Pat’s Point of View

There seems to be a time-warp happening around Australian broadcasters, they don’t seem to know we know about the internet. And channel 10 would have to be the worst offender.

They’ve never had a particularly good reputation with fans of various ‘cult’ TV shows, constantly delaying airing shows from the US and axing shows for no apparent reason. But recently they’re taken their disregard for their audience to new levels. After claiming their new show Jericho would premiere simultaneously around the world, they mysteriously cut the first season in half. Anyone with a web browser can go to CBS and see that season one was meant to have 22 episodes not 11. Channel 10 basically decided to start their own season two at episode 12. I mean, seriously, how stupid is that?

However, I guess that’s better than them pulling it off air altogether, which is what seems to have happened now. I guess we’ll have to just download all the episodes from the web, instead of just the ones we miss. To add insult to injury, the Channel 10 website continues to list episodes as though they were being aired. Cruel!

I liked Jericho and was a bit peeved when channel 10 messed with it, and I’m not the only one. Just look at the forums on their own website for a glimpse of the disappointment their ‘magic bullet’ scheduling has caused. It reminds of trying to keep up with Star Trek episodes, which no Australian TV network ever gave much respect. From TNG, to Deep Space Nine, to Voyager, to Enterprise. They all got shunted from one late night timeslot to another, and usually taken off air with no warning or explanation.

If the networks want to try and win the war against PVRs, DVD burners, and P2P file sharing they’re going the wrong way about it.

See what people are blogging about: Australian TV, Channel 10, Bring back Jericho

Popularity: 26% [?]

I’ve just published a new article on website user research, in which I talk about starting this research by talking to staff within the organisation who owns the website:

By talking with staff in your own organisation, you can leverage the vast body of knowledge on customers (aka clients, students, associates etc) who probably make up a large proportion of your website audience.

I’ve used this technique many times and it’s always interesting to see what staff think about the website and website users, and then compare that with what the users themselves think.

Look out for more articles over coming months…unless I drop dead from exhaustion.

See what people are blogging about: user research, staff interviews

Popularity: 10% [?]

I saw this sign posted on the wall of a medical centre in Sydney. It reads:

[Wheelchair] Restroom Upstairs

That’s a bit bloody rough!

There is a lift nearby, but on first inspection it would appear that should a patient using a wheelchair need to go to the loo, they’d need to somehow conquer the stairs first, and there are a lot of stairs. I think I would probably redesign the sign to say ‘first floor’ rather than ‘upstairs’ and point out that the lift is thataway.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Austin – Denver

Quick poll: who wouldn’t mind flying from Texas to Colorado, a travel time of about 1 hour 40 minutes? OK, what about if the airplane contains the pungent stench of faeces? Yup, someone done shat their duds on that particular Airbus! I don’t know if it was the little kid sitting next to me, or one of the many other toddlers, or the cute lil infant a few rows up. Let me rephrase that, I hope it was one of them, because the alternative means one of the adults was sitting in shite for the best part of two hours. I tell ya I couldn’t wait to get off that plane.

Denver – San Francisco

This time United gave me a good while to get to my connecting flight, over an hour! So I got to have a bite to eat; my stomach thought it was about 9:00pm and so I hadn’t eaten for quite a spell (can you tell I’ve been in Texas?). In the airport I got to experience the worst McDonald’s service ever. Sadly I’ve eaten at Ronald’s place all over the world and this was the worst. The slackers working in this joint made growing grass look speedy. Absolutely no concern for customer service whatsoever. Anyway, at least I got to charge my laptop.

So this flight wasn’t too bad, even though I was in the absolute last row of seats which made it feel like a rollercoaster. This was the only flight on this whole trip that had back-of-seat video units, and I didn’t have any headphones! But it didn’t worry me since I was happy to catch up on email (reading). So far I’ve managed to rip through a huge backlog of mailing list messages from the last few months…I’m going to make an effort to read them as they come in from now on. Might need to buy Mark Hurst’s Bit Literacy.

Finally got to SFO and got mauled by security transferring from domestic to international. May have something to do with the Homeland Security threat level being at orange or it could be that I was looking seedy. My backpack got x-ray’d so much I think it’s going to glow. I even got the fart machine (you step into a booth and lots of wind hits you from all directions). I didn’t mind since I had over an hour to waste.

San Francisco – Sydney

I was hoping that my big flight would be as spacious as my last one, that is nobody sitting right next to me. I was so wrong. Firstly my seat assignment went out the window (no, not literally) and I ended up sitting in the middle of the row up against a partition. This meant no elbow room on either side and no leg room. It was awful, so I spent quite a bit of time standing up at the back of the plane reading a book.

The flight seemed to go forever but eventually we touched down in Sydney at 6:15am. Almost 25 hours of travelling, because of the longer breaks between connecting flights. So you imagine I was well up for a slow trudge though immigration, baggage claim, customs and then quarantine. Finally I exited into the eager arms of my darling wife. I was very proud of her, she almost didn’t cry :)

See what people are blogging about: Austin, Denver, San Francisco, UA1291, UA761, UA863, UPA2007

Popularity: 13% [?]

I’ve recently been helping a client with developing personas for their website audience. During the process I have created a couple of ideas that have helped.

First, an idea to help illustrate the concept of taking explicit user research and shaping this into discrete personas. Most people I have mentored find that the most difficult step is going from research into producing the draft personas. My idea is to use Venn diagrams to show how you take the information you find out about each individual you research (through interviews, focus groups, contextual enquiry, customer data etc) and come up with an archetypal description of them all. Remember, the key is for the resulting persona to have attributes that are a common subset of the attributes possessed by all the users it represents, whilst still being accurate for each of them. So in effect you need to ‘knock the corners’ off the data and look at the overlap, to make something that fits all users in the group.

The Venn diagram shows multiple overlapping circles, each of which represents the information we know about an individual. The intersection of the circles represents the commonality between them. A large proportional area of overlap (top of diagram on right) would indicate a good match or ‘good fit’ and thus tells you that these users would likely be well represented by the same persona. Conversely, a small area of overlap (bottom diagram on right) would suggest the users aren’t very similar and thus probably wouldn’t be well served by the one same persona.

Now, this is simply a method of illustrating the concept behind the persona creation process. I can say with confidence is that the people with whom I have used this method of communication (and they have had varying degrees of expertise in user-centred design) have found it very useful in terms of explaining what we were trying to do. What if there was a way of plotting user attributes collected through research, such that you could actually use Venn diagrams to group users together and work out your personas?

Well I have an idea for this too. A popular method of illustrating comparitive data in an easily digestible way is to plot it on a simple two dimensional graph. Product marketplace maps are a good example, as are Jessica Hagy’s examples on Indexed. And Steve Mulder talks about doing this in his persona book The User is Always Right (chapter 6) for pretty much the same purpose. The trouble is that your users will almost always have many more dimensions that you want to consider, than just the two that could be plotted on these type of graphs. Of course, you can extend to a third dimension but it gets difficult to produce and can be difficult to visualise and comprehend.

Exploring this further, you could move from Venn diagrams to a radar graph which allows you to plot more than just a X and Y axis. Plotting a score for each dimension for each user would produce a pattern that represents that user (diagrams on left). Overlaying several such graphs would allow you to look for overlaps, as with the Venn diagrams. The visual patterns help highlight where a persona could be found. But I suspect this might become impractical to produce such graphs with more than 4 or 5 dimensions (labeled A-E here).

So, my idea is to use a graph based on the slider controls of a stereo equaliser (’EQ’) such that any user’s dimensions, or at least the ones we think are important, can be plotted in one simple chart as shown by the vertical lines in the diagram on the right. Again we have two extremes for each dimension and a number of intervening points (having an infinite scale would make things too difficult). As with other graphs, you assess where the user would ’sit’ on each dimension, effectively giving them a score out of five, for example. Dimension A might represent the user’s level of computer literacy, ranging from low to high. A ’super user’ would be plotted nearer the top of the dimension, whereas a ’soccer mom’ might be plotted nearer the bottom. Doing this for each dimension (A-H) allows you to illustrate that user on the EQ map or chart.

So it follows that you would create an EQ map for each user who participated in the research. It shouldn’t be that big a leap to see how you could combine several such maps in one diagram (as shown in the paragraph above on the right) which would allow you to recognise patterns in the maps. Similarities in the lines between the dots would suggest a persona could make sense for the users involved. A line of best fit could also be produced which would then form an EQ map for that persona.

So, various squiggly lines can help you find possible personas in the data you have collected through research. I will post further findings as I continue to use and refine this graphing technique. Please do give me feedback, especially if you use an EQ map.

NB: As I alluded to in my last post, during Todd Warfel’s tutorial on data-driven persona development, I realised these ideas weren’t really that new. Todd demonstrated a similar approach using a box plot, which is also used by various other people for the same purpose. Whilst I did some up with the above completely independently—and I think the EQ map has some advantages—I guess it goes to show a thorough literature search is a good idea.

I guess it also goes to show that if you have a good idea, blog it as soon as possible. And it’s nice to think that smart people agree with me :)

See what people are blogging about: personas, qualitative segmentation, user research, data analysis

Popularity: 64% [?]

Today I attended the full-day tutorial Data Driven Personas with Todd Warfel. Quite a relevant topic since I’m building personas for three clients at the moment and I really want to refine the technique.

Initially the thing that has struck me was there seems to be quite an emphasis on data, not surprising considering the title of the tutorial, but I mean quantitative data. Well at least I think that’s what everyone in the audience meant, as opposed to qualitative “data” (I use quotes here because I think knowledge might be a better word for this). It could be because typically US organisations have a greater maturity around the practise of collecting real quant data from CRM systems and the like. So this forms a foundation for the design research and persona development that goes on.

My clients don’t usually have anything this sophisticated—but I am willing to concede that they are atypical and it’s just like my luck that I have several atypical clients at the moment—and my design research is primarily qualitative with a bit of web stats to support it. So as we approached the lunch break, I was thinking this could be a problem for me, or it could just be a terminology issue whereby Americans say data and aren’t thinking just quantitative data.

On another note, Todd is quite a good presenter and his approach to consulting seems very similar to my own (and that of Step Two). Almost everything struck a chord in terms of methodology and the reason behind it. So much so, that something I have been thinking through over the last few weeks was kinda spoilt today…in that I thought it was rather innovative but turns out good people have already thought of it (stay tuned).

As it turns out, most people in the tutorial were thinking of quantitative (read “hard”) data, but Todd revealed that he actually meant a combination of qualitative and quantitative research. It’s a tightrope you walk when it comes to design research, and other IA/UCD techniques, and eventually the conversation turned to statistical significance and that’s when some people turned. Comments I heard signalled to me that the audience was a little disappointed by this and thought it was all a waste of time because it’s not “real data” or “proper research”. I’m not sure what they expected, did they think Todd was going to give them a silver bullet for personas? In that regard he made things difficult for himself by titling the tutorial as he did (and in fact he changed the title on the slides to “Design Research Personas”). I’ve seen this debate many times but to be honest I still don’t see why some people get so hung up on statistical significance and hard data, especially since they are not statisticians and probably wouldn’t know good data analysis if it bit them on the behind (note US PC lingo). Why do these people get transfixed by “data”?! I think it removes the responsibility for design…or maybe from doing any thinking at all.

I for one think the approach Todd talked about is the best approach. After all we’re not using personas for computational analysis, we’re using them to help designers design and to help businesses serve their customers. So it doesn’t matter that we build them based on good ol’ conversations with people rather than mining data from a “proper sample size”. We’re not dealing with machines, we’re dealing with people. Anyway, as Todd reminded us, it comes down to “garbage in, garbage out”. Having hugely complex data sources to drawn on is irrelevant if it’s not good data or if you can’t learn anything useful from it. That said, I was interested to hear about analysing customer service emails using a language analysis tool to discover issues and themes.

Rather ironically, the afternoon involved an exercise in creating personas, in groups, but without any research to work with. I think Todd’s idea was to focus on the actual writing of personas, rather than the creating of personas from research. So after complaining about people being fixated with data, I’m now doing it myself since I don’t have any data. We would have got better value by simply talking with Todd, rather than this exercise, which essentially encouraged what we have been trying to stop designers from doing.

See what people are blogging about: UPA2007, personas, design research, Todd Warfel

Popularity: 62% [?]

The biggest problem with traveling is trying to communicate. And in Texas, my accent is pretty much indecipherable. It’s a challenge for me to understand the local accent at times, but they just can’t get what I’m saying at all! :)

Some people laugh (”You tawk funee”), some get a bit annoyed and some just keep asking me to repeat myself. The best was the bus driver who clearly didn’t get what I said but he took it in his stride and just said “OK” and kept on truckin. Luckily I figured out where to get off on my own. Try it for yourself, compare how Americans say ‘bus pass’ to how we say it…worlds apart. Combined with the fact I have been sweating profusely, I guess the accent made me seem a little weird.

Anyway, today I went off exploring again. After a proper night’s sleep I went to a nearby cafe for breakfast and coffee. Then I registered for the UPA conference (and found out there’s no free wireless internet!) and checked my schedule for the next 4 days. Then off for a walk to Town Lake, the Congress street “bat” bridge (no bats during the day unfortunately) and the south shore of the lake. I’ve noticed lots of wildlife in Austin; besides squirrels and bats, there are these birds that sound more like a video game than birds. Freaky.

Then onto the buses, which I made better use of today. I went around town for a bit, then got off at the University of Texas campus. It’s huge but there doesn’t seem to be much open space; all buildings. I wanted to pick up some college merchandise, so went to the co-op and got some t-shirts (as well as many bottles of water).

I took a look at the UT tower, where in 1966 a guy with a rifle started picking off students. I guess that was the original school massacre. I was going to go to the science and history museum but it’s closed for renovations. So I headed back downtown to do some more shopping. I was relieved to hear a local shop assistant say it sure is hot; I thought it was just me! Eventually I got a special gift for Jenn :) Yee-harr!

Feeling peckish I headed towards my hotel to drop some stuff off before getting lunch. On the way I spotted an R2-D2 trash receptacle (ie a bin) on the street. Cool.

It would have been wrong to come to Texas and not have some typical tex-mex so I checked out Chipotle’s and got a great fajita burrito. I tried to keep it small, but there’s just too much per serving. I’d happily pay more for less :)

Then I was off the to Austin Museum of Art, but it’s closed on Mondays. I’ll have to come back on Saturday. Decided to get out of the heat and do some work in the hotel, not a bad half day.

See what people are blogging about: Austin, UPA2007, travel, accents

Popularity: 10% [?]

Yeah baby! OK, not Austin Powers, Austin the city. Today I spent my first full day here and went off exploring. After quite some trouble adopting the local time zone—I got about five hours sleep from 5am to 10am—I didn’t feel too bad. Then I walked outside the hotel, bugger me it was hot. And humid. I was sweating like a pig all day.

First activity was wandering up to the State Capitol building. Then I walk around some other parts of the historic downtown area. Then I walked up to the Texas State History Museum. It was great to get a bit of a history tour about a place you’re visiting…and the place was well air-conditioned! They also had a temporary exhibition on the history of NASA and the part Texas played in it. Whilst in the cafe having a quick lunch I was listening to the soundtrack of country rock, and then all of a sudden the Top Gear theme was playing. So either they used a country rock song and reworked it, or somebody did a country rock cover of the Top Gear music.

Then it was off to the nearest (although I don’t think ‘near’ is the best word for it) Gap store to buy stuff for Jenn. Then it was back on the bus to go downtown. I was going to go check out the Town Lake and maybe see the bats, but my feet were sore so I just went back to the hotel. On the way I checked out a few souvenir shops, but I wasn’t very impressed. Hope I find some better stuff somewhere.

Time for dinner (unlike last night where I ate too late) so I went to one of the establishments in the hotel. Texas beefsteak sandwich is real nice. And so are Texas people. But I could never live here, I would explode from all the food!

I’ve uploaded photos.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Sydney – San Francisco

United flight 870 left pretty much on time, consider how bad the weather in Sydney was looking it’s a small miracle it wasn’t a big delay. Of course I was meant to be on flight 840 to LA but for some unexplained reason it became 870 when I checked in. I was in the arse end of the 747, but fortunately I had an aisle seat in a set of three seats and there was nobody in the middle. That makes economy so much better.

Sitting there waiting for take-off I wished I was flying Qantas, since the United plane had no personal video screens, just one TV on the roof every 5 metres or so and bigger ones on the bulkheads. So pretty much didn’t watch any films or TV. But I did end up watching two movies on my iPod; Over the Hedge (which is very cool) and The Incredibles (which I didn’t finish watching).

I was pretty knackered soon after take-off, so I decided I would try to go to sleep ASAP. The trouble is they serve all the meals in the time zone you’ve come from. That meant dinner was not far into the flight, but I wanted to sleep. It also mean the breakfast they served towards the end was at almost midday in the time zone we were going to. Don’t they know the best thing you can do is adopt the destination zone as early as possible?! :)

The ‘purser’ mentioned that crossing the Pacific is always a bit rough and unpredictable and on this occasion he wasn’t wrong. It was pretty bumpy the whole way, at some times very much so. I even got stuck in the toilet during one particularly long spurt of turbulence.

One other thing that was quite interesting was the lady sitting on the other side of the spare seat. Besides only going to the toilet once in the whole 14 hour flight, she also spoke little or no English. She was Egyptian as far as I could tell, but lives in Sydney (in the suburb I grew up in actually). She had several slips of paper with notes written in English explaining her situation and asking for assistance. The problem was the flight attendants would either ignore the notes or would read them and reply to her in English. Real helpful. Fair enough there were no staff who spoke Arabic, but there has to be a better way that simply talking to her in English. Maltese shares quite a few words with Arabic, but unfortunately my limited vocabulary wasn’t any help (strangely the phrases ‘hurry up’, ‘money’, ‘milk’ and the number 5 weren’t applicable).

One thing she needed help with in particular was filling in the customs and immigration forms for entry into the US. One of her notes dealt with this and after trying a few flight attendants she handed it to me, along with her forms and passport. I wanted to help so I filled in the forms the best I could, it was at this point I discovered she lives in Blacktown. I had visions of here getting to immigration and getting dragged off to some small room because I filled in the forms incorrectly. The fact she spoke Arabic certainly wouldn’t have helped.

By the time we got to sunny/foggy ‘cisco I was well and truly ready to get off that plane. I really don’t like the whole long distance travel. After a short stroll through SFO and a number of security checkpoints I arrived at the gate for my flight to Denver and boarded immediately. Talk about non-stop.

San Francisco – Denver

It’s still Saturday! After piling on to flight 770 it was soon apparent the flight was packed, and a 757 is quite pokey. Anyway, there was enough room to get the laptop out and write part of this. Fairly bumpy flight again, but some interesting scenery including Apple’s HQ at Cupertino (at least I think it was) and some snow capped mountains.

I could just be really tired, but here’s an observation for you. Looking at the geography from the air, it would seem that in the US they build roads predominantly in valleys, whereas in Australia roads have historically been built on ridges. I wonder why that is?

Well if the last connection was close, this one was cut-throat. As soon as I got off flight 770 I saw on the boards that my next flight was almost finished boarding! Luckily the next gate was directly opposite where I was.

Denver – Austin

Still Saturday. Another bumpy flight (lots of thunderstorm activity around Denver). I’m now wondering if my luggage made it from the last flight onto this one (UA1238). That would be great fun if I end up in Austin but my bag doesn’t. Right now I feel about as fresh as three day old pizza.

For this flight I was back onto a familiar aircraft, the 767. And I’ve noticed that all 67’s seem to be squeaky, no matter which airline or which country you’re in.

Anyway, finally got to Austin (with my luggage even!) and it seems nice enough. It’s actually quite green, I must admit I had the impression Texas was all desert-like (well not desert, but like the Grand Canyon). And I got to the hotel rather painlessly, in a cab that barely made the trip. 21 hours of travel…phew.

See what people are blogging about: UA870, UA770, UA1238, San Francisco, Denver, Austin, UPA2007

Popularity: 12% [?]

It’s been a while since I wrote anything about accessibility, probably because I haven’t had much time—too busy with all this consulting and mentoring stuff!

But there have been some recent developments that are worth a mention. For many years there has been fierce debate over the next version of the guidelines (WCAG 2.0) and exactly what they should be. More recently this debate has come to a head in the form of open revolt against the W3C and its plan for WCAG 2.0. A the heart of this was a group of passionate experts (who became known as the ‘WCAG Samurai’) who decided to do something about the situation.

Well the Samurai have just released a draft of their work which they call WCAG 1.0 errata. They are ignoring WCAG 2.0 in whatever state it is currently in and are offering an alternative set of guidelines (a revised version of WCAG 1.0).

As someone who has experience attempting to create accessible websites (and taken a look at WCAG 2.0) I would thoroughly recommend adopting WCAG+Samuari as a practical and effective set of guidelines. All of the politics and squabbling aside, it is quite a relief that some progress is being made towards giving site developers and owners something useful, and definitive, to rely on as they try to do the right thing.

[Thanks to Russ for the tip off.]

See what people are blogging about: WCAG, WCAG 2.0, WCAG Samuari, WCAG errata

Popularity: 47% [?]