The following questions are representative of the two paths in User Experience to determine the direction for a design.
Architecture
1. What are users’ primary goals, and how can they achieve them using the application?
2. How do users get from place to place?
3. What rules exist that users have to work around?
4. How are product features and components branded?
5. What is the optimal scope of the application’s feature set?
6. How does the UI roadmap and product roadmap position the application?
7. What is the application’s search mechanism?
Interaction
1. What layout pattern would work best?
2. Which features and information are of higher importance, and how do I draw users’ attention to them?
3. How should I incorporate the user feedback I am getting from user research, user surveys, and formative and summative usability testing?
4. What behaviors occur on dragging and dropping, on mouse over, etc?
5. How can I communicate the strengths of a feature or application?
6. How can I satisfy users’ primary needs and support the tasks that let them achieve their goals?
7. How can I draw on users’ intuition to get them to the next step?
8. How can I ensure users are aware they’re performing a subtask that’s part of a greater task they’ve started?
9. How can I use the UI components that are available to me—such as grids, tabs, and panels?
10. How can I maintain consistency throughout the application?
Monday, July 13, 2009
On Creating a Conceptual Model
Albert Einstein once said, "Make it simple, as simple as possible but no simpler." This is the goal of user experience. As easy as it sounds, it is not easy. I usually start by looking for visual representations of problems and solutions and draw only the essential items of the system and the relationship they have to other elements. The tasks themselves begin to reveal themselves, that is where the workflows begin and end.
The challenge is to get developers to view the solution from the users perspective, from the task rather than from how the software will function. Once I can do this, the question becomes, how do I present this functionality in a way that is obvious to the user, perhaps through a familiar analogy. This, by the way, is clearly the most difficult job of user interface design, creating the balance between the obvious user tasks and the system functionality. Analogies usually become the basis for the UI conceptual model.
A map is the artifact resulting from the conceptual model and is used for extracting information from the user's task domain as well as the implementation domain. It is useful in so many ways including a tool for tracking unnecessary features, inappropriate assumptions as well as unnecessary functionality. In interaction design, I transpose this model into a visual communication of wireframes as a communication tool. As a designer, I find the structure in information that is useful for an intended audience.
The challenge is to get developers to view the solution from the users perspective, from the task rather than from how the software will function. Once I can do this, the question becomes, how do I present this functionality in a way that is obvious to the user, perhaps through a familiar analogy. This, by the way, is clearly the most difficult job of user interface design, creating the balance between the obvious user tasks and the system functionality. Analogies usually become the basis for the UI conceptual model.
A map is the artifact resulting from the conceptual model and is used for extracting information from the user's task domain as well as the implementation domain. It is useful in so many ways including a tool for tracking unnecessary features, inappropriate assumptions as well as unnecessary functionality. In interaction design, I transpose this model into a visual communication of wireframes as a communication tool. As a designer, I find the structure in information that is useful for an intended audience.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
With or Without a Flashlight
“What is that? Hurry, hurry, hurry turn on the flashlight I said to Michael who was almost asleep and to myself, too stricken with fear to find it in the dark when it had mysteriously disappeared. It felt like the climax to a suspenseful movie, where you are on the edge and holding your breath. Don’t move, did you hear that? It sounds like everyone below us is eating everyone around them!” Night blindness can leave you uniquely vulnerable as we discovered. We were staying in a jungle lodge with only paper thin boards separating us from ‘them’. The Amazon’s sudden, inexplicable sounds can be terrifying at night, especially the first one and, well the rest of the nights as well.
Life in the jungle is immediate in every sense of the word. It certainly is not a ride in Disneyland even though you want yourself to believe it. Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey – The River of Doubt describes the jungle so vividly, “So complex and interdependent was the ecosystem he and his men had entered that the jungle itself could appear to take on the attributes of a living being…the screams, crashes, clangs, and cries of the long Amazon night were all the more disturbing because they often provoked apparent terror among unseen inhabitants of the jungle themselves. In the fathom canyons of tree trunks and the shrouds of black vines that surrounded the men at night, the hum and chatter of thousands of nocturnal creatures would snap into instant silence in response to a strange noise, leaving the men to wait in breathless apprehension of what might come next.”
Those are the perfect words to describe what we felt when we experienced the Amazon Jungle on trip last September. We had excellent guides who knew exactly what to do in every situation. We realized we knew very little about real survival. It was also amazing to us how easy it was to let go of the stresses of our jobs and lives when we found ourselves on high alert to our immediate surroundings.
We are sure you are now asking yourselves, why go there – there are safer, more relaxing places to go on vacation. That’s true, there are, but how alive do you feel everyday in your safe routines? This trip heightened our senses, forced us to face our fears and gave us an extreme view of different cultures and survival. It was exhilarating. Just as Theodore Roosevelt realized the unexpected magnitude of their trip and how unprepared they were, we too were in the same dugout boats they used back then and still use today. BIG REVELATION: Without our guide, I’m not sure we still would have a chance of surviving by ourselves in the Amazon.
Despite all of the surprises in the jungle, the opportunities of fringe travel, as I call it, increases the opportunity you have to really live in the moment. These life skills sharpen your senses and help you operate in the world on a different level. My personal experience in the jungle gave me a gift of a new kind of empathy about perspective. Rather than using a negative judgment about something, understand the principles of the context in which something exists rather than judgment based perhaps solely on fear. This new metaphor of being in the jungle is a new perspective of surviving and not at the lowest level in Maslow’s hierarchy but in self-actualization.
Maslow learned to distinguish “special talent creativeness” from “self-actualizing (SA) creativeness," which springs more directly from the personality, and showed itself in the ordinary affairs of daily life. Self-actualizing humans “do not neglect the unknown, or deny it, or run away from it or try to make believe it is really known…they do not cling to the familiar, nor is their quest for the truth a catastrophic need for certainty, safety, definiteness, and order.”
This year, I believe we have all been provided these kinds of opportunities, especially in the economic conditions and the uncertainty in which we live. I have used these lessons from the jungle in business to help focus on being in the moment by visualizing the bigger picture while examining immediate things going on underfoot. The corporate world is a lot more primal than you could have imagined!
Life in the jungle is immediate in every sense of the word. It certainly is not a ride in Disneyland even though you want yourself to believe it. Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey – The River of Doubt describes the jungle so vividly, “So complex and interdependent was the ecosystem he and his men had entered that the jungle itself could appear to take on the attributes of a living being…the screams, crashes, clangs, and cries of the long Amazon night were all the more disturbing because they often provoked apparent terror among unseen inhabitants of the jungle themselves. In the fathom canyons of tree trunks and the shrouds of black vines that surrounded the men at night, the hum and chatter of thousands of nocturnal creatures would snap into instant silence in response to a strange noise, leaving the men to wait in breathless apprehension of what might come next.”
Those are the perfect words to describe what we felt when we experienced the Amazon Jungle on trip last September. We had excellent guides who knew exactly what to do in every situation. We realized we knew very little about real survival. It was also amazing to us how easy it was to let go of the stresses of our jobs and lives when we found ourselves on high alert to our immediate surroundings.
We are sure you are now asking yourselves, why go there – there are safer, more relaxing places to go on vacation. That’s true, there are, but how alive do you feel everyday in your safe routines? This trip heightened our senses, forced us to face our fears and gave us an extreme view of different cultures and survival. It was exhilarating. Just as Theodore Roosevelt realized the unexpected magnitude of their trip and how unprepared they were, we too were in the same dugout boats they used back then and still use today. BIG REVELATION: Without our guide, I’m not sure we still would have a chance of surviving by ourselves in the Amazon.
Despite all of the surprises in the jungle, the opportunities of fringe travel, as I call it, increases the opportunity you have to really live in the moment. These life skills sharpen your senses and help you operate in the world on a different level. My personal experience in the jungle gave me a gift of a new kind of empathy about perspective. Rather than using a negative judgment about something, understand the principles of the context in which something exists rather than judgment based perhaps solely on fear. This new metaphor of being in the jungle is a new perspective of surviving and not at the lowest level in Maslow’s hierarchy but in self-actualization.
Maslow learned to distinguish “special talent creativeness” from “self-actualizing (SA) creativeness," which springs more directly from the personality, and showed itself in the ordinary affairs of daily life. Self-actualizing humans “do not neglect the unknown, or deny it, or run away from it or try to make believe it is really known…they do not cling to the familiar, nor is their quest for the truth a catastrophic need for certainty, safety, definiteness, and order.”
This year, I believe we have all been provided these kinds of opportunities, especially in the economic conditions and the uncertainty in which we live. I have used these lessons from the jungle in business to help focus on being in the moment by visualizing the bigger picture while examining immediate things going on underfoot. The corporate world is a lot more primal than you could have imagined!
Using Information in Bigger Way
Have you ever wondered how a Website captivates you? It is more than likely it is because the content on the site looks like a good meal and indicate that it’s an easy catch. This intent is very purposeful from the designers who want their site to be caught and visited. Web designers who know about the foraging theory, or adaptive strategies understand how to make your interactions faster and stronger.
Pirolli was one of the founding fathers on the Information Foraging Theory and worked at Palo Alto Research Center in 1992. The idea a few years back was deliberate in trying to keep you on the page longer. Now, as the Web audiences have matured, Website content has also changed:
· Support short visits to your website
· Be a snack (fast downloads and create stickiness)
· Address user's immediate needs
Like animals foraging for food with time and energy constraints, humans forage for information looking for answers. The problem is that we in a glut of information with no time to sort it all out. Humans have naturally adopted adaptive strategies to optimize their intake of useful information per unit cost. The Information Foraging Theory aims to model and predict our evolutionary behavior in adapting to an increasingly complex world. The book both models our behavior in mathematical formulae and validates its predictions empirically to refine the model. Armed with this knowledge, designers can make informed decisions on web designs before they make a heavy investment in implementation.
What Is Information Foraging?
Unlike cognitive engineering models of the early 1990s where tasks were analyzed in well-defined domains and user interfaces, people seeking information are largely shaped by the structure of the content, that is, their information environment. People routinely sift massive volumes of information under deadline pressure to make complex search decisions under uncertain conditions. We are constantly evaluating the expected costs and benefits of our actions in this largely probabilistic textured information environment (Brunswik 1952) to maximize our gain of valuable information. Pirolli calls this behavior information foraging.
Information foraging strategies optimize the use of our time and effort to gain valuable information. We satisfice, getting a good enough outcome under uncertain and limited conditions (bounded rationality). As in the real world where animals forage for food, the online world of the Web is a patchy environment with information arranged into clumps. Patches of useful information reside in different websites, it is our job as "informavores" to seek out the richest patches and extract useful information. As we forage for more information, it becomes harder to find additional useful information as we pick off the "low hanging fruit." Diminishing returns cause us to "feed" at a patch until our rate of gain of useful information falls below the perceived average. Once we think the grass is greener in another "patch," we switch pages, websites, or search criteria, seeking out more fruitful patches of information. Pirolli's mathematics describe the environment and predicts with some accuracy our behavior in the Web's patchy environment.
The optimal information forager "maximizes the value of knowledge gained per unit cost of interaction." We select designs that improve our returns on information foraging. This natural selection implies that sites that have high information scent and usability would fare better than sites that have lower scent and usability. This gives an entirely new meaning to the survival of the fittest when applied to the Web.
Experts in the usability industry: Spool, Perfetti, and Brittan (2004) have also supported that users searched for a scent trail and followed it toward their content. "As the scent got stronger, they grew more eager. When they lost the scent, they backtracked until they picked it up again."
Spool and his colleagues recommend using trigger words that will be recognized by the user. Here are some of Spool's recommendations from the "Tao of Scent" (2004)
Use Search Analytics
Using search analytics helps to "close the loop" between designer and user expectations. Giving users what they are searching for, in the terms they are searching with is one way to ensure higher conversion rates. Regularly analyzing search results is one way to ensure you are not missing topics and "trigger words" that your customers are searching for. Scent is as much an issue in search as it is in navigation."
Pirolli was one of the founding fathers on the Information Foraging Theory and worked at Palo Alto Research Center in 1992. The idea a few years back was deliberate in trying to keep you on the page longer. Now, as the Web audiences have matured, Website content has also changed:
· Support short visits to your website
· Be a snack (fast downloads and create stickiness)
· Address user's immediate needs
Like animals foraging for food with time and energy constraints, humans forage for information looking for answers. The problem is that we in a glut of information with no time to sort it all out. Humans have naturally adopted adaptive strategies to optimize their intake of useful information per unit cost. The Information Foraging Theory aims to model and predict our evolutionary behavior in adapting to an increasingly complex world. The book both models our behavior in mathematical formulae and validates its predictions empirically to refine the model. Armed with this knowledge, designers can make informed decisions on web designs before they make a heavy investment in implementation.
What Is Information Foraging?
Unlike cognitive engineering models of the early 1990s where tasks were analyzed in well-defined domains and user interfaces, people seeking information are largely shaped by the structure of the content, that is, their information environment. People routinely sift massive volumes of information under deadline pressure to make complex search decisions under uncertain conditions. We are constantly evaluating the expected costs and benefits of our actions in this largely probabilistic textured information environment (Brunswik 1952) to maximize our gain of valuable information. Pirolli calls this behavior information foraging.
Information foraging strategies optimize the use of our time and effort to gain valuable information. We satisfice, getting a good enough outcome under uncertain and limited conditions (bounded rationality). As in the real world where animals forage for food, the online world of the Web is a patchy environment with information arranged into clumps. Patches of useful information reside in different websites, it is our job as "informavores" to seek out the richest patches and extract useful information. As we forage for more information, it becomes harder to find additional useful information as we pick off the "low hanging fruit." Diminishing returns cause us to "feed" at a patch until our rate of gain of useful information falls below the perceived average. Once we think the grass is greener in another "patch," we switch pages, websites, or search criteria, seeking out more fruitful patches of information. Pirolli's mathematics describe the environment and predicts with some accuracy our behavior in the Web's patchy environment.
The optimal information forager "maximizes the value of knowledge gained per unit cost of interaction." We select designs that improve our returns on information foraging. This natural selection implies that sites that have high information scent and usability would fare better than sites that have lower scent and usability. This gives an entirely new meaning to the survival of the fittest when applied to the Web.
Experts in the usability industry: Spool, Perfetti, and Brittan (2004) have also supported that users searched for a scent trail and followed it toward their content. "As the scent got stronger, they grew more eager. When they lost the scent, they backtracked until they picked it up again."
Spool and his colleagues recommend using trigger words that will be recognized by the user. Here are some of Spool's recommendations from the "Tao of Scent" (2004)
- Communicate information scent through explicit links, those which match the information found in the link
- Trigger words cause users to click, users expect these words on the destination page
- Link text should be between 7 and 12 words long
- Links should lead to information that is more specific
- Links should accurately describe what the next page contains
- Provide feeback about where the user is in the site structure
- Avoid jargon and cute marketing terms (use short words)
Use Search Analytics
Using search analytics helps to "close the loop" between designer and user expectations. Giving users what they are searching for, in the terms they are searching with is one way to ensure higher conversion rates. Regularly analyzing search results is one way to ensure you are not missing topics and "trigger words" that your customers are searching for. Scent is as much an issue in search as it is in navigation."
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Learning to Speak a New Language
The most amazing experience for me is coming into a new awareness in how to express my ideas with others. Recently, a friend of ours invited us to attend a "Nonviolent Communication," or NVC Session with his practice group. I am always open to new exploration and ideas so we joined him. But, I couldn't help but wonder what nonviolent communication had to do with us. I have never thought of myself as a violent communicator, nor anyone I know.
What I have since come to realize is that the very structure of our language is static. We rarely use our emotions to describe our true needs, nor can we hear others. When we combine observation with evaluation, people are apt to hear criticism. Although we spend our time with other people, we rarely stop to think about the defining characteristic of their behavior or our own. While this has great implications in our personal lives, I am focusing on relationships at work. In observation, our criteria for judging an event as behavior is not just about the complexity, but on the context. It is through the differences that we can view contrast.
As Semanticist Wendall Johnson points out, "We create many problems for ourselves by using static language to capture a reality that ever changing." Our language has conditioned us to speak about constants, similarities, quick fixes to simple problems with complete and final solutions." Yet, our world is quite different from all of this. The reality is the opposite. It is about process, change, differences, interaction, complexity of relationships and learning. The root of the problem is this mismatch in communication.
NVC is like learning to think and speak in a different language. A perfect application in user experience is to think about the ways we deliver design critiques. Design critiques can be exhausting if done in the wrong way. They can immediately become personal. In applying the NVC language, the first step is to separate our observations from our evaluations. The goal of a critique is to identify what we are building and secondly to figure out how close we are to finishing it. User experience evaluations and critiques are done in the spirit of the end user, trying to match intent of the design with the behavior of the end user. It is also done within the perspective of another designer.
I think the best critiques will happen in separating observation from the evaluation. We must identify and observe the strengths of how close the design is from meeting the goal and secondly, raising more questions to inspire directions and paths to get to the final goal.
What I have since come to realize is that the very structure of our language is static. We rarely use our emotions to describe our true needs, nor can we hear others. When we combine observation with evaluation, people are apt to hear criticism. Although we spend our time with other people, we rarely stop to think about the defining characteristic of their behavior or our own. While this has great implications in our personal lives, I am focusing on relationships at work. In observation, our criteria for judging an event as behavior is not just about the complexity, but on the context. It is through the differences that we can view contrast.
As Semanticist Wendall Johnson points out, "We create many problems for ourselves by using static language to capture a reality that ever changing." Our language has conditioned us to speak about constants, similarities, quick fixes to simple problems with complete and final solutions." Yet, our world is quite different from all of this. The reality is the opposite. It is about process, change, differences, interaction, complexity of relationships and learning. The root of the problem is this mismatch in communication.
NVC is like learning to think and speak in a different language. A perfect application in user experience is to think about the ways we deliver design critiques. Design critiques can be exhausting if done in the wrong way. They can immediately become personal. In applying the NVC language, the first step is to separate our observations from our evaluations. The goal of a critique is to identify what we are building and secondly to figure out how close we are to finishing it. User experience evaluations and critiques are done in the spirit of the end user, trying to match intent of the design with the behavior of the end user. It is also done within the perspective of another designer.
I think the best critiques will happen in separating observation from the evaluation. We must identify and observe the strengths of how close the design is from meeting the goal and secondly, raising more questions to inspire directions and paths to get to the final goal.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Welcome
Since design and training are our passions, we hope that blogging will give us a way to express our observations and translate our experiences to bigger ideas. For us, it's really a chance to step back and look at the bigger picture, reflecting on the lessons we have learned or the different perspectives of others on the challenges we encounter in our work. Learning and sharing is what life is all about.
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