Usability Week 2008
New York
Apr 7-12
London
May 19-24
San Francisco
Jun 16-21
Melbourne
Jul 21-26

Application Usability 2: Dialogue and Workflow Design

  • New York: Saturday, April 12
  • London: Saturday, May 24
  • San Francisco: Saturday, June 21
  • Melbourne: Saturday, July 26

Chris Nodder
Full-Day Tutorial

When building an application, one rule applies above all others: If users are to succeed, they must be able to effectively navigate your UI. This holds for all applications—whether you’re building a complex business workflow suite or designing a Flash applet to display e-commerce product-configuration options.

Keeping such requirements and challenges in mind, this course uses real-world examples and results from our user testing to show you not just how to develop effective interface components, but how to assemble them into highly usable and coherent designs. When you accomplish both, users quickly understand what they need to do and how to do it, and can feel confident that they’ve completed their tasks successfully.

This seminar moves beyond understanding UI components (as covered in Application Usability 1), and shows you how to apply UI components to create more effective flows for different tasks.

What You’ll Learn

In this session, you’ll learn design principles that:

  • Give you templates and techniques for handling common tasks
  • Help you overcome any design problems you encounter
  • Help you diagnose and overcome usability challenges specific to your own projects

You’ll also learn:

  • Methods for integrating flows into applications, drawing on diverse product examples
  • How to address internationalization issues and accessibility concerns
  • How to help users simply enjoy working with the applications you design.

Course Outline

  • User-centered application design
    • Tasks versus technology
    • Techniques for determining how users work
      • Users aren’t designers, but they can help
      • What users say, vs. what they do
    • Task analysis
    • Turning user tasks into applications
  • Workflow: behavior guidelines for common task flows
    • Workflow concepts
      • Progressive disclosure
      • Smart defaults
      • User-controlled, vs. being led
    • Different flow structures
      • Task-driven
      • Document-driven
      • User-driven
      • Client/customer/caller-driven
      • Event-driven
    • Installation/loading process
    • Dashboards and application “homepages” to centralize task access
    • Wizards
    • Forms-based applications
    • Secondary windows
  • Application usability guidance
    • Making the UI seem fast and responsive
    • Error handling
    • Archiving
    • Shortcuts and accelerators, including keyboard commands, vs. mouse use
    • International and multi-language considerations
    • Accessibility concerns
  • Specific guidelines by application type
    • Native applications
    • Hosted (client/server, Web) applications
    • Customizing off-the-shelf products
    • Personal applications (e.g. photo management)
    • E-commerce applications
    • Collaborative workflow
    • Complex problem solving
    • Mini applications (applets), and ephemeral applications
  • Integrating a website and an associated application, and maintaining continuity
    • Maintaining user experience continuity
  • Rich Internet Applications (RIAs)
    • New tools, new techniques, same users: User comprehension issues and how to teach your visitors what your RIA does
  • Designing for user experience
    • Design is everyone’s responsibility
    • How to differentiate your application
    • Voice
    • Delighting users

Format

This full-day tutorial includes lectures, exercises, and discussion.

Handouts

Copies of all presentation slides

Who Should Attend?

Whether you’re designing applets for a website or creating a full-blown enterprise application, the fundamental guidelines described in this full-day session will help you better understand your users’ needs and thus create more efficient and effective applications.

Designers, program managers, usability engineers, and developers can all benefit from this guidance, as the class covers interaction design and task analysis along with the guidelines. No prior knowledge of usability methods is assumed, and the day is intended to appeal to all disciplines. The focus is on the user experience of applications, so no code samples will be discussed and a programming background is not required.

This tutorial does assume knowledge of the user experience implications of basic design components for applications, such as buttons, scrolling, notification dialogs, and windows. This information is covered in the companion tutorial, Application Usability 1: Page-Level Building Blocks for Feature Design.

See Also

This tutorial is the sequel to Application Usability 1: Page-Level Building Blocks for Feature Design, which covers the page-level components of dialogue design. Each of the tutorials is a full-day, self-contained seminar and can be taken independently. Taken together, however, they will cover the full range of usability issues encountered in application design.

Instructor:

photo of Chris NodderChris Nodder is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. He works with large and small clients across Europe and the US, in industries as diverse as financial services, health care, entertainment, e-commerce, telecommunications, government, intranets, and highly specialized B2B sectors. He coauthored the NN/g reports on B2B usability and wishlists and gift giving, conducting focus groups, user studies, and field research. Before joining NN/g, Nodder worked as a usability consultant at NatWest Bank in the UK, and then as a senior user researcher at Microsoft Corp. His experiences managing the usability group at NatWest are captured in the book The Politics of Usability. During his seven years at Microsoft, Nodder was responsible for many products, including the user experience for XP Service Pack 2, a major upgrade to Windows XP (documented in the book Security and Usability). He has created personas, reality TV episodes, and even whole rooms ("usertoriums") as ways of getting developers to walk in their customers’ shoes. Nodder earned an M.S. in human-computer interaction from Guildhall University, London, and a B.S. in psychology from the Polytechnic of East London. He has presented at and spoken on panels for conferences such as UPA, CHI, Group, CSCW, and British HCI.