Posted By
Robin Stevens on 01/08/2009
Tidying up a document folder this morning, I came across my notes from an excellent talk I saw at SXSW Interactive last year by usability expert Jared Spool. Spool won over what could have been a skeptical crowd by performing magic tricks to demonstrate that as interactive designers our charge is to inspire user delight—not to explain technical processes. In the presentation, called Magic and Mental Models: Using Illusion to Simplify Design, Spool reminded us that one of the most fundamental visual metaphors of computing—organizing files in hierarchical folder structures via a graphical user interface—is nothing but an illusion. The value of that illusion is clear, of course—the proliferation of home computing and the Internet has depended upon it.
As we get caught up in the often complex systems and processes of the Web sites for which we are responsible, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the people who use our sites just don’t care about databases, user entitlement structures, multiple platforms, or the like. At White Horse, the persona-led design process allows our user experience team the opportunity to listen to users during our discovery process and to champion them throughout project design and development. It's important to remind each other what everyday users don’t know (and and in some cases don't care to know) both about our clients' businesses and the technology that we use to communicate about those businesses.
This is our interactive challenge: to keep firmly in mind what it is that users actually want to accomplish using our Web sites and services. When we do our work right, our users should barely notice the way something works; instead they should simply be delighted by what they so easily find and do.
Tags: User personas, Web design, information architecture, usability evaluations, interface development, user Research
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