Real Wireframes Get Real Results

Stephen Turbek over at boxes and arrows has an interesting article about usability testing with low fidelity vs. high fidelity prototypes. I’ve personally usability tested both ways and gotten good results from both. Also, I generally prefer to conduct formal usability tests with higher fidelity prototypes. If you’re going to go through the effort of recruiting a number of users, spending a couple of days on testing and even more on analyzing the results then the time required to make a low-fidelity, greyscale wireframe prototype into a higher fidelity version is neglible. I agree with Stephen, when it comes to the results from higher fidelity prototypes; users give better feedback because they have more to react to.

“Just because project teams understand the purpose of wireframes, that doesn’t mean everyone will. Similar to listening to someone sing out loud to his iPod: we only hear the singing, while the person hears the whole orchestra. Likewise, the test subject knows only that ‘the page isn’t going to look like what they see,’ but what they see is all they have to react to.”

(Via Boxes and Arrows.)

Somewhere between counting the firings of neurons and calculating profit and loss statements is a useful set of boundaries that define what to consider in a design process, and it’s not just making things easy to use. Usability does not equate to user experience. The specific boundaries vary with each product, audience and situation. I have found the following to be a decent working guideline: The user experience consists of all of the factors that influence the relationship between the end user and an organization, especially when a product mediates that relationship. The key part of this definition, for me, is the relationship of the organization to the product. To me, the user experience is incomplete without a consideration of the organization that created the experience. The end result is the intersection of an organization’s goals and that organization’s understanding of users’ goals, and it’s the designer and researcher’s role to mediate a compromise between these. This means, more simply, that you must look inward and understand why you’re making something at the same time you look outward to understand what people want from it.

From Mike Kuniavsky

“The most common user action on a Web site is to flee.”
- Edward Tufte, Information Design Guru