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My Designs: Process Mapping through Prototyping

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Published: 20 January 2009

My wife doesn't know what I do at work.  I tell her all the time, but her eyes glaze over sometime into the second paragraph like mine do when she discusses her work in the neonatal intensive care unit.  I find my work endlessly fascinating, but I'm in the minority.  What I do is develop user experience designs from which talented developers create world class web applications.

The job is part psychologist, part librarian and part artist.  I have to understand organizational objectives and personal motivations, catalog knowledge and design components, and weave them together into a interface that so closely supports the intended task that it becomes invisible to the user.

I learned my craft over the past two decades after being exposed to a variety of methodologies and techniques.  My current practice most closely resembles the Performance Centered Design methodology developed at Ariel Performance Centered Systems and documented by Barry Raybould.

Business Process Mapping - A clear understanding of the current and desired business process, including what the business needs out of the process and how the user is incented to perform the task, is needed to develop a system that satisfies everyone.  These flow charts are then broken down into information needs for each step to ensure the user can make the right choices.  I don't usually have to do the process maps myself, but I usually influence them and must understand them.

Scenario Development - A scenario describes a single instance of a use case in as much detail as necessary to tell a story.  The scenario provides a narrative that can objectively be assessed to ensure the prototype solves the problem.  A number of scenarios are developed to cover variety of tasks, user groups and work contexts.  Sometimes I share these with my team, but often it's just a structure for me to demonstrate the prototoype.

Prototyping - The processes are divided into screens to support the task and an interface flow is developed to show how the screens interact.  HTML prototypes of the screens are developed and linked to support the story developed in the scenario.  The evaluators can see how the task progresses from screen to screen with as much fidelity in the data and functionality as necessary to understand the intended design.

Evaluation - Users review and identify holes in functionality, information or the process.

Refinement and documentation - After iterating through the prototype, the design will solidify and coalesce into an accepted design.  That design is documented with an annotated powerpoint of the prototype and user interface specification describing every control, behavior and data element present in the prototype.

Maintenance - inevitably, the scenarios don't cover anything, and sometimes technical limitations require compromises in the design.  As a designer, I stay involved through testing and deployment to ensure the system works in the real world.

Living in the cloud

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Published: 25 October 2022

Once upon a time, boys and girls, we had a computer.  In my case, it was an Apple IIc with a floppy drive and 128k of internal memory.  It was a large and bulky thing with a lot of wires and a heavy green-screen CRT monitor and stuff, and even though it had carry handles and was billed as “portable,” we left it on a desk at home.  If we wanted to do something on the computer, we had to go home to that desk.  When we wanted to show what we were working on to someone else, we either printed it out or copied it to a floppy disk and prayed that the person we were sharing it with had the same kind of computer with the same version of software.  If they didn’t, we were out of luck.

Fast forward 30 years. Today, I am no longer tied to a single device. The internet has become my “PC” – Personal Cloud.  I have two laptops, a chromebook, two tablets and a mobile phone.  They all access my data real-time through the internet, so synchronization is not an issue.  My email, contacts, calendar, documents and music are all online.  Regardless of what device I’m on, or even if I own the device, I can securely access my data to get the job done.  The software is a service in my cloud, so I don’t need to install a program on a local device.  As long as I can get a browser and onto the internet, I have everything I need.  Jumping between devices isn’t an issue when the contact I saved on my phone is automatically available on any device I use to access the internet.  My family is the same way, so we can share a device and the customization is done online for us.

One efficiency tip I’ve heard over and over through the years is you shouldn’t maintain multiple calendars.  Everything should be visible at once.  With Google Calendar, I can see a combined view of multiple private and public calendars, and give people access to mine.  Iif I schedule something on my calendar, it is automatically available to my family.  Group calendars, such as for Boy Scouts or the Marching Band, are included in my view so I know how many conflicting events I have.  When someone asks if I’m free on a given day, I no longer have to tell them I’ll check with the paper calendar at home and get back to them.  My calendar rides in the cloud.

I review and edit papers with my college daughter on Google Docs.  She writes the paper and adds comments and questions, then sends me the link.  I can see her paper and we can even interact real-time within the document.  After I make suggestions and comments, I can watch her make the edits.  I do the same thing with organization meeting agendas.  People on the list can add to the collaborative agenda throughout the month so we don’t have to remember to bring something up.  This was nearly impossible before the cloud.

I’ve nearly gone paperless at work.  I take notes on my tablet using Evernote and can access them on any device anywhere.  The tablet is smaller, lighter and more portable; the battery lasts all day.  The tablet is large enough that typing isn’t an issue, and the autoprompt and autocorrect can actually increase your speed once you get used to it.  One of my favorite advantages the tablet has over paper is the ability to take a photo of the white board we’ve been brainstorming on directly into my notes.  When I’m back at my desk, I can review the notes online and sort by tags or do a full-text search through hundreds of notes to find the information I’m looking for. When I’m away from my desk, all of my notes are always with me, either through my laptop, tablet or phone, or even someone else’s computer.  Try doing that with paper.

The only reason I switch between devices now is for convenience (laptops are easier to type large blocks of text, tablets for watching movies, etc.) or for a tool that hasn’t been ported to the Internet.  I’m starting to resent applications like Axure that require a dedicated installation at one device. In the cloud, I don’t have to worry about whether my software is up to date, or if my version is compatible with yours.  The cloud updates for all of us.  I also have not run into a cloud-based application that costs more than $10.  $600 for Office? When Google Docs is free?  Sure, it does things I can’t do in Google Docs, but the price difference has caused me to rethink a lot of application loyalties.

To be fair, the risk online is greater.  Servers could be hacked, the system can go down, the cloud is outside my control.  If I don’t have access to a wireless network, I have to work tethered to my phone.  If I don’t have a 3G connection on my phone, I’m out of luck.  But really, if I am that remote, I don’t really need to be on my devices.  The risks have to be weighed against the convenience and capabilities, and for me, that decision is easy.

The cloud is where I live, and where everyone will live in the future.  The cloud democratizes computing, in that everyone has access to the power and reach of the Internet. The cloud allows for faster and greater collaboration and sharing and connects us as never before.

The Future of User Experience

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Published: 25 October 2022

The field of user experience design has roots in human factors and ergonomics, a field that, since the late 1940s, has focused on the interaction between human users, machines, and the contextual environments to design systems that address the user's experience. With the proliferation of workplace computers in the early 1990s, user experience became an important concern for designers. It was Donald Norman, a user experience architect, who coined and brought the term user experience to wider knowledge.

I invented the term because I thought human interface and usability were too narrow. I wanted to cover all aspects of the person's experience with the system including industrial design graphics, the interface, the physical interaction and the manual. Since then the term has spread widely, so much so that it is starting to lose its meaning.

—Donald Norman

The term also has a more recent connection to user-centered design, human–computer interaction, and also incorporates elements from similar user-centered design fields.

Elements of user experience design

User experience design includes elements of interaction design, information architecture, user research, and other disciplines, and is concerned with all facets of the overall experience delivered to users. Following is a short analysis of its constituent parts.

Visual design

Visual design, also commonly known as graphic design, communication design, or visual communication, represents the aesthetics or look-and-feel of the front end of any user interface. Graphic treatment of interface elements is often perceived as the visual design. The purpose of visual design is to use visual elements like colors, images, and symbols to convey a message to its audience. Fundamentals of Gestalt psychology and visual perception give a cognitive perspective on how to create effective visual communication.

Information architecture

Information architecture is the art and science of structuring and organizing the information in products and services, supporting usability and findability. More basic concepts that are attached with information architecture are described below.

Information

In the context of information architecture, information is separate from both knowledge and data, and lies nebulously between them. It is information about objects. The objects can range from websites, to software applications, to images et al. It is also concerned with metadata: terms used to describe and represent content objects such as documents, people, process, and organizations.

Structuring, organization, and labeling

Structuring is reducing information to its basic building units and then relating them to each other. Organization involves grouping these units in a distinctive and meaningful manner. Labeling means using appropriate wording to support easy navigation and findability.

Finding and managing

Findability is the most critical success factor for information architecture. If users are not able to find required information without browsing, searching or asking, then the findability of the information architecture fails. Navigation needs to be clearly conveyed to ease finding of the contents.

Interaction design

There are many key factors to understanding interaction design and how it can enable a pleasurable end user experience. It is well recognized that building great user experience requires interaction design to play a pivotal role in helping define what works best for the users. High demand for improved user experiences and strong focus on the end-users have made Interaction Designers critical in conceptualizing design that matches user expectations and standards of latest UI patterns and components. While working, Interaction Designers take several things in consideration. A few of them are:

• Create the layout of the interface

• Define Interaction patterns best suited in the context

• Incorporate user needs collected during User Research, into the designs

• Features and Information that are important to the user

• Interface behavior like drag-drop, selections, mouse over actions, and so on

• Effectively communicate strengths of the system

• Make the interface intuitive by building affordances

• Maintain consistency throughout the system

In the last few years, the role of interaction designer has shifted from being just focused on specifying UI components and communicating them to the engineers to a situation now where designers have more freedom to design contextual interfaces which are based on helping meet the user needs. Therefore, User Experience Design evolved into a multidisciplinary design branch that involves multiple technical aspects from motion graphics design and animation to programming.

Usability

Usability is the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.

Usability is attached with all tools used by humans and is extended to both digital and non-digital devices. Thus it is a subset of user experience but not wholly contained. The section of usability that intersects with user experience design is related to human’s ability to use a system or application. Good usability is essential to a positive user experience but does not alone guarantee it.

Accessibility

Accessibility of a system describes its ease of reach, use and understanding. In terms of user experience design it can also be related to the overall comprehensibility of the information and features. It contributes to shorten the learning curve attached with the system. Accessibility in many contexts can be related to the ease of use for people with disabilities and comes under Usability.

Human–computer interaction

Human–computer interaction is concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use and with the study of major phenomena surrounding them.

Human–computer interaction is the main contributor to user experience design because of its emphasis on human performance rather than mere usability. It provides key research findings which inform the improvement of systems for the people. HCI extends its study towards more integrated interactions, such as tangible interactions, which is generally not covered in the practice of user experience. User experience cannot be manufactured or designed; it has to be incorporated in the design. Understanding the user's emotional quotient plays a key role while designing User Experience. The first step while designing the user experience is determining the reason a visitor will be visiting the website or use the application in question. Then the user experience can be designed accordingly.