User Centred Design

Daniele Fiandaca’s opinion piece (NMA 04 Feb) raised the question of whether digital agencies were focussed on aesthetics at the expense of user experience.  I am delighted to see this issue being discussed because over recent years user experience (UX) has become “un-sexy” and the column inches that were dedicated to the subject back in the early 2000’s when it was new and exciting are all but forgotten. Read more…

At Foviance, our job is to help the world’s leading brands understand their customers better. That means uncovering who they are, along with their expectations, goals, behaviours and attitudes. We use this knowledge to deliver an experience that pleases end customers while ensuring commercial success for our clients. Read more…

Interview with Fergus Roche, Head of User Experience at Enable Interactive, facilitated by Sven Krause

Fergus, you currently work as Head of User Experience at Enable Interactive design agency. What career path resulted in you becoming a User Experience Consultant? What skills have you developed along the way that hold you in good stead today?
The user experience industry is pretty young, so you’ll find that people come to our industry from design, technical, client services – all sorts of routes. I worked as a business analyst, notably in the pre-IPO days of Lastminute.com. I received one of the best commercial digital educations money can’t buy. It was brilliant there – very open, lively, rapidly expanding – all the things you’d expect of a big start-up. Following that I continued as a business advisor, and then worked as a producer in digital agencies, then over time the percentage of user-centered or information architecture oriented work just increased from say five percent of my job to 100 percent of my job. The obvious key experiences I bring to the role from my business analyst days are requirement gathering, process mapping, and aligning things strategically – that side of things. I deal with a lot of that in the work that I do now, running workshops for clients and taking a user-centered approach early on in projects to minimise risks. I try to harness my previous experience, as is often the case, and now I head up user experience at an agency called Enable Interactive in Bristol.

Can you sum up the concept of user-centered design in a way in which a non-technical person would easily understand?
I’ll have a go! It’s about realigning the way in which you design from the viewpoint of the user – so outside-in. You then need to use this viewpoint throughout the design process. In some ways it could be viewed as being in opposition to the older engineering process, which is from the bottom up. Instead of starting with the technology side of things and fitting the user into the tool or application, we turn this around. A useful information architecture, or IA example would be the traditional librarian approach to data management of a fixed set of absolute taxonomies for cataloguing information – I guess a user-centered approach is at the opposite end of the spectrum.

Why do you think forward-thinking businesses should be interested and engaged in a user or customer centric approach to their websites and other digital channels?
If I were talking to a business that knew nothing about this approach and thought it sounded a bit wishy-washy or woolly, then the clearest example I could give would be to cite Apple, as a lot of people in our industry do. In 2008 the iPhone was the second or third biggest selling phone in the US behind Blackberries, and Apple had never made a phone before. The iPhone is simply a brilliant piece of user-centered design, and it’s made a paradigm shift in phone design that is being copied by most other manufacturers. But this approach, like in Apple’s case, has to come from the top down, from director level. They are the ones that need to drive a user-centered approach to ensure it is properly adopted across an organisation. It’s not something that your design or tech team can all of a sudden start implementing. It impacts sales, marketing, all across the board in fact. It must be understood and bought into at board level within a company.

Fergus, you recently presented at the UPA conference in Turin on the use of ’storyboarding’ in the User Centered Design process. Could you tell us about ’storyboarding’ in a user experience context, and why this technique is proving to be so popular with businesses and their end customers?
Storyboarding, and visualising things generally, allows you to show an audience of project stakeholders quickly what it is you propose to do. The reason to use storyboarding, doing it roughly and quickly and sticking it up on the wall, is that you can very quickly talk through how you expect something to be used. The idea is to create a shorthand way of visualising a project without the constraints of actually building the thing. It’s a very successful approach used across the film and animation industry that allows you to quickly sketch out a process, a product, or a website. With Foviance recently for example, we used storyboarding to quickly sketch out a user journey through a website. It’s a really easy way for members of a multi-discipline teams to look at storyboards from their individual perspectives and think “Okay, I can see how that bit works with that bit.” It gets people on the same page really quickly and helps them work effectively together. I think it’s applicable for service design, process mapping, product design, website creation, campaign work – all sorts of things.

It must be a challenge though, to take people who have learned meticulous processes and get them to change mindset and adopt these new methods?
People have always been afraid of drawing and being confident enough to show it to other people. In a commercial environment it can prove daunting, especially for people who quit drawing as children. But I’ve been doing this a while now, and I show doodles across the board, to colleagues or in multi-million pound pitches and at no time has anyone ever said “You can’t do that! That’s not professional!” Start small, show them almost in passing, see how they react, slowly start rolling it out maybe on internal projects, work quick and dirty and see how it goes. I’ve found that me and people who are using it are always surprised how useful and engaging the process is and how positive people’s reaction to it are. Everyone can draw a story and make it understood by another person; it’s about feeling free to do it and not being shy about it.

During a conversation recently with one of my clients, we were discussing certain terms of reference and how they are defined. As there are no industry standards as such but as many definitions as there are practitioners, I have broken down, in my opinion, the best and most widely used definitions for the following, within our glossary:

• User Interface (UI)

A User Interface (UI) is the interface by which a computer user is able to interact with the computer. It describes the way that the user uses input devices such as keyboards and mice, the way the information is portrayed on screen or on the output device and therefore determines how an application program or a Web site invites interaction and responds to it.

A Graphical User Interface (GUI) offers graphical icons, and visual indicators, as opposed to text-based interfaces, typed command labels or text navigation to fully represent the information and actions available to a user. The actions are usually performed through direct manipulation of the graphical elements.

• Information architecture (IA)

Information architecture is the art and science of organising information, usually via a strict taxonomy, so that it is findable, manageable and useful. In web design, the term describes the organisation of online content into categories and the creation of an interface for displaying those categories. Information architecture is concerned with the relationships between internal page elements, as well as the relationship between individual pages.

• Visual Identity (VI)

Visual Identity is the sum of all the visual elements used by an organisation or company to distinguish itself from its competitors.
The symbol, colours, formats and other visual elements of the brand signature.

• User Experience Design (UED)

User Experience Design is concerned with the experience of using a product as a whole – from first contact to interaction to reflection on that interaction. 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 (UCD).

• User-Centered design (UCD)

User-Centered design is a highly structured, comprehensive product development methodology driven by: (1) clearly specified, task-oriented business objectives, and (2) recognition of user needs, limitations and preferences. Information collected using UCD analysis is scientifically applied in the design, testing, and implementation of products and services.
When rigorously applied, a UCD approach meets both user needs and the business objectives of the sponsoring organisation.

This also brings us round to another blog posting on job titles within the User Experience (UE) design field.

spent an interesting afternoon at the annual E-Consultancy User Experience roundtable. When you bring together the leading customer-focused businesses and the UK’s most successful consultancies, you are guaranteed a vigorous and stimulating discussion.

The latest fashion for dynamic websites, which refresh within the page, was hotly debated. The introduction of so-called AJAX websites is causing usability and accessibility best practice to diverge. There are a lot of usability best practice guidelines encapsulated in the WCAG accessibility guidelines but AJAX websites can provide a better user experience for many while introducing problems for users of assistive devices.

Where AJAX is used for the heart of the website, it can result in an inaccessible user experience. Serenata Flowers was held up as an example of an accessible website that uses AJAX to enhance the user experience, but which also functions fully without the animation.

Discussion around the table revealed that AJAX sites cost four times as much to develop. Regarding how much should be spent on user centred design, two rules of thumb were proposed: 10% of a project budget, or half the design budget.

One question was whether there is such a thing as a ‘textbook’ defining best practice web design. E-Consultancy’s own research found that there were as many as 11 different ways that online shops ask people to enter the validation code on the back of their credit card. Clients wanted to know if anyone had defined the ‘right answers’ to such process design challenges.

Some people seemed to want something for nothing: they were asking the usability agencies to put their research into the public domain, on a centralised website. But that is problematic because there is rarely a universal right answer to design questions. Best practice depends on the client, its goals and its user base. Publishing results from tests with other sites could lead to misleading conclusions when the conclusions are misapplied elsewhere.

Some clients also failed to appreciate the expense involved in acquiring research results, which would make it bad business to give them away. Foviance hires psychology and human factors graduates, and we need to be able to charge for our services so that we can continue the good work we do. Certification in the industry might help the industry to appreciate the skillset of usability professionals.