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Information on Personas and an Argument for Design
design, processes & methodologies, usability
October 25, 2003, 09:29 PM
There's a good, thorough overview of personas on Information Today. The article gives a great digest of Cooper's description of personas in Inmates, although once again I could ask for a little more guidance on how a researcher is supposed to collect the data to back up a good persona. There's talk of careful collection of qualitative data, but the process of translating those findings into personas is still pretty mysterious.
What I particularly liked, however, was this small story that illustrates the need for user-centered design:
One of the best arguments for using personas comes from some misguided design efforts at Microsoft. When the software giant geared up to redesign its well-known Microsoft Office Suite for a 1997 release, the research team soon discovered that many of the features users wanted already existed. In fact, four out of five of the features users requested for Office 97 came with Office 95. The outcome of Microsoft's design approach is just what Cooper warns against. In trying to support the diverse tasks of many conceivably different software users, Microsoft cobbled together a product that was bloated with capabilities and ended up satisfying few users.
Many people in marketing, development, and management will argue that piling features into a new product is far more important than designing usable interfaces and compelling interactions. And early on in the product's life cycle when the features are few and the interface relatively simple, this may be true, at least if your users are fairly computer-saavy. But once a few layers of those nifty new features have been slapped on to the product, you'll quickly start to find your users asking for capabilities that already exist. Bottom line is, you wasted your time with all those shiny new features, because your interface is so poorly designed that nobody even knows they're there.
The Canonical List of Companies Rob Would Really, Really Like To Work For, Part I
personal
October 25, 2003, 05:01 PM
Here it is, just as the title says:
- Google, Inc. - because they apparently have a great work environment and corporate culture (according to Kevin, who should know), because they do interesting things with information storage and retrieval, a big interest of mine, and because their motto is "Don't Be Evil".
- PARC, Inc. - because they appear to have a nice blend of experimental research and practical application, and they do cool stuff with new user interface paradigms.
That's all for right now, but here's a few that are close contenders:
- Microsoft - The Redmond Giant does lots of neat projects and has the market clout to actually make a difference in the world. But their anticompetitive business practices make me uneasy...
- Amazon - The web's biggest retailer is changing the way we buy products and the way companies do business, and that's pretty nifty. But I don't know enough about their work environment and corporate culture to get really excited about them.
- Carnegie Mellon University - There are lots of interesting projects to get involved with right here at CMU, but the pay is low and the influence on the real world is questionable. Plus Pittsburgh is a nice place but you wouldn't want to spend your life there.
I'm still looking and learning, of course, in anticipation of a full-on job search this spring. I'm also considering doing a PhD if I could get one while working on my open source and usability project, but, to paraphrase Scott, I'm looking for a special company to seduce me away from intellectualism :).
Posted by Rob on October 26, 2003 at 10:48 AM
Here's a few more contenders that, upon reflection, I don't want to give short shrift to:
- The Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) - Mitch Kapor's company seems like the best place to bring my interest in open source & usability, but I don't know too much about them just yet.
- IDEO - working for one of the biggest product innovation companies would be a head trip, but also seems pretty intense. I haven't decided whether a cool job is worth giving up a normal life for.
- NASA - if I were to work for the government, NASA seems the most likely place. They seem to have some projects, such as MERBoard, that are actually usability-saavy as well as just being interesting in and of themselves. But I'm not sure how their work environment compares to the other options.
More will be forthcoming, I'm sure.
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Rethinking File Transfers
design, internet
October 24, 2003, 12:20 AM
Joel is posting about tokens, a new way of transferring large files and/or complex folder structures:
It's hard to believe that here it is, what, 2002? No, I think it's 2003, and when you want to send a really big file or a folder full of little files to someone, you generally wind up messing around with ftp servers and whatnot.Well, no longer. "A token is like a shortcut or alias that you can send via e-mail or instant message. With just one click you can create a token, and no matter how large the files you want to send are, the token representing them will be very small - just a few KB. Anyone you send a token to can then download the free Creo Token Redeemer software, and with one click redeem the token and download the files. It works for anything - a single file, an entire folder, a huge movie."
What's interesting about this idea, whether or not it takes off, is that it's a new interaction design for a very old problem that has enjoyed virtually no improvement for decades. It's always great to see fresh new solutions for hoary old kludges that, for some reason, everyone's implicitly agreed just can't be improved (even if they are obviously in need of improvement).
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Is Usability Destroying Innovation?
design, processes & methodologies, usability
October 23, 2003, 11:45 PM
Dan has a post pointing to an article in the Guardian on innovation and user-centered design. The article's short so it's worth the quick read, but in brief it claims that user-centered design has become dominated by usability practitioners, that usability is a conservative approach and inhibits innovation, and thus it should be de-emphasized to encourage greater innovation in products (well, that last part is implicit but it's certainly there).
On the one hand, the core point of this article is quite accurate. It's important to produce innovative designs so that you aren't just incrementally improving the same old (bad) design concepts. And if you take a narrow view of usability (namely, that it only exists to find errors in the design of existing interfaces through analytical (heuristic evaluation, cognitive walkthrough) and empirical (usability testing) techniques) then this is the whole story.
But this is not the whole story. The user research techniques that form the core toolkit of any usability professional worth her salt include much more than testing. To be specific, we use lightweight ethnographic techniques like contextual inquiries and user interviews to study the way users work in the abstract so that appropriate design solutions can be found. This type of research can drive design, indeed it must drive design if the final product is to be usable, useful, or desirable.
The article also appears fairly ignorant of established usability practices. In particular, it states: "Too much user focus may be a barrier to innovation. Research is likely to tell us that users desire an improvement on something they already understand. Ask them if they would use a proposed innovation and they will say no - and then adopt it when they have seen its utility demonstrated." Very true, but this has been well known to usability professionals for over a decade. Studies by Nielsen (and others before him) firmly established that directly asking users what they want will yield bogus data. Any decent usability professional knows this and would not trust the answers to such questions. Design must be constrained by the users' observed needs, not the user's expressed ideas.
In summary, my main concern with this article is not that I disagree with its premise but that I'm unsure what the takeaway message is. If the takeaway is that user-centered design must begin earlier in the process through user research and interaction design, then I'm firmly in agreement. But if the takeaway is that designers must be left to design without being constrained by user needs that are well understood through sound research, then I'm worried, because then we're dropping the whole "user-centered" part of "user-centered design". The user is not like me; I don't trust my own or anyone else's "educated guesses" about what someone else will want in a product or interface design.
Finally, I'm concerned at the distinction between "usability" and "design" that is drawn in this article as well as in the industry as a whole. I don't really believe that the two are cleanly separable, any more than I believe that software architecture design is cleanly separate from programming, for example. In my not-so-humble opinion, user-centered designers must, at least to an extent, be good at both user research and interaction design, and specialists in both fields must work closely together to be effective. We of all people should know that we ought to be putting the user first in all that we do. And in this instance, the user doesn't care what fancy titles we pin on ourselves. The user cares about getting a great product that makes his life better. And we need all these skills (mixed with sound engineering too, I might add) if we hope to give it to him.
Posted by Dan on October 24, 2003 at 12:12 AM
I think the point of the article might be that designers are relying too much on users and testing to do their designs for them. That's useful for finding out what users want, but not necessarily what they need, nor the best way to give it to them. That's where innovation and creativity come in. (Hopefully.)
As far as the separation between design and usability, one of the three established pillars of design (alongside "useful" and "desireable") is "useful." Designers and usability testers should work hand-in-hand to make that a reality. But, as this article points out, the other two adjectives get neglected by businesses these days. Money seems to more likely be found to do usability testing than to invest in an interaction designer. Partially this is due to the success of Nielsen and the UPA and the lack of a Jakob-like figure for interaction designers. Cooper is working on it, but he's not yet a household name.
Posted by Rob on October 24, 2003 at 12:20 PM
Regarding the point of the article: you may be right that they wanted to emphasize the importance of design and innovation, which is often ignored by usability consultancies (for example) that focus only on generating incremental improvements through testing. I agree with that point completely, but my main complaint was that the article doesn't make it clear that they are promoting user-centered design early in the process; they sound like they're claiming user research should be de-emphasized. And again, sound user research investigates users' real needs, it doesn't just take their expressed desires at face value (knowing user desires can be very important, of course, but they don't necessarily feed directly into design ideas.
Regarding your points on design and usability: I think calling out "useful", "usable", and "desirable" is sometimes helpful for practical purposes but we must ultimately remember that they are highly overlapping categories. A product isn't desirable if it isn't also usable: nobody likes to be frustrated by designs with poor learnability or efficiency. At the same time, a product isn't usable if it isn't also desirable (Norman's new book on Emotional Design is all about the psychological foundations of this fact, from my understanding). The same is true with the connections to usefulness.
The upshot of all this is that it isn't at all clear that "usable" is in the realm of usability practitioners and "useful" and "desirable" are in the realm of interaction designers. From my perspective, the relevant distinction is that there are two important skill sets:
- User Research (psychology-based, scientific data collection practices)
- Design (exploration-based, creative innovation practices)
I argue that both skill sets are required for all three aspects of UCD, and I can point you to specific techniques and connection points in the UCD process where this holds true (although I'll admit that the user research community has historically fallen down on the job with regards to "desirability" in many respects).
Posted by AndyEd on October 25, 2003 at 04:37 PM
Recent research into things like expanding targets and the ongoing efforts in nonlinear magnification show how the heavy science of human factors and cognitive science can merge design and science to produce more usable systems.
The conduits between the right research and designers are not present. Instead, we have conduits between entities like NNG and UIE and designers. Those groups are not rewarded for design innovation.
Posted by Rob on October 25, 2003 at 05:04 PM
Good point, Andy. The problem I have with NN/g is that they are so focused on selling their testing expertise that they have small interest in promoting improved research-based design practices even if this does result in a healthier profession. Of course, the same could be said about Cooper Design in the opposite direction.
Posted by Vidya Gopinath on May 31, 2004 at 01:05 AM
Strongly agree that usability experts and designers have to work together to bulid a website that is not only innovative and beautiful in design but also very usable and easily accessible by the users.
Usability proffessionals will have to work to satisfy both the sections-designers and users.I believe that it is possible to build a website which attracts the eye of a user as well as is usable.
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Paul's Online Social Science Weblog
internet, people, society & sociology
October 23, 2003, 07:56 AM
So it turns out one of my professors for CSCW, Paul Resnick, has a weblog (on livejournal, no less). Doesn't look like he updates it very often, but when he does he posts some nice, lengthy reflections on his experiences with online communities research. His most recent entries chronicle his experiences at the Online Communities Summit, which looks like it was a fun event. Might be worth checking out; he's in my Newsable sources list!
In his last post, Paul learned about Technorati and complained that he didn't have too many incoming links. Consider this my contribution to the cause. :)
Posted by Dave on October 23, 2003 at 06:14 PM
Maybe Rob would have more hits if he had a CSS-based web site....
Food for thought :-D
Oh yeah, I'm an annoying bastard. My bad Rob. (W00t RobLog)
Posted by Dave on October 23, 2003 at 06:18 PM
Hey! How come Rob's email gets the hardcore JS-obfuscation and mine gets freaking character entities in the output.
actual output:
Dave
I think you should fix that, or work harder at encouraging me to create a web-site...
Posted by Rob on October 23, 2003 at 07:03 PM
Yeah, MT's concept of "spam protection" is pretty unimpressive :-P.
I'll try to modify it to use the hardcore JS obfuscation this weekend. I think it'll involve changing MT's source code, so I'm not sure how easy it'll be.
I'll also try to put up your nifty CSS-positioning layout too. I really do appreciate that you did it and I promise it'll go live soon! :)
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A Compendium of Usability Resources
processes & methodologies, usability
October 21, 2003, 01:16 PM
Usability Net is a great reference site for all kinds of usability techniques and processes. They have a table of usability methods along with some "filters" that show which methods are appropriate in different circumstances (I'm not sure how much I believe these recommendations but they're some good starting ideas). They also have a list of guidelines for web, mobile, and other platforms, a list of all the usability methods and their detailed descriptions (U&SA isn't listed; big surprise), some businesses cases and cost justifications for doing usability, and lots more good stuff. Check it out.
I think I found this via Chad a long time ago. He also points to Usability.gov, the National Cancer Institute's web usability center. Rich was working on making these guidelines better, although I'm not sure if his work ever went live or not.
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Mark's Bread and Online Identity
funny, internet, society & sociology
October 20, 2003, 10:39 PM
Mark Pilgrim is having problems baking bread:
I have been coping with my new bread machine for several months now, with distinctly mixed results. The first loaf came out great, an outcome which I attribute entirely to beginner's luck. The second loaf failed spectacularly, by which I mean that it failed to mix, bake, or rise, three steps which are generally considered crucial to successful breadmaking.At this point I decided to quietly stop blogging about it, in an attempt to project, as they say in The Matrix, a somewhat fantasized mental projection of my digital self. Online, I am a god who commands the respect and adoration of thousands. Offline, I am a moron who can't bake bread in a bread machine. This blogging thing, it has legs, but not for the reasons you've been told about.
Mark's a funny guy. His quip also brings up some interesting issues with online identity, specifically the identity of webloggers. It's quite true that the persona a weblogger projects online can be quite different from his "real life" persona. To an extent, you get to pick who you want to be on this Internet of ours.
Sometimes I wonder what sort of person those who read this weblog but don't know me in real life imagine me to be. It all smells vaguely of postmodernism. My friend Katie, a sociologist, argues that the Internet is essentially postmodernist. Now I'm wishing I'd asked her what she meant by that.
Posted by Dan on October 21, 2003 at 10:05 AM
One of the main theories of the postmodernism movement is that all text is context and is linked to other texts. In other words, hypertext.
Role playing and the non-fixity of identity is another theme. Don't like who you are, just play someone else!
Everything is built upon language and thus can be deconstructed as such. There are no facts, only interpretations. To change what something means, simply redescribe it.
There are no originals of anything. There are just copies of copies of copies. Everything is there to be sampled.
There are no closures, only endings.
And there you have my entire sneior year of PoMo American Lit in 11 sentences. You can see how the internet is the embodiment of all these things, most of which were theorized well before the net was known.
Posted by Rob on October 21, 2003 at 11:58 AM
Thanks for the explanation, Dan.
I've always wanted to learn more about postmodernism but never found a good resource for doing so. I listened to part of a lecture series on the topic, but it turned out to be a piece of crap (which is unusual for the Teaching Company's products).
Awhile ago, I read an article called How To Deconstruct Almost Anything. It's a polemic, but it's a funny polemic and makes a few good points. You might be interested.
Posted by Katie on October 21, 2003 at 07:25 PM
I'm referenced in a weblog, woo!
Postmodernism essentially objects to the idea that there is any real 'truth' in anything, believing instead that all we have access to is the surface of things. The search for underlying truth and meaning, therefore, is fruitless, and the image or surface becomes a sufficient area of analysis to determine the state of affairs at any particular moment.
At the same time, we have the principle of multiple selves or identities - we have as many selves as we have social groups that we belong to. Because of the way that technology has broadened our horizons, some believe that we are in danger of becoming saturated - i.e. too many selves (Gergen). The postmodern self, however, is able to be healthy because it is an emergent self (as opposed to a static unitary (modern) self. Because it has no true essence, so to speak, it just continually reinvents itself, and is therefore able to navigate the waters of todays society.
Technology as a metaphor for postmodernism fits like a glove really. Because we are able to utilize multiple windows at the same time in our computer use, we are able to have multiple identities at the same time. Not only does the computer fit into this metaphor, but so does the internet. The internet is a distributed system that is continually being created and recreated - there is no INTERNET per say, but rather a system of different nodes that form the internet.
I could go on ad nauseum about this, but I'm tired now. ;-)
Katie
Posted by Rob on October 21, 2003 at 08:59 PM
Hi Katie,
Thanks for the comments. It's good to get the perspective from an expert! ;)
The multiple-identity stuff sounds very Satre-ish. If I'm not mistaken, Postmodernism was highly influenced by Existentialism, so maybe this isn't surprising.
You might like the "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything" article too, if you're in the mood for some fun criticism. If you do read it try not to be put off by the satirical middle part; I think the last three paragraphs make the most interesting points in the article (whether or not you actually agree with them).
Posted by Katie on October 21, 2003 at 09:07 PM
There's also a book called "The Social Construction of What?" which is really interesting - it takes the perspective that the sociology position that everything is socially constructed is a load of crap, basically. Essentially, the 'true' sciences disagree completely, as does philosophy. After all, if there is no real truth, then what the hell have they been searching for this entire time?
where'd you get the article from?
Posted by Dan on October 22, 2003 at 10:48 PM
A brilliant book that can be read in 15 minutes and pondered for hours and laughed at the whole time is "Life's Little Deconstruction Book: Self-Help for the Post-Hip" by Andrew Boyd. Taking the form of one of those "thought for the day" books, it offers 365 nuggets of postmodern wisdom.
has some selections. Some of my personal favorites:
17. Participate without belonging.
26. Distain theorists.
33. Be as if.
65. Learn from Las Vegas.
81. Cultivate decade-by-decade nostalgia.
200. Make fine distinctions about things that don't matter.
227. Choose religion cafeteria-style.
240. Take irony for granted.
277. Use the word "post-modern" without being quite sure whether it is the dominant logic of late capitalism or pop-culture shorthand for messy-looking buildings.
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