Tag Archives: UX

UX and Project Mangement cross-over article from Interactions magazine

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A Taxonomy of Models Used in the Design Process by Joanne Mendel in the Jan + Feb 2012 edition of Interactions magazine is pretty interesting.

At Covenant Eyes we’re continually in the churn of Agile development, and integrating user experience work can be challenging. We’re figuring it out, and have definitely made some breakthroughs, but this article has provided another perspective that is helping me think about timing of user experience work within the loose phases of work that a typical project runs through.

It isn’t a stretch to layer the phases of Discovery, Reframe, Envision, and Create over a project’s lifecycle, and so tying different models for design work in each phase provides an opportunity to reflect on how we’re doing with matching up appropriate design work.

I’m asking my team and our project managers to read through it, and perhaps we’ll get a chance to discuss it together and consider if we can use some of the ideas to do better work.

IxDA Lansing kickoff featured speaker Dan Klyn

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Last night was the inaugural event for IxDA (Interaction Design Association) Lansing, and information architect Dan Klyn presented “The Nature of Information Architecture.”

Presentation overview

Dan’s presentation was both informative and controversial. He provided some nice background on the naming of the field of information architecture, citing Richard Saul Wurman phrasings at the 1976 AIA convention in Philadelphia and then Wurman’s book “Information Architects.”

Dan also proposed a way of considering what information architecture is through a target diagram, from core to outside as:

  1. Ontology (the study of being)
  2. Taxonomy (the science of order or arrangement)
  3. Choreography (writing/describing circular dance)

I like this description of IA. I do feel it gets to the heart of the work, and I can immediately consider certain areas of my own job in this light. Of course there are plenty of other descriptions of IA from Wurman, Rosenfeld, Morville, and others, but as I bring them to mind, they seem to be more focused on describing IA to outsiders whereas this one speaks to those of us already  in the field.

I wouldn’t, for instance, walk up to a client and say, “I’m concerned with the ontology of your system.” But I can talk with other information architects about questions of ontology, and they will likely bring their own experiences to bear.

After discussing this model for IA and how it circles the concept of understanding, Dan shared two ways to answer the question “How do we know when IA is good?”

  • performance (need to measure change in performance from a benchmark)
  • propriety (how appropriate to the context is the IA solution)

When discussing this question of quality of IA, the point was made that a functional, adequate solution is artless. It is insufficient. We’ve all used a website or service that we end up getting irritated with, and could comment afterward “Well at least it worked.” Good IA goes beyond sheer performance to fulfill propriety as well.

Isn’t naming always controversial?

The controversial part of Dan’s presentation is in the naming of things. The gist of my issue is that I felt Dan was saying that strategic-level IA work—the work that involves not just end-users but is concerned with larger business concerns—is beyond the scope of user experience work. (I really hope I’m not misrepresenting Dan’s meaning.)

My experience as a UX professional (note that I used to refer to myself as an information architect) says that UX begins with understanding both user and business needs, and is best done when exploring the strategic-level in order to frame the tactical work.

That said, I will say that with all the work demanded of UX in my job, I regret that I haven’t had the time to devote to a more traditional strategic IA-based analysis of our systems.

Dan made the point that this strategic work, though done by a smaller group, has greater leverage than choosing which style of form field to use. He is right, of course. I just think that that work is still to be done under the UX umbrella.

Thanks Dan for the talk, and Chris Bachelder for bringing it together

All-in-all, I’m really glad I had this opportunity to take part in Dan Klyn’s presentation. It was well-done and thought-provoking. Dan has shared his slides for “The Nature of Information Architecture.”

IxDA Lansing is the first Michigan group of the Interaction Design Association, and was initiated by Chris Bachelder of Techsmith Corp. I, for one, am grateful to have a Lansing-based group to advance UX events. Thanks Chris!

Stop the stopwatch, UXers!

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Stopwatch graphic from Casey Marshall

Stopwatch graphic by Casey Marshall

Recently, I watched a series of people observe informal usability tests.

Two of the observers have recently graduated with Masters degrees in HCI or an adjacent field.

Both recent graduates used a watch to record time-on-task and completion of the task. One actually broke out a stopwatch while the other referred to his wristwatch.

While these stopwatch fixations livened my day, I do wonder about graduate education in the usability field.

I recall that for the first half-dozen website usability tests that I moderated, I also recorded time. Then I realized that timing tasks obscured more important observations, and I haven’t bothered with timing since then. Besides, we can get times off the recordings.

Is the working world really that far off from graduate studies?

So why did these two graduates pull out timers?

Well, I think they were parroting “proper” methods they were taught without understanding when it is useful. If, in grad school, they only practice for ideal research situations, they’re missing out on the realities of the work world.

I’ve worked in an Agile development environment for the last couple years, and for the decade prior to that I worked on fast-moving projects that used whatever SDL I applied to them. The mission: Deliver value, ASAP.

With that charge, decisions are made that don’t allow for insight from in-depth, long-term studies with huge numbers of participants. I’m grateful for even the small, quick sessions of user and design research.

Regardless, I got a chuckle out of seeing these two bring out timers for a completely informal, one-off usability test. As expected, they both missed seeing key interactions because they were watching the clock.

When to be concerned about time, usability-wise

Okay, I’d hate to give the impression that time doesn’t matter. I just find that a long time to complete a task on a website is rarely the issue, instead it may be a symptom of other issues which become apparent during research.

However, I do find response times of a system to a user’s actions to be very important because too much delay in a system’s response can really hurt the user’s experience and even distract people from completing whatever they set out to complete. Still, this class of problem is often noticeable during observation. (Unless you missed it while you were fiddling with your stopwatch.)

With that in mind, I’ll gesture towards Nielsen’s take on response times.