The six disciplines of User Experience

As envisioned by Donald Norman and inspired by his book "The invisible computer".
The following skills are required for building the best user experience into a product (could be any product from hi-tech to manufacturing)

1. Field studies - Observing potiential users doing their tasks in their normal settings. Skills require careful and systematic observation and usually come from the fields of anthropology and sociology.
2. Behavioral designers - People who create a cohesive model for the product based on a detailed task analysis of the users. They mesh the task requirements with the skills and capabilities of the intended users and this model becomes the basis for engineering design.
   Skills required for this come from the cognitive science and experimental psychology.
3. Model builders - People who rapidly build prototypes and product mock-ups that can be tested even before the real technology is ready. Skills for this usually come from people with a designing and programming background (information architects) and architecture and industrial design.
4. User testers - These people are usually involved in performing usability and feasibility studies. Through rapid user-testing studies , they enable to iterate through designs in order to meet the real needs of the users. Skills for this come from experimental psychology.
5. Graphical and industrial designers - At this stage, the aesthetics of the product are brought in through people who have experience in graphical and industrial design, and the "joy" and "pleasure" of using the product come into picture. Not only must the product designed merge the conceptual model and behavioral aspects but it must also meet varoius requirements of technology. These skills are usually brought in by people from schools of art, design and architecture.
6. Technical writers - The goal of these people should be to show the technologists how to build things that do not require manuals. However in the real world scenario, they are usually brought in after the product is built and are asked to write usage manuals. The technical writers should be able to understand the audience, what the intended users require of the product and how they can go about getting their tasks done through the product. The technical writers should be an integral part of the development team, so that the product is built so well that no instruction manual will be required.

So here's the deal, in a typical technology product, there is no luxury of time to go about doing all the above mentioned steps and in many cases some of the steps can't be executed because the target audience characteristic is too far and wide.

What do you think is the best model that can work for a typical web based application scenario in order to make sure that the real needs of the user are met ?

Need to ‘Undo’ on web applications

The undo problem is one key aspect I am hoping future web apps will support. I just deleted all my mails in my hotmail inbox and I need to ‘Undo’ but I can’t do it. If this was a desktop application I could have done this in a jiffy.

This is a huge problem in web apps, though they are not covered too much and not many people talk about them, as we are now pretty much used to this kind of behavior. Web apps work excellent, they store all our data, enable us to access them from anywhere and give us no worry about licenses etc.

But as we move towards looking at a cloud or what some people call as a ‘cloud OS’ it becomes increasingly important to have all the desktop paradigms on the web. This problem was probably not thought about by people because when the web started it was more a data storage medium where documents, files etc were stored and people would read from it, so probably there was never a need for offlines access or storing states. But as we move towards having a cloud OS, and making the web a operation system, it becomes very very important to look at such issues.

John Dowdell from macromedia has some interesting thoughts on storing states where he basically argues as to whether the Back button on the browser needs to smart to capture these changes and also talks about capturing states in web apps.

Having an undo functionality brings about a sense of simplicity in the user’s mind - “What the heck, I can always undo it” and hence brings more confidence. This will play a vital role as people from different age groups, degrees of tech saviness etc start using the web to perform very important and secure activities like paying bills, making purchases online etc.

So what's your solution to this problem ? Or is this a problem at all ?

Image courtesy : NewbieGamerBlog

Napoleon, the best information architect?

Most usability theories point towards minimalism while presenting data and often warn UX designers against screen clutter and information overload while designing user interfaces.

Edward Tufte is someone who holds an interesting counter-argument to this theory. He believes that there is nothing called an information overload, there is only poor data representation. His concept of sparklines can be found on (or is inspired by?) stock quotes and baseball score charts - both of which compress amazingly large amounts of information into a very small spaces.

The likes of Apple, Google and craigslist have virtually added user goodwill to their balance sheets with their simplicity and zero-gravity design. Simplicity is part of their design strategy with a definite ROI attached to it. But UX designers should not be carried away. Simplicity doesn’t always guarantee better user experience. Designers should find better ways to present data rather than stripping it off for the sake of simplicity. Zen Vs data richness is a very subjective call.

Napoleon’s March

“Probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn, this map by Charles Joseph Minard portrays the losses suffered by Napoleon's army in the Russian campaign of 1812. Beginning at the Polish-Russian border, the thick band shows the size of the army at each position. The path of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow in the bitterly cold winter is depicted by the dark lower band, which is tied to temperature and time scales.”



–Image courtesy http://www.edwardtufte.com