Pat’s Point of View

Today I ran the first of my series of Information Architecture Fundamentals workshops. It was a good day, with a nice small group so we had lots of good discussion.

And it was a really great group of people too, with similar situations and levels of experience. Everybody worked in public sector, either health or education. And because these weren’t absolute beginners, I could dispense with some of the material in the course and discuss stuff that was a bit more advanced.

The feedback from attendees was really positive, with high praise for the lunch (oh and they thought I was pretty good too). The most frequent comments were that the group discussion was great, giving them a chance to hear other people’s perspective. The scope and level of detail was also appreciated. This is good since I deliberately tried to keep the focus on ‘big picture’ and properly defining the problem space, rather than jumping into the details of specific techniques, which IA training tends to do.

Next step Canberra, and there are plenty of places so I might see you there.

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Yesterday I made what seemed like my millionth trip to Canberra. Nothing really deserved it’s own post, so here are a few tidbits:

• There a hell of a lot of roundabouts (’traffic circles’ if you prefer) in Canberra. They are the ultimate in user self-governance. How democratic of Walter, although I suspect the prolific use of roundabouts has more to do with lowering the cost of road infrastructure by not having any traffic lights.
• Whilst the situation with cabs in Canberra is stupendously bad (if you’ve ever tried getting a cab at Canberra airport you know what I mean) it’s worth pointing out that the taxi drivers are pretty good. They’re tidy, polite, topical, they speak English, and they know their way around. Unlike most Sydney taxi drivers who don’t tick any of these boxes (who hasn’t had to give their cabbie directions to a well-known destination?). Dare I say it, this is likely because Canberra’s cab drivers aren’t fresh off the boat.
• I met a lady named Gwenda. It’s like her parents couldn’t decide between Gwen and Glenda. It’s annoying but not as bad as the thing where people create a new name by spelling an existing name incorrectly (eg Jorja, Kortny). I think there are more than enough names in the world without resorting to this kind of ‘creativity’. Either way, I think it’s rather cruel of parents to give their children such stupid names.

See what people are blogging about: Canberra, Canberra cabs, roundabout, business travel, stupid baby name

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Recently I’ve been faced with having to present design ideas to a client, as part of strategic recommendations, prior to a user-centred design process having begun.

The reason behind this is to create some enthusiasm and gain buy-in for improvements to a website, to meet their strategic business goals. Without showing them some ideas—including examples of the end product from other sites—the feeling is that we wouldn’t get the go ahead to start a proper design process. This isn’t uncommon in the real world of doing business with clients.

However, I am not particularly comfortable with this approach for several reasons. Firstly, from experience I know that clients often see these suggestions and fall in love with them, demanding they go into production. No matter what you come back and say later, you can’t renege these ‘golden’ ideas. We have included in our recommendations that user research be conducted, with the view that these ideas may potentially be disqualified based on what we learn about the needs of the target audience. But it might be too late by then.

Secondly, the ideas being suggested at this point are not in any way based on the needs of the target audience. They are based on the ideas which some consultants think would be good. And we’re talking about fairly complex functionality; discussion tools, comparators, information sifting. (Can we spell ‘featuritis’?) We just don’t know if that’s what this particular audience wants or will use.

Obviously we could be on to a winner with these features, after all we are supposed to design new innovative solutions. Usability testing will probably reveal if the suggested functionality is not going to work. I’d just be happier if we started with some understanding of the audience needs, rather than the client’s business objectives.

I am probably particularly sensitive to this issue. In a former life I worked in technical development and engineering, then later in the world of marketing and graphic design. These are two worlds notorious for creating websites they would use rather than something their audience would use. In order to move away from that mentality I have become a bit of a zealot and tend to get all shirty when someone doesn’t do things right.

That said, the argument for showing our hand, so to speak, is compelling. If we don’t get the design work we can’t do anything at all. Like I said this isn’t new, I’ve seen it many times before but in the past I’ve just bitched and whined and put up with it. I expected more this time round.

So I’m wondering, does anyone have any suggestions for solving this chicken-and-egg? How do you find a balance between giving the client an idea of what could be possible without short-circuiting the user-centred design process? This is surely an important issue for those of us working in this field.

See what people are blogging about: user experience, user-centred design, design ideas

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Lately, I’ve been thinking about recruiting users (or I could don a lab coat and call them subjects) for usability testing.

I’ve spent the last year focused on intranets, which when it comes to this, are a breeze. You have a captive audience which can be defined quite well—in terms of job roles and information needs—through a bit of ethnographic research, they are usually close by and are usually quite happy to participate (if it comes to it you can always get their boss to make them do it…<evil laugh>).

Now, working on a website is a whole different ball game. There’s a lot of talk about usability testing—who to test, how many subjects, how to run the sessions—but not a lot on how to find a good source of representative subjects.

In the past, I’ve used two techniques when working on public projects: guerrilla style and external testing. By guerrilla (I just love that word) I mean low-cost, in-house testing where you make use of carefully selected colleagues/friends/family. At the other extreme we almost totally outsourced the recruitment and provision of test labs. Each is a valid technique, if applied appropriately, but both have obvious drawbacks.

Your client might already be in contact with key customers (such as in the case of B2B) and allow you access to their staff, but this is not that common for most projects, and more importantly, are these going to be representative users?

Probably the most popular method of recruitment is to use an external recruiter, normally a market research firm, who can get you subjects. Sometimes they even get you subjects you specify! But this is pretty bloody expensive.

A recent addition to the proverbial toolkit is Usability Exchange which makes it a bit easier by facilitating remote online sessions (specifically for accessibility). But remote testing of this nature has major drawbacks. It’s not surprising that it’s focus is on the more mechanical aspects of accessibility; so much of what you might learn from a one-on-one session is lost with this arrangement.

AGIMO have an interesting bit in their tookit on recruiting participants, although it doesn’t go into specifics. Some of their suggestions are interesting, and the list of pros and cons seems very sensible. Having never used some of these methods (such as cold calling or advertising in the newspaper) I’m not sure how practical they would would be, or how enthusiastic most clients would be to use them.

So it’s looking like the best approach is still to try a combination of methods that are suitable for the specific situation you find yourself in. No silver bullet here…or is there? Do you have a favoured technique for getting hold of usability testing subjects? C’mon let’s hear it.

(And this is just for your usual usability testing, what about cultural probes and other more ‘intrusive’ techniques? How do you find subjects for those?)

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I’ve just published another article, this time it’s Feed your enterprise with RSS in which I discuss the benefits of using news feeds.

Conceptually, ‘news feeds’ are quite simple, allowing content to be delivered over the internet. Web users are very familiar with the idea of feeds, but what about their use within an organisation?

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The life of a consultant is a much varied one. My work environment can be different from one day to the next; in an office one day, workshop the next; call centre here, corporate HQ there; noisy bunch, morgue-like quiet; heart of the city, God-knows-where.

Going from client to client, office to office, desk to desk, is like starting a new job every few weeks. You are in a different environment, you don’t know anyone and people look at you funny when you make ’school boy errors’ (look how was I supposed to know you had to hold down all three buttons to get hot water to come out, I mean come on people!). On top of this you need to get the job done efficiently. Luckily the process of learning your way around and learning about an organisation is closely aligned with needs analysis work. You have to get to know people and learn how it all ticks.

You get to travel a bit too—I’ve been to most Australian capital cities recently, but no overseas yet. Today I just happen to be in an outer suburb of Brisbane. This is interesting as you get to see the differences between cities (and states). Maybe it’s because of the time I spent overseas or because my impressions of other places in Australia were shaped by childhood experiences (and I didn’t pay much attention), but in the last year I have noticed many things during my interstate travel. For example, the accent. I used to dismiss Brits who said they could hear differences in the Australian accents of people from, say, Sydney and Perth. But I now believe there is a difference. Most recently, I’ve noticed the Brisbane (or perhaps Queensland) accent and a while back, the Adelaide accent.

The other thing I have noticed is the number of Kiwis over here. Again, maybe I just didn’t notice before, but since coming back from the UK it seems the level of immigration from New Zealand has shot up. Not that this is a bad thing, but it’s noticeable.

Anyway, I’m off to earn some more frequent flyer points.

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I was recently in the unfortunate position of having to work through the night to complete a project for the next morning. In this case, the work involved writing a fairly long report critiquing a client’s website.

The next day, looking back on what I had written, I formulated the ‘3am writing’ axiom "at 3:00am sentences often sound really, really good—but they’re not".

I found several instances of 3am writing, but my favourite is:

The site is like a novel but what you want is a fortune cookie.

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Scott Berkun, author of The Art of Project Management is running a one day masterclass on Leading successful web and software projects in early September, in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra.

I’m looking forward to this as I’ve really liked what Scott has had to say in the past, and I sure could use some tips on project management! :)

More information can be found on the Step Two Designs website.

See what people are blogging about: Scott Berkun, The art of project management, project management

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Over recent weeks I’ve been in Adelaide (see my photos) consulting with a large government agency regarding their intranet. It occurred to me that this work, as well as a lot of IA and user experience consulting, is much like being Super Nanny; much of your effort is directed towards changing the attitude of the ‘head of the family’.

Within any organisation that has an intranet there is usually someone who has control (although lack of ownership of it is often a major hurdle in delivering a successful intranet). This may be the IT department, or a dedicated intranet team. Combined with senior management these people are like the parents, with staff as the children.

Most of the time Super Nanny (Jo Frost, to be more precise) is involved, the parents are running around like mad idiots, screaming at the children trying to get them to behave. They’re so caught up in the day-to-day madness of it all, they don’t even know where to begin. The children just won’t do what they’re suppose to! But what you see time and time again is that it’s the parents that need work—the attitude and behaviour adjustment.

Super Nanny has to point out what’s going wrong, often to the discomfort and embarrassment of the parents. She needs to explain that it’s not the kids fault, it’s your fault. You can’t make the kids do what you want (especially whilst quite often acting contrary to your own rules…but that’s a whole other story). You need to work out what the problem is and find ways to solve it.

Do you see the parallels? Staff aren’t misbehaving when they don’t use the intranet. They’re not “breaking the rules” because they are disrespectful or out of control. Often the systems that have been put in place are simply not meeting their needs. Not only are intranets and procedures difficult for staff to use, often they’re completely irrelevant. Is it any wonder they don’t play nicely?

That’s why ‘needs analysis’ is the most crucial task in (re)designing an intranet. When consultants perform intranet needs analysis we aim to understand how staff work, then look at how the intranet is helping, hindering or simply not involved. Then we show this to those strategising, designing and administering the intranet (and related systems) so they too understand exactly what’s going on. This is the “Oh…that’s really what they do?” moment. Like videoing the parents before Super Nanny arrives, this holds a mirror up to themselves as much as anything else and usually illustrates the stark contrast between the reality of work life for staff and the vision acquired by implementers and management.

Many of the key techniques Super Nanny uses take the parents on a journey; from their current perspective through to one of understanding how things actually are and the effects on family life. Unless they tread that path they will not change and things will continue as they were, if not worse. Often the process might be given a name (such as the ‘naughty corner’) but these are age-old techniques which in the back of their minds the parents probably already know. Repackaging it as something new can cut-through like nothing else. Perhaps doing this reduces the dent on their pride? eg this new technique is the answer, so it wasn’t really my fault that I couldn’t solve it before.

Compared to this, the kids are a breeze. Once their environment and the expectations of the ‘powers that be’ are adjusted, they start behaving. They’re just happy that mum and dad are happy. And they’re happy that someone is taking some notice of them (the analogy in the intranet world is that staff are often happy that someone listens to them rather than just prescribing solutions on them without asking what they need).

Now, I’m not a parent (yet) nor am I an intranet manager, so I’m not saying either job is easy. They both require strong people skills and an ability to think outside your own box; what about me might not be right for this family/company? It’s also about being brave enough to admit the brutal truth and then go about making the necessary changes.

And with any luck, like most families Super Nanny visits, organisations wishing to improve their intranet will come out of the process with a renewed relationship with their colleagues and enthusiasm for continued progress. Preferably without the tears.

ps: A great deal of restraint was needed to not use the phrase “unceptable” in this post. Oops, there it is.

See what people are blogging about: intranet, IA, Super Nanny, Adelaide

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My mid-year’s resolution is to use the response shown in the middle frame below.

Shouldn’t be that hard :)

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