Following the success of our Interview with Alan Cooper, uidesign.net continues the series with Laura Arlov. Laura is the author of another of uidesign.net's recommended book, "GUI Design for Dummies". Originally from the United States, she lives and works in Olso, Norway, where she is arguably Norway's leading expert on Interface Design and Usability. You can reach her through her company website wordfixers.no .

Laura has been a fan of uidesign.net since it started in January 1999 and it was only natural that we asked her to appear in our series of master interviews.

This interview was conducted by telephone between Oslo and Dallas, on March 10th, 2000. David Anderson was joined by colleagues from Objectspace, Web Solutions Group, Sonny Lacey and Ed Kennedy.

Laura is rightly famous for her sense of humor and light hearted approach. She quickly put us all at ease and as we discovered that she and Ed had grown up in the same town in North Carolina. Once again we started with a script and threw it away as the conversation meandered into a definition of exactly what it takes to make a good User Interface Designer.

Tell us something about your background, how did you get into the field of Usability and Interface Design. Did you graduate from college in HCI?

When I was at college age HCI was not available as a subject.

Actually, I graduated from Berkley and I saw a career in Technical Writing as my goal. I couldn't major in that either, so I did one of those multi-disciplinary degrees where you make up your own major. I did some biology, chemistry, math, computer science and advanced communication, advanced writing. Stuff like that. And some Norwegian classes, as I had met my future husband by that time.

I moved to Norway at the age of 21 and had my first working experience here. My whole professional career has been in Europe. If I hadn't joined Andersen Consulting, here, at one point, I really wouldn't have had any experience of large American projects at all.

Your book showed that you had real big project experience, that all came from your period with Andersen Consulting?

I worked for Norsk Data Minicomputer company, in the 1980s. Norsk did a lot of their own office automation software. I was involved first in writing about that and later in helping to design it.

So I did get a lot of experience before I joined Andersen but it was more like working at a shrink wrap package software house such as Microsoft. What was interesting for me at Andersen was that I began working in what I call "the custom software business".

I think that is something I have tried to do in my book and in my teaching is to recognize that both of those situations [ "custom software" and "package software" ] exist.

The Web has the same [differentiation]. It's quite different, if you have to design an Intranet or even an Extranet for the client's customers to use, than it is to try to build a portal for as many unknown users as possible.

There are different goals. They are different types of projects. They have different economics. You make different evaluations [depending on whether it's a "custom" or "package" project.

Perhaps compared to some other authors in the field, one of your advantages, if that is the correct word to use, is your breadth of experience, in both shrink-wrap and custom software? Rather a lot of books which appear are only applicable to Silicon Valley shrink-wrap software and it is often difficult to apply those techniques if you work in a bank or an insurance company?

My book was partly a reaction to other books which seemed to assume that you were working for Microsoft.

I got tremendous amounts of inspiration out of those books but there was always something missing. I had a lot of problems and the people I was working with had a lot of problems that just weren't described.

Give us an example of a problem which wasn't described in the other books?

You know I really fell for "About Face" when it was published. I loved that book!

But I couldn't help feeling that here was a situation where the author knows what he is going to make. A big problem for us when we are doing custom software development, it is rarely completely clear what it is that is wanted.

Once someone gets started on solving that problem, and they come up with an answer and put it in writing, there is still no guarantee that the client will continue to want it, for long enough for you to build it.

ALL

DJA

Yep! Yep! [laughter]

This is a key project risk. I have seen this happen where a big project has to change focus in mid-stream.

So part of the role of an Interface Designer is to manage the risk and be aware that it is a possibiliy and cope with it appropriately?

From the point of view of the User Interface Design, Yes! It's not their job to be the Project Manager.

I have found that an awareness of the Project Manager's risk management approach and what they perceive as risk, will enable you to communicate better with project management. When you communicate better with them, you get better opportunities to get a good user interface. The project manager will perceive that she understands what is going on. She will think "I can trust her. I can give her information. She won't increase the cost or time of the project frivolously."

As a UI Designer, I need to understand what they are worried about so that I can frame my requests for resources or changes in ways that don't frighten them.

Looking beyond Project Management, what role can the User Interface Designer play within Product Marketing and defining the Product Roadmap?

I find that this question is very relavent to me. If I look at my career over the last three years, all of my major clients are asking my advice on Product Definition. With questions like: "Should we include this feature?"; "Should we not include this feature?"; "Should we try to target this market sector or not?"; "Do you think this product will appeal to this market segment? If not why not? Is there anything we should change to make it appeal?".

Do you have any techniques for answering these [ Product Definition ] questions?

My approach to answering this is embedded in how I see the design process. I try to visualize the target audience. I try to imagine them. I try to make real people out of them, in my mind. Sometimes with a group, we will stop at that point and draw cartoons and give them made up names and describe their daily life and their jobs and their hopes and their fears. When we have the wall covered in made up people and grouped into segments then we go back and say, "OK, now let's talk about our product in relation to these people."

Interesting. This sounds similar to Alan Cooper's "Personas" technique. I'd like to ask you a question that I asked Alan, last month.

A recent client had difficulty buying-in to the Persona definition process. They wanted to know why we were wasting their time with these very specific personas when they already had wonderful market research which cost a lot of money. They could argue that they had the demographic breakdown and they knew the target demographics, they didn't need anything more.

What might you have said to such a client?

[laughing] I would have said to them, that this is an aid to the creative imagination. Demographics don't buy products! Individual people buy products!.

The demographics tell me who the product will appeal to. If you tell me that you want the product to appeal to people in the age range 27 to 43. Then that tells me that I should make up a 27 year old, a 32 year old and a 43 year old. I am using their hard won market data. It just isn't enough!

Actually No!

I think that part of the reason is, I didn't come into the Norwegian market thinking of myself as a User Interface designer and looking for a niche with that tag.

I came here at the beginning of the 80s and worked as a trainer and a technical writer in the industry first.

I was very fortunate as a technical writer to work very very closely with the development department. I was part of the project just in the same way as developers and project management. I was involved at the beginning and discussing with the developers about what we were building, then writing about that and later going to the sales people with the Beta releases and demonstrating it for them.

Naturally, the programmers much preferred to send the writer out to do the demonstrating so that they could focus on programming some more.

I got to be the project interface to the sales people, to the marketing department, to the training department. I got to demo beta products at exhibitions that months before I had helped to design.

In a primitive way this wasn't so much usability testing but I got to go through several versions of several different products and I learned gradually, by making mistakes, all the things that you don't do.

I remember one year, at the User Conference, standing in front of 600 angry word processing users who were furious because I had helped to design and implement something called a "ruler" that meant that Word Processing was suddenly much more complicated. So I had to defend that decision to a huge group of angry users, suddenly a light went on in my head and I thought, "Oh you don't switch the gas peddle and the brakes around!"

So I moved gradually into User Interface Design from sheer laziness. As I was responsible for teaching technical support and sales people and trainers how to use the product, the simpler I could make the product then the less I would need to work.

I give [candidates] a persona exercise, for example, "Edith is 21 year old who is sitting down to use Micrsoft Excel for the first time. Tell me what would run through her head?"

In other words, how well can somebody imagine themselves in someone else's shoes. Someone different from them.

Another thing I look for is based on the belief that User Interface Design is a multi-disciplinary craft. I say craft because I believe that it is something which you get better at, if you practice. It is multi-disciplinary because everybody who does it well is someone who has at least one foot in at least two camps. Maybe they have 3 or 4 feet [laughing].

For me, like Alan [Cooper] says, it's is essential that the person love technology, like technology, want to learn about it.

I'd also like to see them as an artist, or someone who has studied anthropology. Someone who has had two very different careers or studied two very different things.

Finally, I look for someone who can't talk without drawing.

I do think that is one place [Technical Writers] to look for good User Interface people because the technical writer is already interested in how to express the functionality for the users. There is always the motivation that the better the product, the easier their job is.