Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

I'll be up front--this post is somewhat (ok, mostly) half-baked. If you're ok with that, then read on.

For websites, I've been thinking about what each one's "mug shot" is. What is that basic, fleeting image that makes a site memorable and recognizable? What are the immediate cues that help you identify with and orient yourself on them? And, what features are important? Eyetracking studies sort of get at this, but not entirely.

So that was the windup for this pitch:

I want to see people draw (from memory only) what they think the Amazon.com looks like. Email them to me (tmoy at capstrat dot com) or upload and tag them on flickr as "amazon-most-wanted". Link them up in the comments if you're cool and saavy like that. And if you want, include some thoughts. But be brief.

I'll post the results in a few days or when I get 10 submissions, whichever comes first. I won't cite your name unless you want me to.

A few guidelines:

1. Use your head. Don't look at the site or anyone else's ideas before drawing yours. It will be way more fun to see the difference in interpretation. 
   
2. Finish fast. I'll give you 3 minutes. Trust me, I can spot cheaters.
3. Ugly=beautiful. Keep them rough and incomplete.  Visio or illustrator is fine. Even better is some crazy hackjob in powerpoint. If you've got a  cameraphone shot of a napkin sketch, hook it up. If you can't draw (really, you can), write me with some phrases and keywords that help explain what comes to mind when you think of Amazon. 

Lets see 'em. 

Over the last couple of months, Facebook users were given the option to 'test drive' the new Facebook, with the safety net that a switch back to the old version was just a swift mouse click away.  I took the bait and tried the new version in August, only to switch back to my 'safe place' five minutes later.

Tonight I had the slightly jolting experience of logging onto Facebook and seeing that I was now forced to use the 'new' Facebook, whether I liked it or not.  To make sure I wasn't dreaming, I re-typed www.facebook.com in my browser and was promptly redirected to www.new.facebook.com. Yikes, get a sister a crash helmet.

Apparently, Facebook has been doing some user experience research over the last several months, which I have to applaud.  Looks like this new, clean design layout with tabbed content won out.  As for me?  Maybe it'll grow on me but the verdict's still out on Facebook's new Facelift.

Design research is an area that really interests me. In the field of User Experience, design research is really the portion of user experience design that encourages a blend of method and creativity with an observational social experience that helps User Experience Designers fully understand the people their designs will ultimately be communicating with on a very complex level.

At UX Intensive in Minneapolis, the topic of design research was dissected and analyzed extensively and masterfully by Todd Wilkens of Adaptive Path.

There were two aspects of Todd's presentation that really struck me as incredibly useful ideas to enhance the design research process and develop effective and meaningful results across the board that all project team members understand and actively implement. The first of these concepts is painfully simple: bring your client with you as you research their users. This concept can certainly be extended to include the fact that an Experience Designer should ideally involve as many project team members in the design research process as possible. This really helps all of those who will be handling the results of the experience designer's research to more adeptly understand the information that's pouring in and how it should be used.

The second aspect of Todd's presentation that I really clued in on was the concept of creating proto-personas. A proto-persona is basically a very primitive and rough edged version of a likely persona for a certain user set, based more or less entirely upon "gut feeling" about how a certain persona might be portrayed. One of the follow up concepts to this idea was an interesting and very clear approach to developing personas: creating a set of "dimensions" about an entire user set. A dimension is essentially a set of opposites to describe a characteristic. For example, a particular user set might be comprised of single mothers for a project that concerns a baby-sitter business: one dimension of this user set might define two opposites such as, "very cautious and concerned about who is watching her children" versus "just needs someone to keep them occupied while I go to work." This allows the user experience designer to place his/her research findings along clearly defined dimensions and see where patterns emerge. Certain attributes of the user set or actual users (based on user interviews) might fall in similar places along the predefined dimensions. Finding and extrapolating these "clusters" will help the designer clearly see where his/her personas are emerging from the research they've done.

These methods and concepts are extremely useful and provide a good deal of stucture to the experience design process without taking anything away from the creativity and deep thinking required to create a brilliant and comfortable user experience.  Don't be afraid to try them out.