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DESIGN FOR CORE USER’S NEEDS<br />
With your business requirements, personas, and user data in hand, you’ve got a good set of<br />
basic insights for making choices about what interfaces to use given the context of your<br />
users, their goals, and whether those goals deviate from the business goals. As you begin<br />
crafting your design, there is an additional set of factors you want to focus on, which I’ll<br />
discuss throughout the course of the book. For now, I’ll focus on two of them, the first two<br />
of Nielsen’s LEMErS: learnability and efficiency.<br />
When I am in the thick of designing an interface and considering the possible<br />
features to include, I often ask myself: Do my users need to learn anything here? How<br />
essential is this feature I’m thinking of using? Does anyone care about learning some new<br />
feature, especially if it is secondary to the thing they are trying to accomplish?<br />
With the WSJ Live video app, we were told we had significant constraints on how<br />
many changes to the community’s habits we should force, because those habits were<br />
deeply ingrained. There’s a way they like to watch the news, and it was important that we<br />
didn’t interfere with that. For users who have daily habits, like watching TV news,<br />
learning a new way to consume the same old content is just not at the forefront of needs.<br />
That said, we decided that using the new swipe technology for video viewing was an<br />
important value-add that they would appreciate. So the requirement that they learn how to<br />
do it was acceptable, in large part because we knew it was a really quick learning process.<br />
But we still worked to make the process as smooth as possible.<br />
When it came to the Journal’s flagship news app, because of the decision to go with<br />
the multiple columns across the page format, we had to educate the user that the articles<br />
continued after that first page. At the bottom of the first page of each article, we had to<br />
add an indicator: ARTICLE CONTINUES →. This should have been seen as blunt proof that we<br />
had the wrong interface. You always want to do as little teaching as necessary.