The more user interface and user experience design I do the more I feel our tools are still very crude. While computing power and potential ways of delivering that power and interacting with it are racing ahead, we are still using very simple, almost stone age tools.
We use different types of modelling, personas, user modelling, task modelling etc to try and abstract and simplify how users may behave. We try to impose an abstract model onto the complexities of user behaviour. At the heart of our suppositions is that users are rational beings who engage with sites in a goal oriented fashion. They enter our site with a distinct aim or set of aims and we assume they will stick to this aim unless our design or the content of the site thwarts or fails to satisfy them.
Yes, personas are good in the sense that they allow all members of the design team and the client to share a common understanding of the types of people who will use the site. And yes, any abstraction is bound to be weaker and simpler than the reality it portrays. But there must be more we can do than just paint crude pictures of typical users. It is possible to take personas very far and fill in lots of detail to bring them to life, but I still feel we are lacking something.
Lets face it most users are not always rational. We all know from our own experience that online behaviour is far more complex. The nonsense of user paths, which attempt to describe the routes our idealised users will follow through a site are so crude as to be laughable. It would be like attempting to design what will happen in a football game. The routes a user will take are influenced by so many factors, changes in goals, sub goals, forgetfulness, curiosity, the way we react to an image, boredom, external stimuli – a song on the radio, a tangential thought inspired by a comment from someone else, in fact almost anything. Some state that even the most commonly followed path through a complex site is at the most followed by less than 5% of users, yet we persist with these idealised models.
When we design for social interaction sites the situation is even harder. On a social site, users are there to explore their interests and their own agendas. As with any social interaction there is a back story, a need to know what is going on and to show what you are doing and how in tune you are with others. We are social beings and what goes on when we interact, through the medium of the computer with other people, is very different when we simply manipulate and interact with a non social site. The interests, drivers and social aspirations that fuel our normal interactions are very complex. In the case of social tools we do not design solutions only frameworks within which the users “make” the solution through their interaction. In my experience there are, as yet, no modelling or design tools to help to understand this complexity.
Maybe an approach is to simulate users to have some form of software based synthetic user which we can launch in their thousands at a site and see what they do how they react. Maybe there are modelling and simulation techniques we could borrow from other fields.
Do others agree?
Tunde
