Feature: Designers' Roles in Communicating with Users

From the users' perspective, their experience is continuous. Your website, their browser, their computer, their immediate environment, and their life all interact and feed back on one another. What they understand affects not just what they can accomplish, but what attracts them to the product, and what attracts them to a product affects how willing they are to understand it. If a site is visually attractive, they may be more motivated to expend extra effort to understand and use it. If they feel it's easy to use, maybe they'll be motivated to use it more often.

Thus defining 'the user experience' is difficult since it can extend to nearly everything in someone's interaction with a product, from the text on a search button, to the color scheme, to the associations it evokes, to the tone of the language used to describe it, to the customer support. Understanding the relationship between these elements requires a different kind of research than merely timing how quickly a task is accomplished or testing to see how memorable the logo is.

However, trying to look at the whole user experience at once can be vertigo-inducing, and dividing it into manageable chunks is necessary to begin understanding it. For websites (and other information management products), there are three general categories of work when creating a user experience.
• Information architecture is the process of creating an underlying organisation system for information the product is trying to convey.
• Interaction design is the way that structure is presented to its users.
• Identity design amplifies the product's personality and attraction.

Information Architecture
The most abstract level on which people experience a website is the information architecture. All information that's created by people has some underlying structure, and there is always some organisational idea that defines how all the information in a given work fits together. Often that structure is quite explicit, as in the case of the phone book, the Library of Congress, or the Yahoo! hierarchy. In these cases, there's little question about how information is arranged.

Sometimes, however, the creator's unifying idea is less easy to see; it's implicit.When an architecture is implicit, it's hidden behind an analogy to another organisational structure, a metaphor that maps one kind of information to another. The person trying to navigate it has to navigate the 'real' information structure using the metaphor. An implicit architecture sometimes makes things clearer, and sometimes it confuses things further. The desktop metaphor of the Macintosh and Windows clarifies and organises a lot of concepts about files and their manipulation, whereas the geography metaphor of Yahoo!'s Geocities Web hosting service has little connection to the content found there. With the Macintosh, visually moving file icons from one 'folder' to another requires less labour and information about the system than, say, file manipulations in DOS, which require typing and an understanding of the layout of the whole file system. In Geocities, however, the geography metaphor is both dependent on cultural queues ('Silicon Valley' communicates little about the information a section named that contains) and breaks down if taken literally. Santa Clara and Mountain View are both cities in the real Silicon Valley — if Geocities had sections called that in their Silicon Valley, what would they communicate about the kind of content that's in those sections? Very little. Yahoo!, in fact, recognised this and abandoned the geographical metaphor long ago in favour of a more explicit organisational structure; now there's no Silicon Valley; instead, there's Computers & Internet.
Whether it's explicit or implicit, there's always some structure to the information, but often the people making the structure may not even realise that they're building an information architecture. Their way of organising may be so deeply buried in their knowledge of a certain subject or understanding of a certain task that they can't imagine any other way to think about it. For example, a corporate information site organised using the company's org chart is using an architecture that may seem reasonable and explicit to the creator of the site, but from the users' perspective may be unrelated to how they need to see the company. A user looking for support information in such a site may not care that the technical support staff can be found in the operations unit of the North American subsidiary of a Taiwanese company; he has a question about a product he bought and — from his perspective — all this other information is completely unrelated to either asking or answering his question.

Information Architects
It's the information architect's job to make the implicit architecture explicit so that it matches what the users need, expect, and understand. The architect makes it possible for the users to navigate through the information and comprehend what they see. The ultimate goal is for the audience to be able to predict what's going to happen around the next corner, even if they've never been there, and be able to get from point A to point B without getting lost.

When the underlying model isn't obvious, people create one. Humans are always looking for patterns in data, things that can be used to simplify our interaction with the world, make it more understandable. Even when we don't know what to call it or we can't articulate it, we still create an image or a pattern or a story to understand the information space we're in. People always think they've found a pattern in the stock market or a roulette wheel when the vast majority of the time no pattern exists. Thus, although there may not be a specific information architect position in a development team, there is always someone who is creating a pattern in the information. Someone is playing the role of information architect though he or she may not know it yet.

Information Needs of Information Architects
Information architecture frequently happens (or should happen) at the beginning of the development process, and the kinds of research that inform it are fundamental. Specifically, it's information about who the audience is, how they think about the task, what words they use, and whether the existing information architecture makes sense to them.

Note: Many of these needs overlap with interaction and identity designers, and much of the research described in the next section is equally useful to them. In the interest of presenting the techniques in roughly the order they appear in development, I'm introducing several things as information architecture concerns when they're really concerns that under-lie the whole product, no matter which aspect is being examined or designed.

Knowing exactly who is going to be using the product is often a critical part of creating an information architecture. Different groups of people have different contexts with which to understand information that's being presented to them and different assumptions about how to use that information. The more finely a target audience is described, the more accurately the information architect can make the website work as they think. The fundamental way to measure any community is through its demographics, which describe their physical and employment characteristics. Typical demographic characteristics include age, education level, income, job title, and so forth.

For websites, it's also important to create a Web use profile that summarises a community's Web experience. Typical Web use characteristics include how long someone has been using the Web, how much time he or she spends using it, and what kinds of things he or she uses it for.

Appropriate terminology is one of the most important elements in a successful interaction. Most interfaces are largely made out of words, and words can be ambiguous and easily misunderstood, so their comprehension is especially critical. Examining the words that people use to describe a task, and how they organise those words, is one of the keys to creating a product that meets their expectations and needs.

The audience's mental model makes up a third major piece that's used in creating an information architecture. A mental model is how people currently understand the topic, what kind of picture they've built for themselves of how a given task is done or organised, the names and relationship of terms they use. For example, even though food in supermarkets is mostly organised by either food group or storage requirements (all the things that are bottled go together, all the things that need to be cold go together, etc.), research conducted by Indi Young shows that people rarely think of their food in those terms when shopping. People often make up their shopping lists based on meals that they're planning or by which foods go with which other foods. Their mental model is therefore based on meals, not on how something looks or how it's stored. Since a website doesn't have to work like a supermarket, it can be organised in a way that's closer to how people plan their meals rather than by food storage constraints.

Mental model research can be done both before a service is created — to see how people perform a certain task in order to emulate it with a software interface — and after an interface has been designed — to see how well users' ideas match the designers'.

Interaction Design
Traditionally, all the knobs, buttons, and displays that were used to operate a machine (whether real or simulated in software) were thought of as 'the user interface'. Indeed, that's true in a traditional universe of machines and static information; however, in the world of dynamic information, there is not a single interface. On the Web, every page is a different interface. The interface can be thought of as everything that goes into the user's immediate experience: what the user sees, hears, reads, and manipulates. The interface experience isn't just functionality, but readability, navigation, and (the black sheep of the family) advertising. In short, it encompasses all facets of someone's interaction.

Interaction Designers
Interaction designers control the immediate user experience. They determine how to navigate around the information architecture, arrange that users see what they need to see, and make certain that the right data are always presented in the clearest way, with the appropriate emphasis.

Interaction design is different from information architecture in the same way that the design and placement of road signs is different from the process of laying out roads — information architects determine the best path through the terrain, whereas interaction designers place the signs and draw the maps.

Information Needs of Interaction Designers
Interaction design requires more specific, more narrowly focused information than that collected for information architecture. After the mental model and the target markets have been determined, the focus shifts to the specifics of interaction. Depending on the stage in the development process, the designer may need to know general information either about whether his or her designs are on the right track or about whether people can actually do what they're supposed to be able to do.
• Task flows are strings of actions that are necessary for something interesting to happen. Researching task flows include knowing in what order people look at the elements, what their expectations for the next step are, what kind of feedback they need, and whether the results are what they had anticipated.
• The predictability and consistency of interfaces is critical. Research determines how much predictability is enough for people to feel comfortable with the task flows and how much consistency is necessary for different task flows to feel familiar.
• The relationship between the features on a site and the emphasis of specific interface elements is likewise crucial; for example, whether a large illustration on the right of the screen takes attention away from core functionality on the left, or whether the repetition of a feature in different parts of the interface affects how often people use it.
• Different audiences. First-time users need different features and use them differently than experienced users. Teenagers understand terminology differently than 40-year-olds. If a product serves various target markets, it's important to know what those markets want and what they can use.

Identity Design
A product's identity communicates its values and permeates both its information architecture and its interaction design, but is separate from them. It is the style, the feeling, the vibe of a website. It's what makes it memorable and what makes it unique. In some cases, it rivals the importance of the product's functionality (though, as proved by many marketing campaigns that failed to overcome bad functionality, it's rarely more important). The identity is the combination of what a site does, how it looks, what associations it evokes, its editorial voice, and how it emphasises certain features over others.
• Some elements that play a role in determining a site's identity include the way that text copy on a site is written. This conveys a lot about the site's values. Is it funny? Is it technical? Is it condescending? These factors make up the editorial voice of the site.
• Consistent visual themes can create an element of recognition for a site or for a group of sites. For example, nearly all of CNET properties have a yellow background with green highlights and the round red logo somewhere. This combination is recognised by most people once they've used one of CNET's sites for a while. They can even make the connection if they end up on a CNET site they've never seen. It's also possible to maintain an identity through more basic visual consistency.
• The features a site emphasises also tell its clients where it's coming from. Two sites may have both shopping cart features and a bulletin board, but the impression people will have of the site that puts the bulletin board front and center will be totally different from the one that puts the shopping cart as its main focus.
• The Nike site is obviously related to an existing identity and brand by its association with an existing brand. The signals of online brand association are the same as those that defined the brand offline: the logos, the colours, the slogans, the vibe, and so on.
Note: Identity is a big part of the product's brand but is not the whole of the brand. Brands are incredibly powerful parts of the user experience and can colour users' expectations to the point that all other factors virtually vanish. Unfortunately, there is much confusion, debate, and punditry surrounding what makes up and affects the product's brand.

Identity Designers
The identity designer's job is to communicate an identity for the site that's distinctive from its competition and consistent with the company's other products. Though the identity designer's job is closely related to the marketing of the site, there's one key difference: the identity designer aims to make an enjoyable and unique experience on the site and to make it memorable when people are not using it, not to convince them to try it for the first time.

Information Needs of Identity Designers
The information needs of the identity designer are similar to those of the marketing research department. There are some key differences, however, since designers are more concerned with the immediate experience of the product rather than the perception of its brand or its prevalence in the market. Thus, identity designers need information about people's immediate emotional responses and how well they remember the product later. Assuming that a target audience for the product is defined, here's what they'll need to know about it.
• The competitive strengths of the product relative to others in its class. This tells the identity designer what features to emphasise since these are the things that the product does better than its competitors.
• The direction of the users' attention. This includes what people see when they look at the interface, what they ignore, and what they consider to be the important parts of the interaction.
• Who the current users are. This includes how they compare with the demographic and Web use makeup of the target market and what they like, dislike, and remember about it.
• What kinds of references and associations they prefer and understand. For example, people over 50 tend not to like bright colors as much as teenagers.

The User Experience Researcher
The user experience researcher has the broadest job of all. Every aspect of the user experience places different demands and constraints on those who are trying to create a good product. They all have different needs, different vocabularies, different constraints, and are often operating on different schedules. But they share similar and interrelated needs for information, often without realising it. The job of the user experience researcher is to provide insight into the product's users, their perspectives, and their abilities to the right people at the right time. The researcher is in the unique position to draw all this information — and all these information needs — together and have it make sense, making the entire development process more streamlined and effective.


Mike Kuniavsky
"Observing the User Experience"
Excerpted with permission from Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, an Elsevier imprint, copyright 2002. www.mkp.com

Associated Link: Morgan Kaufman

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