Designing For Perception
In this post I am going to speak to something I have been wrestling with for some time now. I managed to improve my own process with regard to this on CommunityWalk, but I am still far from perfect from it and I think I could have had done some things differently to improve it.
In the few short years I have had developing software the single biggest issue I have come across is that software is not designed for perception. What does this mean you might ask? Well let me describe a short scenario that happened the other night:
My girlfriend was using CommunityWalk for the first time and was enjoying the experience quite a bit. About 15 minutes in, though, she turned to me and offered a suggestion on improving the usability and intuitiveness of the interface. It was a valid suggestion but my only response was "I can't do that". She looked at me in a confused manner and I tried to explain that the way I had designed the system wouldn't allow for a change like that very easily. In fact it would have been quite difficult to make the change.
What is the point of this little story? Well it just shows that, with CommunityWalk, I had failed to perfectly design for perception. What looked like an easy change to my girlfriend that may have drastically improved the usability of the system was simply not possible to do. There was a disconnect between the my girlfriend's perception of how it worked and how it actually worked. This happens all the time in software. There may be a piece of information displayed on what part of the screen that another part of the screen is not aware of and can not use to improve the experience. This is not a good situation and can lead to a frustrating and confusing user experience.
"Why don't they just put this information over here?"
or
"Why don't they just have this button do x, y, and z, I mean the information is all right there!"
Personally I am not sure if it is possible to perfectly design for perception. It is very difficult and as much as I thought about it while I was designing CommunityWalk, I did not completely achieve it. It becomes harder as an application evolves and is enhanced. Maintaining the connection between the functionality and the user's perception is difficult and is made more difficult as software becomes more powerful and complex (another call for simplicity in software).
One thing I think I could have done differently is to actually design the perception first then the supporting back-end. I think this would have better enabled me to grasp the user's perception of the system and design the software to support that perception. I haven't quite come up with the complete flow for how to achieve this, but I am thinking about it and will approach it again on my next project.
In the few short years I have had developing software the single biggest issue I have come across is that software is not designed for perception. What does this mean you might ask? Well let me describe a short scenario that happened the other night:
My girlfriend was using CommunityWalk for the first time and was enjoying the experience quite a bit. About 15 minutes in, though, she turned to me and offered a suggestion on improving the usability and intuitiveness of the interface. It was a valid suggestion but my only response was "I can't do that". She looked at me in a confused manner and I tried to explain that the way I had designed the system wouldn't allow for a change like that very easily. In fact it would have been quite difficult to make the change.
What is the point of this little story? Well it just shows that, with CommunityWalk, I had failed to perfectly design for perception. What looked like an easy change to my girlfriend that may have drastically improved the usability of the system was simply not possible to do. There was a disconnect between the my girlfriend's perception of how it worked and how it actually worked. This happens all the time in software. There may be a piece of information displayed on what part of the screen that another part of the screen is not aware of and can not use to improve the experience. This is not a good situation and can lead to a frustrating and confusing user experience.
"Why don't they just put this information over here?"
or
"Why don't they just have this button do x, y, and z, I mean the information is all right there!"
Personally I am not sure if it is possible to perfectly design for perception. It is very difficult and as much as I thought about it while I was designing CommunityWalk, I did not completely achieve it. It becomes harder as an application evolves and is enhanced. Maintaining the connection between the functionality and the user's perception is difficult and is made more difficult as software becomes more powerful and complex (another call for simplicity in software).
One thing I think I could have done differently is to actually design the perception first then the supporting back-end. I think this would have better enabled me to grasp the user's perception of the system and design the software to support that perception. I haven't quite come up with the complete flow for how to achieve this, but I am thinking about it and will approach it again on my next project.
posted by The Entreprexplorer | 10:15 AM
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