The Inevitable 10

Over the years I have, almost inevitably, developed a take on what’s most important, critical, and defining in good sites, applications, and other places where users meet technology.

1. The phrase “user-friendly” is fundamentally meaningless, and allows us to sweep a lot of important things under the rug. Users have particular needs in specific circumstances. How they can meet those needs with the technology needs to be obvious – to *them*.

2. Technology does its best work when it’s organized around what the users will do with it. You can see this dramatically in many government sites. The IRS, for example, has a very nice, complete, list of all the forms you might need to fill out. There’s no navigation for “What forms you need to figure out your income tax” that would take you through the process of determining what forms you need and print them out. Intuit and H&R Block are very grateful for this oversight.

3. When you’re working on the UX of something, you need to remember that these tools are going to *do* something. Those actions, the paths they follow, the effects they have, the time they occupy, are all elements of the Design and must be considered.

4. Make sure you’re solving the right problem. Design with tasks in mind – limit what you can do on any one element to articulate most important aspects, ensure that everything has a call-to-action

5. Impose visual hierarchy – use visual and content contrast to provide scan-ability; solutions should be reviewed in thumbnail versions as well as monochromatic versions to ensure hierarchy is clear.

6. Watch ‘em use it – ask target users to accomplish specific task with think out loud exercises in their context (home, office, etc.), this of course implies that one needs to build some form of prototype.

7. First impressions count but so does the second, third… – make people want to return and design for how that experience should be different. This is where serendipity should be embraced.

8. Deliver an integrated experience – immerse yourself in all the details like email experiences, how search engines see it, etc… but be careful of “edge cases” where doing a few things really well is more important than a lot not well done.
9. It’s never done – iterate, ask for feedback, allow for future generation

10. Users, users, users,… – get outside of your beliefs and be curious about how your users receive, interpret and respond to solutions, but make sure you can identify very specific users. Innovation will come from extreme users but refinement will come from familiar users. In other words: design for everyone is design for no one.

User Acceptance Testing

You know it’s a lie as soon as you hear it – “Of course we care about the user experience. We do user acceptance training on everything!” So the product or site is already developed, there’s no real place for user input except as notes for possible incorporation in future versions, as long as they’re just add-ons, not actual changes. If you’re lucky the run the product through a focus group “Don’t you love this? How would you use it?” If you’re very lucky they actually let some users from the beta group use the site. If the stars are in their proper alignment and luck is raining down on you, they use a few naive users in the identified target market to actually test the product in the intended tasks.

Probably a couple people from management and the marketing department and other stakeholders use it for a while and decide that it’s exactly what they spec’d and it seems really pretty to them.

User Acceptance Testing is usually the opposite of User Experience Strategy.

The N Dimensional Medium

We often talk about UX and interactive business strategy as though the only elements were design, technology, business, and users. This is true, to some extent. But each of those is an aggregate of manifold other elements, all of which reflect upon one another and on the other high-level elements; all of which alter one another and their relative positions. While it’s easy to talk about all this at the high level, to truly do the work you set out to do –whatever that may be — you must constantly remain aware of the effects of each move you make on all the other pieces of the opus. High-level user strategy takes us light years beyond the dictation that used to occur in media; but the more deeply we can work, the more dramatically the results can be seen.