Pat’s Point of View

I’m really liking microblogging at the moment, there’s a freedom from having to write up one’s thoughts into a proper post, you can just blurt stuff out. For those of you that don’t follow me on Twitter, he are my tweets from the last week:

my baby just crawled for the first time! 3:55 PM Oct 31st

love the baby mop http://tinyurl.com/6mxnmk 12:01 PM Oct 31st

RT @trib: Agency people. Make your socmed strategists *and* your clients watch this! Today. http://is.gd/5hbM 11:00 AM Oct 31st

That’s no way to get a discount @docbaty ! :) 11:19 AM Oct 30th

running a small business? where do you learn how? 3:37 PM Oct 30th

@diversionary positivity is over-rated :) 2:28 PM Oct 30th

@AlHaigh born to roam….that’s some funny shit :) 1:32 PM Oct 30th

@trib sure but it was only ever a work-around and is no longer necessary…and it shits me :) 9:38 AM Oct 30th

has a pet hate of people who double space between sentences! 9:08 AM Oct 30th

@docbaty tweetdeck is a bit buggy but see how you go 8:39 AM Oct 30th

IA Summit submission done…. 11:52 AM Oct 29th

I’m not quite there yet @russmaxdesign , hearing my little one almost say “daddy” was pretty bloody great :) 10:08 AM Oct 29th

wish i could make $15k this easy http://tinyurl.com/5elev9 3:22 PM Oct 28th

great idea! “Ending the Conference Bag Arms Race” http://tinyurl.com/6dwv8j 5:24 PM Oct 27th

why do most people think “changing background colours” when they hear personalisation? 4:58 PM Oct 27th

News.com.au redesign launched http://tinyurl.com/5cndyn 2:20 PM Oct 27th

wonders how he can stop Confluence from sending the whole text of a page in its notification emails 1:55 PM Oct 27th

@jamesbreeze heaven help anyone on the receiving end of my posts before I’ve had my morning coffee :) 10:19 AM Oct 27th

are marketers trying to ‘game’ web 2.0? http://tinyurl.com/5cgkg8 10:03 AM Oct 27th

made evil eyes at the moron who sat at bus stop with lit cigarette, she wasn’t even smoking it but killing the rest of us with toxic fumes 9:38 AM Oct 27th

@gerrygaffney I think I’m with you re twitter :) 9:36 AM Oct 27th

In November I’ll be appearing at the Ark Group conference Enhancing Online User Experience in Melbourne. My contribution will be an interactive discussion on “Documenting for interactive websites”.

Since it’s an interactive discussion, the most crucial part of the session will be input from the audience and the discussion that emerges. To that end I’ve launched a special forum to allow conference attendees (or anyone for that matter) to suggest the topics they would like discussed:

(If you can’t see the widget above, you can go to patrickkennedy.uservoice.com)

You can suggest a question, or vote for an existing question. I’ll try to cover as many as I can in the time available during the session.

I see two broad aspects to ‘documenting for interactive wesbites’, the first being design documentation and the second being project documentation. By design documentation I mean the sketches, wireframes, storyboards, flow charts or whatever other form of documentation that is used to document what is it that being developed. And by project documentation I mean those documents such as SOWs and project plans that assist with project management and logistics.

I’ll attempt to cover both aspects but ultimately the session will be run by audience participation, so get voting on the topics you want discussed!

The conference details are:

Enhancing Online User Experience

Developing and executing user experience strategies that will provide business benefits

• Date: 12 – 14 Nov 2008
• Location: Melbourne, Australia

More details on their website

My interactive discussion is on the last day, just after lunch.

Having struggled to find the time to conduct an in-depth analysis of my IA for Agencies survey results, I have decided to do it in pieces. This installment, of which many more will follow, I’ve charted the geographic location of survey respondents.

(Sample size is 206)

It was a surprise to see the US ranked number one on the list, I was expecting Australia to be the highest with possibly the UK as second runner up. Was probably my post to several US-centric mailing lists that produced this result.

By the way, I gave up on the rubbish charts created by Excel pretty quickly, and went looking for a better option. I’ve used Widgenie.com for this chart and it seems to meet my needs quite well. Although I’d prefer not have to insert script into my posts.

This is a mere snippet, I know. As and when I get the time to release a bit more I will do so.

UPDATE: the Widgenie charts use Javascript so if you’re reading this in an RSS reader, you’ll probably have to click through to my website to view it.

Last week I went along to the Australian International Motor Show (formerly the Sydney International Motor Show) since I had a bit of spare time and a free ticket. Despite being an “automotive enthusiast” I usually find these shows dead boring (but that’s a whole other topic) so I tried to think of a way of making it more interesting.

I combined my career as a usability geek with my new role of daddy, and went in search of what might be our next family car. We’re not looking to buy one yet, but our ever-expanding family will necessitate an upgrade before too long. I visited every stand and examined what they had on offer for this market segment (wagons, SUVs and maybe some large sedans).

After a bit of snooping around, two things became obvious. Firstly the “booth bimbos”, female and male, had very little product knowledge. What’s the point? OK I know the point is to have a bit of totty that will attract people (mainly guys) to the stand. But if you’re seriously shopping for a car, you need to bypass the bimbos and find the actual sales staff. I can’t believe it, I’m stating a preference for car yard dealers!

(In this regard the highlight of the show would have to be the Subaru stand, which was staffed by knowledgeable sales people dedicated to each product line. It was one such lady who told me about the stand-out practical features of the Forrester and in essence started this little usability study.)

The other thing I found was that there are several key measures of usability for a vehicle intended for use by a young family. By that I mean two parents and two kids, one in a child’s car seat and the other in a baby capsule, who go on the occasional driving trip and need to take some luggage in addition to a pram and a stroller. And the mum is rather short :)

The emergent metrics were:

A. Size of boot. A fairly obvious metric. When you need to fit prams, strollers, bags of shopping and maybe some luggage, you need a decent sized boot. Most small SUVs fall down in this area, particularly if their child seat anchors are not well placed (see next point).
Particularly good: Subaru Liberty/Outback, Ford Territory
Particularly bad: Peugeot 308 Touring, Volvo V50, Holden Commodore Sportswagon (space is severely hampered by sloping rear hatch)

B. Location of child seat anchor points. Often overlooked, indeed most staff on the stands didn’t have a clue where they were located in their own vehicles. Quite often they are located on the back of the rear seats (which doesn’t seem like a good design to me) or in a spot in the boot where the car seat straps would decimate the luggage space. Also, in many cars it’s too easy to mistake the luggage net hooks or shopping bag hooks for the anchor points (yes there’s a huge difference, you idiot on one of the stands who suggested I just attach my baby to a plastic hook that wouldn’t take the weight of a half a flea’s butt!).
Particularly good: Subaru Forrester (mounted on roof)
Particularly bad: Skoda Octavia Scout, VW Passat Wagon (on both of which they were surprisingly difficult to find)

C. Opening of side doors. Trying to get a car seat or baby (or both) in through the door and onto the back seat is pretty difficult when the doors don’t open wide enough. Ideally, the doors open out to 90 degrees perpendicular to the vehicle.
Particularly good: Subaru Forrester

D. Height of seating position. With a car that is quite low to the ground, trying to get babies or bags into the back seat can be really difficult; you need to crouch and lean in. Not good for your back. Full size 4WDs have the opposite problem, especially for those who are “vertically challenged”. Most small SUVs are at about the right height, whilst most sedans and wagons are too low. Also related to this metric is the ease of entry and exit for the driver.

E. Height of boot “lip”. For similar reasons to above, the height of the lowest part of the rear door is crucial when it comes to lifting luggage or prams into the boot. If you have a flat lip and a low boot floor level, it’s much easier.
Particularly good: Mitsubishi Outlander (had a high lip but it folds down like a tailgate, very handy)

F. Opening of back door. The space needed to open the rear door of the vehicle to access the boot. Holden talk this up in their advertising for the Sportswagon, the fact that the hatch opens within the length of the vehicle. Some other models do a similar thing with their ‘lift up’ hatch, such that you require less space behind the vehicle and they open almost vertically so you get good access to the boot space.
Particularly bad: Suzuki Grand Vitara, Toyota RAV (both of which have a big ‘swing open’ door instead of a ‘lift up’ hatch…very disappointing!)

Note: this list ignores the more common facets normally associated with vehicles—at least by me—such as price, engine size/power, performance, fuel economy. These would of course be important factors in choosing a vehicle, but in terms of usability they are not relevant.

Based on all these metrics, the front runners in my mind are the Subaru Forrester, Mitsubishi Outlander and Hyundai Santa Fe. Should we wish to go a bit bigger then we’d be looking at a Toyota Kluger, Ford Territory or Mazda CX-9 (though the Mazda doesn’t score that well in terms of practicality in my opinion).

Interestingly, there was no stand for Land Rover, Audi, BMW or Mercedes. All three of these manufacturers have vehicles that fit into my category, if not my price range, but I guess a motorshow in Sydney is not high on their priorities. Can you blame them when the majority of the local marketplace can’t see past Commodores and Falcons?

[Diagrams based on: http://www.brian894x4.com/LC62drawing.gif]

I was watching Jamie’s Ministry of Food last night and thought that his “pass it on” model would be great for propagating user experience skills. We teach our colleagues—who work in other disciplines—some basic UX skills, then they teach others, and so on and so forth. Start with the basics, then work up to more advanced topics.

Before we know it we’ll have a whole bunch of people who not only appreciate the importance of usability (and related concepts) and give it the attention it deserves, but whom can also get on with some of the work themselves. Thus the exponential “trickle down” or “snowball” effect could alleviate the reliance on consultants, contractors and specialist practitioners, as well as putting the necessary skills right at the heart of the problem throughout the process (because essentially everyone would be the “UX guy”). It’d be a lot less expensive than formal training courses too.

This approach could be supported by mentoring and providing the equivalent of the “Food Centres” that Jamie uses. I imagine this could be in the form of a central, online resource with more information for both ‘teachers’ and ‘guests’ to refer to.

What do you think? Is this any different to teaching cooking skills?

[Diagram courtesy Misterteacher]

Adobe. You may have heard of them. They’re one of the biggest software companies on earth, with some pretty great products—particualry since they bought Macromedia—and what seems to be almost a ubiquitous brand. I’ve not had a great deal to do with them besides use their products, and I have to admit I assumed they would have a respectable customer service ethic (similar to Apple whose reputation for product usability tends to imply they would do customer service equally well).

However, I’ve recently had a glimpse of some pretty poor customer experience. “Adobe ID” is the customer account you use to interact with Adobe on their website, be it for downloading product trials/updates, online purchasing or contacting customer service. When I first signed up for the Adobe ID which I currently use, I lived in the UK. As such my address and country and set to the UK. Since then I have moved back to Australia, and I think I’m well within the bounds of reason to expect to be able to update my details to reflect this change.

But no. I can update my phone number and address but not my country, which means the phone number and address aren’t valid. When I first moved back to Australia I tried to do this and had no luck. I contacted customer service and was told it wasn’t possible, I would have to close my account and open a new one in Australia. That’s pretty stupid for a “global” company, but I accepted the situation and tried to close my UK account. This proved far too difficult (I asked them how I do this and never received a reply) so I gave up. Not a big deal since I rarely use my Adobe ID and having the incorrect country and address didn’t bother me too much.

Just this week I logged into the Adobe website and noticed the UK address, so I thought I would investigate changing it again; maybe they had changed the ‘rules’? I tried updating my account details. I can change some details but not the country, because it’s just text not a form field. Then I noticed the “United Kingdom (change)” link in the very top navigation. Ah-huh! This looked promising! I clicked that and it gave me a choice of countries, I selected Australia and hit submit. The link now said “Australia (change)” and so I went back to the account details form to see if it had any effect. None. It still lists my country as United Kingdom and won’t let me change it.

Frustrated I thought I would contact customer service again. I filled in the form and complained about the situation, asking “How do I change the country for my account?”. Then I went back to whatever I was doing.

Eleven days later I receive an email from Adobe (at Thursday, 16 October 2008 20:07:03 EST):

Subject: Thank you for contacting Adobe Customer Care; your case has been closed.

Dear Patrick Kennedy

Thank you for contacting Adobe Customer Care. Our records indicate your service request 201300597 has been closed. If this request has not been completed to your satisfaction, or should you need to contact us on the particular issue again, please reference this transaction number. You can contact Adobe Customer Care at http://www.adobe.com/go/uk_supportportal/ or by calling 01 71 23 01 96 from 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM (CET).

In an effort to constantly improve service to our customers, we would be very interested in hearing from you regarding our performance. Would you be so kind to take a few minutes to complete our survey? If so, please click here:
[URL removed]

Thank you for contacting Adobe Customer Care.

What do you mean it’s closed? Nothing has been done about it yet! I logged into the customer support site to see what I could find out. I found this note attached to the case:

Thursday, 16 October 2008 11:07:13 o’clock BST

Dear Patrick Kennedy ,

What are the changes , your’re looking into changing ??

Yours Sincerely,

Adobe Customer Service
Tel: (UK) 02073650733
Tel: (Eire) 012421552
Fax: 0031 20 5820800

http://www.adobe.co.uk/support/main.html

Firstly, what a crap reply from customer service?! I said specifically what details I wanted to change, so why ask me? Then there is the poor spelling and grammar, which really makes me think Adobe have outsourced their customer service to a third-world nation.

Secondly, they don’t even email you when they update the case, so I knew nothing about this reply from their customer service staff. Thirdly, the ‘closed’ email was sent was only a few hours after the note was added to the case. How is that long enough for me to reply to their reply?

It seems to me that the deadline for their response to a complaint was looming, so they put in a quick and useless response and then closed the case. Someone’s “customer care” quota was one notch closer to being met. But “customer care” is not what resulted.

Naturally I complained about this, pointing out the flaws in their customer service. I doubt anything valuable will come out of it, but it’s worth a try. Ironically, this is the message I was presented with after my latest contribution:

A customer service representative will review your issue and get back to you within 24 business hours. Read more about case turnaround times. Once you receive a response from a customer service representative, you will have 5 days to respond before the case closes. After a case has been closed, if you still feel the matter has not been resolved, you may reopen the case.

Hmmmm. Last time they didn’t get back to me within 24 hours, and even if they did I wouldn’t have known unless I logged into their customer service website. And I sure wasn’t given 5 days to respond before they closed the case.

What a joke, get your act together Adobe. That’s a poor excuse for customer and user experience. I’m not asking for much (not asking them to fix a bug in a product) just to update the country attached to my Adobe ID account. If they want to encourage customers to use Adobe ID for greater interaction with customers, particularly as the main channel for complaints, you think they would ensure it works faultlessly.

I’m a big fan of WordPress, the content management system I use for this blog, and I like the changes that have been introduced since version 2.0 including the admin interface. There are clearly many people who disagree, but I’m liking the direction the admin interface is taking.

The WordPress team are currently in the process of redesigning this interface for the next version (2.7) and as is becoming quite popular these days, they are opening some of the process to the public and even enlisting their huge user-base in the design process. The latest output of this process has been a set of wireframes. Wireframes are a tricky thing, and everyone does them differently based on the needs of the project. I would have done some things differently to the WordPress 2.7 wireframes, but overall they look reasonable.

However, I was quite surprised that a survey was used to “give WordPress users the ability to play a part in deciding how the navigation options should be grouped and labeled”. This doesn’t sound like a job for a survey. Unfortunately I caught onto this only after that survey had closed and so I don’t know what sort of questions were asked. Was it collecting feedback on the current navigation? Was it asking for design ideas? Or was it something more like online card sorting?

The first survey was followed by another survey intended to “take your opinions regarding: Where to put the search box, Where to put the Add New Post button/favorites menu, How to label the Future Publish/Edit Timestamp function”. I missed this survey as well, but again it sounds like a survey wasn’t an appropriate method to use. I fear this was a glorious example of design by committee.

It seems they got 5000 responses to the second survey, in a matter of days, so it’s likely there at least as many for the first survey too. That’s a pretty good sample size and would be great for learning more about the audience. What troubles me is the team’s apparent reliance on the surveys as a major input into the design. Were there other methods used, such as usability testing, interviews, analytics, workflow analysis? I hope so.

Getting input from users is commendable, but a better approach to a similar challenge is Leisa Reichelt’s work on the Drupal.org redesign. Lisa also had massive online participation from the user-base, but used a variety of methods to research requirements, needs and preferences. The key difference is the appropriateness of each technique to the information intended to be gathered. A survey was used “to get in touch with people who are willing to help us out with some more structured feedback once we start getting into the design phase” rather than to elicit design preferences. Participatory design or collaborative design shouldn’t be done via survey.

But, of course this criticism could be completely unfounded, as I haven’t seen the survey questions. And perhaps I’m totally jaded by the big surveys I’ve seen being used inappropriately in the past. So, if you completed either of the WordPress surveys, let me know what kind of questions were asked by leaving a comment below.

Short stories are an excellent way of communicating user needs; not just use cases but needs, desires, joys and frustrations. While it was written as a creative short story, “To do” is a very realistic depiction of how someone might use personal organisation tools, and more importantly how they might feel about their experiences. Here’s a taste:

Every time I cross one item off the list, another seems to appear. Making a dental appointment should be a cause for celebration, a satisfying tick; instead, it leads to more appointments, white waiting rooms, condescending child-receptionists and x-rays. And while I now know exactly what I need to do, it’s getting harder to keep track of the when.

Read more

This story has feeling, it is human. Compare this to the way in which user experience requirements that have been captured for one of your projects. I think there’s a huge benefit in presenting the needs of our audiences in this way. It goes beyond a mere scenario, in that it uses the power of creative writing to put you inside the head of the person using—or should that be surviving?—the things we design.

I know the author of this story probably wasn’t describing a real series of events, but the story would have been inspired by real situations, pieced together to create a whole story. This story represents his experiences using to-do lists and other productivity tools. You can easily do the same thing based on the findings of design research.

My IA for Agencies survey is now closed. Thanks to everyone who took the time to fill in the survey, all 206 of you from across the globe.

I’ve also selected the winner of the prize, a copy of Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition by Steve Krug. Congratulations!

Now comes the task of analysing the submissions and compiling the results into a useful format. I’m also compiling a list of lessons learned from the process, as there have been a few. I’ll make all of this available in due course (read as when I get some time to spend on it!).

Thanks again to everyone who filled in the survey, those who helped me with it, those who offered encouraging words and constructive feedback, and thank you even to those who felt the need to leave negative comments.

While not everyone agreed with the manner in which I conducted the survey, it’s all been very educational.