ProductCamp Singapore Meetup — Usability
Ms Purwa Jain and Mr Suhas Sudhakaran spoke on topics related to Usability at ProductCamp Singapore’s meetup in February 2015. This is a brief account of what they said. Archiving it on my medium 😊.
ProductCampSG’s first monthly meet of 2015 meet kicked off with the topic of “Usability” for Product Managers. We had two presentations from Ms Purwa Jain of Mobilewalla on “Leveraging Seductive Interaction Design” and Mr Suhas Sudhakaran of ASM International on “Delivering Effective User Interfaces”.
Leveraging Seductive Interaction Design — Ms Purwa Jain
Slideshare Link
A seductive design makes users adopt a specific behavior that you want, be it repeated usage of an app or reducing bounce rate. The seduction lies in the right combination of psychology and design.
LinkedIn is a great study on an interface that engages users and makes them perform targeted actions: Encouraging a user to complete their profile. LinkedIn shows a banner with a question at the top of the user’s home page in case they haven’t completed some parts of their profile.
LinkedIn simplified it for users: Just one aspect of the profile to act upon and simple “Yes” or “No” buttons to click. It’s easy to answer and the user gets directed to edit the profile section. Once done, the sphere at the right hand side of their profile gets filled a certain percent. The user gets instant feedback and an eye-catching visual imagery for their action.
This feedback loop engages them to perform more tasks of a similar nature and be on their way to “All-Star” status on LinkedIn. LinkedIn achieves their target of gleaning more information about the user to customise news feeds, suggest companies to follow and employment opportunities to seek.
You can incorporate various modifications on your site to pique and gratify the curiosity of your users. LinkedIn offers to unmask visitors to a profile when users sign up for the Premium version.
People respond to humour. MailChimp, the web service that lets you send newsletters, is a company that utilises a playful chimp mascot to show error messages when users are performing tricky tasks like adjusting format of newsletters or wrestling with mailing list compilation.
Companies can also incorporate gifts and other pleasant surprises like Easter eggs for users to make them remember the experience of chancing upon them. Freemiums can also be a way to entice users to try your service and convert to paying ones.
Offering a compelling product or service in itself may no longer be enough to meet various metrics such as increasing the number of registered users or increasing the time a user spends on your app per day. These tiny tweaks supplement product marketing and make you stand out from the competition. Users respond positively to companies that show they are listening to feedback and act upon them, showing that they care.
Delivering Effective User Interfaces — Mr Suhas Sudhakaran
Slideshare Link
User Experience and User Interface designers have specific sets of processes that enable them to create the experiences and interfaces we see in products. It is vital for Product Managers to be familiar with usability, user experience and interface design in order to work with their team’s UX and UI designers fruitfully.
The user interface is what we see and the user experience is the overall feel of a product. User Interface is a subset of the User Experience.
Usable interfaces are kind. They are relatively easy to learn and the user has an easy time doing what they want with the product or service. The endless frustration of searching and failing to find a vital service can be eliminated with consistency and intuitive design.
As the title of the famous user experience book says, “Don’t make me think.” A usable interface reduces the goal completion time because the user doesn’t have to expend mental energy on learning the interface or train hard to use it. A consistent look and feel that is expressed with good colour selection and typography will ensure your brand’s identity comes across with clarity. When interfaces are usable, users spend more time on these products. This translates to more user retention and revenue.
The UI and UX of a product walk the line between art and science. The artistry of the product plays on the emotions and the feeling a particular interface invokes. This is also subjective to the taste of the UI designer and the user. At the same time, these changes are implemented based on user psychology, the science of colour theory, information architecture and gathering requirements and analysing them.
Careful consideration should be given to the layout, colour choices, graphics, text, content and interaction models used in the product. These ensure effectiveness of both visual design and usability of the product.
User interfaces are evaluated via low fidelity and high fidelity interface testing. User psychology also comes in when they are being asked for feedback. When the first low fidelity mock-ups are done, perhaps they may be presented in black and white so the audience is not distracted by the colours used.
Product managers can work with the UI/UX team to see how usability tests fit with the overall timeline of a product. Validating interfaces and experiences are valuable to see what features are important and how these can be improved.
In all, Ms Purwa and Mr Suhas provided us with an enlightening array of issues to consider when it comes to user interface and user experience. Check out ProductCamp Singapore here.
