Editor’s Note: This is a transcript of an audio that I’ve only released to a few people. Please excuse the conversational tone.
This short report provides you with 11 guidelines related to the design process. It’s based on material generated and maintained by the U.S. government, specifically the Department of Health and Human Services (usability.gov).I’ve just giving it to you in plain English.
I’m really excited to share this material with you, it’s based on very rigorous research, but also hundreds of man years of experience. For each of the next 11 usability guidelines, I will give you a rating of importance, and also an indication of how well the research supports the principle. Again this is scientific, tested and proven material.
Let’s dig in. To insure the best possible outcome for a design, the designers should consider a full range of user interface issues, and work to create a website that enables the best possible human performance.
The current research suggests that the best way to begin the construction of a website is to have many different people propose design solutions, i.e. parallel design, then follow up using an appropriate iterative design approach. This requires conducting the appropriate usability test, and using the findings to make changes to the website.
Let’s talk about the guidelines.
Guideline 1: Provide content that is engaging, relevant, and appropriate to the audience. The relative importance of this is extremely high. The strength of evidence is likewise very, very high. Content is the information provided on the website. Do not waste resources providing easy access and good usability to the wrong content. That’s a waste. One study found that content is the most critical element of a website, other studies have reported that content is more important than navigation, visual design, functionality, and even interactivity.
Guideline 2: Establish user requirements. Here’s the exact guideline. Use all available resources to better understand user’s requirements. The relative importance - very, very high, again. Strength of evidence, again, quite strong.
The greater the number of exchanges of information with potential users, or your customers, the better the developer’s understanding of the user’s requirements. The more information that can be exchanged between developers and users, the higher the probability of having it a successful website. These could include customer support lines, customer surveys, and interviews, bulletin boards, salespeople user groups, trade shows, focus groups and so on. Blogs and forums of course as well.
Successful projects require at least 4, and average 5, different sources of information. Do not rely too heavily on middlemen. Try to go directly to the customer.
The information gathered from users can be used to build use cases. Use cases describe the things that users want and need the website to be able to do. In one study, when compared with traditional functionality oriented websites and analyses, the use cases provide a specification that produced better user performance, and higher user preferences. In other words, use cases that are generated from direct interaction with users is more effective than simply looking at the functionality that a particular website can provide. Doing your work in a vacuum is not going to work, interact with your users.
Guideline 3: Understanding and meeting user’s expectations. Here’s the guideline, insure the website format meets user expectations, especially related to navigation, content and organization. The relative importance here, again, extremely high. Strength of evidence is quite good here. Here are some of my comments…
One study found that users define usability as their perception of how consistent, efficient, productive, organized, easy-to-use, intuitive and straight-forward it is to accomplish tasks within a system.
It is important for designers to develop and understand user’s expectations through task analyses and other related research. Users can have expectations based on their prior knowledge and past experience. One study found that users acted on their own expectations, even when there are indications on the screen to counter those expectations.
The use of familiar formatting and navigation schemes makes it easier for users to learn and remember the layout of your website. It’s best to assume that a certain percentage of users will not use a website frequently enough to learn to use it efficiency. Therefore using familiar conventions is going to work best for you.
Guideline 4: Directly Involve users to establish better user requirements. Involve users to improve the completeness and accuracy of user requirements. Relative importance - again, extremely high. The strength of the evidence for this - very, very good again, as well. Here are some comments…
One of the basic principles of user center design is the early and continual focus on users. For this reason user involvement has become a widely accepted principle in the development of usable systems. Involving users has the most value when trying to improve the completeness and accuracy of user requirements. It is also useful in helping to avoid unused or little used system features.
User involvement may improve the level of user acceptance — Although the research is not yet 100% clear on this. In fact, it’s mostly anecdotal; there is little or no research suggesting that user involvement leads to more effective and efficient use of the system. (Still, intuitively, it’s a good idea.)
Finally the research suggests that users are not good at helping make design decisions. To summarize here, users are most valuable in helping designers know what a system should do, but not in helping designers determine how to best have the system do that.
Guideline 5. State and set goals. Relative importance - very, very high, extremely high. Strength of evidence - not quite as strong, but still quite important.
The guideline is: identify and clearly articulate the primary goals of the website, before beginning the design process. This is somewhat of a common sense guideline, more based on experience than the research. Here are some comments about this. Before starting design work, identify the primary goals of the website. For example, educate, inform, entertain, sell, and so on. Goals determine the audience, content, function, and the site’s unique look and feel.
It is also a good idea to communicate the goals to and develop consensus for the site goals from management and those working on the site. These are the stakeholders that you’ll want to involve.
Guideline 6: Focus on performance before preference. Relative importance - still quite high. Strength of evidence - quite high as well. Here’s the guideline.
If user performance is important, make decisions about content, format, interaction and navigation before deciding on things such as colors and decorative graphics. Here are some comments about this. Focus on achieving a high rate of user performance, that is help people achieve their goals through the design and functionality, before dealing with aesthetics, or the look and feel of the website. Graphics tend to have little impact if any on user’s success rates or speed of performance.
Guidelines 7. Consider many user interface issues. Relative importance - very, very high. Strength of evidence - not too bad, middle of the road. Here’s the guideline…
Consider as many user interface issues as possible during the design process, get all the cards on the table. Consider numerous usability related issues during the creation of the website, instead of looking at them after the fact.
These issues can include the context within which users will be visiting a website, the experience levels of users, the types of tasks users will perform on the site, the types of computer and connection speeds used when visiting the site, evaluation of prototypes and the results of usability tests. So this one is quite nice, common sense, very powerful.
Guideline 8. You want to be easily found in the top 30. In order to have a high probability of being accessed in the first place, you want to insure that your website is in the top 30.
What that refers to is top 30 within the major search engines, and typically this means Google. Relative importance - again, from a usability perspective, 4 out of 5. Strength of evidence - again, quite high, 4 out of 5.
Now, if you’re into marketing, or you’re pushing a particular website so that it can reach customers so you can generate income, obviously the importance would be a 5 out of 5.
Here’s some comments about this guideline, about being found in the top 30. One study shows that users usually do not look at websites that are not in the top 30. Some of the features required to be in the top 30 include appropriate meta content, effective page titles, the number of links pointing to a particular website, or to your website, as well as updated registration within the major search engines.
There’s enormous amounts of information on the internet as well as from some top consultants in the internet marketing field, and that does include John S. Rhodes the reader of this material.
Guideline 9: Set usability goals. Relative importance - moderate, 3 out of 5. Strength of evidence - also moderate, 3 out of 5.
Here’s the exact guideline: set performance goals that include success rates, and the time it takes users to find specific information, or preference goals that address satisfaction and acceptance by users. Also consider some of your financial goals and the goals of your stakeholders. Here are some comments about this particular principle.
Setting user performance and/or preference goals helps developers build better websites. It can also help make usability testing more effective. For example, some internet websites have set the goal that information will be found 80% of the time, and in less than 1 minute.
Be as concrete as possible, we have found that this is the most effective way within organizations to generate metrics that are going to be useful for monitoring, measuring and managing your website to specific goals. Be as specific as possible.
Guideline 10: Use parallel design. Relative importance - not quite as high, we’re looking at a 2 out of 5. Strength of evidence - very high, 4 out of 5 strength. Here’s the exact guideline. Have several developers independently propose designs and use the best elements from each design. This is in contrast from having a group work together on design.
It’s more effective to have the individual designers and developers work independently, then come together after, and they can blend their material together.
Do not have individuals make design decisions by themselves or rely on ideas of a single developer, even if they’re very influential and have quite a bit of experience. You want to have everyone involved.
Most designers tend to adopt a strategy that focuses on initial satisfactory but less than optimal solutions. In other words, people go with their gut and they go with a typical response, don’t allow that to happen.
Group discussions of design issues, i.e. brainstorming, do not lead to the best solutions.
Remember what I said moments ago about having designs generated independently and then bring everyone together after the designs of each individual have been generated.
The best approach is parallel design, where designers independently evaluate the design issues and proposed solutions. Attempt to saturate the design space, cover all the bases in other words, before selecting the ideal solution, or as I like to say, put all the cards on the table. The more varied and independent the ideas that are considered, the better the final product will be.
I want to reemphasize something, and that is the strength of the evidence for this is extremely high, the importance isn’t quite as high, but that evidence is overwhelming. This is a smart thing to do. This is the way to get your designers and developers to generate their best work and increase the usability of your website at the same time.
Guideline 11: Use personas. Here’s the guideline. Use personas to keep the design team focused on the same types of users, the same type or the same types, of users.
We don’t want people designing for a different type of individual or different audience. The importance is pretty low here, this doesn’t happen very often, it’s usually not an issue, the importance is a 1 out of 5. The strength of evidence isn’t super high, nevertheless, this is a good design guideline. Here are some comments about this design guideline…
Personas are hypothetical stand-ins for actual users that drive the decision-making for interfaces. Of course you can generate these personas based on interviews that you’ve conducted, and also looking at some of the materials that you’ve gathered from interactive sessions mentioned in 1 or 2 of the previous principles above. These personas are not for real people, but they represent real people as I mentioned just a moment ago. They’re not made up, but they are discovered as a by-product of an investigation process with rigor and precision.
Interfaces should be constructed to satisfy the needs and goals of these personas that you generate.
Some usability specialists feel that designers will have far more success designing an interface that meets the goals of one specific person, or a general type of person, instead of trying to design for the needs of many. I believe this is true because of the focus you can apply as you’re generating your design.
The design team should develop a believable persona so that everybody will accept the person, so if you have 5 designers, each of the 5 designers should have some say in the construction of the persona. It is usually best to detail 2 or 3 technical skills to give an idea of computer competency. If the user is required to use those technical skills. Also to include 1 or 2 fictional details about the persona’s life. This adds some realism and helps the designers get their mind around the design problem overall.
Keep the number of personas for each website relatively small, use 3 to 5, no more. For each persona include first name, age, photo, relevant personal information, and work, and computer proficiency, or website experience.
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I hope you enjoyed these 11 Usability Design Guidelines.
You can support great content like this by grabbing a copy of Selling Usability. I explain exactly how to “sneak” usability and user experience into any organization. It’s getting great reviews.
Cheers,
~ John S. Rhodes
