Some Techniques for Observing Users
Kathleen Gomoll · 2001
The word is out: Users should be involved in interface design. But how many people practice what they preach? Until I started observing users, I didn’t know the excitement, the value, and the ease of involving users in design. Each time I set up an observation, I find myself discovering something new about the way people think and work. I’ve become such an advocate that I try to observe users at every stage of the design process: brainstorming, prototyping, building, and evaluating. When our group at Apple began to design an interface for on-line help, we decided to involve users in the project right away, before we had a prototype. To find out what kind of help users really need, we watched and listened to people using Macintosh applications. We noticed that people ask several distinct types of questions when they need help. These question categories gave us an idea for a menu scheme and provided the structure for our help interface. Since that initial brainstorming session, we’ve been asking users to try out each of our design iterations. And we’ve learned a great deal. We’ve seen users interacting in ways we couldn’t predict ourselves; we’ve found out what works and what doesn’t; and we’ve saved ourselves a lot of time. By observing users early on and often, we’ve been able to catch problems in the prototype stage, rather than waiting until just before the product ships. (For more information about the On-line Help project, see the chapter by Abi Sellen and Anne Nicol.) This chapter is an outline of the steps I typically go through when conducting a simple user observation. This isn’t the only way to observe users; in fact, it’s one of the least scientific ways. But if you try this technique, you’ll get lots of useful data for designing and revising your interface.