100 Ideas for Envisioning Powerful, Engaging, and Productive User Experiences in Knowledge Work
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Application Envisioning idea K13. Reliable and Direct Activity Infrastructure   Examples from three knowledge work domains: (Illustrated above) An architect has used her new building modeling application for several months, and many of her typical actions in the product now feel like second nature. Since the application has been dependable, she feels comfortable estimating how long it will take her to accomplish specific efforts using the tool.Stable and useful tools can become relied upon infrastructure in knowledge work. After an onscreen application has fulfilled its initial promises and users have begun to develop their own meaning and skills within its framework, sequences of call and response interaction can become highly rehearsed, routine, and even seemingly automatic (D7). Ideally, after workers have adopted an application into their practices, they can simply turn to the “at hand” product to accomplish their goals in a familiar and direct manner (D4, G1). Product teams can envision high standards for reliability. They can also strive to cultivate a sense of on demand availability and tightly coupled action and reaction within their technologies. At a minimum, teams can identify critical performance areas within their application concepts and set appropriate goals for them. Going further, they can set performance goals for each of the central functionality concepts that they have sketched, benchmarking a desirable sense of flow for their tool’s core pathways. When product teams do not actively consider how their applications could become reliable and direct fixtures in knowledge workers’ practices, resulting products may promote frustrating user experiences, even after extended usage. Applications that do not behave dependably may not engender trusted, first choice status, given the availability of other brands or alternate avenues of action (K12, E6). When confronted with inconsistent system behaviors, people may spend additional effort performing “defensive” procedures, such as versioning work (D2, D3, H1). Our human tendency toward sense making around unusual occurrences may cause users to “incorrectly” redefine their conceptual models of how a tool functions (C1). In the worst cases, these alternate conceptions can become “ghost stories” of what to avoid and why it is dangerous, potentially leading to rolling failures in adoption. See also: A, C, D1, G, H, K, M Application Envisioning questions: More specific questions for product teams to consider: What requirements do targeted individuals and organizations have for the stability of their computing environments? How far do they currently go to prevent reliability issues in their IT infrastructures? < PREVIOUS PAGE | NEXT PAGE > Back to top | View Table of Contents |
All original contents of Working through Screens online book are subject to the creative commons license (Attribution-NonCommercial- ShareAlike http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) unless otherwise noted. Please attribute the work to “Jacob Burghardt / FLASHBULB INTERACTION Consultancy.” |