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Software, Tools, Or Techniques For UI Review?
Comatose51 writes "Does the Slashdot crowd know of any software, tools, or even techniques for reviewing the UI of an application? Right now at our company this is a long and arduous task of looking at slide after slide of pages and menus from our UI, and taking notes and arguing over what should go where or how the UI elements should behave and interact with the user. It takes many, many hours to do this and with all our UI developers involved, it adds up. This has to be a common and recurring problem so there must be a better way to do this. If there is open source software to help, great, but any helpful suggestion would be appreciated."
used the number of mouse clicks to perform any given task as the metric to determine if Office 2007 had a good UI. It seems the impact of that choice is debatable.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Not in the least. Lord no. Perhaps have them polish up and make things look pretty after the UI is decided upon, sure, but leave the UI design to people with a background in it. That's the equivelant of telling a baker to to cook you a steak. They might both make food, but the thought process is totally different.
If you have a technical writer working on the project, give him/her a shot at it. Their job is to make the complex simple and to make it fit in as small of a container as possible. They'll also be the ones writing the manual on the stupid thing and, more often than not, many design flaws come out in the process of writing the manual. You'd be surprised what kind of input they might have.
Other than that, do you have a corporate psychologist or HR person with a background in psychology? They might also have valuable insight.
Other than that, as far as viewing the UI for a review, have someone make a mock up, clickable UI in Flash or even HTML. It shouldn't take long and will give you a good idea of what the user experience before it's all coded in.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
You know what's better than asking the users?
Not asking the user.
What you really should do is watch the user. If you ask them, they'll tell you what they think they'd do, or what they think you want to hear, or what they think they'd like to see... everything except what is most important: what they really do.
(And I'm not the only one who thinks so.)
JJ
Give the program to the average secretary & watch where she stumbles or otherwise looks confused.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.