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Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

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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.

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