December 3, 2002

Five things to know about Users

From Jared Spool’s UIEtips. (article here)

The user’s intentions, context, knowledge, skills, and experience are the essential things that every designer needs to know. Without this, the designer is going to design something that seems useful, but they’ll never know if it actually helps the user. The result is a lot of content, but not the right content.

Intentions tell us what the user is trying to
accomplish.

Context tell us how they will interact with the application/site.

Knowledge dictates the terminology and concepts.

Skills dictate the type of screens the user sees. Complex? Hand-held?

Experience of the user relates to the resulting complexity of the data that they interact with. More experience, more complex datasets. (generally…but of course, it depends.)

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Tagged As Usability

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