Tag Archives: usability

Usability – A Sign of Business Maturity

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Just about everybody is familiar with Facebook these days, prior to their IPO last year, Mark Zuckerberg announced that their company would stay cutting edge by  moving fast and breaking things. This is a concept that the company would fearlessly break new territory than settle in the dust. However as time moves on, Facebook is seeing the value in increasing their Usability behind the scenes before going into the spotlight with new features and designs. 

By collecting information about their users and testing new ideas they can predict the success of changes before they go live. These are some of the tenants that User Centered Design are based on.

How do you get started with User Centered Design? Well a good start is a Usability Strategy for success. This should include process for projects to follow that are based around:

  • Research and Observation
  • Interpreting Data and Design Ideas
  • Testing and Evaluation

There should also be project success criteria outline. Like how all of this sounds? I’m just getting started, more to come…

Using a Narrative Story in User Centered Design

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Part of the process of creating an easy to use application is sharing vision in a Narrative Story. This entails creating user empathy and explains what issue or pain point is going to be addressed by the software feature. These stories should use the  information collected by the same Contextual Inquiry process performed at customer visits that is also used to build personas.

The persona should be the star of the Narrative Story, and should leverage persona details. The narrative story should be part fact, and part imagination. It should paint a picture around the value of the features that are required to create a most viable product. The narrative should cover an actual sequence of events. It should tell a story around the users pain and frustrations, and it should include day to day information. The story should flow in a narrative sequential way exploring a series of events. Then the narrative should tell how the product should resolve the issue or conflict that the persona experiences.

A Narrative Story can follow a Story Spine like the following format:

Persona name and role, responsibilities….

Primarily concerned with …

(Cadence).. and list of repetitive, tedious or time consuming tasks that produces contrast in the users life.

Painpoint/Frustration

Painpoint/Frustration

Painpoint/Frustration

Persona really wants to…

For (length of time) this has been Persona’s reality.

Until one day, the persona was introduced to/found/adopted, etc…

Which allowed the persona to…(high level summary)

Ever since that day.. list improvements, delights.

Benefit

Benefit

Benefit

As a result Persona… conclude with how personas motivation/goal/pain point has been addressed. Include time/cost savings info (faster, more efficient, cheaper)…

What used to take (time/cost reduction or avoidance) now takes (shorter time/cost).

List how the persona feels now.. with the time/cost saved, the persona can….

Happy World Usability Day!

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What is World Usability Day?

It’s about making our world work better.
It’s about “Making Life Easy” and user friendly. Technology today is too hard to use. A cell phone should be as easy to access as a doorknob. In order to humanize a world that uses technology as an infrastructure for education, healthcare, transportation, government, communication, entertainment, work and other areas, we must develop these technologies in a way that serves people first…

World Usability Day was founded in 2005 as an initiative of the Usability Professionals’ Association to ensure that services and products important to human life are easier to access and simpler to use. Each year, on the second Thursday of November, over 200 events are organized in over 43 countries around the world to raise awareness for the general public, and train professionals in the tools and issues central to good usability research, development and practice.

For more information go to http://www.worldusabilityday.org

To Sort? Or not to Sort? That is the question.

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Have you ever been confused as to where to find an item on a website? Does the primary navigation always make sense? Are things hidden in sub-levels that are confusing? Do you know where something should be located on a website?

I have recently been tasked with creating the navigation for a complex web enabled application. I started by creating a list of Activities that the user should be able to perform on the site. From that I created a knowledge map of all of the areas, and I derived the Information Architecture from the map that I created. Technically Information Architecture should be based on the data collected from performing a Card Sorting Exercise.

What is card sorting? According to Jed Wood and Larry wood’s article from the Journal of Usability Studies, “Card sorting was originally developed by psychologists as a method to the study of how people organize and categorize their knowledge. As the name implies, the method originally consisted of researchers writing labels representing concepts (either or concrete) on cards, and then asking participants to sort (categorize) the cards into piles that were simliar in some way.”

As you may be able to guess, this could be very useful for finding out where users think things should be located on a website, or in a web enabled application. So I wonder, should I be able to use the information architecture that I generated from my own experience, or should this order be dictated by the users. I will look at the results of my validation exercise, and if I am not happy with the results, then I may have to look into performing a card sorting exercise of my own.

Mockup Madness

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I haven’t really had much time to write in my blog lately because I’ve been so busy creating mockups for the Sprints at work. I’ve been using Twitter much more actively than before, but I don’t really discuss Usability Topics on there. So far I think the integration of the Scrum process has been going very well. It’s encouraged communication, collaboration and exposes design issues much earlier in the process than waterfall.

There is one thing that has been in the back of my mind lately. It seems like the process tends to allow for the constant bandaging and improving of software that already exists. Some of the design issues that exist seem like they are ready for a complete redesign. Every time I see a project rushed out the door it makes me think of Alan Coopers quote: “There’s no group of consumers waiting for you to ship your bad product to market.” Not that I think we ship bad products, I think I work on a fantastic product that is extremely powerful and flexible. I would just like to see the UI updated. Being first to market seems to take a priority to the UX.