Tag Archives: User Experience

Decreasing the Knowledge Gap

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One of the considerations in interface design is that not only do you have to acknowledge that you are not the user, but that your users will all come from unique background experiences. During life our quest for knowledge takes us from zero at birth, and many strive for that unobtainable ‘all knowing’ status. Our experiences leave us somewhere in the middle at our ‘current’ knowledge point.

When we strive to do a new task that we have never performed before, that becomes our ‘target’ knowledge. Our goal to assist the user to get to their ‘target’ knowledge is to remove the gap between current, and target. Designers can use many techniques, but there are only 2 ways of moving a user from their current knowledge to their target knowledge, and that is either through training, or by moving the target closer to current by simplifying the design.

Often times when a user struggles with a task during User Testing, they will need a nudge in the right direction. Sometimes giving them a hint one time, will allow for them to accomplish the rest of the tasks (usually I remind them that left click, right click, and double click are all options). Usually the next time they are faced with the same challenge for which they received a nudge, they will glide past it without even giving it a second thought. I call this a “learn once, use many” situation — a pattern that is used consistently throughout the UI, a metaphor that makes sense.  If the user does not hesitate during the next encounter,  I will usually not suggest its removal.

The way to move the user from current knowledge to target knowledge by simplify the design is to do things like reducing the number of fields on a form, or stepping the user through the sections, or using dynamic displays so that the users actions determine their next steps. Requiring field validation informs the user immediately when they enter invalid information and makes it impossible for the user to proceed.

Another technique for simplification is to map out what we know about our users and their tasks starting with basic information and moving on to more complex concepts. You can use personas and scenarios to illustrate examples of levels of current knowledge starting points.

Jared Spool of UIE 18 discusses what he calls The Magic Elevator of Acquired Knowledge as a metaphor for a way to illustrate the Knowledge Gap and how it can be reduced.

Enough of the distractions, back to UX!

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I just finished watching a very good webinar by Forrester entitled  ‘The Current State of the Customer Experience’ by Bruce Temkin. You can view his information rich blog entitled Customer Experience Matters. I think that in light of the recent events that I’ve been working in depth on an application, and recently had my laptop stolen, and was sick for a few days that it felt good to get back to Human Factors related work. I also enjoyed reading the comments that other attendees were making in the chat area during the presentation.

Bruce’s presentation had several good tidbits of information. His focus was Customer Experience (CxP), and I focus on User Experience (UX), so it’s interesting to see where the lines are crossed between these two fields. I believe that the recession has put more of a focus on Customer Service than ever. It as become an initiative at my company to focus on our customers, and our users. The differentiation between CxP and UX is that CxP involves all of the possible channels that can also link to a product, or web-enabled application. I focus on how people use the software that we engineer, not all of the process in place for them to purchase it, or receive support for it.

I do think that UX and CxP are related though. As UX should also convey the brand message throughout the user experience. One person in the chat room suggested that great  experience = (value*usability)/expectation. User experience is often times tied to usability, but it also relates to value and expectation.

Also during my UX work today I stumbled across a very informative website that deems itself “Wise ways and words in all matters creative”. The URL is creatingminds.org, this seems to me to be a good online resource for principles, tools, articles and quotes as they pertain to creativity.

Why does User Experience lack credibility in some circles?

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This morning I read an article in Billing & OSS World Magazine about User Experience. The title of the article was Copping the ‘Customer Experience’ Buzzword and this is how the article began…

“I hate when I succumb to the use of buzzwords. So I came reluctantly to the term “customer experience.” It always struck me as psycho-babble B.S. — and I don’t mean Bachelor of Science — that some precocious second-year grad from the Acme School of Business Management came up with to get a bunch of old techheads to stop thinking about their icky old networks. And thinking it impossible to ever accurately measure the quality of individual or collective experiences, I cringed every time I let the phrase slip into an article, thinking myself a shill for whichever nameless marketeer had coined it.”

So my question is what has happened to this individual and to usability that would create this type of impression to anyone. One of my goals as a UX Evangelist has been to take the mystery out of usability and to make it understandable and digestible by everyone. I mean usability affects every aspect of our life, why would it be so intimidating, or what would have caused it to lose credibility, and be described as a buzz-word of all things?! Is it because good usability makes things so seamless to use that people don’t even notice it?

By the end of the article the author acknowledges that usability is becoming more credible and that more companies are investing in it. But it still seems like this is an area that remains mysterious to many of whom do not understand it. People seem to understand the concept of convenience, why do they not understand ease of use?

As this blog grows, I hope to take away some of the mystery of usability. I know I haven’t gotten into it very deep so far, and most of my messages have discussed methodologies, and the whatnot without getting very detailed, but this is because I’ve been waiting to practice some of the processes, and provide some real feedback about my experiences and have some real content to discuss. Hopefully this will all come to fruition next week as I will be in NYC on customer visits.