Pat’s Point of View

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]

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.

Here’s a Friday afternoon thought regarding a classic mistake in trying to get people to participate in a survey. When you tell people about your survey, make sure they can complete it!

Sounds simple, right? Well that’s because it is.

Some background perhaps. A common sight within organisations is the satisfaction survey, your HR department might call it something else but essentially they’re all the same. And like all satisfaction surveys—think of a motel or car rental company—it’s really a poor attempt at communicating with your audience, or giving the perception that you are communicating with them (but I digress). People know this, that you’re not really listening to them (the vague, clichéd questions are a dead giveaway) so you’re already off to a bad start if you choose to run such a survey. But you’re really going to struggle when you ask staff to complete a survey that doesn’t exist…yet.

I saw an example of this today, where an email—and a rather long winded email full of ‘management speak’—was sent to all staff in a large organisation, telling them about the flagship staff engagement activity for the year, an all-encompassing survey (!!). At the end there was a link to the online survey. At this point I was simply surprised it was an online survey and out of sheer excitment decided to click on the link. Error. Not a nice “survey not open please come back later” message, an HTTP 404 error.

Apparently I was meant to wait until the survey opened in a few days time and then go back to the email, click the link and complete the survey. Hmmm. Delete!

Survey completion rates are typically quite low. Without a tangible incentive they’re even lower. If it has anything to do with work, waaaay low. So you’ve got very little chance of getting a decent set of responses, but when the link doesn’t work at the point when people are the most likely to click on it, you’ve lost before you’re even begun.

Let’s not even discuss whether a survey is a good method for engaging with staff, the moral of the story is if you create a call to action make sure the people who you want to act are able to take action. This goes for surveys but also competitions, sales promotions and website launches.

(You may be thinking this post is rather ironic given my own recent attempts at surveying, but this is one mistake I definitely didn’t make :)

I’m running a survey and I’d like your help.

Best practice design of websites, and other digital media, involves a set of skills known broadly as Information Architecture (IA) which generally means making designs user friendly. IA is also known to people doing this work, by such terms as User Experience (UX), User Centred Design (UCD), Interaction Design (IxD) or simply “usability”.

A significant amount of this sort of work is performed by agencies—whether they be advertising agencies, digital agencies or communication agencies. As a practitioner and educator in the field of IA, I am interested in learning how people go about practicing it, in particular how agencies “do IA”. This is to both confirm and challenge my own understanding of the way agencies work and how IA fits into their processes, who it gets done by and how it might be possible to give agencies the skills they need to perform better in this regard.

To this end, I’ve launched an online survey to get some answers straight from the people who work in agencies (or used to). The survey will take approximately 5-10 minutes to complete and I’ll give away, to one lucky person who completes the survey, a copy of the acclaimed best-selling book by Steve Krug Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition. I recommend this book for anyone considering doing anything to do with IA or usability, so it’s only fitting to offer it as an incentive.

You’ll find the survey at: http://www.gurtle.com/survey/index.php?sid=61824

If you don’t work in an agency, you can still help me out by forwarding this to your clients, peers and friends who do work in agencies. I may run a more general survey in the future, but for now I’m focused on agency folks.

The survey will run until the end of September, so there should be plenty of time for word to get around.

I’ll share the results of the survey (aggregated not raw data), either here on this blog or through conferences in and around the IA community. Stay tuned.

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.

It’s so typical for usability professionals to point out the un-usability of everyday things they encounter, and I normally try to resist, but I just have to comment on the Bonds EasySuit.

You’ll no doubt have seen the ads on TV, cute lil buggers wearing stretchy one-piece numbers. They look good and feel good—no seams or buttons—but damned if they are decidedly not easy to put on!

It looks like it’s easy enough, you just open the hole on the lower back and slip it on. Yeah, good luck. You need to bend baby in half and then simultaneously insert arms and legs into the corresponding holes and somehow they’re supposed to spring back into shape, fully clothed.

Grace gives me a slightly perplexed look and emits a short ‘humpf’ as I bend her in half like a pretzel. The look on her face seems to say “you sure you know how to do this?”.

What’s needed is a suit fitting system like in Iron Man :)

Apparently there were a few sore heads this morning, but I was fine (yes it’s boring but safe). The second conference day got straight into it with plenty of paper presentations, including two by Floyd Mueller, who was without a doubt the most entertaining speaker of the conference.

There were some interesting topics presented today, but I did feel there was a lot of repetition in the choice of papers (is it just me or is everyone in HCI looking into gesture recognition?). In particular I liked the talk on stories with emotion and conflict by Georg Strøm, as this use of narrative is something I’ve been trying to include in my UX work for some time. Compared to use cases and other techniques typically used in software development, stories and narrative are much more useful—from my point of view anyway. I also thought the on-going discussion about the level of formality in diagrams was interesting, and this ran across several presentations, the common factor being Beryl Plimmer it would seem.

Then it was my turn. My quick 15 minutes on mentoring was well appreciated, judging by the feedback I got, but I found it really hard to keep to the time limit. And this was the case, even thought I cut the presentation down to focus on just one aspect of the paper, across about ten slides. Hopefully I was able to affect the audience somehow, and sell the idea of mentoring to those who might not have considered it. And of course I hope I didn’t bore anyone to sleep. My slides are, as always, up on SlideShare.

More on the usability side, I think discussions by Vince Bruno and Jessica Enders were interesting, and caused a fair bit of discussion. I found Vince’s talk, on his research into usability practitioners in Australia, interesting because he seemed so surprised by what he found. For example, of course we focus a lot on having users involved in research and design activities, it’s user-centred design! Practitioners I spoke to appreciated his honesty and the openness with which he approached his research.

Jessica’s talk on her research into the usability of ‘zebra striping’ in tabulated information was a great effort. Practitioners definitely need to get more involved in this kind of work, helping bridge the gap between academy and industry. This has inspired me to look at how I can do some research into a very practical problem such as Jessica has, and come up with some answers which will help the practice of user experience and related fields.

Overall it was a conference that possibly had less to offer me in terms of picking up new knowledge, but the chance to catch up with peers and stay connected with current academic research is always welcome. I’ll definitely aim to present again next year, hopefully something unique and thought-provoking.

However, from my point of view, it’s hard not to find fault with the conference. I said it last year, and I’ll say it again now, there’s a lot to be desired regarding presentations from academics. There is some really interesting material in the work they’ve done, but their presentations don’t expose this. In most cases, authors failed to engage their audience and didn’t effectively communicate the fruits of their hard work. They seemed to be following a rigid format (presumably the ‘traditional’ presentation adopted in academia) and in many cases did not structure the presentation for the allocated time. Granted, this was hard when you only have 15 or even 25 minutes, but presentations are not the place to discuss every single detail of your work, that’s what the papers are for. Trying to plumb the depths of the technical details behind your thesis, or present tables of data in this environment, does you no favours. If anything, you confuse the audience and dissuade them from reading the paper, but certainly you come off looking ill-prepared and it probably heightens your nerves.

I would like to see less presentations, each allocated a bit more time, and perhaps teaming up paper authors with practitioners or communications students, to put together an effective presentation. For all I know, this is what one should expect from an academic conference and this is what the bulk of the audience wants, but is that a good enough reason to continue?

Adelaide put on some lovely weather for the first day of the conference—if a little hot for those of us with pale Celtic skin—and there was a good vibe in all the sessions.

One thing was obvious this year, there are quite a few international delegates that made their way to our distant country to attend OzCHI. And over all there was quite a diverse mix of discussions taking place. Although I didn’t really understand what was being said around some of the more academic topics :)

The things of interest for me included the talk on probes by Mark Rouncefield, measuring cognitive load using speech features by Natalie Ruiz, and the talk on the link between spatial ability and the use of site maps on websites by Chris Pilgrim (he found there is a link, which might sound obvious to experienced practitioners but it’s worth having some science to back that up).

Topping off the day was a great conference dinner at Adelaide Zoo. Under the ‘big top’ and surrounded by all sorts of dangerous critters, plenty of healthy discussion took place (and it wasn’t as nerdy as you might think). I think the quote of the night had to be Shane Morris saying “I’m going to make you a star!” once he found out someone at our table actually liked using Microsoft Expression, and was willing to admit it :)

I spent the day today at World Usability Day in the Telstra Experience Center in Sydney. We had setup a little exhibition stand for Step Two, showing what we do and giving away some articles and information packs related to usability. It was an interesting experience and I have a few ideas for next year, to make the stand more effective.

The Experience Center is pretty nifty, if not completely finished. The testing and observation labs were well setup and the whole place was a pleasant place to spend some time. The auditorium was decked out with comfy chairs that had built-in power and networking sockets for laptops, although the foldaway desks were absent.

Throughout the day there were presentations in the auditorium, and demonstrations of usability testing and eye-tracking software. A tour of the facility was a big hit and so were the ‘door prizes’ and raffles which exhibitors and sponsors were giving away. Our own contribution, a cool little iPod Nano, was raffled towards the end of the day and won by Joanne from Objective Digital, with whom we shared out exhibition space.

I suspect the bad weather in the morning kept some people away, but there was a steady flow of people dropping in throughout the day. Overall it was a great success for the newly formed UPA Sydney chapter, and due reward must be paid to Susan Wolfe and the rest of the organising crew.

Immediately after the event I had to pack up and get to the airport for a flight to Albury, to do some user research. I flew Regional Express out of Sydney’s Terminal 2. It was not quite the experience I’m used to with business travel (Qantas’ CityFlyer was sorely missed, I can tell you) but I got here OK. I found out I am sharing a hotel with the boys from WheelsMOTOR magazine who are busy compiling the next Performance Car of the Year (PCOTY) awards. This made for an interesting discussion over breakfast, and pork seemed to be the order of the day, if you know what I mean.

This year, WUD is on November 8th, and I’ll be manning the Step Two Designs booth at the Sydney event. If you have some time, drop in and say hello. There will be lots of interesting things going on, and at our booth we’ll have lots of information to give away, as well as a lucky dip prize. I hope my t-shirt fits this year :)

Here are all the details:

The Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) has proclaimed that World Usability Day 2007 will take place on November 8, 2007. This year’s focus will be on healthcare. World Usability Day was founded in 2005 with a global mission to increase the public’s awareness of the need to make services and products easier to access and simpler to use. Universal issues such as healthcare, education and government will be addressed through expert forums, exhibits, events and initiatives in over 35 countries.

The UPA Sydney chapter is organising a local event, which will take place at Telstra on Level 4, 400 George Street, Sydney, from 9am – 5pm.

The November 8th event will feature an impressive lineup of speakers addressing the importance of usability across all aspects of healthcare. The program will include presentations on:

• The importance of customer experience to a large corporate (Holly Kramer, Group Managing Director, Telstra Product Management, Telstra)
• Advanced telemedicine – Accessing health services remotely (CSIRO)
• User experience design of a hospital-based managed healthcare service (Telstra)
• The risks of medical equipment failing and why usability is important (Moray & Agnew)
• The impact of poor usability on people’s lives (Objective Digital)
• Accessibility – opening a new world to disabled people (Scenario Seven)
• Usable website development process – NSW Guardianship Tribunal case study (Web Usability)
• Trustworthy technology – Privacy and identity in the healthcare industry (Edentiti)
• Design thinking and usability (Telstra)

The day will also include interactive sessions and demonstrations of techniques such as usability testing and eye tracking, and will provide ample time to chat with people in the field of usability to learn more about it.

You are invited to attend any part or all of the day, and no pre-registration is required. The event is free, and open to the public.

For details of the program, please visit the UPA Sydney website or the World Usability Day website and look for the Sydney event.

A special thanks to the sponsors for this year’s Sydney event:

• Telstra Corporation
• Boomworks
• CHISIG
• CSIRO
• Digital Tsunami
• Epilepsy Action Australia
• Objective Digital
• PTG Global
• Step Two Designs
• The Hiser Group

See what people are blogging about: WUD07, World Usability Day