Burn The Help Manual: A Strategy For Self-Explaining UX Design
Platinum and gold sponsors
goodbobman - Thu, 02/07/2008 - 11:24pm
Presenters:
Bob Goodman
Track:
design and user experience
Session Description:
Burn The Help Manual: A Strategy For Self-Explaining UX Design
None of us really love to read help manuals. Neither do users. Confusion can chase them away from your site, or make them less likely to be active participants in your community. But with the right process and approach, it’s possible for the experience of interacting with an interface to explain itself to your users. This will be a lecture-style discussion of User Experience Design and Strategy for Drupal developers as well as designers.
Some of the principles of Self-Explaining UX Design to be discussed include:
• Output first, input second;
• Show and tell at the same time;
• Embedding and layering instructions
• Enabling both first-time and everyday user
• Just-In-Time Information
Design and User Experience
AGENDA
• Why Visuals and Experience Work Faster Than Words
• A short overview of UX Design;
• Some UI Conventions Old and New;
• Lessons from iPod, Google, and other commercial efforts;
• Implications for Drupal designs and deployments
GOALS
The goal is to give attendees a clear, actionable way to think about UX Design in way they can use regardless of their internal process and can apply even when there is not time or budget for usability testing.
RESOURCES
None
Scheduled:
accepted
Session start time:
03/04/2008 - 9:00am - 03/04/2008 - 10:30am
practical implementation techniques or discussion of theory?
This sounds like a very interesting session. Drupal still has a big barrier to getting new users on board because they just can’t figure out “what’s the next step?” “what am I supposed to do now?” I think many of these issues still need to be dealt with by improving the documentation on drupal.org especially in regards to having site recipes which starts from the users practical questions (“How do I manage images on my site?”) and goes on to tell users which module(s) to use (CCK + Imagefield + ImageCache + Asset/AssetManager/???) OR (Image + ImageAssist) and how to use them (links to handbook pages), most of which exists but needs better organization so that new users can find it easily.
But, like you say, no one wants to look up help books all the time, especially for the “how to use this module” questions.
My question is - are you going to just talk about UX/UI theory, or will you also be showing how to achieve these goals through the use of drupal features and/or modules?