Below are my slides I’ll be using for the Tuesday night Information Session. See you there!
I’ll be speaking about the state of the web industry and my usability class at the NYU SCPS Career Night and Information Session on Tuesday, August 19th. I’ll be sharing some unique research about the growth of the web industry in early-stage companies, using data pulled from my day job at Angelsoft.net. This event is targeted towards prospective students.
Last semester, I wanted to test the level of usefullness for one of the textbooks I assign. Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines is a solid book that I have kept as part of my class for the last couple of years, but I haven’t been completely sure as to how helpful it was to my students because of the broad range of experience levels in the classroom. So in a typical usability-teacher fashion, I ran a test in the guise of a homework assignment to assess the book’s true usefullness.
The Assignment
The assignment was for students to hand in a list of the five most “surprising” guidelines from the book. The aspect of “surprising” was open ended- it could mean that a student learned something new and helpful, that they found something that they vehemently disagreed with, or something else all together.
I took all of the answers, and put them in a spreadsheet to see what patterns could be observed in the answers. Ultimately I found that students gravitated towards guidelines that had practical implications to their current positions. I also found that there was very little overlap between what guidelines students found useful. There were two huge spikes in guideline citation, however…
The Hardest Working Guidelines in Class
These two guidelines were each cited by more than a third of the classroom in the assignment. No other guidelines came close to their popularity.
Guideline 6:9 — Avoid Scroll Stoppers
“Ensure that the location of headings and other page elements does not create the illusion that users have reached the top or bottom of a page when they have not.”
Guideline 1:10 — Use Parallel Design
“Have several developers independently propose designs and use the best elements from each design.”
Many of the students who listed the Parallel Design guideline expressed that they didn’t know how to practically implement it due to resource constraints. So, here are a couple of ways that we do this at my company that are both time and resource efficient:
- With my designer hat on, I’ll sit down with another team member (project manager, programmer, etc) at a table for an hour. We then independently sketch our own solutions to the problem, while looking over each others shoulders for inspiration.
- We will sometimes break out of a product meeting and hand everyone a whiteboard marker. Everyone then sketches out their own solution to the problem at the same time for 10 minutes. We’ll then review everyone’s solution, and then draft a composite of the best elements from everyone’s solutions. The designer can then flesh out the details from there.
This week we finished a whirlwind-tour through primary user research, its analysis, how the findings are disseminated, and finally how those findings are applied. With those final findings, you can act in a reactive or a proactive manner. For instance, if you are working on a new site, you could create personas to help guide the features and design to match the persona- the persona provides a mechanism for designers to predict into the future what the user needs will be, and therefor be proactive in their designs. Another example: if you were improving an existing site and finished a round of user testing, your recommendations will be reactive to the existing site.
The slides and links for Class 3 have been updated for the session on July 14th. We will be finishing our personas workshop, and then moving on to the topics of accessibility and design.
Last week we had just enough time to start the personas workshop. Below are the personas that we’ve developed so far. Please note: there is a missing persona that was done by a group in the back of the class! If you have it, please remember to bring it to class tomorrow.
Molly McFarland
Created by Kate, Lauren, Ursula, and Daniela
- 35 Years Old
- Originally from Wisconsin (but born in Ohio)
- In New York City for 3 years
- Renter
- Apartments in different cities/countries, moves around a lot
- Free spirit/can’t be tied down
- Married twice, divorced twice (no kids) > lots of things to sell and looking for
- New apartment and new boyfriend
- Is an actress, looking for restaurant employment and casting calls
- Favorite color is green
- Looking for free/cheap clothing on Craigslist
- Looking for a ride back to Ohio (for Thanksgiving)
- Loves green tea (will not date a coffee drinker)
- Social smoker
- Killed her only pet (a fish) (by accident, of course… forgot to feed)
- Has laptop and relies on other’s wifi in cafes and parks a lot
James Dean
Created by Mya, Peter, Danielle, Charlie and C
- 24 years old
- Collage grad, computer science
- looking for full time job in programming field
- Lives in Brooklyn, has a roommate who works part time at Starbucks
- Single, has a dog, and a part time dog walker
- Still has student loan
- looking for girlfriend with job
- Community - programming - network - cheap computer (??)
- Volunteers in hospital, doing database work. Keeps skills ups.
- Maybe go back to grad school for different field
- Looking for new friends
- Selling his comic book collection
- Looking for free stuff, bartering, tutoring for cash
- Bartering computer skills for place to live
- ride sharing - free/barter for weekend vacations
- looking for free events, activities, hosted by city
- Goes bar hopping and gallery hopping with buddies
- Looks out for group activities with cheap beer/parties
Jojo Smithy
Created by Gabriella, Justin, Michelle and Cathline
- 30 years old
- Looking for apartment with 2 bedrooms $2700
- Wants office - kids room later
- Director of technology
- Engaged, future oriented
- Graduate work in business technology/creative writing
- location- Brooklyn
- cheaper than Manhattan
- good bars
- better community/neighborhood
- more for the money
- diversity
- Free time/Interests: reads suspense novels, designs web sites, creates educational flash games, watches indie films, eats out and tries new restaurants, vegetarian on principle, animal lover (3 dogs) doesn’t like cooking, gives to charity, listens to NPR, addicted to reality shows
At the end of Monday’s class, we talked about trust in the online world, and how it acts as the bedrock for transactions such as creating accounts, purchases, and entering personal information. After all, we can’t have much of a usable site if people can’t trust the site enough to actually use it.
Here is the list of qualities we created that help us to identify trustworthy sites and transactions:
- There is discussion about the site in the blogosphere
- We can find other people discussing the site with Google
- The site provides exceeding value (example: mint.com)
- Spelling and grammar is correct
- Content is relevant and meets our expectations
- The mechanics of the interface work as expected (e.g. drop downs work properly, works on all browsers, etc.)
- We can find articles about the site from reputable media outlets
- The site represents a known brand
- There is design consistency throughout the site (fonts, colors, language)
- The site has transparency in its operations and content (examples: getsatisfaction.com provides transparency in customer relations, and visicog.com provides transparency into what happens in our class)
- Privacy statements are clear and prominent (example: “we won’t use your email address for marketing purposes or share it with anyone else”)
- The site displays trust symbols such as VeriSign’s logo or industry badges such as the Better Business Bureau
- Someone we know has recommended the site
- Prominent contact information, including phone number is displayed
- The domain name appears valid (no misspellings or odd characters)
We spent so much time on the Usability Test Plan homework assignment, that I forgot to go over two other parts of your homework. Your entire homework for this week is as follows:
- Read chapters 8-9 of Don’t Make Me Think (second edition), by Steve Krug
- Hand in two URLs. One of a site that you think is easy to use, and one that you think is difficult to use.
- Create a Usability Test Plan, using the worksheet we went over during class. Make sure to follow the instructions at the top of the document.
Don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.
I mentioned yesterday that since Webmonkey’s “triumphant return“, that their new wiki strategy resulted in the destruction of a page I’ve used as a reference for about 10 years… their special characters page is now a frequent victim of bad graffiti. My precious resource is no longer viable.
Well, thanks to Lauren Sperber in class for sending over this link to a new xhtml character entity reference. It looks kind of swanky. I’ll miss the ability to do a text search for the names of characters, but this looks pretty easy to scan visually.
Edit: On another look, I realized it does have the ability to show the name/descriptions of the various characters. I’m sold on it.
I’ve just posted updated slides and resources for this semester’s new students in the Class 1 section.
Past students might want to check out the new usability test plan worksheet that is new to this semester.