Tips and Techniques

Follow-Through Is Critical to a Great User Experience

It's not uncommon for new organizations in the initial stages of adopting a focus on user interaction and a compelling user experience to "lose" (or compromise) some of the user interface design enhancements and their corresponding business benefits along the path from development to deployment.

While it's understandable that there are always a couple of last minute design tweaks, it's important that these are kept in control and to a minimum so the full value of the methodological approach is realized in the end product.

Sometimes unnecessary design changes occur as a result of the newness of the rigorous, methodological DAViD approach to the organization or business. The quality checks necessary to ensure its complete delivery are not always entrenched in the overall product creation.

There are a number of ways to make sure the maximum benefit of the approach actually "makes it out the door". Two of the most important ones are:

  1. Formalizing a process for user interaction deployment, not just development
  2. Ensure cross organization education and awareness of the user interaction and user centred design

Formalizing a Process for User Interaction Deployment

Almost all product development processes have a "late stage" quality check on the performance code to ensure the product performs the way it is supposed to at a functional level. Typically this is referred to as verification.

Implementing similar verification at the user interface (UI) level to make sure the UI "performs" the way it is supposed to is a great way to ensure that all the design benefits from the design specification are realized in the physical product. Like all effective aspects of product development this means planning, and ensuring that someone is responsible for its delivery.

Verification of the User Interface design follows the same approach as verifying that the functionality is operating correctly - and in fact, can be done in parallel. Typically the functionality is captured in a document such as a use case (a document capturing the flow and outcome of activities the product is supposed to support). The verification specialist "walks through" a use case - often with a target user - checking to make sure that all aspects of the use case are achievable. The behaviour of the user interface can be verified at this time.

To make this practical it's helpful to have two things;

  1. the verifier should be intimately aware of the UI design specifications and,
  2. they should have something like a UI design checklist that can quickly be used to ensure that fundamental aspects of the user interface are met.

Education

One of the most effective ways to ensure that a well designed GUI actually gets implemented in the way it is supposed to, is to ensure that the actual people coding it, the developers - and the people they report to, development managers - understand the value of the GUI design and the process that arrived at this design. This has important benefits. When developers are aware of how the GUI design contributes to the business requirements defined for the project they are less likely to 'tweak' it because they realize that even small changes may reduce the value delivered. By understanding the DAViD process for delivering a positive user experience, developers will recognize that user interaction design is at the heart of GUI design and that changes to the GUI may have a deeper impact than the 'look' of the interface - they may actually hamper users' interactions with the product.

Even with these and other quality processes in place to deliver an effective design (which delivers the value specified by the business requirements) there are often one or two minor specifications that are missed. The fundamentally important characteristic of a User Centered Design process is that the iterative approach ensures that when the design evolves to the next release or update that problems are corrected and enhancements are put in.

That way, the product is always adapting and evolving to meet business value goals and customer needs.