Customer Centric Organizations - Hype or Innovation?
Many companies talk about being customer focused and selling on value, but where's the evidence? Too often customer value is expressed, as in value propositions, but lost in execution they become value cliches that don't set us apart, don't connect us to the customer and don't compel the customer to act.
since I've been all entrepreneur-y, try Dan Willis's new effort, UX Crank
[10:36] styloid: BTW have you seen any excellent interface guideline documents on line?
[10:37] styloid: mostly for assisting a very green IA/UE team
[10:39] christina_wodtke: yahoo's pattern language library rocks
[10:41] styloid: yeah, I use yahoo's design pattern library all of the time
[10:46] christina_wodtke: Was just on the phone with chris baum.. he likes B&A
[10:46] christina_wodtke: I think it's a bit advanced
[10:46] christina_wodtke: But he says he likes it because everything is domain specific, so you can focus
[10:46] christina_wodtke: thinking, thinking...
[10:47] christina_wodtke: http://www.squidoo.com/ia
[10:47] styloid: I need to cull a bunch of data together and if there were another online resource than yahoo, then I would like to include that link too but I am not exactly finding much to assist me in this regard
[10:48] styloid: yeah, like that:D
[10:49] christina_wodtke: http://resources.ixda.org/
[10:49] styloid: holy sh*t!
[10:49] christina_wodtke: http://iainstitute.org/library/
[10:49] styloid: man, why is your search returning better results ;(
[10:50] christina_wodtke: I'm not searching anything but my brain
[10:50] styloid: ah, that explains it
[10:50] christina_wodtke: http://www.iawiki.net/RoadMaps
[10:50] christina_wodtke: I have a brain
[10:50] christina_wodtke: like a steel trap
[10:50] christina_wodtke: full of mice
[10:51] christina_wodtke: i say to my mice, go find cheese!
[10:51] christina_wodtke: and they do
[10:51] christina_wodtke: http://www.guuui.com/
[10:52] christina_wodtke: http://www.uxmatters.com/news.php
[10:52] christina_wodtke: http://www.usabilitynews.com/
[10:53] christina_wodtke: http://www.baychi.org/resources/
NPR : Talk of the Nation for Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2006
"if you talk to any top CEO in just about any American company, but this especially true of GM and Ford, they'll tell you their job is to 'maximize shareholder value.' If you talk to the top CEO's in Japan especially, what they'll tell you "What we're trying to do is figure out how to delight the customer.' So I say, who's car do you want to buy, the ones who are maximizing shareholder value or ones that are really trying to delight their customers?"
-- John McElroy
How do I interview people (for the press, not for jobs)? | Ask MetaFilter is just a terrific comment I tripped over, especially for those doing user research.
Reading OK/Cancel: The User Experience Community is Thinking Too Big all I could think was dudes, can we collectively move on now? How small and petty is the community if we even ask questions like "who owns user experience?" (though admittedly it packs the seats) At the multi-organization panel on the previous question, I joked that fairly often IA has owned it, mostly because they tend to do what nobody else is doing (like neatly organzing pages), and often no one has bothered to think about the overarching experience. Odd, that.
But does the discipline of IA own UX? Nah, it's not possible. In fact, UX doesn't own UX. The best work ever for the "user's experience" is done by multidisciplinary teams and by multidisciplinary team I don't mean a designer and IA and a researcher, I mean the real kind in which programmers and product managers and marketing gets their hands dirty in the brainstorming and visioning and making and playing.
Still worried about the ROI of design? It's done, people-- read businessweek as well as alistapart for a change, and you'll see everyone is already on board! Hass and Standford are adding design to their curriculum, the MFA is the new MBA, and so on and so on.... They are sold on what you do: now you have to actually live up to their expectations. Scared yet?
It's time for all the usual suspects to stop sniping at their neighbor in the next cube, and start making-- making new products, making new relationships, making new learnings, making new markets, making new ways of business.
Don't worry about the professional organizations that are blooming like mushrooms in the rain-- enjoy them, and grab some of the juicy templates and articles that show up on AIGA and AIFIA and so on. Don't bag on the usability people, ask them to find out some new stuff for you to work with, and hey, ask them what they think of blue, anyhow. Design's not so precious a power that you can't ask for someone's two cents.
YOU AREN'T YOUR TITLE, and if IA becomes the standard title, or ID, or IxD or whatever, who cares... let's go design some cool new stuff.
The presentation I gave in Scandinavia reminded me of how exciting things are right now.... not since '99 have we seen so many new interesting applications of data, technology and knowledge. Do you really want to be wasting your time fighting over who gets to choose if it's a drop-down or a radio button when you could be jamming on the next flickr or newsmap?
Please.
At the Hotel Lucia, one can order a pillow to one's liking. Let me repeat you can order your favorite kind of pillow!
After shower quality, I think a bad pillow is what makes me saddest as a hotel guest. Oh, and bad sheets. and crappy mattress. and not enough blankets. and no clock. and old air conditioners and... hmm. A lot can go wrong in a hotel. Bad wall art is low on the list for me, after many creature comforts including a decent pillow. But having a pillow I'd like was one of the things I had given up on (I like very flat pillows). Imagine my delight when I saw the sign.
I'm happy to say that the Hotel Lucia offered
But moreover, it's a good example of ways you can find to delight people, if you just question every single aspect of the experience...
7 Things to Know about Building a User Experience Team is a succinct checklist of criteria to keep in mind while bringing UCD inhouse.
I'd like to point out #2, "Executives and managers should set the standard for "customer-centric" behavior.' and #4 "Make ongoing conversation about user experience a part of the company culture."
Too often managers hire a "user advocate" whose job then is to fight full time. Customer care is not somebodies job; it's everybodies job. And a lack of user centeredness is not fixed by a single hire any more than content organziation is fixed by buying a CMS, no matter how much we wish for easy answers.
In response to Six Log: How are you using the tool?
I have this blog, of course. I have lots of tiny personal logs, some on eleganthack, some on nothing-new.com which is a old wreck of a destination, but where I mostly like to put personal stuff. personal logs include things like a bookmark list, travel notes, a bad start at a novel (I actually wrote much of my first draft of my book in MT), and a list of comics I've read. What's funny is most of these are meant to be read by one person: me. In fact, to the degree that I have even password protected some. So # blogs is misleading, and even domains is a funny one.
I'm using it for Boxes and Arrows, and even though we technically only have about 4 editors, three copy editors and a tech person plus me we have ot list each contributor as an author to make things appear. Boxes and Arrows currently makes no money, so it couldn't be considered commercial.
Widgetopia might not be so relevant, as I'm trying to switch to drupal for feature reasons-- I want people to be able to sign themselves up to author, allow folks to rate entries, good taxonomy control etc. But that currently has four authors, and shows no sign of being even a break even proposition despite experiments in adsense.
I'd pay 40 bucks for it without blinking. With features I wanted and no limits I'd probably go up to the asking price of 70 bucks.
BTW, this is a dreadful way to do user research, and will result in sample bias:
Threat to the representativeness of a sample that occurs when the procedures used to select a sample result in the over- or under-representation of a significant segment of the population. --washington.edu
I'd recommend to 6A that they send an email to all their customers to fill out a survey crafted by a researcher to inquire into pricing/value issues at the least to get better representation. Moreover, they'd do well to email users of their competitors as well with the same questions, as well as potential customers.
It's amazing to me that so many companies-- many far bigger and far more established than 6A make the same mistake, choosing pricing plans and feature sets from a subset of their overall user base, then wondering why things go wrong. Message boards in particular are prone to misleading companies- they are noisy, but represent a sample of folks who are angry or fanatic enough and have spare time enough to go to the site and find an outlet for their ire. Hardly an average user.
My momma used to say the squeaky wheel gets the oil, but there are plenty of things that go wrong with a car without making a noise until it's far to late. Research is like a check-up-- do it to the entire car, not just the parts that are making strange noises, and do it often enough to prevent trouble.
TC 510 Course Website David Farkas has an amazing collection of web-based articles supplementing his course that would make fine reading over the holidays-- the breadth and diversity of the reading would help round out any IA or ID thinking.
Andi sent me Fly UI
"I have seen one of the finest instances of user interface design ever, and I saw it in the men's room at Schipol airport in Amsterdam."
"Good design starts before the first pixel has been pushed. Successful designers have learned to manage their organizations and demonstrate the business value of usable design. This presentation will give you proven techniques to simplify internal politics, increase the resources available to you, and deliver your best designs."
I'm really pleased to see more courses on how to be effective at our job on a social and polital level, rather than only courses on craft. While there will always be inarticulate genuises in design, it also takes salesmen to assure what they have to offer will be valued.
InformIT - Your Online Guide to Tech Reference has a bad practice I haven't seen in a long time--- required registration to read all their content.
What makes it such a sin is the poor job of setting expectations & providing feedback they do. Take a look at the front page, pick an article that appears interesting, click and whammo-- a brick wall of a registration screen demanding your email. No explanation of why you are there and what it has to do with the link you just clicked... only a list of bullet points on the right about why you should register... the third gives you a hint of why you are there: "Quality IT Content."
I kept clicking back and reclicking article links, thinking I had made a mistake, or maybe there was some freely available content and member only content, like just about every other website...
At the minimum, they should add a line at the top of the section saying "to read this and all other articles on InformIT, please register. It only takes a second and it's free". To set expectations, they might add a line above the articles saying "all articles are available to registered members. Find out more."
Better yet would be for them to give free access to all articles, and use other ways to harvest emails such as useful newsletters, or interest alerts.
With increased suspicion of spam, to demand an email before proving your value is hubris. And bad business practice.
I'll put Coffee, Tea, or Should We Feel Your Pregnant Wife's Breasts Before Throwing You in a Cell at the Airport and Then Lying About Why We Put You There? by Nicholas Monahan in the "user centered design" category, because I don't have a "how to be a human being" category. But our first job is always to remember we are humans, interacting with other humans. Like the stanford prison experiment and the milgram expirament, this made me cry.
According to WebWord.com Weblog Posting I am a Userati with some Connections. I don't fully understand the measuring system, but I'm happy to be there. Like my dear friend Noel, I consider myself a half IA/ half usability specialist, though I concentrate on IA in my writings because it seems to have enough champions and is a much more formed mature profession.
This list does blur the IA/Usability distinction though even further-- maybe we need to add user-centered writers, designers and programmers to the list?
from Rashmi Sinha's Weblog: Creating personas for information-rich websites
"Cooper's suggested for persona creation suggests detailed interviews, identifying patterns, picking up nuggets. However, there is no tight coupling between user research and persona creation. Furthermore, personas are supposed to be representative of large group. However, interviews are not an appropriate method to find out who representative users are. I am developing a persona creation method that is similar in spirit to card-sorting in conjunction with cluster analysis. As with card-sorting, the persona creation method gets some user input and subjects it to exploratory statistical techniques to find patterns. "
Cooper gets anxious, Jared cheers from the sideines, Goodwin makes an official statement-- gosh, comments just make everything more fun, don't they!
I'm leaving for Europe on wednesday, and bought my ticket through expedia. Today I recieved a travel guide for my destination, Paris. Wisely Expedia did not just push their services, they included weather, info about an upcoming art show and various tourist diversions. And of course, at the bottom, they suggest hotels. But the timing is right and the approach was classy.
A Web-based Test of Fitts' Law
is hoping to gather data to reinforce/further understand people's ability to hit smaller or larger targets with a pointing device such as a mouse. One quirk of this study is the posting of the "high scores" of participants. I wonder, does this effect the outcome. I realized when I did my first test in my current set up (ergonomically correct right hander using a left mouse to avoid the reach across the number pad) I scored incredibly poorly--- the high scorer has a time a third of mine. SO I did the test again, this time with my stylus in my right hand, and this time the high scorer beat me by a larger margin, but a livable one.
So I moved from my typical mousing behavior when surfing into my high-control mode I only use for drawing, essentially for ego reasons. I also noticed that durning the test while I was faster I was also considerably less accurate, and relied on multiple "shots" rather than one accurate one.
Will their data reflect typical human behavior or competitive human behavior... and what does that mean to the study?
After reading Bridging the gap with requirements definition I suddenly remembered my favorite example of design-urge overcoming user-centeredness.
My grandparents hired my step-grandmother's son to design their house. He's a formal architect, and had studied Frank Lloyd Wright. My step-grandmother is a tiny woman... 4'10'' or the like. really tiny. A while back, I was in the house the architect designed for my grandparents, and she was complaining about this house. It seems that she had thought that this would be the first time she would finally have a kitchen that fit her. But no, like every kitchen she'd ever encountered, most of the cupboards are up too high for her to reach.
Even worse, as she's grown older, she can't stand atop a stepstool as easily as she did when she was younger.
So what happened? The architect certainly knew the house owner was tiny-- he had known her literally all his life. He knew her age and fragility as well.
I have two theories... one is that he was so excited to design a house-- architects get to do this less and less-- he forgot who he was building it for and built his dream house without considering the inhabitants. My second thought is that the patterns of kitchen were so deeply imbedded in his head he forgot they could be changed. I hope to see my uncle-in-law again sometime, so I can ask. For now I just see their house as a message to remember the person who must spend hours with the thing you design, while you've moved off to the next fun challenge.
Requirements gathering, especially user requirements, can make a big difference to the pleasure your design affords.
it's worth reading In telematics, no technology is a panacea
just to discover car consumers are sometimes called "eardrops."
One of the ways beginners (and experts) are mostly likely to blow usability research is by asking bad questions.
In Nondirected Interviews: How to Get More Out of Your Research Questions, Mike explains how to ask good questions that will get you better data. It is very right on; I wish I hadn't already turned in my research chapter-- this article makes me want to add some stuff. Ah well, you all can buy Mike's book if he ever finishes it. (nondisclosure. I'm partial to Mike as he taught me a lot about what I know about user testing when I was at Egreetings. My Creative Director was listening to him on webmonkey radio and said: "hey, let's hire that guy." Mike came in and he not only ran user testing, but he explained why he did what he did, and what it meant when users did what they did.)
Anyhow, interviewing is the basis of user research along with observation. Knowing these two skills will take you a long way. avoiding influence and coaxing real information from users is an art. Doing it wrong shouldn't stop you from doing it-- I remember one really bad usability test where I saw this marketing research chick do testing and she was horrendous-- she grabbed the mouse out of the user's hand at one point and said "let me just show you where it is. Okay, now how does that blue affect your perception of the company."
Usability testing.
use. get it?
sigh.
Anyhow, we still saw a lot of useful things from users when the moderator wasn't grabbing the mouse or emoting. Any time you watch users you learn something.
But that doesn't mean you can't work towards getting better data. Asking better questions. Working on moderating your voice, speaking more neutrally, being invisible, watchful, attentive, probing.
Mike's wearing a fireman's coat, btw. Very Shiny.
SubAverage's persona parody actually turned out a useful persona. Funny old world.
I really adore this article: Boxes and Arrows: Taking the "you" out of user: My experience using personas
"Like a recovering substance abuser, it's a constant challenge for me to refrain-- can always imagine that I'm the user. "
Exactly. for a year I had "You are not the user" taped to my monitor and I still backslide.
Elan points to a collection of papers on how computers can adapt to human frustration (and a few other juicy topics) at Carson Reynolds's site. He also found this wonderful hand drawn clock
hi elan. where's that pic you took before baychi?
A very nifty concept here-- The Mural:
"The Mural is a "living history" of all knowledge, suppositions, questions, suspicions, and hunches
that employees have about users. The basic framework is first created in a collaborative Team
Meeting, on the basis of a user assessment if one has been done or simply on the basis of any
knowledge the team has. Any new insight or data that the team gains in the course of the project
is added to the mural. And anyone who happens by is welcome to add their own knowledge of
and experience with users to the story panel or to annotate the data structures."
A Scenario-Based Approach to Creating Interaction Frameworks discusses the rarely talked about but intriguing concept of day-in-the-life scenarios.
"Day-in-the-life Scenarios:
Scenarios are created that describe the most typical series of events in the life of the key persona, as they pertain specifically to the product or service being designed. These scenarios explore the mental models that the persona has regarding the workflow, processes, tasks, objects, and other people in their environment, based on ethnographic field research collected and analyzed prior to the creation of the scenarion"
Emphasis mine-- these two concepts are ones often forgetten in discussions on scenerios.
:: TraveLite :: :: home :: is a project from SIMS... check out the design section, esp. the sexy process flow.
uc berkeley sims 213 Spring 2001 SFnight Project is a pretty good introduction to personas... these guys just keep impressing! I'm beginning to think an IA going back to school should put Berekley at the top of the list.
"Scenario is a concise description of a potential user (persona) performing some tasks in an information system to achieve the user goal. "
My latest dream project: two teams of the same competence, both given the same problem and both given user research. One team creates personas and scenarios from the research, the other does not. Both make sites, and then are tested in usability tests. What would the difference be?
Prof. Norman now reveals the answers: The truth about conceptual, mental, and other models.
continues to be one of if not the most useful email that has ever come into my inbox via a discussion list.
Navigational Systems Defined by Customer Experience nice case study from a user-centered project.
NPR : Talk of the Nation for February 1, 2002
"Why is your car easier to operate than the average VCR? Did you buy your computer -- or your toaster -- because of the way it looks or the way it works? Join us in this hour for a look at the design of everyday things. From paper clips to toasters, to cars and computers... what makes something user friendly. "
Listen to Don Norman and Michael Graves explain it all...
User-Centered Design and Web Development is a solid introduction to many of the key concepts behind UCD. Very useful is their top ten usability guidelines, set out in simple language for anyone to understand.
The one that caught my eye was:
"Memory Load
The site should reduce user memory load. Screen elements should be meaningful and consistent across the site so users can recognize, instead of remember, what elements mean from one page to another. New items and functions should relate to ones the user already knows. "
It seems to me that this key element of interaction/interface design is too often forgotten. The web is essentially without standards, save for a few young ones (tabs, anyone?) and sometimes it seems like users are forced to learn a new OS everytime they follow a link. Cruel acts such as removing labels on the second page level, or worse yet, changing labels is essentially an act of cruelty -- and for what? because the site creator is too lazy to QA the site? Or has some stylish need that pre-empts the user's? Or simply that the creator has used the site for so long in the process of designing and building it, and is already bored with it before a visitor has arrived...
Meanwhile back at the ranch, my infamously handsome husband mentioned to me that color palms are known to be easier to use, because color icons are easier to remember. Anyone see any studies on this? I tried googling it and failed.
Why is Google so successful? 10 things Google has found to be true provides a hint, starting with number 1 "Focus on the user and all else will follow."
I think six is my favorite... "You can make money without doing evil." These a formula, there for the taking, that has been espoused by many a successful entrapreneur: "find a need and fill it" In google-world, it is finding that intersection between user need and sponsor-product and making a match. It comes out in the literatures as "Text ads that are properly keyword-targeted draw much higher clickthrough rates than flashing banner ads appearing randomly. " but properly keyword-targeted translated nicely in our parlance to "user-centered" i.e. don't show users ads for things they aren't looking for. Show users ads for things they are looking for, and they will click on them.
Yummmm, profits....
thanks jeff
from the latest issue of Digital Web Magazine Tutorial: What's happening? A new look at Web pages
"Those new to the Web and to computers are scared: Scared of viruses. Scared of pressing the wrong thing. Scared that pornography will "happen" on their machine. Scared that their credit card will suddenly show charges because they've accidentally bought something.
When people are new to something common sense often flies out the window -- the brain is fully occupied processing the new information. And when they are new to these magical and powerful devices called computers they will happily suspend all disbelief. Of course charges can appear by magic on your credit card just because you looked at a Web page, just because you viewed an item at a shopping site."
It's a nice way to remember how it was when you first started using computers (can you remember that far back?)
So let's play a game. Your name is Sam. You are a 52 year old typesetter. You smart, college educated, and a bit artsy-- after all, you are keeping this great old art of hand made books alive! And your daughter just bought you a computer. Sarah got it for Christmas. She set it up, ran the wires, and even ordered an earthlink account. She then showed you how to dial up, and made yahoo your start page. And she told you there are great pages showing old books online.
So here you are, you've been looking at it all week, and it's been looking at you. You fire it up. You try to dial up, it doesn't work, it wants a password. You put in your pin number instead of a password. You realize that can't be right. You call up Sarah to ask what the password is again, you try to dial up, and it fails again. You call Sarah, she asks if you typed it in exactly as she said, capital letter, small letter, number and so on. You say no, you hang up, you put in the password they way she said exactly... you've learned you have to be careful if you want to go online!
So you click on the explorer icon.
Um, that's not quite useful.... you scroll down.
you decide to try arts, since that is more or less what you do, you try book sellers, and suddenly there are a lot of hopeful looking links-- people who sell antiquarian books, art book, etc.
Now you visit these three. When you arrive, can you tell what each site does? Did you arrive there by mistake? What would you click to look at rare, old and hand made books? Which might charge your credit card?
Now be Sam and visit your website.
I've gotten some great feedback on the Carbon IQ User-centered Design Methods document. I'd love to hear more.
One came from David, who asked for a way to learn more about the various methods. Strangely enough I just tripped over a document that does just that: CHARM-Choosing HCI Appropriate Research Methods
from the design for humans acting like humans file:
"What is contingency design?
Things go wrong online. Contingency design is the way the creators of the site right the ship. It includes error messaging, instructive text, information architecture, programming, and graphic design. Successful contingency design helps wayward surfers succeed at their goals in obtaining information, completing a transaction, or other tasks. Poor contingency design results in frustration and lost visitors. "
Visit design not found for examples.
Thanks, Marc, for reminding me of this site!
Task-Centered User Interface Design
"The central goal of this book is to teach the reader how to design user interfaces that will enable people to learn computer systems quickly and use them effectively, efficiently, and comfortably. The interface issues addressed are primarily cognitive, that is, having to do with mental activities such as perception, memory, learning, and problem solving. Physical ergonomic issues such as keyboard height or display contrast are covered only briefly."
User Centered Design Class taught by Jess McMullin, Supah-geeenius. pdf.
good slogan from an interesting lesson on users and personas
Know that you are not the user.
I actually had "you are not the user" taped to my monitor for six months. It helped.
you learn user-centered design from Noel: go Noel!
Claro Studio: User-Centered Design Seminar
Another interesting artilce in my mail this a.m.: Web Writing for Many Interest Levels
"Clear, usable content is easily created by deliberating writing for many different levels of reader interest. Every person has a certain level of interest in every piece of information. A writer should help each reader get their desired level of information as quickly as possible. Knowledge of and writing to these levels will increase the satisfaction of all readers. "
Software and Other Tools Supporting Usage-Centered Design has a PowerPoint file used in our training programs to demonstrate usage-centered design modeling. He describes it as an elegant hack... it rather rough, but it is interesting for thinking about the relationship of use cases to many of our processes, such as scenerios and task analysis, and ways to better facilitate their creation and communicate their results.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Challis Hodge writes up a well-thought out, detailed and insightful article on Customer Relationship management. I know it's a completely different format than Neilsen's column, but still.
Smoothing the Path (Web Techniques, Nov 2001)
To my mind Don Norman's "APPLYING THE BEHAVIORAL, COGNITIVE, AND SOCIAL SCIENCES TO PRODUCTS" is the single most important article I've seen this year if you are an IA or usability wonk. It's actually easier to read than it appears at first blush.
"Too many products, and many start-ups, fail because they don't focus on a simple reality: Humans will need to use and like the product or service. Too often, technologies and products are created because they can be, not because they should be."
Good example of persuading business to improve user experience at Flow Interactive
"Just two years ago, the definition of a well-designed, complete Web site was one that offered deep discounts on merchandise, shipped items for free, and threw in some animation just for kicks. A quaint notion called usability, which software designers and consumer electronics engineers had been struggling with for a long time, was not even a blip on the radar screen for most of the Web. Unless you were working at Staples.com"
InContext Enterprises - Contextual Design: How We Design is an excellent well illustrated explantion of the contextual design process and how it applies to IA.
Site Design as Business Decision looks at the user-centered nature of a nonprofit, and the lessons that can be learned by for-profits. Well written interesting article -- be sure to read to the end.
"The insidious and damaging obstacle to quality Web sites is a lack of respect for users and a presumptiveness with regard to what they want and need. Indeed, the majority of the companies we spoke with either were involved in or had recently completed major redesigns of their sites, yet most had not invested in any type of usability testing before launch. Formal user surveys were not conducted. Even more disturbing, nearly everyone expressed surprise that we would ask such a question."
"It may sound arrogant," says Geric Johnson, vice president of marketing services at shoe manufacturer Skechers, "but we really believe that we are the best judge of what our customers want."
However, there is hope that the economy may be changing people's attitudes:
"Savvy businesses are beginning to take the advice of The Usability Group's Rubin by tying clear and measurable business objectives to site design. Such objectives can be as straightforward as deciding that customer service calls should decrease by 20 percent or that sales leads generated by the site need to increase by 20 percent."
I don't know how many times I've seen redesigns that have made a site worse. Sometimes they are better looking sometimes they are not but too often they are way harder to use. Conversely "evolutionary" site redesigns where the site slowly changes to meet new needs and features tend to be much more effective (though not always 100%... remember Amazon's "tab cancer" before they revamped the tab scheme?)
Thorough and thoughtful requirements gathering is a way to protect a redesign's success.
"Take the time to choose and plan user-testing techniques. Match the appropriate technique to your development cycle and needs -- your product will benefit, and you'll avoid wasting time and resources. Simply putting a product "to the test" in a lab to see whether it passes or fails may provide a lot of data, but not necessarily a lot of value. " Click through for a great looking diagram....
Driving Innovation and Creativity through Customer Data is more than a tease than a full article on the technique of contextual inquiry (much like many articles on UIE) but it does make a persuasive argument for user-centered design, something we can never have too many of.
"One technique we like to use to create innovative designs is Contextual Inquiry. Contextual Inquiry immerses product designers in actual customer data by having designers observe the work of users in their natural environment. Design teams can quickly identify specific problems and needs of their customers, One advantage of this technique is that it provides a framework for designers to synthesize the customer data they collect and use it to produce creative products."
BTW, I hated Web Site Usability: A Designer's Guide but I don't know if it's just me, or... I found it trite, facile, and I wanted data to back up their assertions, which often seemed incomplete or incorrect. Anyone out there love it?
Mike Farley sent me his User-centered design methodology that he advocated at lucent. Lots to pull from here.
I'm also exploring UCD methods put together by software developers. pretty interesting stuff.
one more "me" link: we all have to fight popups at one point or another-- if you've got ammunition, please share.
from Accept responsibility to make your online project work
"Business managers can make online projects by accepting the responsibility for their design - or court disaster by letting technologists shape them."
This is an intriguing look at what happens to a project from conception to reality. The trouble comes when the project is handed over to implementers. "...they hire people and firms who have built software and systems. 'Those people and firms have their own interests', Thomas points out, 'and those interests won't necessarily align with the aims of your outfit. The outsiders want to bolster their list of stated achievements - their CVs, their corporate brag sheets. The individual developers want to work with bleeding-edge technology. The more pragmatic firms want to re-apply previous solutions.'"
As Sartre said, "hell is other people"
Guess what the recommended cure is? Something remarkably similar to an aspect of IA-- interaction design. The article recommends that managers "define in precise detail what users of the system can do - a tough, confronting task which takes place before a single line of code is written, and which requires managers with at least a small measure of technical savvy and a great deal of determination."
The article's key failing is not recognizing that business folks are no more trained to design a humane system than engineers. There are three part of success... what is technologically feasible, what is business necessary and what is user desirable/acceptable. Pay too much attention to one of elements, and the project's likelihood of failing shoots through the roof.
Richard I. Anderson -- Addressing Obstacles to User-Centered Design
"Why do many organizations resist or use poor excuses for user-centered design methodologies (while sometimes claiming to be user-centered)? "
Stalk Your User (Web Techniques, June 2001)
"After all, sitting down with users and watching them try to accomplish tasks with the product can be incredibly valuable. However, usability testing assumes that there's something to test%u2014either a prototype or final version of a product that's on the path to being launched. But how do you know what to build in the first place?
or rather, Jef Raskin refuting an Alan Cooper interview:
Here's a taste--
Cooper: "We believe that good design is self-evident."
Raskin: "If you believe that, then you are stuck in a rut, because the value of deep improvements are rarely self-evident, and even when a better design -- if unfamiliar -- is shown to developers or experienced users, they tend to reject it. "
Software for Use: A Practical Guide to the Models and Methods of UsageCentered Design (ACM Press) This is another 'everyone tells me to read it' but I haven't. So you try it. Anyone who has... send me your thoughts.
Contextual Design : A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs All the cool kids are reading it.
Excuse the ramble...
Andi --fellow IA-- and I were chatting and we hit yet another one of those moments when we start to say, "oh those stupid users" then we stop.. and say, "no it's our job to make it easy". I have a lot of these with IAs.
Even if users are dumb, they aren't dumb. They need our help to do the things they wish to do: we need to create systems (programs websites etc) that actually work for them rather than show off our prowess for cleverness. It's easy to make fun of or villianize the user as a lazy clueless burden... but it's quite more effective to sympathize and try to create a systrem that meets the user's needs and understanding of how the world works (much as we may wish to force them to learn our quite cooler and smarter systems 8sarcasm*). Too often our best work is the work that looks obvious, and it is underappreciated. We struggle to acheive obviousness. It should be valued. For once the desing is obvious, we are sucesses. When is the last time you opened software and knew jusat what to do; or visted a webiste for the first time and knew what do do? That time was the last time you saw the skilled craft of a IA/Interface designer. And that was the time you breezed along, not noticing what happened. Woo hoo! (can being under appreciated be a form of appreciation?)
Same for one's client. often it becomes us against them: designer vs. biz dev, usability vs. marketing, client vs. design team... which never helps the project. It's quite more important to understand the needs of the business, express the needs of the user, and design a system that meets both. Here the IA's moment of triumph is when the user seemlessly does the thing that they want to do which also makes the company money. Like buying a CD by their favorite artist they didn't even know was out...
more from another POV. Whose Fault Is It Anyway?
this is so right in so many ways:
We're writing to ask for your help. Over the last few months, we've
tested several new navigational systems for Amazon.com, looking for a
way to make it easier for you to get around our store. (By
"navigational system," I'm talking about the tabs at the top of our home page.)
We think we've found a winner--feedback from hundreds of customers in
our testing has already been very positive. But we wouldn't want to
make such a change to how our store works without first consulting
you to see what you thought. So we'd sure appreciate it if you could
take a few minutes to check it out. Just stop by:
http://www.amazon.com/new-navigation
Then please drop us a line telling us what you think. E-mail your
comments to newtabs@amazon.com.
Many thanks for helping us make Amazon.com the best store it can be.
Sincerely,
Jeff Bezos
Founder and CEO, Amazon.com
PS: We hope you enjoyed receiving this message. However, if you'd
rather not receive future notices of this sort from Amazon.com,
please visit your Amazon.com Subscriptions page and sign in using
your e-mail address and password:
http://www.amazon.com/subscriptions"
Please note that this message was sent to the following e-mail
address:
cwodtke@eleganthack.com
Kristiina Karvonen has written several papers on creating trust in cyberspace from an HCI viewpoint. check it out!
My AltaVista : --The New AltaVista -- lets users try out and give feedback on the new altavista interface rather than launcing it on unsuspecting users, resulting in massive bailout and tons of CS complaints (most people hate change, even change for the better) There was a good Jupiter research report on this a while ago, with many tasty numbers, but you'll have to pay for it!
found another great resource; a blog on all sorts of useful stuff: Mersault*Thinking - Information Architecture, Usability, UI, Better Design