Books to read and some updates

Good afternoon, team.

I have four piece of news (you have all been sent an email about this as well).


News Bulletin 1
I found one more book, where two of the chapters are going to be useful for our user/task analysis and creating personas. I've only glimpsed at it (I'm at work you know, busy woman HA!), but this might be helpful. I'll try to photocopy this some time today.

Source: User Interface Design for Mere Mortals by Eric Butow (2007)

Did you want to preview the book? A great place to check is here (you can also try amazon, but the site below makes you want to buy any book!)
Look here: http://safari.oreilly.com/9780321447739?tocview=true

Here is the Table of Contents for the useful bits. I consider only Chapters 5 and 6 to be relevant for this project. (Note: I copied this by hand, so I hope it's accurate).

Chapter 5. How Users Behave

The Psychology of User Actions

Psychological Types

The four Primary Temperaments

Knowledge: Brain Versus World
Task Structures
Conscious and Subconscious Behavior
Transforming Difficult Tasks into Simple Ones
Creating a Conceptual Model
Case Study: Interviewing to Establish the Conceptual Model
Summary
Review Questions

Chapter 6. Analyzing Your Users

The Users' Mental Model

The Result
Implementation Versus Mental Models

The Experience Bell Curve

Different Needs for Different Groups

Understanding the User's Goals
User and Task Analysis

Constructing Personas
Watching Users in Action
Persona Evaluation

Case Study: Producing a Primary Persona
Summary
Review Questions

News Bulletin 2
I will try to speak with the IBM librarian this week. She is an expert user (librarian) but unique because she does not use the particular system we are analyzing. I'll update you on my progress.

News Bulletin 3
I have another book to circulate to the team. It's an easy to read, and a very fast read on graphics, general design, and how to use appropriate typeface.

Source: The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams (2008)

News Bulletin 4
I plan to learn how to use Adobe In Design (a desktop publishing program). I hope to create the document plan using this program and our final project. I hope to assess whether it's easy enough to learn and use in the next couple of weeks. I think it will be, but I think more than one person should work with me on it, preferably someone who plans to take the rest of the courses in this certificate. You will eventually have to use either this program or something very similar to it. I have the program for free and a book that helps you learn how to create things and tutorials.


Thank you for all of your hard work team!!!

Class of March 6th: Notes

Class schedule: Topics

March 6^th

Task analysis
Instructions

March 13^th: Structure

March 20^th: Jamie away on vacation

March 27^th: Document plan due

April 3^rd: Project discussion: Jamie will answer questions about the project

April 15^th: Project due

Task Analysis

While you build the audience matrix, you are beginning to tell stories about the user of the technology.

Scenarios: what is the dramatic story that you going to tell about the audience. It shows how a persona in a certain setting works towards goals. The design community recognizes that conflict is part of the story but they focus on goals that are present in the scenario.

Persona: is not usually one real person but is the amalgam of users in your research

People who have roles within a setting and want to achieve certain goals

Goals: Can be defined as success and accomplishments.

What is the goal of the persona?

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Example 1

• First year university students: what role do they play?
1. New users/novices
• What is the goal of the user?
1. To find some books for an assignment
• What is the setting?
1. The York library online catalogue (access from either home or the library)

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• Now that you have the persona, setting and the goals, you can tell the story (flush out any conflicts that get in the way of the goals)
• Creating a story allows you to have a wealth of samples to understand your audience (put into a form that gives you a picture)
• Could our persona actually accomplish the goals
• Some people learn with the help of examples (if you choose this option, have examples that directly transfer into the text)
• Provide key scenarios we’ve identified and mention that in the document plan; persona, settings, and goals.
• Generalize from the specific to write good instructions for your audience

A good process should

o List all of the goals that the audience have

o Decompose the goals into tasks or procedures; do they have a title, subject

o Tasks also have subtasks

o Define the audience; what do they know?

o What roles do users play and what are their goals?

o What kinds of conflicts do they get into?

o What do they need to do to succeed in achieving their goals?

o What tasks do they follow to accomplish goals?

o Find a representative number of scenarios in order to document for the audience

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Example 2

Signing up for a new bank account

Persona

Someone opening a small business bank account, sole proprietor

Setting

Business roles: walks into a bank to open a bank account

Goals

Certain subtasks: get an appointment, discuss what kinds of accounts are available, and maybe get a line of credit.

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What does Jamie want in the document plan?

1. Audience analysis
1. Descriptions, scenarios, and examples

2. Technical description(not a long one)
1. Describe what is it that you are documenting
2. Describe the kinds of problems that the audience encounter
3. What does the system achieve to do? What does it fail to do?

In this process, sometime you might be asked to write a technical description for a system that is not built. In this case you will describe

o your perspective of the system

o the scope of the technology and its uses from a manufacturer’s perspective

o the key features from a manufacturer’s perspective

3. Task analysis
1. Take the goals that you listed and decompose them in their constituent tasks
4. Table of Contents(TOC)
1. Never have a goal that starts with “Using …” or “Working with …”
2. Tasks and goals are actions and therefore should be active and not passive
3. You can group by goals to get information
5. Document Specs
1. What type are you going to use?
2. How will you use white space/ leading?
3. What kinds of graphics and design are going to use?

If you want, you can present a mock to show what it is going to look like.

This document plan should not be more than 10 pages.

o Audience analysis takes the larger part of the plan

o Task analysis should be 2^nd longest part

o Technical description should be from ½ to 1 page

o Once you have a document plan with TOC then it is easy to guess the number of pages that your project is going to have. In a real life project, you can also estimate how many people you need, how long it is going to take, and how much it is going to cost. This way the work can be professional and efficient.

Instructions

• Communicating with users will be effective if you know the physical surroundings and the position of the user
• Is there something physical that can get in the way while the user is accomplishing goals?
• Keep in mind the limits of the technology while writing the instructions

Example 3: Write instructions for someone learning how to walk.