ah teaches interface design (Understanding Users lecture)

Understanding Users

Lecture outline

Looking at different types of users, their goals, and how we can understand them. Lecture slides will be made available on the day of the lecture (June 8).

P1: Features
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Understanding Users

Users Have Goals

Last week we talked about how users have goals in using your interface. This week we're going to get to know the users more.

Types of Goals

End Goals: What a user is trying to do. Made up of a series of tasks to reach a result.

Experience Goals: The type of experience a user may wish to have while in pursuit of their end goal. Often subjective.

Life Goals: Influence on other goals. Often drives the why a user is using a particular system in the first place. Drives decisions.

Types of Goals

An example

End Goals: I want to find dog to pet.

Experience Goals: I want to find a dog to pet fairly easily, while not seeming like a creeper for wanting to pet someone else's dog.

Life Goals: I'm trying to conquer my fears. I have been afraid of dogs since I was a child, but really don't want to be scared anymore.

Expertise

While understanding user goals is important to designing an effective interface, remembering different types of users — from beginner to expert — comes into play when designing an interface.

Expertise

Beginners:

  • No wants to be one.
  • Looking for a mental-model match.
  • Not dumb, likely busy.
Dropbox Onboarding

Expertise

Beginners:

  • No wants to be one.
  • Looking for a mental-model match.
  • Not dumb, likely busy.
 

Experts:

  • Frequent users.
  • Tired of repetitive tasks.
  • Want to push system boundaries.
  • More likely to customize.
  • Most likely to provide feedback.

Users Have Types

Beginners:

  • No wants to be one.
  • Looking for a mental-model match.
  • Not dumb, likely busy.

Intermediates:

  • Need functional reminders.
  • Make more use of documentation.
  • Will see assistance.
  • May begin to customize worflow/interface.
  • Often the largest group of users.

Experts:

  • Frequent users.
  • Tired of repetitive tasks.
  • Want to push system boundaries.
  • More likely to customize.
  • Most likely to provide feedback.

Which users are best supported by each of these?

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An update failure notification from Windows 10
"There is no avoiding the hard work of really understanding the people who will actually interact with your product."
Cooper, Reiman & Cronin (2007)

Users are Human (Too)

Users often do not know what they want, which makes it difficult ot simply ask them what they want you to do. You instead need to figure it out through a combination of interview and observation.

Laseau's Funnel of design

From Rizwan Javaid

A sample persona detailing a fictional individual's behaviours, frustrations, goals, and tasks

Persona example from nngroup.com

Persona pitfalls

No amount of 'fun' attributes can fill the gaps our brains will automatically fill when reading personas. This can be a significant problem as the 'automatic' filling can often be our bias in action.

Stories and prototypes

To fill in this gap of defining our users, we will in this course aim for using stories and prototypes to help answer user's experiences.

How to Use Goals

To better identify goals, keep your focus on the design-related information, and look for insight such as the following:

  • What the user is doing: Usually pursuing end goals.
  • What the user is thinking: Usually about their task, or any given goal.
  • What the user is feeling: Usually driven by their experience goals.

Goals and Interactions

Your user’s goals drive their motivations to use your interface. Understanding their goals will help you understand why they are making the choice they are making, as well as their reactions.

P2: Heuristics

Why heuristic evaluation?

Heuristics let us find a lot of problems in an interface efficiently:

Average problems found by testers with:

  • No usability experience — 22%
  • Expertise in usability — 41%
  • Expertise in usability and domain — 60%

Heuristic problems found

Evaluators will miss both easy and hard problems.

The 'best' evaluators can miss easy problems.

The 'worst' evauators can discover hard problems.

Scenario or exploration?

When doing heuristic evaluations we can take a scenario-focused approach, or a more open exploration of the interface.

Scenarios

  • Steps through interface using a user task or scenario
  • Ensures problems relevant to the task are uncovered
  • Limits scope of evaluation

Exploration

  • Open-ended exploration
  • Good for exploring diverse aspects of the interface
  • Allows you to follow and explore potential pitfalls

Heuristic limitations

Keep in mind that while heuristics offer us a cheaper and faster way to test usability, we still need actual users to test to understand 'real world' scenarios.

Pros

  • Catches lots of problems with few heuristics
  • Heuristics are easy to remember and apply
  • Does not require end users

Cons

  • High-level principles
  • Does not go after subtle interface items
  • Cannot be considered a checklist

For lecture...

For this week's lecture time, please make sure you come ready to critique! If you are up for sharing your P1 deliverables as well for critique, please email Andrew.

Next week's lecture

Talking to Humans

An introduction to approaches for interviewing users and the resulting consideration of research ethics. Pre-recorded lectures and slides will typically become available on Thursdays.

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