Ryan Singer
Two kinds of usability
An Article by Ryan SingerI divide usability problems into two kinds:
- Perceptual: "They couldn't figure out what to do next", "they couldn't find the feature", "they didn't know they could click that button..." etc.
- Domain-specific: "We need a way to jump back here because in their workflow this happens..."
In general, usability testing only catches type 1 perceptual problems. Because in those tests you take people out of the real world and assign them tasks. Usability testing doesn't catch domain-specific problems because they only come up in real life use.
How I Wrote Shape Up
An Article by Ryan SingerHere’s a little behind-the-scenes look at the development of our newest book, Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters.
Keep digging
An Article by Ryan SingerThe hardest thing about customer interviews is knowing where to dig. An effective interview is more like a friendly interrogation. We don’t want to learn what customers think about the product, or what they like or dislike — we want to know what happened and how they chose... To get those answers we can’t just ask surface questions, we have to keep digging back behind the answers to find out what really happened.
Domain-specific vs. Domain-independent UX
An Article by Ryan SingerDomain specific UX means understanding how the supply should fit the demand considering a specific situation and use case.
On the other hand, many aspects of UX don’t require knowledge about a particular situation. They‘re based on the common constraints of human sense faculties, memory and cognition or the net of ergonomic factors around the device and the setting where it’s used. These domain independent elements of the UX are important too.
Domain independent UX should absolutely pervade the organization. It belongs to the general skill and knowledge of each supplier at their link in the chain. It’s part of learning to be a good designer, programmer, marketer, salesperson etc.
The Fidelity Curve
An Article by Ryan SingerHow do we choose which level of fidelity is appropriate for a project?
I think about it like this: The purpose of making sketches and mockups before coding is to gain confidence in what we plan to do. I’m trying to remove risk from the decision to build something by somehow “previewing” it in a cheaper form. There’s a trade-off here. The higher the fidelity of the mockup, the more confidence it gives me. But the longer it takes to create that mockup, the more time I’ve wasted on an intermediate step before building the real thing.
I like to look at that trade-off economically. Each method reduces risk by letting me preview the outcome at lower fidelity, at the cost of time spent on it. The cost/benefit of each type of mockup is going to vary depending on the fidelity of the simulation and the work involved in building the real thing.
Time-based analytics
An Article by Ryan SingerAnalytics apps don't tell you much about usage behavior. You might be able to see how many users performed an event, or how many times they did it. But none of the analytics packages out there are good at showing you how often people do things. Are they using to-dos once a week? Every day? Only signing into the app once a month but happily paying for years?
Time matters. You can't understand usage without time.
UI and Capability
An Article by Ryan SingerI’m very conscious of whether I am affording a feature or styling it. It’s important to distinguish because they look the same from a distance.
...Affording a capability and styling it are both important. But it’s essential to know which one you are doing at a given time. Style is a matter of taste. Capability and clarity are not. They are more objective. That person standing at the edge of the chasm cares more about accomplishing their task than the details of the decor.
What happens to user experience in a minimum viable product?
An Article by Ryan Singer"Feature complexity is like surface area and quality of execution is like height. I want a base level of quality execution across all features. Whenever I commit to building or expanding a feature, I'm committing to a baseline of effort on the user experience."
There’s a distinction to make: The set of features you choose to build is one thing. The level you choose to execute at is another. You can decide whether or not to include a feature like ‘reset password’. But if you decide to do it, you should live up to a basic standard of execution on the experience side.
Features can be different sizes with more or less complexity, but quality of experience should be constant across all features. That constant quality of experience is what gives your customers trust. It demonstrates to them that whatever you build, you build well.
What UI really is (and how UX confuses matters)
An Article by Ryan SingerPeople mix the terms UI and UX together. UX is tricky because it doesn’t refer to any one thing. Interface design, visual styling, code performance, uptime, and feature set all contribute to the user’s “experience.” Books on UX further complicate matters by including research methods and development methodologies. All of this makes the field confusing for people who want to understand the fundamentals.
That’s why I avoid teaching the term ’UX.’ It means too many things to too many different people. Instead I focus on individual skills. Once you understand the individual skills, you can assemble them into a composite system without blurring them together. For software design, the core skill among all user-facing concerns is user interface design.
Two Cycles
Gorgeous artwork by Minori Asada.
Among the trees
To accommodate the spaces between the trees, I built three walls in a radial pattern. Filling out the spaces on both sides of these three spline-like walls, I came up with a structure that appears to be slipped in among the trees. This design allowed us to proceed without cutting down any of the woods.
Small economies
I refer to small money-earning business that consist of the work of a visible individual, or have evolved from a personal hobby or skill, as "small economies". We can include in this category newer forms of at-home work—side businesses, telecommuting and the like. The amount of income is unimportant; meager profits are compensated for by the motivation of the owner. A small economy may or may not be someone's main form of livelihood, but it is always a spontaneously conceived and continuing activity.
An extremely closed structure
Nearly all housing in Japan today consists of exclusively residential units for salaried workers and their nuclear families. Such residences have, by definition, no reason to interface with their surroundings.
Salaried workers commute to workplaces outside, and often a considerable distance from, their homes. Residences built for these workers do not contain a place of livelihood—in the broader sense, a place for exchange. This "residence-only housing" is only a place for the nuclear family to eat and sleep, with no occasions for interaction with the outside world, and no need to foster a sense of belonging to the community at large. Thus the only organizational principle is the maintenance of privacy. Both in external appearance and in lifestyle, it is an extremely closed structure.
Ecological cycles
This house exists in the midst of a year-long cycle of natural phenomena. One might say that this cycle entails the periodic "rise and fall" of the ground surface. In winter it sinks below a snow cover that grows head-high or more; as spring approaches, this height gradually decreases until we can see the actual ground surface, not yet covered with undergrowth. With summer the vegetation grows higher and higher until the plaza seems once again to be lower than its surroundings. With the falling of the leaves, autumn restores our ability to penetrate these surroundings at eye level, at least until the snow begins to fall again... Through the four seasons, we experience the sensation of the ground rising and falling, like the ebb and flow of the tide.
I call this cycle of natural phenomena an ecological cycle.
Doing community
There is a Japanese catchphrase, community suru, literally "making" or "doing" community. I will never forget the queasy feeling that came over me when I first heard that term, phrased as if community were a kind of event.
Hold an event, bring people together, get people who might otherwise never meet to interact. It's a wonderful thought. I have nothing against events per se. However, if they are not spontaneous and voluntary, they will not last. That is my objection to the keep-it-lively concept of community. The perception of community as event stems, I think, from a yearning for the festivals and rituals that once flourished in rural communities in Japan. But those events occurred precisely because a community existed, not the other way around.
What are those borders made of?
Functionalist modern architecture has prioritized the functionality of interiors and treated surfaces and external appearances as an outcome of that priority. Diagrams illustrating functional layouts generally frame them with thick borders. Updating conventional program theory entails questioning what those thick borders are actually made of, and how they should be designed. A dynamic program theory should be one that turns these thick borders into more organic interfaces that will foster exchanges and interactions.
An ecological cycle
In the design of his own residence / workplace, Toshiharu Naka created a small ecological cycle. Rows of green planters in front of the wall protect the house from the sun and help cool it in summer. Rainwater is collected via catch-basins from the roof, and used to water the planters.
In the water buckets is a micro-cycle — fish live in the buckets, eating mosquitos from the planters, eliminating the need for pesticides.