Software Desirability and Interface Design

Companies that once obsessed Rosetta Stone language over how to engineer new products must now also obsess over how to reverseengineer the desires of their consumers. This is more than just a matter of market research. It is fundamental to every decision you make. — Reverse–Engineering Desire By Jeffrey F. Rayport What is desirability and what does it mean for interface design? Evaluating the desirability of a user interface design is a beneficial way of complementing usability testing. After determining that a user interface design is usable, an interface designer might want to know more about what users perceive in terms of intangible variables, such as joy and fun when using an application. A good way of finding this out is through desirability testing. Desirability testing is intended to assess target users' emotional response to a design or stimulus. In effect, desirability testing is much about visual design, while usability testing strives to assess underlying behavioral patterns. Bluntly speaking, in usability testing the emotional response is inconsequential and in desirability testing usability is inconsequential. When an interface design scores highly on usability and desirability it stands a better chance of pleasing clients and being a success. How to measure desirability of an interface design through questionnaires Cheap Rosetta Stone V3 There are a number of ways of conducting the desirability testing of interface designs. One of the ways is through broad and experience-based subjective satisfaction questionnaires. The questions often ask users to rate some part of the interface design on a Likert scale to measure subjective satisfaction. The Questionnaire for User Interaction Satisfaction (QUIS) tool is an example of a standardized one. One of the things to watch out with questionnaires is the "acquiescence bias" (not to mention that set questions could be out of context), which is the fact that people are more likely to agree with a statement than disagree with it. This can, however, be rectified by finding a balance between positively-phrased statements such as "I found this interface design easy to use" with negative ones such as "I found this interface difficult to navigate". How to measure desirability of an interface design through body language The observation of a user's body language such as smiles, frowns, exclamations and other physiological, and even neurological, indicators is another method of conducting Rosetta Stone Arabicdesirability testing. This is accomplished in a number of ways, an example of which is PrEmo, the Product Emotion Measurement tool that uses short animations with sound to accurately depict emotional dimensions.