While reading About Faces 3 by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, and Dave Cronin i began reflecting the information over the startup community.
The processes you get exposed to in the book, though aimed to the Interaction Designer / Information Architect, seem to be very useful to any product design process and seem to be very focusing when it comes to designing products from the ground up, as it is usually done with a startup.
Looking around the web for a one pager / cheat sheet of the books essence i drew a blank. there is a big void when it comes to interaction design.
So i will do my best to get this books essence in the shortest form i can to give the startup community a great guide for product design that requires less than the 600 pages in the book.
This will not replace reading the book if you want to get to the full depth of the interaction design, but it will be handy when you are limited on time and funds and want to get your product focused.
The book bundles together a few processes to create an aspiring for completeness process for creating a product.
When we think of a business about to create a product we let our thought roam in the realms of features/activities and functionality and in the look and feel of the product thinking about our users.
The reality is that we are not doing this in a methodological way and tend to try our luck more then fine tune the product before launch.
Most of us still approach the design of interfaces by asking, “What are the tasks?”.
The books takes us through the following processes

1. Goal-Directed Design
2. Implementation Models and Mental Models
3. Understanding Users
4. Modelling Users
5. Scenarios and Requirements
6. Framework and Refinement

I will try now to skim off the top of each of these and make some sense at the end.
Lets go

Goal-Directed Design
The first principle here is the Goals are not tasks, they are the end goals that the tasks lead to, the motivation for getting tasks done.
The main goal of a user is not to look stupid, keep that as one of the basic principles when you think of all the interaction of the user while using the system.
Most it products tend to:

• Make users feel stupid
• Cause users to make big mistakes
• Slow users down hampering performance
• Prevent fun and/or bore users

but how do we know what are the users goals?
User goals are not like tasks they change slowly, tasks and activities change often and relevant to context.
The way to find what are the goals are to do qualitative research understanding Why a user is performing the activity.

Goals will help later in the process to better understand the users as we model them into personas.
Implementation Model vs. Mental Model, You know how we always cry over software UI that it was “Developed by Developers”? a software like that was developed using the implementation model, thinking over the features from the developers perspective.
Mental model on the other hand is how a user perceive the experience, taking the car acceleration pedal for instance. the user needs to know nothing about the ignition or air intake to understand that pressing harder against the pedal will bring the car to higher speed, this is the mental model of the pedal.
Your users are one of these 3 groups

1. Beginners
2. Intermediate
3. Advanced

The biggest group out of the three is group 2, the intermediates, most beginners turn intermediate quickly and most of them stay like that and never get to the expert group they stay perpetual intermediates.
One thing to remember here is that users don’t use the product in a frequent thus forget how some of the knowledge they accumulated.
Software UI needs to cater to the biggest group while not harming the other group’s usability.
I recommend reading this section in the book (pages 42-48) as it is one of the toughest points you will have to deal with while designing the product.

Now the book goes into understanding the users where qualitative research is to be done to establish Personas and Goals.
The research that is described in the section requires the following:

• Stakeholder interviews
• Subject matter expert (SME) interviews
• User and customer interviews
• User observation/ethnographic field studies
• Literature review
• Product/prototype and competitive audits

When trying to create the initial product in a startup we do not have the means to facilitate such a research and thus will need to create some alternative method in order to acheive partial Personas and Goals.
Some simple solutions will be to look at the competition and find out who of our friends/family/coworkers is using it, observer them and interview them.
If there are no competitors in the space we might be able to get some information from the same people while asking them to imagine the software.

When asking questions about a desired product use the guidance “Imaging that the software is magic” this will get you some ineresting responses.

If we have non of these we can try imagining what are users will be and give them qualities, we can use persona cards like organizational zoo to focus you on the type of persona’s and their associated behavioral attributes.

When approaching the personas definition (hypothesis) ask the following questions

• What different sorts of people might use this product?
• How might their needs and behaviors vary?
• What ranges of behavior and types of environments need to be explored?

When thinking about a persona we need to cover all aspects of the product usage.
Its nice when entering content is smooth and easy to a first grader but when the IT guy needs to create an export of that content and make it available to in the new upgrdaded environment we need to think of him too. He is a persona using the product.
In order to differentiate the Content Editor from an IT administrator we need to specify roles in the system usage. a role is constructed from a given number of tasks needed to be completed successfully with the system

Up to now we have a very flat persona with a Role and some character specifications but we need the persona to get some depth,
The depth of the usage is what we are more interested in as oppose to the theological thought that user might have, though they can indicate user behaviour.

The 3 measurement vectors are Frequency, Desire and Motivation.
Frequency represents the users frequency in usage of the feature.
Desire represent the will to do tha action.
Motivation is the reason behind the action, this could potentially be nowhere near the actions result.

So now you know more about the persona and its goals for some of the usage of the system.

From here the book will go into the methods of research which is valuble in the standard company improving product scanario, but has less relation to a startup before the first alfa, you can purchase the book by then with some funding on the table.

image curtesy of Design and Technology student

Reading Why Parents Write More Persuasive Copy post, only because the post title was interesting for me personally as a parent.
During the reading i got to the thought that this post is not true just for writing, its true for conversion and SEM as a guide.
The mental image i got while reading the line

“Have you ever walked into a toy store with your kids and asked them to choose something? Good luck with that. They���re overwhelmed by the options and run about, touching everything and totally unable to make up their minds about anything.

Your site visitors feel the same way. Give them too many links, too many options, too much to do, and you���ll lose them to option paralysis.”

Was so strong that I had to autosuggest it to the latest shopping experience i had for a compact flash unit.

most of the shops don���t offer all the information in a simple way, when you go to the electronics shop front you have 10-25 categories on the right hand side asking you to start drilling down, their titles are not always that easy to encrypt even if you are a tech guy. Memory in one shop is RAM at another and Media at a third.
The massive amount of links makes it impossible to choose the items that are right for you, nor is it easy to find items at all.
This resonated for a while in the need to create some easy to follow conversion rules.

I will start the list and want you all to participate in adding to it.
So here are the items i got so far:

• use simple navigation and make the choice easy – don���t give me 15-30 navigation points to get me to the subcategories of these to get me to a list of items for the subcategory! Give me my product in the realm I would look for. give me the product using classification and not your internal stock order, if I need a Compact Flash card put it in memory->compact flash or camera->memory->compact flash, Don���t make me think!
• cough up the cost – I want to know how much is delivery before I click “add to cart”, give me related alternatives if there are with costing.
• tag your products and make them match – use tagging to handle products that need to match, i.e. cpu to motherboard, memory to motherboard, display adapter to motherboard, soil for pots to pots and so on.
• push me to buy it – this is the place for the store to shine, make me know how good this product is and how much i need it, be the salesman I miss. Learn from Amazon and give me the full store experience. Taking the article answer to the ���Why?��� question
  

  “Site visitors who feel good about their choice and feel they���re making the right decision for them are going to take action ��� and confidently so.”

• Put yours in the comments

NOTE: this rant is brought to you from the latest online shopping experience I had for compact flash, most of the stores I gone through didn���t get my business because they made me think. I didn���t buy from the easiest to use but I spent more then 30 minutes to get the bloody thing even though I knew what I wanted and how much I wanted to spend.

I love the idea of Liferay portal, its a self sustaining portal and content management system that comes with many applications out of the box that enable you to shape your site as you wish without seeking a third party applications or plug-ins. The portal supports the JSR 168 and 286 for portlet development allowing you to develop a very elaborate applications on top of it with the power of Java, Spring, Hibernate, EJB, JSF and more.
The position of this Portal as of all portals is more in the mid-size business more then the personal site developer.
But with this positioning comes some software design and architecture responsibilities.
The portal should be able to cluster easily and be able to give better performance using caching.
The good news is that although clustering is not a simple switch in the configuration it is not allot more complex then a configuration of the web server, cache and Liferay. caching is also OOTB and has the benefits of the Hibernate.
Having this is very good and very reassuring for the business that sets its eyes on establishing a portal as their website.
The other great feature in the portal is the CMS based on the popular Journal portlet. though it is not a really great and flexible CMS with many of an enterprise CMS features it does get the job with simple content like Articles and so on. Dont expect to get the Vignette Content Management server out of it.
I do have some problems with the portal, especially GUI design and the separation of interfaces.
My first trouble started with the lack of a backend administrative application. i am used to this type of mechanism in most of my web applications including the WordPress i am using now. the separation of preview and management is some thing i find very important for applications.
For an example i would bring the page template management. though i have chosen a very arguable example i believe that this should be a part of the navigation tree and it should be possible to make a selection of several pages and change their templates collectively.

But this is not the end of the problems with the lack of administrative application, the administration is done by pages in the system that make it very elaborate to make it clear what is user controlled and what is administrative.
Now i have not gone beyond the simple install and have not tried to integrate it with any LDAP for users and groups or any other integration to Caching mechanisms but it appears that there is some community out there that will be happy to try and help and you might be able to archive your goal.
So if your company is in the route to get a portal and you want to go the open source way you probably should consider Liferay Portal. if you want an enterprise portal Come to Vignette.

Hi guys i found this online demo tool to sketch your SQL ERD diagrams.
Although supporting only the great MySQL and SQLite and not Oracle or SQL Server, the tool is amazing from the UI design and usability.

VoiceThread set to create the canvas of future collaboration. But after browsing for a short while in some personal experiences, most of them are educational assignments or related to education.
In the beginning of the stroll the application seems promising. a few pictures with voice annotations and a few voice comments.
The interface is very clear and holds the navigation between speakers and items in a very elegant cube like matrix.
But the moment i hit one of the more loaded items with above 10 commenter���s the interface gave in.
The amount of user icons became confusing and the flow between speakers was not expected.
Going into collaboration based on text called a forum we get to see the users interaction to the initial post in an orderly and sometimes hierarchically manner. This enables us to understand the time line and the plot… the post in VoiceThread lacks the plot we are expecting! it is not sufficient to be able to voice out people and let them respond with interactive means. The interface should be guiding and anticipated enough to put the spectator at the receiving end of the experience giving him the tools to understand the plot and participants.
The VoiceThread application is still not mature in its UI and the understanding of the story telling going on in collaborative applications that acts as the drive and motivation of users to post a post initially.
The UI is unable to sustain mass collaboration due to limitations of its display style and needs to look at the UI manufactured in apple to grasp the correct way to condense in a small space like the iPhone allot of information.

I was reading, in the CM Briefing area of steptwo site, about Intranet website designs.
The title of the article is Should the intranet look sexy?
I think that the three major stands of the short article are relevant to any site and are not really adding information to the table.
Every site should be usable, identifiable and branded.
I would like to broaden the view.
Since we are looking at users and thinking of their usage of the site my initial thought will be the need to create a usability to the website that will not be lesser then the internet site and at times better then the intranet since the clients of the intranet site are your asset that gains value to the organization. Taking that into a fact and you need to invest in a modern Web 2.0 interfaces to attract the users to information.
To achieve this I would take a look at iGoogle for example. a user should have the ability to customize the view he wants of the data. to all the control freaks in the organization you can limit this to a template based view or some basic elements that are not configurable.
To make it more attractive you can enable users to consume external news feeds and so forth and make this the page users will use most in their working environment.
This can also be a viewable by other people in the organization (based on security) for review and comparison by peers.
This is just one way to tackle the hurdle of information availability in the organization.
In the company i am with right now Vignette we have a portal implementation that allows you to create your own page. also we provide a content management with a similar implementation that allows you to view and customize your interface to match your needs and role.
I truly believe that the Intranet realm is under-developed and will need to be reconsidered by many organizations since they are neglecting their internal users that are their assets.