Pioneering a User Experience Process

A good post by Amy Hillman on B&A:

"Creating a User Experience (UX) process can be a very rewarding journey; it can also be a nightmare if approached from the wrong angle. Initiating a culture-shift, overhauling existing processes, evangelizing, strategizing, and educating is an enormous undertaking. Often it’s a lonely path the UX advocate walks, especially if you are the only one who is driving that change from within the company. But that path is ripe with opportunities to improve your company’s product creation process, as well as the product itself."

Bill Buxton interview podcast

Jon Udell has a podcast of his interview with Bill Buxton, where Bill talks about his new book, Sketching User Experience. There is a blog post on his blog about this as well...

EyePoint

Now that was a a rather long absence from blogging and after my trip I got a bit caught up in work...

Now, this is something interesting that caught my eye, rather literally. EyePoint is a project by Manu Kumar, Andreas Paepcke and Terry Winograd at Stanford which uses the user's gaze to augment mouse based interactions. This is something I have found wanting especially when working with design tools on a multi-monitor setup. I usually have the screen set on one screen and the tools on the other and having to move from screen to other does take a long time, if the system were to use my gaze to make predictive cursor movement.

You can check out the website which has a YouTube video on it, and also read the paper on it...

53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without

Great list of CSS techniques... Now all you need is a combined cheat sheet...

Microsoft is using a fairy tale to promote office

This comic fairy tale takes you through the improvements in Microsoft's new Office interface.

Easy7 Bangalore

Yesterday, I was at Easy 7, India's 7th Annual National Conference on Advanced User Interface Practices, at The Leela Palace in Bangalore. A nice, compact conference that featured four speakers speaking on six topics. Surya Vanka from Microsoft was speaking on Design innovation and innovation culture, Sarah Bloomer, touched up on UI tools and about converting research into design, Bill Scott of Yahoo! touched upon AJAX UI patterns, while Jeremy Ashley spoke on selling design within the organization. The topics were interesting but somehow there was a feeling the speakers had to hurry things up as the time alloted for each presentation seemed limited. But the effort on CHI South India's part was quite good, and here's looking forwared to Easy8.

PS: Bill Scott has an update on the event and also a link to his talk presentations

Making compact forms accessible. But why?

Mike Brittain in his ALA article talks about making compact forms accessible. Before reading his article I was not aware of a UI pattern of using 'compact forms' (pardon my ignorance) but apparently it is an oft used technique, which actually worries me a lot. I've seen forms where there are sample inputs provided and those too are something I believe is a bit of a nuisance. But in this case, the field label itself appears as the form field value. This must be mighty confusing to the user. Anybody has any experience designing these kinds of forms?

Josh Porter on Iterative Design

Josh Porter talks about how iterative design has worked for Netflix:

"The designers of Netflix.com have a smashing success on their hands, but we didn't find them resting on their laurels. They want to get even better, and for them that means iterate, iterate, iterate."

Book Review: The design of sites

The design of sites: Patterns, principles and process for crafting customer-centered web experience is a great book on web site design patterns. It starts of with some of the basics of user-centered design (customer-centered as the authors prefer to call it) and goes on to describe some of the common web patterns. Since this is pre-Web 2.0 book there is nothing describing AJAX interaction patterns, however the core set of patterns ranging from navigational patterns to layout and error handling patterns hold good even in the web 2.0 era. It may have less of a value for experienced professionals but it is an invaluable asset to people starting out in web based interaction design. Also for people not familiar with design, can get a good primer into good design practices. Also, if you are designer, working for a manager who does not understand design, this book makes a great gift...

The Theory of User Motivation: Applying Maslow’s Principles to Build Better Software Products (Part 1)

Ever been part of a software project where you have had to choose between time to market (read ‘schedule’) and the right thing to do (usually translated as ‘content’)? I’m sure you have. It’s a tough decision, and most people just follow their gut (also known as ‘top management’) and go one way or the other.

How else does one go about in a situation like this? Can any tools be used? How can one arrive at the right course of action?

In this article I would be proposing the use of ‘User Motivation’ as tool to evaluate a situation such as this.

What is ‘User Motivation’: Motivation generally refers to the desire or willingness to get tasks accomplished. It is generally identified by initiation, direction, intensity and persistence of behavior that will lead to the completion of the desired task.

Similarly, user motivation can be referred to the desire or willingness to use a particular piece of software in order to complete a specified task.

Readers familiar with the theories of human motivation would be familiar with Maslow and McGregor’s theories of ‘Human Motivation’. The theory is based upon the ‘Hierarchy of needs’, and it argues that as humans meet their basic needs, they go on to seek and fulfill higher needs one after another. The human needs as per Maslow’s hierarchy start with physiological needs, safety needs, enjoyment needs and going up to esteems and actualization needs. This hierarchy is usually denoted in the form of a pyramid as shown in the diagram.

For the sake of defining ‘User Motivation’ we can use Maslow’s hierarchy as a basis for defining the progressive set of needs user look to when it comes to a software product as well. This ‘Hierarchy of user needs’ is what forms the basis of evaluating ‘User Motivation’. For each level in Maslow’s Hierarchy, there is a corresponding set of software requirement. Let’s start at the very bottom.

Physiological Needs (Functionality): This is the most basic of human needs and takes the utmost priority as far as humans are concerned. Generally this consists of the need to breathe, eat and anything else that is almost important for us to survive. The corresponding category of needs in ‘User Motivation’ would refer to the basic software functionality. Without meeting this need every other need takes a lesser priority. Let us take the example of a user who wishes to use a word-processing document to write an article. Suppose instead of being provided a word processor, the user is provided with a best of breed image editing software with one piece of functionality lack: The ability to set text. This would be a case where the user has been deprived of the most basic functionality; that is word processing. Note here that the user would hypothetically be able to use tools from the image editing software to draw text, but it would require an inordinate amount of time, that would not justify the use of computer for the purpose. Hence the basis for satisfying user needs has to be that the goal that the user wants to accomplish should be easier to accomplish than it would be without the use of computer system.

Identifying Physiological needs: There are a number of methods and processes that can be followed to identify these needs for the particular software. The most common one is to do a competitive analysis of other software that are available in the market. However this is not often a reliable method as most people tend to over-design and it does not give an idea as to what is the bare minimum feature set the user is looking for. A far more effective tool would be to conduct a contextual enquiry and arrive at the bare minimum feature set that the user would require to complete the task. This would need to be updated frequently using either surveys or other voice of the customer techniques.

Safety Needs (Trust): The Human need for safety corresponds to the user's need to be able to trust the system. Generally trust is built by having a stable software product that is free of defects and does not crash inordinately. If the nature of the software involves the privacy of the user's data, then security also plays at this level. Taking the same example of the word-processing need, a user would only be compelled to work at this level if the software satisfies the functionality need of being able to type words and is also stable and defect free. Given the choice between a bug free product and one which is still alpha code, the user will choose a bug free product. Apart from traditional functional defects, at this level, users would like the software to be free of usability defects as well, though they would not lay an emphasis on ease of use.

Along with a stable product, documented and live customer support also works at this level, providing users with a sense of security that they have help available. But there is an exception that can be made for the early adopters who can be made to use the software with minimal support or documentation.

Checking for the level of safety: A formal QA process along with a Beta testing process will ensure that most of the safety needs for the software are met prior to release. Apart from this, including usability techniques like card sorting and usability testing into the development process ensures that no blaring usability flaws are present in the system which might cause the user to perceive the software as being possibly defect prone.

Belonging Needs (Social/Responsiveness): Software that satisfies the first two levels of needs, now has to vie for the next level which is that of social acceptance. A software that is used by a number of highly visible people in the community makes it more acceptable for the user. Thus building a user community and a way for users to share experiences and learn from experiences of others plays an important role at this point. If the software tool is aimed at technology savvy community, exposing APIs is also a good way of building up the community.

Apart from this need to be part of a community, at this level, the user expects the software to be responsiveness as well. The is where qualities like performance and slickness of the design in terms of handling user errors comes into play. Software scalability also works at this level.

Easy ways to fulfill this need: Today engaging the user community is an important part of any software, and a simple effort like having a corporate blog that communicates and receives inputs from the users goes a long way in building this kind of a relationship with the user.

Esteem Needs (Experience): Most software available today, do well with the earlier three sets of needs and it is at the next level that they tend to falter. At this level the user expects the software to provide them with an end to end experience, right from the point of purchase up the point where they are ready to go up to the next level.

How to get there and measure the experience: Developer and user conferences are a a good way of engaging the user community at this level. If the software is in the enterprise space, then customer relationship management plays an important role and customer satisfaction surveys play an important role in measuring the effectiveness of efforts put into meeting this level of user needs.

Self Actualization (Pride): The last and final level is the holy grail of software development, where the user no longer needs any more motivation to use the software, but with each use, there is an actual sense of pride that is associated with the use. At this level, the users will come back and give feedback on the software without the developer actually having to make an effort.

Having understood these levels of user needs it would be easy to prioritize the software requirements so that depending upon the urgency of the time to market, one can actually analyze and decide upon which pieces of functionality can be taken up. In the next part of this article we will take a look at how we can take those decisions.

Firebug

Firebug is an interesting web development extension on Firefox. Reminds me of the tidy validation extension and Aardvark

Don't play around with simple, says Jeremy...

"I'm tired of AJAX being used as a replacement for quality design." This seems to be the message that is coming out of the disastrous re-design exercise of Yahoo!TV. New Yahoo! designs seems to be forsaking usability for the sake of visual design and AJAX coolness. Somehow I feel we are going to see more such user outbreaks in the coming months...

Microsoft to license the 2007 Microsoft Office User Interface

This is a new one, and about as close as M$ has ever come to open-source I think. In a new move, Microsoft has announced that it will be licensing the user interface for MS Office 2007. This means as a developer (developing an non-competing product) you could use the MS ribbon idiom in you application as long as you comply with some style restrictions imposed by the license. This is interesting as many of the MS UI paradigms were aped by a number of applications, thus giving the UI more eyeballs and making M$ applications seemingly intuitive. With a big shift in paradigm from M$'s end they do feel that users will find it difficult to adapt to the new UI, so this is probably a way to evangelize the new UI. That's my reading of this announcement.

I personally have not used the ribbon interface yet, so I can't comment on the merits and demerits yet, but maybe some of you can...