STORYBOARDING VOICE COMMANDS FOR DESIGN TOOL FEATURES

THE PRODUCT PREMISE: IS IT POSSIBLE TO CREATE A PROFESSIONAL QUALITY DESIGN PRODUCT THAT CAN BE USED BY VISUALLY IMPAIRED DESIGNERS AND WHICH WILL DELIVER RESULTS ON A PAR WITH SKETCH AND FIGMA?

Voice interaction will be key to creating successful interactions in this product. Our target users are designers with some level of visual impairment. I previously reached out to a group of designers and asked them what features they considered to be the absolute cornerstones of a product design tool. The results are below, ranked in order of importance.

1. Drawing tools

2. Copy, paste, resize, rename, edit

3. Component libraries

4. Prototyping tools

5. Collaboration features

6. Third party plugins

I've begun storyboarding/mind-dumping how voice command interactions controlling drawing tools could go:

And here's how voice command interactions controlling prototyping tools could go:

I know this is VERY MUCH over-simplifying the complexity necessary to make professional standard drawing tools voice controllable. But for now I'm exploring product viability. I'll continue to test the viability of this product idea by storyboarding something similar for the other cornerstone product features.

THE BENEFITS OF INCLUDING HEURISTIC EVALUATION DURING USER TESTING

THE PRODUCT PREMISE: IS IT POSSIBLE TO CREATE A PROFESSIONAL QUALITY DESIGN PRODUCT THAT CAN BE USED BY VISUALLY IMPAIRED DESIGNERS AND WHICH WILL DELIVER RESULTS ON A PAR WITH SKETCH AND FIGMA?

I've been hearing a lot lately about heuristic evaluations and how they can really improve the UX of your product. Until now I would typically conduct two forms of user testing when I'm validating the UX of a product.

• Cognitive testing: This can be done easily amongst the product team. Its purpose is to make sure that user flows are logical and that the feature task can be completed in accordance with the key feature objective and user goal.

• End user testing: Tested by real end users, in task based scenarios. With loose instructions and with the focus on how users interact with the UI.

Heuristic evaluation is a different fish, but like the two methods above sits firmly within the area of product UX feedback. It differs in the following ways:

• Testers are testing a pre-defined set of criteria, and within agreed upon parameters.

• Ideally testers have not been directly involved in designing the product.

• Testers have some technical or industry knowledge of how the product is being built.

The most commonly used criteria for conducting heuristic tests were developed by Jacob Nielson in 1995 and they are called the Heuristics for User Interface Design. When conducting a heuristic evaluation using these criteria, testers would be measuring the product against some/all of the following:

• Visibility of onscreen feedback

• Match between product and the real world

• User control and freedom

• Consistency and standards

• Error prevention

• Recognition rather than recall

• Flexibility and efficiency

• Aesthetic design

• Help users recognise and diagnose errors

• Help documentation

Although these 10 criteria were defined almost 25 years ago they still form the basis for the majority of heuristic evaluations conducted today.

I'm super excited to try this out! Adding heuristic evaluations to the UX testing plan is considered by many to be the most reliable and consistent way of returning actionable feedback for the product team. At the moment I'm an agnostic - I wonder how you can confidently test using a systematic method for human error and end user fallibility. However I'm very open to being converted! And at the very least this will be another facet of user feedback results that we can utilise to improve this product's UX.