Vou começar pelas notas/ressalvas:
1.Estou usando usuário/cliente, pois depende da natureza do serviço, e ainda há casos em que se confundem;
2.Estou usando UX (User Experience/ Experiência do usuário), mas talvez pudesse ter buscado termo mais genérico, porque não abordarei somente de ambiente informático (não sei se UX é 100% informática); Arquitetura da Informação seria ainda mais específico, portanto manterei UX;
3.”Serviços de informação” aparece aqui como algo muito amplo: desde o balcão de informações de um aeroporto, a um centro de referência ou de documentação, um website…
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A gente que trabalha com serviços de informação costuma seguir uma de duas tendências opostas: gerar uma infinidade de controles e formulários que perturbam os usuários e nos dão muito trabalho para gerenciar; ou deixar a coisa correr frouxa e acabar tendo problemas no futuro. Mas esse post não é bem sobre isso! A gente vai falar sobre algo parecido com UX.
UX pode ser definida como um conjunto de “escolhas feitas para adquirir vantagem competitiva de conteúdo e eficiência para Web sites” (Garret, 2002, p. 187 apud RIBEIRO; KLING, 2016). Embora esse trecho me pareça com muita cara de “cartilha para mercado” (vantagem competitiva bla bla bla, isto é, pensando muito adiante), foi escolhido por que aponta o objetivo que eu espero da UX: tornar um determinado serviço de informação mais atraente por meio da eficiência no acesso aos conteúdos.
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Os estudos da Arquitetura são uma boa fonte de ideias e padrões para UX. O site “99% invisible” traz um texto sobre “desire paths“, que são os caminhos alternativos criados pelas pessoas, como este:
As pessoas têm o costume de seguirem o caminho do menor esforço (a diagonal é o caminho mais curto nessa imagem) e isso deve ser considerado. Excesso de opções mal definidas e trajetos excessivamente burocráticos podem espantar usuários. Por que não fizeram os caminhos de pedestres na diagonal, reduzindo o espaço caminhado evitando a erosão dos gramados?
A UX Magazine publicou em 2013 um artigo muito interessante sobre UX usando um exemplo não ligado à informática: Disneyland! (aqui). O autor cita algumas boas práticas:
Make special moments: Disney and his team had a sharp focus on creating a unique experience that guests could not get anywhere else. This focus on making as many special moments as possible resulted in happy (and repeat) customers. Human beings retain bad memories more than good, so providing happy moments results in people revisiting in a desire to relive or recapture those special moments.
Always be plussing: Disney was never completely satisfied. He always asked for more, always pushed his team to bring more to the table. He called this “plussing,” incrementally improving details and elements of an experience. It wasn’t “adding more stuff”—which so many companies do—it was making a good experience better; making sure the sound effects on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride were loud enough to rattle the riders; making sure that the Tiki Birds were able to have dozens of different gestures, not just ten. It was aspirational, and I think it’s the right way to approach design. Imagine if all designers and developers did their work with this type of attitude.
Give customers options: Walt didn’t design one different locale with the original Disneyland: he made four of them, each with a different theme and different experiences. By doing so he was able to appeal to more people, and also allow for people to either stay in one “land” (such as Adventureland) for an entire visit, or use the “hub” to quickly jump from there to Tommorowland, or another area.
Fix things that don’t work: The grand opening of Disneyland was, in many respects, a disaster. They ran out of food, rides broke down, counterfeit tickets were being used to get into the park, and the asphalt sidewalks had not finished curing in many places. Though I’m pretty sure there was some yelling involved, Disney met with his team, did a postmortem, and fixed things. We need to follow that example, be self-conscious and objective about our designs, and fix what isn’t working.
Take risks: As briefly noted above, Disney sunk a tremendous amount of his own money in two projects: a full-length animated film called Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Disneyland. Both projects brought him to the brink of losing it all, and both projects were huge successes. We need to take risks with what we design, and “aim for the fence” just like Disney did, because great risk also brings great reward.
Hire smart people: Disney surrounded himself with incredibly talented people and let them do their thing. Though he had to approve almost all the details, he knew that he needed top-notch people to execute his vision and to bring new perspectives to the table. Follow Disney’s lead when it comes to building your team.
Innovate: Disney innovated both filmmaking and resort experiences, creating the multi-plane camera for film and a complex series of animatronic robots for his parks. He could have gone the safe route and not pushed the envelope, but he did, and we all benefited. Where can you innovate in your design work? What new ideas or interactions can you bring to the table?
Use data to make things better (and maximize profits): Disney looked at traffic patterns and sales data from his parks to change things. Sold out of ice cream in Frontierland last week? Double the number of ice cream stands there this week. Too many people in line for Splash Mountain? Redesign the queue to make sure that the people have extra shade and fans. Disney was one of the first people to look at analytical data to influence business decisions. Like Walt, UX professionals should leverage analytical data to inform their understanding of users and supplement qualitative user research.
Test, refine, then test again: Disney sent friends and family on rides like Jungle Cruise before they opened to elicit feedback and fine-tune the experience. It’s exactly what we do as user experience professionals, and he did it 50 years ago.
O chefe da equipe de design dos primórdios da Disney estabeleceu os dez mandamentos do Mickey:
1. Know your audience: “Don’t bore people, talk down to them, or lose them by assuming that they know what you know.” This is absolutely necessary in UX design—without a deep understanding of your users you can’t create a solution that solves their problems or adds value to their lives.
2. Wear your guest’s shoes: “Insist that designers, staff, and your board members experience your facility as visitors as often as possible.” This approach increases the empathy your design team has for your users, making the designs you create more appropriate and helpful.
3. Organize the flow of people and ideas: “Use good storytelling techniques; tell good stories not lectures; lay out your exhibit with a clear logic.” Storytelling is a vitally important skill in UX, not just when explaining your final design solution to stakeholders, but also in your designs themselves—especially if you’re trying to describe an offering to new customers.
4. Create a weenie: “Lead visitors from one area to another by creating visual magnets and giving visitors rewards for making the journey.” Imagineers called these magnets “weenies”–objects that are large enough to see from a distance and interesting enough to draw their attention. Very good advice, and when designing a “stepped” process providing a ‘weenie’ to follow will result in lower abandon rates and increased customer satisfaction.
5. Communicate with visual literacy: “Make good use of all the non-verbal ways of communication—color, shape, form, texture.” We are currently having a big debate in the UX design community about skeumorphism (the use of real-world visual metaphors in a user experience) and this commandment aligns with the argument advocating such an approach. Skeumorphism done well helps people learn new experiences because of the visual cues that remind them of real-world metaphors reflected in the design. Of course, skeumorphism done badly is … well, pretty awful and unhelpful.
6. Avoid overload: “Resist the temptation to tell too much, to have too many objects; don’t force people to swallow more than they can digest, try to stimulate and provide guidance to those who want more.” Cognitive overload is one of the major issues that can occur when a UI is “overdesigned” with too many options. This commandment is great advice to avoid that type of situation.
7. Tell one story at a time: “If you have a lot of information, divide it into distinct, logical, organized stories; people can absorb and retain information more clearly if the path to the next concept is clear and logical.” This is information architecture 101, and direction like this convinces me that Disney was the world’s first user experience designer.
8. Avoid contradiction: “Clear institutional identity helps give you the competitive edge. [The] public needs to know who you are and what differentiates you from other institutions they may have seen.” Disney thought about branding before most people even knew what the term meant. When designing, don’t look at brand as a separate thing to be applied at the end—it’s a crucial part of the total experience.
9. For every ounce of treatment, provide a ton of fun: “How do you woo people from all other temptations? Give people plenty of opportunity to enjoy themselves by emphasizing ways that let people participate in the experience and by making your environment rich and appealing to all senses.” The concepts of gamification and immersive experiences are direct descendants of ideas like this.
10. Keep it up: “Never underestimate the importance of cleanliness and routine maintenance, people expect to get a good show every time, people will comment more on broken and dirty stuff.” This is less applicable to UX design, but an absolute golden rule when it comes to process and service design. Always do your best, follow your process and deliver quality.
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Li em algum livro (não lembro exatamente, mas pode ter sido no “Pull: o futuro da internet e o impacto da web semântica em seus negócios” de David Siegel) que os mercados abordam a experiência de uma maneira que pode ser equivocada para o negócio: caixas “até X itens”. O questionamento era mais ou menos o que vem a seguir. Quando um mercado cria um caixa para compras limitadas a, por exemplo, 15 itens, ele beneficia o sujeito que está com pressa e fez apenas uma compra pequena. O consumidor deve ficar satisfeito com o serviço e o tempo poupado, tornando-se fiel ao estabelecimento- o que é bom. Contudo, o objetivo de um mercado é vender o máximo possível de produtos (preferencialmente os mais caros), mas o “caixa até 15 volumes” está favorecendo justamente quem compra menos… Por que não há um caixa para “carrinho lotado” ou “2 carrinhos ou mais?”. Esse exemplo pode demonstrar diferentes “forças” e consequências no design de um serviço:
-usuários reais (fora do controle do serviço);
– quais são os tipos de usuários desejados (queremos quem compra menos ou quem compra mais? No exemplo, parecem querer fidelizar quem compra menos – talvez isso os leve a comprarem mais… não sei, deve haver algum estudo sobre isso);
– quais são os benefícios dados aos “usuários desejados” e objetivo final do serviço (lucro real? verba estatal? doação?)
Encerrando…
Preocupar-se com a experiência do usuário/cliente é importante para a manutenção de serviços eficientes e competitivos. Atender às demandas e fornecer caminhos mais curtos para se chegar ao conteúdo desejado devem ser as qualidades buscadas por qualquer serviço de informação, mas isso não pode ser feito indiscriminadamente. Evitar burocracia desnecessária é um objetivo nobre, mas não se deve burlar toda ela, pois parte tem a ver com compliance (no sentido de conformidade com diretrizes internas e externas [legislação]). E isso é muito importante em se tratando de serviços que tenham informações com algum grau de confidencialidade.
Patrick Ribeiro e Victor Kling apresentaram um trabalho sobre UX e SIGADs (confrontando o e-arq com UX e desenvolvendo uma pesquisa envolvendo usuários de SIGADs) aqui. Nele é possível encontrar boas referências sobre UX.
Referências (não muito no padrão ABNT):
RIBEIRO, Patrick Dourado; KLING, Victor. USER EXPERIENCE E SUAS POTENCIALIDADES NA ARQUIVOLOGIA. IN: CONGRESSO NACIONAL DE ARQUIVOLOGIA-CNA, 7., 2016, Fortaleza.
SIEGEL, David. Pull: o futuro da internet e o impacto da web semântica em seus negócios. Tradução Alessandra Mussi – Rio de Janeiro: Elsevier, 2010.
Infocacto 
