The Cons

According to Nielsen, the “critical failing of user interviews is that you’re asking people to either remember past use or speculate on future use of a system.” Interviews rely heavily on what people can remember (which is tied to the concept of memorability).  Thus, the main critical failings of users are:

•    Human memory is fallible: Humans can’t remember details about how they used a website and tend to make up stories to rationalize their loss of memory by either embellishing what they do remember or disclosing tentative or false information about what they don’t remember.
•    Users are pragmatic and concrete: Since users usually have no idea how to speculate about how they would use a system based on its description alone.  Users can use what is in front of them but not guess about how they would use an interface design that they have not been exposed to.

The main problem with interviews is that one cannot reliably collect concrete information about the specifics of a user interface design.

What interviews tell you and how you can use them

The main benefit of interview is, according to Nielsen, “exploring general attitudes”.  Interviews are a good way to understand the big picture related to an interface design, but not always the best way to measure details and specifics.  With that in mind, if you are going to use interviews as a method of collecting user experience feedback then use them in tandem with a usability testing method that is more precise or quantitative and allows you to get a better reading on the detail-based problems with your design.

Even if already a few days past, I want to use the fact that Sabrina’s (webnographer.com) event photos are now available on flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/iamacameraonline/4018600867/) to write a little retrospect of pidoco’s appearance at last year’s UX Brighton.

Last year’s event topic was: ‘Remote User Research – A 360° View’. For that reason, pidoco’s head of product development, Volker Gersabeck, has been invited to hold a speech and present the first and ever Remote Usability Tester with which you can test clickable wireframes online and in real time.
Even though still in beta at that time, we got some great feedback and many signups for closed beta trials. The effective combination of wireframing tool and usability software suite with out of the box technology for expert reviews and real time remote usability testing (including one-to-one sessions with shared screens, integrated audio, recording and annotation features etc.) was just convincing. And what the audience really liked was the fact that pidoco is 100% web-based and you do not need to install any software infrastructure. It’s right plug and play with almost pay as you use short term subscriptions (monthly).

But actually I just wanted to say thanks for all the positive feedback like: ‘I have to admit I only tried Pidoco° very briefly at UX Brighton last week, but I was impressed with what I saw’ and wanted to let you know that we still have the free trial online.

Read more about the remote usability tester and the wireframe tool on our website.

Everybody who is into interface design, Rapid Paper Prototyping is old school! But ever considered doing interface design on screen?

With pidoco’s web-based prototyping software, screen designers and web developers can save valuable time, optimize communication within the team and build better interfaces for the internet.

Rapid Paper Prototyping has already been in the know for a while to get a web-application started. Rapid Paper Prototyping is about sketching ideas with pen and paper to be shared and iterated within the team. This prototype will then go through an iterative design process by integrating feedback from clients, test users and colleagues. This paper prototype will at last act as a guideline for the whole project – from beginning to the end (but is there a real end?). Some web designers even use these basic sketches for performing usability tests. Revealing usability issues in an early stage of development can save a lot of time and budget, since later alterations in the so called ‘finished’ web application are minimized.

Anyway, there are several drawbacks to Rapid Paper Prototyping.  Paper prototypes are difficult to add to the project repository and also difficult to collaborate on over different locations. Transforming paper sketches into interactive, digital documents for getting the grip on how workflows are reproduced in the design is also a time consuming task as we all know!
That is why many interface designers create their wireframes directly in MS PowerPoint or InDesign and have them distributed to the relevant sources. True, that way one can share the screens more effectively but it is not really more interactive than copying a piece of paper handing it to the team. The Visio-type static wireframes still do not show the real capabilities for test user excitement:  links, dynamic menus and combo-boxes etc. cannot be reproduced effectively and need to be explained individually in long text. Again, more time and effort has to be invested to get the message across.

The fancy startup pidoco° has spotted this problem and made it their mission to tackle it by providing a fast web-based interface design software.