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How Design Decisions affect User Performance

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Introduction - How Design Decisions Affect User Performance

Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen. Welcome to Techgig webinars. I endeavor to empower techic’s. I am Bharat product manager at techgig.com we believe that sharing of knowledge is the key for enhancing our performances and for our growth as professionals with this principle in mind Techgig as initiated series of weekly webinars conducted by industry experts to get a crisp insight of various domains.

Today’s webinar is third in the series and will though light on How Design Decisions Affect User Performance. Our guest speaker today is Rachna Mittal Head User Experience and Design at Times Business Solutions Limited (TBSL).

Rachna has over 13 years of User Experience Design (UED) and Product Innovation experience with companies like Samsung, Quark INC, Info Edge and Encyclopedia Britannica.

Rachna currently heads the user experience design team at Times Business Solutions limited, working closely with Product, Business Development and the Engineering teams to come up with seamless user experience. She is also associated with International NGO's to support the cause of Public Health Awareness where she assists business development team to evangelize program automation for Rural Population.

She contributes actively to Product Evaluation and Innovation, Client Interaction, Gathering User Requirement, Leading, Mentoring & Training. Rachna has conducted several Usability Tests & Customer Site Visits in India & Abroad. She is an active member of many Human Computer Interaction (HCI) communities in India.

The presentation will be continuing for the 45 minutes and questions will be address in the last 15 minutes. In case some questions remains unanswered within the given time we will post them on techgig.com and personally answered by Rachna. The queries can be posted though the chat available in the software. Without further ado I introduce to you our guest speaker Rachana.

Hello everyone I will directly start the presentation now. Topic for today is How Design Decisions Affect User Performance. In this presentation I will touch face multiple facets of user experience and design, I have segmented my presentation into 4 sections,

·         First is how to create user experience for product and services. ·         Second, what are the different practices in user experience field and how you can structure the team within your organization? This will help you to understand the different practices you need to build in your user experience and design team. ·         Third section is what are the various misconceptions behind your user experience and design?·          Last but not the least I touchup on lots of user experience principles so these principle are just hand big principle but you can go and explore lot many.

How the Design Decisions are taken

Let us understand the art and signs of user experience for website, products and any other services you deal with. We fallow design principles and design practices day in and day out. The contribution of designer user experience professional, visibility professional within a development environment is quite evident now.

There is an important aspect which I will discuss in first part of my presentation. This aspect is how we take design decision? It is very important to understand the integrities of design decisions been made on daily routine or for any specific project.

To add a little humor to the subject I have chosen this visual. Let us understand what this slide is trying to represent or what it is all about? There are three monkeys you can see representing the deaf, blind and mute state of our process while we make design decisions.

Can you guess to whom it is deaf, blind and mute? It is none other than the users. The most important aspect of any business knowingly, unknowingly we forget to understand their needs, choices, references likes and dislikes, so what happens is user interface do not hear user needs, if I do not know what is the user need is definitely the application, website, product or the services will be on a different tangents.

Second is user experience do not see who the user is so it is very important to understand for whom you are designing or for whom you are making your services?

Third is mute state. User interface do not speak with users while user is interacting with the website or product or any services it is very important to make user realize as a website is talking to him or her that communication and then bonding part is very important.

What is User Performance?

This slide is about what user performance is?

Usually we talk about our own performances so what we talking here? Does the slide look like a mistake user performance? No, not at all we can also evaluate the user performance to come to our site. The daily visitors and users coming to our site we can evaluate their performance as well.

User performance is actually co-related with the overall performance of our own website, services and product. The basic matrix to judge user performance is there are 2 basic metrics

·         First is time to complete a task ·         Second is number of errors being made to complete a task.

These are the basic matrix on which you can judge users performance. But there are any other parameters available to optimize the user performance for your website so what these parameters are?

There are 6 parameters. First is about the First Time Gratification, First Time Gratification is again an important principle of user experience design field so whenever user is coming to your site and he is a first time user it is very important to give him a impress and appeal so that he want to browse your site or your services or your product more and more. So, the moment is attracted towards your site and services he would like to spend more time on it so that first time gratification is very important. In case the appeal is not there, there is a probability that he may go to some other website because there are so many websites, services and products available it is very important to lose a user. Therefore it is very important to be very careful about the packaging about the first time appeal, about the communication which you are giving to a first time user be very careful.

Second dimension is Rule of 2 seconds. Rule of 2 second is again principle of user experience in design discipline it says that none of the user should be waiting more than 2 seconds or to find information or if he traverse between 1 page to 2 page it should not take not more than 2 seconds, within the 2 seconds time he should be able to understand the basic and the most critical communication the task of website. For example, if I come to the website or the service within the 2 seconds time I should be able or my mind should be able to register what this site is all about and I should be able to find where I need to go where I need to click to accomplish my task.

Third dimension is Rule of 3 Clicks. The Rule of 3 clicks is about completing task. Let us say you are in the mid of completing a task being a designer or user experience professional we should always try to minimize the number of clicks to completion of the task by rule it should not be more than 3 clicks but if transaction is complicated and lots of user input is required we can go beyond 3 clicks as well but there as to be very logical meaning if you go beyond 3 clicks. So, if the transaction is easy task are simplified do not go beyond 3 clicks.

Information efficiency is again one of the most critical aspects for any product, any website so what it means is you have lots of information which you represent on any website, it is very important to make that information contextual to your website. Try to reduce the number of words as much as possible because probably any other product service nobody would like to read too much about your product, about your services.

Your services should be self explanatory so try to give as much as less content and the content which you represent make sure that it is highly optimized for user need. Here you also need to understand your user so that you can use the same vocabulary which uses are using in their daily routine. Try not to use jargons and difficult English languages try to keep it simple.

My fifth point is Keep It Simple Stupid, it is a very famous principle in user experience and design field so it says that simplify as much as possible, simplify everything, your flows, your screen layout, the content aspect, the information which you display try to give wide spaces, if not lot of wide spaces at least so that users eyes can traverse from one section to another. It should not look too jury to eyes and too complex and too complicated to look at the page so try to simplify it.

Site conversion, it is a method to calculate lost of visitors comes to your website but out of those 100% of users we never convert all of them to site users. Site conversion means 100% of users are coming to your sight but put of which only 20 are able to have gone through the task that 20% of users have been converted to your sight user so that is site conversion.

Site conversion actually tells you how efficiently your site is working for a user if site conversion is too low it represents something there is some problem within your site and you need to rectify it. Google analytics is one very good example where you can actually drill down lot of users data. It can give you lots of in depth details studies that from where people exit and where they are going and how long they are on the page? All these insights if you have at least you can draw an outline to understand the site conversion and what action you need to take on the site?

These are very top level principle to optimize user performance and optimize your site as well because remembers user performance is nothing but it reflects and it is co-related with your site performance.

Next slide is about visitors, users and audience. All of them are synonyms of each other. Do they sound synonyms? Actually there not synonyms to each other, few years ago I would have nodded my hand in agreement that yes they are synonyms and my reaction would have been of course they are same what is the difference? All of them are coming to my side and I have opportunity to convert them all, but actually it is not need to understand what the difference between these 3 different types of users whom we target.

Visitors include everyone who happens upon your site. There are multiple sources to access information these days it could be search engine and multiple alliances you run through online and offline marketing but every visitor may not be the real user for you. It can be a visit by mistake, so you need to understand the difference between the visitor, user and an audience. Visitor is everyone who happens to be your site by mistake or by choice.

Next is users, users are intentional visitors who are looking for something specific and this set is very critical for you got to understand maximum details of them. Their needs, likes, dislike, preferences, for the system you need to understand every aspect of it because these are the right set of audience for which you are designing day in and day out.

Audience are the visitors you are trying to reach, to whom you are trying to deliver your message, and with whom you are most likely trying to establish an ongoing relationship, they are equally important for you. You can classify them into primary group and secondary group, so why do we classify between primary group and secondary group? It is just for the ease of so that you can take proper action on your primary group and secondary group. Audience could be very wide so it will help your decision, if you have a clear understanding between a primary user and a secondary user. Probably you can be more focus and oriented towards your primary users because they are the actual users probably give you more benefit for spending more time or doing more transaction on the site.

Secondary user would be a set of people to come to your website but they do not contribute you so much so probably your approach towards secondary user might be different but you will definitely take your primary users very seriously.

 Now we have discussed the definition of Visitors, Users and Audience. I will concentrate on audience aspect because; out of the audience we actually find the users. So I might be targeting between primary and secondary users. I might be targeting probably 1050 people but the real users will 800 only so the users are coming from the audience I target that is why it is important to understand your audience.

Now we have established a fact that there are different set of people coming to our site and we as a part of business should need to understand them in detail. So what are the different means to approach them? Means to approach means how can you understand your audience? What are the various means by which you can talk to your audience? These are nothing but you can do some audience research you can take help of marketing MR activity. Focus group is one option conduct in person interview is another option where you can actually is similar to focus group only.

In audience research focus group and conduct in person interview here you talk to your audience directly. But in most of the cases since lots of time either there is a budget issue attached to it or timelines are so crunched that you cannot approach your audience. So I will prefer the 3rd approach which says interview representative of your audience, which means? Within your organization there is a set of people who is well connected with your audience. They are basically representative of your audience because they are actually talking to or resolving their queries day in and day out.

These set of people could be the customer care people or the tele callers or business development people because they are actually in touch with them very closely. Especially customer care and tele callers they know lot of details about audience problem, users problems, if you get the opportunity, be in touch with them and try to understand the routine and the most frequent problem which your audience and users go though.

You can collect a lot of valuable information through customer care and your tele callers. In case the context is about creating a new service or new product then business development team is the best team to understand the complete objective and audience details because they have the grasp and they might have done some study to draw conclusion about their product and its detail. So it is always better to interview the representative of the audience, if audience is not approachable. Something is better than nothing it will give you insights and would understanding about our audience and it will help you to make your design decisions better.

What kind of details should you look out for? While you taking to the audiences or interviewing the representative of audience. What kind of information should you look out for? Point 1 is what they would be looking for on a site similar to yours? What they would be looking is what your audience would be looking for in a site, again their preferences their needs so you need to understand them.

Their experiences on similar websites, this will help you to use your audiences or your users past experience and it will help you to understand that what they like and what they did not liked in their past experience? It will help you to use that set of information to make your product much richer.

The third point is what they liked? I have covered it. What they did not like? There browsing habits. There browsing habits are very important to understand it will help you to give insight that how technical (( )) are they, how much time do they spend on the website? For example, if you are targeting to a user group who is 40-45 years of age they might not be spending lots of time on the website. But in contrast if you target let us say 20-25 years of age they might spend most of the time in browsing different website and their likes, dislikes and preferences towards a website or any other service will be very different, so that is why it is very important to understand who the audience is?

You do not need to go into the details like creating personas and identifying primary and secondary personas, doing research. If you do not have that luxury of going into research at least have a clear high level understanding about your users and evaluate those matrix against your design decisions are they mapping well, if they do not mapping well probably you need to take action about your design decisions.

Explain some of the Design making decisions

Let us understand the process of making design decisions, there are 3 sections on this slide.

·         One is when designing the wireframe ·         Second is once a wireframe are done we usually move the wireframes to visuals ·         Third is during site construction

Design decisions can be taken at each level and each level has its own complexities and importance so that the user experience can be created. At every stage user experience is getting richer and richer if design decisions are taken well in advance.

Wireframe is nothing but its information architecture and in information architecture it is very important to be very careful at the stage of information architecture, usually we first create the layout, we take care of placements, we do information prioritization. What is important and what is not important? Whatever is not important we try to push it down so that it do not cluttered with the users, with the important category of information. Information hierarchy is very important.

Do not have multi hierarchy information because, again remember it very clearly that on the website or for that matter any other service or product people do not like to read they are skim readers. Do not create long hierarchy of information. The clear visibility of call to actions is very important. Do not have too many call to action on a website. Again it impact the priority, the priority call to actions if you have too many call for actions it will flutter with the important call to actions and user as opportunity to click anywhere and you might take him to the undesirable page.

Findability of information is very important so make sure that the priority information is available affront. If you cannot give everything affront so make sure that at least the path towards that information is very clear.

Number of steps to complete the task I have already covered this, the KISS formula again it is very important. While the information architecture is in process be very sure that content is also very critical. Usually we ignore that aspect and we just hold this aspect for the later stages. But most of the time it has been ignored and it do not get the attention which it should get. Be very careful that content is very well optimized it is not very lengthy, it should not have joggles it should be very simplified for the user.

Let us move to the second category that how you can influence your decision making when designing the visuals. Keep your esthetics very elegant, it helps in first time gratification definitely define the eye movement so visual designers have this opportunity to define how the eye movement will happen on the page and how this is done is through colors, typography and other important design elements.

Visual designer can actually through the design elements to the colors and typography. Visual designer can sub site non important information and can prioritize the important information which will make page look less cluttered and more meaningful to the user, which means that you are actually directing the users that where he should click and where probably he should not click, so you have everything on the page but through your visual skills, through your design skills you have control on the user that where is he going, where is he clicking but do not have too many design elements on the page.

Last is design decisions during site construction, make it cross browser compatible we have too many new browsers coming in these days but I know how difficult it is to make your website cross browser compatible because of multiple browsers available in the market and users using all across the browsers but it is important to make it cross browser compatibility is important.

Second is support user base of old browser, we cannot ignore the users who use old browser you do not know that how important user set is there on the old browser, so make sure that old use up your product, your website services, your web application supports old browser and the functionality and features are not breaking there.

This slide is about influencing user behavior or influencing user is a binary choice, either they are influenced or they are not influenced and if they are not influenced they are moved to some other website. So you can use Google analytics to understand visitors loyalty for your website or web application. The higher the loyalty is reflects the careful decision been made at the design stage. You need to bride usability, visual design and user experience practices to ensure a quality product. Do not forget to handover user experience detail to technology team, lot of time it has been identified that important details are being left out during the implementation. After the implementation is done, so how to control this, if important design decisions are getting dropped out during the implementation phase what is the way out of this? While you are doing information architecture and visual design User interface specification document can be written and delivered along with the deliverable you do.

For example, if HTML are the deliverable or probably visuals are the deliverable to the technology team you can buy the user interface specification document which will be part of your deliverable it includes lots of aspects and insight about user interaction with the application. We are saying that user influencing user is a binary choice either they are influenced or they are not influenced, so if they are not influenced opportunity is gone. It is very important to handle every user with a great care, there you can see a picture on the right hand side some important key elements are been written there for a web application or for a website to make it usable useful to use valuable.

Valuable means information value are probably the tasks which you show should be valuable, findable, credible, accessible and desirable these are very important aspect. Whenever you design any application or website just evaluates your end product or your end design do they have all characteristics in it? Are they usable enough? Are they useful for the user? Do they give value to it? Are they desirable, accessible, credible and findable? All of these aspects in elements are very important.

Here the picture is changed right attitude of design decisions in my second slide it was designer centric approach. Though we have gone through so many slides and seen that how the design decisions should be made. Now we are taking user centric approach where a designer is not doing what he like or what he feels should be done. Basically designer is listening to users he can see who the user is and he can speak with user not he can speak but the user interface should be able to speak with user. The idea is keep your design approach user centric and try to collect details about your audience in advance so that a designer or probably usability professional as a clear understanding about the audience, about the business objectives and decisions and design decisions and usability decisions can be taken in tandem with it.

What are the Phases of User Experience and Design

Next slide is about the phases of user experience and design, start reading it from the bottom it is a bottom up approach so this slide says again it is about user. In our previous slides we have only discussed user need but there are other objectives of a website, it is not just user we need to consider, we need to consider the business objectives as well which is written as site objectives. User need and site objective are equally important. In fact we need to somehow collaborate site objective in such a shape that it should go with the users need because you are actually dealing with the business or giving solutions to your business.

It is important to have a clear understanding in advance, User’s need we have already discussed so have a clear understanding in advance that whatever you are doing, what is the business objective behind it? Do not just design the applications and websites just because you have to design it, have a clear understanding that why you are designing it? What the business objective is because most of the time I have seen it happening that designers are designing the sites but they are not clear on the objective aspect it is not that they do not have skills to reach your conclusion or to give a better solution but gap comes when they do not have clarity and communication is missing about business objective or the site which is being done what the objective of it. Just take a first step and discuss with your business people about the objectives of any feature or any product or any website you are engaged in.

Next step is functional specifications and content requirements. This is being taken care by product peoples so probably we can discuss the third slide which is interaction design and information architecture.

Information architecture we have covered in previous slide but I will again give you overview. Information architecture is a discipline in itself probably I will just give you definition of it you can go and browse and study the detail and in depth of information architecture. Visual is a good tool to create information architecture it gives you lots of stencils and approaches to have detailed information architecture.

In information architecture what you do is you standardize the layout, you standardize the prime objectives and prime information on the page before you start information architecture again the user need and the site objective should be clear in the mind of usability professional. Usually information architecture is being made by usability professional only. In information architecture site flow should be covered important primary navigation and secondary tertiary navigation everything should be taken care of, we can say that information architecture is nothing but a blue print of a website which do not have design elements in it.

When you fill colors, typographies, different style elements and different design elements in it, it becomes your visual design. Information architecture actually plays a very important role in it. Why we do information architecture is just to minimize the time line because, if you directly start from functional specifications to visual design it might take a lot of time because usually such approaches go into iterative format and visual design the movement it come you get lots of subjective opinion about it.

It is good to focus on the information architecture first, so that the topic of discussion is towards the priority of content and the navigation of site or probably the layout of it too keep it centric towards information architecture subject it is important to have not visual design after the functional specification.

After the information architecture is done visual design comes into the picture where a visual designer play very important aspect like I discussed that how the eye movement will happen? How the first gratification on the page looks like?

This is user experience in design. User experience is a term used to describe the overall experience and customer satisfaction coming to your websites. The two important adjectives overall experience and satisfaction, you can never evaluate user experience in silos or page to page bases when we talk about user experience it has been evaluated on a complete product because, your user is interacting with the complete product not with a single page. Whenever you make design decisions be very sure that you are making consistent design decisions, your design decisions are not been made on a single page basis, if you are making any decisions just be clear in your thoughts that it should impact or those design decisions should carried across the side so that consistency is there.

Benefits are

·         Avoid unnecessary product feature. ·         Simplifying customer-facing technical publication. ·         Improving the usability of system and its acceptance by user.·         Expediting design through detailed and properly conceived guidelines.

If you fallow guidelines lots of problems are solved here because lots of principles, guidelines are been written down and everything is there if you start fallow the guidelines you will see the impact in the end result you will definitely get a better result incorporating business in marketing goals while catering to user.

As I discussed that users goal are important incorporating your business and marketing goals are equally important because ultimately you need to run a business.

Name some of the Misconceptions about User Experience Design

The next slide talks about with 10 most common misconception about user experience and design. I will read out this graphic for you far beyond the treasuries mountain ranges of usability heuristics across the vast expense of information visualization.Their lives a guru above all gurus, who know ultimate truth of user experience. This guy is asking great guru what is the secret of a great user experience? So what guru is reply well it depends, it is open ended it depends. There is no specific answer so let’s understand certain misconception about user experience design.What we are trying to tell you here is, there is no fix formula to get a good user experience in your platter. You actually need to discover a lot you need to understand a lot of insights about your users, about your business objectives, about your marketing goals.The first misconception is user experience design is not just interface design, so user experience design and user interface design are two different thing, you might be designing one user interface in silos but you cannot design user experience in silos when you design user experience you design experience for complete application not for single page. Like I mount you design user experience for whole system and make sure that they are interconnected very well. Second, user experience design is not a single step process. While we are working on a product on a feature on a service user experience is not a single step process that look my deliverable are complete and here my job is done no, it’s not a single step process, it needs to evolve gradually you need to understand users on continuous basis because for example if the phase 1 is over if interested you can find lots of user in sites because there is no perfect website.Similarly, if the phase 1 is delivering you can find a lot of usability gaps or probably if not usability gaps you can discover a lot of areas where users are probably if they are not interacting they are not able accomplish the task. They are not actually looking at it. It can be the primary set of content or information from the business prospective but because the way it is handled users can ignore it. It is gradual process it is not single step process, so be very sure and be alert all the time that how your users are interacting with your website and you need to discover lot of analytics in it. You can do usability study. You can evaluate Google analytics, if you have internal MIS that can help you.You can actually go into details to understand that how your users are interacting with it and again it is gradual process, it is a step by step process it will never be complete you will keep on evolving, evolving and evolving on it. User experience design is not just about technology, User experience term or probably the discipline, it is not just specific to technology or website or product or services. I am carrying pen in my hand so it also has some usability or user experience concepts in it. I like parker pen for example because it is easy to handle it has a good grasp in it or probably I like the design the statics of it. User experience can be applicable for anything it is not just about technology it can be anything.

User experience design is not just usability it is about the learnability, visceral, behavioral emotional responses. So I can take example of Apple products. The people who carry Apple product are the proud owners and they feel very proud that they carry Apple product it may be iPod, be it iBook it could be anything but they are very proud owners. Lots of people carry HP, IBM but they do not feel so proud as Apple people do. The reason is that there is a emotional bonding between that product and the owner and then why bonding is there? It is not just by mistake the Apple has been designing its product in such a way that there is a emotional bonding. If you want to explore the subject in detail you will find lots of content on the net that there is an emotional design concepts behind every product not everyone is able to actually map the emotional design concepts in the product because it is not easy but there are certain like Apple is doing it very well. It is not just about usability there are lots of other aspect which you cover in user experience design.

User experience design is not just about the user, again user objectives are very important we have discussed but similarly business objectives are equally important and we need to consider them. We are designing for business only so your business objectives and your user objectives both should be very clear in your mind while you take design decisions and sometimes it will happen because business objectives are so important that you might overrule user’s goal because business objectives are so important to consider.

User experience design is not expensive, you do not need to create personas, user research and all these fancy step every time. I am sure the designer setting across they have lots of options, techniques and tricks to deal with the situation which come across, just do not depend on the personas and user research every time just be little tricky and explore options within the designer because they are really creative people and they know how to deal with the different situation, projects and products.

User experience design is not easy; There are 4 points in it.

*        All assumption, no validation, do not make assumption if you are making assumption just got it validated. *        One-size-fits-all solutions, it is not true so be very careful. *       Do not make it feature heavy *    Design decisions during development do not do that make advanced design decisions

User experience design is not the role of one person or department, it is a organizational culture. So if user experience design is compartmentalized to just 1 team and 1 department, you might not be able to achieve the user experience. For example, Apple the kind of product which Apple is launching, it is not just restricted to their user experience team. It is an organizational culture there is a vision to launch such products which are close to the owners heart. So creating good user experience or creating a meaningful and enriched user experience product it is an organizational culture but yes, you can definitely start from a team and it can evolve till the organization.

User experience design is not a single discipline. User experience design is not user interface design it is not a single discipline. There is multiple disciplines involved in it. You may not have all of them in our company but there is a scope to have multiple design disciplines. For example, human computer interaction, user experience design, information architecture, user interface design, human factors engineering, interaction design and usability, but the most critical one which one should have is information architecture, user interface design and definitely interaction design.

User experience is not a choice, now it is not a choice anymore if any business has to survive they got to implement it. It ‘s a mandate now it is not to choice anymore.

 Let us summarize this, user experience is not user interface design it is the system, User experience is not a one step process it is processor in itself, so it is the process before the development start till the development end after the development ends the product is launched, you need to be careful how your users are reacting with it. What kind of problems do they come across? You need to solve all of them then only you can ensure that user experience is good.

It is not about technology it is about the behavior, user experience is just not a usability it is about adding value to your product, so it is not just restricted to usability. User experience is not about user it is about the context, so you have business objectives with you, you have user objectives with you and you need to make all of them together in a single context.

User experience is not expensive there is a flexibility they are usability professional, visual designer, you can actually use the best practices and standards to draw the solution and to create product. It is not expensive to have user experience or to create user experience.

User experience is not easy, it is a balancing act between multiple activity and multiple (( )). It is not a role of one person or department it is a culture within an organization. It is not a single discipline it a collaboration of multiple discipline, you may start with few but there are many more disciplines under user experience.

User experience is not a choice definitely, it is a means of survival now, for any organization it’s a must activity.

They are certain design principles and very hand pick one, I will recommend everyone that I will just take you through all the design principles of it but you may want to discover more and more design principle to have a good grasp on different principles of design, it will definitely help you to take better design decisions, if you are aware of all the principles if not all at least important ones.

*         2-Second rule - I have already discussed that user should not wait for more than 2 seconds to discover what the site is all about? And to discover the next step. *        3-click rule - To accomplish the task user should not be clicking more than 3 clicks. In case the transaction is too complicated it is a different case otherwise try to consolidate the transaction between 3-clicks only. *         80/20 Rule - Users will use 20% of the feature of your product 80% of the time, which means if your website is very feature heavy, it does not solve the purpose. So be very clear in your guidelines or in your business objective that what are the key features for the users because 80% of the users are actually using 20% of the features. Word is the very good example of it. Word as so many features but what we do? Mostly we type and we do some typography styling that’s all. Which means 80% of the users or 90% of the user are only using 20% of the features, so be very clear in mind that what are the most critical features in your services. *         Affordance - A situation where in object sensory characteristics intuitively implies its functionality, it is a jargon, so I will give you an example, a button whenever we see the button on website we know that I need to click it here it’s a call to action or probably your link because it is blue, it’s underlined I know it is a call to action I need to click it over there. So affordance is very important I just write my call to action in plain English user would not know that, they need click it there. So affordance aspect is very important. *         Cognitive load – it is about the thinking and reasoning which user is doing before taking any action, just make sure that there is the cognitive load is not too high otherwise user is not comfortable with your services and product. Do not give too many choices, do not ask too many questions to get his task accomplished, just give him a free and easy environment to accomplish his task. So cognitive load is about the load of thinking and reasoning before making any decisions.*         Consistency - The principle the things that are presented in a similar way, things that are not related should be shown in a distinctive way. Consistency is for example, if you have buttons I am giving a very high level example so it is clear to everyone you have headings, contents, call to actions, so the similar elements give them a common visual prospective and the items which are not related give them a distinctive prospective.*         Conversion rate - The percentage of people who achieve given task from a given starting point, so again it helps you to understand the performance of your website. It is very important to move the conversion ratio on the website so that you can take appropriate action.*         Direct manipulation - Performing operations by making changes to data directly like clicking on it, dragging different elements from one browser to another or probably one window to another and typing in a small part of a window, so you are directly manipulating or directly taking action, you are not traversing between one page to another, you are taking action on a single screen and you are not moving to another. So web (( )) is a good example especially the AJAX implementation supports all these direct manipulation concepts.*         Display inertia - Do not make too many changes on a screen because there is always inertia of looking at screen again and again over, so do not make frequent changes on screen if user input has been done so just change the particular area of the screen. Face Book is a very good example most of the time you are on the same page you write on a wall the small part of the screen gets changed. There are not changing entire screen so be careful do not make too many changes on screen frequently once the user use on the site.*         Efficiency - The rate or speed at which an interface enables user to accurately and successfully complete a task, so how accurately and successfully user completes the task? Is the efficiency, not user but of the website.*        Effectiveness - The degree to which a interface facilitates a user in accomplish the task. So interface should facilitate user to accomplish the task that is the effectiveness of website.        *           Idiot-Proofing is about making your interfaces more than user friendly, so any (( )) can use it.

·       *               Information efficiency – The minimum amount of information the computer need from the user divided by the amount of information in the specific user interface requires from the user that is information efficiency.

·                 Information overload - Stating too much of information on the interfaces do not do that because not just web users nobody would like to read manuals and details about the services and product so be very rigid an approach when you give content, so try to cut down a number of word as much as you can.·         Intuitive - intuitive is easy to understand without if users are able to comprehend the services without any training you can say it is intuitive.·         Inverted pyramid process - It’s an iterative process oriented around exploring wide variety of alternative, so in inverted pyramid you explore with too many choices and then you keep narrowing down at the end you just close on some few things which makes more sense to your decision decisions. Probably first you accumulate everything whatever is possible is feasible in a product or service and then you keep narrowing it down in inverted pyramid process. It is an iterative process where you evaluate too many things in a context.·         KISS (keep it simple stupid) - The extremely popular principle of simplicity applicable to any area of design engineering, it is not just about user interface it is about anything.·         Know your uses - We have already discussed it, a mantra for usability specialist, understand your users and design for them not design for yourself, design for your users. ·         Legibility - It’s about the clarity of visually presented text affected for instance by the size of the text, the contrast between similar letters, if it’s about printing and quality of printing or display so how well I can read the content on the website on a brochure, on a news letter, on a news paper that is legibility, legibility how well I or any user can read the content. To optimize the legibility the tricks are careful about what kind of typography you choose, what kind of fonts, sizes, colors, contrast you choose and also be careful that who the user are probably middle aged man will not be very comfortable reading small fonts but it can work with the facebook readers or facebook users.·         Mental Map - Representation is in a person’s mind of the structure of the website which is likely to be incompleted and simplified, so mental map is when I interact with the application just because my past experience with similar application and with certain believes, thoughts and expectation in need I have, it is important for designers to understand users mental map so that they can offer similar kind of mapping or navigation structure to your end users.

Video length - 01:12:03

205 attendees

Conducted on - 26 Apr,2023

2362 views

About Speaker
Rachna MittalHead User Experience and Design, Times Business Solutions (TBSL)
Rachna has over 13 years of User Experience Design (UED) and Product Innovation experience with companies like Samsung, Quark INC, Info Edge and Encyclopedia Britannica.  Rachna currently heads the UED team at ...
How well the design decisions have been mapped with audience need is where you build the foundation of success. Design decisions are not restricted to the aesthetics of website, it has a wider meaning. Does your website behave like a pro-active sales person, if not; you need to take action right now.Takeaways are:
  • Let's understand some established facts/ standards of usability
  • How to think, act and react as an audience, it helps in creating user experience
  • Case Study
    • Key points of discussion
    Who should attend
    Software Architect,Software Developer/ Programmer,IT Support Manager

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