Designing for Novices & Experts, Part 1
Back in September 2016 I presented and published at the Society for Technical Communication. This is an amazing professional group of technical communicators and user-focused individuals who gather annually. With their summit in Washington DC last year, and since I live only a few miles away, it was a fantastic opportunity for professional growth and to share some ideas I’ve been working on regarding designing for experts and novices.
I’m writing this to break that talk down into something consumable for reading. In order to not overwhelm anyone, I’ll be dividing my talk into three separate posts:
- An overview of why it is important to design for experts and novices (this one)
- How to design for both
- My advice for how to design for both with some common dos and don’ts.
It is an hour’s worth of content that is being boiled down into written, digestible content chunks. These separate sections should make it easier to read. Also, there may be some sections you’d like to skip or spend more time on.
Before I get started, I’ll cover briefly why I’m credible to discuss this topic. I have 15 years of experience in Human-Computer Interaction working on 8–15 products at one time. I manage a team of 5 user experience engineers and work in a larger product development team of 60 software developers. These programs present real-time visualizations of data being reduced, analyzed, and presented in subsecond-rendered interfaces. The products I work on have domain experts and also experts that have been using the same command-line interface for thirty years. In comparison, I also have people that are fresh out of high school that have to come up to speed in a complex domain with little or no training. Designing for both is a regular balancing act that my team and I design for every day.
You can find the whole presentation here.
Why Design for Both?
Supporting novice users has a great business case: everyone starts as a novice and novices are usually the largest consumer of online applications [1]. The problem is that novices are not the only users of software. At the opposite end of novices are experts. These two sets of users can have vastly different experiences and vastly different tactics for being successful with the same exact software. Yet, with software design budget constraints, there are usually only enough money and time to make one user interface (UI).
To design for both experts and novices requires an understanding that they have different workflows and information density needs. Often, the focus is on novices because everyone starts as a novice. However, this can be to the detriment of the expert. In an article by Jakob Nielsen [7] and another by Bruce Tognazzini [8], both experts in the field of User Experience and Interaction Design, they argue that the focus on the learnability of a UI has made the idea of designing for the expert a taboo. This is because experts are going to need different user interface elements that may be visually displeasing to interface designers. Experts can require extensive features, visual clutter, and a much larger information display density than the novice. Roughly, this means that the user interface that encourages learning is not necessarily the right interface for the expert. UIs that encourage learning have open spaces, clutter reduced, and text to tell the user how to be successful; features that are contrary to what experts may want and need.
Designing for both is not impossible. For example, the Google homepage (www.google.com) shown above does a great job of supporting users along the spectrum of novice to expert. When users first visit the homepage they are visually encouraged by the inviting logo on a stark white background with an open text box underneath the logo. Two buttons are anchored below the text box that give clear calls to action. For the novice user this interface is simple; the help text is even incorporated into the button text, “Google Search.” The workflow of entering search terms is clear to the novice user without even a click.
What is unexpected is that the expert user is also supported on this same page, and not just because the user interface is easy to understand. The experts are supported by all of the items in light gray text that are anchored to the top and bottom of the page. Examples include quick links to Gmail and Images. To novice users these items are ignored because they blend into the background. To the expert these are powerful tools that help them work quicker and with less frustration. Both users can find a home in the same interface.
Lets compare Google’s search to BoardGameGeeks.com. I love this website. I’m on there at least once a week checking out new games or to look up a game that I saw in a forum. However, the first time I went to the website I was so overwhelmed. Rather than a clean interface, users are presented with so much text. Every UI element appears to be fighting for the user’s attention. The search bar isn’t where user’s expect (normally anchored top right), the interface is filled with jargon (“what are RPGs?” I can hear users crying), and what are the numbers everywhere? To a novice this is cluttered, confusing, and lacking a clear call to action.
Experts, on the other hand, know where to go to search (in the top middle, within the blue bar), they know that RPG stands for ‘Roll Player Game’, and that the numbers are how many people recommend that newsletter or game. Experts appreciate what looks like clutter, because to them it looks like dense, useful information. Through learning, domain expertise, and patience, users can become experts in this system.
Another example of different interfaces for novices versus experts that I love to use is Adobe Photoshop. This is a tool that I use weekly and is a premiere software tool that allows for fantastic editing of graphics. It is a tool that is a nightmare for novices and a dream for experts. Lets take a quick look at it to figure out why. The first indicator is the number of small esoteric icons without labels. The use of icons with out labels, as I’ll cover in a later post, is dangerous. For experts, you save the space — meaning you can fit more on the screen; for novices it means that they have difficulty finding what they are looking for. Another problem with this UI is the distributed functions. There are options on not just the top and bottom, but the left and right. And, within options there are further options, which is shown in a double option bar on the right. This sandwiching of functions again means that experts can have multiple toolboxes open and work quickly; but for novices this can be quite intimidating.
While image editing is never easy, lets compare this to something really simple like the Photos App that comes default on an iPhone. Below is a picture I took the other day when I was out to lunch. Look at how stupid simple the app is. The user selects their photo and that they want to edit. They then are given four methods to edit the picture. (While these options are depicted as icon buttons, since there are only four, they are not as overwhelming.) Then, once the user clicks an option they are given easy grip-able actions with clear affordances such as sliding or zoom-and-pinching. The small number of options paired with clear and simple affordances makes this an application that is simple to master.
All of the factors discussed above can impact how easily a novice and expert user are able to navigate an application. The rest of these articles are dedicated to understanding how to replicate the success of the Google homepage by understanding how user needs can vary, creating tools that reify user needs, and making use of powerful design patterns.
Leveling Up
Some users stay as novices; some make the journey to become product experts. What motivates users to become experts? Understanding why a user chooses to become an expert will help with influence. For instance, it may be perfectly acceptable to have a user population that is predominantly novices (e.g., calling for emergency services should be something we all do rarely and it should be as easy as possible). Or, you may need your users to become experts, and quickly (e.g., managing a complex workflow or evaluating nuanced data may require not just domain expertise but also complex functions within the UI). These factors are covered in articles from GivingGoodUX, by Joe Natoli (a super talented UXer), but they are worth summarizing here.
Reasons Novices become Experts:
- It’s important. If the purpose of the task is something that your users care about, then they will put in the effort. An example would be something like taking pictures of your babies’ first steps. Or, when your mom insists she can only call you on WhatsApp when she is in another country.
- It’s something we do often. Your users may have to interact with something often and through that frequent interaction can gain enough confidence to try other features or more complex features.
- The cost of use is low. There are cases where users can switch between applications and features in a way that they aren’t even aware they are learning. Think about how easy it can be to switch between Facebook and Facebook Messenger. The switch can be seamless and can thus reduce the cost of moving to new applications and trying new features.
- We have few alternatives. There some things you just have to do. When you don’t have a choice, you’ll go ahead and learn enough to complete a task. One of the applications that I have to use includes Photoshop. (Oh Photoshop, you beautiful mess.) I have no choice but to use it because there isn’t another piece of software that I have access to that is as powerful.
- Our first interaction seems simple. There is nothing as amazing as deception. Even complex tasks can be broken down into simple steps. If that first step is very easy and then the next and the next, you can con your users into doing almost anything.
Defining diversity of user needs
Now that we know why everyone doesn’t stay as a novice, lets look at the qualities that distinguish a novice versus an expert. While user interfaces must be designed to accommodate a spectrum of users, there are multiple factors that impact expertise:
- How much time the user spends with the user interface. Users who spend a short amount of time with the software are going to have varying levels of knowledge, or even repeated frustration, with the same user interface. Prior successes or failures are going to impact the success of future interaction with the software [2].
- How familiar the user is with modern UI elements and technology in general. This has three implications. The first is that UI elements can be styled differently, and this styling can impact how well users perform with the same UI element. As an example, one study found that younger users preferred and were more familiar, and thus performed better, with skeuomorphism (or flat design) [3]. The second implication is that as new UI libraries are released people who were familiar with older libraries are going to have to transition. This means that users are going to have to learn new methods of interaction to accomplish the same goal. Thirdly, users who are more familiar with multiple types of technology are more proficient at transitioning skills between applications [4]. Similar to learning multiple UI element stylings, when people are used to interacting with multiple kinds of technology the are more adapt at transitioning those skills.
- The tasks the user completes impacts the features used. Users who complete focused and discrete tasks are going to use a smaller set of features within a user interface when compared to users that interact with a broad set of features to complete a diverse set of tasks. Inherently, users with discrete tasks can more easily master their path through the user interface to complete a task than users with more nebulous task paths [5].
- Users with domain expertise understand jargon and specific task elements more easily. When software is created for a niche set of users, the software is going to reflect that jargon back to the user group. However, there are going to be novices within the niche user group who have not yet learned the domain knowledge.
- Users have difference preferences. As an example, one study looked at top versus side navigation and found that a preference for one over the other resulted in more usability errors in the one that was disliked [6].
References
[1] Clarkson, Joshua J., Chris Janiszewski, and Melissa D. Cinelli. “The desire for consumption knowledge.” Journal of Consumer Research 39.6 (2013): 1313–1329. https://doi.org/10.1086/668535
[2] Hone, Kate. “Empathic agents to reduce user frustration: The effects of varying agent characteristics.” Interacting with computers 18.2 (2006): 227–245.
[3] Robbins, William Hunt. “Design practices in mobile user interface design.” (2014).
[4] Prümper, Jochen, et al. “Errors in computerized office work: differences between novice and expert users.” ACM SIGCHI Bulletin 23.2 (1991): 63–66.
[5] Santhanam, Radhika, and Susan Wiedenbeck. “Neither novice nor expert: the discretionary user of software.” International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 38.2 (1993): 201–229.
[6] Pratt, Jean A., Robert J. Mills, and Yongseog Kim. “The effects of navigational orientation and user experience on user task efficiency and frustration levels.” Journal of Computer Information Systems 44.4 (2004): 93–100.
Can’t wait for the next post? You can read other posts on this blog, or you can always come learn more about Next Century. If you are interested in learning more about Next Century, please check our website below:
