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6. Usability
"Attractive things work better... When you wash and wax a car, it drives better, doesn't it? Or at least feels like it does." Don Norman
User Centered Design
User-centered design is a process which includes all aspects of the design process. Key areas of this practice include:
- Designing with your users in mind - by understanding the users’ potential task and goals. This is typically done by developing scenarios of use.
- Understanding your users - learning about their personalities,their technology profile and their task or goal needs - this is usually done by developing personas
- Testing your designs with real users to see if they understand what to do when. You need to have measurable goals in place to evaluate appropriately. Testing can be done for actions, navigation or vocabulary.
Usability Testing in Action
Below is a video which gives us a glimpse at at midpoint in usability testing: the paper prototype. This video documents where the user is getting lost and struggling with the navigation and manipulation of the software. By creating the experience in paper, rather than pixels, mistakes can be corrected early and new iterations tested more frequently..
A paper prototype usability test at the Corel Usability Lab.
Usability as a process - Whose Design is it Anyhow?
Creating a usable interactive interface is almost always a group process and as such, there can be a lot of finger-pointing and name calling. The engineers don't understand or appreciate the designer's contributions and vice versa. We must learn to play nice with each other, but how?
Bob Baxley has created an new way of looking at Interaction design that defines the roles of each practitioner. We will be reading a paper from The DUX conference (an experience design conference sponsored by AIGA, SIGCHI, and SIGGRAPH.) by Baxley.
Baxley compares the process of creating a usable interface to that of creating a movie. It begins with a conceptual model: "The purpose of the conceptual model is to draw on the user’s past experiences so they can readily understand basic operations and accurately predict functionality."
In a good interface design, all of the parts of the design lock together. The interface cannot work without all of the layers relating. As Baxley notes, some layers are more flexible than others; some layers are more visible to the user, while others have a higher impact on usability. As you make changes with the application and/or interface, other layers may be impacted beneficially or detrimentally. Therefore, user input is essential at all levels of the design process.
Design of Every Day Things was written by Donald Norman, professor emeritus of cognitive science at University of California, San Diego and a Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University. In this, Norman explores the parallels between achieving real-world tasks and achieving digital tasks. From these explorations, came the idea of affordances, or clues to how things operate.
About Face is an 1995 reading in interface design which reinforced the theory that well designed software should allow all users to be more effective. The chapter closes with a checklist of usability questions.
On the horizon are new, quick and dirty user analytics, such as ClickTale, an "online service that allows you to watch movies of visitors interacting with your website. The tool records visitors' mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes and scrolling actions. From the recordings, it generates movies of individual visitor's use of the site. The tool can be used to gain insight into how visitors interact with web sites, to find flaws and enhance navigation and overall usability. As such, it can serve as a good complement to existing statistics services and usability tests." guuui.com
Digital Passion
In communication, information is transmitted from between and receiver. Both interpret the information they receive and control the information they give. Much information in communication is implicit and not expressed in words. It is 'embedded' in the situation, in which the communication takes place. ('Put that there!' may be a perfectly intelligible statement in a face-to-face meeting, though to an outsider it is completely indefinite.) In communication it is therefore important to make it clear at all times 'what kind of situation' (what kind of context) one is in... Such communication about the situation in which interaction takes place, is called metacommunication. anthrobase dictionary
In web design, metacommunication is the set of visual cues and contextual information that communicate to the user underlying values, connections & community. It's the accrued information for the colors, the images, the layout, the navigation that tells the user the back story of the site.
Apple and Nike are corporation which are 'lovemarks' (brands with passionate users.) When we create a web site, we, at some level, are hoping to create a passionate user, one who will come back to our site repeatedly, talk about our site to friends and participate in the site. Yet it remains a mystery as to how to create this passionate experience.
So far in this semester, we have studied several of the elements that create the metacommunication underlying passion: design, layout, color, historical reference, ordering, navigation, sequencing. These are all parts of creating a web experience, just as the design elements used by Ridley Scott created the experience of the Apple 1984 commercial. In the video below, Scott talks about how he created 'an event, a happening' for the experience.
Sandra Moriarty's paper,An Interpretive Study Of Visual Cues In Advertising, describes the the visual cues present in 1984. . In the video musical version, Apple 1984 - Behind the Scenes, we get to see these cues as they are applied, transforming smiling Hollywood models into dehumanized soldiers of the big boss (ibm).
Apple continued this myth-making with the Think Different commercials. In these, Apple identified itself, through the single visual cue of the Apple icon, with this tribute to contemporary cultural icons: Ghandi, Picasso, Dylan, Buckminster Fuller, Hitchcock, Martin Luther King. All of the figures depicted in the commercial are American cultural heroes. Again, we are invited to join the club, and create our own story.
Nike has understood and followed a similar pattern, creating commercials and web sites that are focused on heroes, but also offer us an invitation to join the struggle and be like them. Both Apple and Nike have web site that break almost every 'rule' of usability, yet they have passionate users. What patterns or events can we identify that elicit passion from the user?
Passion and the Web
Kathy Sierra, at her blog, Creating Passionate Users, tried to 'reverse engineer passion'. First, she begins with a diagram illustrating the behavior of passionate users. If we understand what they do, we are closer to
understanding why they do it. Her list includes the following behaviors:
- Evangelize
- Connect
- Learn
- Improve
- Show Off
- Spend Time
- Spend Money
These are activities that a web site should potentially inspire. If we compare these activities to the behaviors encouraged in the Apple commercial, we can see overlap in the areas of spending money and building community. But there are no specifics offered.
In his book, Lovemarks (from Emotional Branding listed in the Readings), Kevin Roberts has identified 3 key ingredients in creating brand that inspires 'a Loyalty that goes Beyond Reason': mystery, sensuality and intimacy.
- Mystery
- Great stories: past, present and future; taps into dreams, myths and icons; and inspiration
- Sensuality
- Sound, sight, smell, touch, and taste
- Intimacy
- Commitment, empathy, and passion
Readings
The desire to belong to something, to make meaning out of something, is universal. Douglas Atkins
- Attractive Things Work Better Donald A. Norman
- About Face: the essentials of user interface design - Chapter 1 by Alan Cooper ( Blackboard)
- Design of Everyday Things - Chapter 7 by Don Norman (Blackboard)
- Affordances and Design by Don Norman (make your browser window narrower if the line wrap is odd)
- Universal Model of a User Interface by Bob Baxley
- Emotional Branding - 15 minute video from PBS series, The Persuaders
- An Interpretive Study Of Visual Cues In Advertising by Sandra Moriarty
- Optimizing Flow in Web Design by Andrew B King
- Personas, Goals, and Emotional Design By Robert Reimann
Recommended Resources:
- Flow in Games (and Everything Else) by Jenova Chen
- Jenova Chen's online game based on the principles of flow
- Lovemarks - an interview with Kevin Roberts
- Apple Human Interface Guidelines
- Universal Usability by Ben Shneiderman
Discussion - Week 1
1 - How do you see mystery, sensuality and intimacy used in the Apple interfaces shown to the right?
2 - Are there other principles (storytelling? other visual cues?) at play?
3 - Looking at the Apple or the Nike web site, what are some of the various techniques that they are creating passionate users? How do they allow the user to customize or self-select their community of interest?
4- What are some other web sites that strongly encourage community?
Discussion - Week 2:
Alan Cooper writes about goal-oriented design: design for users with specific goals. These goals are the root cause why a user wishes to use the software (or web site). Satisfy the goal and you satisfy the users. So far this semester, we have spent time looking at the goals and users for your web site.
Alan Cooper was one of the first to be an outspoken advocate of creating software by using personas. Personas guide the design by defining who the users are, and what they do, as well as who they aren't what they don't do, don't like or aren't good at. Personas are fully formed people, as opposed to demographic groups. Persona development is determined by analyzing to task domain, the user dimension and incorporating behaviour and habits. From this analysis, we can derive people that we can understand and respond to, rather than expecting everyone to think like us.
In the Maya redesign of the Carnegie Library, they looked at users as they interact with the library:
"Maya staff shadowed librarians as they assisted the public. They wanted to know about a customer’s experience when they interacted with each of the main aspects of the library (physical, digital, and human), so Maya staff chose a single task — find a book on library design — and a method for achieving that task (physical, digital, or human), and then played out a day in the life of a new library customer. They used customer surrogates to understand our customers’ frustrating and pleasurable experiences with Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s Main Library.
In other words, members of Maya’s staff who had not been regular library customers, acted as if they were customers, noting positive and negative experiences they encountered while trying to achieve a common task. They compiled not only a map of their time in the library that they referred to as a direct-experience storyboard but also a list of things that worked well and things that were confusing."
http://www.ifla.org/VII/s46/conf/pittsb04.pdf
Because the real action is in these last two areas, cognition and emotion. This, to my mind, is the manifest destiny for information architecture. We may not have fully recognized it before because the phrase "information architecture" puts the emphasis on the wrong thing.
It's never been about information. It's always been about people: how they relate to that information, how that information makes them think, how it makes them feel, and how the structure of that information influences both things. This is huge, unexplored territory."
Jesse James Garrett, closing plenary address March 22, 2009 at ASIS&T IA Summit 2009 http://jjg.net/ia/memphis/
"Like any tool, personas can be wielded effectively or not. Steve is right in that the bulk of personas out there don’t serve their desired purpose, because they get too cutesy with alliterative names, or label people as types as opposed to individuals, or become cliched. But that’s not the fault of personas, that’s the fault of bad personas." Peter Merholtz http://www.peterme.com/?p=624
1) As we create our personas, let's consider what a poorly created persona might be. Name one thing that would make a persona a poor or ineffective creation. If you were creating a character for a novel, what would make that character unbelievable (or believable)? How does this unbelievability express itself in the use of your web site? Describe the problem with clarity and in depth. Provide a one sentence contrast at the end describing how this trait might be manifest in a good persona.
2) If we opt not to use personas, what else could we do to build user empathy/understanding across the design team and with the client?
Assignment
There are 2 parts to this assignment:
- You will need to create a set of Personas that will serve to guide your web site decisions.
- Create a User Flow Diagram
1 -Personas are archetypes for users of the site or product. They are not market share. Market share is a bland demographic of blended information - possibly good for Hallmark, not so useful for any sort of niche market -and with the internet, most markets are niche markets. By using archetypes, you can come to understand specific needs that your users have, beyond the generic minimum requirements.
Your assignment this week is to create two personas. This should be fun. Your personas should be quirky and have character. Real people do. Your personas should NOT be based on your or even particularly relate to you. They should be two people who are reflective of the magazine's audience and should be a segment of the demographics that you have identified using the tools below.
Assignment:
- Create two personas using the Personas worksheet** (You do not have to use all of the characteristics.)
- Watch the USA Today demographics presentation and look at some of the Claritas demographics by segment or zip code. This explain common groups or demographics that are present in America today.
- Each persona should each be unique and distinct.
- example of what NOT to do: Two people who are 30, healthy, well educated, but one is artsy and one is a geek; or one is a man and one is a woman; or one can program and one can't.
- If you are stumped, go observe people in their natural settings: Weaver Street Market, South Point Mall, A small local cafe in Sanford.
- Each persona should represent a significant user of your chosen web site.
- One should be a major user
- One would be a minor user.
- Save the personas as a Microsoft Word document to be submitted at the end of the semester.
Minimum persona characteristics:
- a name and picture
- demographics (age, education, ethnicity, family status)
- job title and major responsibilities
- goals and tasks in relation to your site
- environment (physical, social, technological)
- a quote that sums up what matters most to the persona with relevance for your site
- Scenario
Include a scenario of a typical task that this person would want to accomplish.
Make sure this ia a complete task, not a partial or sub-task (if they are searching, what are they searching for - be exact)
Personas will be graded on the following:
- Each persona has: a name and picture, demographics, environment and job title and major responsibilities
- Personas goals and tasks are relevant to your site and reflect your described user group (site survey)
- Persona quote gives insight into the personality
- Each persona is detailed and idiosyncratic; description should contain a sense of world view, limitations and expectations. Use the quote to quickly summarize a personality.
- Your persona's scenario should contain background information about why they are coming to this particular site (And not one of the competitors)
- Your persona's scenario should contain a distinct goal to attain on your site.
Represents a potential complex real-life use of your site - Lose points if personas appear to be an aspect of your personality (strong hint: avoid 30-something year old, college educated, academically-oriented middle-class or upwardly mobile individuals.)
- Lose points if personas appear to be an aspect of your personality (strong hint: avoid 30-something year old, college educated, academically-oriented middle-class or upwardly mobile individuals.)
User Flow diagram will be graded on the following:
- Is based on a proposed scenario
- Shows a user's path through through the existing site while completing a scenario activity
- Examines the steps through one or more key tasks on the site
- Reveals design flaws from user's viewpoint
- Problems are analyzed at both the overall site and specific activity level.

The lower diagram shows Csikszentmihalyi's theory applied to daily life. Passive activities, such as television are equated with apathy; reading requires a skill level, so that becomes equated with relaxation. Learning a new skill is at the top of the chart as the most engaging.