When you redesign a new site, how do you know users are going to like
it? How can you ensure that you know how the redesign will sit with existing as well as new users?
Continue reading "7 Steps to Avoiding User Adoption Problems with Site Redesigns" »
This was my general conclusion when working on next generation usability for the popular directory look-up portal whitepages.com website (used by 200 million adults in the US). It doesn't matter what your website does online, if it involves giving consumers information, you are in the privacy business first and foremost. What does this mean?
Continue reading "Privacy: your biggest user experience challenge" »
Maybe you have heard the saying "we'll take care of that in user training". The
notion that problems users have can be resolved by user training is
severely flawed. Yet entire departments rally around this belief and worse many companies seem to wrap product management around it.
Continue reading "How relying on 'user education' is a failed strategy" »
The Internet is great for taking a rapid look at what your competitors might be doing as you design a user interface. While this is a valuable learning opportunity, it can also be dangerous and inappropriate for your design.
The biggest problem I have found, is that user interface approaches or design elements do not carry neatly across contexts. Each design context is unique. By design context I mean a few things:
Continue reading "Competitor designs: The danger of borrowing across contexts" »
Obama is already being described as the
Internet President. Will his Internet savvy include an agenda for usability? If so, what might that agenda include? In this post I explore these questions, connect some dots and present some potential solutions for how Obama's technology goals are linked deeply to harnessing usability best practices.
Late in the election season, Silicon Valley expressed its joy that a pro-technology President is back, as witnessed by
Google's CEO promoting Obama in the weeks before the election, as well as
former CEO's of eBay and HP and Microsoft also backing Obama in the run up to the election.
Al Gore was the closest the US has been to a pro-IT cabinet level politician. In 1998, Al Gore had this to say about usability:
"The benefits of usable technology include reduced training costs, limited user risk and enhanced performance ... American industry and government will become even more productive if they take advantage of usability engineering techniques". Vice President Al Gore 1998
While Al Gore promoted usability as Vice President, it is unclear what actions were taken if any. Ironically, it was usability of the voting experience, underscored by voter fraud and the infamous butterfly ballot, that helped get Gore un-elected in 2000. (The Usability Professionals Association made this one of their civic projects).
Not since Al Gore was Vice President did usability receive any attention at the national level. Where are Obama's views on IT and usability engineering? How strong of an agenda will usability play in Obama's IT plans?
Obama: more likely to understand the importance of usability
Obama's weighs heavily on the value of Information Technology (IT) investment and innovation, including staffing the nation's first office of the Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Obama's vision for IT is to invest in it to further social change. This is distinctly different to Bush's IT agenda which seemed to extend only as far as military and Homeland Security.
Obama has demonstrated that he gets technology. His campaign is a major case study in using IT to redefine grassroots canvassing and organizing. His advances in social networking for political gains were underscored by gigantic followings and views on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr and others. Obama's age and tech-savvy combined with his recognizing how to use this stage of the Internet's maturity give him an unprecedented quality as tech champion:
Obama's tech-savviness was further underscored by change.gov, a forum for voicing citizen concerns and ideas (like Dell's Idea Storm), set up to help bridge the Nov 4th- Jan 20th gap. The Obama team even migrated their opt-in mailing list when closing down the site on Jan 20th with a permission opt-in and redirect welcome message and blog post from the Director of New Media at the White House. The Obama agenda says Phillips, the new Director, is participation, communication and transparency. The transparency initiative was re-enforced by a memo Obama sent a few days later requiring government agencies to "harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public".
President Obama has articulated a strong desire to preserve and support several important issues: Net Neutrality and broadband access to undeserved communities. His IT plan is to bolster social change by harnessing technology and enabling access to the new opportunities afforded by technology. To do this, Obama and his CTO will need to understand and utilize usability engineering best practices.
The Pew study underscores the need for human mastery of technology. Usability is instrumental for social change efforts with technology. Just because you have access does not mean you can use the technology effectively, efficiently, productively, joyfully etc. Usability is an enabler to the goal of empowering humans to use technology.
There are lots of things Obama could do with technology to enhance learning, education and community. For example giving primary schoolchildren laptops (like a project piloted in Northern England in the 1990's) or a neighborhood strengthening online community (piloted in the 1990's in London when I lived in the UK). Alexandra Samuel provides an intriguing list of 50 ways Obama can use the Internet to govern, many of which have already been acted upon by Obama.
But, what should Obama do to ensure that the people getting the technology can use it?
Today we see usability slowly creeping into regulations and standards. For example, the FDA is mandating usability in medical device development; the government is backing standardization of enterprise software architecture (the FEA framework PDF); or that there are a few existing low-profile initiatives for promoting usability best practices as well as encouraging the importance of usability in government website development. A more coordinated and higher profile effort for "humanizing technology" will be needed. Industry understands that usability creates profitability. Having federal backing can help bootstrap organizations, non-profits and businesses who don't have access to usability methods and expertise.
It is vital that the new federal CTO understands and helps promote usability within the new government. It would be tragic to make the classic mistake of 'technology for technology's sake'. The Obama Web team has demonstrated their skill. For the rest of the government and the older Clinton years politicians, there is a need to educate and champion usable IT. Obama's CTO must be familiar with corporate usability lessons and mistakes in deploying buggy, useless, unsatisfying, unintuitive and user-hostile software and web services over the past decade. Usability is a documented science, this needs to be understood.
People have been able to access Obama's message because he has made it so accessible. If this is accidental then good for you! However there is a science behind this and many more non-savvy companies, organizations and non-profits are light years behind the success that has been pioneered with the Obama campaign.
Any initiative or effort to empower the citizenry with technology needs to be tempered with human-centered design (another name for user-centered design) standards and guidelines.
What Apple has been doing with their products is needed at the national level. Take a vision, base it in known usability best practices and make it work passionately. We need stronger regulations, better initiatives and closer ties with government and industry to promote cross-pollination of best practices.
Usability needs to be understood as not just another technical item (as Accessibility has been treated), but the entire purpose of the product. We need new thinking and leadership within our own usability community to communicate this, and likewise we need an executive federal level understanding that usability is a mandatory requirement and approach for technology initiatives.
What types of innovations can be developed by industry and individuals that support the nations goals for social good? Let's do what Bush did with the Homeland Security innovation dollars but make the innovations we fund have a social improvement backbone, instead of a military and security one.
The Obama government should open up technology innovation (Web and product) to social entrepreneurism. For example, for emergency relief, mash-ups created during Hurricane Katrina helped dislocated persons find shelter...or for health, for example, the Wii Fit is a technology with tangible health benefits (or so I'm told) ;-).
To start, having a conversation about how to get technology to work for the people it's destined for is the first step. It's great we can have this conversation! I would love to hear your thoughts, comments.
Best Wishes,
Frank Spillers, MS p.s. Issues with Typepad have caused a re-write of some of these paragraphs. So I will call out an interesting news item about Obama's staff digging the White House Out of the Dark Ages for starters (hat tip to Matt Schoolfield).
Here is a recording from a live usability seminar I gave a few weeks ago on the topic of emotion design and pleasurability. (Sign up at the bottom of that page to our usability research newsletter to be alerted to upcoming free usability seminars like this)...
In the age of the iPhone, emotion in design is heating up as a competitive differentiator. Products that deliver a compelling and elegant user experience are characterized by their ability to evoke and sustain emotion from the user.
This 40 minute seminar explores these key
questions: What is emotion design?; How does it differ from usability?;
and What aspects of emotion or pleasurability can be measured?
The seminar also covers the following questions:
How does emotion factor into user experience?; What is the impact of
emotion on product user experience?; How can websites and web
applications benefit from the latest insights in emotion design?; Is
emotion a separate metric or related to usability?; How are emotional
responses best measured?
Intro To Emotion Design- Pleasurability and Emotional Design- Experience Dynamics Web Seminar
I gave a two day workshop on User Experience best practices in Web 2.0 at Gallup (yes, the polling organization) in Omaha last week.
Here's a slide from the seminar I thought you might find interesting capturing Usability 2.0 (whatever that is). It is a take on the infamous O'Reilly diagram capturing Web 2.0 concepts. My favorite is"iphone like magic" because I have had clients asking for web applications with that description.
BTW, my definition of Web 2.0 for the Gallup seminar audience was:
Here's a definition from Wikipedia, which I think is right on:
What does Web 2.0 mean to you? Do you even use that word anymore to describe a desired web user experience strategy? (I don't).
p.s. I sent a client an email a few months ago and mentioned keeping current with Web 2.0 best practices and he nearly threw a shoe at me by email ;-) And this is a VP I have successfully worked with on some great 2.0 sites for his company. Anybody had similar experiences?
Best Wishes,
Frank Spillers, MS
A new study (July 2008) entitled 'Factors that Improve online experience' by Sathish Menon and Michael Douma from the Institute for Dynamic Educational Advancement offers key insights on the current state of online user experience.
The study reinforces known usability truths, sheds light on user perceptions but more interestingly points to disconnects between designers and users. The study surveyed perceptions, expectations and practices across various audiences and contrasted the results.
The key findings and what they mean:
1) Designers underestimate the thresholds for an effective site. Respondents consider a site “effective” when visitors are satisfied with respect to enjoyment, can find information somewhat easily, and never get lost in the site. By at least one point on a five-point scale, visitors have higher expectations for effectiveness than do designers. Nonprofit organizations believe that effective sites do not have “information gaps between what visitors want and what the site provides” and that visitors are at least “somewhat satisfied” with their sites. Designers should give greater consideration to overall effectiveness, thereby reducing the chance of failure for a user to find the information they seek.
Comment: Designers rely too much on a "they'll figure it out" approach and underestimate that users need transparent designs that support intuitiveness over flair.
2) Easy access to complete information is key to visitor enjoyment. All three survey groups believe that the ease with which visitors can find information and the ability to maintain orientation is critical to enjoyment. Both organizations and visitors believe that reducing the gap between what web sites provide and what visitors seek is critical to enjoyment. These variables explain 25% to 30% of the variance in visitor enjoyment; hence, ease of finding information is an important foundation for most sites.
Comment: The feeling of satisfaction is highly relevant to how well a visitor found the information they were looking for.
3) Good visual design and up-to-date information are critical. Over 80% of designers and organizations believe that good visual design
is important. A healthy 50% of the visitors agree. Fully 80% of
visitors and organizations believe that up-to-date information is very
important. Only 60% of designers believe that to be the case. When
budgeting for your project, don’t be overly seduced by fancy graphics
and multimedia. Invest in strong, clear design and simple methods to
quickly deliver current information to your visitors.
Comment: Of course, "fancy graphics" is open to interpretation as is "strong, clear design"; as is multimedia. For example, video or a flash demo may be exactly what you need to communicate your product or process.
4) Visitors want information fast. Web site visitors are looking for simple, accurate, fast, and easy to navigate web sites - preferably with links to information they seek. A significant number of comments revolved around the need for speedy access, including but not limited to download speed, in order to find the information visitors are looking for. Even in a broadband age, visitors value fast sites, both those that are fast loading and those that quickly deliver sought-after information.
Comment: This is why popular e-commerce site Zappos.com Director of Development views a key user experience challenge as delivering load times in 1 second or less (view video).
5) Visitors want a broad range of topics. Relative to designers and organizations, visitors more strongly believe that a broad range of topics is important. Visitors believe sites can be more effective by helping visitors find interesting information - even if they are not looking for it. Designers and content developers can provide ample sidebars that link to other recommended pages, and extensively cross-link to other pages based on keywords.
Comment: Visitors want to go to one place with links to many more places, versus navigate to many places for content. the study findings advise: Designers and content developers can provide ample sidebars that link to other recommended pages, and extensively cross-link to other pages based on keywords.
6) Designers are overly optimistic about visitors' ability to maintain orientation. In the survey, the ability to maintain orientation was defined as visitors' ability to know "where they are, where they can go next, and which pages are related." About 70% of designers believe that visitors are almost always able to maintain orientation. That drops to about 30% when non-profit organizations express their view. In contrast, only about 10% of visitors report being able to almost always maintain their orientation. Fewer than 5% report that they tend to get lost frequently. Said another way, your visitors don't know your site as well as you do, so make sure it is obvious how to find information through meaningful menus, prompts, and not too much clutter.
Comment: Usable navigation is classically over-looked by designers and web agencies. I've seen this disconnect between how designers think about navigation and how end-users actually interact with sites consistently for the past eight years. The home link on a top navigation bar is a good example. Users want it there, designers and design boutiques are convinced it is "old school" and every dummy knows to click the logo. A survey we did of a high tech audience (employees who worked for the company) found only 20% knew that the logo meant "home"!
7) Visitors still need hand-holding. The study asked about hypothetically providing visitors with personal assistance using a site. About 70% of organizations and visitors believe that a personal guide would increase the effectiveness of a web site. Only about 50% of designers believe the same. Designers tend to overestimate the clarity of their designs.
Comment: The problem here I think is those of us working in this industry get too familiar with the Web. We take for granted that everyone else knows what has become implicit knowledge for us. This is also true of usability consultants. I'm frequently called in after another usability consultant has been working on a project to bail out the project. Usability "people" often underestimate their users, it's a classic (and yes shameful) common mistake- it's not just designers!
8) Visitors point to the lack of breadth and depth of site content as causing an "Information Gap." Although over 90% of visitors say that they are able to find the information they are looking for, over 50% report that there is a gap between what they are looking for and what typical web sites provide, and 60% think that a personal guide would help them navigate web sites. The reported gap is negatively correlated to visitors' ability to find information, and positively correlated to the need for a local search engine. This indicates that most web sites are unable to provide the breadth of information that visitors seek. Visitors often request broader and deeper information, when in fact they need to find existing information more easily.
Comment: This is a tricky problem because it's so context dependent. Typically usability best practice says solve the users immediate task or problem first, then give them options to explore, expand and enhance the discovery, search or experience.
There are specific interaction design techniques that can help with this problem. I discuss a few here: progressive disclosure (giving users what they need, then offering more) and forcing functions (limiting choices to help users get what they need).
Download a copy of the study here
Best Wishes,
Frank Spillers, MS
The graphical or visual aspects of an interface are the most easily recognizable. They require no methodology (Graphic design vs usability) or design distinctions, (What is design?).
Everyone from CEO to programmer can understand an interface by it's visual treatment. For some the interface is "eye-candy" and for others representative of organized emotional response and visual perception.
Oftentimes, the confusion over who dictates the design can lead to confusion and often a gratuitous use of graphics. This problem can be compounded by an interface being dictated entirely by a designer (where usability resources are absent, underfunded or ignored entirely from a development process).
The question we'll explore in this post is: Does the user experience team dictate what happens to the visual design or do they back off and let designers do their job?
The role User Experience plays
The trained user experience practitioner sees the graphic or visual design as an important element of the interface, finalizing the underlying screen behaviors (interaction design) and adding emotional appeal and queues to the interface.
Most usability people I know don't touch the visual layer. Once a design 'wireframe' is finalized, the design falls entirely in the hands of the graphic designer (aka designer). Sometimes the freedom of articulating the user interface is left in the hands of the designer. For example, one usability consultant I worked with put lines and words at the top of his web application wireframe and explained that "the designer can decide whether it's a tab or a button..." In my experience, it is best to avoid this and guide as much of the visual metaphor as possible.
The job of the graphic designer (when a user interface has been designed based on usability research) is to add emphasis and enhance areas of the design that need more visibility, branding, emotional appeal etc. Whether it's a tab or a button is as much a UI issue as a graphic design issue.
The more specific a user interface specification can be, the more usability will be retained when designers or developers work on it.
How creativity can destroy functional design
In the case where usability has occurred (usability testing or user research), a user interface direction is strongly open to influence from the user experience team. Choice of metaphors, layout, and design decisions in general are more clear due to the user advocacy and understanding of feature and task priority that takes place within the design research context.
Still, when a user interface is specified, it can be undermined unintentionally by a graphic design team, often from a different department or company (e.g. agency). A graphic designer, without sensitivity for the usability research that informed the design wireframe, can re-interpret the design and purge all the goodness out of the design.
Let's be clear that this is less by intention and more likely due to what naturally happens when one human brain picks up and digest a design passed to it from another brain. Creativity is integral to perception in general, whether its artistic (design) or technical (development). This makes it imperative that user experience folks specify and comment on the visual design as it evolves.
If you are a user experience practitioner and you don't like to get your hands dirty in creative issues, get over it. The notion that cognition and emotion are separate is a mute point according to findings in the field of neuroscience from the past 15 years (Ratner 2000). It is important to maintain a holistic approach and see the visual design as *part of the user experience* not something you just hope the graphic design team gets because that's their area.
See Design and Emotion discussion on the link between emotion and cognition.
So, since graphic design is so subjective (e.g. What color do you like?), what is there to say from a usability standpoint? After all, usability requirements come out of behavioral observation not opinions about color. (For example in usability testing we never say "do you like this home page?", instead we ask users to interact with it and then notice if they find features, buttons, navigation and promotional elements).
Usability Guidelines for Graphic Elements:
Here are some guidelines based on a decade of practical and empirical study of this issue.
1) Use of graphical elements generally: Generally graphical elements should help draw attention to content or functionality. The should not be used without a justifiable purpose. i.e. Never gratuitously use images or graphical elements unless they aid or reinforce the usability goals of the page. Use color to add context, to reinforce action areas and to call attention to important task-oriented features.
2) Images: Images should have a connection with the audience (theme, target audience, match values and emotional impact). For example, our client, a luxury hotel chain trying to impact an emotional connection with luxury property ownership showed a couple with their backs turned holding a wine glass. Instead we suggested having the models face the camera. Another client, a health insurance provider showed a picture of an older woman who looked ill, with poor make-up and fading color in her hair (lesson: Choose healthy models if you are in the health business!).
3) Avoid clip-art: Images and icons should not look stock or clip-art (based on how competitors and new sites do "tight" look and feel). Never use grainy or 1980's or 1990's looking icons or images. Note: This is very subjective and if you don't know what I am talking about, find someone who does to help point out the distinctions. Well trained graphic designers will smell clip-art from a mile away, though I have clients now who still use clip art in leading edge applications, blessed by internal graphic design teams!
4) Icon intuitiveness: If using icons they should be intuitive, crisp and used strategically (not randomly). If an icon needs to be interpreted for more than a few seconds, either don't use it or create an intuitive icon. Icon usability is important. This issue is so important, for the past few years we (Experience Dynamics) have been offering icon design services through our Russian design group.
5) Logos and branding elements: Branding elements should be clear and distinct (with clear taglines) and follow company branding guidelines. Avoid placement of branding items next to functional elements like buttons. Users get "branding blindness" on a page (like "banner blindness") if logos etc. are too close to task based graphical elements.
6) Use graphic design to enhance visual appeal: A good graphic design treatment for a website or web application is subtle and looks great, without weighing the page down. If you think graphic design is "fluff" you are missing the point. If you think it is dangerous to usability, you are missing the fact that graphic design can enhance and accent the user interface making it more intuitive. A great example in this area comes from the work of Yahoo! visual designer LukeW, who incidentally has written a book on this topic, though I must confess I haven't read it yet.
7) Be sensible about minimalism: If balanced with usability, there is nothing wrong with graphic design. I am seeing, the more mature the Web becomes, the less relevant the issue of minimalism becomes. Many Web 2.0 sites combine a nice balance of visual treatment and sensible minimalism. Few are bare and sparse. Instead of condemning graphics or running from them, as is the common reaction, use guidelines such as the ones outlined about as well as any patterns you start to see from observing users as they interact with your site, application or product.
Balancing good visual design with usability is challenging, though not impossible. I have found it's more a group dynamics issue, process issue or personal belief influence than an issue with color, color perception or graphic design. In my work, my agenda is not to fight for less graphic design or more, but to appropriately balance usability with visual flair. A dinner table needs to be functional and steady, but also needs to look nice and inviting...or as the great inventor Bucky Fuller most eloquently put it:
"When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong". -R. Buckminster Fuller
Warmest wishes,
Frank Spillers, MS
Design Like You Give a Damn is the name of a really great book on architectural responses to humanitarian crises. The book details design projects around the world from the ecologically dry toilet to the hippo water roller."Built from scratch in a treeless corner of the country, this community of scientists, tinkerers, and refugees - now numbering more than 200 - has created a verdant rainforest where once there was nothing but scrub grass. It has also devised and deployed dozens of inventions with a frequency and success rate that puts some of America's most storied technology companies to shame.
Its products include a hydroelectric microturbine that generates 30 kilowatts and thousands of RPMs from a mere 1-meter drop in a low-fall dam; a system of solar panels, spherical boilers, and tanks that can provide hot water for housing projects as large as 30,000 units; and a remote-controlled zeppelin that uses videocameras to spot forest fires.
In 2007, the founder of Gaviotas, Paulo Lugari, was awarded an honorary PhD in Science in Technology from Carnegie Melon University for his commitment to sustainability. Also last year the United Nations named the village a model of sustainable development. Gabriel Garcia Marquez has called Paolo Lugari the "inventor of the world."Unlike the startups that dot Silicon Valley, Gaviotas has done all this and more with virtually no funding, no well-endowed university backing, no incubators or venture capitalists, and no access to a national power grid, airport, or freeway system. In fact, Gaviotas lies 15 hours east of Bogotá, the nearest city of note, by a two-lane road that traverses the estates of narcotics traffickers and disappears occasionally into sloughs of mud..."
Source: CNN Money / Business 2.0 The Village that could save the Planet (Sept. 27 2007)
"It's all about innovation," says CEO Tim Brown of IDEO, who advises Acumen. "The money is there, but the solutions aren't. Designers can contribute. We're pretty good at taking a bunch of disparate components and figuring out the solution."
Efforts like the non-profit $100 laptop (One Laptop Per Child) project are a huge step in the direction of extending humanitarian "aid" into areas of low literacy and cognitive development. The laptop embodies sustainable design by providing a water/sand proof keyboard and screen; a built in wireless and mesh-network (forms ad-hoc peer to peer connections across geography to strengthen the wi-fi cloud); a hand-crank for energy; a full sunlight back light screen and more. MIT's Nicholas Negroponte started the project as a humanitarian effort, but later ran into the politics of distribution and market turf-battles from Intel in 2007. (Intel ran a competing product against the project; tried to strangle the project then partnered with OLPC; were kicked off the project and finally went back to competing with the project in a for-profit capacity).Source: Business Week Designing Change March 12 2007
What is a forcing function?
A forcing function is a constraint where the user "is forced" to complete a task based on a limited, paired down set of features or controls.
Forcing functions help streamline, simplify or minimize how a user interacts with a design. Designers benefit from this interaction design technique by reducing navigation redundancy, task effort and the complexity caused by "feature frenzy" (see my previous article on feature creep).
Not all forcing functions are based on good design decisions. Successful designs that make use of the forcing function interaction design technique are based on an empirical understanding of user default behavior, task expectations, error and failure analysis and context of use observations.
When should you use "forcing functions" in your design?
When you want to:
- Constrain a user interaction
- Speed up or re-direct a task
- Limit an interaction
- Eliminate confusion
- Simplify a design
- Protect users from danger or hazards
When forcing functions go wrong
Feature-forcing (making users interact with features they don't want) tends to be the end result of inappropriate use of the forcing-function technique. A forcing function is a disciplined use of force, the way a mother would give her child what they need, not what they want.
In general, products that lack good usability are characterized by designs where users are more error-prone, where defaults are inexact, where layout or instinctive behaviors don't feel right. In general designs that include error handling and/or error recovery as a component of the user experience, are lacking a forcing-function. This isn't to say error-handling is bad, it's just that many times error prevention should be the focus not error recovery.
Making a user do something an elegant way is far better than making a user do something a mediocre way and then offering them support as they fail and recover from the error.
The two extremes of forcing functions are too much force, and too little force. An example of too much force, is like making a user interact with implicit rules, hidden actions or metaphors that are unnatural. An example of too little force is making a user 'hunt around' to make something important happen (also a potentially inappropriate use of the progressive disclosure interaction design technique). DVD remote controls are a hideous example of "design minus forcing functions". Too many options get you in to trouble quickly.
Getting the right balance of force is important. Force can be a powerful design tool, but it can also be oppressive: poor user adoption is often the result of force that is difficult for the end user to get used to. When designing a forcing-function, there needs to be a good reason (user-validated) to justify the use of the technique.
Why do we use forcing functions?
Forcing functions are the mothering instinct of user-centered design. A forcing function should feel natural and transparent to the user. Users should never question why there is no "choice" in completing their task. The "dead-end" or directive action required should seem natural and protective either by way of the product experience or by way of the interface that limits all other options in that momentary task.
A razor blade company, after watching women shave their legs in the shower (wearing swimming costumes), realized that a design flaw would potentially cause the razor to slip, leading to dangerous cuts (and lawsuits). The razor handle and blade were constrained for wet hand use to prevent cuts or mistakes holding the razor.
An automotive manufacturer, after observing truck drivers driving on the highway, realized that an incoming email, while driving--could only display two sentences of text, before resulting in driver distraction and an accident. The messaging system was constrained to show no more than a short two sentence summary of the message- the rest of the message available when the vehicle was stopped.
The forcing function allows a design to follow user intuitions based on their expectations, derived from studying their behavior, environment and context of use.
However, designers should take precautions against imposing this powerful interaction design technique without first understanding the user task flow, context of use and error scenarios involved.
Best Wishes,
Frank Spillers, MS
There is a huge problem in the software and web services industry: 3rd
party applications, widgets, dashboards or site add-ons can kill your usability efforts.
Poor user experiences with 3rd-party applications can undermine or make your usability efforts look bad.
Vendors such as PeopleSoft, Vignette and many others are notorious
for providing "clunk-ware", "vapor-ware" or "sneaker-ware" as one of
our clients at Experience Dynamics put it.
Let's explore why this is a major problem that you need to confront head on, or be a victim of 3rd-party usability issues.
First, a 3rd-party application, content feature or widget is something that adds-value to your site and potentially to the user experience. It might be an entire account management dashboard, content management system, a 3D model of the human body, a mortgage calculator, a job board or a web service like an ecommerce shopping cart or secure service solution.
Configuration Nutritional Deficiency
In my article "Configuration Hell" I discussed how users don't do configuration behavior very well. In the case of software vendors, they provide already pre-configured applications or web services. In many cases software is developed fully loaded with features, and configuration entails "turning off" nonsensical screen elements and elements of functionality.
Open source software suffers from the same lack of understanding of defaults; poor or badly organized content and features; functionality lacking a task-oriented design.
Software vendors regularly ship products with poor usability, that are poorly configured. Worse, the practice of shipping unusable web applications or web services seems to be a business model.
"Oh, you want us to configure it so it's usable...?"
The idea is that you get a baseline package (largely un-configured) and if you want it to reflect a coherent user experience (like the rest of your site), you will need to pay more.
For me, this business model lacks integrity. Up-selling should be used for adding powerful features, not for gaining access to basic usability. The reality is that most Fortune 1000 companies will typically pay for the baseline product, ending up with a shoddy or inferior user experience.
Another reality of 3rd-party usability is that project, program or product managers are not able to do anything about 'locked down' third-party applications, widgets or re-directs to outside applications.
Herein lies the problem: users don't know when they are entering
3rd-party country. To users, it's all one big swirling experience. Poor
user experiences with 3rd-party applications can undermine or make your
usability efforts look bad.
How to minimize third-party usability problems
1. Negotiate for usability standards maintenance when signing agreements.
What many companies are doing is writing usability guarantees into the contracts so that vendors are forced to adhere to your standards before they win the contract. This is the most direct and legally binding way to leverage usability in the vendor relationship and with the solution they deliver. Sound drastic? Many of our clients are doing this, having been burned by third party usability issues year after year.
I encourage the practice, and I think vendors need to recalibrate the business model of selling unusable systems. Offering usability from the get-go is core value, it's not a value-add that you should dangle as a carrot in your customer's face for up-sell purposes.2. Mandate your usability standards as a necessary requirement to integrating a third-party application.
Vendors often will beta their next release for a negotiated price. Be careful if you choose to be a beta guinea-pig:
A ruined user experience reputation could cost you more in long term customer retention and satisfaction than buying clunky functionality that doesn't work as users expect, and integrates poorly into your development environment, causing you to write countless API's to patch the problems, for example.
3. Work with your vendor over the course of your relationship to encourage usability as a requirement in their development process.
As a customer you have tremendous influence over vendor development directions. Demand usability as a requirement and encourage specific usability enhancements, maybe not in this release, but in next year's for sure.
I don't think it's wise to even ignore usability in your software purchasing evaluation process. Apparently, neither do 70% of software buyers in a recent study by the Sand Hill Group & Neochange (2008) who rate user adoption (usability issue) as more important then features or functionality in software purchasing.
Your
senior usability lead should be on hand to provide concrete input if
not "gut feel" input. If you don't have a senior usability person, hire
a usability consultant and have them do an informal or formal usability
audit on the intended product. This is a perfect use for usability
consulting firms. If you're going to spend
money on usability later, why not bake it into your due diligence as
one of the risks you need to manage up-front?
In
my ten years of experience with usability consulting, I have heard many
attempts to have me evaluate a 3rd party product before purchase- even
with an existing client- but somehow that criteria gets overlooked or
minimized in importance. Rarely is the usability due diligence
conducted. As a result I run into a lot of clients who are "stuck" with
3rd party usability issues.
Demand a change in direction from your software vendors and partners and you'll avoid or greatly minimize the inherited usability problems that often come with 3rd party applications and web services and tools. That way you won't be a victim of 3rd party usability and neither will your users.
Best Wishes,
Frank Spillers, MS
This Ajax Usability Checklist is a bonus guide that accompanies my AJAX Usability Seminar, I am offering it in the form of this post as a bonus for readers- thanks for your support!
The Web is changing fast. New standards are emerging, new approaches to coding such as Scriptaculous, AJAX, Ruby, Flash/Flex, Silverlight and others are creating a leap-frog situation where many new websites, web apps and portals are implementing next year's User Interface elements.
Yet, when it comes to implementing the new interface techniques AJAX offers, we need to be mindful of how AJAX can improve the specifics of the user experience.
Two simple guidelines for AJAX Usability:
1) If the user has to ”play” with the interface control too much it is probably used inappropriately.
2) If the interface control does not follow the user’s task, it is probably used gratuitously.
1. When and where to use AJAX
a) When presenting complex features or functionality
b) When building a data set for the user
c) When presenting depth of information
d) To correct or intelligently help the user
a) When presenting complex features or functionality
EXAMPLE: Bluenile.com offers a complex ring configurator with advanced filtering and sorting functionality.
An AJAX interface allows users to hover over ring specifications.
Sliders help narrow the selection.
Note: Top to bottom sliders are novel and should be tested since they are less familiar UI elements on the Web.
b) When building a data set for the user…
EXAMPLE: Google Analytics offers Save to Dashboard and hidden report control features to give users more control over the analytics reporting experience.
c) When presenting depth of information
EXAMPLE: Finance.google.com offers pull sliders and instant click in their finance application to give users immediate data overlay feedback.The end result is a quicker, more robust sense of interactivity with the market data.
d) To correct or intelligently help the user
EXAMPLE: Kayak.com uses a “just in time” help system to walk uses through AJAX filter features. The format is a contextual dynamic help system that utilizes a wizard metaphor (next/back).This is a best practice and should be modeled.
2. Key Lessons: Google style AJAX; Yahoo! Style AJAX
Create transparency with complex functionality
Example: Yahoo! expanded the “social web” with a portal social networking approach. Yahoo!’s MyWeb for example, allows users to save search results, as well as share and discover bookmarks and interests. Yahoo! extends the search experience by adding social networking and social browsing with simple AJAX interactions and features.
Reinvent old experiences with AJAX elegance
Example: Google Maps redefined the mapping user experience with AJAX. Characteristics included full screen, direct manipulation maps, with the ability to search listing or make a VoIP call from inside a floating dialog.
Leapfrog the competition
Example: Google Docs has entered a new category of software as live service competing directly with Microsoft. Zoho.com has taken Google Docs a step further and is offering a full AJAX suite of productivity applications online.
Get known by your user experience
Example: Yahoo! assumed industry leadership in photo sharing with its Flickr acquisition and is now a leader in AJAX user interface best practice. Flickr took the lead as a Web 2.0 best practice example (though Bubbleshare.com has a better experience it was not first to market).
Improve performance
Example: Google’s Gmail improved the email user experience by creating an AJAX friendly email client. User experience improvements with AJAX included integrated presence (IM), threaded conversations and search among others.
Revitalize the presentation layer
Example: Yahoo!’s email client made email and junk mail management easier by introducing desktop-like functionality with its new release of Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! Travel has also revitalized travel planning with its AJAX powered social networking Trip Planner site.
3. How to design for progressive disclosure* contexts using AJAX.
a) Extend discoverability
b) Provide dynamic “smart” help
c) Give the user less “drill down”, more shallow navigation
d) Show related details or content
*Progressive disclosure is an interaction design technique that sequences information and actions across several screens in order to reduce feelings of overwhelm for the user. By disclosing information progressively, you reveal only the essentials and help the user manage the complexity of feature-rich sites or applications.
a) Extend discoverability >> make it ease for users to find stuff.
EXAMPLE: tripadvisor.com gives users a progressive disclosure of links contained in a category with an opaque “click to expand” window. The interface feature appears only once and gives way to an ‘accordion’ menu of the other 4 categories.
This is a novel, but potentially valuable device to orient users to further discover the contents of a page section.
b) Provide dynamic “smart” help >> give users better contextual help that provides in-line tutorial type information.
EXAMPLE: Kayak.com uses a “just in time” help system to walk users through AJAX filter features. The format is a contextual dynamic help system that utilizes a wizard metaphor (next/back).
This is a best practice and should be modeled.
c) Give the user less “drill down”, more shallow navigation >> make it easier to get to and from search results and the home page.
EXAMPLE: Patagonia.com lets users view contents of a product from the search results page in an AJAX dialog.
The move to viewing product details and acting from a pop-up window is not new, it is just back from having disappeared with html pop-ups a few years ago.
Extending the pop-up, AJAX offers more direct features from the page without page load/reload such as favorite, add to cart etc.
d) Show related details or content >> give users “just in time” content, controls and features .
EXAMPLE: CNN.com offers an accordion style menu selection with in-line tabs that users can change views (without page reload).
Note: Page tabs should not require page reloading. For a bad example see priceline.com search results “Sort by” tabs (pages reload and reposition users on the page).
4. Five questions you should ask when considering AJAX
Question 1: Will using AJAX greatly improve the user experience with my site or web application?
Do not use AJAX if it does not enhance a strategic aspect of your user experience. AJAX pitfalls (browser incompatibility) can create technical and usability headaches for your JavaScript developers and your users. Be sure to test, refine code and re-test. Just because the AJAX element works on your browser, does not necessarily mean it will work on your users.
Question 2: What is the user experience strategy that compliments the AJAX deployment?
AJAX can be used to add sizzle but you should think of AJAX as a collective strategy used to improve a users ability to complete his or her tasks more effectively. AJAX is not the answer to every design problem and often times is inappropriate or irrelevant.
The excitement in a design is on “how can this improve the user’s task?” not “how can we Ajaxify this page to make it cool?”
Question 3: Will JavaScript gracefully degrade in browsers and is there an alternate if users browsers get stuck?
Support graceful degradation using JavaScript detect scripts and support JavaScript-free and mobile friendly versions. Try to keep AJAX to user interface elements that add value throughout the experience, but do not primarily require the technology to get through a website for example.
Question 4: Is there a real need to use AJAX or is it “just because”?
The technical pitfalls associated with AJAX require a disciplined use of JavaScript and AJAX. Think strategically about how AJAX can help the user on this page or that page. Do not take AJAX for granted as a user interface technique!
Assume users will not be familiar with the interface tricks AJAX offers, instead try to make everything transparent. For example, a plus button that opens up should have a “Details…” link beside it.
Question 5: Are you inventing completely new or reinventing problematic designs and how will you know if they work?
Good AJAX usability comes from testing your design with your target audience. Users rarely drink the cool-aid of new “whiz-bang” technologies or interface enhancements.
AJAX should be used in context of a users task and it should help remove the “work” traditionally associated with a browser fetching pages and handshaking with a database.
AJAX usability means that a user can do something on the screen that changes the display without waiting, with minimal effort and with a responsive and “just in time” interface.
Download this AJAX Usability Checklist:
Download ajax_usability_checklist_bonus_guide.pdf
Subscribe to Experience Dynamics usability Research Newsletter to be informed of seminars and research alerts.
Note: This AJAX Usability Checklist accompanies the AJAX Usability seminar with Frank Spillers, MS. Please refer to that presentation and recording for additional examples, guidelines and for more context on designing for AJAX Usability.
Best Wishes,
Frank Spillers
When the term design is used it can mean many things, depending on who you are and which conversation you are having. Rarely do people stop to compare 'mental maps' and clarify which type of design they are talking about!
I believe this has to do with the multiple definitions of design and the lack of awareness of each specific type of design, its function and timing in a process. The other factor being how familiar you are with "design" based on your past experiences with different design roles.
Here are some examples of conversations I have and hear frequently that cause to stop and ask "What type of design are we talking here?":
- "We'll take care of that when we get to design"
- "That's something the designer will have to figure out..."
- "We're starting design now..."
- "We're bringing in a designer..."
- "Here are some early design concepts..."
- "This will be decided by the designer"
- "Have you started design yet?"
- "Why are these designs in Latin?"
- "The design looks great!"
- "This isn't the final design, we'll get to that later..."
Since the word "design" means many things to many people, let's define design as seen from a usability consultant's perspective.
Design for the Mind
Design that impacts cognitive processes (fit to the mind) including interpreting and understanding the experience.
#1 User Interface Design: Screen layout and design that focuses on user interactions and screen behaviors. User Interface (UI) design is an important component of user-centered and task-oriented design. The focus of UI Design is to improve the “user experience” or usability of the design. Since the mid 1980's, UI design has refined an understanding of human behavior and screen design. Also called "GUI" design, often confused for combined design and programming (see this post). UI Design is often seen as symbolic of green-screen era interfaces or coding, since developers used to be UI Designers before it was recognized that this was a special skill set...
#2 Information Architecture: Skeleton mock-ups or "wireframes" of screen interactions, layout, navigation and features. Used to review, concept and test initial functionality. Information Architecture (IA) is officially unrecognized by academic institutions, because it overlaps too closely with the already existing field of UI Design above. Few realize that IA was invented for commercial purposes originally by Argus Associates in the late 90's, (Rosenfeld & Morville, yes, the polar bear book guys) to promote consulting and book sales, as revealed by former employee Keith Instone at his 'alphabet soup' talk a few years ago in Portland, Oregon.
#3 Interaction Design: Focuses on how the user interacts with a page, application or product. Interaction design follows a task centered design approach ensuring the flow of the interaction as the central goal. Interaction design predates the Web world, and finds its roots in the wider field of Human Computer Interaction. Interaction design is a more general umbrella that many working on Web 2.0 interfaces and web applications prefer, since IA appears stuck in web-page centric paradigms.
Sanity check: Are the three design disciplines above different? Not really, their goals are all the same.
Design for the Heart
Design that impacts sensory processes (fit to the emotions) including the feelings and emotional or affective qualities of the experience.
#4 Graphic Design: The "eye-candy or look and feel". Graphic design is widely known and it's similarity to UI Design in what is often called "visual design" by people like Luke W at Yahoo! (Luke is a graphic design by background but does great UI design and visual design today).
In a usability process, once wire-frames are finalized, they are graphically treated to enhance the interaction design with aesthetic flavor. Graphic design focuses on enhancing layout, buttons, colors, icons and branding elements. The focus of graphic design is to improve the “look and feel” or stylistic aspects of the design. Because graphic designers operate from the heart, they are often accused of producing "fluff". If you give a graphic designer user interface specifications, however, their results can be outstanding. I see it every day at Experience Dynamics in Portland.
#5 Interactive Design: This Art college degree type is largely a hybrid discipline that captures a little of everything. An Interactive Designer produces good Flash pieces, animation, graphic design and some database programming or HTML. At the heart an Interactive Designer is great at graphic design and has a sensitivity and sensibility for usability. I taught Interactive Designers at the Art Institute of Portland (Oregon USA) and I kept telling the school the course should be called "Interaction Design" not "Interactive Design" but they wouldn't listen! My mistake.
#6 Emotion Design: Emotion design comes from the field of usability and product design. Emotion design is concerned with the specific social, environmental, personal and intimate qualities of user experience. Emotion design is a fringe discipline within the usability and user research communities that is gaining an "I told you so" voice with products like Apple's iPhone creating so many "ooooh, ahhhhs" from customers. Emotion design is an approach that can inform the outcome of any of the design types. e.g. "This user is influenced by this perception, expectation, color, shape, feeling..."
Design for the Body
Design that impacts anthropomorphic processes (fit to the human body) including the social and physical contexts of the experience.
#7 Industrial Design: Physical products that we can all relate to...the most obvious-- a mobile device. Like graphic design, industrial design is easy to spot in everyday experience. Physical product design has origins that can be found at any local history museum. Since the dawn of time, human civilization's has been defined by its tool or artifact creation abilities. Physical products with "good design" are intuitive: they feel, sound, look and work elegantly. Good industrial designers have, for much of the 20th century, mastered physically many of the design types described above, creating an impressive history of design for the human body, senses, environment and mind in a way that transcends, evokes and transforms experiences the user performs with the product.
The final group below are methodologies and approaches encompassing the design techniques above. Let's take a quick look at some of these approaches or methodologies that cross into the blurry line of "design".
Holistic approaches/ methodologies
#8 User Centered Design: The overall industry and ISO standard methodology and set of techniques that places the user at the center of the design. User-centered design (UCD) involves three key activities: User research; UI prototyping and Usability Testing. UCD is iterative by nature and has the most impact if conducted early on in a software, product or web development process. Its methods and techniques and general approach to design are proven from an ROI perspective and are widely accepted in industry, academia and in government sectors.
#9 User Experience Design: A relatively new term that updates the term and discipline of UCD or "usability engineering". User experience adding a more holistic element to the technique of designing the user experience (on web sites or web applications). User Experience or UX design I consider more an approach or umbrella of techniques or a general approach. It is not a type of design per say, as its practitioners will inevitably conduct UI design, IA or interaction design as the deliverable of the UX design approach.
#10 Experience Design: Experience design is often used as a short hand for User Experience Design, but is largely considered with what I call Environmental Design, or the design of the experience in retail or open space environments. Again, Experience Design is a general umbrella approach or methodology that penetrates all design decisions but with an experiential agenda."What will the customer experience as the do X?", must have been what the Starbucks experience designers were thinking...
Retail and public spaces can greatly benefit from improved loyalty (attachment feelings, comfort and personalization) and productivity (learning, exploring, browsing) studies have found. Experience Design makes use of the context, social and environmental phenomenon as well as the feelings, perceptions and intuitions of the user in that context.
In Summary: Perhaps at this point you can understand why understanding "design" can be so ambiguous at times. Now that we're on the same page, if you hear "design" and you haven't already had the "what design do you mean?" discussion with the person you are talking to, take a few minutes to level set and get on the same "design page".
Okay, I have to go, there's an email from my designer that I am giving some designs to, based on our client review of designs that we are redesigning...;-)
Best Wishes,
Frank Spillers, MS
It's great to see excitement building for the Apple iPhone (launch expected late June '07). Korea's LG Prada, an iPhone competitor product, launched a few months ago in the UK.
Just this week a new touch screen device- Taiwan's HTC Touch was announced for release immediately in the UK and later this year in the US.
The hot attraction of course with the iPhone, the Prada and the Touch is that they offer touch and gesture-only user interaction. Clarification: Only the Apple iPhone offers gesture-like pinching interaction (eg. open-close; zoom in-out).
What's great about the excitement around these new phones is that they set a new precedent in communication device design for 2008-2010. They are, if you will, a generation up from the slide cover keyboard phones. These devices are hip, keyboard-free, MP3 and mobile Web-friendly.
Watch these demos if you are not familiar with how these new mobile devices work:
- YouTube Demo of the LG Prada touch-only phone interface
- YouTube Demo of the Apple iPhone- touch and gestural interface
- YouTube Demo of the HTC Touch- touch and button interface
Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini offered an early usability review of iPhone features, worth a read, but as one of our consultants pointed out- "how can you do a usability review of a device only using a demo from Apple's website? Is that a real usability evaluation?".
What is Multi-modal interaction?
Multi-modal interaction is an area of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) that has a long history of usability research and empirical study. The virtual reality and game design research community have been studying this commercially since the early 1980's with pioneering researchers such as Brenda Laurel at Atari.
Today researchers like Jeff Han, see images left, are meshing with industrial efforts to bring multi-modal
interaction to life. Last week, Microsoft announced Surface- an interactive coffee-table surface that responds to touch and gesture. Users can explore information linked to objects placed on the desktop (TMobile will use it in stores to encourage handset purchase decision support).
The scenario videos on the Microsoft Surface website are worth a look. Very well presented.
Also, if you haven't seen Jeff Han's TED conference presentation, it's an amazing must see
demo of his Surface-type work-space.
Why multi-modal interaction design?
Multi-modal design brings the spirit of HCI to life by harnessing the rich sensory input afforded by the human body-mind (touch, gesture, sight, sound, voice...smell, well not yet, but it's in the works).
As interface designers, we have really had to compromise with the flat and lifeless limitations of desktop PC's (windows, icons, menus) compared to the original vision of how humans should use computers advocated in the late 1960's:
Computer graphics and interface pioneer Ivan Sutherland told us our computers should not be mere 2D screens that provide information, but instead they should be 'windows upon which we look into a virtual world...where we can see, hear and feel' multi-sensory information.
I began studying multi-modal interaction ten years ago as part of my early virtual reality research. It's an area of interface design that is truly fascinating for it's potential. It's also an area of interface design that is challenging due to the context in which the user is interacting. As a designer the questions become:
"Which sensory pathway does the user have available to complete this goal in that context?"
"Which sensory system is the lead, which is the secondary?"
"How much sensory over-lap is available, tangible, appropriate?"
"How do users back out or recover from a screen event- in a dynamically changing physical environment?"
Does gesture and touch interaction work in other contexts...like cars?
For the past five years I have closely followed the emerging 'Internet in your car' trends in the automotive industry (aka telematics usability). A practical example I can share, which I've written about and spoken about at telematics automotive conferences, is the case of GM's OnStar. Several years ago, GM provided me with a fully loaded Cadillac CTS for a week that I used to evaluate the OnStar, a speech system for help, navigation, communication and additional information.
OnStar weighted it's user interface toward "voice" or speech interaction over a multi-modal interface. The result was a clunky system with a history of poor user adoption and satisfaction. In 2001, 60% of Onstar systems were switched off in the owner's vehicles. BMW on the other hand, weighted it's iDrive telematics solution to a knob-like control (tactile interaction) with 700 features in menus at the turn of a dial.
The result: eroded brand loyalty, confused and frustrated customers (including usability guru and BMW customer, Jakob Nielsen). Jakob Nielsen's wife said at the time she would never buy another BMW again...
The pattern in the design flaws for telematics human factors engineers?
Don't put all your "eggs in one basket" with regard to one modality.
It appears that neither GM nor BMW provided adequate multi-modal support, opting for a "lead" sensory system (speech, touch) over a mixed system.
I believe multi-modal is generally always better than singular modality (as an interaction design technique). But you must be careful if you are designing for multi-modal interfaces, as Oregon Graduate Institute Professor Sharon Oviatt reminds us in her Ten Myths of Multi-modal Interaction (PDF).
Best Wishes,
Frank Spillers, MS
Quick Google user, you need to look up a measurement; phone numer; UPS tracking code; address; mathematical formula ..."Didn't you know Google had a tool for that?"
Yes, Google has a tool for everything these days it seems, but it's not a consistent tool kit. Sometimes you get it and oftentimes you don't.
Is that why Google doesn't promote what I call their "world of widgets" (WoW's)? How is it some people know the secret handshake and many more don't?
This article focuses on why that is and speculates on whether Google may have taken a popular interaction design technique known to the usability community as "progressive disclosure" to heart, when deciding to roll out all those wonderful "WoW's" to you.
What's Google's problem with Hiding Information?
Well we know Google is very careful with their presentation layer (read user interface). Google's army of usability engineers must be under a lot of pressure. You don't win search out of Stanford because of your "I'm Feeling Lucky" button...
Side-note: So how do you win your market category? From my perspective it's no accident that you have a recipe in a few easy steps: 1) Your founders develop some solid technology; 2) Your founders respect and value usability and make sure it's entrenched in core infrastructure; 3) You get a usability leader on your technical board of advisory panel (Jakob Nielsen has been on Google's board for years); 4) You have some market conditions where everyone else thinks the average user configures interfaces. Instead, you decide simplicity is not just an Eastern philosophy, but a technology leadership imperative.
Google has come under a lot of criticism in the past few years for keeping that home page so simple that users don't know 90% of the features and widgets (tools) they offer even exist. Is that stupid or is it part of the plan?
If you look at how Google works, it only serves you up a tool when you "need" it. To your surprise (sometimes), "BAM!" an instant search result with some lightly-branded Google add-on.
Simplicity is sacred at Google
Google knows this is a problem, I think they just don't know what to do about it. How do I know? Look at how Gmail is being promoted on their home page: "Free email with 2.8GB storage and less spam. Try Gmail today." It seems to have become a common fixture with their "official" launch (Feb 07). With Desktop search Google started to add it to the bottom of each search results page, then other major products started to appear as contextual promotions for the new products.
Simplicity has become an imprint of their brand experience. Clutter that search page and you're likely to soil Google's virginity. The equivalent of putting words next to Nike's swoosh- you just don't do it ;-) (the swoosh stays a symbol without words, a testament to it's universality).
Is Google ignoring its early adopter "base"?
IT professionals who helped Google build the "base" in the late 1990's are starting to feel left in the cold by Google's simplicity (in a bad kind of way). Why? Because Google is like a box of chocolates that you have to explore to find the macadamia nut, because the little "contents map" is missing. User centered design pioneer Don Norman explains:
"Look, I like Google. It's a great search engine. But I am sick and tired of hearing people praise its clean, elegant look. Hell, all search engines have that clean elegant part to them: type your search terms into the box and hit "Enter."
"Oh," people rush to object, "the Google search page is so spare, clean, elegant, not crowded with other stuff."
True, but that's because you can only do one thing from their home page: search. Anybody can make a simple-looking interface if the system only does one thing. If you want to do one of the many other things Google is able to do, oops, first you have to figure out how to find it, then you have to figure out which of the many offerings to use, then you have to figure out how to use it. And because all those other things are not on the home page but, instead, are hidden away in various mysterious places, extra clicks and operations are required for even simple tasks — if you can remember how to get to them". from The truth about Google's so-called "simplicity" by Donald Norman, PhD
Norman speculates that this is reflective of the organizational culture. Matt at Signal vs. Noise agrees and further speculates that this un-tidyness is the "price you pay for innovation".
Progressive Disclosure as Business Model?
My guess is that Google is taking "progressive disclosure" too literally- from a business standpoint. Look at the problem: they are hiding what you don't need until you do need it. That is the spirit of progressive disclosure.
Reminder of the definition of progressive disclosure:
Progressive disclosure is an interaction design technique that sequences information and actions across several screens in order to reduce feelings of overwhelm for the user. By disclosing information progressively, you reveal only the essentials and help the user manage the complexity of feature-rich sites or applications.
The problem is, as a business- you don't know what Google has for you. Is this why Google Answers was shut down?? Google Answers was a great service for asking a question, answered by an expert. Just as Google announced it's shut-down, Yahoo! announced a re-launched "Web 2.0" style Yahoo! Answers with community features, intuitive user interfaces and more...
Google hides what it thinks you don't need until you, say, type in 'Vietnamese food portland', then you get enhanced results with Google Maps.
"BAM!"-- progressive disclosure to Google Maps... Any usability engineer would be proud. Except the surprise of it all is sometimes annoying (especially to IT professionals). And worse, the hidden WoW's are not consistent.
Even Google's 2-3 year private beta (wink, wink) release of Gmail (just officially launched last week) is a form of progressive disclosure. "It's here- let's get the tool out to your friends and colleagues, and if you really want it, they can disclose it to you". I would call this more of a clever marketing tactic but it seems to echo my analysis of progressive disclosure as a business model. I also use Google AdWords, Google Analytics and a few others and they do the same thing- for logging in to each- none are connected- each log-in progressively discloses another log-in...it can be really annoying.
Ironically, Jakob Nielsen is on Google's technical advisory board and he is a big proponent of progressive disclosure. Did Google misinterpret Jakob Nielsen?
I don't know, what do you think?
Best Wishes,
Frank Spillers, MS
Why the (feature) frenzy?
Historically, marketing says "software sells with more features" (or perceived features). There is a psychology (especially true in the United States) that the more you get when you buy something, the better the purchase decision.
Unfortunately, added 'bells and whistles' might feel like a better deal, but can turn into a nightmare when you (or your user) sit down with the software and use it.
A few words about features
Features. We love them and we hate them. Features you need, enhance your ability to complete tasks, and are easy to love. Features that get in your way or add extra effort, interpretation or exploration, can be a pain.
The field of Usability Engineering has proven that features if integrated tightly into a user's task flow can be powerful. Features born out of marketing or engineering ideas, not validated with user behavior, can end up being adoption blockers.
Oh, sure you need features to market and sell your product. That's where all this feature frenzy stuff started. Software marketers perfected the art of feature-worship back in the 1980's (starting with Apple's Guy Kawasaki, the guy who decided to ship the Apple IIx without a key feature--a floppy disk drive!). Microsoft, has relied on features to market products for years, but with XP shifted to more task-centered marketing strategies (Windows XP stood for x-perience at one time; for the first time menu features took on "task language" in XP). Windows Vista promises better task focus, but the jury is out on whether the new "task grouping" UI in Office 2007 is good or bad.
10 tips to getting feature-creep under control
The best way to tame feature frenzy (before it turns into the dreaded disease "featuritis") is to identify and understand your user's task flow. Here are ten steps that I use regularly to bring some discipline to feature creep when identifying user experience strategy and defining user interfaces.
1. Get task-focused. Conduct field studies, or Task Analysis, where you can get a bird's eye view of what your users are doing. What problems are they trying to solve and what is the context of the task environment (conditions and constraints in which tasks are performed)?
2. Map business requirements to user tasks. Business requirements are only as good as the relevancy features end up having for users. Focus groups and informal requirements gathering is not sufficient for an optimal user experience. Business Analysts need to take the lead from real world user data. If the business wants the user to do XYZ, how does that match to the reality of the tasks currently performed by the user?
3. Talk about user tasks not features. A common mistake teams make is to get caught up in proposed features and functionality. Keep your language in your meetings task-oriented. When feature discussions are dominating the conversation, can you find a way to turn the conversation toward user tasks?
4. Design for probability not possibility. Engineering requires the mind to think of infinite possibilities in search for "what could go wrong?" or "what is missing?". The reality for the average user, is that what they will probably end up using is a fraction of what you are offering. Now when you use Microsoft Word (or other program), do you use 90% of the features that are available? Did you even know half of them were there?
5. Validate features with user tasks. Features need to be tamed by validating them with real world user input. When you create personas, don't create them in a vacuum- make sure the fake characters are from the real world. Persona research will help identify tasks. How many features are you currently managing in your web application that haven't been validated against user tasks?
6. Map features to tasks. Introducing balance (equal representation of user needs) is the end goal of usability efforts. Once you have your features defined, you will want to do your due diligence and map them to user tasks. When prioritizing your features, do features come first, or tasks?
7. Create a feature-task matrix. Sorting out the features from the tasks can be helpful with a matrix. The more you can transform your features into tasks, the closer your design will reflect true ease of use. What percentage of your features match the tasks users will most likely perform?
8. Think scenarios first, use cases next. Use cases are good and fine, but they are a deliverable of best practices in programming (UML). Use cases describe system driven scenarios. Task scenarios describe probabilities of user behavior as validated through user observation. Have you ever made the mistake of referring to user tasks as "use cases"?
Footnote: They're not the same thing, but few people realize this- I'll cover this in an upcoming post.
9. Use tasks to test features, and features to test tasks. Having identified your user's tasks, you can use these tasks in your usability tests. Usability testing is essentially a feature audit with the primary question: Is it working the way the user expects it to?
10. Use diary studies to evaluate feature adoption over time. Giving users diaries that they can record their thoughts and experiences can help you capture data easily missed in shorter visits. These diaries or "cultural probes" can be extremely valuable for reporting problems with features or "wish list" items- features users want that are not quite there or not presented in a way that makes sense to them. If you've given your users a survey, what's stopping you from sending them home with a diary that can give you an eye into how your features get actually used over time?
Conclusion
Task-oriented designs containing task-oriented features make users feel more successful. Take the simple example of playing video on the web...
Case study:
Why is YouTube so popular? For one, they make playing the actual video easy (by using Flash as a platform). Both Microsoft and Apple continue to degrade the user experience with the politics of media player choice: Windows Media Files are annoying to play in Windows Media Player; likewise Apple Quick Time files are annoying to play on a PC (note: I am both a Windows and Mac user). YouTube fills the vacuum in media player politics by playing with Flash (and making the play button a huge arrow over the start of the video file). File format compatibility and interoperability is a huge win for the user experience.
Note: If you are offering video on your site, look to YouTube for emerging standards in user interface design and display. If you are not using Flash for video, you need to provide options- don't assume QuickTime files will play smoothly on a PC- as MarketingSherpa recently did-they don't always. (Link to conference video promo page with video in QuickTime only format!)
Remember how you deploy features in an application must be guided by real world understanding of users and their tasks. Without task validation and prioritization, you can easily fall into "feature frenzy".
Feature creep as a business and development model has outlived it's usefulness with numerous examples in the graveyard of software history. Thankfully, new Web 2.0 designs are inherently trying to be be mindful of the Importance of User Experience (poster).
Best Wishes,
Frank Spillers, MS
It will be if you don't do something about it.
At Experience Dynamics, (a Portland, Oregon usability consultancy) we recently helped one of our Fortune 10 clients with some usability testing on a product that was actively being improved for usability.
The client pointed us to a blog entitled "Worst Experience Ever" where the blogger recited his experience with the actual process the program manager was interested in usability testing. This blogger's posting had drawn the attention of the entire product team (yes, they are listening- keep writing). So, we tracked down the blogger and invited him to participate in our usability test. Needless to say, our client and the blogger were both delighted! As it turned out the blogger and other users were experiencing the same problems- he just had the wherewithal to write about it. The outcome was positive for both the end-user (a customer and fan) and the program manager who was able to directly include this user in the usability testing.
This is an interesting case of how the web can put you in touch with your users directly.
Bottom Line: Look to bulletin boards, forums, blogs, private and analyst reviews (and user comments on both) for input and feedback about weak areas with your product, brand, website or feature offerings. User researchers are now studying these information sources for leads into user thoughts, opinions and perceptions relating to product usability-- what is now dubbed "virtual ethnography".
A positive and sustained User Experience is the ultimate public relations
Think Google. In 1998, Google began providing a consistent and simplified search user experience (search box interface as well as search results). Popularity with the search engine grew in the dot com sector and with IT pros initially (many of whom still use it like they did from those early days). Google created a great public relations campaign by directly sustaining and nurturing a positive user experience.
Experiential Public Relations
The web is looking for democratization of content, because arrogance either accidental or inherent is not an option anymore. Word of mouth is now a highly legitimate concern of online marketers everywhere. For more see WOMMA the word of mouth association set up to promote awareness in this area. Experience shapes and influences perceptions, loyalty and word-of-mouth referrals.
Sustaining Criticism from Usability People
When a usability person (self-taught or classically trained) rants, they usually drop the roof on you. Usability is powerful and allows for multiple vantage points into an issue- you see business, you see technology, you see marketing rules and pitfalls wrapped around the user interface.
I have this theory that the more you learn about usability, the more elegant your bitching about poorly executed technology becomes. Does this explain Jakob Nielsen's "problem"? (opens How Usable is Jakob Nielsen? article)
The simple rule for sustaining the attack of a usability person is this: if your application or product has caused a usability evangelist to bark, you had better fix or address the problem, today. Of course, this advice comes to you from a usability consultant. Read more to see what happens if you don't heed this advise.
Another personal example from our recent deployment of a custom shopping cart. Due to the large number of international orders we had to deploy an international shipping cart for our Importance of User Experience poster. On a late night deployment of the cart our developer kicked a switch on the way out and disabled a form error checking element. A few days later we were alerted to a post by former Blogger CEO (now Odeo) Evan Williams. Thankfully Evan accepted our gratitude for waking us up to the Experience Irony and was kind enough to repost It Pays to Blog.
Here's an Interesting Line up of User Experience Offenders (flogged in cyberspace)
1) Apple- from usability guru Bruce Tognazzini with "Top Ten (Nine) Reasons the Apple Dock Still Sucks". Tog's conclusion: "Keep the Dock as long as it helps close sales, but provide the real tools needed by people with serious work"
2) Adobe- from usability guru Jakob Nielsen with "PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption". Jakob's conclusion: "For online reading, however, PDF is the monster from the Black Lagoon. It puts its clammy hands all over people with a cruel grip that doesn't let go".
3) Macromedia (now Adobe)- from usability guru Jakob Nielsen with "Flash 99% bad". Jakob's conclusion: "About 99% of the time, the presence of Flash on a website constitutes a usability disease". Note: read the bottom of the article for more kind use of words about Adobe since they became Nielsen's client- which for the record, was Adobe's reverse-PR coup used to turn around the negative Flash publicity.
4) Microsoft- from CNET with "Five things you love and hate about Vista (Beta 2)"- June 19th 2006. CNET's take: "But based on what I've seen after living with Windows Vista beta 2 for a week, here are five things I think you'll like about the new operating system--some of which might persuade certain fence-sitters to upgrade--and five things that may convince others to stick with Windows XP for a few more years". Note: during the summer months, I saw more caustic analyst reviews of Vista Beta than praise. The top ones included error message handling SNAFU's like this one...(Flickr image) or this one.
5) MySpace- from Wired magazine with "Web 2.0 Winners and Losers". Wired's conclusion: MySpace is a loser; "The user interface is clunky and counterintuitive".
6) Sharp- another personal example. When I wrote this review of the Sharp Zaurus PDA for NewsFactor Network, I concluded (after doing some usability testing with the device first): "Enterprise deployment of the Zaurus may be another story, but from a productivity and technical standpoint, the Zaurus fails to meet the usability standard that has been set by other popular PDAs, such as Palm, iPaq, Treo or BlackBerry. In a highly competitive PDA market, ease of use is a distinct differentiator. On a scale of 1 to 5, users in our study gave the Zaurus a 2.0 rating". It's interesting to note that when my review came out, the first call I had the next morning was from the Public Relations firm that was handling the "Zaurus account" who insisted it was not a PDA but a "data terminal"... <sigh>.
How to avoid bad public relations due to poor user experience
1) Fix the problem and let your users know you are doing something about it if possible. When this angry blogger complained about Salesforce.com's poor performance, the Salesforce CEO replied to users (and blogged about it- now removed). See how Salesforce handled it here. If this can't be done, see #4 below with examples.
2) Use usability testing to flush out problems with mismatched tasks and expectations. Users want to be successful and bring expectations to your user interface. If their brain wants to go one way and your design has them go the other, you'll likely create "cognitive dissonance". Usability testing early and often throughout a release will help remove many of the embarrasing problems that are often structural and difficult to fix later on. These are far worse than technical issues or bugs that can be squashed quickly typically.
3) Let analysts and the media know what is happening if possible. If your users are having issues, analysts will be having them too and will write about them. For example, earlier last year I noticed Firefox performance and crashing (Feb-March time period). I asked a colleague and sure enough the same issues were reported. A few weeks later, this Business Week post appeared with similar complaints.
An interesting side note with this Firefox VP interview (and others in the past), when user experience is touted, users in the comments redirect the conversation to the huge memory bleed that is core to Firefox's architecture. To my knowledge FFX acts like it's not there but it's users don't ;-) As one users said, "stop focusing on usability and fix the huge memory leak!".
4) Be tactful with your users no matter how cheesed-off they are. I need to tell you there are a myriad of usability issues with Typepad (the blog software used for this blog), some small- some major. Half of my support tickets are pleas to Typepad to improve known usability issues. And it turns out many Typepad users are also frustrated. One user blogged about the less than perfect Typepad experience and after hearing Typepad's response concluded: "Typepad doesn't suck. In fact it's pretty sweet". Typepad then artfully followed up with a We Heard You message.
Contrast this to the way project management software Basecamp (also has it's share of unintuitive functionality) handled their angry users recently:
"Jason Fried: JWright, thanks for the advice on how we should develop our products, but we feel like we have it under control. We know what we're doing." (posted on this blog)
Interestingly this handling is not an isolated incident for Basecamp who experienced a lot of success last year with increased subscriptions. In one Basecamp forum thread, Fried implied that a disgruntled user should go create a rival product. Several users have abreacted to Basecamp's rough handling and even set up a Basecamp Sux site.
Parting thought: Is Web 2.0's "perpetual beta" philosophy a way of inoculating against the responsibility of dealing with online PR from poor user experience?
This seminar is available with the slides and audio presentation here (requires brief registration, privacy protected).
Transcript of Personas LIVE!:
Frank
Spillers Welcome...
For those of you who have joined us today for Personas Live – an interview with
Personas book authors John Pruitt Pruitt and Tamara Adlin Adlin who we have
live on the phone here. I’m Frank Spillers Spillers. This presentation, or
seminar, is aimed at understanding a little bit more about what went into the
publication and writing of the book. It’s a unique opportunity to hear from the
author’s themselves, John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin. We’ve got something exciting
stuff for you here, so let’s look at the agenda for today. So first up is the
Persona Lifecycle which is one of the major methodologies or themes that the
book wraps itself around. We’re going to look at a couple of case studies. Then
we are going to look at some Persona best practices and discuss the issue of
using personas in a way that maximizes the organizational return on investment.
And then we are going to open it up for some questions and answers with the
authors. Before we begin let’s do a little brief introduction. Tamara Adlin
Adlin is formerly the Customer Experience Manager at Amazon.com and John Pruitt
Pruitt is currently with a Senior User Experience Lead at Microsoft with Vista, Tablet and other projects. Tamara Adlin, would
you like to tell us a little bit more about yourself?
Tamara
Adlin Yes.
About a year ago I left Amazon after helping to set up their customer
experience group for their Platform services, allowing lots of other online
retailers to use the Amazon technology behind their site. I then started my own
consulting company called Adlin Inc. I do
a lot of customer experience consulting for online retailers, other online
businesses and also traditional product design.
Frank
Spillers Okay
thanks. John Pruitt, give us a little bio.
John
Pruitt Yes. I’ve been at Microsoft for a little over eight years
now, mostly with the Windows team but I’ve been about three years with MSN,
working on MSN Explore and a variety of other web products over there. I’ve been
with the tablet and, mobile PC division for a little over a year and a half,
closing in on two years now. We are working on getting the mobility side of Windows
Vista out the door as well as some new products like ultra mobile PC’s and some
new stuff that’s coming down the pipe.
Frank
Spillers And
I’m Frank Spillers Spillers and I help run the user experience and usability consultancy
firm Experience Dynamics. I’ve
been working with Personas for about 9 years now. It’s a pleasure to have you
both with us today and thank you so much for joining us. I just wanted to let
our audience know, that this is actually a re-run and we are recording this
session of the quick release we did of a similar presentation. And there is a
little bit more content in today’s session. That had an overwhelming response
so we decided to re-it again here today. Just a few weeks after the original
publication is where this session first came together. The reason that we
wanted to bring the authors on and talk about this book is because I think it
is a major landmark in the usability and user experience community. For the
first time we now have one place that we can refer to that is really
interesting and solid and useful information. If this book isn’t on everyone’s
bookshelf in the next few months then I really would wonder what they were
doing, because I think this is just a valuable asset. So, thank you so much for
putting this book together. Why don’t you start by telling us a little bit
about the structure of the book. How is
it laid out and why?
Tamara
Adlin Well, the first thing I want to say
is thanks for saying that. When we originally started off to do this book, our
idea was to put together a quick practical bag that was going to be a couple of
hundred pages and our intent was certainly to do that. The when we started diving
in we realized that there was so much to say and so many stories to get from so
many practitioners – that’s a big part of the book by the way – stories from practitioners
who are inserted all the way through as case studies. And the whole thing just
grew and grew till eventually it became the heavy book that it is today. But it
was also our purpose to make it a rich report, a book that you could thumb
through and find ideas, no matter where you are in the persona process.
John
Pruitt As Tamara Adlin said, our book really started with case
studies. We had organized a couple of workshops at the UPA (Usability
Professionals Association) back in 2001 and 2002. At those workshops we had
brought together persona practitioners from around the industry. And at the end
of those full day workshops the general consensus was that we need a book on
personas about the methodology, on how to do it well, and how to use them
right, with case studies and best practices. So Tamara Adlin and I and another
contributor Holly Jamieson decided we should do a book. But we thought it
should be a really small book, about a hundred pages.
Tamara
Adlin And we thought we could do it in
nine months…..
John Pruitt Yeah we thought it would take about nine months, but it just
grew and grew.
Frank
Spillers So
it turned out to have around 725 pages or so of content in here. Why should
someone buy this book, and put another 700 or so pages on their reading list?
Tamara
Adlin Well, that’s actually a big challenge
and I’m glad you brought that up. This isn’t a book that we intend for you to
sit down and read cover to cover. The Lifecycle, which you’ll hear a little bit
more about in a minute, came out of the original workshop which we already
talked about. We had a lot of practitioners there, and we looked at a lot of
their methodologies and we talked about it. And after the first workshop we
realized that personas seem to have a lifecycle just like regular people. And
they go through a fairly predictable set of phases, when you try to create them
and integrate them into a company. And when you look it at through a persona
lifecycle model, you notice that personas tend to run into snags or failures at
a fairly predictable time too. So we created the book around a lifecycle
approach so that could we could talk about how to integrate personas in with other
methodologies that are out there. We certainly don’t think they replace other methods
but rather they augment it. Also, so that we could talk about how this process integrates
with other development lifecycles. So, like this slide says, we give the intro
and overview and the background on where the personas idea came from and how our
lifecycle is structured. Chapters 3 through 7 are each on one of the phases of
the persona lifecycle. Chapters 8 through 12 are invited chapters that we
thought would introduce interesting ideas, research and also methods to the
body of the book. So it is designed to flip through, get a sense of what’s going
on, and maybe read a chapter at a time as you hit each stage in the lifecycle.
And as you hit any snags, as you most likely will, because everyone does, you
can flip through and get ideas, find out how other people have gotten through
it, get inspiration and get tools because we really wanted it to be practical.
And really the only way to practically handle a 700 page book is to use the
pieces as necessary and that’s hopefully what you’ll do.
Frank
Spillers And
you also have these sidebars which are really interesting. I had the privilege
of contributing three or four of these sidebars to your book, Why the
practitioner involvement? Was that just to pad it out? Why are there so many
stories? Practically every page you turn over there are stories from the field.
What’s the purpose of that?
John Pruitt I
think that came out of the fact that we started with workshops and with other
practitioners. The more we talked to other practitioners we realized that the
persona method isn’t and probably couldn’t be just a single approach. Like user
centered design generally, you really have got to fit the method to your
organization, your particular product space, or service space, like what are
you creating, building or selling. We personally found a lot of value in the
stories and best practices, and the case studies that people were bringing to
us, and we wanted to bring those out in the book as well and really highlight
them. I think that’s really the value of the book. To in and read these, in
some cases really detailed case studies about how they applied personas, how
they conceived of personas and what they did for their group. I mean they
literally are almost one per page. We have hundreds of little side bars through
the book.
Frank
Spillers So
the book almost reflects the state of the practitioner community in terms of
how everybody is trying to work together to try and figure out how best to
utilize personas and the user research in their user centered design and their usability
efforts. I need to say I think they are absolutely fantastic and if you haven’t
looked at these sidebars and looked at the book – it’s a really nice design and
a really nicely organization that compliments the state of the other
practitioner community. I just want to say for those of you who are listening
or are just joining us, we are speaking with John Pruitt Pruitt and Tamara
Adlin Adlin the authors of the “Persona
Lifecycle Handbook” just released a few months ago. If you are interested
in asking a question go ahead and “chat it” in the left-hand window. Those of
you who pick up the recording won’t be able to do that obviously. But for those
who are live on the call now, go ahead and chat that in there and I’ll pick up those
questions and field them as we go along. So let’s look at this lifecycle. You
know the more I think about this, this is more of a book that’s about helping
you and your organization use personas strategically and operationally. It’s
not really about writing a persona, although that is in there, the use of the
actual tactical technique. But the beauty of the book which I think was deliberate
on your part, was to have that organizational perspective and of how to use it
in your company of where your at.
Tamara
Adlin Absolutely.
We just found that there was so much information about persona projects hitting
these huge snags. We were in this lucky position of having an overview of so
many stories from other practitioners that we could start to see a pattern. And
that’s really how we started to organize the book. Everybody has become really
excited about personas, since Alan Cooper wrote “The
Inmates Are Running the Asylum” back in 1999. And the problem with that
book, in the sense that everybody got excited about it, but nobody knew how to
do this method. And that’s fine, no critique of Cooper on that. But people did
get excited about it, but nobody knew how to do it. And when they tried it they
would run into problems. And I think that is because personas are asking an
entire organization to change in some fairly significant ways. They are asking
organizations to look more closely and more carefully at user data way earlier
in the process than most organizations are used to. They are asking for
customer focus that’s really walking the walk and not just talking the talk.
They are asking them to think about users every single time we have a meeting
about this product. And if you don’t address the way that you are asking for
change, then the effort is going to fail because the inertia of old methods and
the typical lifecycles are just too strong.
Frank
Spillers Sure,
that makes a lot of sense. I actually brought a slide up here since you
mentioned the book “The Inmates are Running the Asylum”. And a lot of people
attribute personas to Cooper here, in terms of the starting point in the modern
use of personas in 1998 and 1999. So people were left hanging, and that was one
of the criticisms of the book. Your book fills the gap, which people have been
hungry for over the last four or five years it seems.
Tamara
Adlin We were certainly hoping so, yes.
Frank
Spillers Let’s
talk about that lifecycle then. What is the persona lifecycle?
John
Pruitt Well, the persona lifecycle is five stages that we related
to the human procreation process. The initial stage, which we call “Family planning”,
is really about organizational introspection. It is doing what we do as
user-centered design people, kind of turned on our own organization. What do we
do as a process? How do we push users into the center of our design effort? Do
we already do that? Do we do user testing? What other kind of user research do
we do? How do we design our products and decide on features and that sort of
thing? So, it’s looking at ourselves and then doing some analysis of “Does this
persona methodology fit, and how can I best make it fit” So, it’s a planning
process. The second part of it is also going out, and collecting the data that
we sometimes already have, or generating a new data collection effort to inform
what personas we need to create. That is to really provide the meat of persona
creation. The second stage is conception and gestation and that is exactly what
it sounds like. It is the phase where you create your personas out of data, and
in some cases you create them out of educated guesses and assumptions. And then
you go through a process of maturing those initial personas into something
that’s really substantial and substantiated. The third stage is called birth
and maturation and that’s really about getting your personas out and into your
team, so that they become alive and your team recognizes who they are. It’s
also introducing the persona methodology as well as kicking off a communication
campaign that focuses on your personas as a progressive disclosure of
information and regular updated basis so that personas don’t just get
introduced and then die on the vine. The fourth stage is called adulthood and
that’s really when the personas themselves are mature. They are beginning to be
known on the team, and they have got to have a job to do. They are adults now,
and they need to contribute to your organizational society. So it’s about
getting personas to help you to design activities and product decision making,
and through the development stage. So it’s in the planning part at the
beginning and the part in the middle as well as at the release part. So that
when your product is going out to market, your personas have something to do
there as well for you.
Frank
Spillers So are we talking at a project level that all this is
happening? Or are we talking at an organizational level over a period of years.
So, is this months or years, or is it both?
John
Pruitt It’s actually both.
Initially you need to think about the project that you are doing personas for.
Is it a product or service, a software product, a hard product or a goods
product. In some cases as in web products, that may be a six month process. For
Windows Vista that was a five year development cycle. So adulthood is about
applying personas through that entire development process. If you are fortunate
enough to do it, and have the bandwidth and or support from your upper
management to think about personas and user-centered design across your entire
organization, so not just a specific project or a single product but groups,
suites or families of products. This applies to that as well. The final stage
is called lifetime achievement and retirement and that it really about when
your product has gone to market and you want to recognize what the personas
have done for you, if anything. It’s about ROI – return on investment. It’s
about really being accountable. We invested time and effort into personas. Did
they deliver something? And if so, what is that? So that chapter of the book
really talks about different kinds of ROI and how do you measure what personas
have done for you. And then the retirement phase is about starting the cycle
all over. So if you were going to do the next version of your product, or if
you were going to go into a related project area or starting something entirely
new, do your personas live on, do you retire them, do you reincarnate them, or
do you reuse some of the data. If you look at the persona lifecycle diagram it
is kind of circular, but it’s actually spiral in shape. That’s because the
persona lifecycle doesn’t always turn a full circle. It actually continues to
grow and change and your personas will evolve over time. That’s how you think about
your target customers.
Frank
Spillers I wanted to ask Tamara Adlin what is the deal with these
fears and these circles – can you clarify that for us?
Tamara
Adlin Sure.
I want to add one quick comment. I think that two of the places that
practitioners will find the most initial value especially those who have tried
personas already, are in the conception and gestation phase and the adulthood
phase. There are lots of new ideas in all of these phases but the thing we’ve
gotten the most positive feedback on is conception and gestation which shows
really talks in practical ways, step by step, how to get from raw data to personas. And adulthood,
where I would say 90% of the personas efforts fail, people put posters up on
the wall, and then expect them to magically work. But in adulthood, again, it’s
very practical and it tells you how to actually use them in an everyday
environments. Going back to the spiral, we thought long and hard about this
graphic. We wanted each of the circles to give you a sense of how much time and
effort, relatively speaking, you are going to spend in each phase and a sense
of how they morph into each other through the transparency. And the cyclical
nature of it. We wanted something that was very eye-catching and sort of
captured the idea in an unusual way. And that’s how we came up with this. And
you should have seen all the drawings we went through to get here. So, that’s
where that came from.
Frank
Spillers Okay. I want to ask you a question about retirement and
lifetime achievement. That’s the one that when I first saw it I wasn’t sure
what that meant. I thought of the beanie baby, where it gets retired or thrown
away. Do you take your user profiles and put them up on the shelf when you are
done with them? Or pull the poster down, or whatever the case may be. How does
that play out with a product that has a product for say one target customer that
they are working with over a number of years, say five or ten years. Do you
just keep refreshing the persona data or do you literally throw them away and
start all over again and then its time for another product to be launched at
that target audience?
Tamara
Adlin I
love the analogy to beanie babies. No one has ever said that before and I think
it’s great. Let’s pull that analogy a little further. Maybe you grow out of
your little lion beanie baby. Maybe your company has launched a particular
product and now they are moving on to something new, which is related to the
old product, but it’s not exactly the same. Or maybe they have been working on
the same products for many years. Or maybe they are working on B2 of a product.
And so that’s analogous to maybe you grow out of loving your beanie baby by
just putting it on a shelf. Or maybe you just stay in love with it like the
Velveteen Rabbit so it becomes real. So anyway, to get more concrete about this
– its retirement, reuse or reincarnation. Either you are moving on to a product
that’s not related to the first product that you created or you if you have
made the personas come alive in the minds of your team you have to figure out
how to undo that to be ready for the next set of personas. On the other hand,
maybe you are going to do V2 or V3 or Version X of your product and you find
that the persona has evolved a little bit. You’ve released the first version
and now Mary didn’t know anything about online banking, and now maybe she knows
a little bit about online banking and so now you are going to have to look a
little bit at the data and how the world had changed and maybe she might have
evolved a little bit . Reincarnate means well maybe it’s not Mary anymore, but
maybe the data you used to create Mary might go into Meredith. So, every single
time, what we suggest is to figure out what you need out of personas for the
next round, how much you are going to have to introduce, new or revived
personas. But at the heart of the effort you have to go through and look back at
your raw data again and determine if it’s still relevant and how you are going
to use that in the persona effort
Frank
Spillers Okay. Let’s talk about the idea of personas. If you are not
using the word personas you might be using user profiles or something else. Is
that okay? There’s been a lot of buzz and what seems like a lot of hype over
the last few years, less so now – but around 2002-2004 it seemed like everybody
had personas, and everybody had a profile of their customers. Tell us a little more
about the terminology of using personas.
John
Pruitt Sure. The concept of
personas has been around for a long time. Longer than Cooper’s book which came
out in 1999. Cooper re-conceptualized what personas were and also coined the
term “personas” which popularized the idea. But abstractions of user’s
representations of individuals that are related to groups of people but are
caricatures of them have been around for a number of years. But really it began
way back in industrial design with a book by Henry Dreyfuss (I believe). And
this has gone on and been captured by various marketing folks in terms of
representations of user segments and market profiles, user profiles, customer
profiles in that regard. The flavor of what’s included in those representations
differs. So for marketing purposes, not all of these include photos and try to
make the customer feel extremely real, or realistic and have a personality. But
they all capture essential information about who your target audience is, so
that you can do a better job of decision-making with those users in mind.
Frank
Spillers So how about data-sources then. This is something in my
side-bar that I felt was a very important issue in terms of differentiating
where your data comes from when you fill the persona or user profile. Is it
enough to take your marketing demographics for example this is Charlie, he
makes $70-75K, he is 30 years old and likes to play with gadgets. Is that
enough? Or does that have to come from ethnographic studies, such as a day in the
life, two weeks, five week, five month studies with the target audience and getting
deep into their behavior.
Tamara
Adlin We
had really rich conversations about this over the years that we worked together
on this project. In fact, one of the first debates that John Pruitt and I had
was what data you actually needed for personas. So the way I would answer this
is that it’s always best to start to create your personas out of richly varied
data. In the best case scenario you have ethnographic research, you have market
research. You have research from the US
government on the behaviors of people similar to the people that you are
targeting. You have a huge range of information. However, what I think we found
is that the focus that personas can give you is so valuable in an organization that
even if you base your personas on raw assumptions, or create what Don Norman
effectively called “ad-hoc personas”. Which at the very least get everybody
aligned in their assumptions about the users. If you asked around in your
organizations right now, for people to describe the user that you are
targeting, you would be surprised at how much variety you would get. So even if
you just align the assumptions in your organization, personas can be incredibly
effective because the focus outweighs any of the risks of them not being
“correct”. However, the more data you can use, certainly the better. Certainly
for buy in, and certainly for comfort in the entire organization in focusing on
the personas.
John
Pruitt I want to add something,
going back to your original question there as well. Part of what Alan Cooper
really added to the notion of customer representations, is making them real and
giving them personality and substance. And in Alan’s case in particular,
there’s a big focus on making sure the personas have goals, aspirations and
motivations behind why they would be using your product, and what do they do in
life, and what matters to them. And I think it’s that human-ness that personas
have, that take them way far beyond other representations like market
segmentation and user classes of those kind of thing. There become very
powerful proxies for our customer targets.
Frank
Spillers So for example, the agency “Organic” has what they call a “Persona
Room” and they have developed a scenario of the person. They had a stage
designer come in and build a living room. I don’t know what they are trying to
test or trying to create, but the idea is to bring the design team in to
empathize and build out. What Levis (the jeans company) does
is conducts studies and recreates the closets of people. From their
ethnographic fields they will come back and rebuild the teenagers’ closet in
their offices, and use that as a tool. The criticism that some bloggers have
made about Organics personas room is that they never mention that their persona
recreations are built on real data. They are not gathered from any type of user
intercepts or interviews. Is it enough to emphasis like that, to just say we
are going to emphasize and we know our customers. Or do people actually need to
budget for field studies and spend the money to go out there and touch base and
make contact with their customers and really get to know them and their goals
and so forth?
Tamara
Adlin It
depends on how advanced the organization is. You’d be surprised how many
organizations out there are still doing very self-centered design. They are
just thinking about what they would want. If that’s the case, then anything
that could bounce you out of that self-centered design, at least to have a
little bit of empathy with your target user group is better than what you were
doing before. If a company really does say that they are doing user centered
design, they may or may not actually be doing what we call tree user centered
design where you really go out there and gather a lot of data. The purpose of personas
with respect to data: one way to start thinking about that is to make the data
useable itself within the organization. The job of developers is not to analyze
customer data. The job of developers is to develop. Our job as customer
centered design folks or user researchers is to do that research, and get it to
those developers in a way that will actually enhance their daily work and
inform it with data. That’s one way to look at personas. As a communication
technique. And of course, to your point: in some cases in some organizations
you really have to be able to say, hey, here is the raw data. You want to go
take a look at it, take a look at it, you’re more than welcome to. And we suggest
that you make the raw data available within your organization, say on an
intranet site. Once people do that once or twice, they tend to start trusting
the personas a lot more. They don’t really want to read all of the raw data.
They just want to know that you’ve read all the raw data and interpreted it
wisely in the persona.
Frank
Spillers Is there a credibility issue there John Pruitt, with regard
to where the data comes from say for example in a Microsoft type environment?
John
Pruitt Absolutely. So, when
you create assumption personas, which we think are extremely useful and
powerful, we also think you need to make sure it’s clear that these are
assumption personas. So, you always want to maintain a sense of credibility, in
terms of how far can we push these things and have our assumptions been validated
in any way. So, credibility for the personas is something that does come up and
we have a slide later on in this deck where we talk about some of the issues
with personas and maybe we’ll come back to that in a minute. One thing I do
want to add related to going out and visiting customers. A really powerful
thing that we have seen happen with personas is that once you have the personas
in place and the team starts to become familiar with them, then part of the
communication plan we think, should be going and finding out real
representatives of those personas. So if you have the Abby persona or the
Patrick persona then you recruit some of those for either field studies or lab
studies. You bring them in or you go out and visit them and you bring your team
along with you tell them “Okay today we are going to go and see two different
Abby’s. And one of the Abby’s is a man, surprisingly enough”. And they see
these instances of the persona in real life. Every time I have seen this happen
your team mates go away thinking “Man, that guy was such an Abby, I can’t
believe it”. It brings the persona all that much more into focus and really
helps people understand who the persona is, and what the essence of this
persona is.
Frank
Spillers So, it’s a little bit like a usability test where if you
bring in your team or your executives and have them see, hear and feel the user
struggle and succeed its much more powerful than a report or a graph.
John
Pruitt Absolutely. And in
fact what I’m suggesting here is that on top of that you call your participants
by the persona name that they represent. So we do that as we bring people into
lab studies. We say “Today we’ve got two Patricks’ and a Sandra and an Abby”.
And when we report our findings back we say things like “The Sandra’s had these
kinds of issues or reacted to the prototype in this way”. And it really is a
powerful thing.
Frank
Spillers So let’s talk about why personas work. With reference to
the naming of them, how effective have you found that in your own experience. I
want to share an anecdote before I do. On a recent
blog posting the former Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble on his Scobelizer blog was talking
about the ditching of the name whatever it was. The blog post was called
“Ethically Bankrupt Personas”. If you follow the interaction of the developer
and Scoble, basically they are getting hung up partly on the name and the
naming of it. They say “Let’s get rid of Eric or Bobby” or whoever it was. Do
you find that people get attached to names, faces and races? There was an issue
with Cooper that came up a few years ago and someone was asking “Should we
include different races?” What’s your personal experience around the
effectiveness or the confusion around that?
Tamara
Adlin I
think that’s actually really funny. Because all of the people on that blogpost
I looked at are using the name which means that the persona is actually
working. But the fact that they are saying “Let’s get rid of Mike” or whoever,
means that they all realize there’s a Mike and they know who he is. If they
want to get rid of him that’s one thing. And they know about Mike versus
Saundra versus Abby or whatever, but the alternative would then be saying “the
administrator” or the user.
John
Pruitt Or not talking about
users at all.
Tamara
Adlin That’s
right. So I love that. So if they don’t like the name, if they don’t resonate
with the details of the persona that’s one thing. But that’s a very different
level of conversation, much more detailed in terms of users and goals, than it
would have been if they had said “I don’t want to talk about the user” which
never would have happened. That kind of debate with developers is delicious.
Frank
Spillers Is that one of the outcomes of persona process is to get
that dialogue going about the users
Tamara
Adlin Right.
All of a sudden you are having that discussion about the users. I just think
that blog is one of the best arguments for personas that I have ever seen. The
fact that developers are saying lets get rid of this one. And there is a big
debate about stereotypes and about racial equity or gender equity in personas.
But I think the key is to remember that you’re trying to capture real human
goals, needs and behaviors. And if those goals, needs and behaviors vary
according to gender or race, I mean when you are talking about a system for
people to enter their password into a US
Frank
Spillers So since personas are grounded in behavior, they typically
tend to generalize based on behavioral attributes. And in the book there is
that separation. In fact early on in the book, one of the sidebars that I
contributed to was the distinction between a marketing persona and a design
persona.
Tamara
Adlin That’s
right. Marketing personas are for targeting. They are asking things like what
magazines does this person read? Where should we advertise? How should we let
them know about this new product? Which is very different than saying what
goals do people have when they actually use the product? And if you are doing
marketing then you need to know the age range, the gender, in many cases
perhaps ethnic background, depending on the product. That’s why marketing and
product design are two different animals. It’s a different set of needs.
Frank
Spillers When I get asked that question in persona trainings the way
I usually answer it around should we use races and different genders is that
generally personas are descriptions of behaviors that are extrapolated hopefully
out of real and concrete user observation in their settings. It’s the general
practice to have diversity and to have awareness of different races and genders
and abilities and to include those. I’ll even do that just as a way to remember
who I’m serving. One of my users is an international user for example. So I’ll
include someone who is not North American just as a reminder so that when I am
presenting the data, so that I can say “Oh yes and by the way the user in this
country, in China or in India, struggles particularly with these localization issues for example".
Tamara
Adlin Yes.
And in that case it doesn’t matter.
Frank
Spillers I think we have a question. Let’s take our question now.
Then we are going to move into case studies. I have just been putting up a few slides
there with a quote from Alan Cooper about designing for one person or audience.
There have been some really interesting questions on the Internet related to
“BaseCamp” the project management tool. Should you design your user needs or
should you just design to a general audience. Too much to get into in this
discussion though. So here’s a question: “Have personas been proven to be the
best design and/or marketing strategy tool versus more standard design
techniques which view the customer base as being more diverse than a single
persona and thus segmented accordingly?”. This is segmentation versus
behavioral slicing issue: “Are there concrete measurements of the success ROI for
implementing personas versus traditional design marketing approaches?” This is a
great question.
John
Pruitt Yes, great question.
So the answer is – are personas the best method? There is no data out there
that says they are the best method. In a certain way I wouldn’t ask a question
that way. The reason is because what personas are is a way of getting your team
focused on end users. I really think the best approach is to think of them in a
supplemental way to other user centered design work and other proven market
research efforts. We really believe that the best personas, start with good
market research and segmentation data. You then build personas from a variety
of additional data sources including qualitative field research and the graphic
type research to really get a good rounded view of what your end user is. So, describing
personas in that way is supplemental. They are not just a single method.
Because they can also be applied to a lot of different aspects of your
development process including early on decision making, some aspects of product
design including visual design and styling. They can influence and be a part of
the marketing and messaging. They can be part of documentation. So, because of
their multiple applications, it means their ROI can be measured in different
ways as a part of the product. So can they affect your bottom line in improving
sales of your product, or decrease support costs for your product and calls to
the product support line and those kinds of thing? Yes. And there are case
studies that have shown personas influencing bottom line dollar, support cost,
ease of use, and those kinds of things. They also have broader effects which
are harder to measure. Personas can act as a lever to get our catalysts to get
more user centered design activities into your organization overall. So it’s
like a foot in the door technique. You get personas in, and people resonate
with them, and they start discussing customers. They kind of like what they
bring. And then this gives you the leverage to say “Hey, let’s do some further
research or do some user testing. We’ve never done that before. Or let’s do a
focus group, or let’s do some user survey stuff”. We’ve seen lots of cases where personas
actually influence your entire organization towards a more user centered design
approach.
Frank
Spillers Yes. I suppose you have had a lot of people writing in as
well with all the contributions you’ve got in the book. There are literally
dozens of examples of that shared where you can see people are using them. I
think that point was really important and thanks for the clarification and
expanding on that John Pruitt. I get asked that question a lot myself. People
confuse my enthusiasm for personas for a trumping of market research. Its not
that personas are better. What you are seeing in the marketing world in the
last five years or so, is marketers exhausting their traditional market
research design techniques because we are trying to achieve standards of
usability, ease of use and user centered design that require usability and
behavioral research methods such as personas. And that’s really the point. If
you want usability, then don’t use marketing techniques like focus groups and
surveys alone. Add to those and expand on those. That’s where a lot of
marketers are getting very interested in persona methodologies and behavioral
research. This is a good point to talk about case studies, so let’s talk about
case studies for a minute. Can you talk about some of the more interesting ones?
Tamara
Adlin One other quick point before we
move onto that. Part of that last question should also be about are they
(personas) better for design. And I would say this real quickly. It’s almost impossible
to design a product for 35 – 55 year old women. I mean what design decisions
are you going to make that really have to do with navigation and clarity and consistency
across the user interface for a range. But for a specific person, if everybody
in the organizations with the thousands of tiny decisions that get made every
day are all focusing on the same person, then you are more likely to come out
with a product that makes sense from end to end and is internally consistent.
The value of that is enormous and it can not be achieved with ranges. So
traditional market data does not help with that kind of consistency.
Frank
Spillers Let’s talk
about bottom line stuff then and persona lifetime achievement or ROI. Can you
lead us into a couple of the case studies that are in the book that are most
interesting – the Medco and the Best Buy studies. As you
put this book put together, what have you heard and seen in terms of companies
profiting from and the evidence of ROI coming straight from the efforts of
personas? Tell us a little more about that……
Tamara
Adlin Well, like the slide says, the ROI
should be measured in terms of improvement to your bottom line. More people
should buy the product and use it and like it should cost less to support. But there are also improvements that are
worth an awful lot of money. That can happen in terms of your team and your
company and you internal process. So what we recommend is that during family
planning you identify what the problems are that you want to solve with your
persona effort. These could vary from organization to organization. And then
during the ROI phase you actually measure those and see what kinds of results
you have gotten. And now I can turn it over to John Pruitt to talk about the Medco
Health case study.
John Pruitt So with Medco
it was actually with a website that they had applied personas to www.medcohealth.com What they did with personas was redesign their
main site to navigation. What they found was a 33% increase in transactions,
they had less abandonment. They also had more prescriptions being ordered
online which is pretty incredible. Those are really solid numbers. Moving on to
the next slide. I like this example here as well because in this case it wasn’t
about building a software product, which is what I think about most of the
time. It wasn’t about websites but it was really about the physical layout of a
store. The fact that these guys did some really good market research and then
did some good ethnographic research and then built personas and then took them
really seriously and went out and redesigned a fairly good number of their
stores. And then they looked across these test stores compared to the rest of
their stores and compared what was happening with sales. The test stores were
showing an average of 7% more in sales. Those are some great numbers. It’s not
a 100% clean experimental design, but both of these case studies are good
examples of showing improvement in the bottom line of your product in places
where it impacts your dollars. We’ve got
other cases outlined in the book and I’ll just name a few that are interesting:
The dish maker “Pfaltzgraff” did some really great work with personas, not only
redesigning their website but also rethinking about their actual plate ware and
what they were doing as products. And also how they are presenting the website,
how they are presenting the catalogue and how they go about selling those
products. So that’s a really great case study.
There’s a
good one in the book about a game maker company in
Frank
Spillers We eluded to some of the best practices throughout about
how personas can be used and evangelized and so forth. And whether they are
hype or helpful, used or misused in an organization. And we talked about
assumption personas. Let’s turn to best practices here. Do you document cases
in the book about efforts that didn’t work?
John
Pruitt To talk about that,
could we move to the slide. It’s the one where there’s a clown on it and it
says “Personas are Powerful”. We found over the years, particularly early on
when things were just catching on, though it still happens today, that persona
efforts are not always met with success. You go out and create them and they
just sort of die. There were four main themes that came out of us looking across
a lot of case studies and working with companies that had done them, and
talking to practitioners. Those four things are: firstly, lots of personas are
done as a grass roots effort. So a few people on the team get fired up about
the process. They have read Cooper’s book, or they might have read our book and
they then start to do it. And unless you get good support, not just from upper
management, VP’s and the like, but really I mean support from the influential
people on your team. And a lot of time the influential people are just your
peers. And so, picking out the peers are really key to having a really
successful user centered design effort and getting them bought into personas is
a key thing to overcome.
The second thing is that in a lot of cases the persona
characters themselves were just not believable. In some cases they are designed
by assumptions, by groups of people, who create them. And in other cases, they
were based on data but the links to the data is not clear. So, we outline ways
to combat this in our book. The essence of this is that you do have to care
about credibility. And you do have to make sure that your personas, when they
are based on data, that it is clear. And you should always go back to data.
Once you create them, we believe that you are not done. You have to validate
them and continue to update your understanding of them. The third reason why
personas fail is simply that they are not communicated well. We have seen lots
of cases where personas are created and a little poster is made. It’s put on
the wall, or a few of them are scattered around the walls of your building. And
then you’re done. We found that your really have to treat personas as a
communication campaign that you launched and then you launch them with the
notion of progressive
disclosure of information that can’t learn about every aspect of your
personas immediately. It’s just like getting to know a real person. When you
first meet someone you are lucky if you remember their real name. You hopefully remember their face, and maybe
what they do a little bit. But you get to know them over time and then you
start to develop a relationship, trust them and ultimately good friendships
have lots of influence on you when you really know somebody. And that’s really
the way personas need to work. When you communicate them in very explicit ways
over a period of time during your development cycle.
Frank
Spillers We are getting really close to the end of our time here.
Just to say, the book, that we are discussing here, the issues and themes of
the 725 page “Bible” as I would call it, can be picked up at www.amazon.com . It is a Morgan-Kaufman
publication. It runs around $55-$60 and you can search Google for “Persona
Lifecycle Book” and you should get a number of links directly to the book.
Its definitely worth the money, and it probably pays for itself through results
over and over again in terms of keeping you on track. Even if you are as
seasoned practitioner or if you are new to personas this book will come as a
breath of fresh air. I have definitely been recommending it on my trainings as
well. As we wrap up here in the theme of the lifecycle tell us a few things to
consider regarding the lifecycle framework. What are some of the things that
people should keep in mind?
Tamara
Adlin Well
I think its everything that it says on here. It’s just another method. Our book
is long partially because we want to talk about how you integrate this with
other methods that you are doing. And a big take away from all this is – doctor
heal thyself. Think a lot about yourself as a user centered designer and think
about how you are making your own work usable within your organization. It’s
not a one size fits all process. There is benefit even if you just do a little
bit. And you should be systematic and strategic in your approach. That’s really
what it is all about: making yourself and your own work usable to the people
who are consuming the customer data that you are bringing in.
Frank
Spillers Okay, great. And just here as we are wrapping up a few
questions. We have already taken a few as we have gone through, but here’s one.
“How many personas are needed” one person is asking?
Tamara
Adlin Short
answer is it depends…..which is always the short answer. Basically, we talk
about looking either at major roles, or major goals or segments in your product.
And typically a lot of companies have a
way that they are thinking about this. Maybe they are thinking about the
audience or the presenter. Or maybe they are talking about the person who plays
it economically safe, versus the risk-taker. You are really looking for the key
differences that make a difference. So you are looking at prioritizing anywhere
between one, two, three or four personas in typical projects. The rest of it
really depends on the data you have on the product that you are creating.
Frank
Spillers Okay,
another quick question here. Have you ever seen a design team use a real
persona to represent, act and think like the persona.
Tamara
Adlin Hire
an actor I guess!
John
Pruitt Or we have also seen
some cases where companies have identified a target user and said “This is a
great example of our key customer”. In that case they keep going back to that
same person. It’s a dangerous thing to do. There was also one company that we
worked with where there was an individual in the company that served as the
persona. That person did a lot of user research and their job was to “be Bill”
or whoever that persona was.
Tamara
Adlin Part
of our validation process is going back to the users at the end of the project
and seeing if they really start acting like the personas. That’s what you hope
will happen, that you were right, and that these are the goals and this is how
the product will satisfy those goals.
Frank Spillers Great.
Well we are actually up on our time here. I want to thank you both very much.
This has been a most interesting and valuable session here. Thank you John
Pruitt Pruitt and Tamara Adlin Adlin, authors of “The Persona Lifecycle
Handbook” that is definitely worth the $50-$60 that I think it’s going for out
there. This seminar will be available for archive playback and in addition to
that John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin will be presenting a workshop on personas at
the Neilson-Norman event in October in the US and London in November.
Tamara
Adlin People
can get in touch with us anytime. Just email us and we’ll be happy to talk to
you.
Frank
Spillers Email
is up there on the screen right now. John Pruitt’s email is jpruitt <a> microsoft <.> com and Tamara Adlin’s
is tamara <a> adlininc <.> com. Finally,
I want to thank you guys so much for your time and you insights. This has been
really great and we look forward to hearing more from the stories that you
gather as you interact with more practitioners. And hopefully there will be a
follow-up book in a couple of years. For those of you who may be interested, we
may have John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin on our regular web seminar courses coming
up so stay tuned to www.experiencedynamics.com
or hop on the email list there and we’ll
keep you posted. Thanks a lot and enjoy the rest of your day.
End of interview.
This seminar is available with the slides and audio presentation here (requires brief registration, privacy protected).
Best Regards,
Frank Spillers, MS
Next week is World Usability Day, a day when the usability community gets out to raise awareness and visibility about the field and goals of usability engineering and user centered design.
"World Usability Day 2006 promotes the value of usability engineering and user-centered design and the belief that every user has the responsibility to ask for things that work better". (from the WUD site)
Here are a couple of items related to World Usability Day that we are doing at Experience Dynamics, a leading usability and user centered design consultancy.
1. Special Event-Usability Testing methods- What are we observing and why?
Nov 14th 2006 12pm (Americas and Europe) and 6pm (Asia)
When conducting usability testing, what do you measure and why? How do you capture metrics and what you should be measuring?
In this World Usability Day exclusive web seminar, we will discuss usability testing observation metrics and best practices.
Agenda:
1. Usability Testing metrics: What are the things you should be measuring? How to measure qualitative vs. quantitative data (e.g. satisfaction vs. effort).
2. Usability testing observation best practices: Do you measure time on task every time? What do you need to do a good job capturing metrics if you are doing "quick and dirty" discount usability or "guerilla" testing, without undermining your own efforts?
3. New tool for usability testing logging: LiveLogger. Just released this week, we will review a new usability test logging application. We will review the new LiveLogger interface and discuss what the tool does, how it captures and reports on usability testing metrics.
Summary: In this 1 hour live web seminar (held twice on World Usability Day), we will review usability testing observation best practices.
Length: 60 minutes
Who should attend: People new to usability testing or want to conduct rapid usability testing; usability managers; user experience team; anyone responsible for user advocacy or usability testing.
Learn more about this exclusive web seminar
Register by simply sending an email (limited seating)
2. Multi-language Translations of The Importance of User Experience (poster).
The poster now translated into 20 languages and being presented at numerous locations by usability consultants and practitioners around the globe (so I'm told) ;-)
The poster is available for download in: (or for purchase in English here)
French, Dutch; Spanish; Bulgarian; Swedish; Portuguese (Brazilian); Chinese (Mandarin); Danish; Arabic; Greek; German; Hebrew; Portuguese; Italian; Norwegian; Finnish
Coming soon: Turkish, Polish, Russian, Icelandic.
The poster has also appeared on UX Mag as picked up from Angie McKaig's site, where she said:
"Great little visual overview of UX and why it's important. If I still worked in an office, I'd totally want this for my cubicle. And my boss's. And his boss's". (thanks Angie ;-)
Thanks and Best Wishes,
Frank Spillers
p.s. Also check out The Importance of User Experience in B2B Enterprise Environments(JPEG, altered version)
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