Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

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.

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.

When people asked me what a “user experience” designer does, I usually gave them the following answer: “I try to make software easier to use.” Simple and approachable, and without the arm-waving, chest-puffing that we UXDs sometimes use to justify what we do.

After reevaluating that canned response, I realize I was wrong.

As a UX designer, what I’m really after is trying to make software more pleasurable, which is not the same as easier. Pleasure is larger than that, and includes wonder, exploration and serendipity. Sometimes, easier isn’t always better.

Case in point, I like espresso. Scratch that–I have a real problem with it, in the way that addictions can creep into and start to change a person’s life. I’ve invested in $200+ coffee grinders. I go out of my way to buy beans in small batches from people who roast it that day. I adapt my grind for humidity and time my doppios to hit the 25-27 second mark. I’ve measured my tamp pressure to 30lbs using a bathroom scale. I’ll probably start roasting at home unless someone stops this sordid affair.

For god’s sake, I’ve watched YouTube videos showing shots pulled through naked, bottomless portafilters.

Making espresso is not for the impatient or half-hearted. If you want to make it yourself, you’ve got to fully commit. No espresso-head, I argue, would consider pulling a good shot an easy task. All the elements have to be in place. Anything awry–old beans, bad water, weak tamping, too fine or too coarse grind–can lead to swill. I know because I’ve choked it down, and still do so frequently.

But I’m learning.

I love the process simply because it is not easy. Actually, it’s the opposite. It’s a wonderful challenge, with a delicious reward. The learning curve is part of the fun, in a way that mastery of an art should be. If easy was what I was after, I’d head down to the local indie coffeehouse and plunk down my 2 bucks.* Further, if I was conducting a usability test on the process, I’d have to conclude that it completely fails. But that disregards the other intangibles, such as the thrill of mastery.

So, to say that “user experience” is always about making things easier isn’t the whole story. User efficiency is definitely a factor, but not singularly so. Delight and engagement–often the byproducts of ease of use–are higher objectives to work toward. It all depends upon the context; ease of use is simply one factor to consider.

* This is hypothetical. I haven’t found a place nearby that does a decent job of espresso. I won’t name names, but let’s just say that I’m underwhelmed with what I’ve received at the ITB Raleigh coffeehouses.