#016 - Cloudy with a Chance of SaaS
User Experience as Science
Design December
I’ve written a bit about my Masters of Design Methods degree. My design school experience was not about art, colors, layouts, or fonts. Instead, it focused on Strategy, Innovation, and Leadership, along with many research models based on repeatable methods. I am going to focus the next several posts on this type of Design. When I speak with software leaders, they often tell me that they think of User Experience as opinions and that measuring it is nearly impossible and is just a huge time suck on the project. But I say it’s not just opinions and there is a way to measure it. The folks at Nielson Norman group[1] have an excellent method to assess the User Experience of software. Using their method you can make an experience you are proud to deliver, customers are happy to use, and most importantly one they will promote. It’s a Design method grounded in science and user observations. This method has 5 simple questions to address and assess User Experience.
Learnability
This question could also be labeled discoverability or curation. Can the user simply and easily look at the user interface, and successfully get to their desired outcome? Note I said their desired outcome, not your desired outcome. In other words, how many users in the general pool will be able to complete a task successfully?
Efficiency
Once those users are experts at the system, how easily can they accelerate their performance and do things very quickly? Will it be easy to memorize the steps or are there keyboard shortcuts to accomplish tasks very quickly? Or can they clone existing working items and modify them slightly to get new capabilities accomplished?
Memorability
This is often where software delivered on the web falls down. If your users have not been to your offering in a while, will they immediately know what to do? How much of your user interface has changed or has the perception of change from the last time your user visited weeks or months ago? In other words, when they come back how long does it take them to get to the accomplished levels of production they had when they first learned the offering? Subtle User Interface(UI) changes add up to significant changes over time for a user who seldom uses your offer.
Errors
When a user does something wrong, is the next best corrective action offered, or are they expected to troubleshoot the errors they’ve uncovered? Having an undo capability or start-over feature will enable users to go back to the last known good state before they started making changes. Helping users to prevent errors should be your first goal. Humans are creative and crafty and good at breaking things or finding ways in which your offering falls down. Logging errors that occur, and ensuring remediation is provided for your users with future updates, lets your users know that you are considering their needs and designing for empathy.
Satisfaction
Are your users happy and content with what they accomplished? Are they willing to tell others about the experience and promote your offering to coworkers and friends? Having power sponsors and other advocates for your offering will turbocharge your adoption.
1 Tip:
User Experience and Design can be a science, testing users against the metrics of Learnability, Efficiency, Memorability, Errors, and Satisfaction will go a long way toward giving your teams a repeatable method to uncover the quality of your user experience.
Thank You
Jim ‘The Designatic’ Tyrrell
[1]
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-101-introduction-to-usability/