Compete on Usability

User experience reading: expand your skillset

There are a lot of great user experience books out right now.  Some I've been able to get from the library, and some I've just wanted to have on my shelf for reference.

The stick figures in a previous post were inspired by Back of the Napkin (Dan Roam). This is the book that forced me to accept that I must improve my sketching. It's not written specifically for user experience people, but it explains cognitive psychology concepts in terrific plain language. It's full of examples relating to perception, encoding, and visualization.  I highly recommend it if your come to user experience without a strong design background.

Measuring the User Experience (Tom Tullis, Bill Albert) is a good resource for practitioners who aren't well versed in making their user studies hold up statistically. As I posted previously, even if you're focused on qualitative usability test with small numbers of participants, it's important to be aware of what you're not testing. I certainly feel better knowing my chi-square from my confidence interval. The book also includes useful advice on judging nonverbal and emotional feedback from participants, and presenting results clearly to stakeholders.

Another new book with good focus on an important area is Moderating Usability Tests (Joseph Dumas, Beth Loring). Much of the material will be familiar to usability practitioners, but there are great tips inside even for old veterans of test facilitation.

I skimmed over the hefty, full color Designing Interactions (Bill Moggridge) in the bookstore, but it felt like a promotion for IDEO. Yes, they're the premier design consultancy, but how many of us can really do things the way they do? I did enjoy the end of the book, with artistic future explorations of how it might be to own meat-eating appliances and force your children to create hydrogen and power their share of the family.

Better, though I couldn't quite justify the purchase, was Designing for Interaction (Dan Saffer). This book presents hardware and even non-tech interaction design as well as that for software and the Web.  It's a little slim for the price, and I would have liked more references so I could dig into the most interesting points.

Thinking visually

One reason I haven't been blogging often is the graduate course I'm taking in information visualization.  Not only does it consume most of my free time, it's raised my mental bar for blog posts. There are several reasons I want to have better visuals to encompass my posted thoughts.

Usable information visuals break you out of text's serial tyranny.  It's the nature of verbal information to be linear, but visual encourage divergent, nonlinear thinking. As a consequence of this, techniques like mind mapping are great visualizations for creativity, even if they're composed of pure words. On the other hand, linear outlines are fine for organizing one's thoughts when writing a paper, but they're a poor way to take notes or categorize information for learning.

Unfortunately, one thing holding me back is poor drawing and sketching skills. Multiple books I've read claim that you don't need drawing skills to communicate and persuade with sketches. But I've endured one too many patronizing smiles from peers over my stick figures, spindly lines, and lack of perspective. There's nothing for this except a little guidance and learning, and a lot of practice. Perhaps over the summer, I'll convert this blog to documenting some self-assigned drawing work.  I hope I still have readers left by September!

There's nothing wrong with pencil and paper, but if you want to share sketches with your work team, it's helpful to create them directly on a computer. Some of my coworkers use slick tablet PCs for this, but I need a more conventional, powerful PC laptop that can run Visio and Photoshop at the same time without bogging down.  (As an aside, why isn't there a multitouch tablet Mac?)

Squeezing the User Experience

Over the weekend, I picked Bill Buxton's Sketching the User Experience off a shelf in the bookstore. As soon as I saw the pictures of orange juicers, I had to buy it. You see, to feed his morning fresh-squeezed juice habit, Buxton transitioned from a noisy electric juicer, to a functional manual juicer (left above), and finally to the epitome of fruit squeezing, an OrangeX manual juicer (right below).

Why he found the OrangeX juicer  such a pleasure to use, after declaring "usability has nothing to do with their differences," is really what design is all about to him.  Buxton, a Microsoft researcher, goes beyond ruminating on his experiences to interview the OrangeX designers.  He includes prototypes and sketches to show how the OrangeX's levered cam action smoothly produces more power at the end of the stroke, when the user needs it most. The reader is treated to similar looks at the design process of automobiles, film production, the iPod, and Trek mountain bikes.

For all its great examples and thoughtful commentary, I found a number of rough spots in Sketching the User Experience.  The body type is very small -- a strange choice for a book relating to usability. Some of his most provocative contentions are poorly sourced: I want more than a chart of Adobe's product releases before I'm willing to accept that software companies "are hopeless at the task" of developing new products after their first. Finally, Buxton expresses a suspicion of usability, treating it as the ill-favored stepchild of good design.  In my mind the two diciplines are natural allies, not binary choices as Buxton seems to believe.

Still, Sketching the User Experience is definitely worth your time. It's an excellent library choice, and possibly a good purchase, if you're as enchanted as I am by levered cam action. Some related movie clips are available on the book's website.