http://tc.eserver.org/dir/User-Centered-Design A listing of the most recently indexed works about User Centered Design in the field of technical communication. en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/User-Centered-Design http://tc.eserver.org/35728.html http://tc.eserver.org/35728.html Treat others the way you would want to be treated. It seems ridiculous to think that one of the most common rules taught to children somehow hinders effective business communication when these children become adults. But it’s true. To be effective at communicating with customers (for example, internal audiences who buy into ideas or messages, or external audiences who buy products or services), one must turn away from this standard rule and focus instead on treating others the way they want to be treated. http://tc.eserver.org/35705.html http://tc.eserver.org/35705.html Be it web-based applications or online services, they are taking the Internet by storm. Many websites introducing these services are created and launched to get users to sign up and use the software (hopefully for a long-term). The question is: How do we get users from the unfamiliar zone into the interested zone and subsequently becoming a first time use? http://tc.eserver.org/35627.html http://tc.eserver.org/35627.html Seth Godin believes that everything reflects what you stand for—right down to your technical documents. Ever looked at Apple’s tech docs? http://tc.eserver.org/35629.html http://tc.eserver.org/35629.html On the web, write in small digestible chucks, which fit into the information hierarchy. To create your hierarchy, outline the website as you would for printed material. Then examine the site’s purpose and outline the main sections (e.g. words people use to navigate) and the links within those heads. Test it before it goes online. http://tc.eserver.org/35598.html http://tc.eserver.org/35598.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/35608.html http://tc.eserver.org/35608.html The Process and Power team hadn’t conducted contextual inquires before. Since the group was originally launched as a start-up within a larger organization, the Product Design team often found itself in an ad-hoc rapid process with Software Development (SWD) – working frantically to develop the right amount of specificity to keep the SWD machine cranking and the goal of first release clearly in sights. http://tc.eserver.org/35609.html http://tc.eserver.org/35609.html Our plan was to market Project Dragonfly virally. Going out now meant that we were a little early and many details were still on the to-do list. As a user centered design practitioner working with an Agile Development process, I was comfortable working in an iterative manner to engage users quickly so that we think through details and bring solutions forward. Yet something about this situation seemed different to me. We wanted the world to broadcast about the benefits of Project Dragonfly while our marketing efforts simply facilitated the conversation. http://tc.eserver.org/35572.html http://tc.eserver.org/35572.html As part of a project I'm working on, we are going to develop a comic-style collection of user scenarios to help communicate best practices around a security service we are offering. http://tc.eserver.org/35578.html http://tc.eserver.org/35578.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/35590.html http://tc.eserver.org/35590.html The site focuses on web usability, user research, usability testing, accessibility and standards focused design. http://tc.eserver.org/35505.html http://tc.eserver.org/35505.html Personas are a powerful tool for helping you to better understand the needs of your users. In this comic, drawn exclusively for Think Vitamin, you’ll learn more about Personas and how they’ll revolutionize the way you design and build web sites. http://tc.eserver.org/35506.html http://tc.eserver.org/35506.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/35507.html http://tc.eserver.org/35507.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/35508.html http://tc.eserver.org/35508.html We use personas because they are powerful design, measurement, and communication tools. We use them in design to help us avoid the elastic user problem--where "the user" is a total novice one minute and a technophile the next--as well as self-referential design, because designers are seldom representative of a product's target audience. Personas also help cut through assumptions that certain tasks are necessary; if a task doesn't directly help accomplish a goal, we can try to eliminate it. http://tc.eserver.org/35509.html http://tc.eserver.org/35509.html Using "personas" forces us to think carefully about who our customer is for each product — what they need and want and how they'll use it. We've come up with a few personas, and each one has a name and personality. Even for a book on business planning, for instance, "Sally Startup" has different needs than does "Vic Venture." http://tc.eserver.org/35487.html http://tc.eserver.org/35487.html It's not uncommon to hear people complaining about the poor user experience of some B2B and enterprise applications. Read through these top tips to help you design enterprise applications that offer a better user experience and increase productivity. http://tc.eserver.org/35493.html http://tc.eserver.org/35493.html When writing software, *please* don't give error messages that are only meaningful to developers of the software. Microsoft used to be awful for this: "System fault at DEAD:BEEF, please contact your system administrator". Which would've been cool, except that I *was* the system administrator. http://tc.eserver.org/35450.html http://tc.eserver.org/35450.html How can user-centered design principles be applied to technical communication? http://tc.eserver.org/35381.html http://tc.eserver.org/35381.html We don't really know what attention is, despite all the mumbo-jumbo spouted by Nobel laureates. My guess: most of what people say about attention is hogwash: mere anecdotes, or flimsy cultural norms offered up in a 'be productive, be happy' wrapper. Whenever business thinkers seek to apply an economic metaphor to human cognition, it is a mess: remember "knowledge management"? http://tc.eserver.org/35354.html http://tc.eserver.org/35354.html Discusses the impact of an agile software development process on usability testing. Reports opinions about usability testing within a company before and after a change to agile. Presents strategies to incorporate usability testing into agile product development. http://tc.eserver.org/35301.html http://tc.eserver.org/35301.html I have no idea what our users want. I do know they want information, and I know they want that information to be kept up to date as our product evolves and as far as those basic needs are concerned, I’m happy that we are meeting them. Beyond that I admit I’m not really that sure. http://tc.eserver.org/35271.html http://tc.eserver.org/35271.html One of the key characteristics of a manipulation technique versus related techniques like transformation is that the underlying data remains unchanged. The main thing we’re doing is changing the relationship - logical or physical - that one piece of data has with another. Reorganizing the data helps us to identify patterns that may otherwise not be apparent. In fact, it is almost certain that most patterns won’t be visible at first glance. Let’s start by taking a more detailed look at some of the processes that contribute to the manipulation of data. http://tc.eserver.org/35276.html http://tc.eserver.org/35276.html ACID is the Australasian Cooperative Research Centre for Interaction Design. We find better ways for people to interact with each other using communication technologies. Our expertise lies in helping people participate in the digital world. http://tc.eserver.org/35240.html http://tc.eserver.org/35240.html A collaborative approach enables clients to actively participate in the process, increasing the likelihood of achieving a collective vision for the project. This article focuses on the first step in the journey towards collaboratively developing a User Experience Strategy and is concerned specifically with how user stories are generated, themed and prioritized. http://tc.eserver.org/35248.html http://tc.eserver.org/35248.html This article describes how the author investigated the business case for the operation of online customer communities, and evaluated their impact. This was achieved through analysis of opinions from members in company-sponsored and member-initiated online customer communities. The research aimed to understand the relationship between customer and company in online communities, explore the motivations of customers to participate in online customer communities, and the benefits of these communities to companies. The main findings of the research revealed that online customer communities are beneficial to both company and customer. The evaluation concludes with a set of recommendations to companies on how online customer communities might be effectively created and managed. http://tc.eserver.org/35229.html http://tc.eserver.org/35229.html Given just a bit of information, we naturally crave more. Given a puzzle, we have to solve it. So, as interaction designers, how are we using this bit of insight into human behavior? http://tc.eserver.org/35098.html http://tc.eserver.org/35098.html I believe designers gather data to understand the personas that represent the users for whom they are designing a user interface. This is quite similar to the way actors must develop an understanding of their characters. So, developing their character-building and storytelling skills can help designers—just as it does actors. http://tc.eserver.org/35105.html http://tc.eserver.org/35105.html It's easy to bias study participants, whether in user testing or in card sorting, if they focus on matching stimulus words instead of working on the underlying problem. http://tc.eserver.org/34991.html http://tc.eserver.org/34991.html With the rise of Web pages providing interactive support for problem-solving or providing large amounts of information on which a person is expected to act, designers and writers need to consider how a person interacts with increasingly complex information-rich environments and how they intend to use the information. This article examines some of the theory underlying why people make errors early in the problem-solving process when they form an intention. Since these errors are cognitively-based and occur before any physical action, it is harder to analyze their cause or incorporate changes to reduce them in a design. It examines factors which contribute to user errors and which designers and writers must consider to produce documents which reduce user errors in forming intentions. http://tc.eserver.org/34945.html http://tc.eserver.org/34945.html Practitioners of User Centred Design method tend to focus only on immediate user goals and short focused usability. What is meant by long term usability and long term user experience? It needs due attention because only then the impact of products on our environment and health gains prominence! If we take a long term perspective then what we consider usable based on our immediate experience might turn out to be a disastrous product. http://tc.eserver.org/34947.html http://tc.eserver.org/34947.html Now that I have your attention, I’ll tell you up front that what Janea follows is not a rant. It’s not even a statement for or against Triplett political correctness. It’s a caution–words of warning about the creation of personas and the practice of user profiling. Even if one calls it the development of an archetype or ideal type, it is still a stereotype. http://tc.eserver.org/34948.html http://tc.eserver.org/34948.html The human mind is geared to derive meaning out of what it perceives. And this attribute is so fundamental to it, that it may even be the most basic building block of human cognition. In our zest to dig out some meaning from everything, we even go to extreme lengths. There have been diviners, oracles, and witch-doctors who try to read meaning from chicken entrails, yarrow sticks, tea leaves, bird flights, etc, with the same seriousness that a doctor reads an x-ray, or a hot-air balloonist reads weather patterns. The famous metaphysical saying “there is no such thing as a coincidence” is something which rides on the underlying philosophy that says - there is always a meaning in everything - if you can find it. Understandably, this philosophy can be a highly devious tool in the hands of occultist quacks, and yet the motive behind it is a fundamental driving force of human cognition. http://tc.eserver.org/34949.html http://tc.eserver.org/34949.html Having worked with personas before the method ever came to be known as personas there are, from my research and practical experience, three important areas that have to be considered: the data material, engagement in the personas descriptions, and buy-in from the organization which is part of the development process whether it is redesign or a development from scratch. This is the rationale behind my development of 10 steps to personas, an attempt to cover the entire process from initial data gathering to ongoing development. http://tc.eserver.org/34953.html http://tc.eserver.org/34953.html There is so much discussion about user personas, but very few examples are reported on Internet with some evidence of its actual usage. So here is a persona that I explored long back. It was useful! http://tc.eserver.org/34959.html http://tc.eserver.org/34959.html The purpose of this paper is first to highlight some of the social phenomena that are driving the design of people-centred information solutions; second, to develop a broad ontology of information behaviour research that serves to identify factors that should be taken into account when designing such solutions. Finally, the author illustrates how this knowledge is being applied in the design of people-centred inclusive information products and services. http://tc.eserver.org/34961.html http://tc.eserver.org/34961.html This paper seeks to understand how users know when to stop searching for more information when the information space is so saturated that there is no certainty that the relevant information has been identified. http://tc.eserver.org/34962.html http://tc.eserver.org/34962.html This study seeks to apply ecological psychology's concept of "affordance" to graduate students' information behavior in the academic library, and to explore the extent to which the affordances experienced by graduate students differed from the affordances librarians were attempting to provide. http://tc.eserver.org/34963.html http://tc.eserver.org/34963.html This article aims to examine a particular sub-set of human information behavior that has been largely overlooked in the library and information science (LIS) literature; how people are socialized to create and use information. http://tc.eserver.org/34964.html http://tc.eserver.org/34964.html The purpose of this research is to explore a method for the determination of users' representations of search engines, formed during their interaction with these systems. Determines the extent to which these elicited "mental models" indicate the system aspects of importance to the user and from this their evaluative view of these tools. http://tc.eserver.org/34966.html http://tc.eserver.org/34966.html The purpose of this research is to analyse the behaviour of the users of a package of electronic journals using the data of consumption per IP address. The paper analyses the data of consumption at the University of Barcelona of 31 electronic journals of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in 2003. Data of sessions, articles downloaded and abstracts viewed were analysed. http://tc.eserver.org/34811.html http://tc.eserver.org/34811.html Persuasion design embeds various forms of influence and “choice architectures” in products and services to maximize the likelihood of positive behavior change. The challenge for many product designers is that persuasion design can seem full of tricks that diminish the integrity of the designer. But this approach focuses on direct outcomes, not implicit goals as is so often the case with the UCD approach. http://tc.eserver.org/34775.html http://tc.eserver.org/34775.html One of the reasons that technical communicators ought to know the business processes of their users (or at least the reasons they’re using the product) is to generate effective examples in the documentation. http://tc.eserver.org/34711.html http://tc.eserver.org/34711.html Part of the problem in our attempt to demonstrate value is that our help deliverables look the same as they did 15 years ago, more or less. Online help and a PDF manual. It’s not a format that engages users. The web marches forward with innovation after innovation, while the technical communicators are figuratively hunched over keyboards, staring at CRT monitors, wearing 1950s horn-rimmed glasses, typing away. http://tc.eserver.org/34637.html http://tc.eserver.org/34637.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/34638.html http://tc.eserver.org/34638.html In this presentation, Joe Sokohl talks about gathering user research prior to designing and implementing your help deliverables. http://tc.eserver.org/34622.html http://tc.eserver.org/34622.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/34613.html http://tc.eserver.org/34613.html What FAQ pages have become are elephant graveyards of non-information, the equivalent of the Miscellaneous file folder, the place where information-we-didn’t-know-where-to-put was dumped. The challenge of creating a FAQ page that customers will find useful has several aspects to it, but can be accomplished with a lot of planning and a little strategic work. http://tc.eserver.org/34587.html http://tc.eserver.org/34587.html Although there will always be a need for people to explain technical material non-technical people, Ellis Pratt said, others may be doing it instead, through the formats users prefer. To survive, technical writers may need to morph into content strategists, managing the information in a systematic way rather than merely creating it. http://tc.eserver.org/34552.html http://tc.eserver.org/34552.html Users want to know how to do things, and not be told what a piece of software or hardware can do. And good those users can adapt, can work around any ignorance they have, and when needed fill in any gaps in their knowledge. http://tc.eserver.org/34540.html http://tc.eserver.org/34540.html Even on the Web, world dominance must be achieved one country at a time. While Facebook has long been the largest social network in the world, and should soon pass MySpace in the U.S., it is not the largest social network in every country. http://tc.eserver.org/34517.html http://tc.eserver.org/34517.html Technical writing is a profession in transition. The way companies think of, use, and manage the people who help users make sense of and use products is absolutely changing. A lot of companies have started to use the term “information developer” to describe their technical writing positions. I don’t really care what label the profession chooses for itself, but I do know this: if technical writers don’t transition more than their job title then they will be missing out on a huge opportunity to move from the “gotta do it” category into the “can’t live without it” one. http://tc.eserver.org/34501.html http://tc.eserver.org/34501.html The out-of-box experience (OOBE) describes the user's 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. http://tc.eserver.org/34496.html http://tc.eserver.org/34496.html Test-driven development or TDD is a widely accepted practice used by agile software development teams of many flavors – not only Extreme Programming teams. For each small bit of functionality they code, programmers first write unit tests, then they write the code that makes those unit tests pass. TDD is seen as a design tool, since it forces the programmer to think about many aspects of each feature before coding. http://tc.eserver.org/34456.html http://tc.eserver.org/34456.html The use of personas as a method for communicating user requirements in collaborative design environments is well established. However, very little research has been conducted to quantify the benefits of using this technique. The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of using personas. An experiment was conducted over a period of 5 weeks using students from NCAD. The results showed that, through using personas, designs with superior usability characteristics were produced. They also indicate that using personas provides a significant advantage during the research and conceptualisation stages of the design process (supporting previously unfounded claims). The study also investigated the effects of using different presentation methods to present personas and concluded that photographs worked better than illustrations, and that visual storyboards were more effective in presenting task scenarios than text only versions. http://tc.eserver.org/34458.html http://tc.eserver.org/34458.html User centred design can be a useful and speedy way of increasing efficiency and hence reducing costs. More often that not, design is seen as a way of increasing sales, attracting eyeballs or retaining customers. However at Frontend we've noticed that some of our most successful projects concentrate on cost-reduction and business efficiency. Here's a few ways we've used user centred design to help our clients save money. http://tc.eserver.org/34459.html http://tc.eserver.org/34459.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/34465.html http://tc.eserver.org/34465.html The key principal of UCD is integrating users that represent the profiles of the target user group/s into the development process. Typically, friends, family and (most definitely) colleagues are not representative of the target user base! However, they’re nearly always free with advice. But the validity of this advice is often questionable. In order to integrate unbiased user feedback into the process the following are key steps in a UCD process. http://tc.eserver.org/34466.html http://tc.eserver.org/34466.html Could a charter of rights for the user of web applications lead to the design of user-centred interfaces, better user experience and avoid causing frustration, irritation and consequently lost business? The following is an attempt to outline a charter of rights for the user of web applications. http://tc.eserver.org/34444.html http://tc.eserver.org/34444.html Why do product manuals sound formal and stiff-upper-lipped? Why don’t users read manuals? These questions have haunted the precincts of Technical Writing for quite some time now. From what I have seen in Indian writers, I am forced to conclude that English Composition, as we were taught in school, is the culprit. http://tc.eserver.org/34390.html http://tc.eserver.org/34390.html While system-centered places the system and programmer at the center of the design, and user-friendly considers the users, user-centered design put the user at the center of the design. What better way to design for the real needs, tasks, skills, knowledge, and behaviors of the users? http://tc.eserver.org/34388.html http://tc.eserver.org/34388.html In the dim distant past, some of us used to distinguish our work from the masses by declaring proudly that we were ‘user-centered’. At one time this actually meant you did things differently and put a premium on the ability of real people to exploit a product or service. While the concern remains, and there are many examples of designs that really need to revisit their ideas about users, I find the term ‘user-centered’ to have little real meaning anymore. http://tc.eserver.org/34378.html http://tc.eserver.org/34378.html Users would save time by reading the manual, but instead they try to figure the application out themselves and then get lost/frustrated as they end up spending even more time getting up to speed with the application. http://tc.eserver.org/34367.html http://tc.eserver.org/34367.html Clients, like other humans, often fear what they don't understand. Daniel Ritzenthaler explains how sound goal-setting, documentation, and communication strategies can bridge the gap between a designer's intuition and a client's need for proof. http://tc.eserver.org/34368.html http://tc.eserver.org/34368.html The web, with its low barrier to entry and permeable social boundaries, is the ultimate medium through which to explore the finer points of the wisdom of crowds. You’re surrounded by online examples: Google’s search results. BitTorrent. The “Most E-mailed” stories on your favorite news site. Each is powered by wisdom gleaned from crowds online. You need a few things to enable online crowds to be wise. http://tc.eserver.org/34339.html http://tc.eserver.org/34339.html We live in an era of information overload, the just-google overload. And, because everyone can write (!), we also live with community-contributed growliths such as Wikipedia. http://tc.eserver.org/34325.html http://tc.eserver.org/34325.html This is not going to be an article about personas or even what distinguishes a good persona from a bad one. Instead, this article is about the ingredients we can draw on when creating audience models and some alternative ways of communicating the results of an audience analysis. First, however, let me briefly discuss what we generally mean when we talk about personas and the role they play in the design and development process. http://tc.eserver.org/34326.html http://tc.eserver.org/34326.html In this article, I will outline an approach to gleaning insights from primary qualitative research data. This article is not a how-to for creating the design tools that are often the outputs of primary qualitative user research—such as personas, mental models, or user scenarios. Instead, it identifies an approach to generating overarching insights, regardless of the design tool you want to create. http://tc.eserver.org/34328.html http://tc.eserver.org/34328.html If we really do believe in the importance of the audience, the reader, the user, then how have we changed our practice to reflect the changing characteristics, competencies and even literacies of our readers? Have our readers changed over the past few years? The evidence points to the answer being a resounding yes! http://tc.eserver.org/34334.html http://tc.eserver.org/34334.html Almost 2 million book titles were published in the US alone, compared to more than the 1.3 million books published in the preceding 100 years. This change in the amount of information available for consumption is starting to change the way people read. How do we address the problem of information overload? Through good writing, and good information architecture. http://tc.eserver.org/34308.html http://tc.eserver.org/34308.html Web developers frequently launch websites with self-absorbed web copy, which turns off visitors and kills conversions. Who’s to blame? Self-absorbed copywriters and business owners. To engage prospects and turn them into customers, web copy needs to appeal to the visitor’s self-interest. http://tc.eserver.org/34283.html http://tc.eserver.org/34283.html You will not draw any slides—in fact do not even launch PowerPoint—until step eight, 80% of the way through the process. Typically, when you want to create a presentation, you open PowerPoint and start creating slides. Slide one, slide two, … slide seventeen… what I am trying to say again? Am I making my point? http://tc.eserver.org/34252.html http://tc.eserver.org/34252.html In this article, my colleague and I provide strategies, tips, and approaches we’ve learned in creating quick reference guides for software documentation projects. http://tc.eserver.org/34178.html http://tc.eserver.org/34178.html Understanding the extent to which people’s search behaviors differ in terms of the interaction flow and information targeted is important in designing interfaces to help World Wide Web users search more effectively. In this paper we describe a longitudinal log-based study that investigated variability in people’s interaction behavior when engaged in search-related activities on the Web. We analyze the search interactions of more than two thousand volunteer users over a five-month period, with the aim of characterizing differences in their interaction styles. The findings of our study suggest that there are dramatic differences in variability in key aspects of the interaction within and between users, and within and between the search queries they submit. Our findings also suggest two classes of extreme user--navigators and explorers--whose search interaction is highly consistent or highly variable. Lessons learned from these users can inform the design of tools to support effective Web-search interactions for everyone. http://tc.eserver.org/34179.html http://tc.eserver.org/34179.html Workers in organizations frequently request help from assistants by sending request messages that express information intent: an intention to update data in an information system. Human assistants spend a significant amount of time and effort processing these requests. For example, human-resource assistants process requests to update personnel records, and executive assistants process requests to schedule conference rooms or to make travel reservations. To process the intent of a request, an assistant reads the request and then locates, completes, and submits a form that corresponds to the expressed intent. Automatically or semi-automatically processing the intent expressed in a request on behalf of an assistant would ease the mundane and repetitive nature of this kind of work. http://tc.eserver.org/34170.html http://tc.eserver.org/34170.html All of the members of the best teams could tell us, with relative ease, the top five business goals of their application, the top five user types the application was to serve, and the top five platform capabilities and limitations they had to work within. And, when questioned more deeply, each team member revealed an appreciation and understanding of the challenges and goals of their teammates almost as well as their own. http://tc.eserver.org/34118.html http://tc.eserver.org/34118.html If you cater to the younger group, you risk alienating your most senior people (talented, expensive, hard-to-replace experts; people you don't want to lose to the competition; people with great political capital in the organization, who can perhaps defeat an IT initiative by pushing back hard). On the other hand, if you cater to the older group, you risk alienating the younger workers; and you risk keeping obsolete systems in place far longer than you should, making future replacement that much more difficult while also impeding business objectives, etc. http://tc.eserver.org/34121.html http://tc.eserver.org/34121.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/34100.html http://tc.eserver.org/34100.html Fluid layouts are an undervalued commodity in web design. They put control of our designs firmly in the hands of our users and their browsing habits. They’ve also utterly failed to seize the imagination of web designers. http://tc.eserver.org/34105.html http://tc.eserver.org/34105.html The parallels between the theories of technical communications and those of web design are very similar, the key aim is to keep the audience in mind at all times. The way you structure and present the information is also important, as is a sense of usability of the content itself. http://tc.eserver.org/34093.html http://tc.eserver.org/34093.html User assistance can add value to a product or Web service’s business model by influencing how deeply users adopt new features or services. As more products employ pay-as-you-go models like that of SaaS (Software as a Service), the contribution user assistance makes becomes increasingly more important. http://tc.eserver.org/34065.html http://tc.eserver.org/34065.html Does a truly intuitive user interface exist? The author of this blog post doesn't think so. To create one, designers and developers really need to put the wrecking ball to the UI as it is now. http://tc.eserver.org/34049.html http://tc.eserver.org/34049.html Empathy is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. We have an ability to imagine things the way that others see them and how it makes them feel. We don’t even have to have a disability ourselves. Accessibility is NOT a checklist. Accessibility is about usability. Accessibility is a paradigm shift. Accessibility is a personal issue. http://tc.eserver.org/33934.html http://tc.eserver.org/33934.html Having determined to collect and share with you the top ten definitions of User Experience Design from the most credible sources, and so you to form your own, say, meta impression, I found the network falling just short. So, here are the top seven, with an invitation to you to contribute those definitions of user experience design (full three terms) that you find or know of. Inclusion is conditional, however, on a credibility standard that can only be defined as “secret sauce.” http://tc.eserver.org/33935.html http://tc.eserver.org/33935.html User experience design can sometimes be a slippery term. With all the other often used terms that float around in its realm in the technology and web space: interaction design, information architecture, human computer interaction, human factors engineering, usability, and user interface design. People often end up asking “what is the difference between all these fields and which one do I need?” This article examines the term and field of user experience to plainly extrapolate its meaning and connect the dots with these other fields. http://tc.eserver.org/33936.html http://tc.eserver.org/33936.html User experience design is a subset of the field of experience design which pertains to the creation of the architecture and interaction models which impact a user's perception of a device or system. The scope of the field is directed at affecting "all aspects of the user’s interaction with the product: how it is perceived, learned, and used." User experience design, most often abbreviated UX, but sometimes UE, is a term used to describe the overarching experience a person has as a result of their interactions with a particular product or service, its delivery, and related artifacts, according to their design. http://tc.eserver.org/33938.html http://tc.eserver.org/33938.html The term “user experience” or UX has been getting a lot of play, but many businesses are confused about what it actually is and how crucial it is to their success. I asked some of the most influential and widely respected practitioners in UX what they consider to be the biggest misperceptions of what we do. The result is a top 10 list to debunk the myths. http://tc.eserver.org/33942.html http://tc.eserver.org/33942.html While your designs can never control people, they can encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior. The psychologist Kurt Lewin developed an equation that explains why people do the crazy things they do. Lewin asserts that behavior is a function of a person and his environment: Bf(P,E). You can’t change a person’s nature, but you can design the environment he moves around in. Let’s explore some of Alexander’s patterns I’ve observed in my work and the design work of my fellow practitioners. http://tc.eserver.org/33944.html http://tc.eserver.org/33944.html Despite the ubiquity of reading on the web, readers remain a neglected audience. Much of our talk about web design revolves around a sense of movement: users are thought to be finding, searching, skimming, looking. We measure how frequently they click but not how long they stay on the page. We concern ourselves with their travel and participation—how they move from page to page, who they talk to when they get there—but forget the needs of those whose purpose is to be still. Readers flourish when they have space—some distance from the hubbub of the crowds—and as web designers, there is yet much we can do to help them carve out that space. http://tc.eserver.org/33947.html http://tc.eserver.org/33947.html The words we use when we search are not always the words we like to read when we arrive at a website. Over the years, I have discovered that the way we think and the words we use when we search give strong clues as to what we want, but only clues. The words that will help us complete the task we came to the website to complete can be subtly-and sometimes substantially different-to the words we used when searching for it. http://tc.eserver.org/33948.html http://tc.eserver.org/33948.html For users, Web 2.0 was all about reorganizing web-based practices around Friends. For many users, direct communication tools like email and IM were used to communicate with one's closest and dearest while online communities were tools for connecting with strangers around shared interests. Web 2.0 reworked all of that by allowing users to connect in new ways. While many of the tools may have been designed to help people find others, what Web 2.0 showed was that people really wanted a way to connect with those that they already knew in new ways. Even tools like MySpace and Facebook which are typically labeled social networkING sites were never really about networking for most users. They were about socializing inside of pre-existing networks. http://tc.eserver.org/33894.html http://tc.eserver.org/33894.html I should never fully trust anyone on a project. I don’t mean this disrespectfully, because I work with competent, talented professionals. But no one has the full picture of how the application will truly work. The quality assurance (QA) engineer usually has the clearest picture. The program manager and project manager are often living in a slightly different world, full of a vision of how the product should work and how they expect users to interact with it, but sometimes they’re missing important nuances in the actual implementation. The interaction designer builds prototypes and assumes the developers will build them to spec, but since the prototypes are usually HTML-based, and not in Java or .NET, variances are inevitable. http://tc.eserver.org/33865.html http://tc.eserver.org/33865.html In recessionary times, organisations should focus on getting sales from existing customers - so customer retention becomes ever more important. http://tc.eserver.org/33793.html http://tc.eserver.org/33793.html The realization of SOA through Web services is intrinsically driven by core XML technologies. The emergence of service-oriented design principles, however, is affecting how XML technologies are utilized and positioned within contemporary solutions. http://tc.eserver.org/33665.html http://tc.eserver.org/33665.html A good starting point for planning the future of your website is to analyze what you already have. To some extent we are doing this all the time. That is how new projects happen. However, a more formal approach helps to better inform your decision-making throughout the web project. There are two ways to better understand your current website: qualitative and quantitative. http://tc.eserver.org/33647.html http://tc.eserver.org/33647.html Who are your users? How do they work? How do your products fit into their routines? Filippo discusses audience analysis and developing user profiles to create effective user assistance. http://tc.eserver.org/33581.html http://tc.eserver.org/33581.html Adaptive Path’s Peter Merholz recently talked to the founder of User Interface Engineering Jared Spool about user research. http://tc.eserver.org/33582.html http://tc.eserver.org/33582.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33475.html http://tc.eserver.org/33475.html As some in our profession have come to realize, social media and use of the Web in general have changed (and are still changing) the way in which people access and use information. http://tc.eserver.org/33463.html http://tc.eserver.org/33463.html Contingency design is design for when things go wrong. It's the error messaging, graphic design, instructive text, information architecture, backend system, and customer service that helps visitors get back on track after a problem occurs. http://tc.eserver.org/33436.html http://tc.eserver.org/33436.html Persuasive navigation is navigation that persuades a user to do something. That something can be anything that you want the user to do—buy a product, sign up for a newsletter, or download a game. By understanding user needs and matching them up with business goals, you can persuade users to go where you want them to go, making them happy at the same time. http://tc.eserver.org/33437.html http://tc.eserver.org/33437.html Whenever visitors land on your web site, they consciously or subconsciously deal with five issues until they're satisfied, or better yet, delighted. These five issues will either induce the visitor to take the action you want them to take, or a lack of satisfaction may push them to find a competitor. None of these five issues is easy to measure. None has objective factors that are easily influenced. But all are nonetheless key to converting visitors. http://tc.eserver.org/33443.html http://tc.eserver.org/33443.html Personalization has rarely been implemented well. Its failure is usually because of a lack of understanding of customer behavior. http://tc.eserver.org/33371.html http://tc.eserver.org/33371.html I’d personally love a computer experience which emphasized ‘flow’ and gradual, constant change. No longer would every little change pull your attention away from an important task. Instead, those Mail notifications, system messages and the like could gently change without you noticing, until you decided you wanted to actually look. http://tc.eserver.org/33234.html http://tc.eserver.org/33234.html In 2001, Bernard determined that users were able to form a schema for the location of web objects on informational websites. The current study investigates whether users' expectations have changed since the 2001 study. Changes were found in the expected location of the site search engine, internal links, and advertisements. http://tc.eserver.org/33220.html http://tc.eserver.org/33220.html One of the chronic challenges that will be highlighted by emotional design is site download speed. There are many sources of delay in Web site and application delivery. http://tc.eserver.org/33222.html http://tc.eserver.org/33222.html People are impatient on the Web. They are function and task orientated. They want to get things done as quickly as possible. The average person is still accessing the Web over a 56 KB modem. You should therefore have a major focus on 'light' webpages if you want to increase reader-satisfaction. http://tc.eserver.org/33223.html http://tc.eserver.org/33223.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33224.html http://tc.eserver.org/33224.html When your Web pages load, you can't afford to let people be bored by a blank page at the outset. This article gives some tips on how to avoid common page loading problems and give users that valuable information they want even as more downloading takes place. http://tc.eserver.org/33138.html http://tc.eserver.org/33138.html This is a simple technique that enables one person or a group of people to create a categorisation of objects so that it is understood which objects belong with which other objects. Objects can be anything: menu items, blocks of content, proposed web pages, URLs. This method can be used by practically anybody after a few minutes practice. http://tc.eserver.org/33139.html http://tc.eserver.org/33139.html Card Sorting is a technique for exploring how people group items, so that you can develop structures that maximize the probability of users being able to find items. http://tc.eserver.org/33140.html http://tc.eserver.org/33140.html Card sorting is a user testing method for organising data into structure. There’s a lot of information about on what they are, how to conduct them. Problem is, they’re all over the place and mostly they’re written by scientists so tend to be a little difficult to grasp and bogged down in analysis (which can take over your life if you let it!) I’ve decided to document my understanding of how to plan, conduct and analyse a card sort, from a practitioners point of view. http://tc.eserver.org/33141.html http://tc.eserver.org/33141.html You should now have everything ready to conduct your card sorts - cards, users, observers and most importantly a clear objective of what you want to achieve. http://tc.eserver.org/33142.html http://tc.eserver.org/33142.html In the final part of the article I talk about perhaps the most important part of the procedure - Analysis. This is the part in which you can get the most bogged down. You must be thorough, ruthless and accurate. Card sorting won’t always give you the answer - it may just give you more questions. This is where the analysis comes in. http://tc.eserver.org/33158.html http://tc.eserver.org/33158.html Users’ “enjoyment” of a site is tied closely to how easily they can find the information they want and stay oriented at the same time. I think this is a given for technical communicators; we know that users want to get answers as fast as possible, and documentation must be navigable. http://tc.eserver.org/33160.html http://tc.eserver.org/33160.html This paper presents a case study in user-centred design as applied to the redesign of the Monash University web site. It begins with an overview of user-centred design which is then contrasted with traditional development processes. The case study provides some background information about the project and the choice of methodology, an outline of the user-centred design methods used, and the nature of the multi-disciplinary team responsible for the project. http://tc.eserver.org/33164.html http://tc.eserver.org/33164.html Today's software applications need to be both useful and usable, supporting simple and efficient completion of tasks by the intended user audience. Part 1 of this two-part series on user-centered design defined the essential activities of useful and usable software. Here in part 2, Lynn Percival and Jack Scanlon describe the applicability of these core activities across a range of development project types -- selection and possible customization of a vendor application, evolution and rewrite of an existing application, and creation of a new application. http://tc.eserver.org/33165.html http://tc.eserver.org/33165.html Today's software applications need to be both useful and usable, supporting simple and efficient completion of tasks by the intended user audience. Much has been written about methodologies for designing software that meets user needs. But little emphasis has been placed on what types of activities are truly essential in achieving these goals. Here in part 1 of this two-part article, the authors tap into their 30+ years of combined experience in applying such techniques to boil the design of useful and usable software down to its essential activities. http://tc.eserver.org/33166.html http://tc.eserver.org/33166.html User-centric design's (UCD's) aim is to enhance and improve the user's experience with software or a product. This principle has benefits, but can it translate seamlessly to the commercial Web design process? Do UCD principles result in a customer-centric Web site that satisfies the diverse needs of potentially millions of visitors? UCD complements the process of designing and optimizing a site for conversion, but it was never conceived to address the intricacies of building a persuasive system. http://tc.eserver.org/33167.html http://tc.eserver.org/33167.html The Web is about self-service. To achieve success in self-service you need to really understand how your visitors think and behave. If they are to serve themselves they must feel comfortable and confident. That requires getting to know their needs in a comprehensive manner. It requires an ongoing conversation with them. http://tc.eserver.org/33112.html http://tc.eserver.org/33112.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33113.html http://tc.eserver.org/33113.html Outlines some common objections to doing user research and provides some defense against them. http://tc.eserver.org/33105.html http://tc.eserver.org/33105.html Intranet developers and content owners are able to grab the attention of their users through momentum. Interest--caused by curiosity, marketing, word-of-mouth, or hype--is raised during initial rollout. And there will always be a surge in your web server's usage logs during this period. But once the novelty has worn off, will your intranet have enough true substance to transform that initial momentum into regular usage? http://tc.eserver.org/33110.html http://tc.eserver.org/33110.html Many intranets are structured around the organisational chart. It is well known that this method of grouping content is difficult for staff — they can’t find information if they don’t know who is responsible for it. However, it often seems too difficult to move from an organisational-based structure to a more intuitive topical structure. Before moving to a better structure it is necessary to identify why the intranet is currently designed around the organisational chart, and address these issues first. http://tc.eserver.org/33084.html http://tc.eserver.org/33084.html You can’t usefully deliver information to users that you haven’t personally met. This article discusses the challenges in delivering information to all staff within an organisation, and outlining practical approaches that ensure efforts spent publishing intranet content are not wasted. http://tc.eserver.org/33042.html http://tc.eserver.org/33042.html 很多人难以理解我的那篇“以人为中心的设计是有害的”文章。 （哈哈，下面这样说可能有些保守！关于这个问题，肯定有五百篇评论和博客文章。） 特别地，我没能够清楚地说明“以活动为中心的设计”是什么意思，以及它和“以人为中心的设计”是如何的不同。 一些人好像认为我彻底抛弃了我以前说过的话。另外一些人则简单地认为我疯了。还有一些人则急匆匆地出来解释我那样说的含义。 http://tc.eserver.org/33056.html http://tc.eserver.org/33056.html Moving an intranet structure from a producer logic to a user logic is probably the hardest thing an intranet manager will ever have to do, especially in large, complex organisations. http://tc.eserver.org/33059.html http://tc.eserver.org/33059.html The role of the developer is to ensure that their systems don't put undue stress on users simply for the sake of technology. Developing for technology alone helps no one. It may showcase the advances in the industry and impress those in-the-know; but after the oohing and aahing stop, it does little to ease the disconnect between the user and the tool. http://tc.eserver.org/33015.html http://tc.eserver.org/33015.html Personas are "hypothetical archetypes" of actual users. They are not real people, but they represent real people during the design process. A persona is a fictional characterization of a user. The purpose of personas is to make the users seem more real, to help designers keep realistic ideas of users throughout the design process.