Observing the User Experience

CHAPTER 8 Contextual Inquiry, Task Analysis, Card Sorting

Although a Web site is many things—entertainment, advertising, information—every Web site is also a tool. It’s a tool to help people do something that, otherwise, would be difficult, time consuming, expensive, or inefficient. Even if the efficiency it introduces is merely a shortcut to something funny or interesting, it’s still serving as a kind of tool. It’s something that makes their lives a little easier. It solves some problem.

Tools solve problems, and to build the right tool, you need to know what the problem is. There are a number of ways to do that. You can guess, using your knowledge of the target audience and what they’re trying to do. This is fast, but it’s fraught with danger: ...