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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Boyscout Motto applies here.
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April 4th, 2008
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Sometimes tracking down end users can be challenging, expensive, or even prohibited by the client (strange, but true… I’ve been on more than a couple of projects where clients simply didn’t want anyone interfacing with their users).
The next best person to interview is a subject matter expert, or SME. These can be product managers, sales people, call center reps, or even folks who work in a parallel industry.
While working on an online yearbook design application, I gained a lot of insight from sales people about chronology of tasks, criticality of features, and even quite a bit about pain points with the existing software. The app could have been designed with this information alone, and we would have something similar to what is currently being built.
What you can’t learn from a SME, however, is what motivates the users. Understanding user goals and motivation to behavior is extremely powerful, and can take a product from good to great.
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April 4th, 2008
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Recently I’ve been designing an application for teenagers who do page layout in school, most of which are girls. It’s creative tool and our visual designer skinned it with a very “pro-app” look and feel by creating high contrast between the working area and the GUI. This meant making the GUI quite dark, and we weren’t sure if this would resonate with teenage girls.
A focus group is a great way to do a reality check after you have some visual direction for your site or application. It took very little effort to “buy” their time with a pizza and some Starbucks. And in three one-hour sessions what we heard was reliably repetitive, challenged our assumptions, and informed/confirmed our design.
I know that Focus Groups get a bit of a bad rap these days, and for good reason. If you ever want to see group think in action, run a focus group. For any of you who missed out on this fun sociological phenomenon, group think is essentially created by some loud voices speaking for the group and everyone else nodding and parroting what the loud ones say. This isn’t good when you are trying to measure usability of interaction and task flow, but this is fantastic when trying to find out more about the likability of a product. The loud ones are going to be loud at home, at work, in school, and online. The loud ones are the trend setters.
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March 21st, 2008
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User research is an essential component for designing software when tasked with designing a product that will be used by someone who is very different from the design (15 year old girls, 70 year old retirees, long-haul truckers, etc…). But finding time and budget for research is a tough sale.
Most of the current methods that are offered in the lecture circuit or in books on Amazon set aside a period of time in the beginning of a project dedicated to research and persona development. Some methods have offered that complete personas can be developed in as little as 30 days! While one month for detailed and well-researched (read USEFUL) personas is, I agree, more or less the minimum for consumer level products, I have found very very few companies that are willing to swallow the pill and let a contractor have a month for this type of activity regardless of its importance or value.
One of my colleagues came up with a good analogy for the company who agrees to an endeavor. They are a flying unicorn. You see, unicorns are pretty rare and very elusive. But flying unicorns… Well you don’t see many of those around, do you?
Since flying unicorns are extremely rare and user research and other UCD methods are necessary to deliver on target, a new strategy is needed to get the job done. We can’t expect the client to always agree for paying for UCD and research outright, so we need to “bake” them into the project plan and use some very fast and dirty (Guerilla) methods to accomplish our goals as designers.
I’ll be talking about some of these approaches in the weeks to come. Stay tuned.
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March 13th, 2008
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A fellow musician recently sent me an article where every instance of the letters “ass” was replaced with the word “butt.” The problem here is that this is an article about Bluegrass. Bill Monroe, known as a tyrannical perfectionist is rolling over in his grave at the references to his Bluegrbutt Boys.
Check it out: Bluegrass World
There are other articles on this site with the same problem. One is about the sad parting of Bob Paisley. Evidently Bob pbutted away recently.
You have to be careful out there people. Software is out to get you. You can’t let your guard down for even a second.
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February 28th, 2008
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I recently went to Miami for the Internet Retailer Web Design 2008 Conference and Exhibition. EffectiveUI and some other shops partnered with the event to offer 30 minute design consultations to conference attendees. I did back-to-back consultation sessions for two long days and was able to really spend time thinking about and identifying patterns in the current state of online retail. I met with the design departments of some very large companies and a handful of smaller businesses as well. This is what I saw…
Most companies don’t know their users
The vast majority of companies with whom we spoke did little to nothing to know or learn about their end users. Those who did engage their users typically did so through artificial means — surveys, click metrics, etc. Why the reluctance to speak with real people? The investment is so low and the potential return so high.
Internet retail design is mostly a great big yawn
A problem that ran across many sites was a total lack of a refined site design. For many stores, the site aesthetic attempts to speak to a massive audience by not saying much at all. The few industry leaders that have memorable and enjoyable sites have actually taken the time to refine their target. This take daring, but the risk is relatively low with the right user research driving design decisions.
This problem is further illustrated by stores that have little to no emotional appeal or connection with their shoppers. Retailers spend big money in their brick-and-mortar stores to create just the right environment in which their customers want to shop, and then the online store is left as an afterthought, the neglected “step-channel.” Why don’t more retailers take the same time to connect with their customers’ emotion online? Is it lack of knowledge on how to do this or a belief that the online shopper doesn’t care about such things?
Idea: don’t measure clicks; measure page refreshes
Clicks are no longer the right metric for evaluating a task online. The effort and investment of a single click is low. It’s page refresh that hurts a site by inserting a rude interruption to the shopping or browsing experience. At one point, clicks and refreshes were synonymous, but newer RIA technologies have separated the two by updating only the portion of the screen with which the customer is interacting. Most retails sites require at least 3 page refreshes to be presented with the opportunity to put something in the cart and another 5 or so to complete the purchase. RIAs have the potential to change this game completely.
Is the back storage room really the right place to keep key product information?
Most online stores bury key product information in product detail pages that feature only one product, forcing users to dive deep, re-surface, and dive again in order to compare the features of similar products. A few retailers employ rather clunky product comparison tools, a step in the right direction, but there is a lot of room for improvement in this regard. Why not bring more key information into product summaries or allow customers to filter like items on key criteria that are important to them? For that matter, why do apparel shoppers have to drill all the way down to a product detail page to find out whether their size is in stock? Why can’t customers set a global filter on the store for their size — or better yet, a range of sizes that may work — and be shown only those items that will fit. A brick-and-mortar shoe store experience should not be the model for the online shopping experience.
Isn’t the point to sell products?
In many cases, the only way to add an item to the shopping cart is on the product detail page. When a customer is shopping for commodities or other known products, doesn’t it make more sense to give them the opportunity to place the item in the car the first time it is exposed to them, rather than forcing them to refresh yet another page to get to the “Purchase” button?
“Please go to the front of the store to place this item in your cart.”
When shopping in a brick-and-mortar store, how often is a customer forced to pick up an item, walk to the front of the store, drop it in their cart, and then find their way back to the area of the store in which they were browsing to find their next item? If a retailer asked you to do that, how often would you come back? Most, if not all, online stores we reviewed do just that, however. Adding an item to the online cart takes customers into some pre-checkout limbo, forcing them to navigate back into the store to continue shopping.
The salesperson has left the building…
One of the advantages of shopping at brick-and-mortar stores is the ability to ask questions of the staff about the products available in order to figure out which one is the right choice for that particular customer’s needs. While this option isn’t always needed, some purchases justify a significant, self-directed educational phase before making that decision. With only a few exceptions, most sites we reviewed included nothing more than text descriptions of products to educate shoppers. Engaging educational content was by and large missing altogether. This area alone is ripe for massive innovation.
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February 26th, 2008
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