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User-Centered Information Design: A Brand PeterMe TM Product By Peter Merholz
Web Building Studio
Acme Products has heard that the future of retail is on the Web, and they've Computing & Internet hired you to design their site. Unlike the typical brochureware you've previously created for corporations, this site must perform an explicit, bottomBuy Software Online line function: sell goods. Download Hardware If Acme's customers are unable to use the site, if the functionality is at all Tech Resources opaque, that translates directly into lost revenue and an unhappy client. To Tech News avoid that, you must understand your users and make sure you design with Web Site Services them in mind. User-centered information design lets you get inside the heads Software Reviews of your users and Acme's customers. Here are some methods to help you Games ensure your site works for your users. Support Field Research Modeled after the anthropological method known as ethnography, field research means you observe potential users in their actual environments. Since the products Acme wishes to sell are anvils, bat-suits, and rocketpowered roller skates, you should see how people shop for such items in real-world retail outlets. Do they comparison shop, or ask the clerks a lot of questions, or make impulse buys? Ask the customers about their motivations to buy and ask the clerks what kinds of concerns their customers raise. You also want to understand how the products are actually used by the customers. Some of the details might surprise you, such as Acme's anvils are used not just for metal work, but also as a weapon for hunting road runners. Acme's marketing research had not borne that out, and it's an important aspect the site should address. Another factor to study is how users currently interact with online stores. Ask friends, or coyotes, if you can look over their shoulders while they shop for CDs, books, waffle irons, whatever. Have them think aloud as they do so. Take notes and, if it's not intrusive, shoot video. These exercises should make it impossible to not get in your users' heads. By filling yourself up with all this data, you'll be grounded in these real-world experiences as you begin to design the site. Scenarios One of the best first ways for organizing your data is writing scenarios,
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12/09/2001
Feature Story
Page 2 sur 3 stories which detail how a typical customer would use a site like yours. Scenarios are powerful tools in the design process. They force you to think the way users act - not rationally, but impulsively and emotionally. The best scenarios come from stream-of-consciousness writing - don't worry about executing literary pearls. For Acme, you start your scenario with: "Wile E. Coyote just used up his last anvil in an attempt to hunt a road runner in the middle of the desert. Leading a nomadic lifestyle, he enjoys using the Web to purchase from Acme, as he can do it any time and from anywhere. Wile stops into a cybercafe and calls up the Acme Products site to order new supplies. He doesn't see what he wants on the home page, but there's a text box available for him to enter a search, so he types in 'anvil'..." In telling your story, don't get bogged down in too many real-world concerns of technological limitations - if your character is best suited by viewing your site in a PDA on Mars, well, let them! Eventually you will have to reign that in, but this isn't the time to limit your thinking. Scenarios aren't just a brief phase in the design process. Throughout sitebuilding, you should refer to these scenarios to keep your work honest. If what you're designing wouldn't work for the character you created, then you should seriously rethink how you're solving that problem. Write scenarios for three or four different characters. I find it fun for the characters to interact across scenarios, creating a fictional world of users. Don't forget, it's important to have fun in the design process. I mean, if we just wanted to make money, we'd be investment bankers, right? Task Analysis From your scenarios, you can begin abstracting the ways your customers perform activities. A task analysis is the first step in charting the process of how a user moves through your site. Resembling an outline, you start with the highest level task, and piece by piece break it down. Let's say for Acme's site, the most essential user task is to Buy An Anvil. In order to Buy, the user must first Find The Anvil and then Purchase The Anvil. The steps a user may take to Find The Anvil include a Search For Anvils or Browse The Store. The task analysis for this (and a bit more detail) looks like: I. Buy An Anvil A. Find The Anvil i. Search For Anvil a. Type in "anvil" in Search box 1. Read results ii. Browse the Store iii. View anvil B. Purchase The Anvil The task analysis rigorously delineates the process while still keeping the user's perspective. Too often, site architectures are designed to support and categorize the content itself without looking at how the user actually moves through the content. This leads to tidy hierarchical site structures that often
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12/09/2001
Feature Story
Page 3 sur 3 bury what the user really wants. In designing task-based site structures, I've found that extremely wide and shallow sites often best serve users' needs. Next Steps Once you've gone through the basic steps of field research, scenario writing, and task analysis, you ensure that, as a designer, you can't help but think from the user's perspective. You can now further develop your site's architecture (probably as a flow chart, as Drue Miller, in Seven Deadly Sins of Information Design, suggests), and be confident that your process will meet your customers' - and Wile E. Coyote's - needs.
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12/09/2001
