Pat’s Point of View

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

Please never say enterprise software again. I don’t really like enterprise software. Pretend you’re making consumer software. [...] Make software for people in big companies.

Jonathan Grubb (at CHI 2007)

So true. Engineers and techies who build the underlying system might need to think of the whole enterprise—in terms of performance, capacity, reliability—but when it comes to designing the functionality and interface, the people who will use it should be the focus.

Ironically, on the same day I thought about blogging this quote, I did observe a woman on my bus reading a memo entitled User Guide for Simplified Sign-on for XYZ Mainframe (or something to that effect). The memo was about six pages long, crammed with fairly dodgy looking annotated screenshots and quite a lot of instructions, with many bolded sentences.

I thought to myself, if it’s the ‘simplified’ version then why does it need such lengthy explanation? By the look of that memo I would say it was far from simplified and far from anything I would want to roll out across a major financial institution (and yes, ‘XYZ’ is definitely a pseudonym in this case).

Todd Wilkens of Adaptive Path says—to paraphrase—that usability is a minimum requirement, not a suitable end-goal. Here’s a snippet:

…Legibility and visibility are the bare minimum of requirements for a successful piece of writing or a photograph. Any person who focused most of their efforts on legibility or visibility would probably have almost no chance of being a successful artist…No one tells their kids to aim for a C- and then expects them to get an A.

So, why oh why do people in this day age still hold up “usability” as something laudable in product and service design? Praising usability is like giving me a gold star for remembering that I have to put each leg in a different place in my pants to put them on. (Admittedly, I do give my 2 year old daughter a gold star for this but then she’s 2.) Usability is not a strategy for design success…Recently, I’m even coming to believe that focusing on usability is actually a path to failure…

The comments people have left regarding this post show that many of them took offence to what they thought Todd was saying.

Firstly, I think this points to quite a deep insecurity among ‘usability’ people. Secondly, I agree with Todd’s post, in so much as I have come across many organisations who have it in their head that they have to “do usability” and then everything will be alright. And I wrote about this in my post User-centred doesn’t equal success.

Among the comments are Todd’s efforts to better explain himself. I feel for him since I think I’m quite similar at times, blurting out quite a bald statement and having to explain myself. But honestly you would think readers of the AP blog (especially experienced practitioners) would be able to get what he was saying. Would anyone working at AP suggest usability isn’t something that should be taken seriously? Of course not, the point is that it’s not sufficient on it’s own. It should be a ‘given’, with the goal being to create something useful.

Far be it from me to criticise a fellow usability person, but there’s something rather annoying about Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox emails: the subject line and content don’t match.

The subject line for the email relates to the latest Alertbox article, such as “Show Numbers as Numerals When Writing for Online Readers”. At the top of the email content there is a very short summary of the article and then a link to the full version on the website. All good, no complaints, well done.

The problem is that there’s much more in the email than just that. A few ads for conferences, books etc but then there’s some actual content. In the case of the latest Alertbox email we find “Is the end near for text-box ads?” and “Registration costs business”. These mini-articles are shown in full in the email and are generally a good read. I find that I end up reading those rather than clicking the link to the ‘main’ article. I’m sure there is a distinction between these two types of content from the authors point of view (I suspect the shorter bits are more like blog posts whereas the main articles are fully explored ideas) but from a user perspective, the content I read is not what the subject line promises. Add to this the tendency to skip over the very top of an email since that’s normally where ads sit or links for mailing list controls and/or metadata (who, when, where, unsubscribe links etc). Text banner blindness!

So would most people prefer to read inline content in an email or click through to a website? Somewhat ironically, Nielsen has written quite a bit about the area of email usability, but nothing specifically relating to inline vs linked. Scannability is important, which would favour summaries and links. And I suppose if there are graphs, charts or other diagrams in the article then a text email is not going to be very effective yet a page on the website will be. But I tend to stay within the application I’m using, especially if there are hundreds of emails awaiting my attention. I don’t want to have to click through to read the article, which means waiting for the browser to open etc.

Maybe it’s just me…

Yes, this is an unashamed rip-off of Jessica Hagy. Well it’s kinda more like an homage to her witty, insightful and very clever musings. I can, however, only ever hope to mimic her use of graphs and diagrams, rather than what she uses them to communicate.

The inspiration for this particular graph is the popularist rollercoaster which the web design industry can often be. Usability, user experience and then user-centred design; a succession of buzzwords that stirred clients and designers alike in to furious fits of corrective work. There’s no debating that at the heart of this movement was a genuine need for a shift in focus for many businesses and website owners (getting them out of the bottom left on the above graph). However, I’m sure we’ve all seen this bandwagon pick up speed at a frightening rate and career out of control. The net effect is that the herd mentality is now “we must do usability”. Blame the pundits for scaring us and blowing things out of proportion :)

For all the success stories (top right) there are still many examples of well-meaning and well executed projects that fall flat on their faces. Despite a user-centred approach, success does not always follow. A successful website (or business) does not necessarily require a devoted focus on user (or customer) goals, behaviours or attitudes. You mean we’re all deluded? Well, to use that old IA chestnut, “it depends”.

Think about how many products and services are a success even though when you take a long hard look (sometimes not even that long) you can’t find any evidence that users were considered at all. Remember the Motorola Razr? That phone is awful to use, nobody I know who has one likes it. But they still bought it, and I even know someone who bought another one after he broke the first one! As the old saying goes “there’s no accounting for taste”, but there’s also the fact that people don’t always behave logically. We buy and use things that suck, willingly and repeatedly (bottom right).

There are other more sneaky examples too, electrical and computer appliances are pretty much built as cheaply as possible as part of a strategy to shorten product lifecycles and increase replacement and up-sell. This pretty much flies in the face of what consumers want, but overall that industry is a massive success. In this case we have little choice, and the manufacturers know this. There’s no need for user-centred design here, just marketing.

And the door swings the other way too. Massive amounts of time and money are invested into user-centred design projects to improve things like electricity bills and ‘banner ads’. But in the end, none of that matters; the chance of success is low (top left). This is where usability versus usefulness can come into play (although it could be argued that it’s not really UCD if both are not taken into account).

All in all, this topic is an interesting antithesis to the usability hype. The fact that there are so many examples you could place in the bottom right (MySpace and YouTube would have to be the poster children of this corner) would seem to indicate that a balance of user-centred-ness along with everything else will give good results. Maybe even better results than a user-centred focus. This discussion could quickly wander into usability ROI, and none of us want to go there do we.

For my parting comment, I’d like to say I really like these graphs as communication tools, since you can easily map out several different factors and spark a discussion. Coming up with examples to plot on the graph can also be quite a challenge, as some of my examples illustrate…feel free to offer suggestions.