who's investing time and money into usability, and what kind of return are they receiving on their investment in the real world?

Ethnographic Methods: What Anthropology Teaches Us About Effective Usability Research

When it comes to usability testing, the field of anthropology is offering new insight into effective research methodologies. Ethnography is a form of research that anthropologists developed to observe how people behave in their own environments — and it's catching on in product development.

OOBE Project: A Case Study in User-Friendly Hardware

Many people can't even program their VCR, let alone set up a new PC. As part of an industry-wide response to this problem, Epson America came up with the Users Digest. We hoped it would grab users' attention and hold it long enough to get them up and running without calling tech support. This paper relates the history of the User k Digest andprovides a guided tour of this innovative document.

Customer Partnering: Another Way to Gather User Data

Information developers have been using user-centered design principles for some time now. Many of the techniques available, however, do not provide the depth of knowledge needed to design more complex information products. Customer partnering sessions take place ofer a period of three or four months, allowing information developers to learn more about customer needs and how information products are used. Customer partnering relationships benefit both the company that funds the sessions and the customers who attend them.

Why Consumer Products Have Inferior User Experience

Physical products, from consumer electronics to cars, are needlessly complex because they're developed by insular companies that continue to ignore the growing usability trend.

Got Usability? Talking with Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen has brought usability to the attention of the general public, but within the user experience community he's been criticized by those who say he emphasizes a view that excludes other dimensions of user experience. So is he the defender of ease-of-use or the enemy of creativity?

Preference Does Not Equal Performance

People will swear up and down that they love a particular product. They will tell you that the colors are right, the size is perfect, and the information is exactly what they needed. However, until you watch and test users you will not see how well the product works. You will not find out if they really would continue using the product, in the right amount, at the right time, under the conditions you expected. People have a funny way of deciding when, where and how they will using something.

Stalking the User: Practical Field Research

Describes how technical communicators can use field research--observing people in their workplaces, homes, and schools--to gain a better understanding of user behavior.

Rethinking User-Centered Information Development

Often in the computer industry there is a tendency to provide information about the features of a system. However, customers usually purchase the system based on knowledge of its features, when they receive the product they need information on how to accomplish tasks. Developing task-oriented information requires a shift in perspective from what the computer technology can do, to what your customers want to do with the technology. The resulting information must be usercentered rather than feature-driven. These types of customer requirements demand afresh development approach.

Being User-Centered When Implementing a UCD Process

For those who are interested in usability – whether long-time advocates or newly introduced – this is a good time to introduce a user-centered design process.

Dimensions of Usability: Defining the Conversation, Driving the Process

Simplicity Costs Less and Works Better

If ordinary people have to use it, make it simple. You'll be doing your users a favour, and saving money too.

Tech-Support Tales: Internet Hard to Use for Novice Users

The Internet is still much too difficult to use for novice users. Specialized information appliances like WebTV reduce complexity but still involve considerable risk of user error.

Zipf Curves and Website Popularity

Much available data suggests that Web use follows a Zipf distribution. The figure shows the distribution of incoming page requests to www.sun.com during a one-month period last year. Each datapoint represents one page, with the x-axis showing pages sorted according to popularity: the first page is the most popular one (the home page), the second page is the one that received second-most requests that month, and so on until we reach page number 10,000 which was only requested a single time that month.

User-Driven Documentation: From Usability Testing to User Guide

Rockwell Software is a $90-million company specializing in plant automation software. Offices in West Allis, Wisconsin, and Mayfield Village, Ohio allow technical communicators to work closely with development teams to design, test, and release usable, consistent software and information products. While Rockwell Software’s information development process is a multi-faceted endeavor, this paper focuses on the following three steps we implement to create our information products: interviewing customers to establish information guidelines, conducting usability tests, and writing Getting Results guides.

Information Engineering for the 21st Century

Bowie urges technical communicators to spend less time creating documentation and more time designing products that people can use intuitively.

Little Machines: Understanding Users Understanding Interfaces

This paper questions the ubiquitous practice of supplying minimalist information to users, of making that information functional only, of assuming that the Shannon-Weaver communication model should govern online systems, and of ignoring the social implications of such a stance. Help systems that provide fast, temporary solutions without providing any background information lead to the danger of users completing tasks that they do not understand at all. (Word will help us write a legal pleading, even if we have no idea what one is.) As a result, we have help systems that attempt to be invisible and to provide tool instruction but not conceptual instruction. Such a system presents itself as a neutral tool, but it is actually an incomplete environment, denying both the complexity and alternative (and possibly improved) modes of thinking about the subject at hand.

Designing an Effective User Study

When it comes to learning about your users, a plethora of methods await you. But which one is best for your situation? The answer depends on many factors, including the kind of information you hope to discover, the time and budget you have available, and your access to users.

Designing the User-Centered Process Model: A Case Study

The case study involved the redesigning of NCR’s performance improvement model for developing information products, documentation, and training interventions for our customers. This process model, the Quality Information Products Process (QIPP) seeks to move information product developers away from an adversarial, compliance type model towards a quality improvement system that is grounded in the everyday practices of the users. The redesign effort was initiated during a review of the existing process as it related to a new corporate-wide product creation process which was recently implemented.

Low-Fidelity Prototyping for Technical Communicators

Technical communicators are responsible for a great deal of what the user sees and touches. This means that more technical communicators are becoming integrated members of product design teams, bringing their expertise into the group and taking the lead in designing and evaluating their information systems, Creating low-fidelity paper prototypes of software for customer feedback sessions is an effective methodfor gathering valuable user input early in development.

Strategies for Usability: Putting ISO Standards to Practice

Is your documentation and training a solution for complex product design? Whether designing software, hardware, documentation, online help, or a telecommunication network, a strategy for usability is essential to user-friendly design.

Field Studies: The Best Tool to Discover User Needs

The most valuable asset of a successful design team is the information they have about their users. When teams have the right information, the job of designing a powerful, intuitive, easy-to-use interface becomes tremendously easier. When they don't, every little design decision becomes a struggle. While techniques, such as focus groups, usability tests, and surveys, can lead to valuable insights, the most powerful tool in the toolbox is the 'field study'. Field studies get the team immersed in the environment of their users and allow them to observe critical details for which there is no other way of discovering.

Devil's Advocate

The problem with wearing the technical support hat, I discovered, is that it tends to slip over your ears. Over time, you stop hearing the shrill cries of the users you're supporting, then you stop listening so carefully, then you stop speaking the same language as they do. And since you're busy putting out fires all over the building, who has time to start listening again? Problem is, once you no longer empathize with 'them,' you forget that they've got their own unending stream of crises to deal with. But if you want to tame those devils, you're going to need to take the time to understand their needs as well as you understand your own, and find a solution that meets both sets of needs. More often than you'd suspect, the result is a win-win solution.

What Does Usability Mean: Looking Beyond ‘Ease of Use’

The definition of usability is sometimes reduced to 'easy to use,' but this over-simplifies the problem and provides little guidance for the user interface designer. A more precise definition can be used to understand user requirements, formulate usability goals and decide on the best techniques for usability evaluations. An understanding of the five characteristics of usability – effective, efficient, engaging, error tolerant, easy to learn – helps guide the user-centered design tasks to the goal of usable products.

User Experience Design for Working Web Sites and Applications

As Technical Communicators, we’re often added as members of software and web site development teams merely as an afterthought. Executives, managers, programmers, and other team members frequently view the results of our work—manuals, online help systems, tutorials, and other documents—as 'nice-to-have' additions to products. This pervasive attitude is certainly not healthy for the profession of technical communication... but it’s not good for the applications our organizations and clients produce either. When Technical Communicators working in an e-business unit as user advocates are given more responsibility and more authority over the 'user experience' of a web-based application, for instance, they affect the bottom-line. They increase hits, product buzz, and completed transactions. By moving beyond manuals, beyond help, and into the new role of User Experience Designer, we increase the value we add to services and products and increase our professional status within organizations.

Making Research-Based Design Decisions: What is the Best Way to Get User-Centered Research Results to Practitioners?

There are about 1,000 usability-related articles published each year. My guess is that less than 5% ever have any practical, long-term value to most usability practitioners. In some cases, the topics being studied are of little interest to practitioners. In many cases the research results are simply too hard for practitioners to find.

Alternatives To User Requirement Gathering

Of all the disciplines that go together to create a 'usability strategy', user requirement gathering is undoubtedly the most frequently misunderstood. Many product managers or webmasters will believe that they already know their users, perhaps because they have conducted some form of market research, or have a formal complaints and customer feedback programme in place. However, these techniques, discussed below, although similar in aspiration, should not be relied upon as a replacement for a full user-requirement gathering programme. That isn't to say that they do not have their uses of course, but rather that in terms of assisting in application or site design they can be unhelpful or even misleading.

So What Is User Requirements Gathering?

More than one reader has pointed out that our recent article 'Alternatives To User Requirement Gathering' spent plenty of time illustrating why certain methods were inappropriate for the task of requirement gathering, without actually detailing the correct way to undertake this type of research. In way of compensation, this week we provide some (brief) advice on this absolutely crucial area to successful application or site development.

Accessibility Meets Usability: A Plea for a Paramount and Concurrent User-Centered Design Approach to Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility for All

This paper identifies challenges for a user–centered design process with respect to infusing accessible design practices into electronic and information technology product development. Initially, it emphasizes that when user–centered design is paramount and concurrent with accessible design, electronic and information technology can be accessible for all. Next, it provides an overview of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Section 508. Last, it provides basic accessible design heuristics that can be integrated into the design process. It concludes with recommendations for a paramount and concurrent user–centered design approach to product development.

A Preliminary Report on Two Pilot Readability/Usability Studies

Companies are beginning to conduct readability studies to determine how to provide customers with usable sites. Results have been inconclusive, conflicting, and often contradicting results of printed text studies. To discover how users use web sites, two pilot studies were designed to examine users, their purposes, and their reading processes. Many results parallel those of previous studies. In addition, new results indicate we need to examine several new variables, including amount of usage, site-specific knowledge, conventionalization, print bias, gender and age.

Revising Letters to Veterans

A discussion of the process of making letters for veterans easier to understand.

Face to Face With Your Users: Running a Nondirected Interview

An interview is a funny situation. It's like a friendly conversation between strangers, but unlike the kind you may have on the bus. When chatting on the bus, people try very hard to agree with each other and to quickly communicate interesting information. Each person wants to be liked and adjusts the way they speak and what they say so as not to offend. This type of exchange is perfectly fine for maintaining civil society -- deeper exchanges can always happen as an acquaintance deepens -- but shallow banter isn't appropriate for an interview. You need to find out what someone is experiencing, what they're thinking, or what their real opinions are.

Finding the Right Users

If you’re using the eenie meenie method to select users for your research, perhaps it’s time you tried something a little more scientific. There is no such thing as sound user research without an airtight user-selection process behind it. No matter how good the observation and analysis, it’s all for naught if you’ve studied the wrong people. Too much “user research” is conducted, analyzed, and applied without anyone ever having spoken to users. Researchers then offer guidelines based on the needs and preferences of people who would never use the product in question. Relevant user research results depend on two factors: First, obviously, you’ll need to find people who are likely to use the product. Second, you’ll need to interview enough of them so that trends emerge from their collective behavior. These trends will indicate your primary design targets.

Nondirected Interviews: How to Get More Out of Your Research Questions

As user experience designers, a key component to nearly all the techniques we use in our practice is the one-on-one interview. It's the basis of requirements gathering, usability testing, and task analysis. In order to remove our personal biases, expectations and opinions from the questions asked, I practice a kind of questioning technique called the nondirected interview. The questions asked are at the heart of any interview. Following are a loose set of guidelines to help you frame questions in a way that elicits honest and accurate responses.

Listening to the Learners: A Case Study in Health Information Website Design

An important mantra of user-centered design is to 'know thy user.' Accomplishing this requires one to decide what should be known about the user and how to gather the information. In this paper, we focus on the specific instance where the user is a learner. Specifically, we describe our efforts to listen to the learners of an information website, the Arthritis Source, and to act on this information.

Elementos de Navegación y Orientación del Usuario

Los elementos de navegación y orientación tienen como función básica informar constantemente al usuario acerca de dónde se encuentra, que relación tiene el nodo web que está visualizando respecto al resto de la arquitectura del website, dónde ha estado y hacia dónde puede ir. El objetivo: no perder al usuario.

The Art of Being Human

Site visitors crave the sense that someone is there, within and behind your Web pages, your emails and newsletters. Dealing with the bare technology of online interactions is a cold experience for many, or even most of us. It makes us feel anxious. Technology isn't warm. It has no heart. It neither understands us, nor cares for us. For many Web sites, whether for businesses or organizations, we simply plug in and play the bare technology - the super-duper means of information delivery. All the site visitor sees and feels is the design, the interface, the links and the clicks. The experience is about as warm and human as banking with an ATM machine.