The Usability Professionals’ Association 2006 conference ended two Fridays ago. The buzz in the halls was that it was a good conference.
The post-conference page is here.
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June 2006
You probably have a couple of “guilty pleasure” web sites that you read on a consistent basis. C’mon, you know you can’t stop reading The Smoking Gun or Fark.com.
My guilty pleasure is Engadget. It’s a blog about (duh) gadgets, founded by Ryan Block and Peter Rojas. It’s now part of Weblogs Inc., itself purchased by AOL late last year.
Engadget is great because it’s all about high-tech consumer products. Though most posts are “scoop” type articles (they troll the FCC site looking for clues about new products), every few posts actually review new devices. And when something is poorly designed or hard to figure out, they’re not shy about saying it. Sample post: “Pure Digital’s Creepy-Looking Bug Too Radio.”
Highly recommended.
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A recent discussion on a discussion list about setting success criteria for usability test tasks got me to thinking about what else we should measure when we put users in front of applications, devices, and web sites.
In short, I think we should be measuring a lot more than just “can the user successfully complete the task?”
We should also measure:
Whether people want to perform the task at all. Is the feature useful? Does it have utility? Is it applicable to their needs?
How they felt about performing the task. Do they feel positive? Negative? Put through the ringer, as it were?
To me, this is the distinction between studying usability and looking at the user experience as a whole.
However, there are a number of pitfalls in this area. One big one: participants’ ratings of desirability, satisfaction, and perceived utility, like all self-report measures, can all be hugely affected by social desirability – the tendency for people to behave in ways that they think others want them to behave, and say things they believe others want to hear. So this basically leaves “obfuscated self-report” and observational methods of inferring desirability, utility, and satisfaction.
Here’s a couple of resources in this area:
Joey Benedek and Trish Miner’s Desirability Toolkit: A set of techniques for assessing participants’ affective reactions to an application or device.
The Handbook of Human Factors and Ergonomics: VERY pricey, but comes highly recommended from people in the field who I trust.
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