When I took ENG 210 some semesters ago we spent the entire semester discussing the exact ideas he was mentioning, although from a more feminist approach. That class was very challenging. There were days where I was calling the professor at home to get help with the ideas and to this day I still cannot wrap my brain around some of the ideas. There is a mindset trait I am missing for this sort of thing. And to be completely honest I probably couldn't even tell you what they are anymore. The only thing I really remember is the standard "getting away from seeing everything through the white male's eyes" idea.
But Dr. McNely presented it in a different light. I'd never really considered user experience to be a rhetoric topic. I'd thought about the idea but I never connected them in that way.
Earlier in the semester I had a task on my calendar, "Build prototypes for Evelyn." Evelyn is my nearly-3-year-old niece. I'd toyed with the idea of building an app similar to our project, but with different goals such as finding an animal, color, or something a toddler would identify with. I was thinking this would give me an eye into what a child does with the UI (although she isn't new to the mobile app idea, she uses my brother's iPhone like a pro) but I never got around to it but Dr. McNely's talk kind of re-sparked the idea for me. I figured she would be the ideal candidate for getting UI feedback (providing I would be able to recreate the situation is a way she would work with, and a way I could re-translate... which is unlikely) since she has few, if any, preconceptions on software.
Although then I'd have to weigh those results with those who do have preconceptions on software. I think this can relate to the Office 2003 vs. 2007 interface. The ribbon was a disaster for people who knew their way around the old interface, but was easier for less-experienced users to navigate now that buttons and menus were grouped by function.
I've been talking to people about my current user testing adventures and I mentioned that it's kind of hard to find people in our target audience. Android phones still have a small market share so everyone I tested with had to familiarize themselves with the phone. This was... interested, and it gave me some insight as to how they interacted with a UI they'd never used before. I, personally, tend to abuse the Menu button because, to me, that makes sense. My "subjects" had to find the menu key first which leads me to question just how much faith to put in the menu button. Granted, it has its uses but I shouldn't assume it'll be the first place users will look for functions. One of my subjects didn't realize the phone was a touch screen and was using the scroll wheel so now I'm starting to look at usability in terms of scrolling. Interesting conclusions, really.
What I took from Dr. McNely's speech was that I should expand how I'm thinking about the end-user. My idea of the end-user is an all-inclusive model of a person. I'm starting to think of different kinds of end-users now. For example, I saw Evelyn as the ideal end-user because she doesn't really think about what to expect, she just sees and interprets. In reality, users have ideas of where to look for things and it's up to us to try and merge our design with other people's world-view to make a fully usable and friendly interface.
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