4 Days of Usability
I spent the last 4 days at UI13, the annual usability conference presented by User Interface Engineering, a usability and web consultancy based out of North Andover, MA. I absorbed a lot of information from this conference, and put a lot of work into it as a volunteer.
I’m going to go through my highlights from the show, but first…
I have a new hero (sorry Chuck Jones); Bill Verplank gave one of the most fantastic presentations I’ve ever seen. The man spun a tale around metaphors, the details of which I am still acknowledging hours later, but there’s more of that to come along.
Day ONE started off quite well. Luke Wroblewski gave a great presentation titled Visual Design for the Web: Communicating with Customers.
He helped attendees develop a common vocabulary of a visual nature:
Visual Communication is part Visual Organization and part personality. Visual Hierarchy is a deliberate prioritization of Visual Weight enabled by the manipulation of Visual Relationships to create Meaning for users. – Luke Wroblewski
Wroblewski captured views of websites in some instance of their incremental timeline and presented them as examples of the “Dos and Don’ts” of web design. He also presented a detailed explanation on color psychology, including the relationship a user has with warm colors vs. cool colors, how colors found in nature can be more pleasing to the eye and what effect colors have in context to different cultures. Other references to visual elements were classified as images, abstract shapes, and textures and patterns.
Day TWO was great. The biggest highlight was probably the shorter sessions and greater variety of speakers. Jeremy Keith gave a great presentation on his idea of Bulletproof Ajax and introduced his own method of Hijax (a process for implementing Ajax which allows for graceful degradation from unsupportive browsers). He discussed the misconceptions and short history of Ajax, a term originally coined in an article by Jesse James Garret where he said it was an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, though Ajax is much more according to Keith (a thought now also shared by Garret).
He presented the idea of progressive enhancement, where ideally, every website has a series of layers with content at the core, followed by structure (HTML), presentation (CSS), and Behavior (JavaScript).
He also warned about risks in usability when using an established desktop metaphor on the web; if you don’t follow through and reference the entire function of the desktop version, users may get frustrated based on their strong familiarity with the desktop model.
Jared Spool, Principal of UIE, delivered a great Keynote speech about the dogma of user centered design and the need to abandon the existing methodology for more flexible approaches. According to UIE research, Spool determined the teams doing the best, of those interviewed, had no formalized methodology or dogma associated with their usability efforts.
As part of his presentation, Spool came up with questions for team members to ask themselves when striving for successful deployment.
1. Can everyone on the team describe the experience of using your design five years from now?
2. In the last six weeks have you spent more than two hours watching someone use your, or a competitor’s product?
3. In the last 6 weeks, have you rewarded a team member for creating a major design failure?
The best answer to these questions is yes (which may be surprising for the one about failure, but keep reading).
At the end of the day, I saw Scott Berkun take Spool’s mentioning of failure further in a talk titled, Why Designers Fail, and What to Do About It. His idea as I understand it, is we can learn from our mistakes better than from our successes. Failure, according to Berkun, can be broken into two types, Fundamental failure, the total crash of a system, and Partial Failure, where isolated elements fail with mixed results.
Day THREE went into a full day explanation of Agile development presented by Jeff Patton. Agile is a process for product or web oriented development where the project grows in layers as part of a rapid development cycle. Agile consists of a routine of daily meetings and weekly launches called sprints. The core of this method is to adapt along with the development of a product and address issues as they come up.
Day FOUR was great. The day started off with Bill Verplank’s talk about Sketching Metaphors. Verplank was a researcher and designer for Xerox back in the early 80’s and ID2 which later became IDEO; more information is available in Spool’s podcast. As the title of the talk suggests, Verplank literally delivered his presentation by sketching metaphors.
He started with a title drawn on a note card which looked like it was the first screen to any number of the other PowerPoint presentations we had been exposed to over the course of the four days. Only once he started his presentation and manually removed the note card, did the majority or the room realize it was the product of an overhead projector, which made his presentation an implied then distorted metaphor.
He proceeded to sketch out with Sharpie his entire lecture on sheets of graph paper creating icons and symbols which most accurately expressed his knowledge, information and understanding. He produced a chart of sorts connecting the abstraction of a project, to the reality of development.
(these are my notes of the chart)
The too short talk left the wheels of my brain spinning, but fortunately, there was still a full day ahead.
The final presentation I saw was on prototyping for usability, presented by Christine Perfetti and titled Product Usability: Survival Techniques. We learned a number of tricks and techniques around testing for usability:
The teams who succeed focus on tricks and have no notion of formal Methodology.
All components require focus.
All members of the development team get involved early
Don’t think of aspects as mutually independent
Your user isn’t everybody, so who is your user?
Focus on the user’s threshold
Usability and quality should be grouped, and thought of together.
View users as a partner in the development process
After learning about other scenarios of product testing, we all participated in a group interactive development challenge with paper and markers as our medium. The task was to create a Kiosk for users of a fabricated fast food restaurant in order to speed up ordering time. We then tested our designs on a series of three users, where after each we were allowed to update our paper prototype to better the usability of our kiosks. It was a great exercise and I’d like to add that my group finished second (as best as I could tell), but there was only a prize for first.
All and all it was a great conference which I plan to attend in the future and would recommend to any professional involved with designing for users or understanding their habits.