Design for usability E6: Human Factors Design IB Technology

User-product interfaces The user-product interfaces of many electronic products are extremely complex rather than being intuitive and easy to use. Products with intuitive and easily accessible interfaces are likely to be more popular with consumers (especially more affluent and older customers).

Important characteristics Three important characteristics for a user- product interface are: Simplicity and ease of use Intuitive logic and organisation Low memory burden Consider which product features are essential or likely to be used with greatest frequency, the functionality required by a typical user and the common learning problems encountered by users.

Bad design! There are disadvantages to products which are not well organised and cannot be learnt intuitively and remembered easily. This user interface is too difficult to understand or decipher what to do.

So, I installed the facebook application on my phone, along with a handful of other free and pay-for downloads from the Apple App Store. Facebook, however, took an approach that I haven't yet seen any of the other App Store software downloads take... They've incorporated Apple's Icon-based "alerts" into their own Facebook application icon. If I was a heavy facebooker, I'd probably appreciate this. If I cared so much about my virtual friendships that I really needed to know when one of my friends sent me a request to eat zombies, plant a virtual flower or figure out how much more "like" others I am, then I'd really be into knowing the moment that a new request was sent to my Facebook account. The problem is... I don't really care that much. I don't question the value of having these numeric indicators on my screen. I do, however, question the necessity of having them displayed, with no way of being able to disable them... simply telling the Facebook application that "I don't really care that much about you, so STOP stressing me out!". Logically, you'd think that Facebook's application design team would have thought to put a preference in the application that allowed me to turn these numeric notifications on or off.

Novice users of a product should be able to learn all its basic functions within one or two hours. However, many products are full of confusing detail and are difficult to learn. This can lead to incomplete use of the product’s functionality and frustration for the user. Instruction manuals are often poorly organised.

Memory burden Poor organisation of a product imposes a memory burden on the users, who have to learn and remember how the various functions work. This results in them not using the full functionality of a product but focusing on a limited set of features and ignoring those that are difficult to remember. As a designer you should be thinking about how intuitively the product features can be accessed by users to reduce memory burden and make the product more user friendly.

Why is it difficult for a designer to develop simple, intuitive user-product interfaces? It is difficult for a designer to distance him/herself from the product and look at it through the eyes of the prospective user. Re-innovation of a product often involves adding features to the basic design rather than redesigning the user-product interface from scratch, and this can result in a disorganised interface. It is important to consider necessary and desirable features, not ones that increase complexity without enhancing usefulness for most users.

Paper prototyping Definition: Representative users perform realistic tasks by interacting with a paper version of the user-product interface that is manipulated by a person acting as a computer, who does not explain how the interface works. See paper prototyping handout and video for a working example.

Paper prototyping is one example of participatory design. Paper prototyping is sometimes called low-fidelity prototyping. It is one example of participatory design, that is, it involves the users in design development.

In a paper prototyping session there are 4 roles: Facilitator: explains the purpose of the session to the user and how to interact with the prototype. User: represents the target market for the product, and interacts with the user-product interface to “use” the product in response to guidance from the facilitator. Computer: a human being simulating the behaviour of the computer program in response to instructions from the user. Observer: watches what happens and can ask more questions of the user.

Advantages of paper prototyping It is cheap and easy to implement. A paper prototype can be quickly and easily modified and retested in the light of feedback from representative users, so designs can be developed more quickly. It promotes communication between members of the development team. No computer programming is required, so paper prototyping is platform-independent and does not require technical skills. A multidisciplinary design team can collaborate on design development.