December 2007 Issue
Engaging User Creativity: The Playful Experience
Published: December 17, 2007
With so many choices as to how we can spend our time in the digital age, attention is becoming the most important currency. In today’s splintered media environment, new digital products and services must compete with everything under the sun, making differentiation key to developing an audience that cares, invests, and ultimately drives value.
What makes a person want to use one particular digital product or service over its competitor? What makes one user experience more engaging, interesting, or compelling than another? An often overlooked, under-appreciated, and rarely measured component of user experience is playfulness. The digital space is conducive to play—exploration, imagination, and learning. And many successful digital products are built for play or incorporate play into their interaction design. No matter how important our jobs, serious our responsibilities, or stiff our personalities, all people need to play—whether we admit it or not. (Is the boss looking?)
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Category: Columns
Documenting the Design of Rich Internet Applications: A Visual Language for State
Published: December 17, 2007
Ajax and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) have revolutionized the way users interact with Web sites. However, documenting the design of any page that uses Ajax is a challenge, because the page—and, more importantly, components on the page—can have different states, depending on how users interact with the page’s components.
When I use the term state, I refer to a page or a page component that displays different information—content or user interface (UI) elements—depending on a user’s interactions or the information available to the system.
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Category: Features
The Perpetual Super-Novice
Published: December 3, 2007
In this column, I want to further explore one of the issues I mentioned in my inaugural column. I call it the problem of the perpetual super-novice. What is this? Simply put, it’s the tendency of people to stop learning about a digital product—whether it’s an operating system, desktop application, Web site, or hardware device.
After initially becoming somewhat familiar with a system, people often continue using the same inefficient, time-consuming styles of interaction they first learned. For example, they fail to discover shortcuts and accelerators in the applications they use. Other people learn only a small portion of a product’s capabilities and, as a result, don’t realize the full benefits the product offers. Why? What can operating systems, applications, Web sites, and devices do to better facilitate a person’s progression from novice to expert usage?
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Category: Columns
The Repertory Grid: Eliciting User Experience Comparisons in the Customer’s Voice
Published: December 3, 2007
Chances are that, if you do user research, you conduct a fair number of user interviews. When conducting interviews, our training tells us to minimize bias by asking open-ended questions and choosing our words carefully. But consistently asking unbiased questions is always a challenge, especially when you’re following a participant down a line of questioning that is important, and you haven’t prepared your questions ahead of time. Also, if you do a lot of interviews, you might fall into a pattern of asking the same types of questions for different studies. This might not bias participants, but you can bias yourself if you always investigate the same types of issues. Finally, are you sure you are asking the right questions? Your interview questions might be relevant to you and your project team, but are they the questions that will get at important issues from a user’s perspective?
In an effort to address some of these considerations, I’ve experimented with the Repertory Grid method—an interview technique that originated in clinical psychology and is useful in a variety of domains, including user experience design.
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Category: Features
Mobile Usability for Teens Who Are Going Mobile
Published: December 3, 2007
Want to know the future of mobile device use? Talk to your tweener or teenager.
Mobile device use is reaching down into younger demographics. A July 2006 study by iGR showed that, among 15–17-year-old teens, most had been using a cell phone for two years or more. In the 12–14-year-old bracket, 50–70% of these young people already own and use mobile phones, and the mobile phone market is beginning to reach down to kids who are ten or younger.
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Category: Features