king talk

Last week we decided to take 2 days off to head to Belgrade and visit a new conference on art, technology and digital culture. It was time for resonate festival. As co-organizers of the decoded conference in Munich, we have been media partners and share a good relationship to Filip Visnjic (organizer of resonate festival and the man behind creativeapplications).

The conference had an impressive start right in its first year. We saw inspiring talks, met interesting people and, not to forget, enjoyed the city of Belgrade.
For those of you who could not make it to resonate, we want to share a resumee of the talks and our personal highlights here at our blog. Due to the big extend, we decided to split the review in three parts.

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What do you do if you are not sure about a certain design descision? An idea that comes up rather often is to perform a micro-usability-test by testing a friend or a relative – stereotypically your mother – and make the descision dependant on the test result.

That is a bad idea. You should not do it.

Asking a relative to test an interface means that you are conducting a usability study with just one test subject. To put that in statistical terms: it’s a sample size of 1 (in words: ONE). You don’t have to be a statistician to realize that this is not much and definitely not sufficient to draw any conclusions.

But it’s better than nothing, right?

Testing with one (or two, or five) people is not just »not as good« as a proper study — it can actually be worse than no study at all! The reason for this is, that smaller sample sizes, tend to yield more extreme results. Sometimes you will get the result that a design is awesome, sometimes they will say it sucks. You can’t tell if the data you have collected is an outlier or if it represents most of your users.

The graph above shows the sample size you need in order to achieve a 95% confidence with a 10% error margin for various user bases.

Not convinced? Then let me ask a different question: Would you take a medicine that has been tested on just one person?

Is it all futile?

Fortunately, even those »tests« can provide some value as long as you treat the outcomes as opinions rather statistically significant facts. An opinion can provide you with something to think about, but it can never have the same imperative quality as a test result. Not for usability issues, and not for any other kind of design decision.

Don’t fall for the temptation to let statistically meaningless tests influence your thinking too much. If your mother is able (or unable) to use your design, that probably says more about her than about the design. And unless the target audience of your product is exclusively your mother – don’t trust her on that matter.

Bonus exercise

You can calculate the sufficient sample size for your test on this website.

Stellt man sich den archetypischen Designer vor, denkt man häufig an einen etwas eigensinnigen, schaltragenden Kauz, der in seinem stillen Kämmerlein sitzt, eine gewisse Weile über abgedrehten Ideen brütet und sich schließlich mit einer innovativen Gestaltungslösung  zurückmeldet – für den Normalsterblichen nicht unbedingt zu verstehen, aber immer zu lieben.

In der Realität angekommen stellt man doch recht schnell fest, das abgesehen von dem Schal nicht viel von diesem Bild übrig bleibt. Die Kernkompetenz des Designers ist nicht der eigenbrödlerische Kreativitätsrausch. Vielmehr stellt die Fähigkeit, mit den verschiedenen am Projekt beteiligten Parteien zu kommunizieren und die vielfältigen Anforderungen und Sichtweisen zu verbinden, eine ganz wesentliche Kernkompetenz dar. Der Gestalter muss sich gewissermaßen als Bindeglied zwischen Technik, Kunde und Nutzer verstehen und jede Schnittstelle birgt dabei verschiedene Herausforderungen.

Doch wieviel Kommunikation braucht es wirklich, ab wann beeinträchtigt zuviel Absprache die Produktivität und welche Wege bieten sich dazu an? continue reading …

We are living in a digital World, were we post notes on our Phone and write eMails instead of real letters. But when it comes to visualizing some screens or a whole screen flow of your concept, you are much faster with sketching like Philipp pointed out on his post. While we are designing the interactive Experience for mobile as well, it‘s pretty cool to have a template for your sketches.

So we made one for our everyday work based on the iPhone 4S. Afterwards we thought: »Let‘s give it away for free for people.« We did the Illustrator work and you can focus on sketching your Experiences. Enjoy and spread it around!

Download: iPhone Sketch Template for free (Scaled 1:1,4 as PDF, 266 KB)

Download: iPhone Sketch Template for free (Original Size as PDF, 270 KB)

Last Update: 29th Feb. 2012
- Grid is now 80 px which fits better to iPhone proportions
- Additional version with the original size of the iPhone 4S (115,2 x 58,6 mm)

Im Anschluss an meinen Talk über Sci-Fi Interfaces auf der decoded@mcbw möchten wir unseren Zuhörern und weiteren Interessierten eine Liste an Filmen zur Hand geben, die sich aus technologischer und ästhetischer Sicht lohnen gesehen zu werden. Chronologisch geordnet finden sich sicher ein paar »alte Bekannte«, doch auch ein paar Juwelen sind darunter, die darauf warten entdeckt zu werden…

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