Tuesday, April 08, 2008

The Wow! Factor

We all know the saying that states perception is 9/10 of reality? End users perceive the level of quality in software based on how they like the user interface and the experience it provides.

If end users perceive software to be of good quality (based on their individual user experience) they will be more forgiving and understanding when problems inevitably occur. On the other hand, if end users don’t enjoy the user experience and perceive that the software is of poor quality they will be much more demanding and unforgiving when problems occur.

It’s hard to exceed expectations on a software development project without delivering a great user experience. We cannot deliver a great user experience without focusing on interaction design, ease of use and consistency in the user interface. We need to inject ‘Wow!’ into the user interface.

What is the ‘Wow! factor’? It’s when your target end users start to use the UI and immediately get excited about how it well streamline their work, or make their jobs easier or more enjoyable.

How do we get to ‘Wow!’? Some thoughts:

  • Establish UI design guidelines early on in your project. Make sure the UI implementation consistently reflects the UI design guidelines. Continue to enhance and refine the UI design guidelines based on implementation feedback and end user feedback
  • When designing and building the user interface make sure to continuously try to adopt the end user perspective to critique the design and implementation. We can understand our end users by using activity modeling to become familiar with their documented activities and role profiles. This includes the activities, performance characteristics and design implications documented for each role
  • Understand standard usability heuristics and apply them to the design and implementation of the user interface.

It’s often implicit or overlooked, but injecting the ‘Wow!’ factor into your projects goes a long way towards exceeding end user expectations.

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