Curious : In-Forming singular/plural design

Steve Krug explains how we can create better Websites if we just stop wasting time on useless debates within teams and engage in ‘usability testing’ early on in the development process. His book provides the antidote.

He distinguishes between designers and developers in what they consider to be a ‘good’ website design. Designers prefer pleasant layouts, whereas developers enjoy a good amount of features. This is also compared to the duality between commercial culture and craft culture. Which is a question of aesthetics versus usability. Ideally, we would want to have both.

Krug notes that there is no such thing as an “average user”: every user behaves differently and the more you observe and test users the more it becomes clear that users are all different from one another. “All Web use is basically idiosyncratic. [...] Good design [...] takes this complexity into account.” (p.128) The recurrent mistake is to assume that users alike or even that users will think like you(!). To create a site that ‘works’ Web teams should test the usability of their interfaces by observing how people understand the concept and purpose behind the site and how easily they manage to complete specific tasks. This is why considering the context in which users experience a site is very important as well. Usability testing highlights what works and what doesn’t work with a site. Often it is through testing that the most obvious and important flaws are brought to designers and developers’ attentions, as it reveals user intentions, motivations, perceptions, and responses, which give insights into whether people can use the site.

Moreover, Krug emphasizes the need for ‘usability testing’ in the early stages of designing a site, as it will help teams get rid of underlying issues once and for all (and it saves time!). For him, ‘Testing is an iterative process. [...] You make something, test it, fix it, and test it again.’ (p.135) In other words, KEEP TESTING until you are left with a site that users can actually make something of.

The author then prescribes a set of prescriptions for doing your own testing when on a low budget. He proposes that: testers should avoid divulging a site’s content to testees, make sure they think out loud, document both the screen-actions and the testees (using a camera and a screen recorder), ‘usability testings’ can be held once a month, in an office room or any room with a computer, 3 or 4 candidates who have basic knowledge of the Web are a good number for every test made during the development process of a site, offering stipends ($50 to $100 per user) shows that you care about their opinions, and that this procedure can be made in a morning and debriefed with the team during lunch hour. It’s not rocket science!

However, he points out that while ‘usability testing’ is important, there are problems users will encounter that will not be essential to focus on (such as ‘why doesn’t this site have “…” service?’) and other problems that will need immediate fixing. Also, it’s important to design for you audience and others, for experts and beginners, which is why clarity of information (i.e. clarity of the wording used throughout the site) becomes significant when ‘usability testing’ is made on virtually ‘any’ user. He names 2 types responses to focus on while testing: “Get it” testing (do users get it?) and Key task testing (were they able to perform a task? and how well did they do?) (p.144).

What often happens once a few determined problems have been fixed is that new (or hidden) problems come to the foreground, which explains why testing must be made often.

Although I found the text a bit redundant, I must concur that it will be difficult to forget his advice: “Recruit loosely and grade on a curve.” (p.139)

After having been asked “What do you think is most important about interface?” Don Norman responded that interfaces are NOT the place to start, but instead explained that design happens during ideation (or conceptual phase), and that design is a collaboration of different fields of knowledge working together to create sensitive and effective tools: tools that respond to user needs.

Norman stressed the importance of understanding the logic behind the act of designing, which includes considerations for the human factor. In this interview he sets ground rules for ‘good design’ and focuses on the idea that design should be inherently ‘humane’; which is to say that technological tools need to be thought of with a user-centered approach. “Cultivate Sensitivity to Design” explains how experimenting (observing, testing, etc.) helps designers reach a place of “empathy” for the user and simplifies complex products or systems in accordance to audience feedback. So, Norman proposes a shift in priorities. The priority is to provide appropriate tools for people that consider the whole system, or the ‘big picture.’ Design should be task-specific.

He suggests that human-centeredness is attainable in design through collaborative work. Involving people from diverse specializations (cognitive scientists, industrial designers, anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, etc.) to collaborate in the ideation process can create designs that understand user needs and expectations, and responds to user habits.

In short, having the knowledge background and perfecting tools through prototyping, testing, and experimenting, are primers to any good design creation. In fact, Norman recommends that we invent a new programme of study wherein “each member [would be] trained in design, cognitive science, and programming.”

What I retained from this interview is that: to be a designer is to have the necessary knowledge to create meaningful tools for society. ‘Good design’ requires social-research methodologies and involves a back-and-forth dialogue between users and designers, testing and prototyping (re-designing). ‘Good design’ is also design that understands human beings; that is, design that is sensitive and that follows natural human behaviour and understands both needs and expectations. To be a designer today is to be able to open up to various fields of knowledge and adapting design to changed contexts and audiences.

“As a quest for expanding the vocabulary of social practices and of the object-subject relationship, emotional technology (smart, intelligent) simulates human behaviour and creative energy. It revisits the environment anew for new types of interactions and explorations. Golan Levin is a software artist who creates screens and robotic objects that study sound, speech, movement, and gaze. In his work he explores the ability for motion to create shapes and enable experimental activities in a social context. In this way, interaction reveals a type of individual personality (rhythm, shapes, emotions) and collaborative relationships between the subject-object and subject-to-subject interface. The screen results in a series of movements and shapes that emit sounds. Making visible the un-designed, real the designed.” (Diab Yunes, 2009)

In a TED talk: “Golan Levin makes art that looks back at you,” Levin explains that his process originates from Oliver Sacks’ observation of synaesthesia (that some people can hear colours and others taste shapes), which he calls ‘funaesthesia’.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/golan_levin_ted2009.html