Category — Remote Usability Tests

On mobile devices, interface design challenges steer users towards dedicated apps

Today’s web browsers, enabled by always-on internet and the cloud computing model, can be used as a conduit for all ranges of applications unthinkable when Mosaic, which would morph into Netscape Navigator, debuted. According to TheNextWeb article, the tide is starting to turn in favour of native apps again. Chief reason for this is the rise of smartphones and their respective app stores. To make his point the author uses the example of Twitter which is used 81.43% of the time through an app rather than the website.

Even on the desktop apps like Spotify, the music streaming app, eschew the web browser save to entice visitors to download it. However for every Spotify there are more, such as Grooveshark and Last.fm that deliver their services through their website. The web browser, reliable connection permitting of course, still holds a number of advantages. Web browsers are ubiquitous and come bundled with almost every computer regardless of operating system. The cloud also offers the advantage of availability. Sure, apps like Spotify and Steam, the video game delivery app, can be signed into from anywhere in the world but you have to go through the hurdle of downloading and installing them first!

According to the Nielsen Group’s iPhone usability studies, users prefer using dedicated apps than using a browser. From a usability and interface design perspective this is understandable due to the nature of small screens on smartphones whereby the interface design of mobile browsers is severely restricted by the size. This, of course, requires a rethink of interface design hence mobile optimized websites and apps.  On the desktop, meaning most computers, the browser remains king.

To be fair the thesis put forward by Boris and Adam Richardson does not try and play Nostradamus and predict the day when web browsers will become extinct but rather browsers will become more and more invisible, perhaps echoing Dan Norman’s seminal concept of The Invisible Computer. Nevertheless, with cloud computing conquering the business world, such as Salesforce’s CRM software, Google’s Docs office software, or Pidoco’s wireframe software, the web browser will for a long time still be very much in use, even if less visible.

Website building applications

Website building applications provide users the ability to construct a website using design ready tools. Users build websites using templates and function or feature options provided by the website building application. With website building applications users only need to select their templates, functions, and features, and then simply enter in content, be it words or the uploading of photos. Website building applications provide users with coded, finished programs that can be published. Often, these website builders are included with hosting packages or are readily available in different quality levels. Be careful, since they often differ by ease-of-use.

Website builders are targeted at private individuals and very small businesses wishing to quickly create a simple, cheap web presence. Website builders limit users to the particular design or layout templates available, and while it is easy and quick to publish a site, it often does not fulfil all needs or wishes of users looking for a more advanced, customized website with functions not provided “off the rack”.

Wireframing

Wireframing tools allow users to create low or high fidelity wireframe prototypes as visual guides that lay out the structure of a given website and the relationships between the interface design’s pages. Wireframes are not finished code, and so they are not suitable for immediate publishing as a website. But they give the user much more flexibility regarding the user interface design of his website in the works, going far beyond the options provided by website building applications. A wireframe is an outline of a website’s structure that allows users to explore the following relative to their future interface design:

•    ideation: the process of creating new ideas

•    conceptualization: the formation and interpretation of concepts

•    usability tests: the process whereby users and designers evaluate a given wireframe prototype

Since wireframing is a before programming process, its goal is to give designers the ability to evaluate the converging and diverging features of the prototype in order to submit an outline that will eventually become a successful and usable interface design. Wireframe prototypes are an ideal way to involve different stakeholders in the process of creating a website, and in combination with usability testing, they lead to better interface designs for applications that professionals rely on for their commercial purposes, such as e-commerce shops or other portals. Wireframes are not meant to represent or generate finished code, and exist mainly as a basis for exploration and improvement of a given interface design. The implementation has to be done separately.

Which method best suits your needs?

If you are building a website, the process you choose depends on what you want and need. If you are constructing a website for personal use, for example for birth or wedding announcements, then website building applications are appropriate because they are simple and do not require much effort on your part. Since such sites often contain only simple information (text, images, links), your personal needs can be fulfilled by website builders. As long as you are satisfied with using their standard templates. If you have a bigger, more professional project in mind, such as creating an interface design for a corporation or for eCommerce purposes, then using wireframing software will allow you to follow a design process that permits you to create highly individual, interactive website concepts and in the process optimize usability. For example, programs like the Pidoco rapid prototyping software give you the ability to create interactive, wireframe prototypes that can e used in usability tests within the same software and facilitate your capacity to discern the requirements and constraints of your future interface design as they relate to usability and user experience. In summary, choosing between wireframing and website building applications boils down to your personal needs vs. professional needs.

In this blog post I shall look at design patterns as a usability method in 2 parts. In part 1 I shall look at what design patterns are and the advantages of using them in interface design.

What is a design pattern?

Design patterns are a useful method for the interface design of websites and software programs. One of the hallmarks of humanity is the evolution of our empirical collective body of knowledge that succeeding generations have built upon to get us, a relatively feeble creature, to where we are today. Anyone wishing to start a fire to prepare a meal does not have to accidentally discover fire first! In the same vein design patterns are a collection of solutions to typical problems encountered during the interface design of web sites and software programs. Over time these interface design problems have been documented and paired with solutions to assist all interface designers be they a novice or a seasoned professional.

What are the advantages of design patterns in interface design?

One of the ways of ensuring good usability in interface design is to always adhere to usability standards. These standards have been tried, tested and proven to work. Design patterns are there to assist you in solving the common problems encountered during interface design, including usability issues, thus enabling you to optimize your time much like a shortcut takes you to your destination faster. Design patterns sum up best practices and can be thought of as a template or guide that interface designers can use as a direct solution or a starting point to fine tune their interface designs.  Design patterns are also useful because they function as a code or standard that can be used by software developers, interface designers and other stakeholders to communicate and collaborate more efficiently. Novices can become accustomed to them and rely on their proven success, while professionals can share and show their expertise. Design patterns are also continuously being updated, tested and improved upon by an ever growing community of information architects and interaction or interface designers.

When organizing a task analysis, follow these steps:

1.    Assemble a group of 4-10 people (people can correspond with the amount of subtasks if you choose)

2.    Choose the task you want to analyze as a group (pretty self-explanatory).

3.    Break this task down into 4-10 ‘subtasks’. These subtasks should be logical and specified in terms of objectives. Make sure that your subtasks contribute to the overall synergy of the original task in question. Each group member should be responsible for a subtask.

4.    You can draw (or even wireframe) your subtasks as a diagram to ensure that all categories and objectives are relevant and logical.

5.    Commence with the ‘decomposition process’. Each group member should hypothesize the various ways in which users can perform tasks by testing out different methods on themselves or other group members. Make sure that your detailed analysis of job performance corresponds to cognitive reasoning. Encourage all group members to be as detailed as possible.

6.    Discuss results and determine ways to incorporate the information gathered from your task analysis into your user interface design.

Task Analysis Pitfalls

Task analysis allows you to build a model that organizes all the relevant information related to a task that needs to be accomplished by your users. However, the cognitive nature of this information means that a task analysis is more psychological than technological—the results are rather abstract. Thus, task analysis cannot really help you tackle technical or design questions outside the realm of direct user behavior information. The results have to be “translated” into a great user interface design.

Task analysis can also be tricky because it requires a very in depth analysis of very small tasks. This can be time consuming, so make sure that when you are conducting this type of usability method, you choose a group of patient and focused participants.

This blog post is the second in a series of two about scenarios of use as a usability method.

How to generate scenarios of use

Scenarios of use are not exceptionally difficult to craft, which makes them an attractive usability method.  Creating them, however, is easiest if you have a facilitator with strong communication and interpersonal skills—this helps boost group morale and creates an atmosphere that has a higher level of productivity.  When creating your scenarios of use, try to generate a number of scenarios that cover a wide range of circumstances, both positive and negative (the negative are called ‘misuse cases’).  You want to be sure to include misuse cases so you can investigate non-functional requirements such as the security and accessibility of your interface design.  You should go through all scenarios of use by yourself or with your group before you include stakeholders.

What are the 8 steps to developing scenarios of use?

According to Edward Kenworthy’s 1997 book Use Case Modeling: Capturing User Requirements the eight steps to developing scenarios of are:
1. Identify who is going to be using the website (this also works for other web-based, desktop-based or mobile applications).
2. Pick one of those actors.
3. Define what that actor wants to do on the site. Each thing the actor does on the site becomes a scenario of use.
4. For each scenario of use, decide on the normal course of events when that actor is using the site.
5. Describe the basic course in the scenario of use. Describe it in terms of what the actor does and what the system does in response that the actor should be aware of.
6. When the basic course is described, consider alternate courses of events and add those to “extend” the scenario of use.
7. Look for commonalities among the scenarios of use. Extract these and note them as common course scenario of use.
8. Repeat the steps 2 through 7 for all other actors.

What are the limitations of scenarios of use?

According to Alistair Cockburn, scenarios of use are an indispensable usability method, but they do not “take care of system design, user interface design, feature lists, or testing”.  Thus, scenarios of use can only assist you in laying the foundation for a great user interface design; scenarios of use help you hypothesize about your interface design, but they do not aid you in the actual feature design or edits of your prototype. Scenarios of use provide guidelines and suggestions only, but are still very useful because they help you identify the points in your interface design upon which you should focus design effort and subsequent usability tests.

This blog post is the second in a series of two about brainstorming as a usability method

How to conduct a brainstorming session

What you need for a brainstorming session

•    4-6 participants

•    Adequate location

•    A question to discuss

•    Note taking tools (paper, white board, word processor, markers, pens etc.)

•    Positivity—leave judgments and preconceived notions at the door!

So you learned what brainstorming is and why you should do it as a usability testing method from the first part of my blog post, but now you need to know how to do it. Before you begin your brainstorming session, you must first pick a question to present to the group or to yourself as an individual. The question should be neither too narrow nor too broad.  For example, brainstorming header fonts is too narrow and brainstorming on how to satisfy customers is too broad.  More appropriate questions would be: “What service for mobile phones is not available now, but needed?” or “What are some strategies for developing a new software usability test?”  Larger questions can be addressed but they should then be broken down into smaller brainstorming sessions.

You should also have a method for keeping track of ideas during a brainstorming session.  You can have post-it notes, a white board, or someone who types “meeting minutes” that can later be disseminated via email among participants.  It is important to talk and come up with ideas, but even more crucial to remember them!

Make sure to set some ground rules aimed specifically at reducing social inhibitions among participants while simultaneously increasing their creativity.  If you follow these four basic rules for brainstorming, you will be in good shape to achieve the aforementioned goals:

1.    Focus on the quantity of ideas produced: spreading the net as wide as possible increases the likelihood of producing a radical and effective solution.

2.    Withhold criticism: withholding criticism until the last stages of a brainstorming session is vital because early criticism can become a bottleneck hindering the flow of creativity.

3.    Encourage unusual ideas: suspend your assumptions and encourage the production of ideas that are not only unique, but also atypical.  This leads to an increased volume of ideas and a higher likelihood of an original solution.

4.    Combine ideas: you should encourage participants to combine their ideas as this will improve them and augment the sense of group solidarity.
Finally, if you are conducting a group brainstorming session, how do you select participants?  As a rule, you should select a heterogeneous group so that the diversity of generated ideas reflects the diversity of the thinkers.  Diverse participants can come from different careers, education levels, cultures, genders, and ages.  Diversity in participants cultivates diversity of ideas. However, sometimes you want to have group members who have a little more in common.  For example, if you are conducting a brainstorming session on software usability, you may want to ensure that there is a common link of technology and interface design knowledge among participants.

Docs users can also chat in real time with collaborators as they evaluate spreadsheets, proposals, and other written projects. MindMeister specializes on online mind mapping and allows users to create, edit and share mind maps very easily and collaborate on them in real-time. Pidoco offers its users real-time collaboration possibilities as they create wireframe prototypes of planned user interfaces for web, desktop or mobile applications, including applications for the iPhone or iPad. Pidoco users are able to send collaborators links to their wireframes for editing and user experience feedback purposes and for conducting usability tests to improve the user experience of applications. These and other applications underscore the importance of web interfaces design that keeps in mind usability and time-effective functionality.

From the range of tools now starting to offer real-time collaboration capabilities, it is apparent that this modern form of team work is becoming increasingly important, especially as globalization, cross-border cooperation and outsourcing intensify. While real-time collaboration is useful in such general settings as creating text or spreadsheet documents, it can be seen from the examples above that many specialized areas are discovering the advantages of it. Web interface design, for example requires active engagement and feedback. In order for designers to stay competitive and relevant in the world of web development, they need to have the ability to collaborate with colleagues, clients and users in the fastest way possible. And similar arguments can be applied to many other fields where individuals and businesses try to be innovative in their processes in order to remain competitive.

The pidoco° screens design software consists of three main components which complement each other perfectly. They speed up the interface design process and optimize the general workflow in all stages of user centered web design.

Clickable wireframes are quickly sketched with the Prototype Creator (just by drag&drop) and can later easily be shared and reviewed by colleagues, test users or clients. If there is need for even more in-depth feedback on individual aspects of the clickable wireframes, just use the clickable wireframes to perform a one-on-one remote usability test where moderator and test user are connected remotely by a shared screen and an integrated phone. All modules are aimed to increase productivity of the interface design process and ease communication within the team.

Have you ever thought about outsourcing some of your web developments? I did and it caused me a lot of headaches! Outsourcing services like Elance or RentACoder sound intriguing in the first place, and it seems that you get a lot of bang for your buck – in theory!

But the real experience looks quite different! As everybody knows in the web world, there is a lot of room for misunderstanding when it comes to getting the idea of a project across. Even if you design the most important screens in Photoshop so that the coder roughly knows how the style guide looks, there will always be stuff in a static screenshot that can be interpreted one way or the other.

And just telling the outsourcing provider to “get back to me when something is unclear” does not help. To the developer it is absolutely clear what to do and how – but he thinks like a coder thinks and probably not like the marketing person who was posting the web site job on the outsourcing platform.

In other words, a good project description (aka specification) and continuous communication is king in such an outsourcing project. Fine, but here another problem occurs: Ever tried to get your message across in plain English (e.g. via Skype), when your service provider just speaks Hindi or Russian and broken English? This can end in a real disaster (and in my case it did with some of the projects I outsourced through Elance).

On almost every website, you can select data from a given pool of options. The Yahoo! Design Patterns show you the best practices for different contexts of selection. The date picker is just as represented as the picture carousel which you can see nowadays in almost every online shop (now you know why).

Yahoo! Design Pattern – Rich Interaction

This is a nice one! These design patterns show you how users can interact with your site by using dynamic and animated effects. But not only do the Yahoo! Design Patterns show you what dynamic patterns exist, but also how you get users to use them really and manage the right level of effects without creating an overkill.

Yahoo! Design Pattern – Social

Web 2.0 is everywhere and what has been so special a few years ago, is today rather common practice on many websites – without being labeled 2.0. The Yahoo! Design Patterns tell you a lot about the core principals of social media and interaction among your users. These social design best practices deal with patterns attached to people (e.g. identity, reputation and presence) but also to objects for rating content and sharing stuff what they like, thus making social interaction work.

Thumbs up for the Yahoo! Design Patterns Library

What started out as an internal Yahoo! project is now a strong and powerful source for designing usability. These design patterns are not limited to what the Yahoo! people did and still do on their site, but they are a guideline for all the web designers out there. Of course, the design pattern library contains examples on how Yahoo! uses these patterns. But consider these design patterns more like a concept outline and not a copy paste solution. Two tab navigations can have the same core concept, with completely different designs – thus enabling designers to take these design patterns to create something great, something beautiful AND usable!