Testing a paper prototype

Excuse 1: “It’ll slow us down”

Finding users, building prototypes and working through hours of research takes time. Why not spend that effort on writing more code?

Counter argument. You say: “Our business objective is to reach profitability as quickly as possible. To do that, we need to understand what our customers really need and make sure we’re all agreed on the direction. A usability test might take some time in the short term, but it will help us reach our overall business goal quicker.“

Usability testing, like many UCD tactics, is an investment. You put in time and money, but you get back a product that sells better and costs less to support. But usability testing is also beneficial during the design process…

The managing director observes a usability test via a video link

1. Design the thing better, quicker: Trying to design a product for target users, without ever meeting any, is like pulling teeth. But if you just watch a few users using a prototype, a competitor product or their current system, they’ll tell you what you really need to know quickly, effectively and (comparatively) effortlessly.

2. Manage the politics more easily: Successful designs come from teams all pulling in the same direction. Usability testing results will reduce squabbles, give confidence to management and get people to focus on improvements rather than feature creep. Even the most sceptical team members can’t ignore videos of 5 or 10 real people battling with their software.

3. Get a team energy boost: Seeing ideas succeed makes the team feel positive. Seeing them fail motivates people to sort things out.

Excuse 2: “Our product is already perfect”

You and your team will become so deeply familiar with the product you’ve designed that you will think it is perfect.

Counter argument. You say: “We believe the product is perfectly easy and useful. But can we prove it? How many problems exist that we’re not aware of? What impact might they have? Developers may think their code has no bugs, but we still hire testers to prove it. What evidence do we have that our design is perfect first time?”

This behaviour is often referred to as “drinking your own Koolaid“. It means you’re doubly ignorant…

In a thought-provoking piece a few years back called The Five Orders of Ignorance, software engineering expert Philip G Armour says,

“The hard part of building systems is not building them, it’s knowing what to build — it’s in acquiring the necessary knowledge… A functioning system is the by-product of the activity of finding things out.”

Excuse 3: “We already have lots of feedback”

Listening to customer feedback via email, call centre or the web is vital. Analytics and search log analysis is great, too. And it can seem like you’re getting all the user input you need.

A group of developers watching usability testing video

Counter argument. You say: “We’re only getting feedback on major issues and from committed product users – lots of other people encounter our product and never feed back. So we’re getting a skewed perspective. Usability testing will let us observe and discuss all sorts of things that customers and non-customers would never actually feed back about. It will also explain what to do about the strange patterns we’re seeing in our web analytics. This extra insight will give us a competitive edge, because it’s not obvious stuff that our competitors also know.”

Excuse 4: “This concept is not ready to test yet.”

Ready for a usability test

It’s easy to tell yourself that you’re not ready to work with target users yet – that your ideas haven’t settled down to something stable and complete which users will approve of.

Counter argument. You say: “Don’t worry if it’s not ready. We’ll test what we’ve got, and won’t worry much about the areas where we know things aren’t finished. It can give us reassurance that we’re heading in the right direction and stop us from spending loads of time designing a blind alley.”

The truth is, your ideas will never be stable and complete until you’ve had the input from users. Until then, they are just hypotheses. Better to test your hypotheses when they are young and flexible, rather than when you’ve spent weeks on refining them, and publicly declared them as “finished and ready”.

How to run that test

Doing the perfect usability test is no doubt hard. But doing a useful test is really easy…

As Bruce Tog says, without iterative usability testing “you’re going to throw buckets of money down the drain”. So just get out there and test.

Occam's razor has been really useful to me on several projects recently. It's nothing new. Occam was around in the 14th Century. And it wasn't even his idea: it might well have been Aristotle's. Perhaps that long history proves that it's a great tool to have in your arsenal when designing user experiences.

The basic idea is something like:

"If you have two equivalent theories or explanations for observed facts, all other things being equal, use the simpler one."

The user-centred design version might be:

"If you have two interfaces that both address user needs, go with the simpler one."

But there are three different ways the idea gets expressed, and each form has something to offer interaction designers.

First blade: Choose simple solutions

"Two interfaces - choose the simpler one." A no-brainer, right? Simple designs are easier to implement and maintain, and quicker for everyone to learn and use. But choosing a simple design when you see it is actually surprisingly hard. Organisations with lots of people, objectives and agendas will generate complexity faster than you can say "knife" (or indeed "razor").

• Some stakeholders can be left feeling short-changed by simple designs that do what customers and users really want. One cry that's very familiar to website designers is "but I want my product/service/department promoted on the homepage too". And that leads to tragedy.
• Other stakeholders will obsess about edge-cases - things that logically can happen, but very rarely will. Catering for all of these ties your design up in knots.
• And some people seem to gain a sense of importance from fiddling with a good design - turning it, step by step, into a disastrous mess. This video about the design of the stop sign says it beautifully.

All these kinds of events will conspire to push an unwary interaction designer off course. Remembering Occam's razor, and quoting it to your clients, team and stakeholders, can help to keep you focussed and change other people's points of view.

Second blade: Keep merging features

Another common phrasing of Occam's razor is:

"Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity."

In interaction design terms I like to phrase it as:

"Whenever you see two things that seem to do something similar, see if you can turn them into just one thing."

"We've got the 'picker' over here, for choosing widgets from a long list in alphabetical order. And the 'chooser' which sits over there for choosing widgets from a categorised short list. Then there's the 'finder' up here which is for finding widgets which might be in either list. And the 'selector' over there which pops open when you need to select a widget from the full database."

You get the idea. If you find yourself having conversations like that you should take a breath, and realise that you've multiplied your entities beyond necessity. Chances are you need one tool for selecting widgets, not four.

For example, Google has taken the merge blade to their Chrome web browser. They've merged the search box and the URL box into one. Those are two very different boxes. But from most people's point of view having one box where you type in what you want is great. No tricky decisions to make.

So as you go along, be on the lookout for ways to merge multiple separate components in your design into one. You'll end up with a design containing a few flexible items, instead of many small, inflexible ones. Typically that means less to learn, and a more elegant user experience.

Third blade: Don't oversimplify

Knowing when something is simple enough can be tricky. Trying to oversimplify something that is inherently complex can be a waste of time. How do you know when to stop?

Einstein's phrasing of the rule helps us here:

"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."

The UCD version is, perhaps:

"Understand what people really need to do and make sure that your simplest design really does all those things."

That's why UCD stresses that you need to go out and observe your target users in action. It's the only way to find out what they really need.

A single button mouse is a great example. Apple hung onto the idea for years, and with good reason. It really is way easier to learn than a two button mouse. Watch a young child using a two-button mouse and see how many errors they make by pressing the right button intead of the left. But in the end, the multibutton mouse has won. Why? For the applications people were running in the early nineties, one button was often sufficient. But people's needs and expectations have grown, and now a single button mouse can't provide convenient access to the wide range of features people expect, and know how to use. A two button mouse, plus scroll wheel, lets people do more of the things that they really want to do, more quickly.

But this does beg a question, though. With a complex piece of software like MS Word 2007, people want to do hundreds of different things. How can you ever make something like that simple?

Alan Kay to the rescue:

"Make simple things easy and difficult things possible."

In other words make sure that you prioritise your design. Put the most commonly used features within easy reach and tuck away the more specialised and advanced ones.

The deadline sharpens the blades

It's easy to get tangled up. What MUST users have? What would they like a lot? What do we think they should want? Can we just squeeze this element in? What would happen if they tried to do that other thing? Luckily, Occam's razor suddenly gains power when you are faced with looming deadlines and limited resources. Those force you to really use the razor and they have the power to silence the most tangled corporate debates.

And when you're forced to use it, something amazing happens. All the "what about if" cases drop away, leaving you with the "all users will want to" cases. And following close behind that you typically find a clean, simple interface. Simple because it doesn't have to solve all the world's problems, just a manageable and intelligible subset.

So:

• Quote Occam's razor to help you fight for simple interfaces when you see them
• Look for interface elements which you can merge into a single element
• Understand what target users are really trying to do, so that you know exactly how complex things have to be
• Prioritise features so that the most popular are visible and the advanced ones are tucked away
• Use the power of the deadline to force yourself or your team to stop adding complexity and start fighting your way towards simplicty.

And remember Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of "The Little Prince":

"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

Understanding the fans

Jamie Oliver fans like relaxed living and eating with an edge of no-nonsense practicality. They care about the environment they live in and about supporting people who make the food and products they love.

What does that mean for online shopping? We created a hypothesis. Jamie Oliver fans would want:

• Inspiration: How to mix and match products, recipes and ideas so they can live the Jamie lifestyle
• Usefulness: Understanding how products would fit into their lives and help them achieve their goals (a great dinner party, a beautiful home, and flourishing garden...)
• Background and context: Insight into where the products come from, who designs and makes them and why they are special
• Connectedness: Helping customers to form a connection to the community, the product designer and Jamie.

When we considered this, we realised that the Jme site should be integrated with JamieOliver.com, Jamie Oliver's existing blog and community site. Inspiration might come from seeing a photo of a family gathering where a delicious risotto is served in a beautiful bowl. From there, visitors should be able to find out about the bowl and its designer, get the recipe and buy the bowl.

Mapping and testing the site

To understand how the different content should cross-link we created a wall chart. We identified silos, such as recipes, products and forum posts and connected them with arrows. (Jamie came in to see it. He liked it a lot. He's a nice bloke.)

From there, we created a wireframe prototype to represent these ideas ready for testing with users. The most successful website wireframes tend to contain "real fake content" - lorem ipsum doesn't give users a real feel of what the final experience will be like. These wireframes had to contain a lot of visual imagery showing example products, people and situations where they might be used.

User feedback told us two things:

Firstly, we needed to keep our feet on the ground. If you're going to show a desirable bowl customers will soon need to find links to the plate, side plate and coffee cups that match. It also reminded us that you can never be too clear about practicalities like delivery information, pricing and the checkout process.

Secondly, the connected, contextual, useful and inspirational idea made for a great user experience. Jamie Oliver fans loved to use it. And it provides the kind of rich information and emotional content that people need to help them make purchase decisions.

Take a look at Jme

The site is quickly growing into its new home. It's got genuinely fabulous kitchen and dining room stuff, herbs, books and DVDs - all selected by Jamie himself. There are lots more products, recipes and articles coming on all the time. We think it's great to look at and delightful to use.

As Jamie would say: "Nice one!"

Team: Peter Otto, Genevieve Chapman (Splendid), Simon Parbutt (Splendid)

People love stories. But beyond that, stories are fundamental to the way we think as human beings. Salesmen tell persuasive stories about successful installations and satisfied customers. Social workers pass on complex case histories as stories. Just about every culture in the world passes on valuable knowledge to the next generation in the form of stories.

When properly told, stories incorporate all the ingredients people need to think and learn: situation, actors, events, challenges, consequences... They help us gain a little of the benefit of direct experience, with much less of the pain.

So it makes sense that interaction designers need to be great story tellers. I've picked three kinds of storytelling used in interaction design...

• Scenarios
• Specification
• Rationale

Scenarios: Invent a story

Because we're not fundamentally good at imagining futures or situations different to the one we are in, we have to consciously and explicitly create stories to make sure we do things right. Interaction designers create personas (the characters in the stories), describe the context of use (situation and back story) and the personas' goals.

Then we create scenarios. We try to tell a compelling and realistic story of how our personas will reach a happy ending by using the product. Because we're all good at listening to stories, the team can spot the good ones, the implausible ones and the radical-amazing-breakthrough ones quite quickly.

Specification: Many stories

A specification - however sketchy or detailed - is a story. Actually it's many stories, captured simultaneously. What will happen if the user goes here or there? A good specification has a lot in common with a Choose You Own Adventure story. (Did somebody say adventure? Now there's some classic interaction.)

The trick for a good interaction designer, though, is to make sure that the story of your product has no dead ends. So the best specs spend plenty of effort on handling error situations, as well as just the positive story.

Rationale: Meta-story

The importance of rationale is often underestimated. Rationale is the story of how and why a design decision has been made. "We're doing it like this because..." When your storytelling has led you to a non-obvious (but demonstrably right) conclusion you don't want your team and your stakeholders re-creating all the failed stories you've already told all over again. It takes too long.

Rationale also demonstrates how much effort has been put into reaching a conclusion, so that the team doesn't forget how far they've come.

Pictures are not stories

A picture, in this context, doesn't tell a story so much as beg for one. A beautifully drawn image of an interface, frozen in time, might look persuasive - and it might hint at past and future interaction. But it doesn't answer many of the important questions: how do your users reach this point? Where do they want to go next? Will they know what button to choose? What will happen if they click that button? A picture on its own is open to misinterpretation by everyone who looks at it, from developer to CEO.

When you surround it with other pictures and information about the sequence they link in, then a story unfolds. And that's what interaction design is all about.

I was lucky enough to watch a great talk by Gary Marsden at the recent SA UX meeting in Cape Town. He talked about many interesting things, but this one captured my imagination the most.

In developing markets, mobile devices have much greater market penetration the personal computers. In South Africa, for example, around 77% of the population have mobiles but only 12% get online with PCs. So for hundreds of millions worldwide, the main, everyday experience of digital technology is probably a phone. When a phone is one of the few pieces of technology you've got, it's amazing what you will use it for. In emerging markets, mobile phones are becoming a primary mechanism for reading text, storing photo albums, watching video and listening to music.

Nokia has recently announced their $50 2323 phone, along with a suite of carefully targetted custom content to address this developing market demand.

But nearer the "bottom of the pyramid" the the cost of mobile data services is too much for most people to afford more than a trickle of bytes. Typical data consumption for a young South African might cost them around R7 per week, which is around 50 pence. Downloading MP3s or ebooks isn't realistic. So instead, some content is percolating across the community using bluetooth sideloading and sneakernet.

Sideloading sneakernet

Sideloading is a newish term, still ill-defined. But one meaning is that people can share content from one mobile device to the next, rather than downloading it from network servers.

Sneakernets are a venerable concept, still used by even the largest companies when the cost of electronic data transfer is too high. It just means that you carry data from A to B on a storage medium, instead of sending it over a wire. Google, for example, used blocks of disks to transfer 120 terabyte files.

If you put the two together you can transfer data to mobile devices for free, across any distance. Basically, one person sends a piece of content to another using bluetooth. The recepient can share their copy with more friends, and from them it can go on to more. The potential rate of distribution grows exponentially.

Riding the sneakernet

With only 6.6 degrees of separation between everyone on the planet, it's not hard to see that this could let content percolate quite fast. But our daily face to face contact is with far fewer people than our total network, so content will percolate more slowly, really.

Targetting connectors will help. The Tipping Point tells us that a few people in the world are connectors - they know a lot of people. To get a message out over a sneakernet, it would make sense to ensure it gets to the connectors.

In reality, it may be that most content won't hop quickly or reliably enough from user to user for many applications. So providing physical severs in public spaces to allow bluetooth content downloads looks like a more controlled option.

To do just that, Gary Marsden's team at the University of Cape Town, along with Microsoft Research have invented Big Board. It's a digital message board that allows people with ordinary, bluetooth-enabled phones to download text, images, audio and video for free. Most important, it requires no extra software on the handset at all - most phones can already receive mutimedia messages via bluetooth.

What content is worth distributing? For big board, community and local content make sense. Big board can also allow content to be uploaded to it, making it true, digital message board. Education and entertainment also fit well, and are good sneakernet fuel too. I've heard plans for using soap opera mobisodes to provide health education and AIDS awareness messages...

Further reading

• One Laptop per child: A formal sneakernet proposal for the OLPC initiative
• Wired: The real action in music sharing isn't online. It's on foot.