Process: Task Modeling

Organizations that have IT (Information Technology) departments should be more effective than organization that lack them. If your organization doesn’t use and maintain its software and servers efficiently and effectively, that’s money down the drain.

But, while it’s easy to see the direct impact that the user experience of a consumer application has on user conversions, that’s not true of user experiences for the enterprise segment of the software marketplace. Computer software that automates the business of non-software organizations is usually slow evolving. However, the user experiences of enterprise applications do have direct impact on an organization’s performance. When the applications that an enterprise employs provide better user experiences and usability, its people are more efficient and productive. The greater the cost of human resources within organization, the bigger that impact is. Read More

Recently, a client asked me to do a heuristic evaluation. They had hired another vendor to design an iOS app for one of their divisions, and it was my job to see how well they had done. And I almost failed. It was way, way too hard to evaluate the design, because it was all pages. There was no overall view of the system, no task flow, and only occasionally had they even really defined an interaction.

This is, sadly, typical of our industry today—and one way or another—this is something that I encounter regularly. While mobile UX designers may like to pretend that no design before the iPhone matters, we stick to many of the principles of 1970s graphic design in practice. Just look up almost any UX design pattern library, and you’ll find nothing but screenshots. Read More

This month in Ask UXmatters, our expert panel discusses how to handle a company’s insistence that you make an application user friendly upon its first use—even if the task for which you’re designing a solution is inherently difficult, complex, or time consuming. The panel explores what user friendly means, specifically within the context of difficult tasks. Our panelists also discuss defining concrete objectives for design solutions. Plus, we’ll consider training as a way of addressing the complexity of such tasks.

It is important to acknowledge that the complexity of a task can sometimes make an application difficult to use—not because the user-interface design is lacking, but just because the task is so inherently difficult. Read More