Designing the User Experience at Autodesk

Building Trust: AutoCAD Customer Councils

by Melissa D. Schmidt

On the AutoCAD UX team, we've been thinking a lot about building trust with our customers.

We've recently transitioned our software development process from waterfall to Agile. As a result, we are getting closer to having smaller, working chunks of code that we can show to customers sooner.

We have designed a Customer Council program as a way to partner with customers throughout the development of our key features. AutoCAD has a very broad user base from nearly every industry. So for each Customer Council, we carefully select people who have a vested interest in a particular feature area, and invite them to participate in our development process with us. Through the council, participants get to preview very early builds of AutoCAD that have partially complete functionality, revealing the direction we're going. They can try the functionality out on their own drawings and projects, give feedback, and watch the features evolve. This gives customers much earlier exposure to the actual implemented solution. The big win for us is that we can get feedback in time to make really meaningful changes.

Often, with AutoCAD, you have to wait until everything comes together to get a good understanding of the experience that a user will have. Unlike a website, in which interactions are often linear and decoupled, the AutoCAD experience is an immersive design canvas with complex, highly-precise interactions, relying on a sophisticated graphics system. If performance is slow or the code isn't stable, it will drastically interfere with our users’ experience and we will lose the sense of how they would really behave. For example, with slow performance, you see cognitive step-down effects that cause users to lose their concentration and shift focus. In cognitively demanding tasks like design, this breaks our users' flow and dramatically changes how they work.

We've noticed that sharing these early bits of code with customers is like exposing your soft underbelly. You know the code isn't rock-solid, and there will be bugs and quirks and probably crashes. You can't hide the buggy areas with a well-practiced demo, or a controlled usability session. You are releasing the code over to customers to try out on their own, in the wild, to do whatever they might with it.

To do this, you have to be willing to be more vulnerable. This is where trust comes in. We don't want to let our customers down or to disappoint them. We're also aware that the first impression is crucial because it can anchor our users' perceptions and expectations in the future. These concerns are in direct conflict with the goal of letting users into the inner chambers of our design process, allowing them to co-design with us, and observe the work in progress as it comes together.

In spite of the discomfort of being exposed, we are learning to be more vulnerable. So far, we have found that many people are willing to work with us from this early stage.  They are prepared to put up with the bugs and crashes in return for being able to help guide and influence the functionality so that it gives them what they need. And through this process we are building trust.

By partnering with our customers in a deeper way, we are building more human relationships. For example, we introduce the council participants to the relevant development team at Autodesk. We share names and pictures of people, have webinars and one-on-one phone calls. This helps us move beyond the perception of being the big company Autodesk, to just being people who are trying hard and doing our best, who will acknowledge if we make the wrong assumption about a feature or leave out something that is important.

We want to build something that users are thrilled to get their hands on and that will amplify their abilities to do even more amazing work. We are still in the early stages of learning with Customer Councils, but we are getting glimpses that we can get closer to our goal by letting users into the development process earlier.

Designing with the Color blind in Mind - Part 2

Tips for making color more accessible

by Mark Jamieson

Part 1 of this series provides information about the physiology of color blindness, and lists examples of situations that are challenging for color-blind people.

Part 2 provides tips to prevent color design oversights and help reduce accessibility barriers for color blind people.

• Choose colors that all color vision types can identify easily. In the design process, determine which hues and shade combinations are problematic in terms of their perception or differentiation, and avoid them. Refer to the available Web resources to help determine a color palette that is suitable for different types of color blindness, and to proof your color palette. Usually, if you increase the contrast between the brightness of colors, even when their hue and saturation are different, they can be discerned more easily. Note: See the resource list at the end of this article.
• Ensure that color is not the only differentiating cue. When designing for a Web site or the interface of a software application, use explicit text labels, shapes, line borders, or textures. Ensure that there is sufficient contrast between the text label and colors. Black text on a white background is prevalent because it provides good contrast for differentiation.

 
  Shapes and text labels help with the differentiation of items.

• Explicitly identify a color whenever its identification is useful and could be misinterpreted. For example, to ensure that a color can be accurately identified, regardless of the context:
  • Add the color name to a bar code tag for an item of clothing.
  • Ensure that a crayon contains the color on its label, and imprint the color name in the crayon wax in case the label is torn off.
  • Print the color of the plastic insulating covering of a wire every few inches along its length.
    
  • Use a tooltip to identify the color by name (or its RGB value).
    
• Add a color blind test to your regular set of accessibility checks for your product. Test the colors that play a critical role in any aspect of the design of your product. Consider involving one or more color blind testers, each with a different type of color blindness. In the early design process and during usability evaluations, ensure that your colors are distinguishable for their intended purpose in various planned contexts. The solution is often not as simple as substituting a color when a confusing color is critical to the color palette of a design. Sometimes it is necessary to evaluate various color palette options.  For software application and Web site designs, a number of utilities are available to help proofing how colors in the design appear to a person with color blindness. These utilities help to ensure that important colors are readily differentiated, and you can tweak any colors at issue. Minor color adjustments can make a huge difference in color perception for a color blind person.  Note:  See the resource list at the end of this article.
• Allow customization of the colors of user interface elements. Many software applications provide preferences for customizing the colors of various UI components, such as text, background color, and highlight color. This option provides the most flexibility for a color blind person. A few Web sites also provide the capability to change between a limited set of predefined color palettes to display their UI elements.

A poorly designed user interaction can unintentionally impede an otherwise efficient workflow. Likewise, the wrong color choice for elements of a design that you want users to distinguish greatly impedes accessibility for a color blind person. Make a difference for color blind people by considering these tips for your projects.

References

1. Adobe Creative Suite – Proofing Colors – Soft-proof for color blindness (Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator)
2. Designing for Color Blindness and Color Universal Design (CUD) – The Distinct Studios Journal.
3. Color Universal Design – Web site for the Color Universal Design Organization (mostly Japanese, but this link provides an overview in English).
4. Can Color-Blind Users See Your Site?  An article by Robert Hess for the Microsoft Development Network (MSDN), October 2000.
5. Color Oracle – A free color blindness simulator for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
6. Vischeck – A Web site that provides resources for simulating color-blind vision.
7. Visolve – A utility that transforms colors into discernible colors for the color vision deficient.
8. Designing for People with Partial Sight and Color Deficiencies  Aries Arditi, PhD. Guidelines for making effective color choices that work for nearly everyone.

 

 

Designing with the color blind in mind - Part 1

The limitations of color-blind vision

by Mark Jamieson

I’m color blind. When I divulge that information to people with normal color vision, they usually respond, “Really? Can you see any color? What color is this?”, as they point to something within close range.

This seemingly innocuous reaction indicates a general lack of understanding and empathy for people who live with this genetic-based vision disability. Color blind people experience many barriers and frustrations when using items that are designed for people with normal color vision.

In this two-part series:
Part 1 provides information about color blindness and its limitations.
Part 2 provides tips to reduce design oversights that affect people with color blindness.

Most of the people with color blindness (about 8% of males and 0.5% of females) can see color in a reduced color spectrum compared to people with normal color vision. Color vision deficient is a more accurate term than color blindness. Only in rare cases does color blindness mean seeing the world in black and white, or through a range of gray tones.

From a physiological perspective, our eyes contain photoreceptor cells that are named rods and cones, based on their shape. Rods number about 120 million per eye, and sense light and dark. Cones number six to seven million per eye, are less sensitive to light, and sense more color. Each of three cone types senses one of three primary colors: blue, green, or red. The information that these three cone types receive, when combined, is what our eyes perceive as color.

In people with a color vision deficiency, one or more cone types is malfunctioning or missing. As a result, they cannot distinguish as many color hues as someone with normal color vision.

The relative lighting (bright, dim, daylight, incandescent, fluorescent), background (light, dark, front lit, and backlit) and size of the color sample all play a role. A color blind person can generally see all primary color hues (red, green, and blue) at full strength (saturation). But the mixture of the deficient hues with other colors makes some colors challenging to identify, or indistinguishable from another.

Contrast is a huge factor in accurately differentiating between color shades. Color gradients (color ramps) are tricky too. One end of the ramp can begin in a hue that is perceptible, and end in a hue that is not. If text appears on top of the color ramp, it is sometimes not readable if the contrast between the elements is not high enough.

The two rows of colors in the following image provide examples of solid colors that can challenge some people with red-green color blindness.

It is relatively easy to differentiate (not identify) the five colors in either horizontal row, as there is good contrast and variation between the color hues.

To the red-green color blind, the colors in the vertical columns are almost identical, depending on the context in which they appear.

As the palette for a pie chart, these ten colors are problematic for most people with red-green color blindness, which is the most common color-vision deficiency.

Anything that involves identification of an item purely by its color can challenge a person with color-blindness. (Examples: matching clothing, plant foliage, signage, LED indicator lights on electrical devices, matching paint colors, colored pencils/crayons, Web sites, user-interface icons, color-coded information charts, board games, sunburn and rashes, insulation colors on electrical wires, maps, GPS color displays).

Color is often used as an element to simplify and differentiate items in the design of a product. Unconsidered color choices make the accessibility of a product more difficult and frustrating for a color blind person. We use color increasingly in the communication of information in many aspects of our society. We can easily reverse accessibility issues by designing products with colors that are perceptible by as many people as possible.

References

1. Colblindor – A Web site dedicated to color blindness, with many articles, and a free eBook.
2. We are colorblind – A Web site dedicated to making the Web a better place for the color blind.
3. Ishihara Color Blindness Test – The original Ishihara Color Blind test first published in 1917 as an online version.
4. Testing Color Vision – Advice for parents and teachers in dealing with color blind children.

Alerts and Warnings: Is your UI crying wolf?

by Cecilia Farell

We all remember the story of the boy who repeatedly tricked the villagers into thinking a wolf was attacking his sheep. When the wolf’s attack became real, no one believed him. The moral of the story is don’t squander your credibility, and it’s a lesson that applies to user interface design as well as human behavior.

If an application raises the alarm about every little thing that might happen or go wrong – if it “cries wolf” – its alerts and warnings gradually become meaningless and lose their intended effect. Worse, they can become annoyances or even hindrances to the user, who then ignores them or, if he can’t, ends up hating them.

Alerts and warnings:  error messages by any other name?

My last post was about error messages and how to make them effective. I mention this to emphasize that alerts and warnings are not the same as error messages.

Error messages occur “after the fact” and show the user how to navigate away from the problem and get back in the flow. Alerts and warnings are about problems that might occur in the future. Their intent is to prevent these from happening in the first place or, if that’s not possible, to mitigate their impact (think “preemptive damage control”).

Alerts “alert” and warnings “warn”

There is a difference between alerts and warnings, although it’s a subtle one. Alerts are a kinder, gentler version of warnings (think yellow traffic light instead of red). They inform more than they warn and are not fatal or even critical. An alert is the right way to let users know of upcoming downtime for maintenance or that the site login process has changed.

A warning is an absolute must when the user has to act (or refrain from acting) to avoid the loss of:

• mission-critical data
• access to the system
• privacy or control over confidential information
• the user's time (a significant amount) ¹

Going with “the flow”

The Holy Grail of UI designers is to create experiences where the user becomes “fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment.” This is known as flow, a psychology concept with recent application in the field of Human Computer Interaction, particularly in Gaming.

Flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate experience in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning.²

If flow is the Holy Grail, breaking it is anathema. Unfortunately, alerts and warnings do just that. In fact, breaking the flow is what they live for: their job is taking the user’s focus away from what she’s doing and towards something that needs her immediate and undivided attention.

This is the very reason for using alerts and warnings sparingly and judiciously. In a nutshell, avoid them unless absolutely necessary. Apple’s guidelines³ declare alerts unnecessary if they merely:

• increase the visibility of information already available
• update users on tasks that are progressing normally
• ask for confirmation of actions initiated by the user
• inform users of errors or problems they can do nothing about

Red light/Yellow light

Earlier I suggested you think of yellow vs. red traffic lights as a way to differentiate alerts from warnings. Red and yellow (and of course green) are common colors in UIs because their significance is universal.

Using these colors in alerts and warnings is an effective way to grab your user’s attention and quickly convey the severity of what’s involved. When you combine these colors with equally significant symbols or icons, you can replace redundant Alert and Warning labels with more specific and meaningful content (e.g., Scheduled Downtime or Malware Detected).

 

Green light

These are simple guidelines to follow when crafting alerts and warnings. I’ve also stressed the importance of using caution and good judgment when giving an alert or warning the green light, so to speak. Before making that decision, ask yourself: Is this alert or warning worth interrupting the user’s ever so elusive state of flow?

Until next time and happy trails.

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¹ Adapted from a list in the “Messages” section in Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd535525.aspx.

² Both quotes are from the Flow (psychology) page in Wikipedia. The second is the words of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who, together with J. Nakamura, proposed the concept. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology).

³ Pared-down version of the list in the “UI Element Usage Guidelines” section of the iOS Human Interface Guidelines. https://developer.apple.com/devcenter/ios/index.action.

 

Changing Cultures: Towards a Lean User Experience

By Joshua Ledwell

Autodesk development teams that once requested design specifications up front now are collaborating with user experience designers to design, build, and test software in rapid cycles. This incremental approach offers more opportunities to gather user feedback and optimize the product. Success depends on practicing “Lean” UX, in which designers stop attempting comprehensive documentation, and embrace “just-enough” design combined with constant iteration.

The idea of working lean comes from “Lean Manufacturing” at Toyota and more recently The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. Lean companies minimize wasteful business processes that don’t add value for end user. They also get products to customers faster, even with fewer features, so they can learn from their target audience and build the most value into the next version.  

I am a passionate believer in Lean UX, so I was pleased to attend the Lean Day UX conference in New York on March 1. In the morning, seven speakers from different industries described how they navigated the switch to Lean practices.

Key insights from these speakers:

• Ries’ The Lean Startup treats product development as a series of quick, experimental launches. However, transitioning an organization to this lean workflow requires a cultural shift from “experimenting to validate” to “experimenting to learn.” As a UX professional, you may be accustomed to usability testing a complete product. Now, though, you may need new methods to help the product team quickly adapt to user feedback.
• Changing mindsets is critical for Lean UX success, but it’s not easy. Simple rules can help change your organization’s behavior. One speaker’s group outlawed surveys and mandated that all teams meet face-to-face with real users.
• At another speaker’s business, the priority is building lean entrepreneurial teams that take risks and learn from them. To help achieve this goal, managers at this company must present failures and suboptimal outcomes to the entire organization.
• Designing for delight requires building user empathy on your team. One recipe for success is generating many ideas and iterating solutions, moving from broad to narrow focus as you learn more about user needs. “Delighter” features create promoters for your product and brand.
• To paraphrase Bill Scott of PayPal, Agile is a good “engine” for delivering products, but it has no brain. Lean UX leadership can be the brain that ensures the team builds the right product. (see image below.)

After lunch we participated in a rapid prototyping exercise. My team designed an app for public transportation users to refill their passcards anywhere. We focused our design time deciding exactly what user problem to solve and how little we could build to solve it – also known as Minimum Viable Product (MVP). I was impressed by the POP app for iOS for rapid mobile prototyping. With this app you can photograph your paper prototypes, select hotspots for navigation, and link them into a flow.

Here are links to the presenters’ topics. Some of the presentations are online, and links are provided:

Lionel Mohri, Intuit: Getting Dirty With Design Thinking - How Intuit Is Enabling a Culture of Entrepreneurship and Experimentation

Farrah Bostic, The Difference Engine: Research Rebooted - Why Most Market Research Is Broken, And How Lean Can Help Fix It

David Panarelli, LivingSocial: Iterating Forward: Maintaining Alignment and Focus Across Multiple Lean Teams

Tom Illmensee, Snagajob: Build A Recipe For Better UX Process With Fresh Lean Ingredients

Andrew Crow, GE Healthcare: One To Many: Designing For Scale

Emily Holmes, Hobsons: Iterative Innovation – Small Guerilla Projects Can Lead To Big Successes

Bill Scott, PayPal: Lean Engineering: Key Principles For Transforming Engineering Into A Full Lean UX Partner

On the train back to Boston, I reflected on the speakers’ ability to promote user-centered change in their organizations. When UX professionals are willing to abandon potentially wasteful up-front design practices and embrace lean workflows, they are leading by example and increasing their influence on the whole organization. I like that being a change agent and a user-centered designer are mutually reinforcing aims.

What’s a Service Anyway? New Packaging for an Old Concept, or a Game Changer?

By Kursat Ozenc

Software designers and development teams have lost the luxury of working on a single platform or device. In today’s fast-paced environment, traditional waterfall processes and long product launch cycles are gone. Within recent years, major software companies—including Autodesk, Microsoft[1], and Adobe—have moved toward service-based offerings. These take the form of monthly subscriptions and product suites covering comprehensive workflows. Many factors account for this shift, including demand from the users, competition, and protection of profit margin. The overall zeitgeist in the software industry also plays a role, with game changers such as ‘the Cloud’, mobile, and social app ecologies.

Designers and product development teams are now in a tough position. They need to respond quicker to small product level challenges while also applying far-reaching, insightful thinking across platforms, devices, and workflows. Designers and product owners need a fresh perspective that can address both particular and systemic design challenges at the same time. That fresh perspective can be service design, which combines design, business, and development lenses. This two-part post will uncover service design, and make a humble suggestion for product teams to reconsider what a software ‘product’ might mean in this new era. We will also examine how designers might address mobile, social, and cloud-related design challenges more effectively.

Service design (SD) is an interdisciplinary field that aims to deliver service interfaces that are usable, useful, and desirable to the users, while also being efficient, effective, and distinctive to the suppliers (Mager, 2009.) In the past decade, interest in SD among designers has been noteworthy, including organizations such as www.service-design-network.org, as well as personal blogs such as www.servicedesigntools.org, designforservice.wordpress.com, and design4services.com. SD can be seen as a T-shape discipline that addresses both systems- and product-level challenges. Service designers approach a service problem as a drama with beginning, middle, and end phases. They also frame front and back stages of the business as design challenges. Finally, service designers bring a holistic perspective that considers both single touch-points, and the overall journey of a user engaged with the service.

Sample coffee shop service with journey map and touch points

SD methods are real mash-ups, taking best practices from different design disciplines including interaction, graphic, and industrial design. The most distinctive methods, however, are mapping and enactment. Mapping of journeys, relationships, and stakeholders allows exploration of system level interactions, whereas enactment methods such as experience prototyping and role enactment reveal the product level interactions and service moments.

In characterizing service design thinking, Stickdorn suggests user-centeredness, co-creation, sequencing, evidencing, and being holistic as the five principles of the discipline. Among these principles, sequencing means designing all the steps that a user might take while using the service, which can be developed through using journey maps, role-enactments, and scripts. Evidencing means defining the intangible delivery of the service through offerings, such as a coffee-latte for a coffee shop. Engine, a service design consultancy, similarly put value, systems, journeys, people, and propositions as the five fundamentals of service design. Journeys are similar to sequencing: the path that the user takes to form her experience. Proposition is the distinctiveness and desirability that a service can offer to the user, such as a preference for coffee shop A over B.

In software design, it’s easy to relate current design practices to user-centeredness. What user-centeredness means in our hyper-connected world is another story. In parallel with advancements in computation, the way people access, create, and use information has changed dramatically. These changes affect not only people’s tools and resources, but also their habits around technology use. People become real jugglers, wearing many hats at once, curating their product wardrobes based on emerging needs and desires. One workflow per product is not the case anymore. To unlock this dynamic challenge, other principles become handy, mapping peoples’ prospective journeys and creating offerings, value, and propositions accordingly.

The strength of SD lies in its ability to capture both the system-level and product-level challenges. Aforementioned principles blend both abstract, intangible wholes and concrete, tangible parts of a service. The next post will take these principles and apply them as lenses to inform the design of software. Situating service design in a cloud-computing and cross-platform SaaS context will demonstrate how the manifestations of these principles can inform the design endeavor.

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[1]
http://www.kuow.org/post/microsoft-launches-new-office-subscription-service

 

Navigation is information in context

By Kursat Ozenc

Having laid out the main influencers in navigation design, how then can designers create smooth navigation controls in spatially-based software?  Depending on the complexity of the design brief, designers can embrace these influencers without marrying one in particular, instead synthesizing navigation features and behaviors based on their priorities.

How do you as a designer form priorities and act accordingly?

• Do your homework: know your audience and their contextual needs, and discover which navigation mode is priority: egocentric, exocentric, or both. What are the contextual needs? Are your users office-bound, or are they usually mobile and in the field? Do they navigate for the sake of navigation, or is navigation just one step in another task? Are they shortcut-savvy power users, or do they come from all walks of life? Do they need a first person egocentric view, a global exocentric view, or both? Which modes of navigation do they want: look at, walk, drive, or fly over? Do they want to navigate through an object, an area or global world? These questions can be taken as guide posts to help you strategize and determine your priorities.

• Hybrid is the new norm in design. Designers should consider a design that will work across platforms and devices, which means a curated navigation framework rather than a one-type-fits-all approach. Curating is different than blind consistency; it means being sensitive to the specified platform or device context. Delivering the same interaction on both tablet and desktop may not make sense, since they have different affordances. Disruptive technologies such as gesture or other novel input devices are a critical influencer for forming these hybrid designs.

• Navigation means information in context. People navigate in order to get informed, or to inform others with different goals. The value proposition of way-finding is to get location information. For leisure, it’s to get information to progress in the game setting. For engineering, it’s to inform the designer so that she can better design an object, and for creative production it is to present and convey an idea in an editorial setting. From a broader perspective, navigation design is about creating affordances for intuitive, flexible, yet structured paths for the end user to reach and consume information. This idea should bring an information architect’s mindset to the navigation problem, which is to create a framework or skeleton for the navigation flow before thinking about specific features or controls.

• Designers need to create or use already-formed navigation patterns to simulate a smooth flowing experience. What do patterns provide? Patterns address felt-life experience by leveraging the user’s memory and cumulative experience.  Patterns are also an embodiment of best practices where the designer can cherry pick snippets of best flow, behavior, and controls. However, current state-of-the-art products lack good explicit navigation pattern libraries, leaving designers to try to deduce patterns by observing the products in action. One drawback of patterns might be the inflexibility that they bring to the table when non-traditional influencers are at play, like disruptive technologies, gamification, or reverse webification. At this point, it is the designer’s call to break the pattern, especially when these new influencers are necessary to provide the best user experience.

• Finally, designers need to think of the quality of the navigation experience. What gamification or reverse webification shows us is that creating playful, light-weight, straightforward products is a way to reach quality. To achieve this quality goal, designers can leverage game-like or web-like experiences and deploy them in the navigation design. 

In designing navigation challenges, designers should be aware of the main influencers that are at stake, namely gamification, reverse webification, disruptive technologies, and felt-life experience. To effectively manage or make sense of these influencers, designers need to act strategically and prioritize what’s important for their users. To do that, they need to dive deeply into understanding their target audience and that audience’s contextual needs. Designers need to think hybrid, drawing on a constellation of experiences, instead of trying to provide a one-size-fits-all solution. They need to rethink what navigation is in terms of information in context. The designer should leverage design patterns to use felt-life experience and best practices in the field. However, designers should also be cautious, but perhaps brave enough to challenge established patterns to address disruptive technology influencers. Finally, designers need to think of creating a quality experience that will provide a working flow while the user is in action.

UX in Real Life

 By Allen-Hongwei Bai

“All eyes are on user experience” -  this was mentioned many times by the speakers at the UPA China Conference this year. On returning from the conference, we organized a half-day outing for the UX Club members to go out and observe different kinds of user experiences in real life: in the park, the subway and the streetcar. This blog gives a brief introduction to what everyone observed, with some pictures.

Restrict some actions to encourage people to do the right thing

The trash cans in the park usually have two openings, one is for recyclable waste and the other is for rubbish, which makes filtering easy. When removing the waste from the bin, workers can easily do the post-process. Additionally, this design helps to raise everyone's awareness of environmental protection.

However, many people don’t care much about which opening they use, because both kinds of waste (recyclables or rubbish) can be put into either of the openings. There are also two different kinds of trash can in the park –  one which has the two openings together on the top, and another which has the two openings on opposite sides of the bin. A common phenomenon is that most people don’t follow the rules when putting garbage into the latter type of bin; they don’t even know that there is another opening on the other side!

 

Image 1: Side-by-side openings for rubbish and recyclables

Image 2: Trash can with openings for rubbish and recyclables on either side of the bin

Would people do the right thing if more restrictions were in place here?  If there were different shapes for the recyclables opening as opposed to the rubbish opening or if they were at different heights would people put their rubbish in the correct place?

Add necessary information to help people reduce their steps

In the park, toilet signs contain very useful information, especially if someone needs to find a toilet nearby quickly! The following two signs are the most common.  Compared with the sign in Image 4, the sign in Image 3 adds a line of text to tell people the distance to the nearest toilet, which is what most people wanted to know. Because of this, it doesn’t just enable tourists to reduce their steps but it is more useful.

Image 3: Toilet sign with additional text

Image 4: Toilet sign without text

All public information should be streamlined or it may be confusing. Take the following road sign for example, many people are confused by “Zhangjiang Rd” and take a while to figure out where it goes (the fact is, Zhangjiang Rd is straight, but Ziwei Rd goes around a corner).  In this case, the text is not helpful as it actually confuses the matter, and it certainly wouldn't help anyone reduce their steps. Would it be better to consider using a different type of sign to show that Ziwei Rd is a curved road?

 

 

Image 5: Confusing road sign

 

Text should not be the only thing shown

The choice of font and text layout are important considerations for information displays in public places. However, they are not the most important thing. The essential thing is to ensure that the text is readable in the environment and can be understood by the target user. The following picture shows some fire hydrant equipment in a subway station. In order to get a better visual result, three Chinese characters are mapped to two English words.  The result is that the English letters are broken up into three groups “Fire Hyd Rant”, but is it readable? The answer is obvious.

 

Image 6: English text arranged to match Chinese characters

 

 Labels, graphics and text

In some streetcars there is a new mechanism for opening the door.  When people want to get off at a station they can open the door themselves by pressing a button on the door when the indicator lights around it are lit. However, many people miss their station because they don’t know how to open the door after the streetcar has stopped even though there is a text label next to the button to tell them what to do. If there were some graphics added alongside the text, it would be easier for everyone to understand how to operate the door.

 

Image 7: Would an image here help users understand how to open the door on the streetcar?

 

And last but not least

User experience is not just a paradigm for thinking about software design – it can be applied to everything in our daily life, and to any services you want to provide for your users.

Navigation, not the same old story

By Kursat Ozenc

Navigation in software products usually has two meanings: one being 'to move around software’s mental space', and the other 'to get around spatially-based software’s two or three dimensional world'. Navigation in mental space means easy access to architectural pathways such as menus, functions, etc., whereas the latter means traveling in a spatial ‘world-like’ or virtual representation. In this article, I will focus on navigation in a 2 or 3 dimensional space and sketch out the main paradigms shaping today’s navigation design.

Reflecting on state-of-the-art frameworks, products, and applications, one can discover four influencers in current navigation design efforts:

1. Gamification: ‘Gamification’ means providing a game-like experience in other domains. In 3D modeling software, this means adapting navigation tools from the game domain to enhance the user experience. Most games offer a spatial journey to their users, which usually requires extensive navigation controls, whether it be a 1^st person or 3^rd person game. The advantage of gamification is the playful, engaging experiences it can provide; the disadvantage is the potential for misuse of gaming metaphors without proper justification.  
   
   
2. Reverse Webification: ‘Webification’ refers to the simplification of a software feature to make it suitable for a web context. However, in recent years, with the ubiquity of map applications over web and mobile, software designers are looking at these simpler navigation controls for inspiration or adaptation. An advantage of reverse webification is ease of use, but with the risk of oversimplification of tasks that need a more complex interactive behavior.
   
   
3. Disruptive technologies (Mobile, Gestures, and sensors) Disruptive technologies have had a tremendous effect on navigation design. With the widespread use of tablets, touch and location-aware interfaces, navigation design gained new traction towards its long-awaited promise of augmented reality, or ‘immersive’ experience. Tablet/mobile apps now give users built-in navigation metaphors. Think of an iPad with a motion sensor, or a mobile app using image recognition software. In both, navigation design becomes more like real life (and therefore intuitive) rather than virtual and metaphorical. This provides both advantages and challenges for designers. One advantage is the ability to create simple, powerful interactions that don’t tax the mental and financial bandwidth of your user. For example, imagine an augmented reality app that uses motion and image recognition technologies with very little user input or guidance required. One disadvantage is the ’halo effect‘ of these disruptive technologies, which can lead to over-expectation from your users.  For example, they might ask for a holographic navigation control because they have seen that technology in a recent Hollywood movie.
   
   
4. Felt-life experience & Metaphors Designers always face the paradox of creating new solutions while maintaining old conventions. Along these lines, felt-life experience plays an important role in defining the amount of novelty required. Felt-life experience means two things. First, the user’s built-in capabilities and their perception of affordances, in the context of navigation. This means up and down, left and right perceptions, which are also called direction metaphors. Felt-life experience also means the sum of all the user’s experiences with other products available to them. The advantage of felt-life experience is the designer’s ability to be one of their own users, and empathize with them through research and role-playing. The disadvantage of too much reliance on felt-life experience would be a tendency to inflexibility where a novel behavior is needed.

What do these influencers mean for navigation design in the context of product development? Navigation is used in an array of domains including map-based products, 3d modeling and animation software, geographical positioning devices, and games. Given the richness of these domains, these influencers can help designers find creative navigation solutions for the creative arts, engineering, entertainment, and way-finding. The designer’s role in creating new ways of navigating is also constrained by other inside factors, such as legacy code inside a product, stakeholder expectations, industry standards, etc.  To effectively deliver a navigation design that can add value to a product, designers need to pay attention to these influencers in the design process. In a way, all these influencers are expectations from different stakeholders, and mainly from end users. In my next post, I will focus on users through the lens of their main influencers.

Geeking Out with the UX Book Club, Part 2

By Ian Hooper

Have you ever wondered what the difference was between Concept Mapping and Cognitive Mapping? Do you want to know more about Design Ethnography? Did you ever wonder about the history of Card Sorting? If so, then Bruce Hanington and Bella Martin’s book “Universal Methods of Design” is for you.

This was the book that the Toronto UX Book Club decided to read recently.  As I described in my last post, the book club had the opportunity to use the Autodesk office to video chat with the authors. We had a really good turnout that night as many of the regular readers showed up, and many new faces were also in attendance. The large numbers may have been due to the attraction of being able to meet with the authors, or it could be that there was more interest in this particular book.

The book has a rather long, but descriptive subtitle – “100 Ways to Research Complex Problems, Develop Innovative Ideas and Design Effective Solutions”. One of the book club members told me he thought that people were attracted to this book because they generally like simple lists of things.  “Just look at all those top ten lists you get at the end of the year”, he said.  The evidence was all around me.

It is true that this book provides a neat selection of the “top 100” design methods.  It is simply organized in alphabetical order, with each method getting exactly 2 pages: one page for the description, and the second page for pictures and case study examples. Rather than breaking the methods up into thematic groups or chapters, the authors use two small infographics to contextualize the methods.  The first characterizes each method using the following facets: behavioral/attitudinal; qualitative/quantitative; innovative/adapted/traditional; exploratory/generative/evaluative; participatory/observational/self-reporting/expert review/design process. The other infographic is a simple set of numbers from 1 through 5, representing during what stage the method is typically applied, from “Planning and Scoping” to “Launch and Monitor”.  The net result is that you can see at a glance where a particular technique fits in.

This brings me to one of the few shortcomings of the book.  It is a gorgeous book that is easy to read and a pleasure to have on my desk, but I really found myself wishing that it were more interactive.  Despite the handy infographics, I wished I could pivot and filter the methods to suit my needs.  For example, I wish I could have been able to click on the “Phase 3” icon to see a listing of all the concept generation and early prototype techniques, or to click on a quantitative/qualitative facet toggle as needed. There is an eReader version of the book, but from what I heard from those who purchased that version, it did not fully take advantage of the digital medium.

100 methods is a lot.  One of the book club members asked if anyone would ever use that many different techniques and if so…why?  Many of these methods were variations of other methods that were designed to achieve the same goals.  It was agreed that most practitioners use a small fraction of this total.  In my own work, I’ve probably employed a dozen or so different methods at various times over the years.  Those working in consulting seemed to use a slightly higher number, but the point is, different users, different workplace cultures and different projects can all motivate you to seek a more suitable technique.  With “Universal Methods of Design” at your fingertips, you have an easy reference of what alternatives you should consider.

p.s.

Cognitive Mapping is an exploratory research method that visualizes how “people make sense of a particular problem space” while Concept Mapping is a way for designers to generate new meaning by absorbing concepts into a visual framework.

According to Martin & Hanington, Design Ethnography “approximates the immersion methods of traditional ethnography, to deeply experience and understand the user’s world for design empathy and insight.”  The book includes a great list of recommended texts if you want to dive deeper.

Card Sorting was developed in 1946 (!) to assess patients with frontal lobe brain injuries.