Where is the User in the Design

Creation and delivery of help content was what was on my mind as I sat crocheting a tiny coin purse for my mother.  She has a very cute, 3-inch, pot-bellied leather purse that she uses to keep her loose change in but it's coming apart at the seams, hence I sat there, crocheting this:

To zoom in, click on the picture

And, have we not often come across something like this:

To zoom in, click on the picture 

[Note: Thanks for catching the misplaced apostrophe. Feeling too lazy to edit the pic.]

I am picturing a scenario with me and my mom:

 To zoom in, click on the picture

Creating and delivering help content is very similar to creating any other product.  So, I ask myself, Where, How, and When is my reader going to need this information.  If I can answer these three questions, the content I create will truly be User Assistance.

Where is the user in the guide

Yesterday, I got myself a new phone. Last time I had bought one, it was April 2004 - a time when cellphones here did not have built-in FM radios, internet support, multimedia messaging, and all such exciting features that are so much passé today. Consequently, it was a very celliterate me that held the phone gingerly and regarded its QWERTY keyboard with interest. And thence started my frustration. I could not figure out how to do any of those exciting features that all phones have nowadays (let's not blame the UI now.  All UIs seem non-intuitive to first-time users).
So, I reached for the user guide. A glance at the ToC, and I could not find answers to any of my three questions.

To magnify the picture, click on the picture

"So what", I told myself. "Just a 37 page booklet. I'll flip through it and will surely find something."

Five minutes later, I threw the booklet away, powered my laptop on, asked Google, and found answers to all my questions:

• How do I transfer a photo taken on the phone to my laptop?
• Where do I get the Missed Calls list?
• How do I disable the keypad beeps?

I see several things wrong with this user guide but the one thing that stands out prominently is - this guide is describing the features of the phone; it's not describing the tasks I, the user, do.

Task flow - Analysed?

I took the following screenshot from the website of my credit card company. I was at the website trying to see if the payment I had made yesterday had been effected.

What is not quite right in the picture?

Would it not be better to tell me (the user) right away that if I use PayNet (which I always do), I cannot see my payment history through this interface? That, if I want to find out the status of my PayNet payment, I would probably need to call up customer service?
How about the following picture?

Is it not simpler, smaller, clearer? Does it not communicate upfront about what it can do and what it cannot?

Now, if only the designer who created the user interface had approached the interface as a user would have...

What is the point in telling me AFTER I have selected the dates , clicked Go, and waited for a few minutes, that I cannot view my payment history if I paid through PayNet?

Website users have a short attention span and do not read the entire page from top to bottom before they begin doing the task at hand. They quickly scan for the numbered steps, and start off following the instructions step-by-step. If the prerequisites (or, limitations) are not stated before the numbered list begins, the users can only get frustrated. Like I did.

User scenarios, anybody?

It was while leafing though the microwave guide, trying to find something, that I realised those good souls at the techpubs department of the microwave company had probably not done a user-needs analysis.

Before we go any further, let's first profile me. Female, Indian, grew up on mother's cooking, manages a home and a career, hates eating out, is always rushed for time. A microwave, they say, is handy for such people. It even (!) cooks Indian food without using as much oil (or time). So, fine, here I was trying to cook Indian food. I was making myself some aloo-dum and wanted the steps to:

1. Heat oil on high, throw in the seasoning, reduce heat.
2. Wait for a minute, increase the heat, throw in the aloo cubes, stir, cover.
3. Wait for two minutes or so, reduce the heat, let it cook.
4. Take out cooked aloo-dum and eat with puffed rotis cooked separately.

I was looking to combine steps 2 and 3 - I wanted to keep the stuff on increased heat for a few minutes and then get the microwave to reduce the heat automatically without manual intervention.

The microwave guide had no instructions for this scenario. Which means, I had to hover over the microwave for two or so minutes, manually reduce the heat, and ...
Two minutes is a long time for anyone rushed for time. Heck, even a Hindi film song gets over in two minutes. If I have to hover around the oven for two minutes, I might as well use the good old gas burner. So, I remembered the techwriter's Law No. 1: RTFM*

I did. And found nothing. It has a nice section on Indian recipes, with nice preset buttons that you can use to cook stuff. Nice. But it still did not tell me anything about setting the cooking cycle for multiple stages. The closest it got was this:

No, I wasn't cooking chicken tangdi kebab, thank you.

All Indian cooking, if my knoweldge serves me right, goes through a cycle of increase heat -> decrease heat -> increase heat -> decrease heat. This manual, meant to accompany a product that was being sold in India for Indians, didn't tell me how to.

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* RTFM stands for Read The Fucking Manual. Back

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Just in case you're wondering - the brother figured it out. He looked at the manual, tossed it aside, looked closely at the buttons, tried a few press this - press that combos with still-raw food (we ate it after those several experiments of his), and figured out the combo. I'm not sure if I'll ever look at that manual again.

 

Comparing Blogger.com and WordPress.com

After using for the past weeks the free blogging facilities offered by Blogger.com and WordPress.com, yesterday I sat down to list the similarities between them. Then, I jotted down the areas where each scores over the other. Finally, I created a wishlist. Read about it on my WordPress blog

If it’s not easy to use, it’s not used

Debates about Microsoft Word vs. Adobe Framemaker appear regularly on the tech-writing mailing lists I am subscribed to. Everyone agrees Frame is an awesome publishing tool. Yet, everyone keeps cribbing about it. So, why does a bright bunch of people who are masters at figuring out stuff, otherwise known as tech-writers, only hesitatingly agree Frame is “kind of great”?

Confession: I love Frame.

I think it’s mostly because Frame is so difficult to use. Its user interface is not intuitive (it doesn’t even have a print preview), and its Help sucks big time. Word, on the contrary, has a fantastic Help, and a user interface so easy even a child can use Word. Developers love Word - they can open Word files in any browser (or even WordViewer or Open Office), and they can review Word docs easily by putting in coloured lines of text (most I know never use the Track change or Comment features). Try turning a black word into red in Frame - and you need to go through a process!

“So what the heck”, thinks a bright techwriter. “If I can learn Frame, I might as well learn XML.” And thus is born a host of companies who get in place a documentation system that can handle big documents effortlessly (the single-most crib against Word) and can also offer single-sourcing (Frame’s big plus): their docs are written in XML by writers who need not worry about structure and formatting, which are taken care of by the XSL, DTD or FOSI that the consultant came in and wrote for a one-time fee. And their XML docs still get converted to HTML-like things that developers can open in their browsers and add their red-ink comments to.

And Word continues to sell - in the home segment as well as in the office (as a part of the Office Suite) - at rates and at volumes that keeps Microsoft happy and profitable. Frame, on the other hand, is so steeply priced that even companies think before buying it - and its steep learning curve doesn’t help.

If something is not easy to use, is anyone going to use it?

User is king

I have an account with a public-sector bank. It's a bank that opened a branch right next to our new office (of one of my previous employer-companies), and it's where my salary was credited. I still have that account, but since it's about 7 kms from my residence, I was thinking in terms of internet banking...

"Not a chance", scoffed the brother. "It's a public sector bank; they're dinosaurs."

I didn't agree with that line of reasoning, so I went and checked their website. Sure enough, they had internet banking facility. They even had an FAQ for users of their internet-banking facility. I saw the FAQ page and saw red. The following image is a composite screenshot of their FAQ page peppered with my red-ink comments (to magnify the picture, click on the picture).



And then it struck me. I was looking at the Web page as a techwriter, not as a user.

An average internet-banking user of this bank would be an Indian whose primary language, either at school or at home, was not and is not English. Such a person would not even notice the errors I’ve marked. Such a person would find the text totally comprehensible, unambiguous, and useful - though a tad incomplete because it answers only about four questions and doesn’t even address the how-to of the options provided by the internet-banking facility.

Such a person is the average user of the webpage. Which means, almost none of my edits are required.

Does it matter at all that a minuscule percentage of users, like me, are put off by badly-written help? And no, it’s not because I am a tech-writer that I am put off. Ever since I can remember, I’ve hated badly-written text (even before I knew - courtesy technical writing - why I hated them). It somehow smacks of a cavalier attitude.

Coming back to the example in question - I, as that minuscule user percentage, am put off by the bank’s FAQ page and will never read it. How does that effect me, the user, and other users like me? I, for one, will never use their internet services, preferring to physically visit the bank for my transactions - if they can’t get their webpage right, they won’t get my online transactions right as well. Presumptuous and unfair of me, but still… Does it effect the bank? Nope. They’ve still got my account with them. But in the longer run, I may be leaning more towards banks that care…

So, where does audience analysis begin? And stop?