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First Rule of Usability? Don't Listen to Users

yj发现篇文章推荐给我，比较赞同这个观点吧。包括界面设计、需求调研等方面都有用，就是不能光听用户讲，而应该花更多的时间体验用户的工作习惯，尤其是那些用户完全认为理所当然的习惯，常常被用户自己忽略，他们认为不是重点不会说出来，反而能说出来的往往是一些改造和憧憬。做一个系统或者软件，基本的功能和习惯不完成，怎么可能满足他的憧憬和改造。如果他们能说清楚，那么还要我们干嘛？做法上面就是扮演用户的角色做用户的事情。

这一点比用户访谈更重要。

Summary:
To design an easy-to-use interface, pay attention to what users do, not what they say. Self-reported claims are unreliable, as are user speculations about future behavior

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20010805.html

First Rule of Usability? Don't Listen to Users

Summary:
To design an easy-to-use interface, pay attention to what users do, not what they say. Self-reported claims are unreliable, as are user speculations about future behavior.

In past years, the greatest usability barrier was the preponderance of cool design. Most projects were ruled by usability opponents who preferred complexity over simplicity. As a result, billions of dollars were wasted on flashy designs that were difficult to use.

One of the main advantages of the "dot-bomb" downturn is that cool design has suffered a severe set back. Companies are now focused on the bottom line:

• Public websites, which formerly focused on building awareness, now aim at making it easy for customers to do business.
• Intranets are similarly refocused on improving employee productivity. Many companies are attempting to create order, impose design standards, and enhance navigation on previously chaotic intranets.

Unfortunately, winning a battle with usability opponents doesn't win the war with complexity. It simply moves us to a new front line: The battle is now to get companies to do usability right.

Watch Users Work

For example: A spinning logo might look pretty cool if you don't need to accomplish anything on the page. Another example is the drop-down menu. Users always love the idea: finally a standard user interface widget that they understand and that stays the same on every page. However, while they offer users a sense of power over the design, drop-down menus often have low usability and either confuse users or lead them to unintended parts of the site.

To discover which designs work best, watch users as they attempt to perform tasks with the user interface. This method is so simple that many people overlook it, assuming that there must be something more to usability testing. Of course, there are many ways to watch and many tricks to running an optimal user test or field study. But ultimately, the way to get user data boils down to the basic rules of usability:

• Watch what people actually do.
• Do not believe what people say they do.
• Definitely don't believe what people predict they may do in the future.

When and How to Listen

However, when collecting preference data, you must take human nature into account. When talking about past behavior, users self-reported data is typically three steps removed from the truth:

• In answering questions (particularly in a focus group), people bend the truth to be closer to what they think you want to hear or what's socially acceptable.
• In telling you what they do, people are really telling you what they remember doing. Human memory is very fallible, especially regarding the small details that are crucial for interface design. Users cannot remember some details at all, such as interface elements that they didn't see.
• In reporting what they do remember, people rationalize their behavior. Countless times I have heard statements like "I would have seen the button if it had been bigger." Maybe. All we know is that the user didn't see the button.

Your best bet in soliciting reliable feedback is to have a captive audience: Conduct formal testing and ask users to fill out a survey at the end. With techniques like paper prototyping, you can test designs and question users without implementing a thing. Following these basic usability rules and methods will help you ensure that your design is truly as cool as it looks.

Learn More

Three-day camp teaching Usability in Practice at the Usability Week 2006 conference in New York, San Francisco, London, and Sydney.

Intensive in-house three-day workshop on user testing for your team is another learning option, where we test your own design as the case study for the seminar.