|
 Saturday, January 20, 2007 |
One of the basic concepts that programmers use when realizing a UI design is to recognize that the customer does not want to use a program for its' own merit. Most often the user wants to accomplish something ... and they paid you to help them. This leads to some basic overall principals of UI design.
1. The customer should accomplish the task he or she wants as quickly as possible.
2. There should be as few distractions as possible to the customer accomplishing his or her task, or recognize how to accomplish their task(s).
3. The UI should bend toward the way the customer is accustomed to performing their work rather than requiring the customer to learn a new way of doing their business.
4. Since the customer has particular task(s) to accomplish the software should be designed toward those tasks.
5. Choices are good and bad. Choices can give a customer empowerment. Choices can also be confusing. The choices that are presented are a critical element, as critical as any underlying mathematical algorithm.
The software is an important product. Yet the customer does not want to know its there. The programmer has done his or her job when the software is so easy to use it is taken for granted. The programmer makes the UI design 'look easy', yet a significant amount of effort is expended to make it look that way.
A few years back I was working on a consulting job to design a robot to help in field work for the local utility company. My business partner, Ed, suggested I spend time with the linemen 'on the job'. At  first I thought this was a little extreme, but I soon changed my mind. I actually spent a couple of weeks as an intern working and doing the actual tasks of the linepeople. This experience was invaluable in understanding the customer, their tasks, their challenges and problems. Every morning at 7 am the line crew met. I was able to see that they were intelligent, hard working, and wanted to do a good job. Most did not have a college degree but were educated, some had big hands and all wore these huge clumsy gloves, ... and so on... We had a profile of the user.
I experienced some of the tasks that they were asked to do on the job. They wanted to get each of their tasks done quickly and move on. We were able to see the steps required to accomplish the pre-identified tasks the robot was expected to be integrated into, and to identify new tasks and increase the products value. The experience of 'walking in my customers shoes' was invaluable to our design (and by the way, those shoes were big, heavy, steel tipped, leather, work boots). It also showed my direct customer, the guy paying my bill, how concerned we were in doing a good design for him.
Understanding the tasks and customer is key to a good UI and product design. |
admin4 at 1:39 PM |
(1) Comments |
Add a comment |
Permalink
|
|
|
|