Daniel Carrera wrote:
I think this email is useful, but not quite in the way you might think. I'd
like to point people to this article:
Title: First Rule of Usability? Don't Listen to Users
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20010805.html
[...]
Now, the point of the article is not that users don't matter (he he) but that
rather to pay attention to what they *say*, pay attention to what they *do*.
User experience is invaluable for finding problem areas. But users are
awefully bad at designing usable interfaces.
...watch them work. This is the best test of all. We need folks in the
community
who introduce the web site to new folks to do so in an environment where they
can be watched, such as a classroom, perhaps with particular assignments which
present a goal to the new user of the web site. Only then will people truly know
how well the web site serves its users.
Folks at Collabnet or Sun or other contributing companies are likely in a
position to watch other users and provide feedback, as they train new coworkers
at their work places to use the web site.
For example, they have a tendency to rationalize. A user might say "if the
link had been bigger I would have seen it". Well... we don't know that. What
we know is that the user didn't see the link.
Some users are analytical, and can accurately rationalize their behaviour. I
think it is a mistake to make this a black and white item. There must be room
for a gray area here. For instance, my mortgage bill was reformatted at one
point, so that the account number was bolded and the font was made way bigger
than the rest of the print in the page. I had to hunt for the account number to
find it, every month! This bugged me enough that I pulled out old bills and
compared them to learn what had changed. When the account number is in the same
font as the rest of the bill, I can easily find it. I have noticed this about my
own behaviour repeatedly. My eye tends to filter out print of a different format
for some reason. Now that I know this about myself, I can retrain myself to pay
better attention when I have a hard time finding something. This is a real
observance that is a pattern for me. I rationalized this behaviour by purposeful
analysis. If I were designing a bill or a form for users, I would work this into
the design, after observing my own behaviour.
[...]
I think his suggestions about multimedia and human faces is a very bad idea.
Yet, this very technique is used on the website that is linked to this page that
you have shared with us! Check out the People link:
http://www.nngroup.com/reports/tips/usertest/
On Tue, Jan 25, 2005 at 10:55:41PM +1300, Tony Sutorius wrote:
Hi all,
I am a communications professional, and a business owner who has now
switched to OOo throughout my company.
I hope it was not missed that this user is a *communications professional* !
There must be a least a little merit in that?
I personally like function over form. I don't care about icons or pictures; I'm
usually hunting for information when surfing the site. It's a bummer to know (to
be very familiar with) a web site, know the information is there, yet have to
click a chain of links to get to something that used to be one click away! The
licensing information and list of JCA signers is one place that I can think of
that has changed in this way. The project list is another place that requires
more clicks to get to the meaty information than it once did. Both pages are
somewhat like tools to one that hangs out in the community to do work, yet both
pages are becoming buried in order to appease the folks that are new to the
site, or the people that insist that visual clutter is a nuisance. This thought
comes to mind almost every time I use these pages, although they both have been
changed to their current format for some number of months. I consciously tell
myself to have patiences each time I surf to either of these pages.
Perhaps different chunks of the site should be set up for different audiences.
The website is a tool. Who will the tool serve? Likely each page will serve a
different audience. As I write this I realize that it's very hard to appease all
audiences. I don't like to complain about the site, because I appreciate how
hard it is to meet all the needs that exist. I don't think a term like resources
will be better than support or mailing lists; it will just be different. Only
watching users use the site will provide the real data needed to determine if
one way is better than another. I think the message of the web page Daniel
linked was missed.
Diane
--
OOo1.1.4 and OOo1.9m69 on RH9 Linux
http://www.mackmoon.com/OOoHelpOutline.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
