Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

I constantly hear sentences like "users want such-and-such." I cringe every time. This might sound strange coming from a user experience designer.

Users are not vague outsiders. To misquote Charlton Heston, users are made of people. They're specific types of people, with names and lives. And consciously or not, these folks have to decide whether your product helps them accomplish their goals.

So, you need to know them intimately.

 

Let's role play.

Pretend you have a recipe Web site. Think your "users" are people who want recipes? Nope. They're people like Mary.

 

Mary is an unmarried mother of two. She works double-shifts when she can and is studying for her GED. She needs to feed her kids a cheap, nutritious dinner in under one hour because she has to study from 9pm to 12am.

 

You can picture her right? She might sound like someone you know. You can empathize with her deeply. And since you now know her, you can make informed decisions on her behalf.

 

Building for Mary.

So back to the recipe site. Assuming people like Mary are your priority, you might decide to:

- Build your database around easy-to-prepare meals.

- Show ingredient substitutions, in case she doesn't have something on hand. Help her minimize trips to the grocery store.

- Add a "Find recipes that use..." search tool, so she can find recipes that use ingredients in her pantry.

- Allow recipes to be filtered by total prep and cook time.

- Write a series of articles called "One Pan Dinners."

- List nutritional data with comparisons to daily allowances.

- Let her scale ingredients by the number of servings.

- Create a tool that scrapes Kroger's sale items and emails her a customized weekly menu, replete with shopping list and coupons.

 

Furthermore, this newfound focus helps you decide what not to invest in. Knowing Mary, you might not:

- Spend time adding recipes that use squid ink and other Iron Chef-caliber ingredients.

- Court advertisers like Viking ranges, Le Creuset or Whole Foods.

- Build a MySommelier app for recommending wine pairings.

Here's the point.

Real people use your product, not users. If you can't describe them like they are your next-door neighbor, then you can't design for them. Get to know them intimately and banish the word user from design discussions.

 

Need more convincing?

Sam Farber saw his arthritic wife struggling to control a carrot peeler. With this person and her situation in mind, he started prototyping kitchen utensils that were singularly focused on ergonomics. After testing and refining with real people, his work became the OXO Good Grips line. By considering real people deeply, his kitchen utensils redefined a household commodity and created a new market.

Now go read OXO's story.

Not only was SXSW09 an educational experience, it was also an exercise in team building.  No team is as close as the one who plays together.  Naturally, when we showed up at the Interactive Closing Party, hosted by our good friends at Media Temple, the Capstratters couldn't resist a challenge from an on-site mechanical bull. When in Texas, do as the Texans do, right?  Here's how it all went down.

 

Todd Moy makes the following statement:"I'll get on that bull if someone else does."  Enough said.  Laura signs a waiver, grabs a glove and saddles up first for the Capstrat team.

 

Todd's up next.  Yes this is actually Todd Moy on a mechanical bull.  Enjoy this, you might never get to see it again.

There goes Evan, our official time keeper.

 

And John, our winner...at 44 seconds!

 

Virginia our fearless leader, never one to back down from a challenge, finishes up the night strong.

 

After all that hard work, we finished things off with mmmpanadas out of a truck.  I'm so excited I think I'm waving mine at Evan. It was truly an authentic night out in Austin and a great way to end our SXSW09 experience.

 

At an interesting panel* at SXSW 09 , YinYin He demonstrated a device she created, dubbed "Patches," that was designed for touch via the Facebook "poke" interaction. This little patch, easily worn on your clothing, has sensors inside it that vibrate or "buzz" when you're poked on Facebook. After a Facebook user "pokes" you, a message is sent to a server and them to a microcontroller on the patch. A text message is also sent to your mobile device.

The patch is made of snaps, conductive thread, fabrics, and grey thermocromic ink (the same stuff mood rings are made out of).  Pretty cool, huh?

So for those of you that always thought the good old Facebook "poke" was pretty pointless, maybe we're on our way to a more interactive experience via touch technology.

*Touching Me Touching You: How We Feel Technology

At SXSW 09 , I listened to a panel* of UX game designers talk about the unique challenges around building games. Much of their discussion, however, applied to usability testing in other software. Four big takeaways that I heard:

Let testers bail

Usability tests--especially structured task tests--often put the participant in an artificial situation. While the task may be representative, the user may spend more time on the task than normal. In fact they might keep banging away at the task even if, in reality, they would have bailed a long time ago. At the onset of a usability test, give the participant a "stop word" so that they can clue you in to where they would have abandoned your site.

 

Let go of the formality.

Some clients are forever looking for formalized tests. These include a "magic" number of users, tested during a specific set of time, and using very structured and repeatable tasks. While there are merits to this approach, it's important to recognize that conducting tests is not the end game. Making the product better is.

So grab your neighbor, your friends and family, and evaluate the design without a whole lot of hullabaloo. Its better to get some data often than a lot late. Remember that, despite usability testing having roots in science--it is most often not scientific. That's a good thing because it gives you more flexibility in test execution.

 

Test in person

There are definite kinesthetic and verbal reactions that users have to products, which can't be observed remotely. Erica Firment noted one that she sees often is the "eye flash," or the point at which the user's eyes widen in enjoyment. Jason Schklar noted hearing the repeated smack of the joystick against a controller as evidence that the gamers were playing in a way less subtle than expected.

 

Go into the wild

Usability is as much about analyzing reactions to your products in the wild. So, set up Google Alerts, Twitter searches, etc. to automatically scan and report on problem phrases you anticipate your users saying. This can help you get a leg up on those people who aren't submitting trouble tickets, but are being vocal about problems your product has.

* Funologists Live & In Person: Guerrilla Game Research

I just read a happiness study on global wellbeing. This University of Michigan study measured countries' attitudes about economic growth, democracy and social tolerance. Ranked at the top of the happiness heap is Denmark, whose prosperity and democratic systems are the keys to its contentment.

That Danish giddiness must be contagious too. Seven of the top ten happiest countries are European. Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research noted the bottom tier was rife with unrest. "It strongly suspect there is a strong correlation between peace and happiness," he said. To which I say, "Duh!" Almost all the least happy countries have struggled with decades of authoritarian rule and widespread poverty. The bottom of the list is Zimbabwe with its soaring inflation and continuing political crisis, unsurprisingly ranked 99th.

I thought it would be interesting to plot this on a map. A happy map if you will. At Capstrat we love to look at data in fresh ways. I learned that happy countries have happy neighbors. Unhappy countries are stuck with other sourpuss neighbors.

Click to see the full map

The United States — the world's richest nation — ranked 16th. China, at number 54, is responsible for one-fifth of the world's unhappy population. And Russia at number 89 is the largest, unhappiest land mass on Earth with well over 17,000,000 square kilometers of great wide open gloom.

Despite the credit crunch paired with rising fuel and food prices, Inglehart's study says we’re getting happier. Researchers say that compared to a similar survey twenty years ago, everyone is a lot happier. I guess that's good news.

In user experience, it seems common that the terms "goal" and "task" get confused quite a bit.  Tasks get cast as goals, when they really aren't. It's easy enough to do: goals can seem amorphous and hard to design for. Tasks are more observable and tactic-oriented. But that does not mean consideration of goals is unnecessary in the design process. In fact, this focus is critical.

We identify goals through research. User research is designed to ferret these out and inform the design and architecture that will support them. This research is not about focus groups, preference, or even opinion. It's about getting to the heart of what challenges people, their contexts of use, and their shared mindsets. It's about building a solution to meet those needs.

Now, don't get me wrong. Tasks are important. They are, usually, the manifestation of how people are trying to achieve a goal. But designing just for tasks is myopic at best. Let me break it down for you.

Take Jill. jill is an an online banker, age 28, fiscally conservative and single. She manages her own investment portfolio. Her overall goal is to retire comfortably at 50. The tasks that support this, however, are much different. They range from her:

• tracking her budget against her actual expenses
• establishing and contributing to a 401k, Roth IRA, and other securities
• taking cost-effective vacations
• ferreting out discounts and sales

Her goal of early retirement is an umbrella that covers a variety of supporting tasks.

Now, if we focused solely on her tasks, we would be short-sighted. We would focus on those transactions that she conducts with the company today. It woud be: checking an account balance, transferring money, ordering checks. Optimizing these are great, sure. 

Where they miss out is the larger context. They focus on just a small piece of the pie. There might be huge opportunities to improve the entire event of retirement planning. Or there might just be great places to sync up with these other tasks, if they're outside of our control. Using the example, this might range from providing lifecycle funds,  financial planning, to discounts on Quicken and Turbotax.

If you only focused on "getting things done" -- i.e. making existing tasks only faster and more intuitive -- well, you would have missed the boat. As Steven Keith said to us presciently the other day, you left equity on the table.

Over the course of my life, I’ve probably seen close to 400 movies on the big screen. And maybe five of those have caused “theater time warp.” What is theater time warp? It’s the name I’ve given the feeling I get when a movie is so engaging, so absorbing that when I walk outside, it feels like time passed me by. The 2008 Cusp Conference I attended in September achieved theater time warp.

By promising to address “the design of everything” in two days, the Cusp coordinators gave themselves a tall order to fill. Well I didn’t learn about the design of everything — but I was powerfully reminded that everything has a design.

Webster’s dictionary lists 17 definitions for the word design. That’s a lot. But when I hear the word, I immediately think graphic. That might come from the fact that I work in the advertising industry, and for every project, I’m paired with a designer who gives our concept a graphic interpretation. But at the Cusp conference, presenters talked about the design of things created without pencils and paper or computer software; community, courage, identity, connections, ethics, hope, the future, reality, fantasy — even food. Each speaker had a personal story, a unique perspective and a creative approach to life — a designer’s approach.
    
One presenter, billed as a body hacker, talked about designing our physical selves through alterations like tattoos, piercings, plastic surgery, pharmacology and — coffee consumption. A seventeen-year-old musical prodigy played flawless compositions designed by composers long dead. A retired catholic priest encouraged us to immerse ourselves in a community in order to design solutions for social issues (he also completely immersed himself in a trough full of water).  

The Cusp conference planners shoehorned 23 presenters into two days. Very ambitious and surprisingly doable. Each had 30 minutes to communicate their message. Some of them were definitely type A, prepared and ready with an outline, PowerPoint and summarized conclusions. Others were Bs, meandering towards their points, discovering tangents and weaving them in as they went (I don’t fall squarely into either camp so I enjoyed both, however one guy threw me by making his entire presentation wearing a creepy, grotesque rubber hobo mask and talking in a monotone voice. Bizarre.)

I must admit this conference impacted me in a way I didn’t expect. And I’m guessing that had to do with a combination of elements — or the design of the conference. First of all, the mixture of professions, ages, races, talents and personalities that paraded across the stage was intoxicating. As a result, I found myself at times simultaneously wishing the speaker would talk longer and that they would hurry up and finish so I could hear what the next person had to say. Before each session, they would keep the doors to the theater closed and about 10 minutes prior to beginning they would start playing intense music that built an atmosphere of anticipation in the lobby. We watched short films, we got the opportunity to win door prizes, and while speakers talked on the stage, a video of their presentation played on the screen giving it a multi-dimensional feel.

The result: I laughed, I cried, I sang (seriously, AND clapped along). I experienced awe, admiration, disbelief, conviction, inspiration and hope over the course of 16 hours.  I revisited the past, relished the present and glimpsed the future. And at the end of it all, I left the museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and felt like time outside had passed me by while inside it stood still. That’s what good design can do.


Read about all of the presenters from the first Cusp conference, or sign up for next year.

Experience design is a primary component in creating successful, high-performance Web sites.  We've come to learn this over the last few years mainly because of the plethora of Web sites available that are not optimized for the user.  But is this a new problem?  I don't believe so.  Since the beginning of design, there's been bad design and in many ways we need bad design to appreciate good design.  The lack of well-crafted experiences on the Web seems like a new problem because bad designs of the past didn't make it to the consumer.  Organizations were motivated by the high cost of producing stores, workspaces, brochures, reports and advertisements to make sure that they produced something of value to their audience.

I recently took a trip to IKEA, a worldwide home furnishings store, and instead of carrying a shopping bag I put on my UXD binoculars and made a few observations. 

Consistency

The first thing I noticed was a line of shopping carts and bags at the entrance.  The sign read something like "borrow one now if you like, but we'll have them right where you need them when you do."  This reminded me of providing a consistent set of controls on each page allowing users to search or contact a real person whenever they need to.

Call to action

In the showroom the aisles were marked with large blue arrows to remind you of which way you were heading.  This funnels shoppers through a guided tour of different household rooms showcasing IKEA products.  This is like having a clear call to action on each page.  It lets the user know exactly what to do next. 

A clearly labeled alternative

This semi-guided tour was long and prohibitive to running in and looking at only one part of the show room.  The folks at IKEA addressed this problem by providing shortcuts to other sections of the store, but not without proper warning.  Signs stated exactly what parts of the showroom you would miss seeing if you took the shortcut.  This is much like providing users with more than one choice on a page enabling them to explore and experience information instead of pushing it upon them. 

On the other hand, IKEA wants you to experience the entire showroom, so these shortcuts were a bit difficult to find.  Nevertheless it illustrates the need for good labeling and sufficient explanations to help users realize the results of selecting an option before they decide to click.

Contextual grouping

Pricing in the showroom was also clear; anything which was displayed in a group had an accompanying sign that told the total price of all items in the display.  This keeps users from having to figure things out on their own, because the information is readily available and contextually placed.

The right tool, right when you need it

There wasn't a lack of tools to help you make decisions.  Several racks were placed throughout the store with measuring tapes, pencils and notepads.  This touch resonated with me quite well.  It reminded me of configuration tools and wish lists in an online shopping site.  They're readily available and easy to use should you need them. 

Navigation just the way I like it

I must admit that this was my first IKEA trip, and I was feeling a little disappointed that the store was set up as a showroom.  I prefer to look at products by type instead of context.  I was hoping to see racks full of categorized products that I could choose from.  This was when they surprised me.  At the end of the showroom tour the helpful blue arrows pointed me to the "self-service area" full of categorized products, but not without a prominent warning on the floor that I might need a cart going forward.  This is not to say that everyone prefers items a type-based organization, but that it's helpful to see the products both contextually and categorically, and allow the visitor to choose one or both.

 

The dedication to a shopping experience is one of the things that makes an IKEA store unique and I think they have the right to call it "a major retail experience" as stated on their Web site.  So the next time you have a shopping experience, put on your UX binoculars and take note of the carefully crafted design, or lack thereof.

Thanks to Geoff our UXD Intern for making the trip with me on foot after a long day of traveling.  Expect to hear more of out insights this week as we attend Adaptive Path's UXIntensive in Minneapolis.

One thing I continue to struggle with is how relevant sitemaps are--and to whom?¹

Below is an example sitemap, which indicates the basic hierarchy of pages or categories within a site.

What's wrong with this picture?

Sitemaps don't represent pages...

Implicitly, they communicate pages of content. This is not necessarily the case. They are a quasi-system model that blurs the lines between content and page. This leads to misinterpretation.

Extending this, they are rooted in a page-centric approach that assumes pages have one state. Ajax-y interactions that reload different content into the same page aren't communicated. 

...and they don't really represent content.

They suggest content, but a through the lens of a page. This, I believe, is an artifact left over from the days where sitemaps were closely tied to the physical implementation. As we've evolved the idea of a sitemap away from actual pages, we didn't rethink how it is actually interpreted or used by either developers or clients. 

...and they don't reflect true navigation or interaction paths.

In fact, they indicate a hierarchical flow between pages. Sitemaps suggest that users typically access the site through the home page. Users who arrive via a search or a link from a friend are likely to be entering at a deeper level than the home page. Luke Wroblewski has a great podcast and set of slides on this.

And sitemaps don't account for related items--hyperlinks that bring together similar content that exist in different categories of the site. Similar information may be "nearer" than sitemaps suggest. The perceived distance is content too and associate navigation can be as important as the categorical navigation. 

So, what do they do well?

For me, they are good as a sketch -- not a final product -- for how content may be organized and how navigation may occur. They work well for initial scoping. But having to caveat what sitemaps are feels like a cop out. There's gotta be a better way.

 Any thoughts? Do sitemaps help you or confuse you?

¹I'm talking about the information architecture kind, but many of the points also extend to those junk drawer sitemap pages that many sites have. That's entirely another issue to address.

It was announced today that troubled movie renter Blockbuster offered to buy troubled gadget seller Circuit City.

Never mind that analysts are scratching their heads on the economics, I’m intrigued that this signals a rapidly approaching new era of on-demand cocooning. This is just another sign of change that Blockbuster started twenty years ago.

I grew up in Raleigh with only a handful of big movie houses. One was The Cardinal Theatre. With two huge screens, great concessions and midnight showings every weekend, it was always packed. Sometime around the early 1990s, The Cardinal Theatre was replaced with…wait for it…a Blockbuster. It’s sadly ironic isn’t it? After all Faith Popcorn told us cocooning was the new wave back in the 90s.

My, how things progress. “The deal is a sign that Blockbuster doesn't have confidence in the retail video rental business anymore, says Shahid Khan, a partner at IBB Consulting. The movie rental store business is officially dead.”

The Blockbuster that replaced The Cardinal was closed a few years ago when the chain began facing online competition.

If designed correctly, the merger could result in a new customer experience for both companies. The new “CityBlock” or “CircuitBuster” has a chance to reinvent itself in a way that satisfies the entertainment buff in everyone. I just hope they understand that today’s retail environment HAS to be about the experience. Customers have easy online alternatives.