Pat’s Point of View

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.)

I’m very pleased to have my first article How to combine multiple research methods: Practical Triangulation published on Johnny Holland. Here’s a taste:

All research methods have their pros and cons, the problem comes when you rely on just one method. I’m often disappointed when UX and IxD practitioners describe the research they do, and it’s obviously very one dimensional. They only do surveys, for example. Or they only do usability testing at the end of the project (it’s quite alarming but this practice does continue).

…

This is where the concept of “triangulation” comes into its own. Also known as “mixed method” research, triangulation is the act of combining several research methods to study one thing. They overlap each other somewhat, being complimentary at times, contrary at others. This has the effect of balancing each method out and giving a richer and hopefully truer account.

This will of course be one of the many topics I will be covering in my full day workshop on design research methods for UX practitioners at UX Australia 2009 – a 3-day user experience design conference to be held next week (26-28 August 2009) in Canberra (Australia).

As many of them do, this post by Seth Godin struck a chord with me, and made a lot of sense:

Is marketing an art or a science? It’s both, and that’s the problem. Some marketers are scientists. They test and measure. They do the math. They understand the impact of that spend in that market at that time with that message. They can understand the analytics and find the truth.

The other marketers are artists. They inspire and challenge and connect. These marketers are starting from scratch, creating movements, telling jokes and surprising people. Scientists aren’t good at that.

Sounds a lot like the field of user experience, doesn’t it?

You definitely have those practitioners who are more “data driven”, analytical, more “quant”. And then there are those that are at the other end of the spectrum, who use research, intuition and “qual” (by the way, I really like how Seth puts it: “inspire and challenge and connect”).

I’m tempted to say the “scientists” are bogged down in strict methodologies, rules, templates, and patterns. That they have lost sight of the forest for the methodological trees. And that the “artists” are more agile, free-thinkers who don’t follow rigid process that kills creativity and serendipity. But that’s just my bias showing, I’m not a strict process kinda guy. The truth is that you can be scientific but not suffocated by rigidity, and you can be an artist that is so fixed in the way they work they miss valuable insights.

Seth then elaborates, explaining that the problem is two-fold:

1. Outsiders are confused. Which are we? When we’re artists sometimes and scientists other times, we often seem like charlatans, because we’re associating scientific results with artistic endeavors.

2. We’re confused. If you don’t know if you’re doing a science project or an art project, you’ll probably emphasize the wrong elements.

Ok that’s two for two, from a UX point of view. I come up against the first issue on almost a daily basis, people we work with expect one approach and are confused when we turn around and propose the opposite approach—if they have any understanding of what we do at all.

For example, my colleagues are often a little amazed that I don’t turn to analytics straight away, if at all. And many of our stakeholders think UX is all about demographics and looking at which section of the website gets the most hits. When we say we’re going to “sit around and talk to people” it’s quite a shock, evidently. (On the subject of analytics, my reluctance has more to do with the ridiculous tools being used and the data being collected, rather than a philosophical opposition to the concept.)

Regarding the second point, all you have to do is monitor any relevant mailing list for a short time and you’ll run into this issue: who are we? what do we do? how do we do it? how do we “define the damn thing”?

I wrote an article a while back, attempting to give some definition to the many faces of information architecture and while the article served the intended purpose—to explain all the associated terms/titles to those who were familiar with only a few (or none) of them—it wasn’t conclusive other than concluding that the “faces” are overlapping and difficult to define. This issue of schizophrenia in our field is not going away any time soon.

Seth concludes by suggesting: “figure out what sort of marketing you’re going to do today and go do that”. Fair enough, but does it actually solve the dilemma, for marketers or UX folk? Try as we might to explain what “brand” of UX we do, it just doesn’t seem to work, does it?

Perhaps a better question is how do we balance the art and science? or how do we communicate that it is a balance of art and science?. Because it should be a balance of the two, I think. You can’t go down a wholly quantitative, scientific route and have a well rounded result, nor can you just go down the qualitative, artistic route. The scientist and artist within all of us should be grappling with each other to keep each on the level, to ensure we cover both aspects of the subject we are studying and designing for. And on a team level, we need people within the team that sit on both sides of this fence, to balance each other out.

What do you think?

Last week I took part in Full Code Press, in which the team I was part of had to design and built a website for a not-for-profit client in the space of just 24 hours, competing against a similar team from New Zealand.

It was an intriguing prospect that didn’t fail to deliver some eventful moments, as well as a lot of frenzied activity. We didn’t win but that doesn’t matter I don’t think any of us were doing it for that reason.
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I’m pleased, and more than a little nervous, to announce I’ll be on the Australian team for Full Code Press; a friendly international competition whereby teams will design and build a website for a charitable organisation in just 24 hours. And this year we’ll be in full view of CeBIT attendees!

This will be interesting from the point of view of user experience practice, but I have a few tricks up my sleeve.

Wish us luck!

I spent today at Ark Group’s Strategically Managing Intranet Developments conference, which I blogged about before.

There were some good things being said, and by real people who have done the hard yards. They’re not “industry luminaries”, but people out there in the trenches working out how to create effective intranets. Grounded and real are two words I would apply to the conference.

Then there was my presentation, a tad more abstract, but I felt it went well. Slides below.

I felt compelled to steer my presentation towards audience participation, if only because of the collective knowledge in the room; about half the room were presenting at the conference so I was learning as much, if not more, than I was dishing out. That’s the downside of being a consultant, you rarely get that rich experience that in-house staff have. Some great examples were offered by the audience, complementing my own examples.

There were one or two people twittering, you can follow the conversation on #smid.

Happy to hear your comments on my slides, either here or on slidehsare.

There is a difference between your target audience (who you want to reach) and your user-base (who actually uses your website). At least that’s the mental model I’ve always used when approaching web design. Let me explain, using a nifty Venn diagram:

The following notation goes with the diagram:

A = population of all web users
B = your target audience
C = your user-base (users of your website)
D = target audience using your website (B∩C if you’re a math geek)
E = target audience not using your website (B \ C)
F = users who are not in your target (C \ B)

This model provides a good platform for discussing strategies and tactics for a website. For example;

• If F is big you might be targeting the wrong people. Or your content is attractive to people other than who you want to attract.
• You generally want to shrink E and F and grow D, such that B and C become much more aligned. That is, the people using your website match your target audience.
• To shrink E (the people in your target audience who don’t use your website) you don’t have to spend money on marketing! You can create good content that attracts them, or to put it another way, “use SEO”.
• And, following on from that, if the content and functionality are well crafted you won’t grow F.

This last point is an interesting one, and it’s something that isn’t necessarily clear to some in this industry.

Case in point, I was recently involved in a conversation where a website owner told me her organisation didn’t know who their audience is. Not just their users (C), but their target audience (B)! The distinction between the two, as “my model” above describes, is that people actually using your website are at most a subset of who you’re targeting (at worst they’re completely different).

The fact that these two groups are different isn’t uncommon, nor is it unusual to not have a good idea of who the people using your website are (you might have analytics that tell you what they do but still not know anything about them). But it’s kinda scary to not even know who you’re targeting—who you’re trying to communicate with—other than “people who use the web”. This is wrong on so many levels! How are we supposed to create useful content for that? How are we supposed to design an effective user experience for “anyone”?

So, I guess it shouldn’t really have come as a surprise after that, when there seemed to be no recognition that there are people out there not using the site who could be. This gap between users and target audience is full of your potential customers (E). These are the people who you can “win”. So how do you do it? I thought it was logical, you create something those people want. Quite literally, if you build it (good content), they will come.

I was told that trying to gain more users (grow E) wouldn’t happen because there was no budget for marketing. OK, but wow about just creating better content?! Do a bit of research, find out what that untapped vein are interested in. I may be delusional but if you have to spend big on marketing to trick people to use your website, there’s nothing worth using on that website. OK maybe that’s a bit harsh but you catch my drift. Marketing can help, for sure, but it’s not the only answer nor is it the most direct solution.

Thoughts?

I will be speaking at Ark Group’s Strategically managing intranet developments conference from March 2nd to 4th, on the topic of Re-engineering your intranet with user-friendly architecture. To quote the brochure:

This session will take a case study approach outlining projects undertaken by Patrick Kennedy for clients within Australia

• Assessing user psychology: identifying needs and analysing behaviours
• Streamlining processes to simplify work flow and usability
• Personalising the intranet experience by creating user centred design

Hope to see you there!

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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Now that I’ve got your attention, let me clarify what I mean. When we refer to this activity called “usability testing” there are often a lot of misunderstandings. It’s really not very applicable for the thing we should be doing. Here are some reasons why…

• It gets mistaken for UAT.
• It gets mistaken for technical testing.
• It makes it sound more ‘scientific’ than it (usually) is.

Usability testing is not UAT

UAT, or User Acceptance Testing, is a term used in software engineering to describe when the client would give final approval for the built system to be delivered. This becomes really confusing when the term is taken out of that context and used in web design, for example. When you don’t understand the “user” it refers to and what is being “accepted”, you might very well think UAT is the same thing as “usability testing”.

Conceptually, the intention of UAT might be to make sure those who will ultimately be using the system are happy with it. But in practice, this is rarely the case. I could go on, but this is not a discussion of why I don’t like UAT (which I don’t) but rather my point is that we don’t want stakeholders thinking that usability testing is UAT, and thus something that can be dispensed with because “we always go through UAT”.

Usability testing is not done by Mr Test Manager

The term “usability testing” often gets misconstrued by technical types, project managers and business analysts. It gets turned into a stale, rigid, bureaucratic affair. The old “unit, integration, system” mantra. It’s done as a matter of course, at the end of the gantt chart, to tick a box. That’s pointless.

Again, in theory, test driven design is not a bad thing. Software, websites and anything technically complex should be checked to make sure it has been built as was required. That assumes a lot though, for example are the requirements valid? do users actually want or need what is being built? But let’s leave that one alone.

What I’m trying to say, is that usability testing shouldn’t be mistaken for the technical testing done by a Test Manager according to a test plan, using a test script. (At least not the kind of usability testing I want to be doing, which is possibly a qualification I should have stated up-front). People do run highly structured usability tests—typically summative in nature—which are very similar to technical testing. In my experience this is the minority of cases and the least valuable. On to my next point.

Usability testing sounds really scientific

Following on from the tail end of that last point, the term “usability testing” makes the activity sound more definitive, more scientific. Let’s be honest, even when we try, it usually isn’t. But it doesn’t have to be!

There is a place for large scale, highly structured, task-timing testing, but often what is most useful in terms of formative (but also summative) user input is something more simple. Many use the term “guerilla usability testing”, but that’s really just cowering in the face of academics and purists who scoff at our “lax methods” and “dismal sample size”.

If we don’t put that connotation of science on it, we won’t have to battle questions over statistical significance, or waste time defending something that gave useful results and improved the design process.

Closing the loop with user feedback

So let’s stop calling it usability testing. Let’s call it what it is: feedback, confirmation, validation. Showing people who will be using the thing we’re designing, and getting their feedback. It should be a natural part of the design process, closing the loop to ensure that what we’re designing it usable and useful for the intended audience.

Don’t show your designs to your boss, project manager or stakeholders for “approval” (ok not just to them). Show them to the only people who can truly sign off on them, your users.

I’m talking informal sessions. Collaborative or participatory design, if you will, but not testing.

UX practitioners often call it that to make it sound more than it is, give it more persuasive weight and the importance—or should that be respect?—that it deserves. I did it today in fact (well the day I started writing this post).

But no more. Let’s call it what it is and act like it’s part of the process. We can start to educate our colleagues and get them to the point they assume it’s part of the project too. “No, Miss Project Manager, we don’t need to wait until UAT to see if all the money we spent has paid off”.

What do you think? All feedback appreciated.

[Photo credit: Closing the loop by jspad]