Henry Rose

Today I read the Gould Paper “The 1984 Olympic Message System: a test of behavioral principles of system design”. (PDF from www.tol.oulu.fi) It was an interesting paper from a systems design perspective and I’m hoping I can draw from it some useful points for the designers and builders of modern web applications.

More after the cut, including my dream for a cool use of the web for large scale usability testing.

This paper outlines the design, testing and implementation of a Voice Mail system for contestants and they’re families at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

They used a pretty strictly scenario based design which served them well as a design tool. However what I found most interesting was their remark that the scenarios they used and the personas they created were useful tools for showing their progress to the client. In my work at a small design firm in Seattle we work a lot with non-profits. These clients are often not at all technically savvy and frequently do not understand the importance of good information architecture and interaction design for their organizations websites. We do not generally expressed personas and scenarios when designing our client sites but I wonder if doing so would provide valuable deliverables for the clients to show them what it is that we’re doing in the design stages of a project. That is, beyond making pretty pictures in Photoshop.

Another point I found interesting in the Gould piece was how crucial training and real-time user help were for the system. This team created two documents at the very begining of the design process that were invaluable later on. These were simple user guides for the contestants themselves and for they’re families back home. By starting with the help the designers were able to better assess the usability of they’re system and design it’s functionality around the user experience rather than the technical capabilities of they’re computers.

In the world of modern web apps it’s often impossible to provide training to users before they start using a system. (The obvious exception to this rule is an Enterprise or Organizational app such as an Intranet.) Users for systems like mail clients, social networks and media sharing services come to the site hoping to immediately start using the system. , thus there is very little time for training. There is however great opportunity to offer real-time help to users. Particularly with recent advances in the use of Javascript designers are able to provide unobtrusive help. An example of making such help unobtrusive would be to have a “help me” link simply display a hidden Div, rather than opening another page and thus disrupting the workflow of the app.

The final applicable point that I found in this paper was their use of a kiosk mockup in the hallway at their lab. By having a rapidly revised mock-up placed in a semi-public place these designer were able to leverage the experience and expertise of anyone who might walk by. In this instance those people were not only other designers, but craftsman and construction workers as well. This exposed the designers not only to the end users of they’re system but to the stakeholders that would be physically constructing portions of the system.

This idea of prototypes in a hallway gave me an idea: Wouldn’t it be cool if there were an online sharing place for designers? Think how Flickr exposes your photography to thousands of other photographers. If they were then encouraged to give you tips on your work you’d have an amazing forum for the discussion of photographic techniques. And if you were somehow able to share your prototypes with a group of designers online you’d be able to not only gain valuable input on your designs, but provide an extremely valuable source of real world case studies to less experienced designers.