The 4 Cs

Описание: The 4 Cs: Consistent, Coherent, Context, and Clues. Learn how this simple set of general heuristics can help to improve upon almost any user-experience.

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Full transcript:

Hi, welcome back. I’m Soudy Khan, Director of User Experience at Neuron. Today I’m going to talk about the four Cs. The four Cs to us are a limited set of heuristics that we use. If you’re not familiar with heuristics, please watch the video before this. But, this limited set of heuristics is something we apply to almost every project, and of course we create contextual heuristics too with a specific project. But, the four Cs are consistent, coherent, context and clues. I’ll explain each of those.

So, consistency means in our case using the same elements for the same purpose in the same way. So, in other words if you’ve got a page for example that has bullet points of a particular style and you’re using it to talk about a particular type of text, don’t switch the bullet point style on the next page. If they are orange and round, don’t switch them to the finger pointing to the right or some other style of bullet point unless you actually are trying to say, “This is different, these bullet points are unique, they’re not standard.” So, you really want to have things that are consistent. Again, it’s defined as using the same element for the same purpose in the same way.

Coherent really speaks to brand. When we talk about the definition of coherency, we’re talking about being united in forming a whole. So, all the parts are united in forming a whole. But, that really speaks to the tone and the feel being united, and that it’s on brand. For example, if you are using a font like Old English that might work for Juicy Couture as a fashion brand but it probably wouldn’t work for say, Ralph Lauren for a fashion brand.

You want to make sure that those things, the whole experience is coherent. If you have a particular style of writing, a particular tone that you were using, you want to make sure it’s coherent. If you’ve had two people author different parts of the content of your site, that the voice is the same, that it speaks in the same manner with the same tone. That’s really about the brand. Right? You want to make sure that things are being coherent and loyal to the brand, and speaking to the tone of the brand.

The next thing is context. So, often when we talk about context it’s in the context of the user: about in the place where they are (physical location), at what time, possibly the mental state or other conditions that a user is in when engaging your product or service. But, when we talk about context here we’re talking about providing context to the user. Letting them know where they are, what’s expected of them or what affordances they have, how long they should expect to be there, and how do they exit.

A great example of this would be a checkout system. So, checkout system on a commerce website. Checkout systems been around for a while now and we find we have a good set of best practices. We let people know this is the checkout process, that they’re on step one of four, what information they’re expected to enter here, etc. And how they can get out (exit), which is often hidden on – a little bit hidden on a checkout system. But checkout systems provide all that information. So, again, where am I, what’s expected of me, how long should I expect to be here in terms of number of steps, and to the extent that we can provide time, well that would be good as well. Lastly and how do I (the user) exit.

Providing clues is another one. When we look at that it’s really just helpful hints or contextual help. An example of that would be a text field with example information in it. So, you’re reinforcing the idea. Remember people scan things on the web. They look at things very quickly. So, you might want to give an example. If you’ve got a text field for first and last name which is a little uncommon (most people separate first name and last name). If you got first and last name you might give an example of John Williams ghosted in the filed. So, you’re providing a bit of information to the user.

Directional arrows that let people know that you’ve can paginate left and right or an arrow that maybe shows at the bottom that there’s more information below the fold, maybe that blinks or flickers or that sort of appears kind of last of in a delayed fashion when they page loads, that’s sort of saying, hey I’m over here. I’m providing a clue, something that’s not obvious to the user that this page can paginate.

Hopefully the use of consistency, coherency, context and clues is something that you can use and add to your repertoire. It’s been really helpful for me over the years.

Thanks a lot. Take care.