User Interface Design for Mere Mortals®

6

Analyzing Your Users

“Observation more than books, experience more than persons, are the prime educators.”

—Amos Bronson Alcott

Topics Covered in This Chapter

The Users’ Mental Model

The Experience Bell Curve

Understanding the User’s Goals

User and Task Analysis

In Chapter 5, “How Users Behave,” you learned about how users behave as well as the personality types, experiences, and behaviors that they bring with them. This users’ mental model is the user vision for your user interface—what they expect the interface will look like and how it will behave. The closer you come to this vision in your interface design, the happier your users will be.

If you plotted user experience levels on a graph, you would find that they adhere to a bell curve. ...