As part of the last class’ assignment, I asked students to bring in a link to a site that they thought was both innovative and usable. Innovation can pose an interesting case, as it both pushes our standards forward, potentially making our sites easier and more enjoyable for our users, while at the same time challenging what they already know.
Students’ links to innovative and usable sites:
Monthly Archive for April, 2008
New slides and links are posted for Class 4, our April 29th and final class. It covers forms, navigation, technology and innovation.
It was asked during a break in class last night about usability in developing countries, and the conversation quickly turned to the subject of mobile phones. Mobile phones are much cheaper than computers, and are much more ubiquitous in developing countries. It can be the prized possession of a small village to have contact with the outside world, where they can get the price of crops. It seems that people making only dollars a day are investing first in telecommunications before ‘health, education, or housing’, according to this really interesting article from the New York Times, ‘Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?‘.
The article describes how anthropologists are being deployed by large corporations (such as Nokia) to do field research, and help in what we’ve called in class ‘user centered design’ and ‘contextual inquiries’. They’re helping to discover how users are using their existing products, so that they can improve on their designs for this huge growing market. This again, reflects on the “design something, talk to users, repeat” paradigm that I talk about in each class. You may find people using your product in ways you never dreamed of.
From the article:
Last summer, Chipchase sat through a monsoon-season downpour inside the one-room home of a shoe salesman and his family, who live in the sprawling Dharavi slum of Mumbai. Using an interpreter who spoke Tamil, he quizzed them about the food they ate, the money they had, where they got their water and their power and whom they kept in touch with and why. He was particularly interested in the fact that the family owned a cellphone, purchased several months earlier so that the father, who made the equivalent of $88 a month, could run errands more efficiently for his boss at the shoe shop. The father also occasionally called his wife, ringing her at a pay phone that sat 15 yards from their house. Chipchase noted that not only did the father carry his phone inside a plastic bag to keep it safe in the pummeling seasonal rains but that they also had to hang their belongings on the wall in part because of a lack of floor space and to protect them from the monsoon water and raw sewage that sometimes got tracked inside. He took some 800 photographs of the salesman and his family over about eight hours and later, back at his hotel, dumped them all onto a hard drive for use back inside the corporate mother ship. Maybe the family’s next cellphone, he mused, should have some sort of hook as an accessory so it, like everything else in the home, could be suspended above the floor.
Slides and links for Class 3 are now posted. Today’s subjects are Accessibility and Design.
Please excuse the wonky design for today.
Generally, I use spreadsheets to track user research information during an iteration of our product (which is typically about 4 weeks between releases). However, this method doesn’t scale well to long-term needs. In particular, what happens if I find out some information that I know will be relevant 6 months from now, but won’t be relevant until then?
What’s needed is some sort of database solution. The drawback with any database driven solution is that you lose a lot of the spontaneity that you can have with a spreadsheet. However, I think it’s the next step for us here at Angelsoft. I’ll be posting here as I consider our options. From a quick Google search I didn’t see anything primarily for the usability and user experience design community, so I may consider rolling out something from scratch.
Someone from class wanted to know if there were any specific chapters to read from Research Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines.
The answer is, no there are no specific chapters you must read. You can browse through it and read what is interesting to you. It’s a thick book, but it has a great design that makes it much more amenable to browsing as opposed to cover-to-cover reading. My objective is that you become aware of this book as a resource, and I suggest you pick it up again from time to time. You’ll find that different parts of the book will be applicable to your work as you work on different projects.
Paper Prototyping
You can buy a paper prototype video of your very own from Jakob Nielsen’s website.
Personas
The personas exercise from last night was a lot of fun. I wish I had brought my camera to take pictures of the personas you all came up with.
If you’re interested in personas (and it really resonates well with some folks- I’ve met a few filmwriters who go nuts over them), you should check out The Inmates Are Running the Asylum”, by Allan Cooper, who is the godfather of the technique. Be warned, like anyone with a technique and a book to back it up, its sold as more of a panacea than it actually is.
I think it’s quite interesting to see how well our Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines book rates it as a technique. Still, I say from the point of view for helping large teams understand reams of complicated user research data, it can be a really great technique. The fact (um, “fact” may be too strong a word… “in my experience” would be better) is that few people will ever venture into a spreadsheet file full of user data, no mater how useful and rich it may be.
Article at TechCrunch today on how specialized web pages for the mobile experience are becoming irrelevant. Last week in class, someone asked about designing web pages for mobile, and whether they should be separate designs. I may have started talking about the impact of the iPhone and surfing, but this article really addresses the point that I was trying to get to- that going forward most phones will probably be able to handle the webpages you throw at it. However! There are definitely going to be some types of applications (maps, restaurant reviews, etc) and content that people are going to want to use more frequently on a mobile device. In this case, yes I think it makes sense to make a version of your web page for mobile consumption. I think it really depends on what type of product you’re dealing with. Checking out your site analytics may be able to give you a peek at what percentage of your audience is dealing with mobile devices, and whether you should consider addressing them directly. We’ll address site analytics and how they can help you make choices like these in our fourth class.
Welcome! I’ll be posting links to resources for this class.