Archive of Interaction design Articles

I came across a really interesting article LukeW.com, showing how making changes to the way an input form on a website increased interaction by 25 to 40%. The changes reflect the value of thinking outside-in, investing in user experience, and performance measurement.

Bonus: the idea is cool.

Design-Free requirements are important for two reasons, and hard for two other reasons.

Design-free requirements are hard because you “know what you want” when you should be documenting “why you want it.”  Writing design-free requirements can be hard when you don’t trust your development team to “do the right thing” even though it is not your job to design the solution.

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When defining requirements, you always start in the context of a goal – either a user goal or a corporate goal.  You need to be aware of both.  Having a positive user experience is important, and requires a user-centered understanding.  Achieving your corporate goals might be in conflict with some user goals.

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Learning how to write use cases can be tough, but it is simple compared to the balancing act of determining which use cases to write and how to manage the expectations of all the stakeholders that are involved. It can be a difficult balancing act to prioritize use cases to assure that you meet the goals of the business while satisfying the needs of the users.

A couple weeks ago we wrote about Outside-in Software Development, by Carl Kessler and John Sweitzer. One of their ideas about stakeholders and goals has got us thinking about traceability.

Implementation continues on nexus, and we’ve re-factored the way that items in a bundle are ordered, as mentioned in our earlier post. We talk a little about affordance, and show a couple screen shots.

The last step in our agile software development project was documenting our understanding of our users. In this article, we will define the personas that we will use to guide our design and requirement development. This definition of personas is built by combining our experiences in consulting, product and program management, and business analysis.

A couple other good articles on how to create personas:

• Leisa at disambiguity on the merits of creating personas.
• Practical persona creation at evolt.org.

In this article we define our primary, secondary, and supplemental user personas.

Continuing the articles in our agile project case study.

The next step in our agile requirements management process is to develop an understanding of our target users. We believe a user-centric design approach is important. The user interface should conform to the way our users think about what they are doing and trying to accomplish. We should minimize the amount that we force our users to think like our software, and maximize the amount that we should force our software to work the way people want it to.

In this article we document some of the thoughts around who are target users are, and how we think about finding patterns in the way that they would approach using our product. This is a micro-example of market definition / segmentation. We’re looking for patterns that provide interesting commonalities. We’ll use this as a foundation for developing personas.

Its easy for us to overdo almost anything. Kim Goodwin offers some good advice about how not to overdo it when using personas as part of our software development process.

Actor Hierarchies give us an overview of the people who will interact with the system. We can extend this model to provide a visual indication of how use cases are distributed through the organization. Further, we can leverage a hierarchy to show how use cases are rolled out to the users – a targeted communication for our stakeholders.