Usability First rule: don't listen to users.

The greatest usability barrier in the past few years has been the superiority of a cool design. Most projects prefer to use complex rules rather than simplicity in usability, and as a result, a large number of beautiful knives are spent on dazzling but difficult designs.

One of the main benefits of the first dotcom bust was the severe frustration of the odd cool design that companies are starting to focus on:

Public sites, originally focused on building concepts, now start to facilitate customer business as the goal;

Intranets has also been working to improve employee efficiency. Many companies are trying to create workflows, promote design standards, and strengthen the grooming of previously confusing intranets.

Happily, the glamorous design was gone, and the advocates of usability were the first and hardest to win, and companies are really paying attention to usability requirements.

Unfortunately, defeating an opponent who does not attach importance to usability is not a showdown between winning and complexity, which directly pushes us to the new front: the campaign is enabling companies to do the right thing with usability.

observe the user's actions

Many companies have built their designs on the basis of getting misguided user opinions, and I've heard it over and over again. Do you need an example? Take a set of optional designs and show them to a group of users and ask them which one they like. This is completely wrong!! If the user has not actually tried to use the design, their opinion is based on the appearance of the features, so that the views obtained are usually the opposite of the actual use of the feedback.

For example, a interwoven logo might look pretty when you don't put anything on the page. Also on the Pull-down menu, users always like the design: a standard user interface widget and consistent on each page. However, when they provide the user with a strong visual design, the drop down menu is often low in usability, or misleading the user to make the user understand this part incorrectly.

In order to find out which designs are really best, watch them when a user really tries to perform a task with a user interface. This method is so simple that many people look down on it and always feel that there should be some other usability testing methods. Of course, there are many ways to observe, and there are a lot of techniques for performing a best user test or scenario study, but fundamentally, the way to get user data will ultimately depend on the following basic usability rules:

Observe the actual operation of the user.

Don't believe what the user says.

Be resolute not to believe what users expect from their future operations.

For example, 50% of respondents claim that if they provide 3D view they will buy more from E-commerce sites, which means you should immediately achieve a 3D effect? Absolutely not, that just means the 3D effect sounds cool. There are countless things in this world where business is built on the basis of arbitrary products and services that lead to failure. In speculative research, users simply speculate on what they might do or what feature they would like, but that doesn't mean they actually use or like it.

When to listen

When should the user's preference information be collected? Only after the user has used a design and has a real sense of how it can be used better. Jonathan Levy and I analyzed the data from 113 contrasting UI designs that supported the unified task and found that there were 0.44 correlations between the performance of user surveys and their stated preferences. A design that makes the user simpler and more efficient to do what they want to do, the more they like it. The phenomenon is very, very well understood.

Then, when collecting user preference data, you have to take into account the nature of people. When it comes to the behavior of the past, there are three levels of difference between what the user says and what is typical of the truth:

When you ask a question (especially for a particular group of people), people tend to tell you what you want to hear or generally accept.
When it comes to telling you what they're doing, people are actually telling you what they can remember. Human memory is very unreliable, especially for trivial details, which may be critical to design, and users simply cannot remember, as they have never seen that user interface element.

When reporting on what they do remember, users try to rationalize their actions. I have heard this expression countless times: if that button were any bigger, I would have seen it. Maybe all we know is that this guy didn't even see the button.

Finally, you must consider when and how to get user feedback. While it's tempting to simply do an online survey, you're probably not getting credible feedback. If a user fills out a questionnaire before they actually use the site, you'll get a completely unrelated answer. And if users use the site to see the questionnaire, most of them will quietly leave, who to fill out these messy forms for you. There is a problem in the website survey that will really make a good effect, is "Why do you visit this site today?" "The problem involves the user's motivation, and they can answer it when they arrive.
In obtaining trusted user feedback your best bet is to have a fan-level User: Guide it to use and ask the user to complete the survey form last. Using a number of prototypes similar to paper products you can test users and ask questions without actually implementing them. Following these basic usability rules and methods will help you to be sure that your design is really as cool as it looks.

Original Author: Jakob Nielsen Translator: Lostfire (Http://hi.baidu.com/loxtfire)

Original link: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20010805.html