When designing to provide a great user experience, it's important to understand how people perceive information, how they remember what it is that they've perceived and how people use that information and what they remember to act in pursuit of goals when using a system that you've designed. Often, in user experience research and design, however, what we're most interested in is advice on how we can design systems to use the knowledge about people to improve the user experience. Typically, that advice comes in the form of guidelines, which are sort of rules or bits of advice about how to design specific types of systems in order to provide a great user experience. There are lots of different forms that guidelines can come in and let's look at a couple of examples. So, this first example is a set of guidelines that was produced for US government websites. The US government produces a bewilderingly large number of websites and many of the people producing them don't necessarily have background in user experience, research and design. So, they created this very thorough and comprehensive set of guidelines for best practices that can be used in designing these government websites. So, let's take a look at some examples of what these guidelines look like so we can get a sense of what kind of advice is being provided. Let's look in the navigation section. We will look at section 4; providing feedback on user's location. We can see here that the guideline that's being proposed is, provide feedback to let users know where they are on the website. Right below that, there's a little bit more information about why we would do that and how to go about doing it. We can also see good examples of how to do this. So, for example, here it's showing an example of a page that highlights the tab that the user is on, that shows them where they are and also uses a breadcrumb to show that that research is a page that's under home and that research overview is under that and so on and so forth. We can see some other examples of techniques that are used for showing people where they are in a website. Another interesting thing about this particular set of guidelines which is not necessarily common is they've actually shown the importance of each suggestion and the strength of evidence from the research that backs up that particular suggestion. So, let's look at another example. This one is the style guide for producing Android apps. Here, they're giving recommendations about the size that touch target should be on a user's screen in order to be accessible to users with different levels of motor control. They're specifically recommending that the physical size of the touch target should be no less than nine millimeters on each side in order to accommodate those different users with different capabilities. So, these are two examples of recommendations and you can see that you could produce very specific, very low-level recommendations and guidelines. However, there are some drawbacks to these types of guidelines that make them hard to use in general cases. So, one drawback is, guidelines like these are very platform specific. So, it will be difficult to take the recommendations from the usability.gov set of guidelines, which are designed for government websites and apply them to ecommerce websites, for example, let alone Android apps or Windows software. Same thing with the Android recommendations, they are very specific to designing mobile applications on the Android platform and it would be difficult to apply them to other types of scenarios. Another issue with these types of guidelines is, because they're so highly detailed, there are a lot of them. So, in the usability.gov example, there are over 300 individual guidelines that a designer would have to take into consideration when designing a website using those guidelines and that can be an overwhelming task, especially for somebody who's just becoming familiar with that particular platform. So, you can use any set of guidelines, but it's important to choose the right set for what it is that you're trying to do. What you might consider when thinking about guidelines that are appropriate for your situation is, first of all, are they well-supported and focused on user experience or do they have other goals? Are they more about branding for a particular platform or providing an aesthetic experience of a certain type? Do they cover all of the important best practices or are they just focused on a particular subset of the user experience? Do the guidelines apply to your particular platform or situation? Are they easy to use? Is it something that you'll be able to adopt? Is it a small enough set of guidelines that you can wrap your head around them and you can use them in a way that's efficient for the task at hand? A widely accepted set of guidelines in user experience practice are Jakob Nielsen's 10 Heuristics. This is a simple set of guidelines that can be applied in a wide range of different situations. Heuristic just means rule of thumb. So, you could think of them as being slightly more general than a guideline, which means that you can have a smaller set and apply it to a wider set of different situations in contrast to the specific guidelines we just looked at. Jakob Nielsen's 10 Heuristics were derived from a systematic review of usability problems across a number of systems and a number of usability tests. So, it has the benefit of being backed up by research and by a systematic process for developing them. It was designed to be a small, complete and usable set. So, they were thinking very specifically about making this something that designers and researchers could use effectively and efficiently across a wide set of systems. In fact, the goal was to be able to teach these heuristics to designers and researchers in just a few hours, though, of course, you get better with practice. As we will see, these 10 heuristics are well-supported by theories of perception and cognition, such as we've been discussing earlier in this course. I'm just going to run through these heuristics right now and in future lectures, we'll be going into more depth about each one of them. So, don't worry too much if you don't understand exactly what they're talking about right now. So, the heuristics are visibility of system status, a match between the system and the real world, user control and freedom, consistency and standards, error prevention, recognition rather than recall, flexibility and efficiency of use, aesthetic and minimalist design, help users recognize, diagnose and recover from errors and finally, help in documentation. We'll be going into more detail in the next few lectures.
