The Importance of User Interaction, Part I
Today, human interactions with software - or user experience - reigns. Businesses has finally recognized that complicated portals that try to serve a wide selection of users under serve the requirements of many and that more users would adopt software if it respected the human being interacting with the underlying info and business intelligence.
Eight Standards for Building an Engaging UX
Users require better software. In this series of articles, we're going to present eight factors for good user experience. A good user experience will meet all of these criteria for success.
1. Provide Usable Feedback.
Have you ever pressed a button and nothing happened? You haven't any clue if a click meant anything as the software didn't acknowledge your action. So you click again, and you continue to wonder what is going on on.
Good software should offer a reactive experience; it should let you know what is happening with apparent clues - a spinning icon; a dimmed menu item; a background sound or a message box like, 'Please wait while we retrieve your information' or 'Do not hit your browser's back button right now.' Good software should acknowledge your actions thru plain responses.
2. Behave Consistently.
One of the most inconsistent behaviors is the sign-in procedure to customer-facing enterprise portals. A portal may need multiple usernames and passwords in different areas. For example, you log in to your home loan account at your bank differently than you log in to your checking account at that same bank. In another case, a consumer who had 2 home insurance policies with the same company had to log in twice to use the two policies. The software did not recognize the user using multiple account numbers.
We see lots of other inconsistent behaviors in design practices, interaction metaphors and style guides. For instance, if an application's drop-down menu behaves one way in one circumstance - like a vertical reveal - all of its drop-down menus should show vertically in all areas of the application. Just as we will be able to be assured that pressing the red telephone button or icon on a cell phone ends a call, we need to know that a different colored, underlined piece of type always will signal a hyperlink.
3. Behave in a well-recognized way.
A familiar application or interface fits easily with a user's wishes. Familiarity is crucial in creating trust between the user and interface.
For instance, if we are building an application for teenagers doing yearbook page layouts, we all know they're doubtless devotees of Facebook and other age-appropriate social networking sites, so we're going to use metaphors and interactions that feel familiar to them. On the other hand, if we are coming up with a complicated data visualization tool for a commodity broker, we will approach the experience design with a more mature, multitasking Type A character in mind.
The best way to ensure a good fit is to conduct ethnographic research, which simply entails observing people's's PC habits. What email client do they use? What browser is standard in the company? That information informs the developer to the types of interactions, styles and metaphors we use.
Eight Standards for Building an Engaging UX
Users require better software. In this series of articles, we're going to present eight factors for good user experience. A good user experience will meet all of these criteria for success.
1. Provide Usable Feedback.
Have you ever pressed a button and nothing happened? You haven't any clue if a click meant anything as the software didn't acknowledge your action. So you click again, and you continue to wonder what is going on on.
Good software should offer a reactive experience; it should let you know what is happening with apparent clues - a spinning icon; a dimmed menu item; a background sound or a message box like, 'Please wait while we retrieve your information' or 'Do not hit your browser's back button right now.' Good software should acknowledge your actions thru plain responses.
2. Behave Consistently.
One of the most inconsistent behaviors is the sign-in procedure to customer-facing enterprise portals. A portal may need multiple usernames and passwords in different areas. For example, you log in to your home loan account at your bank differently than you log in to your checking account at that same bank. In another case, a consumer who had 2 home insurance policies with the same company had to log in twice to use the two policies. The software did not recognize the user using multiple account numbers.
We see lots of other inconsistent behaviors in design practices, interaction metaphors and style guides. For instance, if an application's drop-down menu behaves one way in one circumstance - like a vertical reveal - all of its drop-down menus should show vertically in all areas of the application. Just as we will be able to be assured that pressing the red telephone button or icon on a cell phone ends a call, we need to know that a different colored, underlined piece of type always will signal a hyperlink.
3. Behave in a well-recognized way.
A familiar application or interface fits easily with a user's wishes. Familiarity is crucial in creating trust between the user and interface.
For instance, if we are building an application for teenagers doing yearbook page layouts, we all know they're doubtless devotees of Facebook and other age-appropriate social networking sites, so we're going to use metaphors and interactions that feel familiar to them. On the other hand, if we are coming up with a complicated data visualization tool for a commodity broker, we will approach the experience design with a more mature, multitasking Type A character in mind.
The best way to ensure a good fit is to conduct ethnographic research, which simply entails observing people's's PC habits. What email client do they use? What browser is standard in the company? That information informs the developer to the types of interactions, styles and metaphors we use.
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