Last week my excellent colleague Cristin Witcher and I presented to the International Institute of Business Analysts (Calgary Chapter) on the subject of user centered design. We had a big crowd and it went down very well – in fact we’ve had two further bookings on the back of it.
The focus of the talk was on Personas and Lo-Fi Prototyping, based on a case study of a recent project that Cristin worked on. To be honest Cristin did all the hard work, I just brought a much needed bald white-guy angle to the proceedings. The bit I liked the most were the examples of good and bad design from the real world that she had found.
One of her examples of bad design was a shot of the interior of a Chrysler PT Cruiser. The challenge was to open the window. Because on the door where anyone who has ever been near a car would expect to find the window controls there was nothing. Instead you had to go hunting (or open the door if you prefer). It turns out the window controls are in the middle of the dashboard. The designers have sacrificed ease of use for originality or creativity. Big woo! All in all a great example of how standards and conventions help us when navigating an interface in the real world or online.
On the up-side was this shot snapped in TW’s favourite Calgary coffee shop, Bumpy’s.
Want to take a spoon, which side do you go for? My suspicion would be the one with the handles sticking out, just asking to be grabbed. This is a brilliant example of Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think” principle where even without trying to read the labels you can get a good idea of what does what. The interface helps us achieve our goal more quickly.
My main contribution to the proceedings was a shot of the interior of my apartment here in Calgary. It’s great, don’t get me wrong, and it’s got one of those massive North American fridges that makes ice and everything. Trouble is the fridge is directly opposite the broom cupboard and you can’t stand in front of it and open the door at the same time. From anywhere in the kitchen getting something out of the fridge involves the following steps.
- Open the fridge door in your face
- Close the fridge door
- Walk around the fridge
- Open the door again
- Take item
- Close door
- Walk back around the fridge
I’ve put a photo in the presentation below that makes it a bit clearer. The point I wanted to make by all this is that the Customer who pays for our service is very rarely the User of the finished application. In this case the Customer was the property developer building the condo block. To the developer a big fridge and a broom cupboard are all good things to have in a kitchen and the builder delivered to the specification. The User of the apartment however has a completely different set of goals. Some early user testing of this configuration would have soon pointed out the problems.
Analysts/Designers need to develop workable applications for users, whilst still satisfying our customers who will be paying the bill. This can be a difficult balancing act but the user-centered techniques described in our presentation are a way for us to try and manage this process.
[...] UX eye for the BA guy. [...]