Desirability and Interface Design
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Posted On :
Feb-05-2011
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Article Word Count :
761
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Evaluating the desirability of a user interface design is a beneficial way of complementing usability testing. After determining that a user interface design is usable, an interface designer might want to know more about what users perceive in terms of intangible variables, such as “joy” and “fun” when using an application.
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“Companies that once obsessed over how to engineer new products must now also obsess over how to reverse–engineer the desires of their consumers. This is more than just a matter of market research. It is fundamental to every decision you make.”
— Reverse–Engineering Desire By Jeffrey F. Rayport
What is desirability and what does it mean for interface design?
Evaluating the desirability of a user interface design is a beneficial way of complementing usability testing. After determining that a user interface design is usable, an interface designer might want to know more about what users perceive in terms of intangible variables, such as “joy” and “fun” when using an application. A good way of finding this out is through desirability testing. Desirability testing is intended to assess target users' emotional response to a design or stimulus. In effect, desirability testing is much about visual design, while usability testing strives to assess underlying behavioral patterns. Bluntly speaking, in usability testing the emotional response is inconsequential and in desirability testing usability is inconsequential. When an interface design scores highly on usability and desirability it stands a better chance of pleasing clients and being a success.
How to measure desirability of an interface design through questionnaires
There are a number of ways of conducting the desirability testing of interface designs. One of the ways is through broad and experience-based subjective satisfaction questionnaires. The questions often ask users to rate some part of the interface design on a Likert scale to measure subjective satisfaction. The Questionnaire for User Interaction Satisfaction (QUIS) tool is an example of a standardized one. One of the things to watch out with questionnaires is the "acquiescence bias" (not to mention that set questions could be out of context), which is the fact that people are more likely to agree with a statement than disagree with it. This can, however, be rectified by finding a balance between positively-phrased statements such as "I found this interface design easy to use" with negative ones such as "I found this interface difficult to navigate".
How to measure desirability of an interface design through body language
The observation of a user's body language such as smiles, frowns, exclamations and other physiological, and even neurological, indicators is another method of conducting desirability testing. This is accomplished in a number of ways, an example of which is PrEmo, the Product Emotion Measurement tool that uses short animations with sound to accurately depict emotional dimensions. Other measurement methods include Electroencephalography (which measures activity in the different parts of the brain), Blood Volume Pressure, Electromyography (measures muscle activity for excitement levels), Electrodermal Activity (measures sweat gland activity), pupil dilation, and respiration. The results of these measurements are often collated and paired with responses from questionnaires. The downside is that thorough physiological and neurological measurement is relatively expensive to conduct.
How to measure desirability of an interface design through Triading
Triading is a method of testing the desirability whereby user interface designers present three interface designs to test participants in order to elicit attributes and adjectives in a way that is not biased by the researcher, such as with questionnaires. Test participants could be asked to identify two that are different from a third and why. This method helps interface designers to understand what is important to target users. What it is not, is a vote of which of the three is the one interface design that should be used in the final version, but it is used to then make a better user interface design .
How to measure desirability of an interface design through cards
Production Reaction cards, based on Microsoft's Desirability Toolkit, are another method of measuring desirability. This is done through the cards that contain 118 positive and negative adjectives. Users are then asked to pick which five cards best describe their reactions to a user interface design. These five cards would then become the basis for an interview where the researcher would ask to expand on their choices. After gathering adjectives from a number of test users a simple way of analyzing the data is through a word cloud. Words that were chosen more will appear with a larger font. The interview can be analyzed by dividing a piece of paper in two columns representing positive and negative. Each positive comment gets a tick in the positive column whereas negative ones result in a tick on the negative column. At the end you can compute the percentage of positive comments to get an indicator of how your interface design is perceived by users.
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Article Source :
http://www.articleseen.com/Article_Desirability and Interface Design_51642.aspx
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Author Resource :
Pidoco.com – Interface Design, Interface Design Tool, Wireframe Software, Wireframe Tools, Interface Prototyping, Clickable Wireframes, Usability Testing and Digital Paper Prototyping. User centered design for improved user interface design.
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Keywords :
interface design, clickable wireframe, clickable wireframe, wireframe, wireframes, interface design software, wireframe softw,
Category :
Computers
:
Software
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