John McRee – UXD

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.

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.

This January I turned 32. Birthdays, as was tradition in the McRee family, are of little importance to me. This is something I hope to change now that I’m a father. But I have begun not to expect calls from my parents or sibling, and most birthdays in recent memory would have all but slipped by unnoticed if it wasn’t for my wife’s efforts to “make something of the day.” And really, that’s fine with me.

This year was different. I woke up feeling old but I don’t know why. I don’t really think 32 is old, I just feel it. Whatever it was, I still haven’t quite shaken it. Some fundamental shift has occurred that transcends the addition of the role of father or the fact that I have a few more grays.

So naturally these thoughts work their way back to the surface, past the limenal point, as I sit here wondering what to write as my first blog entry in a very long time.

How much easier this has become! I haven’t kept a professional blog since back around 2001/2002. It was an entirely manual process (though even then it didn’t really have to be) of constantly tweaking the css or hacking my way through xml/ActionScript integration.

I had a handful of coworkers then who, like me, re-architected their portfolios and blogs almost weekly. It was more a process of learning the tools we wanted to use more than anything else, and we all know that the online travel site where we worked would never let us use half of the emerging (or fully emerged) technologies that we were excited about. We pushed each other.

And now Wordpress has made it all so simple. Well, at least simple enough that I think the benefit of efficiency will make up for the time I’m going to spend slogging through code to make it my own. We’ll just say there is plenty of room for improvement and that it’s good to be a UX designer these days. I wouldn’t recommend Wordpress to my father – something along the lines of Blogger would work if he was inclined to keep a blog (and he isn’t).

And that’s mostly what I hope to write about in the coming entries. Not my father’s lack of enthusiasm for sharing thoughts with the anonymous masses, but about software and how people shape their lives around it, for it rarely shapes itself around them. We’ll see how it goes. And now I must leave. It’s 9pm Friday night. It’s way past my bedtime.