Introduction to the usability of User Interface Design

This article describes some basic knowledge about user interface availability.
Definition of availability

Availability is an attribute that evaluates the ease of use of the user interface. The term "availability" also refers to a way to improve usability during the design process.

Availability is defined by five attributes:

· Learner habits: the level of difficulty that users can perform basic tasks when they first come into contact with this design.

· Efficiency: the speed at which tasks are completed after users are familiar with the design.

· Memory: re-use the design after a period of time, and the difficulty for users to perform the operation again

· Error: How many errors have occurred to the user? How serious are these errors? Is it easy to recover from the errors?

· Satisfaction: user satisfaction with this design.

There are many other important attributes. One important thing is practicality, that is, design functionality: Does it cater to user needs? Availability and practicality are equally important: It doesn't matter if it's not what you want. If the system can do what you want, but the user interface is difficult to use, it will be terrible. You can also use user research methods to improve availability to study practicality.

Why is availability so important?

Availability is a prerequisite for survival on the network. If a site is difficult to use, people will leave it. If the homepage does not clearly indicate what the company can provide and what users can do on the webpage, people will leave it. If users get lost on the site, they will leave. If a site's information is hard to read or does not answer users' key questions, they will leave. Have you noticed a pattern? The user does not automatically read the webpage, or spend a lot of time figuring out an interface. There are many other available websites. leaving is the first choice when users encounter difficulties.

The first rule of e-commerce is that if users cannot find a product, they will not buy it.

Availability is related to employee productivity on the Internet. If you have paid the employee's salary but they have not completed their work, the amount of money you have wasted is equivalent to the amount of time the user has lost on your website and struggled to interpret the explanation.

Now, practice has proved that it is best to spend 10% on availability in the design project budget. In general, this is twice the expected performance of the web page, slightly less than the Internet performance. For software and physical products, this improvement is relatively small, but still valuable-when you emphasize the integration of availability in the design process.

For internal design projects, you can increase the availability investment by halving the training budget and increasing the number of employees traded per hour. For external design projects, increase sales, increase the number of registered users or customers, or increase other ideas that can promote your design project.

How to Improve availability

There are many ways to study availability, but the most basic and useful is user testing, which includes three parts:

· Select representative users, such as customers of e-commerce sites or Internet employees (they will work outside your department in the subsequent process ).

· Let users complete representative tasks in the system.

· Observe what users have done, where they have succeeded, and where they have encountered difficulties on the user interface. Make users speak, but you should keep silence.

It is important to test the user independently and let them solve the problem on their own. If you help them or direct their attention to any particular part of the screen, you have affected the test results.

To identify the most important availability issues in the design, it is enough to test five users. Compared to large and expensive research, make good use of resources to perform many small tests and iterative design after each test. You can improve it based on the availability problems found. Interactive Design is the best way to improve user experience. The more versions and interface ideas you test with the user, the better the effect.

Different from the focus group, the focus group is the method to evaluate the availability of the design. Although the focus group plays a certain role in market research, you must carefully observe how each user operates the user interface tasks for evaluating interaction design. Do not listen to what users say. Observe what they do. [Next]
When to implement availability?

Availability plays a role in every stage of the design. Based on the results of a large number of studies, I recommend that you learn more quickly and easily. The main steps are as follows:

1. Test the old version before performing a new design to find the good part that should be retained or emphasized, and the bad part that may cause trouble to the user.

2. unless you are working in an Internet company, you should test the design of similar characteristics of competitors to obtain cheap data (if you work in an Internet company, please read the Internet design annual report to learn from other designs ).

3. conduct extensive research on users' behaviors in natural living environments.

4. Create paper models for one or more new designs and then test them. Because it needs to be modified based on the test results, the less time you invest in these design ideas, the better.

5. After a large number of iterations and improvement of the tested design plan, the transition from a subsistence model to a high-fidelity prototype that can be run on a computer is gradually transitioned. Test each iteration version.

6. Compare the design with the existing usability guidelines to see if it is derived from your own early research or published research results.

7. Once you decide to implement the final design, test it again. Detailed availability issues often occur during implementation.

Do not perform user testing until a complete design is available. Because the test is not covered, it is impossible to fix most serious availability problems. Many of these problems are structured, and major reconstruction is required to fix them.

The only way to improve the user experience is to start the user test as early as possible during the design process, and perform the test at every step.

Where to test availability

If you study at least one user every week, it is worthwhile to establish an availability lab. For most companies, in any case, they can test in a conference room or office-as long as you close the door to isolate external interference. What's important is that you find real users sitting next to them when they use this design. The only device you need is a notebook.