Siolon

The Most Trivial Aspect of Designing Interfaces

I’ve been doing UI work for almost a decade.  I’ve seen a lot and been through many fads (although I won’t claim them if asked).  For a long time I thought the most impor­tant part of design­ing inter­faces was the way it looked, and I was caught up in the next DHTML fad that would come across my RSS reader.  Well, thank­fully I’ve grown and real­ized what’s really impor­tant, and I’ve come to real­ize that an interface’s appear­ance is not the most impor­tant thing.

Note: Please don’t think I’m say­ing that the way it looks is not as impor­tant, but is pales in com­par­i­son to our fol­low­ing discussion.

What? You Mean Users Come Here?

When I heard first of User Expe­ri­ence (UX) I had a hard time wrap­ping my arms around it.  I made it more dif­fi­cult then it is sup­posed to be.  In short, UX is the dis­ci­pline that aims to under­stand not only who your users are but what they are try­ing to accom­plish with your appli­ca­tion.  When you under­stand UX then you cre­ate an inter­face that facil­i­ties these user’s behav­iors and desires.   I found this great def­i­n­i­tion of UX:

The term “user expe­ri­ence” refers to a con­cept that places the end-user at the focal point of design and devel­op­ment efforts, as opposed to the sys­tem, its appli­ca­tions or its aes­thetic value alone. It’s based on the gen­eral con­cept of user-centered design. (Source)

I love this def­i­n­i­tion, because it illus­trates that UX “places the end-user at the focal point” which is crit­i­cal to your appli­ca­tions suc­cess.  When you neglect how your users will inter­act with your sys­tem then ulti­mately, and I guar­an­tee this, it will be a failure. 

We’ve all been on sites that have left a sour taste in our mouth.  Maybe we are forced to use this sites, and when we use them we’d rather com­plain about them then actu­ally use them.  Whether it’s an intranet or public-facing site we still have the same pos­si­bil­ity for fail­ure.  Often times sched­ules push the nec­es­sary time to under­stand UX to the back-burner in order to “get some­thing out in front of the cus­tomer.”  Doesn’t that seem ridicu­lous?  We want to get some­thing out for our cus­tomers so they can ben­e­fit from it, but we don’t do the care­ful assess­ment nec­es­sary to ensure that this happens?

Prac­ti­cal Steps to Facil­i­tate UX Research

Here is a short list of items to remem­ber when devel­op­ing your next appli­ca­tion to con­jure UX research.

1. Spend some mean­ing­ful time inter­view­ing a wide-range of poten­tial con­sumers to uncover what they would use your appli­ca­tion for.
2. If you’re replac­ing a legacy sys­tem then be sure to ask what about the cur­rent sys­tem frus­trates them.
3. Let your feed­back from the con­sumers drive those tense deci­sions that often play out between the devel­op­ment team and management.
4. Dia­gram work­flow to under­stand all vari­a­tions your users can get from your application.
5. Usabil­ity test­ing will become invalu­able to see how users actu­ally use your sys­tem as opposed to a hypo­thet­i­cal discussion.
6. Engage user feed­back and under­stand­ing when devel­op­ing your infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture (labels, nav­i­ga­tion, etc).

We are all users, and we all have strong opin­ions on how inter­faces should look and func­tion.  The only prob­lem is when we start design­ing appli­ca­tions that cater to our per­sonal or inter­nal desires and not what aides our cus­tomer.  UX doesn’t have to be a bur­den­some process that puts your project behind sched­ule, and if done cor­rectly you’ll see imme­di­ate and last­ing pos­i­tive effects from your effort.