Pat’s Point of View

Today I gave a talk entitled Prioritising user experience at Ark Group’s Information Architecture – Designing and managing information structures for improved web access and usability conference.

I tried to make the topic a bit more interesting (read controversial) and I think it went quite well.

I covered two main topics, firstly I outlined why I think user experience (UX) should be prioritised over information architecture (IA), and then I discussed prioritising UX within the organisation.
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1. Discovery and optimism

   

   I’ll just jump online and find somewhere to make up some business cards for my new designer baby clothes venture. Oh that’s handy! BusinessCards2u.com lets me design and order my cards online.

   I’ll carefully type in my details, and I should have new business cards in minutes! Have to make sure I get all my contact details correct. Hmm needs something snazzy. I’ll bold this, underline that. Ah much better. Submit.

2. Suspicion

   

   Huh? “Your request could not be processed”? OK well try it again, silly computer. Submit.

3. Shock and confusion

   

   What do you mean I “haven’t entered any content for my business card”? Yes I did, it took me ages to get it just right! You mean you’ve lost all my work? I have to type it in again?!

4. Desperation and guilt

   

   Oh noooooo! I must have done something wrong. I thought I did everything it said. Arrgh it’s all my fault!

5. Denial

   

   No, no, no it can’t all be gone! It must be in there somewhere! Command+Z…undo!

6. Anger and bitterness

   

   That’s ridiculous, why didn’t your website save my details? I’m never using this again! Time is money, people!

7. Acceptance and resolution

   

   Hey, I found this website Moo.com and lots of people say good things about it. If I have to start all over again, I’ll try them instead.

(The moral of the story is simple, if you want the business—including that of 6 month old entrepreneurs—you need to get the user experience right. Your potential customers will go elsewhere otherwise. Oh and it’s also an excuse to post these cute pics of Grace.)

At this year’s Oz-IA conference I’ll be presenting a short session entitled Bringing them online: using design research to identify online opportunities with my colleague Alun Machin.

It’s all very hush hush at the moment because we’re operating under an embargo, but the general gist of it is how user research can inform the design process for a product (in this case a website) that pertains to an activity that is normally an offline experience.

We’ll talk about how we identified the audience’s “information ecosystem” and found an opportunity for our website to fit in with that in a useful way.

We’ll also talk about the very different groups within that audience and how we catered for each.

Alun will then talk about the transition into design and go through the process we followed.

And if all goes to plan we’ll be able to unveil the new website resulting from all this work!

All this in 25 minutes, including questions :)

Update: if you promise to come along and watch our preso you can use this discount code: PK0265. Use it to get $100 off when you register for OZ-IA.