I think we (as an industry) create personas that are stuck in time. We don’t know who they were or who they will become. I’m not much like who I was five years ago, most people change quite a lot with time. That kind of information HAS to be important – especially for building brand loyalty. My background effects what I do, what I buy. Who I am. I am more than who am am right now. Everyone is. Maybe personas need to be too, or else they become caricatures.
During some user research we’re doing for a client related to the department of defense, we discovered a group that is totally irresponsible, porn-surfing, binge-drinking, low-tech and yet massive and very homogeneous group of late teens or early 20s men (boys still) in the military. The persona we would create based on the prevailing trend for the demographic wouldn’t have been pretty, and we were afraid the client might find our assessment to be disparaging at best. Their goals don’t go very far, and they certainly aren’t the type of customer the client has in mind… yet.
We already had another persona, a 24 year old male who is just starting to get his act together. So we gave him a back story. He may have been reckless a couple of years back and not very interested in the products our client hocks, but he’s getting there.
By understanding where he comes from, and maybe even where he’s going, we can design a product that fits around the stages of his life and is something that goes beyond filling a very limited and timstamped need. Maybe this will be a new trend in personas. Maybe not. But I think it’s pretty interesting.
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July 2nd, 2009
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Anthony Franco has posted a video of the session on his blog. It’s an iPhone video, which I think is pretty great even though a bit shaky. Thanks for posting this Anthony.
Check it out: Anthony’s Blog
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July 1st, 2009
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… And finally I get to write about it! This was a really big effort (the third largest telecom) that took about a year to design and build. It forced me to stretch outside of my comfort zone from a project leadership perspective. At one point there were eight designers on the projects, and client management was challenging. The pace of a large company can be maddening sometimes, but somehow we all made it happen.
We took a very holistic approach to the redesign. We started with user research, stakeholder interviews, and a meaty literature review to get us into the telecom head space. After developing personas, we used scenario-based designs to tell the story of how users will interact with the site. We developed a vision for the site that would stretch out for the next five years. After the application of much will and determination we were able to get a vision pushed through the beurocratic lines and into implementation. Roles overlapped and were at times ambiguous. Dupplication in effort created uncertainty, and an organizational overhaul mid stream worked against us in delivering final designs. But we prevailed.
The success of this project is evident. The website is a mssive lead generation vehicle for Qwest, and even before they began to market the redesign, lead generation from the site increased 50% right after the launch. EffectiveUI and Qwest recently partnered at a Forrester conference in New York to talk about the experience of this effort and the considerable ROI. We made a video to showcase the work.
Check it out: Qwest Large Business
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June 30th, 2009
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There’s this friggen icon bouncing in my dock all the time. It’s called the Adobe Updater. I have to basically stop everything I’m doing in order to make updates, so I choose to ignore it as often as I can. Finally I relent and shut down just about everything so I can get updates on some dumb thing that I’ll likely NOT use in some Adobe app I rarely open. Ha!
Im typing an email when I notice the damn thing bouncing again. I stop what I’m doing and see that it’s an alert, telling me that it’s… finished. I click “Okay.” WHAT THE F-CK?!!? What a waste of my time and attention. Leave me alone! Did Adobe steal these designers from Microsoft or something?
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January 12th, 2009
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I have seen it in action and it works very well, but it’s hard to convince some folks that hand-drawn prototypes are just as effective as Photoshop mockups for interaction and information design testing.
I was able to dig up a paper from researchers at Berkeley who did some empirical testing and found that there are no significant differences in test results using low-fi vs. high-fi prototypes. Read it yourself.
Download the PDF
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January 7th, 2009
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This isn’t about how long it’s been since I made a post, though it easily could be. I’ve heard a lot of talk about “putting in your time” as a designer in order to really excel at experience design. I think this is fairly accurate. I know that the longer I’m at it I feel like I can solve design problems with more efficiency and with better results. But what is this really all about? What are some of the things I’ve learned that might be distilled into giving someone who is fresh a little leg up in this game. Really, this is about going back to basics.
One idea that I have been kicking around recently is that good experience design is about time – but not from the standpoint of doing your time as a designer. Rather, it’s a deliberate focus on time (and the flow of activities over some duration of time) from the user’s standpoint. This seems so basic to many of us, but the criticality is often overlooked by junior experience designers.
I’ll try not to get too philosophical, but time can be thought of as series of activities that flow from one to the next. Activities in the past effect the present, and activities of the present effect future outcomes and choices that might be made.
Experience is the sum total of our activities (consciousness). To understand experience we have to understand context, and a critical component of context is time.
I was consulting recently with a client who has an internal design team that is more used to building traditional brochure-ware web sites. Most of them come from an academic background focused around accessibility and usability. Despite their formal training, I saw a lot of problems with their designs from a usability standpoint. These problems became even more profound as they starting building applications instead of just web pages. There were some logic holes and some decisions being made that were going to really create problems down the road. Through a few working sessions with this team I understood where these problems were coming from.
It had less to do with creativity or design savvy than it did with where they were starting in the timeline of user activities. They weren’t driving back to the beginning and answering some basic questions about who the user is, why they are using this application, what their desired outcomes would be, what would the most important tasks be in their workflows. They were jumping right into the middle of workflows. With a lack of the context of workflow over time, there were some buried and incorrect assumptions guiding their design.
It didn’t take us long to create some very elegant applications once we worked through the more abstract process of understanding the user’s timeline as it would relate to their experience with these applications.
So yeah, it is about time. Time for me to post a bit more often. And time to get back to basics and continue to develop those essential skills of understanding user context through an examination of workflows and timelines.
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December 27th, 2008
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A disaster has just happened on a project I’m on. We were wrapping up wireframes and were intending to do a quick round of comps based on those wireframes to test with users. Take the ego out of it by getting unbiased feedback. This would save time and money and get us to our goal faster. Instead we have become mired in client revisions based on suppositions of what the user will think. Blast!
This could have been avoided by strong-arming the test-first approach. Instead we crumpled and offered a sneak-peak. Initial feedback was entirely about nomenclature instead of the intended purpose of establishing color palette, typography, texture, layout, etc… But overnight the feedback become a shower of “The user won’t know what to click…” and “The user won’t understand [it's] active.”
There’s a lesson here.
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August 26th, 2008
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On a project I’m currently working on, we brought a couple of client stakeholders on user interviews. We also involved them in the initial design concept phase as we were drawing ideas up on whiteboards. This has turned these few stakeholders into allies in all of our meetings. It’s so awesome to hear one of your clients answer other people on their team by saying “What I heard during the customer interviews was….”
I’ve also seen the reverse happen. When there’s no client participation in the interview process, they dismissed the research findings whenever it contradicted their individual notions or assumptions.
Involving the client in user interviews builds trust in the process. Involving the client in the creative effort coming out of those interviews builds their trust in the designer.
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August 21st, 2008
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Tom Fishburne is a genius. I love his work. I saw this one going around again recently:
It’s funny because it’s true. A friend of mine was working with a client recently who could be characterized by all of these. It sounded painful for sure. Even one of these can be difficult to deal with if they are very passionate about their opinions.
The best way of dealing with this type of client is to have some real end-user research to back up your stance. I have seen it happen again and again – when you can tell a client that your solution isn’t simply what you think is a good idea, but what their customers think is a good idea, you have effectively removed ego from the equation. There’s nothing left to argue about. If you can identify that you have a client like this early on in the project, you can introduce some finding from research early on to help put an end to this behavior before it really becomes a problem.
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April 21st, 2008
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In a recent article on Wired:
Customer satisfaction with online banking sites has risen significantly over the past five years, according to a survey released Tuesday by ForeSee Results. ForeSee’s survey uses the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index, and this year, the index registered a score of 82 out of 100 for online banking, up 12 percent, or 9 points, from a score of 73 in 2003…
Web site technology is expensive, Freed said, but the payback is significant. The same survey showed that highly satisfied online banking customers are 31 percent more likely to buy additional services from the bank and 54 percent more likely to recommend the bank to others.
So there you have it. Another example of ROI on building a good user experience.
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April 15th, 2008
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