FRONT - A Strategy, Design and Technology Studio

Andy brought the participants through a well structured workshop on why and how to run effective usability testing sessions. Using examples from web design and computer game design, Andy showed how it makes eminent financial sense to iteratively improve the quality of products based on user testing - a little testing at the beginning of your project with a small number of people can catch the vast majority of issues that would otherwise be experienced after release; damaging the perception of your product and brand.

His talk reinforced a core theme of this year’s Web 2.0 Expo: online services need to integrate with users’ existing social networks if they want to succeed in the long term.

The Challenge

At the core of our jobs as web designers is the need to take complicated data and offer this to users in a way that’s accessible and useful. In our context, this takes the form of information architecture and sensible interaction design principles - but what if the set of data is so rich, so deep, that traditional information architecture fails to cope? How can we make a web of data, not of pages, useful and comprehensible?

This three hour workshop covered a lot of familiar ground: researching and documenting users’ needs, then mapping those needs to functionality and the prioritisation/placement in the interface. It was really nice to see that some of the core skills we use when designing for larger displays (on the desktop) still apply when designing for mobile. Having said that, Kim highlighted a lot of key things to take into account when designing for the mobile experience, and offered some great insight from her own work.

In this situation (after hearing the screams of a thousand web designers in my head) I mostly find myself arguing for the right to scroll. Although other times I plot against the scroll and damn it to hell. So what is the issue?

The right to scroll is an age-old argument (well, an age in GUI terms…), and one that is likely to continue into the future so long as the volume of our content eclipses the display area available. For the mean-time we need to take a balanced view and begin with the most important factor – context.