Designing Help and Program Flow
From CS160: User Interface Design Sp12
Readings
- The Need for Web Design Standards. UseIt.com Jakob Nielsen.
- Designing Apple Help Interface Design & Document Design Kevin Knabe.
Reading Responses
Arturo Wu-Zhou - 4/14/2012 15:56:23
Users see the internet as a ‘single, integrated resource.’ Possibly implying that all sites are similarly designed, organized. However, many sites deviate from the expected norms. About four-fifths of the websites used in two studies had used 37% of all design elements in a similar way: a logo in the top left of the page, a search box on the homepage. About half of the sites used 40% of all design elements in a similar way: changing the color of visited links. About 23% of all design elements were used in many different ways: placement of help and search feature. Author surmises that the most firmly standardized issues are the simples and that there should be design standards for every important website task. I concur with the author’s opinion. I find it annoying to have to look around for a sign in button or a logout button and other commonly used design elements. However, I have a very limited number of sites I go to and since I go to those sites most often I become accustomed to their design and don’t have many annoyances. It just takes me a little bit more effort to acclimate to a site’s design and once I have use of it is easy. So, point is, it seems like too much effort to refactor the design of websites.
Apple’s Human Interface Group found that most of the questions by users were either descriptive (“What is…?”) or procedural (“How do I…?). Their solution was spoon feeding the correct instructions to users, which didn’t irked many users – particularly experienced users – because they didn’t want to be spoon fed. They wanted “a more in-depth body of content that supported faster information access.” During usability studies, the testers found that placing the help button on the top-left of the screen increased the visibility of the help functionality from undiscovered to occasionally used. This is a design their first goal: Make Help Visible. There other design goals include: Take advantage of the Internet, write minimally, automate tasks when possible. For me, I prefer to be spoon-fed instructions, at least initially. When I get more proficient on a task then I prefer to switch over to a more “in-depth body of content that support[s] faster information access.”
Jonathan Sulistio - 4/14/2012 17:33:22
Nielsen’s proposition to enforce web design standards is a legitimate one, as it would help both users and the website owners as well in their efforts to draw in more traffic. However, I think there still needs to be some sense of open-mindedness and creativity when encouraging designers in their work; otherwise, advancements and change in design will be stagnant. Thus, the majority of the design should perhaps follow some global standard, but designers should not be afraid to step outside the norm and introduce snippets of a new design that will possibly influence the path of design standards in the future. Meanwhile, Knabe’s overview of the design process of the Apple help guide was quite enlightening and actually paralleled many concepts that we implemented in this class. Usability testing was and will always be one of the most valuable resources in designing a product since, after all, it is users like the test subjects who will be using the application. Other notable aspects of the design process included making the help option very visible, and to describe tasks broadly, but write minimally. The latter part especially is important because users just want to get to the point on how to carry out a certain task, and drawing out this process will only frustrate the user and degrade the application in their eyes.
Darren Sue - 4/14/2012 20:11:44
Apple Reading
The web is constructed too collaboratively to be called intelligently designed. However, most websites use conventions. Unfortunately, the conventions used are usually on the visual end rather than the functional end. Anyhow, standards are important because users are unwilling to spend time to learn the individual standards of each website.
Standards Reading
Goal oriented questions seem very similar to me. Shouldn't a description ("What is this?") include functionality (What can I do with this?"). The other categories are more immediately clear to me.
Staying in the active layer keeps the user at the task. Ideally, help should be totally integrated into the main application but this is impractical just because of how much work this would be. The apple guide uses a "coach mark" to relate the help window back to the application.
Eugenia Lee - 4/14/2012 20:49:40
The first reading was on the need for web design standards, which basically states that since users spend a very little time deciding whether a website is worth spending time on, the designers need to make the website easy to use and place all the elements in locations that are easy for users to find, otherwise users won't stay on the site. The reading was very helpful in that it actually gave specific examples of design elements that had conventions and ones that didn't (for example the placement of logos or search fields).
The second reading was on Apple's help window, in which the designers went through the testing and experimentation processes we learned about earlier in the semester. It gave examples of how the system has evolved over time, and broke down the help features into a series of design goals.
Shuqun Zhang - 4/14/2012 22:03:58
The first article describes and supports the need for standards in UI design (specifically for websites). A series of studies revealed that although less than 25% of design elements differ drastically from site to site, these elements were the more important ones in terms of usability, such as navigation and help. Websites should comply with design standards because of Jakob's Law, which states that users spend most of their times on other websites. Although it is important to make your website stand out in terms of services, if the interface doesn't follow the crowd, users will probably leave. The second article hilighted all the main concepts of designing a good UI we studied so far. Designing a help interface takes many if not all of the same steps as designing any other UI. It hilights the importance of usability testing and minimalistic design.
Lichen Han - 4/15/2012 1:17:07
Good design requires standards and consistency by which other designs can be judged upon. Better designs integrate ingenuity into conventional models of representation in a complementary way so as to stand out without generating confusion and entropy associated with lesser designs. For web design, the entirety of the web is an integrated resource and standards become critical in maintaining order and user expectations. The fact that users spend most of their time on other sites, as dictated by Jakob's Law, explains why a well designed site is considered in the global perspective of web design conventions. Similarly, help guides should also follow conventional structures. Apple help guide is a prime example. Early research into designing Apple's help structure probed into questions of what, how, why and where, and determined a set usability goals. In doing so, Apple found users where better and more efficiently able to complete tasks because the burden of learning is mitigated when user's expectations are met through a structured, standardized program flow without confusion.
Lichen Han - 4/15/2012 1:17:19
Good design requires standards and consistency by which other designs can be judged upon. Better designs integrate ingenuity into conventional models of representation in a complementary way so as to stand out without generating confusion and entropy associated with lesser designs. For web design, the entirety of the web is an integrated resource and standards become critical in maintaining order and user expectations. The fact that users spend most of their time on other sites, as dictated by Jakob's Law, explains why a well designed site is considered in the global perspective of web design conventions. Similarly, help guides should also follow conventional structures. Apple help guide is a prime example. Early research into designing Apple's help structure probed into questions of what, how, why and where, and determined a set usability goals. In doing so, Apple found users where better and more efficiently able to complete tasks because the burden of learning is mitigated when user's expectations are met through a structured, standardized program flow without confusion.
Chenkai Gao - 4/15/2012 11:45:35
The first reading is about the need for web design standards. The reason for needing web design standards is that in visiting all these other sites, people become accustomed to the prevailing design standards and conventions. Thus, when users arrive at your site, they assume it will work the same way as other sites. We need to include: 1. the structure of product pages. 2. workflow (beyond simplistic shopping carts). 3. the main types of information a corporate site should provide. 4. the information architecture for that information (where to find what). The second reading is about designing help for Mac OS. The design goals for online help for Mac OS are: Make help discoverable. Make help easy to author. Provide a central point of access to all available help. Take advantage of the Internet. Define tasks broadly. Write minimally. Automate tasks when possible.
Jacob Rashoff - 4/15/2012 13:14:25
The reading for this weeks was focused on keeping consistent design across multiple interfaces, almost all of which you will not be designing yourself. This convention seems similar to the plagiarism aspect in one of our earlier readings on the design cycle. If a user sees an UI element with similar conventions, then that user will know how to react appropriately. In addition, a lot of the conventions from the apple seem similar to what we have learned earlier, such as with having help easy to find and minimalist design.
Elena Gasparini - 4/15/2012 13:27:19
Many web designers do not necessarily use the same conventions. This makes HCI incredibly difficult on the web. This article is arguing that it would be much better for websites to conform to design standards to make usability easier. The author makes the argument that users will spend more time on your site if they can understand how to use it properly.
The second article speaks specifically about apple and how they designed their help content. Participants were asked to think aloud like we are doing in our pilot study. Some of their design goals for their help include making it more easily discoverable, providing a central point of access for their help content, witing minimally, etc. Their results in usability tests showed that these methods were very successful.
Ken Yu - 4/15/2012 15:09:31
One interesting thing that I read about designing websites is that the more you design an interface that users are familiar with, the more you'll give them what they expect. Also, the more success you'll have at keeping users at your site. Follow design conventions, follow what already works. From the Apple Help reading, always provide a central point of access to all help, and make the help easily discoverable (such as placing it in the path of exploratory learning).
Tobit Narciso - 4/15/2012 16:50:03
This weeks readings focus on standardizations, and giving help to the users. These two topics may seem unrelated, but having an interface that conforms to standards and conventions makes it easier for the user to infer how an interface works, therefore reducing the amount of help we need to provide. The Web Design paper talks about how much the web is currently standardized/conventionalized and why this is important. The Apple Help paper talks about the various goals the designers had for designing for Apple Help.
Lu Cheng - 4/15/2012 17:47:46
I thought that this weeks reading on "The Need for Web Design Standards" was very interesting. I actually was thinking about this in the past few days. For users, perhaps the best thing to do would be to make every single website standard and enforce that a CSS document must be used on the internet. In this way, users would know exactly how to navigate a website and would know exactly what to expect. For the people actually creating the website, however, this would not be good. There needs to be a uniqueness for every site. This uniqueness helps make a website memorable and persuades users to go back. A global web standard in this case would not be beneficial for the people creating the websites. It's clear, however, that web design standards have been converging over the past few years and will continue to converge. Jakob Nielsen wrote this article back in 2004 and perhaps the internet in our time is what he envisioned.
Benjamin Le - 4/15/2012 18:30:10
To be honest, I never really though about websites having standards was really all that important. For me, even though all the sites I use are fairly different from one another, I find it easy to navigate through the sites (Although this could be perhaps I am used to them). However, the more I think about it, this could be because if I am on a really confusing website (like much of the berkeley.edu ones), I tend to avoid them like the plague and avoid the problem as well.
Bei He - 4/15/2012 18:32:58
It seems from when the article on web standardization was written, a lot has changed on the Internet. Most sites today lean more towards simplicity than conformity; however, simplicity itself may be the new standard. There are also sites that, in contrary to Jakob's law, do occupy almost all of someone's time when surfing the web. Sites like Facebook and other popular sites have set standards for what people are used to. However, as new site come out, these standards are being changed to the current norm that people are used to.
Robert Marks - 4/15/2012 18:49:49
I loved the quote about parts of the web being written by "ants on LSD". It very accurately described the patterns and lack there of for many of the websites in the world. I was surprised to see how standardized web pages are, but when I looked at ones I frequent they definitely seemed to follow a convention.
The apple help article discussed very interesting aspects of help design. I liked how they talked about the principles that made writing help easier for non apple developers. This seems like good software design in general. It was also interesting to see the requirement for concise instructions and omission of things that were obvious to most. I was unclear whether there was a way to find out how to use the cd player buttons.
Sally Lee - 4/15/2012 19:56:53
"The Need for Web Design Standards" talks about the importance of design elements in websites. The author says that design standards help users navigate the site easier and design standard benefits help increase user's sense of mastery over the web site. Jakob's Law, which says users spend most of their time on other websites, is one of the reasons why websites should comply with design standards.
"Designing Apple Help" is an article that talks about Apple's approach to designing the online help for Mac OS and its evolution. It talks about their many different design goals, like design tasks broadly, make help discoverable, etc and what their early research revealed about user behavior(users tended to represent problems in form of questions). I found this article interesting and helpful in case I ever go to design something like that sort.
Jeffrey Yu - 4/15/2012 20:08:31
The article "Designing Apple Help" was an informative read about how Apple came to designing an online help for Mac OS that led to remarkably high rates of task completion in usability studies. They begin with their findings from the research phase, where they learned that users formulate their problems in question form, which can be categorized into five different categories. Then they talk about their design goals, from making help discoverable to automating tasks when possible to making help easy to author. This new approach which consists of core elements troubleshooting-focused writing, task automation, and the use of step-by-step guidance turned out to be very successful for Apple. "The Need for Web Design Standards" is a reading about how important design elements are to helping users navigate websites. It claims that design standards are crucial to web design as users come to expect certain features, and because of Jakobs Law, which states that users spend most of their time on other websites.
Danube Phan - 4/15/2012 20:09:37
I agree that website design should move toward standardized design because then it would be easier for me to navigate through websites without having to wonder whether or not I correctly navigated to what I want. A lot of times, websites would be riddled with advertisements and random buttons that I won't know which button I should click. But maybe this is the design of the advertisement so that I could incorrectly navigate to their sites. In order to figure out what is the best standardized design, we would have to do extensive usability studies in order to figure out what are the best ways for the user to successfully complete their tasks online.
Shu-Chen Chen - 4/15/2012 21:05:31
Jakob Nielsen’s article about web design standards is highly informative about the functions and features that we have come to expect when going online today. As a user, one may not necessarily think about the standardization of many of these features but when you read about them, you suddenly realize how important they are. For example, you always look to the top right hand corner of the page for a search box. One thing I didn’t expect was that only 40% of the websites surveyed would change the color of visited links. This is one of the most useful features, especially on websites with a lot of information.
I really like the law “Jakob’s Law of the Internet User Experience: users spend most of their time on other websites.” This has a big impact on what you design because there are certain things that allow for innovation, branding, and uniqueness, but there are also things you should not mess with. If people feel that your site is difficult to understand or use, they will not stay and they will not come back. Most important is your information architecture and the structure of your workflow, especially if your site is eCommerce. It would be great to see an updated version of this study for 2012.
Another interesting section of the reading was the bit about Intranet standards. I definitely understand how intranets differ from internets in terms of design standards. It makes a clear contrast against the wild west of the online design world.
Yuki O'Brien - 4/15/2012 21:18:51
The amount of research that went into apple's help shows a great deal of respect and foresight for the user, which in turn is a aspect of their success.
The reading regarding the lack of standard in web-site layouts was interesting. Although the results were more consistent than I thought, due to the sheer number of websites in the public domain. It seems that this idea could apply to other such HCI mediums as well, such as iPhone apps. From using a multitude of apps, user will have a certain expectation as to how your application will look and feel, and it is certainly important to keep this in mind when designing an application.
Raphael Townshend - 4/15/2012 21:19:15
Today's readings were very useful to me as they provided concrete figures and scenarios involving design problems and, even better, they show how professionals went about solving the problems (in the case of the Apple reading) or recommend serious solutions (in the Web Design reading). The discussions involving the providing of help were particularly enlightening since they showed me how they consist of a user's last line of defense and must be placed in a well thought-out way so that even when the user is completely lost he can recuperate himself. It is particularly interesting to note the ubiquity of the need to design for help, and it is really a user interface element that should be considered quite carefully and specifically.
Joseph Schadlick - 4/15/2012 21:35:18
In designing the help interface for Mac OS 8.5, researchers developed some guidelines for producing a an interface that was created for and with users. They made sure to keep the user in the context of the task they were performing, and used visual cues to help the user stay focused on the task at hand. Designers wanted help to be simple to find, understand, use, and navigate, and used an internet based central help center to do so. Neilson believes that websites should all follow a defined set of interface standards that would aid users, in allowing them prior knowledge of site design, navigation, and operation. This helps the site designer, as poorly designed sites are shown to deter traffic.
Christopher Nguyen - 4/15/2012 22:00:54
The first reading discusses the need for Web Design standards. Web Design standards are important because most users spend time on other websites and when they visit a new one, they expect it operate similarly to previously viewed website. When users know what to expect, where to find things, and and don't have to think to complete their task, then their overall satisfaction increases. The article discusses three standardization levels: standard,convention, confusion. One area of confusion that the article mentioned was signing-in. I think this process has become less confusing as more sites are using standard login (i.e. login via Facebook, Google, Twitter) that require little to no effort on behalf of the user. The second article discusses the design goals and principles behind the Apple Guide. It discusses some questions that users face (such as goal oriented, procedural questions, descriptive questions). It then goes about discussing some important design goals that the Apple Guide incorporated. The one that most resonated with me was providing a central point of access for all help. By putting all the help information in a Help Viewer, users can access help for multiple applications within a single window and search for relevant information. To me, this is single best goal that reduces confusion. The best help I've used incorporates this feature (I'm a current Windows users and this principle is incorporated in the help) as it makes navigating for help far less time-consuming.
Alvin Chang - 4/15/2012 22:10:50
This week's article on design conventions follow closely with the design cycle in the first week on Plagiarism. By using an interface that is already tested and proven efficient, it may save the designer time on creating new user interface elements and the user, who can rely on recognition rather than recall. With the successful use of Help documentation, the program can further increase its usability in terms of error prevention, help and documentation heuristics.
Matthew Leung - 4/15/2012 22:11:09
"The Need for Web Design Standards" discusses a study on the layout of web pages and categorizes web elements into three categories: standard, conventional, and confusing. Standard elements behave the same all the time so users are never confused by them, conventional elements usually behave the same way so users have an idea of how to use these elements, and confusing elements rarely act the same way, so users don't know how to treat them. The article discusses how it is important to have standards for webpage layouts since many people spend on average about two minutes on a site before they decide it does not have the information they are looking for and leave. If your web content follows standards, it is easier for users to quickly and accurately tell if the content they are looking is on the site that they are looking at. "Designing Apple Help" discusses the design goals and procedures that Apple used in order to design Apple help for Mac OS. This involved tons of user testing to discover if the approaches were effective. For example, users missed it when the help icon was in the top right corner of the screen, but could accurately find the help menu when it was placed in the top left corner near the file menu. Also, the use of things such as coachmarks which explicitly circled the elements that a user would need to click on or modify was found to be good for inexperienced and new users, while more experienced users wanted a quicker and more efficient way of getting the information they needed to perform the tasks that they wanted. The Apple Help is important to user interface design, because for the most part, it helped define what help menus would look like, and still look like to this day. It helped create the standard for which other companies would base their help menus around so that users could more easily navigate where they need to just because they were more familiar with the interface.
Rosette Su - 4/15/2012 22:40:16
There are three levels of standardization for web design elements: standard, convention, and confusion. Standard design elements are present in 80% or more of websites; some standard elements are breadcrumb trails and logos in the upper-left corner of a page. Conventional design elements are presents in 50-79% of websites and include shopping carts in the right-hand corner of the screen and changing the color of visited links. All other design elements are classified as "confusion"; these include the main navigation scheme (tabbed menu, navigation bar, etc.) and the placement of the Help section. Elements of web design should really be standardized because users spend so little time on websites that they shouldn't be given even more incentive to leave the site due to things not being where/working how they expect them to be.
The design of Apple Help was an iterative process involving a redesign of an existing help system. The design achieved high rates of users being able to complete a task after consulting the Help due to writing that focused on troubleshooting, automation of tasks, and spoon-feeding step-by-step guidance only when needed.
Jessica Chou - 4/15/2012 23:02:39
Web design elements should provide users the expected functions based on three sandardization levels: standard (80% or more websites use the same design approach), convention (50-79% use a similar approach), confusion (users don't know what to expect). In a study conducted, 37% of design elements on 4/5 of the sites were the same, 40% were the same on at least 1/2 of the sites, and 23% were completely different. Standards should be used because they help users know where and how to use the features they expect. Jakob's Law states that users spend most of their time on other sites, which is why they become used to certain conventions. In designing Apple Help, goals included 1) make help discoverable, 2) easy to author, 3) central point of access, 4) take advantage of the internet, 5) define tasks broadly, 6) write minimally, and 7) automate tasks.
WenJie Zhou - 4/15/2012 23:17:57
The response for reading of "The Need for Web Design Standards" and "Designing Apple Help":
The first article is useful for user interface design. The design is not all about creativity, but embed many standard thing. Such as web design, the web designers must not design the interface as they like. The designers have to approach users' feeling. The more familiar with the web site, the more comfortable the users' feeling. all of the standard, convention and confusion parts are considered during web site.
The designing apple help talk about the evolution of online help for the Mac OS. It describes the history of online help for the Mac OS and the design of apple guide. And the usability testing and market research is important steps during design. it helps improve the quality of the product.
Kelvin Jie Lam - 4/15/2012 23:32:44
Apple seemed to utilize a lot of the user interface concepts that we have learned in the class to improve their help menu. From experimentation, they were able to figure out the problems such as layer switching, and fixed them to provide a better user experience. After further user testing, another iteration was done that lead to much greater success in task completion for users. Design standards are very important, and Jakob’s Law is a strong reason for standardizing the websites as much as possible.
Brennan Polley - 4/15/2012 23:45:15
Nielson's Article on the need for web design standards was interesting. He discussed three main design elements and then went into a study he did and explained the average results of it in comparison to a study done by University of Washington. The results state that about 40% of elements on a website were standardized by about 4/5ths of websites. These included where the website's logo were, etc. It goes on to discuss how about 25% of design elements varied largely in their implementation on websites, which causes a lot of uncertainty and confusion for users. This finding is used as a basis for why standards are needed on websites. Knabe's article discusses Apple's online help and how years of research and development went into its formation. He outlines design goals the company had which included making help discoverable, taking advantage of the internet, writing minimally (because who wants to read a paragraph about how to get to photos), and automating tasks such as opening the necessary window to perform the described task.
Hywel Lo - 4/15/2012 23:46:46
Web standards do need to be standardized to some aspects in my opinion but it has been hard for the industry to solidify on equal footings because of the various things you can do on the web. Having some prior experience to web development, I realized that each browser has its own standards and such that makes it harder for the developer to standardize across the board. Having to check for each individual formats one by one instead of just forming it all into one, web design standards are annoying to deal with and often causes confusion in bugs and such. As for designing Apple help, with the massive testing feedbacks and contained environment that allows for an executive decision, Apple has solidified its design standards to make it easier for everyone because it's all the same and everyone follows it instead of having varying decisions and "standards".
Bernard Julve - 4/15/2012 23:47:05
The Nielsen reading argues for increasing web design standardization in order to decrease user confusion. He divides web design features into three broad categories: standards, which are features used by about 80% of websites; conventions, or those used by 50-79%; and confusion, where no approach dominates across websites. Based on his studies, he notes that users often glance at web pages and leave within a minute. The possibility then that your website does not work in the way the user thinks it should is bad for business, as Nielsen concludes that "your best strategy is to follow everyone else."
The Knabe reading describes the development of Apple's Help system. To be noticed is the use of usability testing in research into the problem. Observing test subjects helped developers pinpoint the problem to 5 main categories of questions that are specific and thus easier to solve. The Apple design process was also iterative, building on previous work and developing new tasks, some of which were identified for Mac OS 8.5 as making Help more visible to the user, making Help more available across platforms and the internet by writing it in HTML, and focusing on troubleshooting style writing instead of procedural step by step style help instructions. This example demonstrates the usefulness of principles such as usability testing and iterative design that have already been discussed in this class.
Kaiyuan Deng - 4/15/2012 23:55:06
The apple development of help documentation resulting in an eventual score of 21/23 correctly exectued tasks is impressive. The inclusion of a good help section is one of the chief principles to help users navigate correctly and use programs correctly. One of the best practices is to have consistency across programs; this similarily assists users in operating their programs.
Pedro Tanaka - 4/15/2012 23:57:12
In "The Need for Web Design Standards," Jakob Nielsen's argues for web design standards as a way to improve user experience on the internet. Nielsen points that standards would increase the "user's sense of mastery," increasing the user's ability to accomplish what he wants to.
Kevin Knabe's "Designing Apple Help" describes how Mac OS 8.5 Help was designed. Knabe defines the design goals for the Help system as: make help discoverable, make help easy to author, provide a central point of access to all available help, take advantage of the internet, define tasks broadly, write minimally, and automate tasks when possible. He concludes that such approach was very successful in usability studies.
Ashley Hsu - 4/16/2012 0:04:51
The reading on designing the Apple help guide was a good summary of the concepts that we have been learning in the past semester. It described the process from defining tasks to finding users to test and the in between steps, just like we've learned. It was interesting to read about a real-live product that was produced from the same process we read about academically, such as the evaluation and execution gaps.
The short reading on web design standards laid out a persuasive argument for the standardization of different web features. I agree that having standard features would make things easier.
Rohan Ramakrishnan - 4/16/2012 0:04:57
I thought this week's readings were very interesting, especially the part that talked about Jakob's Law, which I had not heard of (on a quick bit of further research (Google), it turns out that it was coined by the guy who wrote the article, which seems a bit disingenuous.) At any rate, despite its etymological origins, the idea that people spend more time on other people's websites is an interesting one, although I don't know if that necessarily means that all websites should look similar so that users don't get confused. That would imply that there is no innovation in website design, only a massive push towards a single unifying design for all websites ever, which seems like it could be a bad thing if that singly unifying design turns out to not be very good.
Andrew Wun - 4/16/2012 0:19:35
When users visit different sites on the Web, they expect standard elements to work a certain way. The interface standards follow conventions only for the simple issues, however, and the elements important for usability are confusing. Eliminating the design confusion will give users greater mastery over the website; following the widely-used design patterns will maintain more users. More success will go to those that have an interface that comply with design conventions, like intranets. The Apple Guide really did its research, because the step by step instructions and coachmarks are features that would be a big help and improvement for me. Usability testing is the only way to discover specific issues such as users wanting more content for faster information access. Designing focuses on preserving strengths while addressing issues, so research must be continually done to update users with an acceptable system.
Douglas Treadwell - 4/16/2012 0:21:36
All the things that Apple did make sense, and it's clear that they had a benefit for the users. Similarly, it makes sense that because users of websites spend most of their time on other websites, to design websites to be somewhat consistent with each other. This is a sensible approach, but I would think these are intuitive approaches for intelligent designers. These sorts of rules are good for preventing less intelligent people from doing stupid things, but I'm not sure they're good for helping intelligent people do things better than they already are.
Camilo King - 4/16/2012 0:26:45
I do agree with some of the ideas that are presented in the first reading. It would be wise for companies/or anyone building a website to follow conventions that are commonly followed by successful websites. However, I feel like it is unrealistic to enforce these design standards for all web designers. Along with following these conventions, designers must also find ways to make their website unique and engage the viewer. I like the idea of intranets, because of the fact that they can implement and enforce design standards.
Jessica Miller - 4/16/2012 0:46:09
One article discussed the need for standardization within Web design. Jakob Neilsen asserted that most users when using a website expect simpler web elements to behave a certain way when these assumptions turn out to actually be incorrect. Neilsen defines three levels of standardization levels including standard which says that websites should use the same design approach.Convention ensures that when a user visits a site, things behave how they expect them to. Confusion is the level that encompasses sites that do not have a single design that dominates. By having standarization in web design, Neilsen believes that websites will be much more effective because users will not be confused about the content of the site. The second article discussed the way in which Apple developed their Help system. Apple went through rigorous user testing to research the way in which users would expect a Help system to function. They wanted the expectations to match what actually was searched or was trying to be accomplished. One of the goals they strived for was to making the process automated. Instead of giving a user a set of instructions to follow, the Help system would just perform the action for you.
Kenneth Do - 4/16/2012 0:48:35
I wholeheartedly disagree with Nielsen's call for standardized web design. Standarding things like placements of logos and location of navigation menus severely limits the creativity of the designer. While all websites would look the same and be easy to use, they would be incredibly boring, which would be incredibly detrimental to the user experience. Everything would end up looking like Twitter's Bootstrap framework. While the coachmark in Apple Guide looks useful, I can see how users would be unsatisfied by it. When writing documentation, I often find myself writing the obvious - such as the "press the play button to play" help screen.
Lingbo Zhang - 4/16/2012 0:58:22
"The Need for Web Design Standards": One weakness in internet design is the difficulty in establishing design conventions given the sheer number of existing websites. Yet web design in becoming more and more crucial as users come to expect certain features and layouts based on previous browsing experience. In today's fast paced world, web design is of utmost importance because it assists users in finding the content they are seeking within the small amount of time (1 min 49 sec) before they pass judgement on the suitability of the site. "Designing Apple Help": Early research showed that help content should remain in the context of the problem, enabling users to quickly transition between the task and the instructions and directly showing users which interface icons to click on through "coachmarks".Later design goals included help content that assists users in forming goals, performing actions and interpreting feedback, automating tasks, and writing minimally. One idea for help content is the ability to link that content with interface icons and system output. For example, instead of clicking the help button and searching for the meaning of an icon, users should be able to right click and select an option to bring up information on how that icon can be used. In addition, it would be helpful for the system to identify possible task goals and provide tips if the user right clicks and select the help option. This would tie eliminate the need for users to break out of a task to seek help by closely linking help content with tasks (as users don't have to navigate the cursor away from the object they're manipulating).
JinWoo Roh - 4/16/2012 1:00:54
I enjoyed reading about the design goals featured in the Designing Apple Help Website. To create a good design, a designer must incorporate some goals, such as making help discoverable, making help easy to author, and providing a central point of access to all available help. I thought that writing minimally was an interesting point, since a huge and gigantic wall of text will do nothing but to befuddle the users. I further learned that this approach will lead to "remarkably high rates of task completion." Doing so will be essential and effective for the designers to test and understand their design
Erik Gui - 4/16/2012 1:03:18
In the first reading, the author expressed the "need" for web design standards. He states that users would be confused about the variations of design in webpages. He also names a few design standards that may help users. From a fundamental standpoint, I vehemently disagree with this author's position. In an extreme scenario, he is essentially telling web developers to strip away their creativity and conform to some norm of web design. This is absolutely hideous! An analogy of this would be forcing all the landscape artists to draw the same tree, or perhaps making all fashion designers make dresses that are in the same color. I cannot believe someone would make such proposal that eliminates the creativity of this industry. Perhaps all the author would like is some definite and coherent feedback and user experience from websites. However, I still believe that such proposal limits more than it allows. The second reading is an interesting analysis on the Mac OS's help files, and how it makes finding help for this OS easier to users. Although the intent of the article is positive, the material itself seems way too outdated. In modern day standards, such help system would not be even close to what users enjoy today.
Timothy Zhu - 4/16/2012 1:05:11
These readings point out the importance of having well-designed help interface, the first thing that users turn to when they don't understand the interface. Nielsen points out that unfortunately, help on the web is one of the least standardized things, with the result that users looking for help get even more confused than they were before... The Apple Help article talks about steps Apple took in redesigning Apple Help from OS 7.0 to make it better. While reading it, I thought it was interesting that their studies showed that automation helped the users _despite conventional pedagogical wisdom to the contrary_. Was this ever foollowed up and explained? Or after reading this, is it okay to apply that result across other interfaces?
Samuel Zhu - 4/16/2012 1:21:26
Standards are indeed very important when designing websites and UI. Natural affordances must be taken into account for whatever you use, and having a universal standard helps with that.
Adhering to a standard also helps with help pages, not having to explain many things if they are things commonly known to many.
Kurtis Freedland - 4/16/2012 2:13:28
I think these readings were very relative to our project. We need to make a help screen and following the mac help development could potentially help us design our screen. I think the other reading was really cool too. These standards and conventions may seem stupid at times but really they are there so that many people can work on the same project and have the same basic language of understanding. All in all this was a great read!
Michael Greenwald - 4/16/2012 2:20:03
The Apple reading discusses design choices that Apple took and learned when designing their Help feature. They came up with a bunch of design principles, so here are a few that I like: - define tasks broadly: Apple figured out that if they write how to do one particular task, users won't be able to adapt to it, not would they necessarily know what their goal was. Instead, they should write help documentation that helps users figure out their goals, - make help easier to author. This should be one of the obvious points. Make standards for help menus so that developers don't have to worry about the details,
The Nielsen article calls for more standards and consistency over web page design. After performing a study, it turns out that similar sites tend to use the same layout.
Yian Shang - 4/16/2012 2:37:18
A lot of users view the web as a single resource, so some consistency in design is also expected. Design standards allow the user to know what to expect and to feel like they have some level of mastery of the interface. Most users will be accustomed to the standards that other sites have set already, so you would want to design your site to function like others.
Yu Gan - 4/16/2012 2:39:56
Article 1 Web sites these days have a striking number of design approaches that are not standardized. Though this can contribute to the originality of a design, the surprising lack of standardization means users will have difficulty knowing what features to expect and how to use these features. Standardization is particularly important because of Jakob’s Law of Internet user experience, which states that users spend more time on other sites than your own. Thus, they will come to your site with presuppositions about how to use the interface. Though not everything can be standardized, important things like workflow and structure are surprisingly standardizable. Intranets, as opposed to Internet sites, have even more reason and ability to standardize themselves, since an intranet has a single authority in charge. Article 2 The second article talks about improvements to the Apple help system. One such improvement is drawing circles around interface elements instead of showing images of them, which makes the images appear selectable. Usability testing also helps the development team find out where users want improvements, such as a more streamlined help system that doesn’t spoon-feed information to them. One design goal of the online help system is to make it more discoverable; many users simply gave up looking for the help function after a while in the previous iteration. This was done by giving it its own section in the menu bar. Another goal was to make help pages easier to author by making it HTML based. Other goals include making help more centralized, using the Internet to provide better experience, writing minimally to avoid giving users information they don’t need to know, and automating tasks (even if it means the users learn less).
Varad Kishore - 4/16/2012 2:40:08
The reading talks about the standardization of design principles needed across the internet since the lack such standardization leads to an interrupted experience for users, who are expecting much the opposite. The reading links this with how Apple provides design guidelines for third party application developers.
Sahana Rajasekar - 4/16/2012 2:45:06
It was very interesting to read about web design conventions. The fact that people take only about 1 minute and 49 seconds on a site before they leave if it doesn't fulfill their needs is informative. It shows us the direct relationship between user interface and design to success and functionality.
Of the design goals, the two that really caught my attention were "write minimally" and "design tasks broadly." These relate back to the previous article because we must assume the user does not want to spend too much time "looking" for anything. In this case, the user doesn't want to look for help. The fastest way to get solutions is if it is short and easily structured.
Benjamin Shapiro - 4/16/2012 3:23:15
In this lecture's reading on design standards, Nielsen explains why standards important for designs. He points out that users generally expect 77% of all elements of basic Web design to behave a certain way: 37% of them standard and 40% of them convention. He points out that promoting standards rather than confusion and different unique interface layouts and icon sets, allows users to take more advantage of the websites you provide to them for several reasons, including easier navigation and knowing how to operate standard features. It is important to note, however, that this is a very simple case because it applies to web design. In software design that is not web design, I think this gets a little more complicated because different people are used to different schemas for their user interfaces (i.e. a Windows user vs. a Mac user) and application design becomes much less standard as a result.
The second reading was on the Apple help system. Not much to be said here; the reading provided a brief outline of the goals and accomplishments of the system and they conclude, essentially by saying "it worked." I think it would be much more interesting if there were items in the reading that addressed problems with the apple help system and posited solutions to them rather than simply stating that the apple help interface is perfect, since as we know, most designs are far from perfect. That said, it is interesting to contrast this writing to the earlier one, in which Nielsen explains that standards are important, because this was a case in which a standard needed to be invented and sometimes changed. This is a good question, and one that I have asked myself many times: if you are creating something that requires a never-seen-before design, is there any way that we can use concepts involved in design standards to make our design more "standard" or easy to use even if it does not explictly encode or contain standard elements?
Praneet Wadge - 4/16/2012 3:40:03
I really liked the reading on the design of the Help Menu for the Mac by Knabe. Especially interesting were the design goals of making help discoverable and easy to author. Making help unobtrusive and subtle, but also easy to find for the user is usually a big debate during interface creation. The help button is a bit unsightly and can create a negative portrayal of the product as hard to use and poorly made; however, it is also critical to show that a support system exists that the user can fall back and rely on. Alongside, allowing help to be authored is incredibly critical nowadays because of the range of mobile phone OS's that apps have to run on.
Tamzid Islam - 4/16/2012 4:29:20
Today's reading assignment consists of two readings focusing on designing help and program flow that improve usability for users, and allow them to receive a quick and convenient web surfing experience. The first reading assignment asserts the importance of standardizing web design elements. Standardized components would help reduce confusion among users and allow them to know what features to expect, how these features will look in the interface, or where to find these features on the site and on the page. The second reading assignment deals with providing online help for users in a way that access help effectively to complete tasks. The core elements of the system - troubleshooting-focused writing, task automation, and the use of step-by-step guidance when appropriate - appear to support users well "when all else fails."
Connie Guo - 4/16/2012 5:05:27
Design standards are important for several reasons. They prepare users for the features to expect, how to interact with these features, and getting a sense of familiarity as they navigate through the system. Jakob's law states that most of a user's time is spent on other websites; this means that in designing an interface, features and functionalities from other platforms should also be considered.
Can Zhang - 4/16/2012 7:28:06
I am reminded of a similar article in Joel in Software, where Joel talked about why standards are developed and how do they fail. This reading, however, approaches from a different direction. It tried to justify that standards should have 100% adoption, when the law of leaky abstractions pretty much nullifies any notion that a standard will ever have close to perfect records.
The apple article seems to be more evangelism. The older Mac's GUI design were terrible.
Danny Tan - 4/16/2012 7:31:24
The readings discussed web design standards and online help design. Web design standards are important in that they help users know what features to expect, what they look like, where to find them, how to use them, and are not left wondering what the meaning of certain elements are or why they are important or useful if the elements are non-standard. People are used to the design standards and conventions so websites should be designed in a way that allows users to match what they know from websites they have visited to a new website. The design standards and conventions include the structure of product pages, workflow, the information provided, and where to find information. For help documentation design, users often asked questions that fall into five different categories: goal-oriented questions, descriptive questions, procedural questions, interpretive questions, and navigational questions. For the Mac OS online help, there were several design goals: (1) make help discoverable, (2) make help easy to author, (3) provide a central access point for all help, (4) make use of the Internet, (5) define tasks broadly, (6) write minimally, and (7) automate tasks when possible.
Adam Braman - 4/16/2012 8:01:10
After these readings I began to compare Apple's help for old OSes with the talking paper clip that used to be used in Microsoft Office. Not only was it annoying, but it also did a bad job of following the rules set out in Apple help paper. You didn't always know where to get your help, because the paper clip wasn't always in the corner, and unless you used it before you wouldn't know how to bring it up. I believe the hotkey was f1 or f2, and that there was an option under view that would also bring the paperclip up. It was application specific, as the paper clip was exclusive to Word, although there was a similar helper character in excel. It didn't use the internet, and it wasn't minimalist or useful for broad questions. It was useful for direct questions such as "how do I print this document in landscape," but was useless for similar questions from less experienced users like "how do I print this document sideways." It was always something of a laughing stock, maybe not just for its incessant remarks, but also for this too. These aspects of the paper clip are likely what led it to be so disliked.
Ritu Kiragi - 4/16/2012 8:10:10
It was really great that the authors tried to quantize the disparities in website design and how it affects users because we all know that it's true that there is no standard and this can lead to users being confused, but without quantitative proof, it's hard to realize the actual impact of there being no standard. However, I don't know how likely it is that people will adhere to a standard because there are so many people who are all disconnected that design websites and in order for there to be an international standard, it would probably have to be government imposed, and it could be dangerous (to creativity and regulations) to let the governments have a huge say in website development and design. I found the article on Apple Help really interesting because that's one thing I have always appreciated, and it was interesting learning how that was designed, and how long ago it was designed! Having a pop-up and then highlighting the actual object that would be used rather than having an image of it is less confusing for the user and faster as well. The help center is more useful for general searching.
Victor Kmita - 4/16/2012 8:27:01
I also think that web design standards are necessary, but I like the fact that they are not necessary. The freedom of the internet is probably more important to me. Ultimately though, you want to make the user experience the most enjoyable that you can, and in that light web standards are a no brainer. Increasing the ability for users to get work done is almost always a beneficial thing for you website, unless you want the users to be stuck on your page all day.
The online help documentation reading reminded me about how most programming language documentation is structured, usually pretty badly. It just makes sense that these things are standardized. Apple made theirs with html so developers didn't have to make multiple forms of documentation. The task model used in Apple help makes sense to me now that I have a little experience with tasks through our project.
Kate Greenwood - 4/16/2012 8:46:38
There were two readings for today. The first one was about discussing why there is a need for Web design standards. The article begins talking about how the problem originates because "the Web" is not a single, unified, designed whole, but is rather a mere composite of individually designed websites. It goes on further to relay numbers for how the most complex of interactions (such as navigation) are "confusing", the least consistently implemented across websites reviewed. It concludes with a discussion about why having design standards would help the current situation and why standardization would help users. I found this article's main points interesting, but find it implausible that such standards will ever be adopted because each individual website serves such a different purpose (with such different information) and accordingly, each web-designer is (plausibly) concerned with how to aesthetically and productively lay-out their website to address those given constraints.
The second article was about how the online help for Mac OS 8.5 was developed as a sort of example of a successfully designed interface. They first began with researching current literature and implemented designs of online help menus. They tested the implemented designs with users, and observed the way the user interacted with the help menus - only to discover that users often expressed what they were looking for in the form of a question - the most demonstrated forms being descriptive or procedural. Key features of their process were iterative user testing and focusing on addressing targeted (but not too specific) design goals. This was a helpful paper to read, in particular, seeing what sort of design goals they laid out - it helped get a better understanding of what sort of features to be seeking to be able to provide.
Omar Ali - 4/16/2012 8:47:58
The first article talks about design standards for website and how following design conventions can be helpful to the users. The second articles discusses the development and design of the help system included with the Mac OS. The author talks about the design goals and how they reached them through minimalist design along with usability testing.
Adib Kashem - 4/16/2012 8:58:13
Nielsen's reading touches on the need for web design standards, which I think is very important. Although the piece was written in 2004 and things have changed quite a bit today in 2012 when it comes to e-commerce websites, unfortunately not a lot has changed when it comes to other commonly used websites like personal banking and credit card management as well as course and resourceful websites from universities. A couple of examples come to mind. Although one would expect the American Express site to be very similar to Citicards and Chase, each one has a radically different way to reach the statements or to contact them. It gets very confusing and I think it is a shame because the services offered by these sites is not all that different or even complicated. The other example that comes to mind are course webpages. Just looking through my computer science classes this semester reveals that each one is laid out in a very different fashion from the next and accessing course content is different for each one of them. However, the underlying tasks that I, as a user, want to accomplish are very similar, in that, I only want to look at the schedule and lecture slides for all the classes. Fortunately, sites like Piazzza are trying to eliminate this problem to an extent, but the individual course websites with their different accessing methods still exist nonetheless.
Sherman Ng - 4/16/2012 8:59:40
The concept of standardization serves to provide a common set of assumptions for the user to use when browsing the internet. While it does make new website more easily navigated by its first time visitors, it can stifle new design that might be more applicable. This leads to variants to the same standards on the internet. Despite the fact that elements that are truly unique and of potentially confusing role in the user's eyes still exist, these various sets of standards serve to make the internet a much more navigable domain. However, I feel that the lack of a proper help for site elements that are defined on a site by site basis make the unique or rarely commonly used elements impossible for a first time user to understand and use.
Whitney Lai - 4/16/2012 9:26:29
The quote "the Web is like an anthill built by ants on LSD" was great, hahaha.
I do agree that web design needs more/better standards, though. This is something that's improved a lot in the last few years, but still has a long way to go. For instance, most iPhone/iPad app sites look the same (horizontal layout with 3-4 layers, the top being a header/navigation, the middle being a huge screenshot of an iPhone with their app on it, the last being some footer with misc links and contact info). But the content that these sites provide might vary, or as a better question, is this the correct content/design in the first place?
