: How to explain "achieving good Usability" I have a quite hard task right now: I need to explain agencies and graphic designers, how to design a usable website concept and visual design. The

@Alves566

This is just an idea, so it is not completely articulated.

Designers are used to working based on specs and under a tight set of restrictions. A good example is design work for the print industry. Artwork that is meant to be printed is created based on a set of well tried industry standards and project restrictions. The designer knows these restrictions beforehand and while they are creating the artwork. They know, for example, how many inks they can use before the budget breaks, how small the copy can be before the press would mess it up and render it illegible, how thin knockout lines can be before they get blotted, etc. A design that fails to meet these restrictions is considered unacceptable.

A good exercise would be to define the "web user" for (or together with) the designers. A web user is usually thought as a super human that can do anything a human can do, but that is inaccurate. A web user has a very small attention span, for example. It does not read sequentially, but it skims through the page. It has a minimum eye resolution. It has learned to ignore certain areas of the page or certain elements depending on how they look, etc.

The idea would be to think of the user as a machine that will consume the website (the same way the press will consume the artwork to produce a print) - sort of a robot with a set of skills and limitations - then to design websites having that user-machine in mind. The design would not be meant for humans but for the user-machine, with its tight set of skills and limitations.

Again, this is just a draft...

Vote Up Vote Down

@Murray976

We always need to focus on the fact that the purpose of a website is to convey an idea to the user. That idea may be motivation to do something, desire to buy your product, or something completely different, but there's always something you want the user to go away with. If you don't know what that idea is, you need to know. When designing, we need to continually remind ourselves of this purpose.

In order to convey the idea well, we need to design our sites in such a way that reduces the amount of hindrance to users understanding our the idea we're trying to convey. We want to try and make the users forget that they're reading a screen and instead focus on the idea that we're trying to convey.

With this goal in mind, we can explain specific usability issues in respect to the end goal. At the same time, we will never be able to teach the correct usability choice in every specific situation, but we can get them thinking in a usability mindset as they are designing. That means that as designers, we need to think critically about every aspect of the site and make sure that it's achieving the goal that we want, which will make it usable in the process.

Besides really pushing this goal, we need to also teach some practical examples so they get the gist of what we're saying. Personally, I think going through examples of what not to do as well as how to fix it, explaining the reasoning and principles behind those decisions is one of, if not the best way, to do so. Showing good examples of how to achieve small goals is also incredibly helpful. Examples should be pulled from the specific project(s) that your team is working on as well as clear examples from places online. User Flow Patterns has a lot of good examples, but there are many sites are similar.

As for external resources, it would be helpful to have them read a book or set of articles dealing with usability to reinforce the concepts you're preaching as well teach some things that you may have left out. There are many good resources recommended on GraphicDesign already, go look for them!

Resources to be used after something has been design, like the checklist you bring up, should be applied at different stages of the design, starting on the basic sketch or idea, again once it's mostly designed, and again when it's near finished. This should be done by the designer them self as they're designing. This may require that parts be redone before the design is finalized - which is a good thing! Iteration of smaller parts of a design is far better than having to redo the design at the end. Applying the principles at multiple stages will also reinforce the rules in the mind of the designer to where it comes out more naturally the next time.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Bryan765

I'm on here and on UX.SE... so not exactly your target group. I've also had 20 years writing technical documentation for all audiences (from highly technical to "my grandmother") under my belt.

My suggestion to you is to have the designers in question look at the materials you've already brought up (Neilsen's heuristics and the ISO standard) and have the designers ask you about things they don't understand. You will be surprised at how quickly they will pick up UX concepts. It behooves the agencies and designers to learn the UX industry jargon if they are to serve their client base well.

The best way to have designers learn usability is to have them shadow the UX expert when they are conducting tests with users. In other words, turn a "designer" into a "visual designer" (in the context of UX practice).

These are the several books I have used to broaden the depth of understanding of UX principles:


Seductive Interaction Design by Stephen P Anderson
Desigining Together: The collaboration and conflict management handbook for creative professionals by Dan M Brown
100 Things: Every Designer Needs to Know About People Susan Weinschenk, PhD
The Icon Handbook Jon Hicks
Sketching the User Experience Greenberg, Carpendale, Buxton, et al.
Designing with the Mind in Mind: A Simple Guide to Understanding User Interface Design Rules by Jeff Johnson


I also found attending courses at NN's Usability Week to be extremely helpful.

Vote Up Vote Down