Designing for Politeness
“If we want users to like our software we should design it to behave like a likeable person: respectful, generous and helpful.” — Alan Cooper, “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum”
A few years ago a grad school friend asked me to come in and speak to his class about interaction design. The class was 50 minutes long, and I could take as little or as much time as I wanted. I prepared some brief notes, 30-40 minutes worth, and figured the rest would be taken up by discussion. I got up in front of the class, and promptly used up all of my material in under 10 minutes. I was mortified. In desperation I pulled up some wireframes for a project I was working on, and started listing off the changes we’d made and the rationale behind them. The class was bored to tears.
As I talked through the changes something clicked in my head, and told the class that “a UI is a conversation between the system and the user.” I started pointing out how the old UI was cold and aloof, full of empty form fields and imperious demands on the user. The new UI ditched the jargon, embraced a more conversational tone, tried to make the outcome of every action transparent, and gradually engaged the user over time.
Breaking Down the Process: TapMetrics.com
Having the opportunity to refine an idea or concept into a solid and successful product is one of the things I love most about my profession. Here at Viget, we often do just that, on a foundational level, with our start-up clients. Working with the founders of TapMetrics was no exception.
TapMetrics is a tool that consolidates iPhone application sales data, user feedback, software metrics, and other information to allow both business development folks and developers to manage a portfolio of applications. The fellas at TapMetrics, working within a limited timeline and budget, decided to focus our team's efforts on refining their tool's existing information architecture and alpha interface. With that in mind, Kevin and I worked toward an end goal of delivering fairly high fidelity wirefames for some of the tool's core views. The plan was to let TapMetrics' business owners and their team of keen developers take the details from these and run with them, then refine the design after implementation.
Getting Started
Diving into TapMetrics was a fun process. We started with a great brainstorming and research session with Nolan and Chris. Our conversation centered around their hopes, as business owners, for TapMetrics as well as the praise, gripes, and wishes their alpha testers had voiced while using the tool. A good majority of the feedback concerned the following:
- All available information for a particular iPhone application should be centralized and presented in a unified way.
- An application's analytics, messages and alerts should be communicated effectively and appropriately, based on their context.
- The process of managing, importing and exporting an application's information should be straightforward and as streamlined as possible.
- iPhone application information should be leveraged for insight into application management and strategy over time.
From there, we wrapped our heads around all of the data TapMetrics can gather and leverage from the iTunes Store and took a peek into the application's current interface with some general usability heuristics and the above list in mind.
After taking stock of things, we created wireframes that represented an account owner's Dashboard View and an Individual iPhone Application View.
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