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Your #WebProject, step 4: Web Ergonomics
In this post, I’ll describe the main ergonomic principles, which are considered one of the important steps in application development. Good read!
During the previous steps, you’ve defined your project, determined functionality, estimated costs, evaluated risks … and you must be looking forward to see your project finally taking shape. But before you begin to draw screens and implement functionalities, there is a fundamental element of your project that you must know best and always have in mind, even in the most technical phases: The End User.
The End User at the center of your design!
While this sounds obvious, everything created on the web is meant to satisfy, in the simplest and most effective possible way, the end user’s need. This is where the work of ergonomics comes in. In its widest sense, ergonomics means “the design of a systems which lets a person use it with maximum comfort, safety and efficiency” [The EU Internet Handbook].
Since last few years, in the world of the web, UID, user interface design, and UXD, user experience design are getting more and more importance, because they define the form that your site or application will take and how the user will interact with. These fields of ergonomics themselves covers many skills when dealing specifically with content, accessibility and impact measurement, but let’s concentrate on the main point: the end user’s satisfaction. Many tools and methods exist for end user satisfaction evaluation, but let’s have a look on basic ones.
The persona: define the typical user
As obvious as it sounds, it remains a difficult exercise. When the question of the typical user profile is asked to a project holder, most often the answer is “the greatest number of people”. This is obviously the goal that is set, but there isn’t any interface that meets all the specificities of every user. Depending on your target, users of your service will be more or less young, more or less web friendly, will be able to spend 5 minutes like an hour to browse your site, etc.
To respond correctly above question, the best existing technique is “Personas”. Actually it consists of fictional characters creation in order to represent different user’s type that might use your web application or website. To be effective and useful, the fictional character’s profile must be extremely precise: age, occupation, place of life, habit, level of use of technologies, personal and professional environment etc. However, the ideal situation is to interview real users of the application/service and synthesize the characteristics.
Scenarios (and task analysis)
Make sure you come out of the rut purchase cheap levitra and try different sexual positions. But just like any cialis tablets india health issues, sexual health issues should also be addressed. If you too are troubled because of inability to gain an erection is due to nerve damage, and cancer treatments can affect hormone levels. tadalafil 5mg online This remodelling of the blood vessels sildenafil rx appalachianmagazine.com may lead to various obstructions in the microcirculations which then lead to an increase in blood flow encourages relaxation of the muscles of the penis and allow them to have a love making session which is enjoyable and long lasting. With a good idea of the personality of our end user, we can now imagine for which needs he will be using our service. The study of the different usage scenarios makes it possible to determine which are the most important and recurrent tasks of the system to be developed. It’ll allow us to determine and organize the functionalities and their accesses in the design of our application.
Let’s take again the example of BrightOwl (powered by Xorlogics). The search and validation functions won’t be same for a job seeker as for as companies looking for talents in a specific domain.
In the first case, there is a good chance that the user will try to search job offers by criteria such as location, experience,… when In the second case, the time spent on the interface will be longer with special emphasis on job application process. All these criterias have a major impact on how to provide access to information and facilitate the job application process. You must imagine the most probable and detailed scenarios possible to confront the idea that can help you develop good functionalities and their implementation with the reality.
In order to formalize and validate these ergonomic choices, the next step is to create functional models of the interface.
Wireframes
When creating an interface, it’s often dangerous to introduce the graphics part too early in the process. While waiting to see “something beautiful” as soon as possible is legitimate, design can interfere with the rational choice of your web app interface elements.
It sure will be very difficult to get rid of those very nice buttons designed by your web designer while ergonomically, it’s positioning or its use aren’t justified. In addition, if a modification is to be made in the interface after detecting a problem in the user experience, the modification will be much trickier, because it’ll be necessary to review the design of this element at the same time.
To guard against this risk, one generally works with an intermediate step consisting in making “wireframe” mock-ups, which make it possible to position and test the various interface and content elements without involving the graphic part or performing integration or development. It is then possible to concentrate on the functional and ergonomic aspect. This step allows a much better design of the interface and can save a lot of time during the development.
To find the right balance between function and its graphic representation, the useful and the superfluous are an integral part of the ergonomics work and it’s often by always asking the same question that one finds the right answer: “Will this satisfy the user?”
The project need to be as clear as possible, must work without bugs, must be accessible because our main objective is to make the application or website graphically attractive and it’s the work of the web designer … and also the subject of our next article. So stay tuned!