Jared Spool talks about why experience design is so important

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In Alan Cooper’s “The Inmates are Running the Asylum” and “About Face 2.0“, he talks about how the user’s goals are the most important thing to consider when making design decisions. He also mentions the need to consider the person who is buying the product as well. If you can’t sell the product to the customer, then designing for the end user becomes a moot point.

In the situation that I am currently in (see previous post), we have a problem where instructors are not using the course modules that are being provided for them. In this case, they are like the ‘customer’ that Cooper refers too. If we cannot sell the module to the instructor, then fulfilling the user’s goals, again, becomes a moot point.

During the research phase of this redesign, I will be very interested to see why these instructors are ‘working around’ these course modules. What is it about the current product that frustrates them? What goals does the instructor have that are not being met?

It will be interesting to see how the importance of the instructor’s goals compares with the importance attributed to the customer in Cooper’s texts. Will the instructor be treated as the ‘customer’ in the research and modeling process, or will he become another primary persona that needs to be considered in the design process?

A response from someone I was having a conversation with at lunch. I was trying to describe to my fellow conventioners what I did. I told them I was an interaction designer, and proceeded to explain the methodology of user centered design. The responses? “Oh, we just usually skip over that part.”

Classic.

So, I am at the CFUnited conference here in DC. Sitting in the ‘Flex Coding Kitchen’ presentation, I realized that I am truly hanging out with 1000 of the brightest, most talented inmates in the asylum. It is interesting to hang out and hear them talk, and I am glad I am able to get a better insight as to what makes them tick.

I just got done listening to a guy from Microsoft who was talking to us about “User Experience”. He proceeded to describe some elements of what user experience design is. They included: it works well, it looks good, etc.

I know that we have to consider the audience: mostly Coldfusion developers. But, his ‘elements’ of the user experience were not explained well (let alone NAMED very well), and he did not fully connect how they relate to the product he was featuring: Atlas.

Atlas is Microsoft’s Ajax framework. It is designed to primarily work with .NET technologies, but also interfaces to other platforms as well. I am sure there are probably more bells and whistles when using Microsoft platforms, which is certainly why they are giving it away for free. But, exactly how does Atlas support and improve the user experience?

This is where the danger of using technology blindly can occur. Ajax is fun for developers to use, because it allows them to make user interfaces do things that they could not do before. This is also why interaction designers like it as well. Yet, without implementing user centered design techniques, using Ajax has the potential of creating an equally bad user experience as plain old HTML. The main issue that comes up is breaking the user’s mental model of how web pages normally work by implementing asycrounous data calls to the server and displaying them in the user interface– before the user hits the ‘Submit’ button. So, letting the inmates run loose with the design of these new types of interactions is dangerous.

Now, some of the questions of usable Ajax interaction have been solved since I was made aware of them at User Experience Week 2005. For example, if you have an e-commerce site that allows you to customize a product, and you are using Ajax to dynamically update the product view to reflect these customizations, Atlas creates a simple way to incorporate those attributes into URL variables so you can send a friend a direct link to a page that represents the same state the page is currently in.

Ajax itself is no different than html was in the early ’90s. In the wrong hands, it can cause major frustration for users. Interaction designers applying user centered design techniques can embrace these tools and use them to create great user experiences.

I just hope we can convince the inmates, and get them to trust the designers to create usably pleasant interactions.

This is possibly one of the hardest things for me to explain to the people I work for. WHY a design process that includes the usability engineering is so IMPORTANT. Reading the forward to Alan Coopers 2004 edition of “The Inmates are Running the Asylum” has given me some greater insight into why the old ways of creating software/web applications are still prevalent today.

Cooper talks about how it is the ‘old economy’ thinking that equates programmers in the same way that it classifies variable costs. In business, there are two strategies for increasing profits: reduce costs, or increase revenues. In the old economy of manufacturing physical goods, reducing variable costs became the best way to increase profits. If I can build widget A with cheaper materials and less labor, then I can produce it at a lower cost per widget. Building and distributing software/web applications is a completely different animal than creating a physical good. Increasing revenues through higher sales is the preferred way to increase profits because the cost of distributing software after it is design is, for all practical purposes, zero. Sure there is support to provide, packaging to design, salesman to hire, etc. But, the actual good itself, the code, does no incur further costs as sales increase. If you make widget A out of steal, widget A will always incur a cost for the amount of steel needed to create it. Code does not incur cost for each time it is reproduced. Therefore, it is desirable to SELL MORE to increase revenue, rather than reduce the variable costs.

This is an important distinction to make. Since old economy thinking strives to reduce variable costs, it tends to group development resources into these variable costs. Since you cannot create software/web applications without programmers, they are often left to design the interfaces and interactions as well. This is where the danger of old economic thinking comes in. Would a building project, needing to cut costs, cut out the architect and leave the building design to the people swinging the hammers and laying the pipes for the plumbing? This would be recipe for disaster. In fact, I would be surprised if a building could be built this way at all. Yet, software IS often built in this way. Leaving out the Information Architect, Interaction Designer, or what ever you want to call it, is like building a building with out the Architect– a recipe for disaster in anybody’s book.

I have only read the forward for this book so far, but I am excited to read the rest so that I can arm myself with the knowledge the can change the minds of the business leaders in my organization.