Designing the User Experience at Autodesk

Responsive Web Design

By Joshua Ledwell

Not long ago, designers optimized their websites for a single page width, and worried about supporting only two or three PC web browsers. How should web designers respond to today's world where mobile web devices are proliferating in dozens of different resolutions? In the fourth book from the A Book Apart collection, Ethan Marcotte outlines the Responsive Web Design approach that allows a website to embrace users' needs on any size display, all with the same underlying HTML.

Responsive web design involves implementing three components in a site's CSS files. Flexible grid layouts use percentage widths to maintain a page's proportions over small changes in resolution (like all the slightly different mobile screens out there). Next, fluid images scale to the containing layout. Finally, media queries rearrange page layouts on a macro level for classes of Internet devices such as phones, tablets, and PCs.

Together these techniques can make the web accessible and usable on almost any Internet device available. Examples of websites that have gone responsive include ThinkVitamin and the Boston Globe. However, the approach is not for everyone. Advertising-supported websites, for example, often are contractually prohibited from resizing or moving ad placements.

What sets this short book apart from a CSS manual is the author's empathy for traditional web designers grappling with the mobile web's ascendancy. Marcotte shows why mobile content should be different, and how to delight mobile users without coding an app or a separate mobile site. If you're a web designer or developer this book will have you thinking "mobile first!" on your next project.

 

Resources:

Book website: http://www.abookapart.com/products/responsive-web-design

Summary article: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/

Sample responsive website (pictured): http://responsivewebdesign.com/robot/

Method 19 of 100: Laddering Questions

100 User Experience (UX) Design and Evaluation Methods for Your Toolkit

by Chauncey Wilson

This is the 19th in a series of 100 short articles about UX design and evaluation methods. Today, the focus will be on the laddering question method, a semi-structured interview technique where you ask “why, how, what, and ‘tell me more’” questions multiple times to drill down, up and sideways to go from general to specific, specific to general, or from one item in a category to another item.

Method 19 of 100

Laddering questions can provide insight into attitudes, beliefs, and values that affect requirements, brand image, consumer preferences, and buying decisions. For example, you might be interviewing someone as she works with software in her office. During the interview, the person says, “This feature is great!” Then you would follow up with a “ladder down” question – “Why is that feature great?” The person might say “It saves me a lot of time.” Then you continue with another ladder-down question – “Why does it save you a lot of time?” The person replies that “I didn’t have to find the dialog box – I could just use the pop-up menu.” You could go further, but in this series of “why” questions, you have gone from a general emotional statement to one that gets at the underlying issue – a particular feature reduces the amount of movement and search time required to perform a task. Laddering is a way to move from surface statements to root causes, details that are actionable, or core values that might affect adoption or satisfaction or loyalty.

In addition to drilling down, you can also drill sideways and ask a set of questions that reveal multiple examples or categories related to a particular topic. For example, if you were interviewing a usability expert about what methods he uses to discover usability problems, he might say “usability testing.” You could then ask “Are there any other methods that you use to get at usability problems?” He would pause and say “pluralistic reviews.” You could drill down on “pluralistic reviews” and then drill sideways and ask for other methods that involve users, getting the answer “diary studies.” A combination of drill-down and drill-sideways questions can provide useful and persuasive data.

There are a number of methods that are based on laddering questions including the “5-Whys” method that is often associated with root cause analysis.   

When to Use:

You can use laddering questions to:

• Understand organizational culture
• Complement other methods
• Elicit and understand knowledge from experts
• Elicit knowledge and details about a new domain
• Determine details about how new features and product attributes affect the user experience
• Produce data that are actionable
• Link features and product attributes with user/customer values

Strengths and Weaknesses:

+ Laddering is a technique that gets at core values and the underlying reasons for particular behaviors or choices.

+ Laddering is a way to elicit semi-tacit information that might not be revealed by other UX methods.

- Laddering can be tiring for participants who are continually asked “why” or other laddering questions.

- Conducting interviews with many laddering questions requires a facilitator who can keep the participant engaged. People who use laddering questions need to be comfortable with the repetitive questioning style and be prepared to vary their prompts as needed.

- On some occasions, laddering can get into sensitive issues (e.g., how corporate politics affects productivity).

- Laddering questions assume that there is hierarchical information. In some domains, the information may not be represented hierarchically.

Procedure:

You can conduct interviews that are focused on laddering or you can use laddering questions as part of a more general interview protocol. Here is a high-level set of steps for using laddering questions.

1. Develop a small set of laddering probes that you can use in your study. Consider problems for moving down, up, and sideways. Here are some ideas for laddering questions:
   
   “Why do you think that this product is “great”?  (laddering down when a person makes a general statement and you want to get an underlying value, attitude, principle or rationale)
   
   “Why is this important to you?” (laddering up when a person mentions a specific feature and you want to understand the higher level value of the feature)
   
   “Can you tell me about similar/different types of….?” (laddering sideways to get examples or variations)
   
   
2. During an interview, you can elicit features, attributes, concepts, or constructs of interest. You could, for example, ask a person to list the features that she disliked the most or that are most important to productivity.
3. Ask the person to prioritize the list and then begin doing a “laddering interview” starting with the items at the top of the list. The person might tell you that she most dislikes the collaboration aspects of the product. You could then ask “Why do you dislike the collaboration aspects?”
4. Ask laddering questions until you get answers that have reached “the end of the ladder” or that are actionable.
5. Repeat the laddering exercise with the next item in the list or the next item in the interview where laddering is useful.

References:

Corbridge, C., Rugg, G., Major, N.P., Shadbolt, N.R. & Burton, A.M. (1994)
Laddering: Technique and Tool Use in Knowledge Acquisition.
Knowledge Acquisition, 6, pp. 315-341

Hawley, M. (2009). Laddering: A research interview technique for uncovering core values. UXmatters. Retrieved on January 20, 2012 from http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2009/07/laddering-a-research-interview-technique-for-uncovering-core-values.php

Rugg, G., Eva, M., Mahmood, A., Rehman, N., Andrews, S. & Davies, S. (2002)
Eliciting information about organisational culture via laddering. Information Systems Journal, 12, pp. 215-229

Sherlock, G. & Rugg, G. Using laddering and on-line self-report to elicit design rationale for software Proceedings of EASE & PPIG joint conference, Keele University, 8-10 April 2003 Addendum, pp. 453-472

The ‘5-Whys’ Method. http://www.mapwright.com.au/newsletter/fivewhys.pdf

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What’s Next in the Series?

In the next post, I’ll describe the method of “Magic Things.”

My First Plug-In

My First Plug-In

by Lillian Smith

As architects become more knowledgeable about sustainable building design, they are becoming familiar with metrics such as Energy Use Intensity (EUI). EUI measures the energy a building consumes relative to its size and can be used to compare the energy use of different buildings. Users of our Conceptual Energy Analysis tools in Revit and Project Vasari are using EUI to compare simulation runs. Users often comment that an overwhelming number of results are returned by our analysis tools and they ask, "What do they all mean; why can't I just see this one EUI number really big?". They want a simplification of the complex data that we currently return which would highlight one particular piece of the data to make it easier to compare different designs.

 

 I am an architect and user experience designer and have been working on the Conceptual Energy Analysis tools in Revit and Vasari for the past few years. Through this process, I, like many of our users, have learned a great deal about building science and energy use simulation and analysis. Interpreting analysis results is an exciting area for our field because there are many new user experience paradigms to explore. In addition to learning about building science, I have also wanted to learn more development skills so I could build and experiment more quickly with my own UI prototypes. I thought that building a simple app to display the EUI number really big might be a good beginner's development project. The new Autodesk My First Plug-In Training and a class I took on Expression Blend gave me the skills to get started.

As I worked on the project I learned how much I don't know about coding and why people get degrees in computer science! I was able to build a basic UI in Expression Blend, but the back end was still difficult for me. Luckily, we had really sharp interns over the summer who were able to help fill in the gaps to get my little app up and running. It was fun to be able to make tweaks to the UI myself and get results from simulation runs in this simplified UI.  

Once the app was complete we handed it over to the energy analysis experts on our team to see if they might want to consider this prototype for use in our products. They brought to our attention some important points we had not considered. They felt that showing this one number in isolation, while seemingly simple and convenient, could lead users to incorrect conclusions. Just looking at EUI can be misleading. Actions like removing perimeter zoning from a building lowers the EUI, however this is actually harmful because it underestimates simulated energy use. EUI doesn't always paint the whole picture either: EUI can go down, but energy costs can actually go up if the mix of electricity (more expensive) and fuel (less expensive) changes. Our colleagues explained how important it is to understand the interplay of the results rather than just looking at a simple EUI number. We learned that while many users may want to see a simple number, they are better served by looking at a more comprehensive set of simulation returns.

While we ultimately decided not to include the app in this incarnation, in the future, I hope to build on the new prototyping and simulation analysis knowledge that this experience taught me. Then I’ll be able to redesign the app to include a wider set of simulation data that satisfies the user’s desire for better guidance from the data without sacrificing good building science.

 

 

 

On User Research at Autodesk University 2011

by Alan Millar

Autodesk University is a year-round educational resource for users of Autodesk products. Each year, right after Thanksgiving weekend, Autodesk University's flagship event brings together design professionals from around the world for classes, keynotes, product demonstrations, exhibits and networking events. And as it turns out, quite a few AU attendees also spend some of their valuable time improving the ease-of-use of Autodesk software.

When you bring 8074 users of Autodesk software and services together in one place, it stands to reason Autodesk researchers and user experience designers will also be there, analyzing as many users as possible. This year, 375 AU attendees participated in various user research activities that are critical to optimizing the user experience in Autodesk products.

Like Autodesk University, Autodesk research activities are year-round. At #AU2011, we conducted 140 individual activities such as interviews and usability studies, and 27 group activities ranging from focus groups to participatory design sessions. 

In a participatory design session the SWSS team conducted, we prepared worksheets, cards and mock-ups useful for gathering individual input, understanding how users organize tasks and group information, and how users react to existing comparative and internal solutions.

For some additional participatory research examples, read about ACAD Design Jams in Eunice Chang's recent post.

I've found that whatever the study type, participants in these activities seem to walk away feeling as though they've really contributed something to the future of Autodesk products, and frankly, we feel the same way. Consider this post a thank you to all 375 of you who participated in our research sessions at AU, and to the hundreds more who participate year-round in our user research activities. We can't do it without you.

Quotes from a few participants:

"I'd like to learn Revit in two weeks...like a curriculum where you could log-in or have it pop up and guide us along."

“You are showing novice and expert, but there is a lot of gray area in-between. The system should understand based on user activity what is most important to offer right away.”

"I want the cloud to tell me where I can find solutions to problems I have. I want to know what my options are beyond what my personal experience tells me. I want to step out and tap into everyone else's experience and draw that back into my project.

Ideally the cloud will make us more informed about the decisions we make so that we make better buildings and improve the products we deliver. It would not just act like a storage device, not just speed up some of our processes, but actually make us better at design."

And one from one of our researchers:

"This year at AU, our team had the opportunity to speak with over a hundred users. Their interest in Cloud and involvement in redefining their work was extremely interesting. I feel that we'll see big shifts occurring in BIM, Cloud, and distributed work. We are always interested in hearing from our users and encourage people to sign up to participate in our studies at www.autodesk.com/usability"

Thank you to all our users from the user experience design and research teams at Autodesk.

 

AU Report: AutoCAD Design Jams

by Eunice Chang

On the Monday before Autodesk University (AU) officially kicked off, the AutoCAD UX team was hard at work brainstorming and co-designing with end users. We were piloting a new methodology, coined the AutoCAD Design Jams, where we collaborated with users to envision the AutoCAD experience in five years. After breaking up into small teams composed of 2-3 users and 2 AutoCAD UXers, we developed concepts that focused on three main topics. The pilot was wildly successful. Not only did our participants roll-up their sleeves to build out and present concepts that would be useful for them, we also had a couple folks from the software development (SWD) team join in on the action! Some of the feedback we received from our participants after the Design Jams included:

• “What I enjoyed about the event was the ability to collaborate with likeminded peers in my industry and forward thinking product designers and programmers. This validated that Autodesk is not only actively listening to current customer feedback, but also looking ahead into future trends as it relates to computing technology.” - Shobit B., Principal
•  “I think that the session was nothing less than a rare and probably singular opportunity to voice our hopes and needs for future releases of the software. I've been using Autodesk products for 23 years and this has been the sole opportunity I've had to speak directly to team members who had direct effect on the user experience of AutoCAD.  – Curt M., Owner/Editor
•  “It was the coolest event I had in AU :-)”– Basam Y., Digital Design Group
•  “I had a great time dreaming the future and creating a wish-list of what I would want in AutoCAD.”– Arzan W.

And in the words of one of the AutoCAD SWD participants: “It was refreshing to talk with customers, listen to their experience, their problems and how they envision a solution from Autodesk… I personally feel empowered and energized when I know my work is helping somebody specific. The Design Jam Session gave me [this] rare opportunity.”

Given the positive feedback, we hope to run more AutoCAD Design Jams in the future and will continue to include SWD! 

 

HTML5 and CSS3 for Web Designers

by Alan Millar

Grab your popcorn, throw your dog a bone, adjust the lighting -- and otherwise prepare yourself for the briefest yet deepest of briefs on HTML5 and CSS3 and what it means to all of us in the WWW. In books one and two from A Book Apart, Jeremy Keith and Dan Cederholm put on a clinic about how HTML and CSS were dragged kicking and screaming into the 21^st Century. But before we go any farther, let us ascertain who you are and why are you reading this post, much less considering a deep-dive below the photic zone of markup and style?

I need to know if you really care WTF is the WHATWG? Do you lay awake at night replaying your carefully crafted argument for (or against) significant whitespace? Are you doing back-flips of joy because you may now wrap other elements inside a single a element?

So you’re moving from presentational to semantic markup but you haven’t found a way past the nuanced (and perhaps elitist?) comparison of b and strong, between i and em, and why big went obsolete while small survives. Before you even consider perusing the content of any web page do you nervously eye-track : ^ ? to your web developer toolbar to pre-verify that this hobo HTML has even validated???

May I ask what band was playing when you pulled off your first JavaScript rollover effect? When you dream, do your backgrounds scroll parallax in harmony with your dreamy electric sheep? Do you hanker for deep form styling? Waterboarding aside, are you gasping for subtly rounded corners?

If you answered yes, yes, yes to ANY of these questions, then the help you desperately need is at hand. So GET YOUR GEEK ON and read these books. Before I call your momma!

In HTML5 for Web Designers, Jeremy Keith begins with a wee tale on the fuss that led up to HTML5 (Chapters 1 & 2). He flies through the Rich Media markup of Canvas, Audio and Video in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 is the whatup on Web Forms. Chapter 5 is nothing much…(unless your idea of game on is the semantic web that everyone keeps Yammering about). Finally, Mr. Keith lettuce-wraps it up with a down-to-earth review of things you can actually do today in HTML5 without smoking your browsers.

CSS3 for Web Designers is by Dan Cederholm. Now hold on, because this guy is really, really into space travel. And I’m guessing wine. And definitely design with a capital Dribbble. But without doubt Dan is best known for his uncanny command of stylesheets, the lingua franca of the presentation layer. He is pretty funny too, with handcrafted topics like “Navigating the Moon”, “Hover-crafting”, and ‘The Disappearing Gnome” sprinkled throughout his book like extra butterscotch on a jam donut. Sit up and take note CSS design intern and let it be learned that ingrained in this briefest of tomes Mr. Cederholm dispenses sage advice not just on how, but also on when one should...</spoileralert>.

 

Method 18 of 100: The User/Task Matrix

100 User Experience (UX) Design and Evaluation Methods for Your Toolkit

by Chauncey Wilson

This is the 18th in a series of 100 short articles about UX design and evaluation methods. I’m back from my sabbatical and ready to keep building the UX methods toolbox. Today, we’ll look at a simple task analysis method called the User/Task Matrix.  

Method 18 of 100

Understanding the frequency and importance of tasks that are performed by different classes of users (or personas) is critical for many design decisions. For example, if an architect will be using a function hundreds of times a day for weeks on end, then you would want to design a highly efficient user interface that included shortcuts and ways to select many things at a time. In contrast, you might have some features, like creating templates, that you do occasionally and designing the UI for templates might require support for fast learning and “re-learning” after gaps of use. If you are designing something that you only do once a year and that task is critical, you might design a step-by-step procedure. A simple approach for exposing frequency and importance by user class is the user/task matrix. This approach can also indicate which tasks are primarily the responsibility of a single user group and which ones cross groups.

Here is a generic example of a user/task matrix. The letters represent task frequency: H = high; M= medium, and L = Low. Task 4 in the matrix is a critical task and is marked with a red background. Only one user group performs that critical task with low frequency so the interface related to that task should focus on preventing errors and be easy to learn.

User Groups	User Group 1	User Group 2	User Group 3	User Group 4	User Group 5	User Group 6
Task 1	H	H	M	M	M	M
Task 2	L		L	M	H	M
Task 3	L	L	L	L	M
Task 4		L
Task 5	L	L				L

When to Use: 

You can use a user/task matrix to:

• Summarize data related to frequency and importance of tasks.
• Determine whether some tasks are used by a few types of users or many users. In the example matrix, tasks 1, 2, and 3 are used by almost all groups with varying frequencies. This information can be helpful for making trade-offs about what features should get priority during the design and development cycle. For example, something that is important, done by many user groups, with moderate to high frequency, might be an area to focus usability sessions.
• Consider whether the primary focus for design should be on ease of learning or ease of use (efficiency).
• Determine if different classes of users can be combined into a single class.
• Provide some clues about where to focus user assistance development.  

Procedure:

1. Ask questions about task frequency and importance when conducting user research. 
2. Develop a set of user groups or personas that represent the major classes of users. Keep in mind that there are some low frequency tasks (like initial deployment of software across an organization) that are critical to success and often performed by a small group of users.
3. Develop a visual coding scheme for highlighting frequency and importance in your matrix. My example is very simple.You can extend the basic concept in my example to create something visually compelling. 
4. Use the matrix as input to feature and UI design trade-offs and other design activities. A related method called the UXI matrix was presented at the 2011 UPA conference by Jon Innes and James McElroy and discussed by John Schrag at http://dux.typepad.com/dux/2011/06/the-forgotten-user.html

 

Strengths and Weaknesses:

+ The user/task matrix is simple and conveys critical information for design teams who are considering what aspect of usability they should focus on during conceptual design

+ You can easily substitute the language of your organization into the matrix. For example, you might substitute “stories” into the task column and “personas” into the user group row.

-       If you have hundreds of tasks, the matrix can become unwieldy and you might have to create a hierarchical version.

References:

Hackos, J. T., & Redish, J. C. (1998). User and task analysis for interface design. New York, NY: Wiley.

Wixon, D. & Wilson, C. E.  The Usability Engineering Framework for Product Design and Evaluation. Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction (Second Edition). Elsevier: Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1998, pp. 653-688.

 

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What’s Next in the Series?

In the next post, I’ll describe an interview technique called “laddering” which is used to get at root causes, understand how knowledge is organized, and get insight into organizational cultures.

Nicely Done Steve Jobs

By Erin Bradner

In Spring 2010, there was an Apple bloom across Autodesk – iPads had sprouted up in conference rooms from San Francisco to Shanghai. Some appeared carefully wrapped in protective cases, some with diminutive keyboards. Many sat atop conference tables unadorned, barely weeks old, occupying the table space and mindshare previously occupied by Macbooks and PCs.

A second bloom happened later that spring when a new variety of iPhone… black, white and now glinting with stainless-steel…began dispersing into the iPhone ecosystem at Autodesk. And just last week I watched the Apple enthusiasts on our user experience team prairie dog across a bay of cubes to chatter excitedly about the iPhone 4 announcement. I also watched those same colleagues hush mournfully, the day Steve Jobs died.

This week I asked my colleagues to tell me how Steve Jobs, via Apple, has influenced design thinking at Autodesk. I’ve compiled some of the responses below. A common thread is that Jobs exerted influence on Autodesk through his courage to re-invent products and re-imagine entire industries. Designers and design leadership at Autodesk have drawn inspiration from his fanatical attention to detail, such as his ability to sell the minutiae of “cut, copy and paste” on the iPhone, and through his consistency in delivering powerful, beautiful technology. Here are their words:

 

“One comment of Steve Jobs that stuck with me was his advice to “Edit, always,” because while that is easy to say, it is inherently hard to do in business. Businesses are constantly bombarded by opportunities, competitive threats and customer demands and can naturally end up pursuing multiple priorities. Jobs strove to do a few things really well – a smaller set of products, a focused set of principles but then executing them completely.” – Amar Hanspal

"Steve Jobs was a believer of User Experience, not in the traditional practice of the trade but in its essence. He ultimately knew that building a great product was intertwined with the user – their needs and perceptions. He connected not just tasks, error rates, and usability but also emotion and passion to create a powerful legacy." – Julie Schiller

"Steve Jobs wanted to go beyond making products that are useful -- he wanted to make products that reach people on a deeper level, products that people fall in love with.  As someone who did 'fall' for Apple products, I know what that experience is like and strive to foster that feeling among users of Autodesk software. Steve Jobs (and his team at Apple) showed many UX professionals at Autodesk, myself included, what a good user experience feels like. This influences the user experience goals for our projects every day." – Edward De Guzman

“Unlike almost any other CEO out there, Steve Jobs had faith in the human experience as a business model. The experience of Apple’s design is what drove profit, not the other way around. He intuitively invested in something that no financial analyst could predict, but only measure afterwards.” – Alison Kather

 “Steve Jobs showed to the world how User Experience can make all the difference. His impact is profound as technology companies across the globe have changed their culture to make UX a priority over features and capabilities.” – Ananth Uggirala

“Steve Jobs and Apple’s designs are such a penultimate of achievement that anyone in a design oriented field cannot help but be inspired to follow suit. Their designs being centered on the individual, rather than the company or the project, have helped influence the next generation of design at Autodesk. When working on AutoCAD for Mac, Steve’s reality distortion field helped bring back excitement to an otherwise fairly mature brand.” - Rob Maguire

 

Autodesk is one of those tech companies whose design culture has evolved thanks to Steve Jobs. It is rare if a week goes by at Autodesk when one of Apple’s innovations isn’t used as a gold standard for user-friendly UI or loyalty-inspiring customer experience. Yesterday in a conference room filled with managers, interaction designers and researchers, we deconstructed the Genius Bar. The experience distilled down to three important elements:

1. It’s not a transaction, it’s a relationship: they don’t give you a number as you wait, they call your name instead.
2. They are empathetic: the Apple geniuses, not technicians, walk around a bar, not a desk, and stand next to you as they respectfully examine your dead phone or empathetically listen to your wireless networking woes.
3. They are empowered to exceed your expectations: they typically solve your problem plus give you something more, something unexpected… an iOS upgrade or even a new laptop.

The Genius Bar, iTunes, iPhone and Macbook each have their fanbase at Autodesk. This month AutoCAD for the Mac celebrates its 1-year birthday. Autodesk has a growing list of Mac and mobile apps for tinkers and seasoned professionals alike. We’ve both drawn inspiration from Apple and are delivering products in partnership with Apple. Our Mac and mobile products aren’t faultless. The products Steve Jobs helped create aren’t faultless either. And their user interfaces aren’t always as intuitive as some in our field might hope. Yet Apple products strike an emotional chord – they deliver experiences that are human, empathetic and that routinely exceed expectations. Nicely done, Steve Jobs.

A Book Apart - The Elements of Content Strategy

by Alan Millar

A List Apart has begun codifying its knowledge in a strangely familiar form. Yes, the iconic web design digizine is now utilising paper to get its point across. In this recently archaic format, words are first printed onto paper, which is then cut up into pages, which are then assembled into something called books! *Mindblowing!

The first four books in the already classic A Book Apart collection seem destined for blockbuster status if only because each is intelligently written, informative, appropriately witty, and best of all – brief!

 

The Elements of Content Strategy

The award for brevity aptly goes to Erin Kissane for her title The Elements of Content Strategy, weighing in at a concise yet somehow comprehensive eighty-three pages. Admittedly, it starts out on the scary side with words like delay, derail, desperate, and discipline piling up in the first few paragraphs.

Not to worry though, you won’t need a crash helmet as Erin efficiently escorts you through her aptly named chapters: Basic Principles, the Craft of Content Strategy and Tools and Techniques. The Craft chapter is my favorite wherein Erin humanizes this complex, creative beast by shining her explanatory light on the influence that editors, curators, marketers and information scientists are having on the practice of content strategy.

Also in the mix are relevant links, predictions, a few invites, even a bonus track on how one gets into this business of content strategy.  You may also expect well-curated referrals to more extensive treatises like Clout by Colleen Jones and Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson.

With this straightfoward lead-in Erin begins to zero in on exactly what a content strategist does:

To do content strategy, defined as the planning and leadership of content projects and online publishing endeavors, is to run point.

This book is for you if you:

• Are an interaction designer or information architect and want to expand your niche a bit
• Are involved in building a content framework (company website, online help, app store) and the content plan is “that guy in the warehouse is going to scan all our stuff onto the internet” (true story)
• Need to make a case at work for a real content strategy and all that arm-waving is not working

~~~

In my next post I’m planning a combo review of books 1 & 2 by Jeremy Keith and Dan Cederholm, respectively, followed thereafter by a potential screed on book 4, by Ethan Marcotte.

For those into the raw numbers, here are the page count breakdowns:

Book 1 - HTML5 for Web Designers, 89 pgs

Book 2 - CSS3 for Web Designers, 125 pgs

Book 3 - The Elements of Content Strategy, 83 pgs

Book 4 - Responsive Web Design, 150 pgs

Pow! You can blow through any these while driving to work in the morning.  But you won’t have to. With so few precisely chosen words, you’ll prefer to linger and learn.

*No longer embracing this recently archaic delivery mode? NP. The exact same knowledge is also available as electrons conveniently formatted as .epub, .mobi and .pdf. Whew!

Straddling the Divide

 by Alex Rice-Khouri

Consumer audiences are diverse. We had to keep this in mind when user-testing 123D™ Sculpt, the 3D, touch-driven, iPad sculpting app pictured above, and the latest application in the Consumer Group product line. We tailored our experimental protocol to test if Sculpt could really serve the opposing user populations we anticipated: recreational designers vs. the professionals who lean toward more powerful applications like Maya®, Mudbox™, Inventor®, and AutoCAD®.

Why does this matter from a user experience standpoint?

Working in the consumer market, if an application is powerful but requires a lot of instruction to start using, you risk losing your casual user base. If the application is easy to dive into but sacrifices higher level functionality to achieve that ease-of-use, it may turn away consumers who see the application as a stepping stone to beginning their professional career. In order to straddle these two demographics, you need to engage your user the second they delve into the application, and nestle advanced functions deeper in the interface.

When asked if this is a typical struggle, UX designer, Greg Fowler, said:

“When you try to build your application for as broad a group as "engineers", then various professionals come to you asking for specialized features, and they’ll tell you that a thousand people like them want the same. If your application is cluttered with dozens of these features, then the average user will have to learn complicated unfamiliar workflows. But consumers pick up our apps because they want to enjoy the experience. If they're not enjoying themselves, we’re not succeeding.”

In testing, some of the users saw Sculpt as a game while others saw it as an introduction to professional prototyping. Playful users wanted to show off their work and share it on social networks. Professional users wanted to export their files, customize the interface, and integrate Sculpt with 3d printers to prototype their ideas.

On the other hand, testing revealed that for both children and adults, for both seasoned 3d modelers and for users who can’t tell a spline from a line, many usability problems were universal. Analyzing our twenty-five sessions revealed that the novices and experts agreed on a surprising majority of the design errors. This demonstrated that ‘straddling the divide’ can produce consistent, meaningful results.

“I hope this feedback helps you and Autodesk achieve the best apps possible!”

Mitchel and Participant 18

Fourteen years old, articulate, and a mind reader when it comes to predicting other users’ opinions, Mitchel isn’t alone in his support of the Consumer Group’s design ambitions.

Aside from his charming enthusiasm, Mitchel offered insight into how users younger and older than him intended to use Sculpt. He intuited what they wanted from what he wanted despite being fourteen with no modeling experience. If we had followed our instincts and screened for modelers and experienced iPad users we would have missed this middle schooler’s sharp insights.

But if we had screened out Autodesk’s more technically proficient employees to match the general population, we would’ve missed such valuable input as:

“I can see that as new users get more familiar with Sculpt, they’re going to want to create basic forms and maybe merge them together, pushing and pulling different surfaces. This is a great way to introduce them to modeling and get them interested in our desktop apps.”

The fifty-year-old Autodesk architect, with years of modeling experience, accurately intuited what all of the kids and three-fifths of the novices would criticize – the inability to drag, drop, cut, or create shapes. In other words, Participant 18, like Mitchel, could sleuth out what users unlike him expected from Sculpt.

Ultimately, if we had tested just one of these demographics, we would have missed a sizable chunk of our user market. And any differences in opinion can impact where we take our applications as much as agreement across different demographics.

Should we have tested the way we did?

To answer that question, you first need to know how we tested.

• We recruited a mix of children and adults, novices and expert modelers, employees and external volunteers.
• One fifth were children, two fifths were Autodesk employees, and three fifths had little to no modeling experience.
• All 25 participants had used or owned an Apple touch device before volunteering.
• We split the participants into two test protocols, one with help content, and one without.

It’s difficult to conclusively say whether these protocols adequately served our user base. What we do know is that our testing and analysis helped guide our help content, by prioritizing the features that users struggled with the most.

The tests delivered critical feedback and insightful complaints. Sampling broadly across age groups and skill levels helped represent our diverse user market. Categorizing users and their feedback helped identify distinct patterns. And the overall process demonstrated that we could tailor systematic user testing to a consumer product.

When Sculpt finally launched in August, it placed third in iTunes’ free-app category.

These outcomes suggest that recruiting from diverse user groups helped make Sculpt a success.