Sun.com Customer Experience and Stuff: Notes from the Sun.com customer experience team.

Speaking of comic books and design... At the Usability Professionals Association annual meeting earlier this month, Mark Wehner from YAHOO! presented more best practices for using comic book panels in the design process. YAHOO! has begun to use comic-based storyboards in the user centered design process for selected products.  As the centerpiece of a participatory design process with customers, YAHOO! uses storyboards in a comic book form, and walks users through the comic panels to research concepts and reveal user needs.

Here are some tips from Mark:

Walk through the comic with users and ask them to "tell your own story." Instead of showing them a finished design with design screens, start with a formative comic. Create a simple flow with characters and panels, print out the sheets on big paper, and assemble them in a suggested flow.  Let users move things around, add notes, comment, tell you what they need at various steps.

Have user mark up aspects of the story with notes in different colors. Choose a different color for items that are:

• Appealing
• Usfeul
• Confusing
• Complex

Have observers to the study take notes on stickies. Group the comments later around the panels in the comic (which of course represent stages in a story or process around using a web site or product):

Realize that comics storyboarding isn't "normal." Going through comics is not a normal process for your user participants. Ease them in. And, you'll have to do a lot of facilitating. Like any kind of participatory design, it's much more exhausting to run than a simple usability test.

Iterate on the concepts after your tests (still in comic form). And in further followup sessions with other users.

Tips for the comics themselves:

• Keep the story linear (for users). Most participants don't understand branching, and it's hard to follow in a story.  You can do branching in your own design sessions, obviously.
• Keep UI elements simple. Sometimes small, simple UI elements are good to include in the comic panels. But, don't include complex UI in the storyboards during concept development because it will confuse things.

Technorati Tags: Design Web-Design CustomerExperience Comics