User centred design - is it working

User centred design in practice - is it working? Donna Maurer – Maadmob Interaction Design

Me – right now
Freelance information architect/interaction designer
Lead interaction designer – big government project
this talk is not about my current team
Chair for next year's IA Summit
Board member – Information Architecture Institute
Committee member – Web Industry Professionals’ Association
Writing a book about card sorting - due early 2007
Wife, mother, weaver, orchardist

Me - previously Usability testing Search implementation Website design Intranet design Information architecture Interaction design User research Web applications Card sorting Usability testing Expert reviews Usability testing Intranet design Information architecture Card sorting Accessibility User research Website design Mentoring Business strategy Web applications Information architecture Card sorting User research Website design Web applications Interaction design Mentoring Training Build websites Study Community

Today’s structure Challenges & opportunities Current state of practitioner UCD Interesting new approaches & tools Far out, that is a cheesy image

Today’s structure Challenges & opportunities Interesting new approaches & tools Current state of practitioner UCD

Current situation
Usability is fairly well known
‘ Ease of use’ is well known
Many jobs for usability, user-centred design, interface design, information architecture
Web, business, mobile
Severe skills shortage

But…
Much work being done without UCD
Many of great sites and applications are done without a specific user-centred design role. Done by a team who knows something about it, or a team of generally smart people
Most government work still unaware of UCD
Thousands of developers designing internal systems without considering needs of people on the end of them

Poor work
Dissatisfied clients
Clients unhappy with the work they get from UCD practitioners, primarily consultants
Work is shallow
Limited understanding of the domain
Focus on users only, not a holistic examination of the problem
Expensive for limited return
“ Yes, they’re just the shit-kickers, but you still need to talk to them”
Overheard from a usability consultant
Who said that? I’ll buy her a beer – she’ll spill the beans

Who knows they do user-centred design
User-centred designers
Usability specialists
Interaction designers
Information architects
User experience specialists

Many years
Job: Consulting company
Length: 2 years in this job, many years in the field
Type of work: Design projects for clients. Usually hired to do strategy, user research, information architecture or interaction design. May get involved in usability tests
Well read on the basics – keeps up with blogs and magazine sites via RSS.
Buys books a couple of times a year.
Participates in discussion lists.
Attends one conference a year, speaks at local groups occasionally.

Some experience
Job: interactive agency
Length: 2 years
Type of work: Website design for clients. Designing page layouts for websites.
Does user research on some projects, sometimes can do usability testing.
Has read a number of usability books and has IA book but hasn’t read it all.
Subscribes to Jakob Nielsen and Gerry McGovern. Reads other things sent by colleagues.
Attends one conference a year.
Mostly learns on the job

Into usability
Job: independent usability consultant
Length: 2 years
Type of work: Usability testing for clients (makes design recommendations)
Occasional user research work. Design work for simple sites & applications.
No training – figure it out as she goes
Reads web articles, subscribes to a couple of lists, attends UPA
Finds it challenging to sell usability
But who’s that dude in the background

On the sideline
Job: webmaster of medium company
Length: 1 year
Type of work: Company website and intranet design and maintenance
Background in communications
No user research experience, once had a usability test by a consultant
Subscribes to Jakob Nielsen.
Mostly learns on the job
Sick of everyone criticising - just needs answers
How do you feel being stereotyped like this?

Learning
Books
Online articles
Conferences
On the job
Most practitioners have no knowledge of or access to academic research
And most don’t care
Hmph…their loss

“ In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground overlooking a swamp.
On the high ground manageable problems lend themselves to solution through the application of research-based theory and technique. In the swampy lowland, messy, confusing problems defy technical solution.
The irony of this situation is that the problems of the high ground tend to be relatively unimportant to individuals or society at large, however great their technical interest may be, while in the swamp lie the greatest problems of human concern.”
Donald A Schon – Educating the Reflective Practitioner

“ I am a sucker for presentations where standard user-centered design methods (stakeholder interviews, user research, interaction design, prototyping) are used in novel environments, such as the design of a web, kiosk, and mobile system for supporting art appreciation at the Getty Center in L.A. It continues to provide evidence that such design isn't special or otherworldly.”
http://www.peterme.com/archives/000797.html

Interesting tools and approaches

Tagging
Tagging:
Users provide descriptive keywords to the resource.
No vocabulary, categories or master scheme –whatever authors or users
Characterised by the long tail
Folksonomy:
Technically a taxonomy generated by the folks – the users of it.
The word usually applies to the use of tagging within a social network
The two poster children of tagging are del.icio.us and flickr
Others
Gmail – tag messages, rather than filing them
Extra tasty – tag drinks for refinding
Powerhouse museum – categories plus tags

Tagging
Advantages
Flexible
Great for emerging domains
Reflects language of users
Cognitively easy to manage
Disadvantages
Not suitable for all the uses to which it has been put
Not suited for domains in which retrieval accuracy is key
Many decisions about maintenance
Still new and odd

User-generated content
Threadless – T-shirts designed by the community, voted on by the community, printed and sold to the community
Extra Tasty – all recipes provided by the community
Flickr
Wikipedia – the ultimate user-generated content site
Del.icio.us – all content provided by the community
Digg – community diggs for articles and returns them to the top of the pile
Upcoming.org – user-added events
Does she ever stop talking about booze?

Mash-ups (link)
Combining data from two different sources
Most commonly public data plus google maps
Most famous
Housing maps : Craigslist + Google Maps ( avi )
Chicago Crime : Chicago crime data + Google Maps ( avi )
My favourites
Upcoming+last.fm (images/allcrazystyle.avi)
What’s interesting
Showing available data in different ways
Providing value beyond the original service

Social & connections
Flickr – connect with friends
Del.icio.us – find bookmarks from others or from friends
Upcoming – see who is attending
Lastfm – listen to music from friends or similar interests
My social group is the same everywhere, but I have to enter it from scratch

AJAX
AJAX stands for asynchronous javascript over XML
Richer interface interactions
Part-page updates with no page reload
Direct editing
Drag & drop
Feedback, automatic saves
Challenges
Designer inexperience with rich interactions
Part-page updates break the user mental model of ‘pages’
Visually communicating what can be done
Emerging interface conventions
Accessibility
Big deal, we’ve been designing guis for years

Our challenges… OK, deep breath

New design challenges
Designing for engagement, not basic usability
Designing shells to be filled with content
Designing for social networks & interaction
Non linear processes – closer to synchronous
Designing for reuse of data
Building and maintaining community
Traditional usability testing doesn’t work

Process changes
Build for your own problem
Focus narrowly
Generalist teams
Get it out there
Build community
Listen to customers
Release often
Market virally
Less user research or usability testing

“ in the last 10 years, there has been no discernable relationship between corporate investment in user-centered design practices and the regular production of usable products from those corporations”
“ The best way we can collectively improve our opportunities is to stop drinking the Kool-Aid and start questioning our own practices and beliefs. It shouldn't be a matter of faith that our practices produce good designs. It should be a matter of fact.”
Jared Spool. http://www.informationdesign.org/special/spool_interview.php

Where I think we need to head
“ Design is one of the basic skills a person needs to function in modern society”
Kees Dorst. By Design, Radio National, 12 August
Focus less on user-centred and more on design
Learn about our own context
Understand business
How do development teams work
How do developers think
What do they need to know from us
Totally eliminate design by testing

Selling our services
Stop selling usability
Stop acting like you’re the centre of the universe
Start selling design
Communicate more clearly
Pay more attention to what you do - know your own value

Teach and mentor
Mentoring is more useful than delivering
Adopt design studio thinking
Work in teams
Always analyse design outcomes
Stop writing ‘what is’, start writing ‘how to’
How to think, not how to do
Teach principles not rules
Provide tools not methods
Identify & share learning opportunities
Most conferences are podcast

“ This is that category with the asterisk that means ‘hard’, since I feel like I’m giving you advice that says, ‘to win a beauty pageant, (a) get beautiful, and (b) enter the pageant’.”
Joel Spolsky (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDevelopers.html)

Take it up a notch
“We’ve evolved from a focus on features to focus on ease of use and now will have the opportunity to focus on quality of life”
“Good design is at the heart of quality of life. Designers today have an opportunity to design at a time when mass consciousness will really value great design”
Linda Stone, IDEA Conference

Questions & thanks
http://maadmob.net/
0409-778-693
[email_address]

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User centred design - is it working

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