Teaching People to Sketch

Business analysts in many organizations are being shouldered to do more than just requirements analysts and research. BA’s are being tasked to take the requirements they have documented and create a UI to support them. This puts them at a bit of a disadvantage because they are being asked to perform activities they might not have the necessary skills to accomplish, or have little interest in doing. However, just because they might not have the design skills, or even the interest, it doesn’t mean they can’t come up with great concepts.

One advantage a business analyst has is the deep understanding of the business and technical requirements a particular feature, or set of features, need to support. The question still remains how can you instruct them to use their well of great information and create a well designed UI to support it?

Twitter-Sourcing Blog Posts

One of the biggest challenges I have had getting started with blogging is coming up with topics that haven’t rehashed over and over again. I have tons of ideas that pop up in my head, and thanks to Google Tasks I have been able to keep up a decent number of posts in the hopper. Every now and then, I still struggle to come up with meaningful content to post out there for the world.

A solution I have been trying, and have had some success with, is see what my twitter network wants to hear about. Here are the tweets I got last week when I opened myself up to all my twitter friends:

Length of Design Reviews

Design reviews can be a brutal process, and take up a large amount of time for the whole project team. During the review, a designer can often feel as if they are standing in front of the firing squad, hoping to dodge the majority of the ‘bullets’. Many steps can be taken in order to make this process go smoothly and painlessly, such as presenting the design early and often during the conceptual stages of a design.

Handheld Designed for Restaurant Servers

Last night my wife and I went to a local BBQ restaurant, Bandana’s, for dinner. When the waitress came to our table it was quite easy to notice that she was planning on taking our order using a mini Tablet PC. Being an interaction designer and user experience practitioner I was intrigued and started asking her about the device. how it help her taking orders, and how well it performed. Her two complaints were that when she tabs the screen, with a stylus mind you not her finger, it doesn’t register it all the time and it crashes all the time.

An example of what the device looked like, minus all the extra ‘rugged’ features:

My curiosity sated, we started to give her our dinner order. Luck be hold, as she is typing in my lunch rib platter the system crashes and starts to shut down. As she slings it back around her shoulder to reach for her trusty pen and paper, I notice the classic Windows XP shut down screen. Way to go Microsoft!

The real problem with the interaction design and the actual product design isn’t the fact that the device was HUGE and bulky or that it required a stylus to directly tab in our order. The problem is that the server is being forced to use something that does not support their standard method of taking guest’s orders. Many servers will use a mnemonic system when recording what their guests want to eat. Great servers can perfect this art to the point where they don’t even need to write anything down. How many times have you had a server take a table of 10’s order without writing something down, and everything coming out right?

These mnemonic systems are normally passed down from trainer to trainee when someone geta hired on at a restaurant. This means that the system is normally a standard for the servers at a particular location. My proposed interaction design for a handheld device that is used in a restaurant environment is one that can be setup by the restaurant managers to support the mnemonic system that they already have in place, and allow the servers to quickly input and submit orders when serving guests. Based on the details that were set up in the system, it can translate the mnemonic short hand into full order descriptions so the cooking staff knows exactly what to make.

The device to handle this type of interaction can therefore be small and easily fit in the palm of a server’s hand. It would still require a stylus for input, but the stylus would be used just as a pen would, making it feel more natural. Servers would write the shorthand ‘codes’ into the handheld and the only button pushing that needs to occur is when they submit the order or are initiating a new one.

If a system like this were in place, it would support the way servers have been taking food orders for decades and align directly with their mental model and goals.

Over User Customization

During a meeting today, a single sentence made by the meeting leader filled me with inspiration to write todays post.

“Our goal is to offer our customers with a complex and customizable system that they can use any way they please.”

Now, there is nothing wrong with offering the user the ability to customize a system to meet their specific needs, or to give them a degree of control over their experience. A problem arises though when you offer so much customization that you allow the user to make the system overly complex and confusing. Which leads me to a golden rule I like to follow, if a user can make something overly complex they will.

When you offer the user the ability to customize anything and everything you don’t give them a clear direction on how to accomplish their goals. They are offered a virtual swiss army knife with hundreds of attachments, when all the user needs is a spoon. It’s important as the designer or product manager to understand what the goal of the user is and offer ways to streamline their work flow via customization. Show the user exactly how to accomplish the task they want to perform and provide them with a structured system that fully supports the task.

It is my view that user customization is a tool used by advanced intermediate users and power users. These users will use the the customization options to makes their jobs easier, and as designers we are empowering the user to take responsibility over their experience. Basic and standard intermediate users will unlikely ever take full advantage of all the options, and need a clean and structure process to follow to accomplish their daily goals. In the end, it is a balancing act between offering the user a flexible, structured environment and not over constraining the user by overbearing business rules and complex processes.