User interface design for beginners, intermediates or experts?

Posted by UXPassion.com in Featured Articles, UX thoughts on Jun 25th, 2010 | 92 responses

Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

As a user experience designers we are regularly in situations where our design decisions will make significant effect on the end users of the web site, application or generally any user interface or service we design. Apart from the need to understand business case and idea – probably the most important is to understand who are users of our interfaces?

Introduction

Prior to starting any experience design work you should be familiarized with the business idea behind the user experience you are designing, how you could deliver added value and, probably most importantly – with the end users of your interface.

For the sake of this article I will focus on the user interface design – and will try to stay away from going too deep and too wide into discussing overall user experience design from the perspective of beginners, intermediates or experts.

One of the biggest challenges is how to address the needs and requirements from all those users? You have probably heard stories saying that if you are designing for everyone – you are designing for no one. However, in today’s globalized market where your users are coming in from all walks of life and with different experiences – finding the right balance between designing for beginners or experts is increasingly complex and important task.

Most users are neither beginners nor experts

When we design user interfaces we try to understand who our end users are – are they beginners with no prior computing experience (or, at least, without experience using the product you are designing) or, perhaps, they are experts who are finding their ways around easily? Or, as it is the case in majority of cases – your users are not homogeneous group – rather, they are mixed bunch of people consisting of users with different levels of experience and familiarity with UI you are designing.

We can divide users’ skill spectrum in three parts. First part is for beginners, middle is for so called intermediates and the third part is for experts. As it is the case with the general population age distribution, IQ distribution or a number of other different population distributions, according to Alan Cooper and Robert Reimann (authors of famous book About Face which has heavily inspired parts of this article as well), experience level of people performing specific UI activity tends to follow Gauss’ – classic statistical bell curve.

If you position the beginners at the left hand side and experts to right hand side, largest, central part is where majority of users fit. Their skill level can be characterized as intermediate and therefore term “intermediates” is often used for them.

It is so obvious from the picture that most of the users are neither beginners nor experts – they are intermediates.

Skill spectrum dynamics

Bell curve is nice representation but it does not give us a full understanding of the users’ behavior and dynamics. As such – it is static – a snapshot captured in time. As you probably know from your own experience, if you start as a complete beginner and use some piece of software, you won’t be staying beginner for too long. You will learn new ways of getting tasks done faster and easier, you will probably learn some shortcuts and grasp number of available concepts and features enabling you to be more productive. In other words – you will move from the beginners to the intermediates part of the skill spectrum.

And you will most likely stay there – happy and satisfied in the middle with all options you need right there where you need them. Some of us will probably move forward to the experts part of the spectrum, maybe even earn some professional certificate as a proof that you are an expert or specialist in the specific tool or technology. But – those certificates don’t last forever – you need to renew them – meaning that after some time – you will slip back to the intermediates part of the spectrum. Reason is, actually, fairly simple – maintain high levels of expertise and competence is extremely difficult today with the increasing competition and new versions and editions of tools and technologies. And after all, that certainly explains why IT teaching powerhouses and vendors are issuing new generations of certificates and courses.

Bottom line is – all users do gravitate towards central part of the skill spectrum. We all do spend some time as beginners, but we learn how to use specific tool or technology and soon we are intermediates.

You can even draw a parallel with everyday life experiences. Remember when you have started to learn how to ride a bicycle – you were beginner at the very first moments then you have learned some skills and moved into intermediates. Just some of us have moved into experts riding bicycles as a pro today. Under heavy pressure and competition – sooner or later they will again fall into the intermediates.

Design for everyone, optimize for intermediates

As UX designers and consultants our paramount is to deliver high quality, enjoyable and valuable experiences for our users, clients, businesses… Our goal, when we look at the user interface design discipline, is to create user interfaces that will look appealing and useful for all users – but that will be able to adapt and support the fact that users are migrating from beginners to intermediates. Also, we need to be smart and reasonable to allow intermediate users to move towards experts so that they can even extend their abilities and increase their productivity and satisfaction.

It’s probably easiest to summarize it all by saying that we need to be very pragmatic – accommodate the beginners and experts but optimize our UIs to the largest segment of the users – intermediates.

Accommodating beginners

This is the only phase we are all definitely going to get a taste of. For how long we will stay beginners is almost completely up to UX and interaction designers. Bear in mind that users usually will go from beginners to intermediates, but they might, as well, just turn away and quit using the product if they don’t find it easy enough and understandable for them to use. To make sure that users will start using the UI and move to intermediates later, as a designers we must ensure that the things they see, use and feel as a parts of UI do resonate well with their mental models and the perception of the UI.

If you have ever conducted or watched serious usability study where users were complete beginners you could notice at least two major focus areas within the UI for them: menus and messages in dialog boxes.

They tend to browse through the menus and their hierarchical architectures, reading all the labels and basically trying to get the overview and understanding of where specific options and features are positioned. And as for dialogs and notifications – they tend to read them slower, trying to understand them thoroughly even though in many cases they don’t feel very confident to execute or cancel specific actions.

It is wrong assumption that beginners will rely heavily on help and support systems. Main purpose of those systems is to serve as reminders, reference points – not always as starting points. However, adding the walkthroughs that are appearing for beginners and guiding them through the user interface, explaining the main ideas, concepts and scope of the particular software is good idea. Just make sure that users who don’t need those instructions anymore can easily turn them off.

Really good idea that is now relatively often used as an example of irritating UI metaphor was infamous Clippy from the early editions of Microsoft Office suite. While it was useful for beginners, intermediates and experts have felt that Clippy is too annoying. Do you remember those “It looks like you’re writing a letter” remarks?

Important, probably fundamental key is the fact that nobody wants to remain as a beginner for the entire period while the UI and application is being used – one of the goals that should be thought about before we even start designing is that user interface as such must be built in a way that enables users to short their period of being beginners as much as possible and advance into the central part of skill spectrum – towards intermediates.

Accommodating intermediates

While beginners were looking for answers to questions like “What does this program do?” or “Where do I start?” and “How to do I use this?” – Intermediates are looking for access to desired features – answers to questions asked few lines above are past for them – they have grasped those basic concepts and now they are here to use the tool. Since they are familiar with the basics – they will now go and look for reference materials – in these cases having good help and support systems can be extremely useful. Pay special attention to the index pages – Cooper and Reimann are pointing out that intermediates are relying heavily on them.

Other UI pattern really helping a lot is the usage of ToolTips. Though beginners will find so called “rich tooltips” useful as well, intermediates (and even experts to some extent) will use ToolTips as a helpful notes stating the functions and features in simplest way.

It was stated earlier in this article that intermediates are, in fact, majority of users. Also, it was stated that you should optimize user experiences and, as a first touch point, user interfaces, for intermediates. Often, however, technical architecture, preconceived implementation models or other company policies are preventing UX designers from developing and creating user interfaces that are optimized for the majority of users. Having UX consultants or other UX people in your organization positioned as technical or business decision makers should in most cases enable that technical obstacles and policies do not interfere with your design thinking. After all, most resources should be applied to accommodate majority of users. We are talking about some sort of ROI here!

Accommodating experts

Though their number is much smaller than intermediates and it’s probably even smaller than the number of beginners, experts are extremely important group of users. Their number might be small in absolute figures but their impact and influence is extremely high and important.
After all – we all tend to trust experts and ask them for advices and help. Large companies like Adobe, Microsoft, IBM, Google and others have recognized importance of experts and pretty much all of them have some experts communities.

Why is all this important to UX designers? At first it might be considered that experts will have no problems with using any user interface since they are, well, experts. But the fact is that experts require some more functionalities and abilities. Also, if expert says that some application or website is not quite good, those word do carry some significance and beginners and general public might judge them only by what some experts have said about that.

Your user interface should enable experts to use them and became more productive with them. Of course, you have optimized your UI for intermediates, you have helped beginners to get the idea and feeling about your application – now you need to take care that even experts will have good time and be productive and satisfied while using your UI.

Experts might be into some rarely used features needed for really complex scenarios, they will definitely require some shortcuts and abilities to manipulate the UI without mouse (think about keyboard shortcuts). They will be looking into possibilities for significant customizations, automation and maybe even for some levels of extensibility.

They will even find that some graphical user interfaces are, in fact, slowing them down and might turn to console – like interfaces like the one from the PowerShell on the picture bellow.

As you can see – all those needs are rarely or never used by intermediates, not to mention beginners. However, experts do need them for their very specific tasks and you should organize and architecture your UI to enable them to find them and use them. Luckily, it is general opinion that experts will not usually be distracted by features and approaches put in place for intermediates. But then again, be wise and remember the Clippy asking you do you need help writing a letter assuming that you are total beginner and not, for example, Word expert.

User interface design for beginners, intermediates or experts?

Introduction

Most users are neither beginners nor experts

Skill spectrum dynamics

Design for everyone, optimize for intermediates

Accommodating beginners

Accommodating intermediates

Accommodating experts

Further reading

92 Responses to “ User interface design for beginners, intermediates or experts? ”

Trackbacks

Leave a Reply

Sponsors

Related Posts

Recently published

Search accelerator

Usage and copyright

Popular at UXPassion.com

Our supporters

Microsoft Blogs

Other blogs