While help centers and up-to-speed aids can be helpful, there are ways that they are used that can be very beneficial to users, but others that do little for the user. As talked about in Designing the Obvious, often times help aids have a bad habit of asking the user what exactly they will be using the product or design for. The problem with this is that a lot of the times, the user isn't familiar enough with the product to make a informed decision. While many designs do a great job at making "obvious" designs, there are things that the user cannot learn on their own. Having these instructions are a good tool for people that may be finding the product difficult or older generations that struggle with the use of new innovative designs.
When developing personas for project 5 it is important that we keep in mind that we are developing for the viewer. What does our persona want to see that is new and improved for our superhero of choice. The superhero my group chose was The Hulk. We want to focus on personas that are avid comic book readers, people who have seen The Hulk movies, and are informed on our superhero. What does our audience want to see change with our superhero?
Great job highlighting the duality -of help and hindrance- that comes with using help systems. You clearly summarized the main point that Hoekman seems to be trying to make: Designers should be very careful about how they introduce help and understand the variety of different needs that their users have as they become more proficient with the application. This makes me think that help itself seems to be its own iterative and evolving process which needs to be interwoven into the application and carefully designed.
ReplyDeleteThe Hulk is an awesome choice, we also almost chose him.