Theory: separating good prototypes from the bad

Why is it that some people can produce good system prototypes and some can’t?

Maria Murphy recently blogged about her experiences with systems prototyping. Maria wouldn’t describe herself as an IA, but her efforts always result in systems that can be translated into good and appropriate user experiences. I’ve known many BAs in my 10 years with the public service in Canberra and, to be frank, most of them couldn’t design their way out of a wet paper bag. These BAs produce great systems requirements documents, some even produce and incorporate user requirements into their documents, but they can’t design usable systems. I also know many graphic designers who have delved into interface design, particularly for websites. While most of them produce beautifully looking system concepts, most of these products are completely unusable in the real world and break just about every usability rule in the book.

So why is it that Maria’s stuff works and these other people’s stuff doesn’t?

At lunch recently, Donna Maurer was talking to me about the book she’s working on. She said that, for one chapter, she couldn’t write about certain tools without writing about the discipline of Information Architecture. When I asked why, Donna said it was because it was important to talk about the theories behind information architecture first before introducing the methods and tools. Lots of people do card-sorting, she said, to solve information-related problems, but its because of theory that an IA understands why he should do card-sorting, when he shouldn’t, and how to ensure that the outputs are correctly interpreted and applied to the architecture of information and the resultant system prototypes.

I think Donna is onto something here. It explains why Maria is so good at producing usable prototypes and why many other BAs produce bad ones. Maria understands the theory of communications and marketing, of which an understanding of users’ motivations, their behaviour, and their resultant needs and wants, is an integral part of message and channel design. With an understanding of theory, she applies and adapts the theoretical perspective to her requirements gathering and systems prototyping.

For those of us who call ourselves IAs, Jason Winthrow [1] explains that this discipline is based on the theories of cognitive psychology with an emphasis on understanding the mental processes of users and how to support those processes. While the card-sorting tool might give you the output of how people think about information, without the theory, it won’t give you any further insight into users’ behaviour and it won’t tell you things like:

• why it works
• when it works best
• why users came up with the categories they did
• how to turn the categories into an experience that will work for users
• tell you what to do next
• tell you whether its the right tool to use next time

I think it’s this gap between theory and action that separates those who can do information architecture, successfully realising designs as prototypes, and those who can’t. It explains why “the majority of systems are built based on the interests and perspectives of the [various] experts” [2] because the resultant product is based on subjective assessment of motivation and behaviour, and not on the interests and perspectives of users.

As both an IA and a psychologist I’m quite aware of the theories that apply to good information design, theories that include:

motivation

• ensuring that systems are usable will motivate people to use them

memory

• the first thing someone sees and experiences, and the last thing someone sees and experiences, effects and modifies people’s behaviour and expectations
• people can only hold limited amount of information in their memory
• it takes a lot of effort to move information from short- to long-term memory
• short-term memory is only a few seconds

visual perception

• proximity and context influences people’s click behaviour

semantics

• choice of words effects people’s browsing decisions

learning

• past experiences effect people’s expectations of system behaviour
• recent learnt experiences effect people’s future interactions with systems

These theories give us the rules of usability that I spoke of earlier. The theory equips good prototypers, like IAs, with the all important factors for effective information design: an understanding of how people think [3] and how people behave. These theories then giverise to rules to design by, and tools by which to gather users’ requirements, and assess their value against business drivers.

Without theories like these ones, there’s not much to go on when building your prototype, except your own personal judgement — this is what separates good prototypes from the bad.

M

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[1] Withrow, J. (2003). Cognitive Psychology & IA: From Theory to Practice. Boxes and Arrows. Online at: <www.boxesandarrows.com/…_theory_to_practice>, accessed on 3 July 2007.

[2] Hannah, S. (2005). Comparing methods for information architects, usability specialists, and other practitioners. Online at: <cardsort.stevehannah.net>, accessed on 3 July 2007.

[3] Barker, I. (2005). What is information architecture. Two Step Designs, 2 May. Online at: <www.steptwo.com.au/…nfoarch/index.html>, accessed on 3 July 2007.