Tag: software development

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Speed sketching vs. art/perfectionism

For a Five Sketches™ design session, I ask design participants to bring at least five substantially different ideas to the table, in the form of sketches. A common initial reaction is: “…But I can’t sketch!”

Many design participants believe they cannot draw. To be honest, I believe that about myself. People who feel they cannot draw tend to extend that belief to encompass design sketching, as well. However, I have learned to distinguish between drawing (below, left) and sketching a software design (below, right).

Drawing versus sketching

Software design does not require drawing, only sketching. From experience, I can tell you that sketching is easy once you realise that the goal is to produce only rough and low-fidelity ideas, not decorative and high-fidelity pictures.

Occasionally, I encounter a design participant who has trouble with sketching. I once had a participant who was so self-conscious of her sketching ability that she was paralyzed during the rapid iteration phase, when the design participants are quickly mashing up the sketches with borrowed and new ideas to produce additional sketches. I noticed that this participant was always busy—talking or wiping the board or replacing the snacks—but never sketching. This avoidance, and the underlying mental block, was an impediment to the whole team. Like all generative design processes, Five Sketches™ relies on its participants to saturate the design space with ideas. If a participant isn’t participating, it increases the project risk.

To pre-empt this mental block and to reduce the project risk, during Five Sketches™ training, I now introduce a quick speed-sketching exercise. Speed sketching is a race against the clock. With pen and paper ready, before each round, I give the participants five seconds to think, and then:

  • Speed sketching in seconds!10 seconds to sketch a cell phone.
  • 8 seconds to sketch a sandwich.
  • 6 seconds to sketch an airplane.
  • 4 seconds to sketch a ship.
  • 2 seconds to sketch a house.

After each sketch, the participants look at the other sketches. I ask them to identify the details that make the sketched object recognisable. There isn’t time to draw a high-fidelity rendering, so the sketches are rough and have few details.

Interestingly, with few details the sketched objects are still clearly recognisable. Participants learn that detail and fidelity aren’t needed. By the last round of sketches—the “2 seconds to sketch a house” round—participants have seen that everyone’s ability to produce sketches is about equal, and they usually conclude: “I sketch well enough for others to grasp my ideas.” Generative design requires lots of ideas—disposable ideas—not fancy drawings.

Jason Santa Maria says a similar thing in his Pretty Sketchy blog post, in which he declares that sketching is not about being a good artist; sketching is about being a good thinker.

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This sugar packet is a movie

Whether it’s ethnographic research, usability research, or marketing research, I’ve learned that the best insights aren’t always gleaned from scheduled research.

Here’s a photo of impromptu research, conducted by Betsy Weber, TechSmith’s product evangelist. I was her research subject. Betsy recorded me pushing sugar packets around a table as I explained how I’d like Camtasia to behave.

Jerome demos an idea to Betsy. Photo by Mastermaq

Betsy takes information like this from the field back to the Camtasia team. There’s no guarantee that my idea will influence future product development, but what this photo shows is that TechSmith listens to its users and customers.

The ongoing stream of research and information that Betsy provides ensures better design of products that will be relevant and satisfying for TechSmith customers down the line.

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Sketch, wireframe, prototype

Over the past month, I’ve come across the same discussion several times: “When designing a website or product, do you use wireframing or prototyping?”

The first part of my answer is: “Make sure you sketch, first.”

At the design stage, sketching, wire-framing, and prototyping are not equal. Sketching is useful at the divergent phase of design because it lets the design participants express and capture lots of different ideas quickly and anywhere that pen and paper will work. Nothing is as fast as running a pen across a sheet of paper to capture an idea—and then another, and another. And since sketching is intentionally rough, everyone can do it.

divergence-and-convergence

Responding to Œ the problem statement, first  saturate the design space with lots of ideas, and then Ž analyse and rapidly iterate them to  a design solution.

I also believe sketching is great for the convergent phase of design, but there are potential hurdles that design participants may encounter. It can be challenging to convey complex interaction, 3D manipulation, transitions, and multi-state or highly interactive GUI in sketches without learning a few additional techniques. This is unfortunate, because having to learn additional techniques reduce the near-universal accessibility of sketching.

The second part of my answer, therefore, is that “if you need to learn additional techniques to make sketching work, feel free to choose wireframes or prototyping as alternatives when there are compelling reasons to do so.”

I should point out that the three techniques—sketching, wireframing, and prototyping—are not mutually exclusive. Wireframes and paper prototypes can both be sketched—especially for simple or relatively static GUI designs.

There are no validity concerns with the use of low-fidelity sketches, as these readings show:

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Usability of a potential design

Three-quarters of the way through a Five Sketches™ session, to help iterate and reduce the number of possible design solutions, the team turns to analysis. This includes a usability analysis.

 generative-design-stage-3

After Œ informing and defining the problem  without judgement  and  generating and sketching lots of ideas  without judgment , it’s often a relief for the team to start Ž  analysing and judging  the potential solutions by taking into account the project’s business goals, development goals, and usability goals).

But what are the usability goals? How can a team quickly assess whether potential designs meet those usability goals? One easy answer is to provide the team with an project-appropriate checklist.

Make your own checklist. You can make your own or find one on the Internet. To make your own, start with a textbook that you’ve found helpful and inspiring. For me, that’s About Face by Alan Cooper. To this, I add things that my experience tells me will help the team—my “favourites” or my pet peeves. In this last category I might consult the Ribbon section of the Vista UX Guide, the User Interface section of the  iPhone human-interface guidelines, and so on.

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Imagine users asking “Help me”

When you’re tempted to cut corners off your product, what do you cut?

Is it the usability?

Image derived from a photo by © Kacie KazerToday, I watched a video of people helping a motorised cardboard construction or “robot” to navigate. The so-called tweenbot has a flag on it that says “Help me,” and that asks people to send it on its way to its outdoor destination.

And people help it, time and again, get to where it “needs” to go.

On your next project, when you’re looking for corners to cut, I’d like you to imagine your future users wearing a sign that says “Help me.” Will that encourage you to help them?

The tweenbot pictured above is from Kacie Kinzer’s Tweenbots site, which creates a narrative about “our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it.”

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Teamwork reduces design risk

It takes a range of skills to develop a product. Each skill—embodied in the individuals who apply that skill—brings with it a different focus:

  • Product managers talk about features and market needs.
  • Business development  talk about revenue opportunities.
  • Developers talk about functionality.
  • Usability analysts talk about product- and user performance.
  • Interaction designers talk about the user experience.
  • QA talks about quality and defects.
  • Marketing talks about the messaging.
  • Technical communicators talk about information and assistance.
  • You may be thinking of others. (I’m sorry I’ve overlooked them.)

What brings all these together is design.

Proper design begins with information: a problem statement or brief, information about the targeted users and the context of use, the broad-brush business constraints, Design as a teamsome measurable outcomes (requirements, metrics, or goals), access to a subject-matter expert to answer questions about the domain and perhaps to present a competitor analysis.

Design continues by saturating the design space with ideas and, after the space is filled, analysing and iterating the ideas into possible solutions. The design process will raise questions, such as:

  • What is the mental model?
  • What are the use cases?
  • What is the process?

The analysis will trigger multiple rapid iterations of the possible solutions, as the possible solutions are worked toward a single design:

  • Development. What are the technical constraints? Coding costs? Effect on the stability of the existing code? Downstream maintenance costs?
  • Usability and experience. Does the design comply with heuristics? Does it comply with the standards of the company, the industry, and the platform? Does paper-prototyping predict that the designed solution is usable?
  • User experience. Will the designed solution be pleasing due to its quality, value, timeliness, efficiency, innovation, or the five other common measures of customer satisfaction?
  • Project sponsor. Is the design meeting the requirements? Is it reaching its goals or metrics?

It’s risky to expect one person—a developer, for example—to bring all these skills and answers to the table.  A team—properly facilitated and using an appropriate process—can reduce the risk and reliably produce great designs.

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Ten-year-old advice

Fresh advice, still:

“Usability goals are business goals. Web sites that are hard to use frustrate customers, forfeit revenue, and erode brands.

Executives can apply a disciplined approach to improve all aspects of ease-of-use. Start with usability reviews to assess specific flaws and understand their causes. Then fix the right problems through action-driven design practices. Finally, maintain usability with changes in business processes.”

—McCarthy & Souza, Forrester Research, September 1998

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How to test earlier

Involving users throughout the software-development cycle is touted as a way to ensure project success. Does usability testing count as user contact? You bet! But since most companies test their products later in the process, when it’s difficult to react meaningfully to the user feedback, here are two ways to get your testing done sooner.

Prioritise. Help the Development team rank the importance of the individual programming tasks, and then schedule the important tasks to complete early.

  • Prioritise and schedule the tasksIf a feature must be present in order to have meaningful interaction, then develop it sooner.

    • For example, email software that doesn’t let you compose the message is meaningless. To get meaningful feedback from users, they need to be able to type an e-mail.

    Developers often want to start with the technologically risky tasks. Addressing that risk early is good, but it must be balanced against the risk of a product that’s less usable or unusable.

  • If a feature need not be present or need not be working fully in order to have meaningful interaction, then provide hard-coded actions in the interim, and add those features later.

    • For example, if the email software lets users change the message priority from Standard to Important, hard-code it for the usability test so the priority is always Standard.

  • If a less meaningful feature must to be tested because of its importance to the business strategy, then develop it sooner.

    • For example, email software that lets users record a video may be strategically important for the company, though users aren’t expected to adopt it widely until most laptops ship with built-in cameras.

Schedule. For each feature to be tested, get the Development team to allocate time to respond to usability recommendations, and then ensure this time is neither reallocated to problem tasks, nor used up during the initial development effort of the to-be-tested features. Engage the developers by:

  • Sharing the scenarios in advance.
  • Updating them on your efforts to recruit usability-study participants.
  • After developers incorporate your recommendations, retesting and then reporting improvements in user performance.

Development planning that prioritises programming tasks based on the need to test, and then allows time in the schedule to respond to recommendations, is more likely to result in usable, successful products.

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User mismatch: discard data?

When you’re researching users, every once in a while you come across one that’s an anomaly. You must decide whether to exclude their data points in the set or whether to adjust your model of the users.

Let me tell you about one such user. I’ll call him Bob (not his real name). I met Bob during a day of back-to-back usability tests of a specialised software package. The software has two categories of users:

  • What type of user is this?Professionals who interpret data and use it in their design work.
  • Technicians who mainly enter and check data. A senior technician may do some of the work of a professional user.

When Bob walked in, I went through the usual routine: welcome; sign this disclaimer; tell me about the work you do. Bob’s initial answers identified him as a professional user. Once on the computer, though, Bob was unable to complete the first step of the test scenario. Rather than try to solve the problem, he sat back, folded his hands, and said: “I don’t know how to use this.” Since Bob was unwilling to try the software, I instead had a conversation (actually an unstructured interview) with him. Here’s what I learned:

My observation For this product, this is…
• Bob received no formal product training. He was taught by his colleagues. Typical of more than half the professionals. 
• Bob has a university degree that is only indirectly related to his job.  Atypical of professionals.
• He’s young (graduated 3 years ago). Atypical of professionals, but desirable because many of his peers are expected to retire in under a decade.
• Bob moved to his current town because his spouse got a job there. He would be unwilling to move to another town for work. Atypical. Professionals in this industry typically often work in remote locations for high pay.
•  Bob is risk averse. Typical of the professionals.
•  He is easily discouraged, and isn’t inclined to troubleshoot. Atypical. Professionals take responsibility for driving their troubleshooting needs.
• Bob completes the same task once or several times a day, with updated data each time. Atypical of professionals. This is typical of technicians. 

I decided to discard Bob’s data from the set.

The last two observations are characteristic of a rote user. Some professionals are rote users because they don’t know the language of the user interface, but this did not apply to Bob. There was a clear mismatch between the work that Bob said he does and both his lack of curiosity and non-performance in the usability lab. These usability tests took place before the 2008 economic downturn, when professionals in Bob’s industry were hard to find, so I quietly wondered whether hiring Bob had been a desperation move on the part of his employer.

If Bob had been an new/emerging type of user, discarding Bob’s data would have been a mistake. Imagine if Bob had been part of a new group of users:

  • What would be the design implications?
  • What would be the business implications?
  • Would we need another user persona to represent users like Bob?
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Why products stay pre-chasm

I’ve spent some time working with legacy products—software for which the core code was written before “usability” was a term developers had heard of, back when developers were still called programmers.

I remember my first conversation—held last century—with a developer about his users and the usability of his legacy product. The product-adoption curve, with the chasmI used Geoffrey Moore’s book, Crossing the chasm, to introduce the idea that there are different types of users. The chasm (illustrated) shows five groups of users. The area under the curve represents the quantity of potential users, in the order in which they will typically adopt the product. Users who are technology enthusiasts and visionaries either enjoy or don’t mind being on the bleeding edge because of the benefits they get from using the product, according to Moore. Usability isn’t one of the typical benefits to the left of the chasm, where new products are first introduced. Wider adoption follows only after the product is made to cross the chasm—but this takes a concerted effort on the part of the development team.

What delays a product from crossing the chasm?

  • Revenues that are sufficient to let the company putter along.
  • Team members who themselves are tech enthusiasts or visionaries. This occurs, for example, when a nutritionist who also knows how to program develops software for nutritionists.
  • Team members who have infrequent exposure to newer user experiences. This could include someone who still uses Microsoft Office 2003, eschews social-networking applications on the web, or uses Linux.
  • Product managers whose roles are weakly defined or absent, making it more likely that new features get developed for the technical challenge of it, rather than for the user need or the business strategy.
  • Sales reps who ask for more functions in the product in order to make a sale—and a development culture that goes along with this.
  • Managers whose vision and strategic plan leave out user experience and usability.
  • Team members who have been on the team for decades.
  • Organisations that don’t use business cases to help them decide where to apply business resources.
  • Organisations with poor change-management practices—because moving a product across the chasm is more likely dramatic and disruptive than smooth and gradual.
  • Designers who are weak or absent in the process, so that “design” happens on the fly, during development.

If you recognise your work environment or yourself in this list, do you want to change things? If you do, but don’t know how, what actions can you take to learn the answer?