Toward Strategic Usability - User Knowledge as a Basis for New Service Development

t im e Conception Completion Functional Specifications Content Requirements Interaction Design Information Architecture Visual Design Information Design Interface Design Navigation Design Site Objectives User Needs User Needs: externally derived goals for the site; identified through user research, ethno/techno/psychographics, etc. Site Objectives: business, creative, or other internally derived goals for the site This picture is incomplete: The model outlined here does not account for secondary considerations (such as those arising during technical or content development) that may influence decisions during user experience development. Also, this model does not describe a development process, nor does it define roles within a user experience development team. Rather, it seeks to define the key considerations that go into the development of user experience on the Web today. task-oriented information-oriented 30 March 2000 © 2000 Jesse James Garrett http://www.jjg. net/ia/ Figure 10 The hierarchy of the el ments of user experience, f rm bott m to top: strategy plane, scope plane, structure plane, skeleton plane, visual plane. (Garrett 2000) earlier phase has to be finished before the next one can begin. Instead, the requirement should be that the latter phase cannot finish before the earlier one has finished. This leaves room for iterative and parallel design. (Garrett 2003, 26-27) Regarding web user experience, two different communities exist. Originally web was seen as a publishing medium consisting of static pages and links between them. As technology advanced, new possibilities emerged and web became more interactive and dynamic. Suddenly it was seen as a platform to support interaction much like traditional desktop applications. As a consequence one group of designers saw every problem as an application design problem, whereas the others saw the web in terms of information distribution and retrieval. The former group stems from the traditional desktop usability world and originally from ergonomics and human factors engineering. The latter comes from world of publishing, media, and information science. To take this division in account, Garrett divides each plane into two halves, one concerned with web as a software interface, the other seeing it as a hypertext information space. (Garrett 2003, 27-31) There are areas that are crucial to the success of the service but are not included in the model. Garret emphasizes the role of content, as no user comes to the site just to enjoy navigation if there is nothing of value provided (Garret 2003, 35). Another aspect left outside the model is technology, which naturally has the important role of making everything possible and which often largely determines the nature of experience that can be realized in a given project. Excluding it from the model, however, guarantees that the framework by no means becomes technology-centric (Garret 2003, 36). What follows is a more detailed look at different phases: the questions that are asked, the methods that are used and the deliverables that are created. Strategy plane is the basis of the model. This plane sums up essentially two things: what the company wants from the service and what the users want from it. The first question defines the site objectives, the second one addresses the user needs. Garret points out that while these questions are usually somehow addressed, they need to be stated explicitly to provide a solid basis for the design. Site objectives include business goals, brand identity and success metrics. The business goals should be specific enough to be supportive but not tied to specific solutions before the actual needs are clear.