This is just a quick post to share good resources for designing usable interfaces. (It always helps to have a handy set of links).
Hope you find these helpful,
-Jon Fukuda
We believe that product usability is the responsibility of all departments and functions involved in the development process: Marketing, Sales, Software Development, QA, Help Desk and more.
In an ideal product and end user oriented organization, usability should be a core principle throughout all phases of the development cycle. This is a quick post to provide an overview of where various usability milestones should be injected into the definition, design, development and deployment of a given product or website.
Definition
In this early stage where requirements are being gathered, product management & marketing should take some time to better understand the target users, their environment and the subtleties of the interface requirements.
What are the gross categories of the target audience? This doesn’t necessarily fall simply into categories of user-role or demographic. More often than not, behavioral and environmental trends are what drive perceptions of whether something is usable, or useful. For example, people who work on their feet and are not necessarily at their desk for the full 8hrs of a given work day, will need larger visual cues for critical alerts or timely calls to action. This is typically the type of thing you will only catch if you conduct contextual interviews and user ethnography.
Design
During the design phase, it’s helpful to have your target audience and user types documented as personas. The persona documentation is a helpful reference tool for business and functional analysts charged with translating processes flows and functional requirements into system work-flow models and interface schematics.
More often than not, the phrase “That looks alright to me” is uttered among product managers and analysts without having a touchstone to vet the flows and schematics. Knowledge of the user personas, task models and use cases will always drive the design to a more solid state.
Even the best straw man work-flows and schematics can use some vetting – before moving into your development sprints, have the marketing and product team test out the design on paper with some sample users. Initial feedback on the mock-ups typically reveal insightful recommendations. Questions like “What would you expect to happen when you click here?” or “Why did you decide that’s what you needed to click?” will help you understand how they are perceiving the design and the information as you designed it.
Development
For whatever reason, UI designs often undergo a round of changes between leaving the hands of the UI designers and the final build. This is typical and usually can be attributed to technical, time or budgetary constraints.
Every now and then, changes are snuck in by engineers who have a feel for UI and have their own approach to design. For this reason, it’s helpful to document all of the flows and schematics, along with interactive states for all UI components. The documentation should be supplemented with the design rationale in order to maintain the integrity of the UI. This is particularly important for actionable design elements. If you don’t have a rationale for the design, you may want to rethink how it got into the schematic. As an added benefit, this helps to reducing developer’s time spent on interpreting designs and to remain focused on clean code.
Validation
Once development is complete and the product enters alpha/beta testing, A formal round of Usability Tests are essential and effective methods for benchmark data, validation of your designs and gauging readiness for market. Key concerns should be identified and addressed prior to release, or where appropriate they may be deferred and addressed during future product releases.
By keeping a fixed eye on the users and their interactions with the product, your organization will strengthen the vital bridge between usability issues and the software development view of the user interface.
Post Product Launch
Even after the product is released to market users will go through adoption and long-tail stages of use. Several rounds of usability testing will help gain the quantitative and qualitative user interaction feedback essential for success.
In gathering feedback from users and preparing for successful future product revisions and enhancements, your organization will ensure that the product has every opportunity to achieve the results required by your end users’ investment and trust.
-Jon Fukuda
The set up
In October 2007, GE Energy signed a memorandum to deploy advanced energy delivery and metering technologies that will give residential and industrial consumers greater control over their energy usage and costs. November 2007, Google announces investment in energy technologies marking the tipping point of a new era on our energy experience. Just this month, Google revealed the iceberg tip of their Smart Meter consumer solution, harnessing the power of their analytic tool set, Google has settled in the keystone position of the smart meter user experience.
Earlier this month, Limina had the privilege to compete against leading technology consulting firms for a contract to research, design, deploy and test a consumer facing portal that would empower consumers to make the smart consumption decisions and, in the future, play a key role in consumption based home automation.
Much of how this future scenario is already in the works as demonstrated by LucidDesignGroup’s Building Dashboard product for schools, companies and homes. With this dashboard you will, not only monitor and your building’s usage, but chart it against your usage history and, if you have on-site renewable power generation such as wind and solar, you can make smart decisions on when to sell back to the grid to maximize your return.
This display panel was featured in a Michelle Kaughman home on an Episode of NextWorld on the Science Channel, where she discussed live scenarios for home and energy automation with the dashboard as the centerpiece.
The Challenge:
1) Getting the energy providers, homes and consumers ready: In October 2008 the Government in the UK announced a mandate to have every household outfitted with gas and electricity smart meters by the year 2020. On March 19 2009, www.whitehouse.gov posted the recovery act with an $11billion dollar investment in a smart-grid. While there are no mandates, one can predict action is imminent.
2) Ubiquity: Google is about as ubiquitous of a technology service provider as you can get, their interest and investment in this space is a key indicator that this challenge will be met. LucidDesignGroup’s Dashboard has thought forward to live case for interfacing with consumers in an easy to use way making the information and more importantly calls to action accessible and elegant.
Limina is always looking forward to turnkey technological and experience innovations in any industry, but has a special interest in contributing to the global efforts to reduce energy waste and build awareness in renewable resources.
-Jon Fukuda
Submit your RFP’s to services at limina-ao dot com
Design tips for Rich Clients
RIA’s have been sprouting all around us and every web application (and website) seems to have some ‘richness’ in the interaction that it provides to its users. From information browsing to task based applications, users now have a rich set of controls and interactions that allow them to have a more efficient and satisfying experience.
The interaction guidelines for making web applications ‘rich’ traditionally came from Rich clients (Desktop Clients). But as web applications were deployed in a web browser, they were unable to simply follow the guidelines; instead they had to adapt them to the platform. As web applications evolved into RIA’s, they introduced some new interface and interaction styles.
Desktop applications have already implemented a few typical web idioms (Hyperlinks, Back buttons), and here are some newer interface and interactions that can be ported back to Rich Clients. These may not apply to all Rich clients but could be used creatively to enhance the user experience where possible.
Organizing without Menu’s (Tabs and toolbars)
Many RIA’s do not use traditional cascading menus as means of organising the applications functionality (normally this is to avoid having 2 sets of menus); instead they use tabs and toolbars. This reduces the time spent searching for functions and also allows for a better way to view and manage content.
Integrated popups
In order to reduce window clutter and to keep the interface visually lightweight, many RIA’s have rich interactive integrated pop-ups. This allows the users to see the context of the popup content and also have multiple popups open. These popups can show details (Image and text) and also be used to add or edit object properties.
Motion
Although traditionally motion and animation has not been used widely, many RIA’s do a very good job of using transitions and effects to present information, convey organization and show movement from one part of the application to another. Motion provides the user with an added feedback of space and time rather than objects magically appearing and disappearing. Examples of this are: Steps in a Wizard flying in and out, panels sliding, window and objects growing/shrinking as they are brought into view.
Look and Feel/ Branding
Rather than simply inheriting from the operating system, RIA’s have their own look & feel and branding. We are seeing more of this in rich clients (Yahoo messenger, MS Office 2007), but there is a lot more that can be done to help products both stand out and achieve higher usability.
Although it may seem ironic that Rich clients are adapting designs from web applications, as designs evolve and more applications and users take to the internet, this maybe something that can help provide the users have a unified experience.
Creating and using the best design to make your product more usable is just one of the services provided by Limina.
-Vikram Dere
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