Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

A few posts ago, I talked about the pseudo-formula :

Behavior = function(people, environment).

Succinctly, to elicit a certain behavior you can manipulate the environmental variables. People are who they are and it's hard to coerce them in to behaving a certain way.

When I wrote that original post, I was thinking mostly about functionality. You can change the features you offer, such that you channel people's behavior. If a certain behavior is desirable, then build out tools to support it.

But is that enough?

On a recent project, I was thinking about how to subtly encourage people to complete an action. The behavior we wanted was engagement: reading content on a site and completing certain activities. Drawing from patterns used on LinkedIn and online dating sites, we settled on a progress bar to encourage certain types of interaction. Surprisingly enough, knowing that you're "incomplete" is an incentive to perform the next suggested action. This is especially true if that action substantially changes the completeness.

But on thing still nagged at me. The site was designed to be very personal. The progress bar, on the other hand is a bit cold. It unemotionally calculates the height of a bar based on elementary math. So I started thinking. People tend to be attracted to faces. What if the progress bar was humanized a bit?

Below are four comparisons of the same data. The first is the pure math, where completeness is expressed as a percentage. The second is a typical thermometer, which shows the completion differential. The third and fourth make this a bit more human. The third simply adds features, giving it more personality and expressive qualities. The fourth takes a static image and brings it out of the blur and into clarity.

With the last two, you lose a bit of the differential--i.e. your degree of completeness. But in the process, I think, you gain something a bit more humane and ludic.

What do you think?

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.

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.

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.

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.