In user experience we trust

Picking one or two quotes from participants to start off a report brings your results to life and gives your readers an immediate sense of the validity and importance of the research.

Źródło: The Perfect Report: How to Write it So That People Want to Read It (dostęp ograniczony), Libby Hanna, Kirsten Risden, User Experience, Volume 11, Issue 1, UPA 2012

What makes a user interface engaging is adding more detail to the user’s mental model at just the right time. Angry Birds’ simple interaction model is easy to learn because it allows the user to quickly develop a mental model of the game’s interaction methodology, core strategy and scoring processes. It is engaging, in fact addictive, due to the carefully scripted expansion of the user’s mental model of the strategy component and incremental increases in problem/solution methodology. These little birds are packed with clever behaviors that expand the user’s mental model at just the point when game-level complexity is increased. The process of creating simple, engaging interaction models turns out to be exceedingly complex.

Wyrwane z kontekstu: Why Angry Birds is so successful and popular: a cognitive teardown of the user experience, Charles L. Mauro, Pulse UX blog

To be great at UX you need to obsess about the details. You need to see every tiny flaw and think “How would a world-class awesome version of this look?”  In a fancy expensive restaurant, you bet your ass they line up the fork and knife and fill the salt shaker.

When I look at a User Interface, I imagine myself as an extremely impatient, distracted and nit-picky user.  The worst case scenario.  Then all of the sudden, little annoyances that are really fine look like glaring screwups.  It doesn’t mean you need to fix every single thing before you ship, but you should strive for excellence.  I am proud if I can ship 70-80 of what I consider perfect.

Źródło: UX Sensitivity, Glen Lipka, Commadot

Product people often fall into the trap of confusing themselves with the actual target customers. Just because you or I don’t like something doesn’t actually mean much, if we’re not the target audience.

Very often these backseat designers are pointing to secondary tasks that frankly don’t really matter. Good product managers and designers know that there are a few critical tasks in every product that need to be exceptionally good, and if this comes at the expense of some secondary tasks, that can be a very good trade to make.

Źródło: Defining Good, Marty Cagan, Silicon Valey Product Group blog

It’s been seven years since I took that first step into IA, and, sadly, it seems that the practice of understanding and prioritizing information before designing the interface has been abandoned. And because of that, we are facing a huge problem in the world of UX, which is, simply put, that we are devolving.

The definition of de-evolution is “to degenerate through a gradual change or evolution.” It seems to me that by removing the information architecture step—where one takes the time to understand and prioritize information—from our day-to-day process, we’re on our way down the path of de-evolution. I’m not saying that there needs to be a structured phase that everyone needs to follow, but I am saying that IA (which includes first understanding and mapping out how information should be structured) needs to be done and signed off on by stakeholders before a project can move into interface design (including wireframes).

Źródło: The De-Evolution of UX Design, Lis Hubert, UX Magazine.

My, Internetowi fanatycy… ;)

By the summer of 2007, Mail Online’s traffic had risen a hundred and sixty-two per cent, to make it the U.K.’s second-largest newspaper Web site. The Drudge Report started linking to some of its stories. In 2010, it became the U.K.’s biggest newspaper Web site.

Clarke and his staff built the site by instinct. „I didn’t look at that many Web sites for design ideas”, he told me. Formally, they stuck with what they knew, developing a publishing system that allows them to put together the home page with the glue-pot flexibility of a newspaper, rather than having to slot stories into a template. The home page is hectic, with hundreds of stories competing for the reader’s attention. It is unusually long—literally, like a scroll—as are its headlines. (Both tactics help to bolster its search-engine rankings.) It uses far more pictures, and in larger sizes, than its competitors. „The site breaks all so-called usability rules” Clarke said. „It’s user-friendly for normal people, not for Internet fanatics.”

Źródło: Mail Supremacy, The newspaper that rules Britain, Lauren Collins, The New Yorker 04/04/2012

The three key foundations of Practical Interaction Design are:

1. The initial design based on the  twin elements of the designer’s familiarity with the world and technology and the client’s brief. The brief may be as loosely defined as ‘a new application for the iPhone’ (the coursework in the first delivery of the PID module) or a tightly specified set of requirements. The designer’s task is to understand what is wanted, using their own familiarity with the world and the technology it comprises. The world is both filled with and defined by technology: technology with which we have been familiar from our earliest moments. Our familiarity with interactive technology facilitates our ability to cope with it, and in coping with it we modify and improve our familiarity with it. Students draw on their familiarity with interactive technology to make sense of the brief and to ground that understanding in what technology can do. This phase of PID culminates in the generation of initial ideas. Familiarity with the technology and setting of a specific design project is also expected to be extended and enhanced through the use of ethnography.
2. The profile of the people being designed for, expressed as personae. Having established an initial understanding of what is to be designed it is only now that who is being designed for is brought into consideration. Personae are introduced as lively, realistic, embodiments of target  users. Established HCI ‘user’ research techniques and the tools of design ethnography are taught as supporting activities for persona development. As students gather data and define personae for their emerging design they are supported in the identification of design implications and consequent modifications. The project, however, remains designled rather than user-driven.
3. Based on (1) and (2), the development of a very early prototype. Turning initial ideas into something tangible is the pivotal step.  The sooner the designer commits  to paper or software the sooner can the process of iterative  refinement begin. In PID students start with paper prototypes and move on to embody their designs as simple software applications.  Crucially, design features are not defined in response to ‘user needs’ or ‘tasks’ but as affordances  offered to those who will interact with the artefact. If we think about interaction as identifying and exploiting affordances, what follows is a game-like, exploratory approach which is closer to the aims of interaction design. The process is not only playfulin its repetitive nature, as observed above, but also in its oscillation between the security of the familiar and the risk of the new. This is the very essence  of earliest childhood games, as explored in Freud’s classic account and persists through much adult play.

Źródło:  Practical Interaction Design, Phil Turner and Susan Turner, Interfaces 79/2009