Corvus Consulting is now part of Denim & Steel Interactive. We help startups, product managers, marketing agencies & dev teams develop web and iOS products that are humane and business-smart.
Visit Denim & Steel to Learn MoreIf you’ve been in software and website development long enough to see a few releases, this scenario is likely familiar:
It’s a few days from launch, or just around sign-off on a major design component. Someone on the project has an itch and reaches for external feedback, putting part or all of the design in front of new eyes. Then they ask, innocently enough, “What do you think of this?”
Even when they aren’t part of the deliverables, I write up personas to guide most of my interaction and experience design work. They keep me tuned into motivations and needs that aren’t strictly intuitive to me.
Personas are necessarily artificial; they present a single, fictionalized instance to stand for an entire audience of customers. Despite the assumptions that such abstractions come with, they earn their keep by reminding the development team what’s important to the people they’re building for.
Lately I’ve been wondering about the single-person focus typical to personas, and whether they need to be expanded to capture the real-world social existence of users even when the design doesn’t have socialization as a primary objective.
A couple years ago I learned from Paul Hibbitts a way of using slideshow applications for testing the flow and completeness of a design. Typically, I use Apple’s Keynote for this, though PowerPoint or Impress can work as well.
The essence of the method is to put all screens and all their states into sequences that follow a task or scenario. Paging through that sequence, imagining or even pointing to screen elements as you go, brings missing pieces and potentially confusing points into focus, often with shocking speed.
I’ve used the technique in a number of projects since then, always with good results. But in describing it with others I could rarely put my finger on why it worked so well for spotting what was otherwise missed when just looking at the wireframes on their canvas.
Yesterday at lunch I was talking up this method once again, but this time I hit on what I think explains its effectiveness by drawing from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.
