Northern User Experience

I’m currently studying an OU course in UI Design and Evaluation. Over on the course message board we’ve been having an interesting discussion about the terminology / jargon that the course materials use - in particular the concepts of task scenario, concrete use case, use scenario and essential use case:

a task scenario is related to a specific case, ie it is ‘concrete’
a concrete use case is not related to a specific case, ie it is abstract
a use scenario is a predicted task scenario for an as-yet unwritten system
an essential use case is less specific and higher level than a concrete use case

The students with a development background find this terminology particularly problematic because terms like use-case already exist with a definite and slightly different meaning in OO programming. It’s less of a big deal for me - I’m not a programmer so in my head, they mean what the textbook says they mean.  Even so, as a writer I can see that the concepts and their definitions are a bit on the messy side. This is an area of the course that everyone seems to be struggling to learn and retain.

I’d be interested to know how much use these terms get from people doing usability in the real world.  If you’re communicating with people from different disciplines, the last thing you need is terminology that means something different in their discipline.  I can also see how, as a field that often has to fight to be taken seriously in industry, the language of programming may have been appropriated to add gravitas.

Your thoughts please…

Following some research with my colleague who found our site, he suggested EventBrite as another place we could list our events. It’s free to list free events, so looks like it might be another opportunity for us to be found.

http://www.eventbrite.com/home

We talked a little in Wednesday’s (July 2nd) meeting about the lack of recognised qualifications to audit or certify a web site as “accessible”. I recalled a customer of my company had asked about the use of a “trusted friend”. Alas, my recollection was faulty and the phrase they had used was “critical friend”.

It is desirable that the system meets the W3C level 2 accessibility standards or conforms to another equivalent standard…
Please supply detail of how you audit your systems compliance to achieve accessibility standards. Do you make use of a ‘critical friend’ in this process if so, please state…

– extract from a request for tender document

I researched at the time the meaning of this phrase, which was new to me, and found the following reference in Wikipedia:

A critical friend can be defined as a trusted person who asks provocative questions, provides data to be examined through another lens, and offers critiques of a person’s work as a friend. A critical friend takes the time to fully understand the context of the work presented and the outcomes that the person or group is working toward. The friend is an advocate for the success of that work.

– Wikipedia article ‘Critical Friend’

The concept is very interesting and seems to have been coined in the context of UK local government.

To paraphrase, I might describe a critical friend as someone who is knowledgeable and honest enough to tell you the truth about the bad stuff, but who will, equally, give praise about the good stuff. A ‘consultant’ who is likely to dress up your short comings in fancy praise-sounding words in a fat document for a fat fee will not do.

It needs to be someone who is knowledgeable about the system under review or at least the domain involved. Someone who perhaps has a moral interest in seeing that the system succeeds: both for your organisation as supplier and the end user as consumer, but who can still be paid a reasonable fee for their time.

In the case of an accessibility review it needs to be someone who can look at the whole picture; beyond just the validity of the mark-up and ticking the boxes from the WCAG check-lists. Someone who can empathise with at least some of the challenges faced by people with a range of disabilities. Someone who can understand the use cases and evaluate your system from a functional, goal oriented viewpoint.

It naturally follows that this someone must understand ‘usability’ and the very close relationship between the two disciplines — An accessible site is likely to be more usable and a more usable site goes a long way to address some of the cognitive accessibility issues.

Great to meet Chris, Mike and Rachel, and of course Jackie (but we know each other already, from Lancaster). I certainly found the conversation got my grey matter working, which I always enjoy.

Couple of sites to look at…

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/  - written by Joel Spolsky, which I really like. Great writing style (well, it would be he wrote an essay on that too) and some very interesting ideas.

http://www.ted.com/   - If you’ve not seen the TED talks, there are some great design related ones. Jackie, if you can tear yourself away from the cooking and homely arts this will be a great distraction - assuming you’ve not devoured them all already.

If you look at http://www.ted.com/index.php/profiles/view/id/60092 you’ll see my profile there with some of my favourite talks - no desperately design related, but what the heck.

Yes, I remember, I somehow accidentally volunteered to talk about designing for older people. I can also talk about personas (till the cows come home). I’m giving a one day tutorial on personas at HCI 2008 in Liverpool again this year (did it last year) so do tell everyone and I’ll be your friend forever. I’m also putting together a half day session for executives called “Design Matters”. I’d love to run this by a test audience, so before you get sick of the sound of my voice I’d love to try this out on you and get your views. Very much focussed on helping execs understand why design is important.

Looking forward to next month, see you then.

–Pete