Goal Orientation

The Task's Goals | The Users' Goals | How You Can Achieve Goal Orientation

An application performs a certain task, or – from the users' point of view – serves a certain goal. With regard to simplification, this goal should be intuitive and understandable. Ideally, an application should serve one simple and understandable goal, or just a few of them.

 

The Task's Goals

We put task goals and company goals together, because – at least ideally – an application should reach the company's goals. For this reason, it has been bought and made "productive" – or not, if it fails. An application can fail in a number of ways. We will describe the two most important ones.

The simplest but most severe cause of a failure is that an application does not meet its goals – or at least that its users fail to perform the required task. While in the first case, the design specification may be flawed, in the second case the design specification may be correct, but the way the software tries to accomplish its goals are not appropriate: The procedures may be awkward, the functionality obscure, the flow of control unclear, and so on. This is usually an indication of a design process that did not incorporate users. In other cases, the users may have been asked, observed, and analyzed in the initial development stages, but the design was never verified with actual users. As we say below, the best insurance against such failures is to implement a user-oriented design process.

The second reason for a failure is that an application tries to perform a multitude of tasks, resulting in a feature-laden, overly complex application – a typical characteristic of today's software. Often, this multitude has been required by the customers (by different customers that use the same software or sometimes even by a single customer), and the developers have merely done what the customers told them. However, this is not a valid excuse: You as a developer or designer have to take into account that customers and end users are not the same. Among "customers" we count the people who buy the software and the people who are responsible for choosing and maintaining it. Both groups are "loyal" to their decisions and both usually care little about end users. However, they really should do so because the decision for a certain piece of software largely determines how efficient the end users will be.

End users are the people who eventually have to use the software in their daily work. From the end users' point of view, applications that serve a multitude of goals and subgoals are a hassle. They have to keep all these goals in mind and to keep track of them. Even worse, often either the relationships between tasks and subtasks are unclear, or the tasks (and goals) form a deeply nested hierarchy that users find difficult to understand. Therefore do the following:

  1. Make sure that task(s) coincide with the user goal(s) for your application
  2. Let the users know what your application's goal is and how they can achieve it

Ideally, a simple application should serve just one goal, or at the most, a small set of closely related goals.

 

The Users' Goals

Alan Cooper has drawn our attention to the users' goals, which often may not coincide with the program's or the the company's goals. However, if you know the users' goals, your application:

  • Will not frustrate users because it takes care of the users' goals
  • Will also find ways to integrate company and user goals, so that both parties' interests are satisfied

We have already listed most of the typical user goals in the section on users and their needs. Therefore, we recall only the two most important user goals, namely that (1) users want to accomplish their tasks quickly and efficiently, and that (2) they do not want to look stupid. Most of the guidelines in this guide just care for these two user goals.

If you design a new application you should, however, carefully look for additional user goals that are important for the interface design and not rely on just these two.

 

How You Can Achieve Goal Orientation

Use methods found in the "Design Process" section of the Design Guild to determine your application's goal(s). Ask users and domain experts in order to identify their goals and needs. This is the one big issue here. It depends largely upon how the development process is institutionalized in your company and how user-oriented it is. The following items are just a few "reminders":

  • Design a simple and transparent application that users can understand, so that they can achieve their goals
  • Avoid distracting users from their tasks. For example:
    • Protect users from technical details
    • Use a terminology that is task-oriented, instead of technical jargon
  • If possible, use metaphors that help users to transfer their domain knowledge to the application

 

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Source:  Simplifying for Usability