User experience is a thing with a whole lot of facets.
Designer Niko Nyman presented some great ideas in his Web2Expo-speech
* You can add good user experience to software and use that to sell it to your customers.
* You can add good user experience in the experience between the user and the screen.
* You can add good user experience in the processes and interactions you design.
The latter is probably the most intensive, but also the must productive way of using good experience, good vibrations. It takes a lot of creativity and a lot of power to shape these interactions, connect them to the user's offline needs, add that kind of value that allows you to address and solve the most important problems, and to become an important part of the user's life.
Sounds great.
But I think there is even more: In my eyes, the biggest benefit would come from a chain the keeps all three steps together and allows you to have full control.
* Build software (or have developers) that follow(s) the rules of user experience
* Work with designers, who follow, develop and use the rules and elements of user experience.
* Have these two steps prepared in a way so that
* you can reuse them
* you can draw a line from the software to the output and explain how it helps the experience
* you can draw a line back from the interface to the software and explain how it helps to handle that issue easily
* you can prove that your software and your designs follow consistent ideas – and those ideas are based on common problems in the real world.
I like this idea, because
* I like new thoughts and productive ideas
* ideas should be connected to solutions; at least as a guess – visions are not enough
* that shapes a product, that can be offered, discussed and sold
An important prerequisite is, that you can measure user experience. This is where we need new and reliable criteria. What do people consider as a good experience?
* It may be very simple things – even if they are not good for anything
* it may be something very important – even if it's very complicated to achieve
* or it may be something in the middle.
That doesn't answer a lot, but I understand it as a hint: We should probably look for pairs to describe what it's about. Very simple and very important would be great, very simple and a little important would be as good as very important and not so simple or quite simple and quite important.
That requires some more thoughts.
Posts mit dem Label information architecture werden angezeigt. Alle Posts anzeigen
Posts mit dem Label information architecture werden angezeigt. Alle Posts anzeigen
Mittwoch, 22. Oktober 2008
Interaction Audit – test your page and create an objective diagnosis
Josh Williams from Hot Studio had a great speech at Web2Expo on reshaping ebay.
The two outstanding feature were:
he gave a definition of “feel” in “look & feel”
he introduced a well shaped method called Interaction Audit
The feel is an interaction groove - “It can be click-click-click oder clickp-hover-type or click-scroll-type – it does not matter, as long as you don't start to turn a telephone in an airplane cockpit.”
The target of controlling feel is not only to attract the user, but also to make him feel comfortable, so that he can reserve bigger parts of his mental bandwidth for the content of a site instead of it's technology.
In the interaction audit (which aims to check and harmonize the feel), they started with
* defining some example workflows: what do users do, what tasks do they perform on the way.
* that led to a task-activities matrix to find out similar activities in different tasks.
* Detailed descriptions of both were collected in a database
* The number and the number of variations in the interactions are now a criteria o quality (links, tabs, forms, mouseovers etc. - 16 different types of reactions/behaviours after you click on a link, 5 different types of forms ertc.)
* in addition to interaction inconsistencies, also task inconsistencies were analysed
* object inconsistencies as well.
This was a base that could be used to define targets, go through the enterprise universe and clean up.
What makes this so great?
It's all about structuring – shaping and describing a problem is maybe not solving it, but it's a good start to avoid it in the future.
There is no common taxonomy or reusable usecase for that – it's up to us to create the best practices and to find innovative ways and solutions.
As long as you don't forget your goals, there are never to many details – all those small pieces (if kept in a clear structure) will help you understand new problems that will keep arising every day.
The two outstanding feature were:
he gave a definition of “feel” in “look & feel”
he introduced a well shaped method called Interaction Audit
The feel is an interaction groove - “It can be click-click-click oder clickp-hover-type or click-scroll-type – it does not matter, as long as you don't start to turn a telephone in an airplane cockpit.”
The target of controlling feel is not only to attract the user, but also to make him feel comfortable, so that he can reserve bigger parts of his mental bandwidth for the content of a site instead of it's technology.
In the interaction audit (which aims to check and harmonize the feel), they started with
* defining some example workflows: what do users do, what tasks do they perform on the way.
* that led to a task-activities matrix to find out similar activities in different tasks.
* Detailed descriptions of both were collected in a database
* The number and the number of variations in the interactions are now a criteria o quality (links, tabs, forms, mouseovers etc. - 16 different types of reactions/behaviours after you click on a link, 5 different types of forms ertc.)
* in addition to interaction inconsistencies, also task inconsistencies were analysed
* object inconsistencies as well.
This was a base that could be used to define targets, go through the enterprise universe and clean up.
What makes this so great?
It's all about structuring – shaping and describing a problem is maybe not solving it, but it's a good start to avoid it in the future.
There is no common taxonomy or reusable usecase for that – it's up to us to create the best practices and to find innovative ways and solutions.
As long as you don't forget your goals, there are never to many details – all those small pieces (if kept in a clear structure) will help you understand new problems that will keep arising every day.
Dienstag, 26. August 2008
Design
I tried to present some designs for the new intranet in a project I'm currently working on to the boss of the communication department. I just wanted to get some feedback on colours, use of logos, the general look and feel and maybe some discussion on the top level menu.
Not even the first sentence was finished as we were in the middle of a discussion on content details, wether to put tables of content on the top or on the bottom of a page, on how to remodel the voluminous pieces of content that made up large parts of the intranet and on about which new interaction schemes should be designed and how that would influence the organisation.
As regarding the look and feel, she just made an ugly face at the beginning, but at the end of our discussion she said something like "Well, the longer, I look at it, the better I like it, somehow."
We think we're focused clear and precise when we go into a presentation. "I want to discuss our new designs with you, just to give you an overall impression of what it could feel like." - But even artifical terms like design allow such a wide variety of understanding.
Two me, we need two things to cope with that:
1) More definitions, which means more artificial terms. Concerning design, that could be Information Design, Interaction Design, Identity Design, Graphic Design
2) Nobodx will listen while we are trying to explain that stuff. we should have explanations ready and we should be prepared to discuss it with everybody, but it is even more important that we are prepared to understnd who is talking to us about what, to categorie the inputs todeal with everything at it's time, but to stay focused enough to get now the decisions we want now.
This could be something like agile presentation mode.
Not even the first sentence was finished as we were in the middle of a discussion on content details, wether to put tables of content on the top or on the bottom of a page, on how to remodel the voluminous pieces of content that made up large parts of the intranet and on about which new interaction schemes should be designed and how that would influence the organisation.
As regarding the look and feel, she just made an ugly face at the beginning, but at the end of our discussion she said something like "Well, the longer, I look at it, the better I like it, somehow."
We think we're focused clear and precise when we go into a presentation. "I want to discuss our new designs with you, just to give you an overall impression of what it could feel like." - But even artifical terms like design allow such a wide variety of understanding.
Two me, we need two things to cope with that:
1) More definitions, which means more artificial terms. Concerning design, that could be Information Design, Interaction Design, Identity Design, Graphic Design
2) Nobodx will listen while we are trying to explain that stuff. we should have explanations ready and we should be prepared to discuss it with everybody, but it is even more important that we are prepared to understnd who is talking to us about what, to categorie the inputs todeal with everything at it's time, but to stay focused enough to get now the decisions we want now.
This could be something like agile presentation mode.
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