Don’t ask me why a presentation on user interface design made it into the IEEE proceedings schedule of the FH Hagenberg’s NFC Congress. Nevertheless, being the UI fetishist I am, Alice Moroni’s presentation struck my interest. Enjoy:
Alice started out by presenting a few cases of extremely bad design:
According to her, catastrophes like the ones above are caused by a wrong approach to design – it does not consider the user:
The solution is called user-centric design…which means putting the user at the center of the development process:
Understanding users can be difficult – the slide below presents an overview of users needs:
Prototypes are very useful when it comes to figuring out how users “tick”:
Unfortunately, user tests are not easy. Their experience showed them that users should not be given too many tasks at a time (among other things):
Users must be monitored discreetly, as their behavior changes the moment they feel monitored:
Point-of-view cameras can be useful:
Alternatively, a screencast solution can be used:
When it comes to determining the users, a surprising thing pops up: 5 users are usually enough to find 85% of all eekers; whereas 15 are likely to find all of them according to J Nielsen:
The next surprise: advanced users loathed their simple application. Some missed core features, while others felt that the program was “too lowly” for their taste:
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