Designing Interfaces

THE BASICS OF USER RESEARCH

Empirical discovery is the only really good way to obtain this information. To get a design started, you'll need to characterize the kinds of people who will use whatever you design (including the "softer" categories just mentioned), and the best way to do that is to go out and meet them.

Each user group is unique, of course. The target audience for, say, a new cell phone will differ dramatically from that for a piece of scientific software. Even if the same person uses both, his expectations for each are different—a researcher using scientific software might tolerate a less-polished interface in exchange for high functionality, whereas that same person may trade in his new phone if he finds its UI to be too hard to use after a few days.

Every user is unique, too. What one person finds difficult, the next one won't. The trick is to figure out what's generally true about your users, which means learning about enough individual users to separate the quirks from the common behavior patterns.

Specifically, you'll want to learn:

• Their goals in using the software you design

• The specific tasks they undertake in pursuit of those goals

• The language and words they use to describe what they're doing

• Their skill at using software similar to what you're designing

• Their attitudes toward the kind of thing you're designing, and how different designs might affect those attitudes

I can't tell you what your particular target audience is like. You need to find out what they might ...