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.

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

There are three interesting case studies on how companies are making small, progressive improvements in their site based upon usability testing.

•  Hidden Secrets of the Amazon Shopping Cart. How much do you know about Amazon.com's "Buy it now" button? Less than you think. This case study analyzes the primary call to action on the site--and how it has evolved over time. Amazon is a huge proponent of continuous improvement, constantly fiddling with and optimizing their site for maximum payoff.
• The $300 Million Dollar button. Redesigns don't need to be expensive or huge. Sometimes, its the simple changes that pay dividends. Jared Spool recounts how tweaking the interaction logic on an online shopping cart resulted in $300 Million in additional revenues. The question, of course, is which button you change--and here, user testing provided that insight.
• The Freedom of Fast Iterations: How Netflix Designs a Winning Web site. How do you know if users will like a feature? Put it in front of them and test it. For changes, Netflix tries to balance internal speculation with statistical evidence of what works. Failing fast, learning and responding is key to their success.

At my last web conference, an audience member was picked to come up to the podium and perform a task from the speaker's last usability test. The audience member was asked to vocalize his thoughts in front of the group as he attempted to perform a random task on a web site he'd never seen before. As the participant visibly struggled to perform the task, I subconsciously began to grow surprisingly anxious. After the session, struck by my strong reaction to the mock usability test, my mind drifted back to my psychology studies in college.

During the session, I felt torn between two types of thinking:

Line of thought 1: "Poor chap, I'd be anxious too if I couldn’t find that information in front of all these people. If only I could hold up a sign for him to click down into the sub navigation, that's where I think the content he's looking for lives! Sheesh, this reminds me of that time (insert embarrassing work example here)!"

Line of thought 2: "Man, that link should TOTALLY be over there in the right rail; it would surface the piece of content he's looking for, making it accessible and relevant to the defined user group. Then this poor shmuck could actually find it! I'd like to talk to that web designer about his page element placement."

If line of thought 1 sounds like you, you tend to relate situations to similar events in your own life, using personalizing cognition.

If line of thought 2 sounds more like you, you tend to relate situations to objective facts, using objectifying cognition.

So what do you think? Can personalizing cognitions and objectifying cognitions both be useful forms of processing information as it pertains to smart web design? Or, for user experience design, is it more fruitful to accomplish the goal of making informed decisions by using only the objectifying cognitions that come out of our research and usability testing?

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.

A co-worker shared a site with me that I find stunning: http://whatareyouwondering.com/. This site is meant to answer questions for new parents or soon to be parents.

At first glance I was overwhelmed with the beauty of the site. It's scalable and depricates well in many browsers. The concept is simple, but lovely. The questions are the content and the visual aspect of the site, is created by simply shadowing text. It is at once beautiful, human and content rich. 

However, when I began to play with the site I began to notice I did not like it as much. Do a search for crying. How many results do you get?

My first search resulted in 7, but only 3 questions. The rest were repeats.

I reduced the size of my browser window and I only received 4 results. I reduced it further and I receivd 3, but all three were not viewable on my screen.

If you click on a question, you go to the March of Dimes site to get more information. Is this beautiful site enough to get me engaged and then send me over to the real site where I can find more information? Will I be satisfied as a user?

What are your thoughts? How do you marry beauty and functionality? How would you make this better?

At the Web Content 08 [WC08] last week, I had a syntactical epiphany: the noun is making a comeback. For decades now, verbs were the darling of writers — think more action! — while nouns have been dismissed as stodgy and murky, the equivalent of sludge in a conversation’s engine. Who needs ’em?

Well, turns out we all do. Jerome Nadel, Chief Experience Officer of Human Factors International, pointed out that Web sites often err in putting verbs first, pushing visitors to act before they can even choose the object of their visit. He says that users need to find a starting place. They’re looking for the product they want to buy, the topic they’re researching, or the person they want to learn about. But they have to find that before they can buy, research or learn.

Even before they reach a site, they’re usually thinking nouns when they search on Google or scan tags on del.icio.us [with a few verbs and adjectives thrown in too]. It's like the Dewey decimal system on steroids.

So what? It signals the way we’re categorizing the world. Whenever we choose search terms or tags, we try to make sense of our thoughts and the thought process of others. When we create site navigation or keywords, we succeed only when we make it easier and more intuitive to find our sites and our information. And getting into users’ heads, into the way they’re classifying and interacting with their world – usability – should be the foundation of every Web project.

Nadel claims that businesses don’t have to relinquish control of their brands – not if they understand their audience and craft social Web experiences that deliver unique value and build relationships. That’s how sites can truly engage visitors and deliver greater ROI.

The next time a user experience designer presses to interview more stakeholders or a copywriter questions a keyword, just consider it time well spent. And show a noun some appreciation.