The Product Usability Web log has a good article talking about the gap between what the designer knows and the user is capable of in the design of applications.

The designer-user gap

This is what Jakob Nielsen (or his ghostwriter) in his Alertbox column is calls the designer-user gap. Nielsen identifies three levels of designer-user gaps:

• Level 1: The Designer Is the User (he completely understands how the product works, and so do the users)
• Level 2: The Designer Understands the Product (and the designer is in the dangerous position of knowing more than the user group)
• Level 3: Designing for a Foreign Domain (where the designer has the problem that he knows much less than the user group)

The reality is that we are almost never the target audience, so when we say that to some executive that wants it red or blue, the truth is that they may be closer to the target audience than we are.

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We could use the Nielsen Norman group definition…

“User Experience” encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products. The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother. Next comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to use. True user experience goes far beyond giving customers what they say they want, or providing checklist features. In order to achieve high-quality user experience in a company’s offerings there must be a seamless merging of the services of multiple disciplines, including engineering, marketing, graphical and industrial design, and interface design.

…because, well, they get paid a lot of money.

But, I like to keep things simple. This is what User Experience means to me:

For quite a while, I drove a BMW Z4. It’s a nice car, but most amazing is the placement of the cupholders: they’re right underneath the left and right air conditioning and heating vents, and when you pressed on them, they would pop out. Among all the other things that the car had — a lot of power, a stereo that would increase in volume when the car was going faster, seat warmers, and a power top, excellent handling — it was the little things like the cup holders that made it an excellent user experience. In the time I drove that car (for several years), I never spilled a drink.

The Z4 was in the shop for a while, and I rented a Chevy Aveo for almost three months. Among other things about the car (other than the running joke that a friend of mine came up with a different name for it every time he talked about it) I didn’t like, the cup holders were in the middle, between the seats. I spilled drinks in that car five times. The were a lot of things I didn’t like about the car (poor handling, uncomfortable seating, brakes that were similar to what Fred Flinstone had to do), but what stuck out most was the cup holders.

That’s what user experience means to me — you never know what the end users are going to complain about or like about your product, but you do know that everything they see is something that could be criticized as a poor user experience. It could be that the product crashes every five minutes, or that help text was poorly written, or that it takes ten steps to go through something that should take five, it’s the complete experience. It should even be to the level that users don’t know they want a feature, but it works just as they expect it to.

User Experience specialists act as holistic evaluators and product managers that recognize any that could limit the effectiveness of the product. In that sense, User Experience architects act as gatekeepers, working with all teams (Development, Quality Assurance and Marketing) to make sure what goes out the door is an excellent product.

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How we deal with clients and how they view our professionalism is sometimes more important than what we know, especially in the field of User Experience where our knowledge is treated at about the same level as a fortune teller. I’ve told some of my reports that likable and professional is more billable than  knowledgeable.

I asked this question over at LinkedIn (I’ve grown to like the site, and it really is a powerful networking tool). I’m going to publish some of the answers every week, and you can respond to them, or not. Sometimes the answers will repeat — my apoligies. I will give credit where credit is due, and I’m going to try to live by some of these.

This was submitted by Anurag Purohit:

This is a piece by a former Accenture consultant that I often use to set the basics right. These are the things a consultant can do right. Conversely, not following these basics will land consultant in a soup:

• Always travel on your own time, not client time.
• Always dress one notch better than client’s do. Dressing the same or worse than clients is sure to draw unneeded attention to you.
• Concise, frank, honest communication will win more client loyalty and referrals over time than evasion, obfuscation or avoidance will ever net.
• Never accept work that is unnecessary or work you are not qualified to complete. Smart consultants stick to their core competencies.
• Always keep the big picture in mind. Just because the arrangement letter says one thing, doesn’t mean you should blindly follow it.
• Always be a diplomat. I try hard to understand everyone’s viewpoint but, in the end, when the CEO or client sponsor wants to know my findings, I have to give them. I state the facts. I give clients facts and unless specifically asked for my opinion, I stick with positions firmly supported by cold hard facts. There are, though, good, bad and better ways of breaking news. Great consultants think about the delivery as well as the content.
• People are always in the heart of every project and great consultants learn to make the most of them.
• Solid ethics are not situational. Just because some businessmen get ‘massages’ during lunch in some countries, that doesn’t make it an appropriate behaviour for you to embark upon.
• Always seek second party review. No one can come up with 100% of a great idea by themselves. Always socialize new ideas with colleagues.
• Lastly, always travel in business attire.

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I had this on a previous blog, and that blog’s not around anymore. I figured it’s worth keeping around. By the way, I have no idea of who the author is.

Dear Mr. Architect:

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don’t have nearly enough insulation in them).

As you design, also keep in mind that I want to keep yearly maintenance costs as low as possible. This should mean the incorporation of extra-cost features like aluminum, vinyl, or composite siding. (If you choose not to specify aluminum, be prepared to explain your decision in detail.)

Please take care that modern design practices and the latest materials are used in construction of the house, as I want it to be a showplace for the most up-to-date ideas and methods. Be alerted, however, that kitchen should be designed to accommodate, among other things, my 1952 Gibson refrigerator.

To insure that you are building the correct house for our entire family, make certain that you contact each of our children, and also our in-laws. My mother-in-law will have very strong feelings about how the house should be designed, since she visits us at least once a year. Make sure that you weigh all of these options carefully and come to the right decision. I, however, retain the right to overrule any choices that you make.

Please don’t bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the house: get the big picture. At this time, for example, it is not appropriate to be choosing the color of the carpet.

However, keep in mind that my wife likes blue.

Also, do not worry at this time about acquiring the resources to build the house itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the house to be under roof within 48 hours.

While you are designing this house specifically for me, keep in mind that sooner or later I will have to sell it to someone else. It therefore should have appeal to a wide variety of potential buyers. Please make sure before you finalize the plans that there is a consensus of the population in my area that they like the features this house has. I advise you to run up and look at my neighbor’s house he constructed last year. We like it a great deal. It has many features that we would also like in our new home, particularly the 75-foot swimming pool. With careful engineering, I believe that you can design this into our new house without impacting the final cost.

Please prepare a complete set of blueprints. It is not necessary at this time to do the real design, since they will be used only for construction bids. Be advised, however, that you will be held accountable for any increase of construction costs as a result of later design changes.

You must be thrilled to be working on as an interesting project as this! To be able to use the latest techniques and materials and to be given such freedom in your designs is something that can’t happen very often. Contact me as soon as possible with your complete ideas and plans.

PS: My wife has just told me that she disagrees with many of the instructions I’ve given you in this letter. As architect, it is your responsibility to resolve these differences. I have tried in the past and have been unable to accomplish this. If you can’t handle this responsibility, I will have to find another architect.

PPS: Perhaps what I need is not a house at all, but a travel trailer. Please advise me as soon as possible if this is the case.

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The truth is that most, if not all, Information Architects have a toolset of interactions that we use over and over again. This is usually because we’ve observed interactions at certain jobs that happen over and over again (come on, how many different ways are there to design an effective sign-in screen?). Because of this, my information architecture and screen designs are very, very boring — but effective.

Here are a few of my favorite resources:

• Internet Studies has a really good list of sites that have stored design patterns that they use when coming up with ideas.
• UI Patterns is one of the best libraries I’ve seen, and some of the patterns there, I’ve used for years.
• Here’s Yahoo’s design pattern library — they aren’t the best example because their IA across channels is all over the place, but at least they have something documented.
• The best book I have ever seen about this is Designing Interfaces, and this is the website.

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A few years ago, I worked at a company that had recently adopted Extreme Programming. After slogging through a few books about how XP worked, I refused to do the putting requirements on 3″ x 5″ cards, falling back to what I was comfortable with — wireframes. The wireframes were never really complete and detailed, but for six months, we ran an Agile development framework that ran on rails — so smooth, in fact, that we rarely pulled features.

That was a pretty small team. In larger teams, Thinking and Making talks about a change to their development process that successfully handled managing the requirements gathering process in an Agile environment. Read on…

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