Evan Carroll, User Experience Designer
Bio
Evan puts his analytical and diagnostic skills to work developing Web site architectures, performing user research and usability testing, and creating wireframes and specifications. Clients including Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, Scandinavian Child and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have benefited from his insight into Web user behaviors.
Evan started at Capstrat as a UXD intern, but prior to coming here, he honed his technical talents with an internship at IBM. As a part of a student team, he performed analyses and made recommendations for increased findability and helped establish a methodology for content analysis and guidelines for content classification.
Taking every opportunity to develop his expertise, Evan worked for local businesses including The Coastal Companies, Cox Investments, Inc. and Blueocean Multimedia. His responsibilities ran the gamut from maintaining Web sites, to developing a database system for sales tracking and inventory from providing customer technical support, to configuring a point-of-sale system.
Evan graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a bachelor’s degree in information science and a minor in music. While there, he served as both the pep band conductor for the Marching Tar Heels and the president of the Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia Fraternity.
Articles
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Is Aristotle on Twitter?
One of the most perplexing panel discussions I attended at SXSW was “Is Aristotle on Twitter.” And the answer is most certainly yes. Here’s one of the many affirmative arguments that the panelists presented.
Aristotle felt that a good rhetorician held an understanding of current and past events along with a strong theoretical knowledge. They held practical wisdom and could take knowledge of the past and apply it to the current. In order to judge someone’s ability or character, individuals would look to their intuition and decide if they would pay attention to them.
Consider the influential Twitters today. They give good URL references and insight about them. They are good filters of information and aid in community deliberation. In the end, they're simply rhetoricians using a different medium and their status is confirmed by their large audience of followers.
So, Aristotle would probably find qualified rhetoricians on Twitter.
As one questioner asked, if Aristotle is on Twitter, then where is Socrates? A panelist responded, “He’s on Usenet.” I suppose that’s a panel discussion for another SXSW festival.
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Natural User Interactions
I’m sure you’ve all seen the hype about the Microsoft Surface. While at SXSW I had the opportunity to play around with the Surface and attend a panel about natural user interfaces (NUI). The most well known example today is Apple’s iPhone with interactions like flick to scroll and pinch for zooming. When using the demo, I asked about what new interactions we might see moving beyond those on the iPhone. Unfortunately the demonstrator could only pick on the iPhone and didn’t really provide a direct answer to my question. But, he did show us some possible uses and a few utilities that shed some light on its capabilities.
The Surface uses a set of cameras to detect thousands of touch points simultaneously. It has the capability to discern between fingers, whole hands and specially coded objects placed on the Surface. Not only does it allow for multiple touch points, it can serve several users simultaneously. Virtual objects on the Surface can be moved, sized, rotated and spun while expanding. All of these interactions are performed directly with the human hand and feel almost as natural as interacting with tangible objects.
Here’s a video that shows the possibilities of the Microsoft Surface. I’m looking forward to seeing more and more natural interactions come about as this technology grows.
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Augmented Reality
Augmented reality, or the combination of virtual reality and live footage, is on the cutting edge of interactive experiences today. At SXSW John and I attended a panel that discussed the emerging trends in mobile technology. While AR was once confined to the desktop computer with a connected camera, today's mobile phone technology has placed the capability right in our pockets.
Here is an example of an augmented reality pet on an iPhone. Notice how the user is able to interact with the pet by touching the iPhone screen.
You might be thinking that this technology is only for play, but check out this example of using the iPhone's built-in GPS receiver for navigation. While the video is a bit unclear, notice the navigation path overlaid on the current image of the road ahead.
Other applications of this technology include everything from tactical military devices to advertising. Have any ideas for how this might be used for clients? Add a comment and let’s talk.
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Photos from SXSW
Here are a few photos for you from SXSW. Right now Todd Moy and Margot Lester are leading the session called Love in the Cloud: Online-Only Marriages.
The Capstrat darts have been a crowd favorite so far.
Stay tuned for more photos (and insights) from Austin.
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SXSW Guide
As a SXSW newcomer, I wanted to take a minute and share with you the basics of having a great SXSW experience. SXSW is a big event with more stuff to do than you can imagine. If you have a bad experience, it's probably your fault.
Here are my thoughts:
1. Plan ahead. It's easy to miss events because you spend too much time trying to figure out where to go and what to do. Make a schedule and stick to it (unless something awesome compels you to change it).
2. Wear comfortable shoes. The Austin Convention Center is a big place and you'll be doing a lot of walking.
3. Bring a backpack. You'll want to carry around your laptop, a jacket and various other things you pick up along the way.
4. Bring a Mac. I'd estimate an 8-2 Mac to PC ratio. If you want to fit in, visit Steve Jobs first.
5. Speaking of Steve, I'd estimate that 90% of US iPhone owners are here. Okay, maybe that's a bit inflated, but there are a lot of them. So many that the 3G network is simply clogged. Mine's been pretty useless at times.
6. Tweet. Twitter is the official language of SXSW. If you're not tweeting, you're missing out.
7. Bring your battery chargers. With all of this Tweeting and blogging, you’ll need to recharge.
I'm sure there's more, but that's all I have for now. Feel free to comment with others.
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User Centered Design is Dead
Midday on Sunday I stopped in to listen as Jared Spool led us on a Journey to the Center of Design. Okay, I admit it--I didn't plan on going. Truth is I was too lazy to walk a mile across the convention center to another panel. Well, not only did I save my soles, I got the better end of the bargain. I'll go ahead and say that this was the best presentation I've attended thus far. I Twittered my way through the panel, but I'll provide you a summary here.
1. There's no evidence that UCD has ever worked. We've seen marginal success, but nothing overwhelming.
2. Apple has all but closed their user experience division. Microsoft runs over 15,000 usability tests per year. Who has the better experience? Yeah, interpret this one for yourself.
3. Process is how we do things. Methodology is a repeatable process. Dogma is something we believe without any logical reason.
4. Every successful organization that Spool has studied doesn't have an official corporate methodology for UCD. Except One. That one has a VP whose job it is to release people from the official methodology.
5. Process includes techniques and tricks. Tricks are things we do when the preferred technique is too lengthy or expensive.
6. UCD is a dogma and it's time we change it.
7. The placebo effect works 60% of the time. UCD work is placebic.
8. It goes without saying that the point of user research is to inform design.
9. Most usability tests end the same way. Developer says "If we'd known that two years ago, we would have done this differently."
10. Analytics can be interpreted in conflicting ways. Eye tracking is voodoo.
There are three core user experience attributes that make a difference: Vision, Feedback and Culture.
Vision.
Can everyone on the team articulate the experience of using your design in five years?
Feedback.
In the last six weeks have you spent more than two hours watching someone use your design or your competitors designs?
Culture.
In the last six weeks have you rewarded a team member for creating a major design failure? This indicates a culture that learns from failure.
The UCD dogma is dead. Informed design is here. Let's go.
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7 Rules for Great Web Application Design
First thing on Saturday I listened to Robert Hoekman, Jr. talk about the 7 Rules for Great Web Application Design. Robert is the author of Designing the Obvious and Designing the Moment. The panel focused on human psychology and how that relates to design principles. Most applications on the Internet are successful because they support innate human desires.
1. Understand users, then ignore them.
People are bad at predicting their own behavior. They don’t know how they will act in a situation until they are in that situation. We need to know what they’re going to do and ignore what they say they’re going to do. This emphasizes the importance observing users, not just interviewing them.
One company found an opportunity to sell milkshakes in the mornings by realizing that customers didn’t want breakfast; they wanted something to do during their morning commute that would keep them busy for the entire time. They installed a milkshake kiosk from 7-9am each day and sales went through the roof
2. Build only what’s absolutely necessary.
It’s easy to add features, but applications need to have clarity. By only adding what you need your application can be as simple as possible and accomplish users’ goals
Most people here said that their hard requirements for a mobile phone were a telephone and the ability to browse the web. Stocks, weather and calculator were all optional. All of those features are nice, but for most users they add to the clutter preventing them from finding what they need.
Senduit is a file sharing service that has only one form. You choose your file and when it should expire and it gives you a private link. That’s it. They could have added file management, but that would have also required user management. They have a great service because they did exactly what users needed and nothing more.
3. Support the users mental models.
People don’t think like computers, they think like people. We need to come up with things that are grounded in what they already know. Consider the trash bin on modern computers. It’s grounded in the established concept of throwing items into the bin, rather than typing a set of cryptic commands to delete a file.
4. Turn beginners into intermediates immediately.
The primary goal of WordPress.com is to create an account and their old homepage design featured three ways to create an account. That seems effective, but one of their developers had his friends calling and asking how to sign up. He suspected that the conversion rate could be improved. As it turns out, users couldn’t find the signup link, so they left the site because they didn’t want to feel dumb. They created a new home page design with a large, green sign up button. The new concept took about ten minutes to design and conversion rates went up 12% on the first day and up 25-30% the following week.
5. Prevent errors. (And handle the rest gracefully).
It’s really easy to make mistakes in interactions. By eliminating the possibility of errors, you can make users feel smarter.
Robert told us that he really enjoys using Backpack , but couldn’t figure out why until he prepared for this presentation. He went in search of applications that handled errors well. After an hour of working with Backpack, he identified that you couldn’t make any errors in Backpack. He couldn’t find anything that returned a confirmation or an error page. Users feel smarter when they don’t make mistakes and thus the product is a pleasure to use.
6. Design for Uniformity, Consistency and Meaning
Communicate what your site is about. Robert talked about squidoo.com and how most of its incoming traffic is on internal pages via Google. Users tended to bounce because they didn’t know what to do next. Adding the tag line “Share your knowledge. Make a difference” helped to provide that meaning to users.
7. Reduce, reduce, reduce. (And refine.)
Robert cited the well-known “fish story ” from Presentation Zen. I’ll let you read it for yourself, but the point is that all of the contextual clues about the store were already there, so the store’s sign was unnecessary and merely reduced the signal to noise ratio. They reduced (and refined) the sign until it contained only what was necessary, which turned out to be nothing at all.
There’s a lot of overlap in these principles and that’s because they're part of one underlying truth: Communicate Intentionally. Every element on your page communicates with your users. Choosing them intentionally allows you to say everything you want and nothing you don’t. -
5 ways to build loyalty
Today is the first day of SXSW Interactive and after waiting in line for badges and SWAG; I attended a panel called Try Making Yourself More Interesting. In short, it’s about building community around your online service by tuning into those who matter and taking advantage of smart thinking. Here are a few keys to making your project epic.
Apprentice yourself to good work. Don’t just build something fast; take the time to study the great work of others and build something great of your own.
Focus on details. It’s often the small things that will take service beyond the table stakes and create a truly compelling experience.
Go long. Think about what will happen with your data in the future. Plan for how you might help users migrate to other services when you shut down.
Share. It’s not just about a typical buyer/seller relationship. Make the service beneficial to everyone, especially your users.
Plan for sustainable awesomeness. This is about having a solid content strategy that includes planning, creation, publishing and governance. Ensure that you have a plan to keep the service fresh and interesting in the future.
While this panel was focused on online services, it’s highly relevant to marketing. You should make people aware of what you offer and retain them because you give them something highly valuable. By focusing on delivering compelling experiences, you can create stronger relationships between companies and their brand ambassadors.
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Capstrat Diagramming Suite
For the past year our team of user experience designers has worked to find the best way to record and present our design strategy. We, like many other interactive teams, use Visio to create site maps and wireframes. Lately, we've delved into other tools for more interactive prototypes, but Visio still has its place in our reliable toolbox. Anyone who's used Visio knows that it wasn't designed specifically for this purpose and our UX colleagues have provided several add-ons and enhancements to make it work better. We've collected some of these, pulled them together, and made our own additions; now we have a consolidated template for our Visio diagrams. We call it the Capstrat Diagramming Suite.
Here's a list of features for you. We'll post a handful of articles over the next few weeks explaining how to use some of the key features.
- Templates for site maps and wireframes
- Extensive set of shapes, including common interactive widgets
- Annotation tacks for different audiences/purposes including development, design, copywriting and questions
- Ability to show/hide annotation tacks by type
- Ability to generate reports in Word with the annotations for easy printing
- Copy and paste remembering the X and Y position of elements for quick duplication of pages
- Ability to copy an entire page
That's just the short list. If you're interested in giving it a try, you'll need Visio 2003 or 2007, but watch out if you're using both. 2007 makes some changes to the macros when it saves the file, so you'll have to do some spelunking into the Visual Basic settings to get it to work with 2003 again. Let me know if you run into that problem and I'll lend a hand.
Download
ZIP File (0.98 MB)
Credits
Welie's Visio Macros, Martijn van Welie
Export All Pages as JPG, Chris Roth
Annotation Tack, Dan Brown
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Are you still alive? Part Three
You probably remember my previous posts about Dead Man's Switch and the e-mails I've received from the service. Here's a follow-up to the last e-mail.
Subject: Dead Man's Switch is REALLY worried about you
Hi, Are you okay? You haven't answered our last two emails. If you don't answer this, your emails will be sent out in one week.
To update your status, visit the following address:
http://www.deadmansswitch.net/update/
Hope to see you there,
Dead Man's Switch staff
There's only one more week before my test e-mail gets sent out. I'll be sure to post when it gets to me. Stay tuned.
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