Chapter I, 24th July 2010 - 30th July 2010
Ethnography in UX
Usability (and user experience, by extension) does not rely just on the skills and proficiency of user experience designers on creating good software. At the same time, when interacting with end users through the many, well known techniques - card sorting, interviews, etc. - it is insufficient to have them sit at your office.Context is everything. Understanding the situational surroundings, in-situ culture, etc. is as important as everything else. This article by UX matters discusses the usage of ethnography as another tool on the UX expert's belt.
On a side note, I had the pleasure of reading Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems as part of my undergrad formation. It goes deep into the issues of using ethnography as the centre of designing usable systems. I strongly recommend you to read it too, but here's the Wikipedia gist on Contextual Design as a first peek into these concepts.
Psychological Study of Web Designs
When creating things for people, psychology is a key factor for success. While deep analysis with theoretical cognitive models such as GOMS and ACT-R are applicable in Human-Computer Interaction situations, they are often too complex to be used on a daily basis.Nevertheless, practical outcomes of psychology are applicable when designing software. This article at Abduzeedo discusses some of psychology that can boost the Return on Investment of a Website, such as trust or colour.
A Real Web Design Application
Designing a Web site aims at providing a good user experience for its target audience. And this is done with the aid of miscellaneous tools, ranging from graphical design to hand coding HTML. However, the landscape of powerful tools to aid Web designers is worse than desired (talking about eating your own dog food...) In this article, Jason Santa Maria puts out his own frustrations on designing Web sites, and what would be the ideal tool for this task.Provocative, I'm sure. But there might be a business opportunity for like-minded software developers to enter into the reign of Adobe. A happier Web designer will certainly deliver better designs.
(Be sure to read the post and the comments section too)
Interviewing Users
Nielsen's bi-weekly column is frequently filled with good insights and lessons into usability processes.It's latest article discusses the pros and cons of interviewing users in the context of usability studies. While these practices are essential, they cannot be taken lightly. Starting from how questions are formulated, and passing through the lack of results from singled-out focus groups, Nielsen's advice finishes with the triangulation of studies as the best solution.
Recent studies we've done centred around using expert analysis, usability tests, and focus groups as complementary techniques to ensure a high quality usability study of a software. I can attest that it sure does work.
What's in a Name?
This was probably the most significant and most interesting read I had this week. UX Magazine's article provides us a detailed analysis of UX's meta level: keywords, jargon, names, and how it influences interaction with clients and co-workers.The best advices from this article are: to put a glossary of UX terms in your proposals, including descriptive images for each one (when possible); and decide on a common lingo to be used inside your team.
(that's it for now. next week I'll definitely have more to share.)
