September 2007 Issue
How Do Users Really Feel About Your Design?
Published: September 24, 2007
Perhaps you’ve done contextual inquiries to discover your users’ requirements and understand their workflows. You may have carried out participatory design sessions, usability tested your design, then iterated and improved it. But do you know how users really feel about your design? Probably not.
The user experience field has been trying to move beyond mere usability and utility for years. So far, no one seems to have developed easy-to-implement, non-retrospective, valid, and reliable measures for gauging users’ emotional reactions to a system, application, or Web site.
In this column, I’ll introduce you to a promising method that just might solve this problem. While this method has not yet been subjected to rigorous peer review or experimental testing, it offers an intriguing solution and is endlessly fascinating to me. And it just might prove to be the kind of powerful technique we’ve been looking for to illuminate users’ emotional reactions to our designs.
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Category: Columns
The Help Landscape: A Mile Wide and 30 Seconds Deep
Published: September 24, 2007
Two questions any writer must deal with are: “What do I write about?” and “How much do I say about it?” Essentially, these questions deal with the scope and the depth of a document. Technical communicators have a tendency to want to document a topic as completely as possible, and we carry this instinct with us when we architect and write Help files. In this column, I challenge that prevalent instinct and offer an alternative way of thinking about the scope and depth requirements of Help systems. The benefits of this approach are, I hope, better Help for users and, for our clients and employers, a more efficient use of technical communicators’ time. First, I’ll discuss three principles that underpin my perspective, then I’ll give some practical advice about writing Help that people will actually use.
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Category: Columns
Conducting Successful Interviews With Project Stakeholders
Published: September 10, 2007
If you’ve read some of my previous columns on UXmatters, you could be forgiven for thinking my entire working life is spent largely surrounded in a sea of quantitative data. This is, rather surprisingly even to me, not nearly close to the truth. Looking back over recent months, by far the most common form of research I’ve carried out is that stalwart of qualitative studies—the interview.
A simple, semi-structured, one-on-one interview can provide a very rich source of insights. Interviews work very well for gaining insights from both internal and external stakeholders, as well as from actual users of a system under consideration. Though, in this column, I’ll focus on stakeholder interviews rather than user interviews. (And I’ll come back to that word, insights, a little later on, because it’s important.)
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Category: Columns
Card Sorting: Mistakes Made and Lessons Learned
Published: September 10, 2007
Card sorting is a simple and effective method with which most of us are familiar. There are already some excellent resources on how to run a card sort and why you should do card sorting. This article, on the other hand, is a frank discussion of the lessons I’ve learned from running numerous card sorts over the years. By sharing these lessons learned along the way, I hope to enable others to dodge similar potholes when they venture down the card sorting path.
Card sorting is a deceptively simple method. The beauty of card sorting is that it just makes sense. I normally get enthusiastic nods of approval when explaining it to others. But therein lies one of the key problems with card sorting: our expectations of what it can do.
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Category: Features