Jared M. Spool, CEO & Founding Principal of User Interface Engineering gave a presentation Magic and Mental Models: Using Illusion to Simplify Designs at NYC Usability Professional Association (UPA)'s meeting last night at AvenueA | Razorfish. Jared's talk rode the metaphor between Magic and how user interface design can benefit by using illusions such as altering time perception. One example is how there is a disconnect with the objective measure of "time" for downloading pages and how long it takes for the web pages to be rendered verses the perceived time by end users. Jared found the end users believed that Amazon.com was "fast" while About.com was "slow" when in fact the opposite was true when the actual download times and web page renderings were timed. The end users were subjectively rating the speed of the webpages in terms of successful task completion time rather than the simple time measurement. Thus, Amazon.com was giving the "illusion" of being a "fast" website, when in fact it really wasn't. However, it was perceived as faster because the end user's experience of the transactions and tasks were "faster" which is what counts.
When I had dinner with him and others after his talk, I asked him what he thought about Agile development and the best way to include usability methods. His answer was to manage usability both before and after each sprint at the same time - which is a challenge.
1) Do User Research in advance to get the right Stories for the next Sprint
2) Do Usability Testing after each Sprint
This suggests you would likely need more than one usability person working on an Agile project in order to handle the work load and add the value of usability methods at the right time.
Tonight I'll be going to Dan Saffer talk at the monthly NYC IxDA meeting at RGA. I will report back what I learn at his presentation in one of my next blogs.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment