Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Alexander Muir

Alexander Muir — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 21:37:32 GMT

Designers certainly should have acting seminars – or courses in counselling, or reading ancient myths and legends, or live in a different culture etc because this type of activity helps one get out of one’s own reality tunnel and experience things from someone else’s perspective.

Most people find it easier to empathise with certain types of people, and harder with others. Its important to know one’s limits, because a shallow level of empathy with a persona is pretty much useless. For example, a persona who represents a patriarchal, head-of-household type. People may tend to see his shadow side: grumpy, authoritarian, old fashioned. But that isn’t good enough for rich persona work; its necessary to see the hopes and aspirations, the softness and dreaminess, inside this person. Otherwise, the persona has just become a cliche of little value and no interest.

When I’ve interviewed people for UX/IA positions, and asked them their experience, they often say that they have worked with personas. When I ask them if they have found it easier to relate to some than others, they say No – they have no trouble relating with them. This indicates to me its likely they haven’t really related very much with any of them! Or, the personas they have worked with have been rather banal. If, on the other hand, someone said to me: ‘Yes, I found it hard to relate to the young teenager’ – that would indicate they have some degree of self-awareness in this area.

So I’m all for acting classes, or whatever floats your boat.

Alexander Muir — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 15:46:39 GMT

I’d like to read more on this idea if the article goes into nitty gritty detail. Especially if Praveen has new insights or angles into how we design and test for user experience.

Alexander Muir — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 22:05:11 GMT

In our usability lab we keep finding people don’t scroll for the types of site we’re involved with.
So I would love to see this paper, especially if there is a good analysis for which contexts the findings hold true for, and where they can’t necessarily be applied.

Alexander Muir — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 16:50:27 GMT

Streamlining recording, analysis and reporting sounds very useful David! Will this article talk about harnessing features in Morae 2.0?

Alexander Muir — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 18:46:45 GMT

Sounds interesting, I would like to read this – especially how to get lucky :-)

Alexander Muir — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 18:50:28 GMT

This should be a good read. I know Anthony through work, and he brings a unique mix of freshness and experience to things. Plus he brings another angle as he has internal experience.

Alexander Muir — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 16:50:36 GMT

How do you handle input from the bosses wife? I would laugh if it didn’t happen! Its hard since there is a certain resistance to getting uninvited feedback, and it can be perceived as a personal slight (though it generally isn’t). If there is already some tension in the team where some members feel their professional experience is not being respected, this sort of thing can be taken pretty badly.

On the other hand, inspiration and ideas can come from any where.

I would like to hear experiences of bosses who do manage to bring in ideas from their wife (or kids or pets!) while still keeping a happy team.

Alexander Muir — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 22:52:13 GMT

Yes, its easy to say ‘lets test it, lets get some data’ as a delaying tactic. As the user advocate / usability specialist, I feel I have to be on my toes to produce data at that point, if I don’t feel doing a whole test is worthwhile.
Also, I have to be ready to explain usability heuristics that often go into my own analysis – that’s something I’m working on now: how to explain easily to a team mate why something will be hard to use, without necessarily having to resort to a full usability lab test.

Alexander Muir — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 19:21:58 GMT

I’ve had to push my team members to keep things above the fold, because we are developing a social networking site where the on screen layout and interactive elements are not ‘familiar’. We’ve found in user tests that people were misunderstanding things because some of the key interaction elements were below the fold – which, as you say, is one of the times that its important to keep things above the fold.

We found that people were trying to asses the page by what was visible above the fold – and coming to some grief as a result.

Alexander Muir — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 18:04:37 GMT

May I politely suggest trimming back the analogies and bringing to the fore the practical things that this article would teach.

Alexander Muir — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 18:09:38 GMT

Re: the ‘web 3.0’ in the title: personally I’d rather see the ‘web 3.0 moniker’ arrive in its own good time, rather than try to pin it to web technology that hasn’t fully manifest yet. Its hard to write about how speech would relate to web 3.0 when no one yet knows what web 3.0 is. It would, though, be interesting for me to read an article about what speech online actually IS nowadays, and it does make the web more comfortable for humans to interact with. If you (or someone) could give examples of (un)successful projects or experiements, that’d be really interesting.

Alexander Muir — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 19:18:17 GMT

Hearing best practices based on research would be very interesting. Holistic is one of these words that’s a bit vague, but does correspond to a definite type of experience or outlook. Its hard for me to put my finger on it, so reading this would be a help!

Alexander Muir — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 00:05:35 GMT

I’ve found these brief, snappy types of interview great for doing a first pass over a user group. But also insufficient to really get to know users, which does take time. So though I think this is a good approach to have in the toolbag, it doesn’t replace longitudinal studies where you get to follow real users for a while.

Alexander Muir — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:50:32 GMT

I’d like to read a case study on designing transitions. Your own take on the Vista copy feature sounds interesting. Though, in fairness, if you don’t know what the designers were or weren’t trying to do, ie if you’re only guessing, then better to leave that part out.
But still, seeing a worked example of how to design transitions would be cool.