Pat’s Point of View

Several months ago I talked about the enhancements I made to the Chakra Jewellery Designs website to help improve SEO, and it’s now time to examine the results of the work by checking search engine rankings again.

The table below shows the current rankings for the same keyword phrases selected before. The numbers in brackets show the previously recorded ranking.

So there is clear improvement in some areas. And the number of leads coming in from search engines on certain keywords has increased considerably.

However there are still some areas for improvement, in particularly around the “chakra crystals” phrase and anything related to locality (ie Sydney, Australia or Bondi). And the Page Rank has gone from 3 to 2, so that’s something I will have to investigate further.

It has been pointed out to me that I may have left this re-assessment a bit too long, and that I may have missed the main affect of the improvements when it was its greatest. In other words, the rankings might have improved a lot more at first, but then slipped back down to where they are now. I’m not too worried about this, if it’s indeed correct, because we’re not after short-term gains but long-term benefit.

From here, the plan is to continue to get good quality incoming links. For example, a recent piece in body+soul magazine was great, hopefully the first of many!

More than likely your content management system (CMS) will have many usability problems if you just use it “out of the box”. Having been involved in a number of projects tasked with implementing a these types of systems—including content management systems for websites, intranets and wikis for knowledge management—I’ve noticed that there are a number of key areas of the user interface that frequently need fixing from a usability point of view.

All the usability tips you see here link back to general usability principles, and they apply to any software package or web application, it just seems that they are an issue in most CMS implementations.

Use these tips to improve your current CMS or to help you when implementing a new one.

1. If in doubt, leave it out

The user interface should be devoid of everything that is not necessary in terms of users completing their tasks. Most CMS products will have capabilities in excess of what is being used, but don’t show it if they don’t use it. And many products will have optional extras and upgrade possibilities, so your version might not have all the bells and whistles. For better or worse, some vendors will leave a stub to these missing features (possibly to help encourage up-sell). Don’t show it if they can’t use it.

Use CSS to hide stuff if you have to, but clean up that interface. We’re talking about main navigation, links, and irrelevant details spat out by the system. This also applies to words; as Steve Krug said “Krug’s third law of usability: get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half what’s left”. Each page title, sub heading, button label, navigation label, form field label, icon and graphic should be useful and meaningful, clearly communicating what it should.

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I’m a big fan of extracting lessons learnt from one field of expertise and applying them to another. I’ve written about this before, be it Gordon Ramsay, Trinny & Susannah, parent craft centres, shopping for furniture or super nanny. I’ve also talked about cross pollination before.

Why is this? I’m not sure. I find it frustrating when people run around in tiny circles trying to conjur a solution to something whilst wearing blinkers to other sectors, industries or fields or expertise that have already found a solution. A great case in point is the borrowing of psychology, anthropology and other scientific methods by those practising user experience and web design. It’s not new, but I find this stimulating, and I actively look for good sources of knowledge to cross-pollinate from one field to another.

So I’ve decided to collect references to this cross-pollination.

One I found today is Lessons for User Experience Consultants from Barack Obama:

That said, there are a few lessons from Barack Obama’s campaign that apply to our world of user experience consulting … Lesson 1: Use Clear Calls-to-Action … Lesson 2: Put a Priority on Creative … Lesson 3: Make Personal Connections (Or At Least Fake It) … Lesson 4: Don’t Let The Man Throw You Off Your Game … Lesson 5: Set Up Shop in Chicago … Lesson 6: Be Young, Charming, and Good Looking

(Can’t argue with lesson 2, by the way, the Obama brand was very well executed.)

Feel free to suggest more, leave a comment below.

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]

So many people have extracted lessons from Gordon Ramsay’s style, from management to consulting (for instance there’s me, Ruth, Donna, Craig and even The Australian) that it’s becoming boring. He’s obviously good value, but I’m now looking elsewhere for analogies.

Sticking to the reality TV theme, though unintentional, bears much fruit and I can’t think of any better example than Trinny and Susannah. I think they are brilliant at what they do, without having to drop the F-bomb every few seconds (don’t get me wrong I don’t mind Gordon’s profanity but it does make him less accessible).

I first happened across Trinny and Susannah (T&S) in their UK show and series of books “What Not to Wear”, where they gave ordinary people fashion tips tailored to their body-shape, lifestyle and budget. For those of you not familiar with the duo, this isn’t your typical fashionistas spouting on about “What’s hot this season, darling”, it’s honest and useful advice for real people. And it goes much deeper than vanity, most often the cause of the problems they solve are the emotional hang-ups we all have inside. They make people feel good about themselves and accept who they are.

Since then they have continued to help people across several more TV series, as well as across the globe. Theirs is an excellent model for consultants, with core traits such as:

• Working as a pair, they balance each other out
• Breaking it down into simple rules we can understand
• By exposing themselves, literally and figuratively, they foster trust and empathy
• A true desire to help others
• Ruthlessly forward, there’s no room for shyness, excuses, self-denial or apathy
• A simple process: research, understand, extract, boil down, try, validate, rollout

The process I speak of in the last point, was well documented in the more recent series “Trinny and Susannah Undress…”, where the girls showed that their approach can scale too. Doing some very ethnographic-like formative research around a particular problem, they extract insight and develop their rules, followed by application of the results to thousands of people. A series of huge publicity stunts for the BBC, no doubt, but this is consulting on a level rarely seen (and with genuine results).

I think possibly the most interesting aspect of their approach is the development of rules. This is what makes their work so accessible; anyone can get simple and straight-talking advice that suits them. What colour combinations go together? What choice of clothing hides this, or accentuates that? What colours go well with my complexion?

I’ve even done this myself, making use of the rules for guys-without-six-pack-abs and it works. In fact T&S’s work with men is probably the best of all, because if there is anyone who needs simple rules to supplement bugger-all fashion sense it’s the male population.

Over the weekend just passed, I joined my wife and baby daughter at a Tresillian Family Care Centre for an intensive programme of ‘parent craft’. The idea is that parents and baby stay in residence for five nights, learning best practice techniques for settling, sleeping and feeding. We wanted to brush up on technique and shed any bad habits we had accumulated whilst trying to survive the first four months of parenthood.

This “live-in” method gives you 24-hour access to experienced childcraft nurses and allows you to concentrate fully on the task of parenting without the distractions of cooking, cleaning or going to work. It’s the perfect opportunity to master the necessary skills, with expert support at hand, should you need it. It’s a very effective method.

They demonstrate techniques in a realistic environment, as opposed to a classroom or conference hall. They observe how you handle situations, and attempt to adjust your behaviour as necessary (after all what we’re talking about is a change in attitude, awareness and behaviour, not a fundamental change of the game).

The nurses’ intervention reduces from near 100% at the start, down to a bare minimum by the end of your stay. This serves two purposes, at the start they give you a break by taking the reigns for a short time, which is crucial in terms of ensuring the sanity of parents and the effectiveness of the learning. Additionally, reducing this intervention is crucial to getting parents to a point where they can go home and successfully continue using the practices they have learned, on their own.

Throughout your stay, of course, the nurses are always on hand should you need them. They give that all important advice, at the crucial moment it’s needed. This is really important, because by allowing any time to pass allows for post-rationalisation and self-denial. Getting help at that point when things get unstuck also increases the likelihood of remembering what to do.

This live-in approach really struck a chord with me, and I started to consider how it could be used in other fields of expertise. I think it would be an absolutely great model for consulting, and more specifically mentoring. At least in my field, which is information architecture, user centred design and information management.

Techniques and guidelines, no matter how simple and refined, can’t give you the wisdom to know how to apply them to all situations that might arise. Raising a child is complex because life is complex, but many work situations people find themselves in are very complex also—such as managing an intranet, redesigning a large website or any number of major IT projects. This is where mentoring has much to offer above and beyond training or the self-taught approach.

I’ve long thought that mentoring is best done in-situ (in my presentation on Mentoring Collaborative UCD I concluded that an in-house mentor works best) where the team being mentored has access to their mentor’s advice as and when it is needed. Additionally, it should be face to face. Having to call or email your mentor, or wait for them to come in for a meeting, really stifles the inherent intimacy that mentoring thrives on. My experience is that even a relatively small physical distance, such as a taxi ride away, reduces the effectiveness of mentoring.

A traditional consulting engagement doesn’t allow for this, but there are some relatively common tactics to improve the situation. Such as clumping together several visits into one whole day, but this lacks the impromptu nature and feels slightly forced and hypothetical. If you tackle problems when they occur, the better the results are.

Another alternative could be the use of a contractor, to supplement the team. While many contractors and freelancers would have the skills and experience in their particular field to be mentors, they typically aren’t hired to do so and of course don’t have any motivation to go beyond their remit. Contractors are usually hired to perform a specific piece of self-contained work, with little “leave behind” for the rest of the team. To approach the live-in model, they would have to actively coach the team in which they are embedded, but also gradually reduce their intervention.

A ‘day stay’, where the mentee comes and works in your office, is another approach. This gives the access to their mentor, and is close to the Tresillian model. However, most often in my work, the mentee is more than one person, so to be truly analagous to the live-in model, the whole team would need to come and live in the mentor’s facility. While you would gain the same benefits, primarily the elimination of distractions, it just wouldn’t be practical to do so (plus who wants to have a sleep over with their work colleagues?!).

This arrangement would also share the potential problems with the Tresillian model, which is the fact that once you leave their facility you may not be able to match your success once you get home. The very nature of taking the problem to a controlled (or semi-controlled) environment could jeopardise its success; practicing any technique is more difficult in your day-to-day environment.

But if we reverse the scenario, it may be viable. That is, the mentor becomes part of the team being mentored, for a length of time, and operates as part of that team. This is a longer interaction than normal consulting would allow, and something akin to secondment, but more flexible. It needs to be long enough to ‘get into the thick of it’ and practice techniques in a realistic environment with realistic situations. And this is definitely such a thing as too early. Like an advanced workshop or master class, you need to have a bit of distance under your belt. In the case of parenting you need to know your child and what works and what doesn’t, and as with most things, you need to give it a genuine go yourself, before seeking help.

This may be a common approach to consulting or mentoring in certain fields, but it’s not as widespread as it could be, in my experience. Especially considering how powerful it is as a form of up-skilling. I’ve not come across this in web design, IA or UCD fields, but I’d be interested to hear if anyone has used such an intensive, live-in approach to mentoring, as either the mentor or mentee.

Yesterday I attended the half-day WIPA Usability and Eyetracking Seminar, and found it fairly good use of a few hours of my time. Largely because it helped confirm some things in my own mind.

First up was Challenges for Usability in Agile Development presented by John Eklund of UX Research. There has been much talk about agile development methodologies in recent, and probably as much talk about how user experience practitioners can remain valuable in such an environment.

To paraphrase John, my summary of the discussion is as such:

• Agile is about “bringing design forward” (I like this definition)
• It’s about less documentation and specification up-front
• Acknowledge that requirements will not be fully correct, complete or fixed in stone; learn to live with it rather than boxing requirements gathering into one neat discrete step that must be finished before anything else can begin
• Agile is also iterative or incremental development
• Partial prototypes help elicit requirements and specifications from the client
• Clients rarely read spec documentation and often can’t articulate what they want until they see it (you know it’s true!)
• Creativity is less bounded by specification when the specification is yet set (this is not just in terms of visual creativity but also the overall design directions)
• For UX to fit into this methodology it needs to be embedded, flexible, fast and practiced by an experienced practitioner
• For best results in agile environments, UX expertise should be independent of designer (and client)
• Additionally, UX practitioners must play the “expert advocacy” role (providing ad-hoc advice on simple issues without the need for a costly ‘engagement’ or bulky reports)
• Generally faster turn-around is needed for activities like usability testing

I enjoyed John’s perspective on this topic, and a few of his points in particular are closely aligned with my own views on UX practice. I’ve used mentoring in the same way as John’s “expert advocacy” where UX or IA expertise is bought by the hour, allowing for much greater freedom to add value to the design team without having to get approval for a project each time they want to ask a question.

Next up was Eyetracking – Applications in Digital and Media by Peter Brawn of Eyetracker. I was impressed by Peter’s presentation of eyetracking as part of UX practice, as opposed to how I have seen it pitched in the past (that is as the answer to all your problems). This makes sense, since there is a lot that gaze paths and fixation data can not tell you about the usability of a website, and vice versa there are some things you can’t really get out of traditional usability testing and ethnographic research techniques.

For example, a certain section of a website is not receiving much traffic. Usability testing might tell you that users are interested in the content in that section, but perhaps not why they aren’t getting to it. Eyetracking can tell you that users simply don’t look at the obvious, big, fat link that goes to that section, but not why they don’t look at it. Combined you are getting a more complete picture.

That said, I still believe that, dollar for dollar, other methods are better value than eyetracking. For the cost of the hardware and software (or consultants to do it for you) quite a lot of low-tech testing and research could be done. Ideally, you’d do both, but going back to John’s topic, if you want to ensure UX keeps its foot in the door in agile environments—or any other—the approach needs to be lean, mean and cost effective.

I do understand that many clients want the snazzy visualisations you get from eyetracking, not to mention the snob value, but this is only going to be realistic for big corporate clients. Smaller clients should save the cash and use other methods.

I read with interest, Any Rutlidge’s post on Pre-Bid Discussions. You see, Andy was invited to bid for some work but decided not to do so after an enlightening discussion with his potential client, in which he got a good sense for the project timeline, the nature of the work and whether or not it is work he even wanted to do.

To others, these concerns might seem ridiculous, because for some agencies and freelancers the only relevant pre-bid concerns are 1) is there a slight possibility that I can do the work? and 2) can the client pay? For these folks, nothing else is relevant to pre-bid discussion. The likely result of this foolish approach is a succession of nightmare projects with only periodic success, and a stressed-out and unhappy life and/or staff as the norm.

I know exactly what he means. There have been quite a few times I have wondered why we—the agency I was working for—were even involved in some projects. But in recent years, I’m happy to say that there was more careful consideration given to the work that was taken on, particularly which tenders and RFCs to respond to. In fact, my ex-colleague Cairo Walker developed a set of criteria, or questions to be asked of clients, for this very purpose. (Perhaps this knod her way will entice her to post her thoughts on the subject!)

I like Andy’s approach, but I think many organisations will come face to face with the issue of branding. Not the pretty logo they use but who they are and what they want to achieve—their values. Without a clear sense of this, determining whether a potential client is in-line with your brand will be difficult. The logistics such as budget and schedule can be assessed

All in all, I would recommend we all do more of this vetting, whilst fully admitting that I’m not the best when it comes to this; I have a terribly bad habit of attempting to diligently do whatever anyone asks!

The time has come for a change, as if I haven’t had enough change lately. But this change is a career change, and it is with some sadness that I announce this is my last week at Step Two Designs.

While it has been quite an experience, it is time to move on and experience something else. My immediate move will be to join the team at News Digital Media. I’m looking forward to it, especially to the change in pace and surroundings, and working with a great bunch of people. In many ways it will be a return to the sort of environment I had worked in for many years prior to coming to Step Two.

So, next after Step Two—the third step as it were—is News. I start next Monday and I can’t imagine it will be long before I’m rubbing shoulders with uncle Rupert himself. You don’t suppose he monitors the blogosphere do you? :)

My latest article has just been released, in which I interview Gerry Gaffney on the use of cultural probes in the context of intranet development. This was actually to return the favour extended by Gerry to interview me for his UX podcast. Here’s a taste:

Often it’s difficult to tell exactly who is using an intranet, and how they are using it. Obviously, some research is required to help answer these questions, but what technique can capture the tacit knowledge without shadowing users in an uncomfortable and expensive way?

A relatively recent research technique that can be very useful in this situation is known as a ‘cultural probe’. In essence, the technique involves getting users to give you information without you actually being there. Often this means giving them a diary to write things down in, but the technique can make use of all manner of objects.

I think there are many benefits to this technique for those designing, or redesigning, an intranet. Firstly, it’s often the case that intranet teams are working with very little budget, and thus including all user groups—say interstate or overseas—in research activities can be next to impossible. Sending out a probe which can collect data for you at low cost is a good solution.

It’s also a great way to reduce the ‘Hawthorne effect’, that is the effect you will have on those you are researching simply by being there. This effect is especially difficult for intranet teams to avoid, since they are often researching their own colleagues. It’s hard to blend into the background when you know everyone in the room! External consultants have it easy when it comes to quietly observing or doing contextual inquiries.

I really like the cultural probe technique, especially the sorts of whacky and creative things done by design researchers such as Bill Gaver. These might be a bit ‘out there’ for the corporate environment, but certainly get your attention.

(I’m interested in case studies that describe the use of probes, particularly ‘inside the firewall’. Have you probed your enterprise? What did you find?)