Ease of Use

If you just focus on the evaluation activity typically with usability testing, you're actually doing *nothing* to improve the usability of your process. You are still creating bad designs. And just filtering them out is going to be fantastically wasteful in terms of the amount of effort. So, you know, if you think about it as a production line, we have that manufacturing analogy and talk about screws. If you decide that your products aren't really good enough

for whatever reason – they're not consistent or they break easily or any number of potential problems – and all you do to *improve* the quality of your product is to up the quality checking at the end of the assembly line, then guess what? You just end up with a lot of waste because you're still producing a large number of faulty screws. And if you do nothing to improve the actual process in the manufacturing of the screws, then just tightening the evaluation process

– raising the hurdle, effectively – is really not the way to go. Usability evaluations are a *very* important tool. Usability testing, in particular, is a very important tool in our toolbox. But really it cannot be the only one.

What is a signifier? Signifiers are one of the most important tools of a designer. Grand old man of UX design, Don Norman teaches us that signifiers are signals. Some signifiers are signs, labels and drawings placed in the world, such as a signs, labels, push, pull or exit on doors. Arrows and diagrams indicating what is to be acted upon

or in which direction to gesture or other instructions. If you fail to add signifiers, people struggle to understand how they can use your product or app. You put an unnecessary mental burden on them and you waste their precious time. People become frustrated and angry when they're unnecessarily slowed down in achieving their goals, such as paying a bill in their bank app or buying a ticket as a metro station.

Let's make the world less frustrating. Let's save valuable time. Let's solve this problem in a better way. Let's design smooth user experiences by designing signifiers which communicate clearly. The first step is to understand what signifiers are. What are signifiers. Signifier refers to an ID mark or sound, any perceivable

indicator that communicates appropriate behavior of a person. Don Norman. You design signifiers when you create visual and audio designs which indicate where and how people should interact with apps and websites, as well as with physical products such as stoves and speakers. More specifically, you design signifiers when you indicate where people can tap, slide sideways, scrolls sideways,

or scroll upwards on your app. You're creating signifiers when you indicate where people can turn. You're also designing signifiers when you indicate when people can start speaking to a voice controlled app. Here you hear and see a mix of audio and visual signifiers. These two signifiers support each other to help people who are either hearing or visually challenged, and it makes it safer for everyone to cross the street.

Similarly, you can combine audio and visual signifiers when you design digital products. Furthermore, signifiers can communicate which gesture or body motion should be done. Signifiers can appeal to all of our senses. The most common signifiers help us understand by appealing to these senses. The visual seeing sense, the auditory hearing sets

the signifiers most often appeal for us to act using these senses. The tactile touch sense, the vestibular movement and the proprioceptive body awareness sense. The visual seeing sense. Why are signifiers essential in good design? All digital and physical products need signifiers, otherwise people can't understand how and where they can interact with your product.

People need some way of understanding the product or service. Signifiers help people perceive the affordances and A.I. affordances. Affordances determine what actions are possible. Signifiers communicate where the action should take place. We need both done normally. The affordances of touching exists on the entire screen. The signifier communicates where and how people should touch to interact with the product.

Best practice design signifiers which communicates clearly Best practice. The role of the signifier is to clearly communicate the purpose, structure and operation of the device so people can understand and how to use it. It is the sign that is important to anything that might signify meaningful information. Don't know if people clues and signs that help them understand how they can use the product, where they can interact, what is happening,

and what alternative actions they can perform. You can use these insights when you design apps, websites, services, household machines, or whatever you're designing. Sign up for courses. Learn from top design specialists. Get your certificate. It's industry recognized. Interaction Design Foundation.

In a world overflowing with information, how do we find exactly what we're looking for, both online and offline? Enter Information Architecture, or IA: the discipline that helps us navigate through vast data landscapes. Information architecture is the framework of organization and labeling we use to structure and categorize content and data, primarily within digital products to make it easy to understand and navigate. Is like organizing a massive global library so you can find that one book without getting lost.

Whether it's grouping Jurassic Period fossils in a museum, or arranging your favorite snacks in the supermarket, IA can guide us through physical and digital spaces alike. At its core, IA focuses on arranging the part of something to be understandable as a whole. In the context of UX design, IA is akin to the blueprint of a building: it lays out the foundation and structure upon which user experiences are built. It operates on the understanding that we perceive information as places

made of language: labels, menus, visuals that can be organized for better navigation. Good IA is shaped by the content available, the context in which it's sought and the users seeking it, forming a complex information ecology. For UX designers, this means starting with understanding users needs, which leads to the creation of intuitive site maps, navigation and user flows that make digital experiences seamless.

After a designer identifies user needs and content requirements, they will create a hierarchy that aligns with user behavior and psychology. This involves defining how information is grouped, how it flows from one section to another, and how users access it through navigation and search functionalities. Effective IA results in a coherent, intuitive user interface that allows users to find information quickly, accomplishes tasks efficiently, and understand the location within the digital space at any given time.

Effective information architecture isn't just an initial step. It's the foundation upon which effective user experience is built, ensuring that every digital interaction is meaningful and easy to navigate.

Imagine walking into a room filled with countless doors, each leading to a different destination. Where do you begin? This is how users feel when faced with a new and confusing interface. To combat this, designers use progressive disclosure, a user centered design method that carefully reveals information and features to users as they are needed. The purpose here is to avoid overwhelming the user with a cluttered interface. We are talking about this beast. How do we fix that, right?

Well, there is a very simple way of fixing it. First of all, for tables, you usually would have not that many options In customize and sorting, you would have, you know, probably some hopefully not hover actions, but a button saying actions, which would be a dropdown opening things on tap, on click, have us you know, the checkboxes on the left allowing you to select things. We have 49 filters. We have 49 dropdowns with approximately 300 options living within those dropdowns.

Now imagine that you're working on Finviz. That means that you are, you know, you have your screen application, so you might be managing a portfolio with 60 different assets, right, of sixty different customers. You also want to kind of understand trends of what you know, what is going on. You also want to navigate the table to understand what is going on there. Right? So maybe there are some companies that are performing really badly. Some companies are performing better. You kind of monitoring it. And very often you would be looking at this interface for 6 to 8 hours a day.

Right? Speed is important here. Dropdowns are the worst thing you can give for people who want to be fast. Dropdowns are the slowest mode of interaction. And you know what is the fastest? Buttons! There is nothing wrong with just 200 buttons. Give people 200 buttons. Just organize them better. And they'll be happy because this is going to be much faster. How can we do that? Well, if we think about the filtering experience,

well, surely enough, we have 49 of those. So we better organize them in some way, like this. So we have this different groups of filters, right? And then we basically need a search engine or like a little search autocomplete for filters. We do it in two steps. The first step is we select what filters we want to have. Right? So we go for the sections. We just have a couple of checkboxes to mark the filters that we need. And in the second step for each of those filters, we define what the properties should have.

You know what? What properties every filter should have. I'll show you an example in a moment. And there is nothing wrong, again, just show buttons. A lot of buttons. Just show buttons. There is nothing wrong with showing buttons. It's fine. In its simplest form, it could look like this. You search your filters. It's kind of a filtering for filters, where you go for all the different groups. Then you select what filters you actually want to have. And then for each of them, you actually define the properties that you want to define.

Now, in example, this is what it looks like on Financial Times, which is a great example of equity screen. You have exactly the same amount of filter actually, but it looks differently. We have a core audience. We have the split menu. We saw this already, right? You select what attributes you care about first. You have buttons so you can actually tap on those quickly, relatively quickly. And if we open equity attributes right, not only do we get this button kind of giving you this overview of what is the most common kind of area where you should be expecting those results, you also can add

or change criteria, and this is how it works. Balance sheet. Okay, I need to add cash per share. Boom. And I need to add price, boom. And I need to add 52% receivable turnover. Right. And so I kind of always show what you need and you never show what you don't need. Which I think is actually pretty cool and pretty useful as well. So that's actually very, very helpful. And I guess this is actually what it needs to be, right?

You show what you need when you know that people need it. And most importantly, you do not show things that are likely to be irrelevant to people. We just say, “here is everything we've got, all the navigation, you've got, you figure it out”. Or “here are all the filters you've got, you figure it out”. No. We need to show things that matter to people when they matter and nothing else.

First-click testing – we're talking about  visual design rather than navigation. So, in first-click testing, we need to upload the material to be tested, but, of course, here it is visual. And it's a good idea, I think, to use wireframes or other low-fidelity prototypes early on, but it depends entirely on what you need. The advantage of low fidelity is perhaps more important in face-to-face testing where people

– we find participants are more willing to give us feedback when the thing that's being tested doesn't look totally finished and polished. But here we have a wireframe for Optimal Workshops' Bananacom demo. Users are asked to perform a number of tasks. The one here on the right is going to be: "You've seen an ad for a new Nokia phone." – Oh! those were the days when Nokia was still a big phone company.

See if you can buy it on this site. So, that's what they're being asked to do. So, they will be asked, "Where do you click on this page?" And I've only shown you the top part of the page, but we'll get on to that in just a minute. The results can be determined by comparison to correct answers if the service you're using *allows* you to define correct answers for first-click testing. Usability Hub, as I recall, does not. So, from them, you simply see where people clicked, which is of course very informative. But if you're trying to filter out participants  who perhaps have not taken the study as seriously

as you would have liked them to, then there is no  concept of success rate because you don't know whether those participants actually clicked in sensible places or not. They can click anywhere on the screen and you'd be none the wiser. So, I have tended to use first-click testing services that allow me to define what a correct response looks like. In first-click testing, the material is usually something like a wireframe.

But it could be – as I mentioned already – a pixel-perfect finished screenshot if that was useful to you at your particular stage of development. The one thing I should mention – I've talked about tree  testing and first-click testing being fairly isolated in terms of what you're testing. But – of course – with the tree testing, you are testing *just the navigation*. There is no real visual component to talk about. Here, with the first-click testing, it is a combination of the visual presentation and the navigation terminology.

So, you really do want to make sure  that the navigation has been tested first or that you're happy with the navigation before you start  going into first-click testing. We have a summary for first-click testing. It's very similar in many respects to the summary for tree testing. We've got a pie chart, and on the right-hand side is an image  of the page being tested with the correct answers highlighted in green. So, you do that graphically.

It's not terribly complicated. You just draw some rectangles on the screenshot when you upload it to say, "These are the areas we are hoping people are going to click in." And in spite of it including a very large part of the page, in this particular case, the success rate is not so good. About a third of people get it right, and two-thirds get it wrong. So, this would definitely be grounds for starting over. And don't forget, this particular question was to do with finding a Nokia phone. And there was nothing really terribly direct in terms of

manufacturers on that page we saw just a second ago. There is on the right-hand side a very vague description of something labeled *categories*, but that wasn't enough to inspire participants to think that that was the right place to click. And, along the same lines as the tree testing, we want to set a maximum of around about 10 tasks, although my feeling is you could be a little bit more generous with the number of tasks with first-click testing because it is very quick relative to tree testing.

Again, write tasks that test the parts of your website you want to improve. Write tasks as hypothetical "scenarios",  and that's exactly what this one does. It sets out by describing the scene, the situation. And, of course, as before use different language than the labels in your screenshots. Some researchers include an area on the page which wouldn't normally be there. But it's just a big rectangular area, typically, or a big button that says "I don't know where to click." or "I wouldn't click on any of these."

And the real attraction of that is that it helps you to see very clearly that people are confused, because if you just expect people to answer randomly, then you're going to have to keep checking for significance. You can't easily tell how much of an impact the random answers are having unless most people answer pretty randomly, in which case you'll just get a very – you'll get a 50/50 kind of split between success and failure. Most services do allow you to ask a simple question after each task.

It can be open-ended or multiple choice. One thing I would say about asking people questions like this – "Why did you click there?" – is that self-reported post-task justifications – which is quite a mouthful – you do have to take with a pinch of salt. I have seen people in face-to-face testing who've basically tried to come up with a sensible reason for why they just screwed up. They made a mistake – and they're reluctant to say so. You could see how they did it that they'd misread  something or that they misunderstood something. 

And the justification they'll give you if you ask  them why they clicked where they did bears little resemblance, and that does happen from time to time. It's not necessarily a big problem, but I wouldn't take as Gospel the words that you find in response to questions like "Why did you click there?".

In a world overflowing with information, how do we find exactly what we're looking for, both online and offline? Enter Information Architecture, or IA: the discipline that helps us navigate through vast data landscapes. Information architecture is the framework of organization and labeling we use to structure and categorize content and data, primarily within digital products to make it easy to understand and navigate. Is like organizing a massive global library so you can find that one book without getting lost.

Whether it's grouping Jurassic Period fossils in a museum, or arranging your favorite snacks in the supermarket, IA can guide us through physical and digital spaces alike. At its core, IA focuses on arranging the part of something to be understandable as a whole. In the context of UX design, IA is akin to the blueprint of a building: it lays out the foundation and structure upon which user experiences are built. It operates on the understanding that we perceive information as places

made of language: labels, menus, visuals that can be organized for better navigation. Good IA is shaped by the content available, the context in which it's sought and the users seeking it, forming a complex information ecology. For UX designers, this means starting with understanding users needs, which leads to the creation of intuitive site maps, navigation and user flows that make digital experiences seamless.

After a designer identifies user needs and content requirements, they will create a hierarchy that aligns with user behavior and psychology. This involves defining how information is grouped, how it flows from one section to another, and how users access it through navigation and search functionalities. Effective IA results in a coherent, intuitive user interface that allows users to find information quickly, accomplishes tasks efficiently, and understand the location within the digital space at any given time.

Effective information architecture isn't just an initial step. It's the foundation upon which effective user experience is built, ensuring that every digital interaction is meaningful and easy to navigate.

Imagine walking into a room filled with countless doors, each leading to a different destination. Where do you begin? This is how users feel when faced with a new and confusing interface. To combat this, designers use progressive disclosure, a user centered design method that carefully reveals information and features to users as they are needed. The purpose here is to avoid overwhelming the user with a cluttered interface. We are talking about this beast. How do we fix that, right?

Well, there is a very simple way of fixing it. First of all, for tables, you usually would have not that many options In customize and sorting, you would have, you know, probably some hopefully not hover actions, but a button saying actions, which would be a dropdown opening things on tap, on click, have us you know, the checkboxes on the left allowing you to select things. We have 49 filters. We have 49 dropdowns with approximately 300 options living within those dropdowns.

Now imagine that you're working on Finviz. That means that you are, you know, you have your screen application, so you might be managing a portfolio with 60 different assets, right, of sixty different customers. You also want to kind of understand trends of what you know, what is going on. You also want to navigate the table to understand what is going on there. Right? So maybe there are some companies that are performing really badly. Some companies are performing better. You kind of monitoring it. And very often you would be looking at this interface for 6 to 8 hours a day.

Right? Speed is important here. Dropdowns are the worst thing you can give for people who want to be fast. Dropdowns are the slowest mode of interaction. And you know what is the fastest? Buttons! There is nothing wrong with just 200 buttons. Give people 200 buttons. Just organize them better. And they'll be happy because this is going to be much faster. How can we do that? Well, if we think about the filtering experience,

well, surely enough, we have 49 of those. So we better organize them in some way, like this. So we have this different groups of filters, right? And then we basically need a search engine or like a little search autocomplete for filters. We do it in two steps. The first step is we select what filters we want to have. Right? So we go for the sections. We just have a couple of checkboxes to mark the filters that we need. And in the second step for each of those filters, we define what the properties should have.

You know what? What properties every filter should have. I'll show you an example in a moment. And there is nothing wrong, again, just show buttons. A lot of buttons. Just show buttons. There is nothing wrong with showing buttons. It's fine. In its simplest form, it could look like this. You search your filters. It's kind of a filtering for filters, where you go for all the different groups. Then you select what filters you actually want to have. And then for each of them, you actually define the properties that you want to define.

Now, in example, this is what it looks like on Financial Times, which is a great example of equity screen. You have exactly the same amount of filter actually, but it looks differently. We have a core audience. We have the split menu. We saw this already, right? You select what attributes you care about first. You have buttons so you can actually tap on those quickly, relatively quickly. And if we open equity attributes right, not only do we get this button kind of giving you this overview of what is the most common kind of area where you should be expecting those results, you also can add

or change criteria, and this is how it works. Balance sheet. Okay, I need to add cash per share. Boom. And I need to add price, boom. And I need to add 52% receivable turnover. Right. And so I kind of always show what you need and you never show what you don't need. Which I think is actually pretty cool and pretty useful as well. So that's actually very, very helpful. And I guess this is actually what it needs to be, right?

You show what you need when you know that people need it. And most importantly, you do not show things that are likely to be irrelevant to people. We just say, “here is everything we've got, all the navigation, you've got, you figure it out”. Or “here are all the filters you've got, you figure it out”. No. We need to show things that matter to people when they matter and nothing else.

If you just focus on the evaluation activity typically with usability testing, you're actually doing *nothing* to improve the usability of your process. You are still creating bad designs. And just filtering them out is going to be fantastically wasteful in terms of the amount of effort. So, you know, if you think about it as a production line, we have that manufacturing analogy and talk about screws. If you decide that your products aren't really good enough

for whatever reason – they're not consistent or they break easily or any number of potential problems – and all you do to *improve* the quality of your product is to up the quality checking at the end of the assembly line, then guess what? You just end up with a lot of waste because you're still producing a large number of faulty screws. And if you do nothing to improve the actual process in the manufacturing of the screws, then just tightening the evaluation process

– raising the hurdle, effectively – is really not the way to go. Usability evaluations are a *very* important tool. Usability testing, in particular, is a very important tool in our toolbox. But really it cannot be the only one.

What usability is, and basically it's the  extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with three things: effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction, in a specified context of use. Okay, that's the official definition of usability. It's been around for a really long time. But the *effectiveness* – okay – is it effective? So, if a person comes to a  website, an app, you know, anything – can they do what they're supposed to do?

*Efficiency* – can they do it quickly? Do they get stuck? Do they get sidetracked? Do they go in some totally different direction? And *satisfaction* – do they feel good? Okay, that's the more emotive kind of aspect. Do they feel good about their experience? We want to make sure that what we're  creating makes sense to our users and meets their needs. Are we meeting their needs?