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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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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Are you still alive? Part Two
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. It seems that I didn't successfully confirm my continued existence, so here's my next notification:
Subject: Dead Man's Switch is worried about you
Message: Hey there, where have you been? You didn't answer our first email. If you don't answer this, you will get one more warning in a week before all your emails are sent out.
To update your status, visit the following address:
http://www.deadmansswitch.net/update/
Hope to see you there,
Dead Man's Switch staff
It's still kind of creepy, but I do like that the subject line shows a bit more compassion. I wonder what the final notice will say... stay tuned.
As I said previously, I don't have it setup to send any e-mails in the event that I don't respond. Although I may set it up to send one to myself, just to see what type of introduction the service might add to the e-mail message.
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Real World Interaction Design
For the last few months, I've taken the time to closely observe interactions in physical spaces. You may remember my post about the experience of visiting an IKEA store in Minneapolis. I guess you can consider this the second post in an irregular series about physical spaces.I've summed up my thinking into a couple of principles about interaction in the tangible world that likely translate to the online world as well.
1. Patterns Matter - Consistency is Key
The genesis of this principle was my new apartment. In each room, there's a switch plate with three switches, and in all of the bedrooms and living room the pattern is consistent: fan, overhead light, other light/lamp. This is consistent and comfortable, and it didn't take long for me to operate the lights without thinking. But there's one pesky inconsistency: the master bathroom.
You see, in the master bathroom the order is as follows: overhead light, fan, other light. I've turned on the fan countless times when I really wanted to use the light. Some might argue that it's just something to learn, and that I should deal with it. The fact is: I have learned over the last four months and I am used to it, but I still make the mistake at least twice weekly. It's not a matter of learning; it's a matter of habit and muscle memory.
2. Labeling doesn't always help.
Recently, I visited a local restaurant, and I spent a few seconds trying to turn the water on for this sink. The lever there looked a lot like sinks that I've used in the past where you pull up for the water to start. This one, however, you had to push. Even though it had the label "push" inscribed on the knob, that didn't help until I was already frustrated. Had the faucet looked more like this common push button, I could have avoided this frustration.
One might argue that labeling would also solve my light switch issue, and they're probably correct at first. The first time I visited the apartment is was daytime. I could have seen the switch, and I may have taken time to read them. But try figuring that out when you're in the dark... Exactly... labels don't always help.
(http://flickr.com/photos/toastforbrekkie/104806617/)
3. Build on a known concept.
I listened to a talk by Bill DeRouchey a few weeks ago called "The Language of Interaction," and he does a great job of explaining how we derive meaning from what we already know. I think his best example is the colors green and red. Green means go, and red means stop, right? Why? Why are green and red inseparably connected to those actions? Well, it's the language of interaction. Those are the colors that are used by traffic signals, and before that railroad signals, and before that boat signals. So if the pattern already is established and understood, why would I use blue and orange for a good/bad rating system? It doesn't make sense. It's much more intuitive to build upon the green/red language than to create my own.
(http://flickr.com/photos/atomicshark/1288380740/ )
So this is my list of interaction principles that I've observed recently. It's a work in progress and is certainly not complete. Now it's your turn. What interactions trip you up on a regular basis and what principles can we derive from your frustrations?
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Are you still alive?
A while back I posted about www.deadmansswitch.net. Here's the first e-mail they sent me to confirm that I'm still alive. I like how it's doesn't assume that I'm alive, but I was hoping that it would be something more formal. In either case it's still kind of disturbing.
Hello you,
this is your plain old regular email to remind you that you should check
back with us at Dead Man's Switch, so we know you're doing well.
To update your status, visit the following address:
http://www.deadmansswitch.net/update/
Hope to see you there,
Dead Man's Switch staffFor the record: I don't have it setup to send any e-mails in the event that I don't respond.
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World Usability Day
Today is about making our world work better. It's the fourth year that the Usability Professionals Association has celebrated the second Thursday of November as World Usability Day. The event was created to bring attention to usability and its importance in a technology-driven society. Many local events are scheduled around the world today, including one here in RTP. This year the focus of the event is transportation and the UPA is sponsoring the Global Transport Challenge. The goal is to encourage individuals to measure, monitor and minimize the carbon footprint of their travel. While it might be a stretch, it's a great idea to talk about usability and sustainability in the same conversation.
To learn more about World Usability Day, visit the primary site at www.worldusabilityday.org or check out our local event at www.triupa.org.
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Dead Man's Switch
When the gang here at Capstrat set out to brainstorm some ideas for SXSW 2009, we talked about what "digital will" service might look like. We decided that the basic model would allow a user to write e-mail messages and they would be sent on their behalf posthumously. The user would be prompted to check in from time to time to keep the messages from being sent. It's like having a jet ski engine stop when you fall off or stopping a train if the operator isn't touching the controls. It's called a dead man's switch.www.deadmansswitch.net went into beta in late July with a service that does just this. From their site:
This is how this works. You write a few e-mails, and choose the recipients. These emails are encrypted with military-grade algorithms, so you can be sure that no-one except the intended recipient will ever read them. Your switch will email you every so often, asking you to show that you are fine by clicking a link. If something were to... happen... to you, your switch would then send the emails you wrote to the recipients you specified. Sort of an "electronic will," one could say.
The concept here isn't new. People have been writing wills and leaving behind letters for centuries, but now we have an online equivalent. I'm not sure how I feel about having a web server send an e-mail asking if I am alive, but the service is designed to give you several chances to verify your continued existence. I also think these guys deserve the award for the most morbid user welcome message on the Internet:
The last time you showed signs of life before today was on Friday, September 19, 2008. Now you can write a new email, or see the ones you have already written:
Of course, the terms of service state that "it comes without any warranty, neither express nor implied (even the actual sending of the messages is not guaranteed, but we'll do our best)."
What do you think about this? Is it something worth using or too morbid to think about?
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Sustainable Publishing
I recently picked up a copy of Designing the Moment a new book on Web interface design by Robert Hoekman. When I flipped through the book for the first time, I found this listed in the acknowledgments:A portion of my royalties from Designing the Moment will go towards offsetting the carbon footprint of the book's printing process, so you can enjoy the comforts of the printed word without worrying about damage to the environment.
Before even reading the first page of the book's content, I am impressed by the author's attention to detail as evidenced by this message. I think that Robert Hoekman deserves significant credit for understanding the environmental impact of his book. Moreover, I think he should be praised for cutting into his own profits to do something about it.
This is is a significant accomplishment for the publishing industry and it sets the bar for other authors and publishers. Does anybody know of any others who have taken similar steps?
I look forward to reading the book and I'll report back about his thoughts on interface design.
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