Die Die MUST READ:User Research Smoke & Mirrors (Christopher Fahey, 2006)

Lecture 10: User research smoke and mirror
From Part 2

Using of the eyetracking device use as empirical user interface test. I truly agree with Fahey’s opinion of “an eyetracker can tell you what people are looking at, but not necessarily what they are seeing (or why they are looking at it).” Applying this to our product (Kumon Online Portal for Students), this is especially true and tricky for testing children, because basically children they are fascinated with colors, colors seem to be the key attraction to them. Their attentions are captivated with seemly novel and interactive activity on the interface. But do they really understand what the message intend to deliver is really hard to tell from such eyetracking device. Interviews and surveys come useful in terms of testing whether the message get through to them and whether they find the product useful.

“Secondly, the results generated by an eyetracking study are, to a good UI designer, rarely surprising.” I would agree that that to an experience designer it won’t be surprising but in a sense isn’t he too idealistic to say that because to an experience designer almost everything will seem too simple and too mundane. Design is quite subjective. Especially a challenge when our target audience is the kids. The age gap, the generation gap and their ‘child’ languages are such wide different, not to compare it with our lifestyle and thinking now as an adult but comparing it with our childhood memories is already very different! In the past everything that is digital is like a revolutionized product. Kids go ‘wu and ars’ about it. Now kids are so expose to such interactive media and activities, it is not easy to complete with the giants of the industry!

I agree with Fahey that it is important that we do not misinterpret the results of the test. Because what might have been a great design may be altered or destroyed after we made changes to the so called badly interpreted results. For an example when one spend a long time looking at a online user-guide page, it ‘does not’ mean that it is extremely interesting, it could just mean that the product is extremely complex to use or that user-guide is extremely hard to comprehend.

This is a bad design website, people will spend long hrs staring at it, because of there are practically 4 columns of content.

Dealing with the ‘BOSS’

“So how does a designer or a design manager convince their boss that a good design decision is in fact a good design decision if the boss has no design instincts? What if the site won’t get redesigned at all unless the boss can be convinced that the current design stinks?” Ok for this I would want to agree with him, as a freelance designer I often have to do last minutes changes even at 2am in the morning just because the ‘boss’ thinks the design( may not be even the design, maybe just the content) does not match the one he/she has in mind. Many of times, some organizations think that ‘more’ is better, so they will squeeze (they want us to squeeze) as much info as possible in one page design (for print). When we try to convince them that it is cluttered they just simply say they don’t feel it that way. So they are assuming they are the target audience?

Forrester Persona Rooms

Summary of what is this persona rooms about: “Design personas help companies create a shared understanding of the most important attributes and goals of their most important users, enabling more focused, effective design of interfaces like Web sites and phone systems. Persona rooms recreate the living spaces of personas, providing a new, highly accessible level of insight for all stakeholders on the design team. The result is an environment that aligns everyone, from marketers and programmers to interactive and traditional agencies, behind a deeper understanding of the target customer.”

Firstly creating a persona room does not allow one to be like the person when entering the room. Understanding a persona through the place they live is does not deliver anything that could conclude how a persona uses a particular product or would want to have a particular function in that product. Many of times, a persona’s characteristics do not align with how his or her room would look like. The ability to create the correct persona room is already questionable? How about the experience of it? Does stepping into a brightly glittered and ‘blink blink’ , covered with pink and gold wall papers and life size dog picture handing on the way, with gold plated utensils makes you feel and behave like Paris Hilton? I bet not.

The IDEO Shopping Cart Legend

I have watched the IDEO video in my technopreneurship lecture, it seems almost like an idealistic production, everyone is the company seems so satisfied and passionate about their jobs. However I do not agree with Fahey that researching and all those observational studies are ‘bullshit’. Because personally through the course of this module and others I have done research of my users and targeted audience, and they have proved to be useful. Sometimes it informed us of the things we have not expected. For example the brand Abercrombie and Fitch you would have think that since this brand is already so famous that even the Microsoft word could spot the spelling mistakes once you spelled it incorrectly, it must be due to its successful marketing campaign – sex appeal. I would tell you that it would be in US but not in Singapore, where it still doesn’t have its retail shop here.

Singapore’s demand for A&F products are mainly from the online retail stores and a few stores in Orchard where people buy in bulk and sell it in their shops( although still doubtful about whether they are real, fake or defects). What make A&F really popular here are not the sexy ads, it is the word of mouth and really the ‘counterfeits’ you see in universities bazaars and pasa malam.

I have just attended a talk called the “Digital Light” the speaker Sean Cubitt, University of Melbourne mention about how the experience of reading a book a very simple act could be differentiated with the kind of books we are reading, not the content or the author of the book, but the tangible material of the book, the feel of the paper whether recycled or chemically bleached white, the touch of hard cover and the smell of the paper, a juxtaposition of the smell of chemicals, pulp and ink. I always thought that I am the only few minorities who are affected by such things, but as these words came from a professor, it must mean something right?

User Research Smoke & Mirrors, Part 5: Non-Scientific User Research isn’t a Bad Thing

I like how Fahey uses the analogy with an art (ART vs Web design). A web designer still need to do both qualitative and quantitative research to really teased out the important elements that make the user satisfied and achieve the intended aim. The user interacts directly with the webpage. There is no third party to help navigate the user around a webpage. The only helping might be the site-map, but if the user has to rely on that does it means that the webpage design has failed?

However, on the other hand, the art piece required a curator, many of times what is conveyed out of an art work is not really directly from an artist, (especially since most of them are dead) there is a curator who helps to interpret the art work, whether one like it or not, curator drove the interest to the art piece not the art piece itself. Just look at the Impressionist’s painting, why do people know about it? Because a curator thought that they are rubbish and had insulted the Art.