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Building better interfaces.

The psychology of user-centred design.

Usability can make or break a web-site or consumer product. A great interface can boost traffic or sales, whilst a poor one can switch people off. We carry out analysis with typical users to understand where improvements in usability can be made. However the earlier in the development this work is done, the greater the savings in terms of avoiding mistakes and re-working.

User-centred design draws heavily on cognitive psychology. We focus on measuring behaviour and understanding the user's model of how they think they can achieve their goals We produce a description of the user's experience, highlighting strengths and weaknesses in the design, and seek to give you clear recommendations for improvements.

To find out more please call 01628 674398 or email info@self-insight.com.

In a typical project the key steps are to:

Establish objectives for the project, define scope and usability metrics.
Collect data - about the users' experience. We would seek to understand the user's goals, their implicit model of the way the system works and their priorities. Factors that users believe are important include: ease of finding information and performing actions; the ease of discovering how to achieve goals if it is not obvious; performance (e.g. page load time); the clarity of the languge used; and accessibility. We collect data on users' experiences using a variety of methods:
- Lab testing. The key idea behind lab testing is to control the environment in which the user is operating, and observe directly what they are doing. This generally provides stronger evidence than asking them afterwards to recall what they thought they were doing. Video recording of their actions. Audio recording as they talk through performing a task. Eye movement tracking, for finer-grained analysis. This produces a map showing where on a screen people are looking most frequently, and the sequence of eye movements. This highlights both what people are looking for and what they are missing.
- Direct observation.
- Interviews. Structured interviews can provide in-depth, qualitative insights.
- Focus groups. Focus groups can collect feedback more quickly than individual interviews, in a more natural setting, and allow people to 'bounce' ideas off each other. They can provide a quick means of sanity checking suggestions for change. A video recording is usually taken for off-line analysis. Focus groups can also be used to brainstorm new ideas for an interface.
- Questionnaires. Questionnaires are a more formal approach, and can be used to collect comments as well as quantitative ratings from users that can be aggregated to produce usability indexes.
Analyse the key findings. We generally produce reports that summarise performance against the key metrics and highlight areas for improvement. We also use techniques such as protocol analysis and task analysis.
Feed the findings back into the design.
Map out a strategy - taking a wider view. We can dig deeper into the context within which the web-site or product operates and answer questions such as: How do you rate against your competition? What are the different user profiles? How do these relate to customer segmentation? What do people with different profiles want? How should the web-site re-inforce the brand image / communication strategy? What is the business case for a web-site refresh? How do you measure return-on-investment for a usability study? How is the content managed and do you have an information architecture?

In addition to this we offer the following services:

Accessibility audit and advice. We can audit your web interface against best practice for accessibility and help you comply with the Disability Discrimination Act and the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative.
Prototyping based on user-centred design. Working with our software development partners we can go beyond measurement and analysis, and using rapid prototyping tools - iteratively develop new interfaces with you. Prototypes focusing on usability issues would initially be vanilla, graphic-design-free. At a later stage we could bring in our graphic design partners.
Competitor benchmarking. We can compile metrics and commentary on competitor websites and products.
Usability training. We can arrange training courses for developers, project managers and business analysts on user-centred design, usability and accessibility issues.