|| Contents:
|| 1. Innovation: Design Studies. [APPLICATION]
|| 2. Design: Navigation Aggravation. [TECHNIQUE]
|| 3. Learning: Teaching Doing. [TRAINING]

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* Agile or lightweight approaches for rapid usage centered design.
* Usage-centered techniques for e-commerce and Web-based applications.
* Designing self-teaching interfaces using instructive interaction.
These and other topics are covered in the latest revision of
our public training seminar. Join us in scenic Portsmouth, NH,
25-29 June 2001. Details at <http://foruse.com/seminars/>.
SAVE $500! Register by 18 May 2001.
* DEADLINE EXTENDED: You can still save $500 if you register online by 25 May for the June seminar in usage-centered design. Details at <http://foruse.com/seminars/>.
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1. Solving Design Problems.

How does one learn how to do usage-centered design? You can start off with hands-on classroom training, such as our in-house courses or the up-coming public seminar in June. (Details at <http://foruse.com/seminars/>.) After that, having experienced designers look over your shoulder as you work--or looking over theirs--can be a particularly effective way to consolidate classroom learning or to acquire advanced skills. To that end, we provide clients with coaching, mentoring, and other follow-up services.

This month we launch a new series intended to add another way to learn. In effect, these Studies in Applied Usage-Centered Design will afford an opportunity to look over the shoulders of experienced designers as they tackle particularly interesting or challenging problems in visual and interaction design. Each Design Study will explore one particular problem in depth, looking not only at the specific solutions considered or developed, but also at the process by which the design was derived in relation to the objectives, constraints, and the nature of the forces shaping the problem.

Our first Design Study is one of several to be based on our work on a performance-support application for K-12 classroom teachers. We were charged by our client with developing a world-class user interface design that would establish a new benchmark for simplicity, efficiency, and ease of learning. In the course of designing this classroom information management system, we were led to devise several novel features that may have broader application in user interfaces for other systems. (Legal counsel even recommended patenting some of these innovations, although the client opted not to pursue that route.)

In Design Study 1 <http://foruse.com/articles/designstudy1.htm> we discuss the design of a user interface widget to provide users with a simple mechanism for navigating within and controlling the contents of multi-part documents. The widget itself is interesting (and more importantly, it really works), but we hope you will find the story behind it even more interesting. In our view, the best recipe for really good visual and interaction design is often a dash of creative insight beaten into shape through the dogged pursuit of many small details. We have seen this formula work for us and our clients on numerous occasions. We decided to describe not only the results of our work but the details of our thinking because we believe that ultimately these details will be of the greatest value for showing how to create usage-centered designs.

2. Navigating Uncharted Waters.

Navigation--how users are able to move through a Web site or application--is a key part of the user experience and a major determinant of whether and how easily users will be able to accomplish what they set out to do. If navigation is slow, awkward, confusing, or inconsistent, users will become annoyed and frustrated and may even give up altogether. In our own work, we devote a lot of attention to navigation, both in terms of the overall architecture of a site or application and the details of how the architecture is presented and how navigation is accomplished. Some subtle and off-neglected aspects of interaction design can ruin navigation. In this and succeeding notes, we’ll look at several of these navigation traps, beginning with a technique that could be called branching logic.

A recent piece by ClickZ’s Gerry McGovern offering some elementary advice on navigation missed its mark when it cited Dell’s computer-sales Web site as an example of well-designed and effective navigation. In truth, the Dell site gets off on the wrong foot almost from the word go with a technique that may be popular among e-commerce marketing types trying to tailor the customer experience but often merely frustrates users. Visitors must, in effect, choose which of several hallways to turn down, not knowing the consequences of the choice of paths or what reasonably to expect about what lies ahead.

One of the most frustrating experiences to users is to know that something is on a site or in an application, having seen it before, but being unable to find it again. The chances of this happening are increased with deep information hierarchies arranged with strict branching logic down mutually exclusive paths.

For example, the dell.com site offers (or forces!) a selection within major user categories: Consumer, Business, and Public. Among others, these options include: Home & Home Office, Small Business, and Medium & Large Business. Right there we have a problem. What if you are a small business operating as a virtual corporation out of a home office? Even if your business category is unambiguous, what does it mean to choose one route over the other. Do you get more information if you go down one hallway? Better prices? More options?

As it turns out, the Home & Home Office branch and the Small Business branch are organized so differently that one imagines they are being designed and managed by completely different business units that do not even talk with each other. Things that are easily found down one path are difficult or impossible going down the other. As it turns out, the links provided by Dell on my laptop and my desktop machine are set differently, so that I once spent a frustrating hour trying to find and order something on their site from back at my office after I had already checked out the product while on the road.

The branching illogic on this site continues deep into the site. One gets a different list of available monitors depending on which branch is taken, whether you follow links or do a search, etc. In practice, it is a site within which it is easy for the user to get lost and to lose track of information.

Branching logic that takes users down mutually exclusive paths is often problematic. In general, users have a better chance of finding what they seek if there are multiple paths to the same target and if the target is the same regardless by which path it was reached. A PC marketer may want to lead with certain simple configurations for consumers, but the same option to “View all models” should appear prominently at the same point whether the consumer path or commercial path is taken. Because users might go down more than one path in search of a particular product or combination of options, the same basic options and information should have the same basic appearance and behavior regardless of how approached or reached. The overall visual configuration of a page is one way users know and keep track of where they are. (“I’ll recognize that page when I see it again.” “I don’t recognize this! Where are the rest of the models?”) In contrast, at dell.com, apparently meaningless visual differences abound. Compare, for instance, three alternative paths to “notebooks” from the dell.com home page:

http://www.dell.com/us/en/bsd/products/line_notebooks.htm;
http://www.dell.com/us/en/dhs/products/series_inspn_notebooks.htm; and
http://www.dell.com/us/en/gen/products/line_notebooks.htm.

The general problem of branching logic and navigation is not, of course, strictly limited to the Web. In desktop applications, users can just as easily get lost when led down one of several branches of nested dialogs that partition facilities into mutually exclusive categories reachable by one and only one path. More than once, I have been thrown because MS Word scatters the various spelling, grammar, and correction settings among several locations that may have made sense to some C++ programmer but often elude users like me. Everything should be controllable or reachable from one place (like Tools|Options|Spelling & Grammar...), but it is not.

3. From the Source.

Some do it and some teach it. Some like doing it and some prefer teaching it. Larry Constantine and Lucy Lockwood are practicing designers and consultants who also love to teach others how to do what they do. Past class evaluations and repeat business from clients like Nortel Networks, Siemens, and Nokia are proof of the success of the combination. Come learn first-hand from the inventors of usage-centered design. Register by 18 May and SAVE $500! Details: <http://foruse.com/seminars/>.

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forUse is published 9 times a year by Constantine & Lockwood, Ltd., trainers, consultants, and innovators in usage-centered design. On the Web at <http://foruse.com/>. © Copyright 2001, 2002 Constantine & Lockwood, Ltd.

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