Interaction design

Mark Hurst of ‘Good Experience’ wrote an interesting article about the most common usability mistakes. Central question was how to avoid making errors?, and how to achieve better usability?

Mark Hurst argues that whenever a user centered product or website is developed, it is important to stay strategic, always try to improve the business, and listen to customers (as human beings, not as users of a tool).

But in doing so, avoid the following:

1. Not conducting any customer research.

Some companies still don’t conduct customer research, but instead rely on their best internal guesses as to what their customers want. Except in organizations where ESP is a common employee skill, this tends not to lead to healthy, customer-centered operations.

2. Conducting “pretend” research.

Let’s pretend our user’s name is Jane. Let’s pretend she is 38 years old, drives a purple Prius, reads mystery novels, loves bulldogs, and likes to go sailing. Let’s pretend she comes to our website and likes feature A but not feature B. Therefore, we should develop more things like feature A. See? We’re very customer-centered.

This is the fun of creating a persona, which allows teams to make decisions based on fictional people, rather than doing the hard work of listening to real customers. (Yes, I’m being provocative; yes, personas can be useful in some cases)

3. Conducting research, but the wrong type.

One of the most popular research methods in business today is the focus group: an individual moderator, typically a high-energy person, encourages a live panel of many respondents to give feedback on a product or service. This can be useful in some situations. But where customers interact individually with a company - say, on a website or in some other customer experience - the one-to-many method of focus groups doesn’t yield very appropriate findings.

4. Conducting one-on-one research, but with tasks defined beforehand.

Traditional usability dictates that the moderator should write the test questions beforehand. But how can you know the right questions to ask before you’ve even met the customer? Task definition comes from the age of software, when the tool - a piece of software - was being optimized (thus the term “usability” refers to - and focuses on - a tool, not a human). Customer experience is concerned with the customer; their individual, real-life experience is what we’re supposed to be observing. It’s beyond presumptuous to think you can predict the appropriate tasks before the session starts.

5. Not inviting stakeholders to attend research.

I’ve often heard the complaint from UX professionals that “we don’t have enough impact in the organization.” Maybe that’s because too many practitioners write reports about their work, and lob them over the cubicle walls, rather than getting stakeholders involved in the research. Writing reports may work in the publish-or-perish academic world, but in the business world, it’s infinitely better to have stakeholders physically sit and watch customers as they interact with the website (or product or service or whatever).

6. Not prioritizing findings.

My favorite, love-to-hate conclusion of a usability report goes something like this: “We uncovered 52 usability errors on the site, and here’s a list of all of them.” Oops: an unending list of tactics that no one will want to wade through. Instead, whenever discussing results (presumably in-person, to stakeholders who attended labs), focus on the most important two or three strategic findings - the ones that will really move the needle on key business metrics. (You DO focus on the business, don’t you? See the next point.)

7. Not relating to business objectives.

Some usability researchers seem to see their work as an extension of their master’s thesis in human factors - a scholarly exercise that demonstrates their mastery of various research and analysis methods. This may work in academic research labs, but in the business world, the point of this work is to improve the business. If you want to have an impact, then conduct the work in the light of business objectives: increasing revenue, or cutting costs, or improving usage or conversion rates or pageviews or something that helps pay the bills.

8. Missing the larger picture.

Tactical disciplines like usability and information architecture are useful, valuable, and have their place in the development process. But what’s much more important is to understand the people, the human beings, who make the company possible. The customers, the visitors, the patients, the readers, the guests, whatever you call them - their experience is what determines the company’s success or failure. So focus first on the overall experience. It’s strategic, not tactical. It’s about the people, not the tool. Focusing on the larger picture first will set a better context in which to work - later - on usability tactics.

Via Good Experience