Over the last 5 years, “usability” and “user experience” have been often used (abused?) as buzz words to improve web designers/developers curriculae (and apparently improve their actual skills).
Most of these people never conducted a single usability test.
How enterprise web applications and web 2.0 tend to merge.
Enterprise Web Apps VS Shiny Web 2.0
Any improvement ideas?
Most of the users don´t go to a website to interact with its beautiful and brilliantly designed interface.
They just want to go in, get stuff done, and get out. Take google.com as an example: People go in, search, and get out (the faster, the better).
If users don´t notice the interaction, the better. And this doesn´t mean that they aren´t interacting.
I believe if people could choose between clicking and thinking, clicking would win.
Sometimes, “click count to complete task” might be a usefull metric tool, but here’s what I mean:
When you want to find something, it’s easier to click some times along a well structured and predictable data-set than trying to figure out a specific item in a uncategorized cloud or in a poorly designed information architecture.
On the other side, redundant or over-fragmentated data structures might seem frustrating and make your user feel his click-finger a bit tired.
In the end it’s all about satisfaction – every click should be worth it – since you don’t have to think.
EDIT: check out this article about the 3 click rule
In the Usability process, testing is probably the most focused and documented step on the web. It happens that the most critical part for a successfull and juicy report, are the moments before and after testing.
Not-so-easy-as-it-might-look tasks that make the difference.:
Make sure you understant the project
A clear vision about the project must be built on every team member.
Setting a vision may include some intensive study – a meeting with a project stakeholder/manager it’s probably the best starting point.
Plan what to test
Before testing, it may be possible to predict some potential problems. But be careful, some expectations may be broken.
Here’s a suggestion:
Plan how to test
Don’t perform a card sorting for a successfull and already built information structure.
Use only the right methods for the right tasks (even if your client needs a lot of output from you).
Extract usefull information (usabilitymetrics (ugly site but nice list))
Effectiveness:
Efficiency:
User satisfaction:
Recently I got a little verbal fight with a friend because of animation and usability. It all started with a public Touchscreen. It was nice to play with but, between screens, a sliding animation took place, and, (there’s where it all started) took a bit to release the interface to full interactivity – buttons didn’t work on those final miliseconds or so.
It’s not too much, but that freeze-momentum seems that, if it might be solved easily, it should be solved. On the third action I performed, it started happening to me all the time.
Here is a condensed version of what followed:
Me – “This is sh$%!” (One of the best ways for loosing your audience instantly)
My Friend – “What? Are you nuts? I think this is kinda cool!”
Me – “No, It could be cool… look at that… [problem explanation here]”
My Friend – “But the target user likes it that way”
Me – “… who’s the target user?”
My Friend – “People like attractive things”
Me – “that’s true, but that is not enough… you like it because it is hypish and made with Flash…”
My Friend – “Animations are not evil as you might think!”
(Ok lets break here… my friend scored)
I think He is right. Animations can be a great way of telling your user where something came from or went to. Violent layout changes such as panel rearrangements/resizes/show-hides, may be smoothed out with a carefully designed animation.
On the other side, I think we all should keep “entertainment animations” away from almost any kind of interface (Games and kids stuff are the first exceptions that I can remember).
Back in the time when animated gifs on web pages started to be seen as ridiculous artifacts, Nielsen pointed that “Flash was 99% bad“. Big mistake (by the way, there are some of them from the same author). Just like Javascript, it was used to make a lot of crap, but should global ignorance kill a fantastically designed tool or tecnology?
Neither flash nor animations will kill your interface usability. Bad approaches will.
Writing this article caught my attention toward this subject – I would like to see some studies about the impact of animations in user interactions. I’ll write more on the subject as soon as I find something interesting.
The Elements of User Experience – User-centered design for the web.
Just got my book after a 1month+ wait time. International regular mail just sucks.
The book doesn’t. In fact I’m quite impressed how this book, copyrighted in 2003, can be so much usefull in nowadays tecnology rush.
Maybe because It is not about tecnology, it is about how web interfaces should be designed, or how you should look at your problem in order to design better user interactions.
The author, Jesse James Garrett, clarifies its 5 plane diagram over the 170 pages.
Nice addition for my growing UX library.
I’m getting into Data Visualization in order to support my Usability Testing and Card Sorting session’s data.
Here’s some of the most precious information I found today:
I just came back from FOWA London.
Here are some notions I came up with after the last week.
