Chapter 8: Contextual Inquiry, Task Analysis, Card Sorting


Overview

Although a Web site is many things—entertainment, advertising, information—every Web site is also a tool. It's a tool to help people do something that, otherwise, would be difficult, time consuming, expensive, or inefficient. Even if the efficiency it introduces is merely a shortcut to something funny or interesting, it's still serving as a kind of tool. It's something that makes their lives a little easier. It solves some problem.

Tools solve problems, and to build the right tool, you need to know what the problem is. There are a number of ways to do that. You can guess, using your knowledge of the target audience and what they're trying to do. This is fast, but it's fraught with danger: if you're not a member of the target audience (which, as a developer, you rarely are), your understanding of the nature and severity of your users' problems will not be the same as theirs. You could decide that someone needs a bigger hammer, when in fact, he or she needs smaller nails.

Another method is to ask representatives of the target audience what their problems are, but this too can lead you in the wrong direction. People tend to idealize their needs and desires, and their statements often don't correspond to their actual needs and behavior. Many sites have been perplexed about why no one uses their personalization functionality after everyone in a survey said they wanted it. The reason is simple: ideally, people would love to have everything tuned perfectly to their preferences and needs, but the actual tuning process is much harder than they first imagine. So although they would love a service that's personalized as they imagine it, when faced with the task of having to make it that way themselves, they'd rather use the plain vanilla service.

Moreover, the obvious problem isn't always the real problem. The person who wants a new hammer and smaller nails? Maybe she really just needs a cheap birdhouse, so she's making one. Once she's done, maybe she'll never need the hammer and nails again. The best way to find out what people's real problems and needs are, and how they really do things, is to discover them for yourself. The techniques in this chapter are designed to reveal how your target audience lives, how they think, and what problems they run into.

These procedures are best done before specific solutions have been created, which is generally at the beginning of a development process. Ideally, they're done even before any technologies have been developed or ideas for solutions have been suggested. Then, all the development effort can go into solving the target audience's problems rather than trying to adjust existing technology to fit their needs. In practice, that rarely happens, but it's still good to do this research as early as possible.




Observing the User Experience. A Practioner's Guide for User Research
Real-World .NET Applications
ISBN: 1558609237
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 144

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