Blog

Posted on

User Experience and the ease of usability

The definition of usability is sometimes reduced to “easy to use,” but this over-simplifies the problem and provides little guidance for the user interface designer. A more precise definition can be used to understand user requirements, formulate usability goals and decide on the best techniques for usability evaluations. An understanding of the five characteristics of usability – effective, efficient, engaging, error tolerant, easy to learn – helps guide the user-centered design tasks to the goal of usable products.

  • Usability means thinking about how and why people use a product. 
    Good technical writing, like good interaction design, focuses on user’s goals. The first step in creating a usable product is understanding those goals in the context of the user’s environment, task or work flow, and letting these needs inform the design.
  • Usability means evaluation.
    Usability relies on user-feedback through evaluation rather than simply trusting the experience and expertise of the designer. Unlike conventional software acceptance testing, usability evaluation involves watching real people use a product (or prototype), and using what is learned to improve the product.
  • Usability means more than just “ease of use”
    The 5 Es – efficient, effective, engaging, error tolerant and easy to learn – describe the multi-faceted characteristics of usability. Interfaces are evaluated against the combination of these characteristics which best describe the user’s requirements for success and satisfaction.
  • Usability means user-centered design
    Users are satisfied when an interface is user-centered – when their goals, mental models, tasks and requirements are all met. The combination of analysis, design and evaluation all approached starting from the user’s point of view creates usable products.

Read the well written, in-depth post by Whitney Quesenbery on her site here: http://www.wqusability.com/articles/more-than-ease-of-use.html

Posted on

Starting a consulting business

A close friend recently approached me asking for advice. They are considering launching a consulting business and in doing their research, they wanted to know any “off the cuff” words of wisdom I might have for them. Having run my own graphic design and website development firm for several years, I had some things to say.

When I was starting my company in the USA I had approached a businessman and asked a similar question, his wisdom was invaluable and I would say it is part of the reason my company was successful.

First, let’s define successful.

Each individual needs to define success in their own terms. For me personally, success would look far different today than it did a decade ago. I’m going to assume you’re reading this because you’re defining success monetarily, so let’s move on.

Look around enough and you will begin to recognize the “blah blah me too lemming-like” marketing speak everywhere. It’s boring and useless and begins to look pathetic. Be bold enough to plant a flag on ONE specific mountain and work hard to be the unquestionable SME (subject matter expert) to defend it. Find good people you can trust to hand off certain requests you are regularly getting asked for, maybe even work out a finders fee, but stand firm on top of your mountain. Get speaking gigs, get recognized, be the expert.

ADD VALUE. When you are an expert and you are adding value, you’ll be busy and well paid.

Consider these very distinct stages in how you make money in consulting, in order:

  1. Know your hourly rate and use it as a positioning tool.
  2. Get a second shift job to keep from compromising while you build it. 
  3. Fill >60% of ALL the time you work with residual fees. 
  4. Maintain >60% with an increasingly higher hourly rate. 
  5. Move exclusively to package pricing w/o reference to hours. 
  6. Build scalable income (webinars, books, etc.).

I personally have not made it to ‘6’ yet. I always am a bit nervous to put myself out there as I do not want to come across braggadocios.

Be very helpful in giving away terrific advice for free as long as you don’t personalize it; then charge ridiculous amounts of money to do so.

I spoke at an event once where I gave ALL of my secrets away. It was a wild plan, but it worked. I gained more business from that engagement than I could possibly handle and my hourly rate nearly doubled because of it. The reason: the business owners trusted me.

Figure out why you’re in business. I’d suggest these three things, in this order: 

  1. Make money. 
  2. Make a difference. 
  3. Enjoy the process.

If you don’t charge enough, no one listens and you don’t have an opportunity to make a difference. But just charging a lot of money, especially in a service-client relationship, can be soul crushing. You must find the win-win balance where you’re making enough money while feeling like your customers are winning. 

Take chances and be different. This leads me into my second take-away:

Be amazing at communicating. I have found transparency as highly valued in the C-Suite.

What I mean by transparency is: communicate as clearly and often as possible. Imagine yourself in the C-Suite and answer the questions you imagine them asking – especially the difficult ones. If your product is necessary then it will be easy to sell. Find out why it’s necessary and walk boldly as the expert in that category. In 2007 the iPhone was the answer – Apple wasn’t hiring salespeople to sell it, the product sold itself. 

Posted on

Feeling Machines that Think

Quick answer: Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio found that emotions, not logic, drive roughly 95% of human decisions — patients who lost the ability to feel emotion after brain damage could list every pro and con of a choice but still couldn’t actually decide. Damasio’s conclusion: we’re not “thinking machines that feel” but “feeling machines that think,” which means self-awareness and humility matter as much as facts do when making good decisions.

Over the past several weeks I’ve been performing my research on developing empathy and humility, the foundation of servant leadership, in Afrillennials. I found in the past session an interesting “aha moment” popped up in our discussion and it brought me back to this quote:

According to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio our emotions are the deciding factor for 95 percent of our decisions. So rather than “thinking and acting,” we generally “feel and act.” Part of Damasio’s research involved brain-damaged people who were unable to experience emotions. Even though they could list the pros and cons of any given choice, they were unable to make decisions.

Damasio’s work led him to believe that human beings aren’t “thinking machines that feel,” but rather “feeling machines that think.”

The 95% of our decisions are based on emotions is a staggering thought. I’ve found in my own life, as the development of this research has been taking place, that I desire to make more decisions based on fact vs. emotions. The self-awareness required for this takes deep effort, introspection, and humility with others to allow them to speak into your life, calling out the areas where your thoughts may not be in alignment with your values.

Frequently Asked Questions

What did Antonio Damasio discover about how humans make decisions?

Damasio found that emotions drive about 95% of human decisions, not logical analysis. His research on brain-damaged patients who couldn’t feel emotion showed they could list every pro and con of a choice but were still unable to actually decide — proving emotion, not just information, is what triggers a decision.

What does “feeling machines that think” mean?

It’s Damasio’s reframe of how humans actually work: rather than being rational thinkers who occasionally feel emotions, we’re fundamentally emotional beings who use thinking to make sense of and act on what we already feel. Emotion drives the decision; logic mostly explains it afterward.

How does this research apply to leadership?

If most decisions are emotional first, then self-awareness and humility become leadership skills, not soft extras. Leaders need to recognize when their own emotions — not just the facts — are steering a decision, and stay open to others pointing out where their reactions don’t match their stated values.

View all posts