The User Experience (UX) disease

Some businesses get user experience, but for every one that does there are 999 that don’t. Companies like that aren’t interested in serving the needs of their users.

In the past Cennydd’s had to make companies take usability seriously. Now, undercover user experience is designed to help usability professionals to progress in these companies.

The Undercover Usability Manifesto

• Go undercover
• Ground up, not top down – don’t approach your boss asking for resources, just do it.
• Change through small victories
• Delivery, not deliverables
• Good today is better than great next year
• Work with people, not against them
• Action, not words

Let’s take action. Two big things you can do now:

1. Expert Review

Using heuristic evaluation. Step through processes with your website, is it:

• Made for humans – is it relevant, useful or enjoyable? Does it fit their mental model?
• Forgiving – does the site prevent errors, does it minimise them?
• Accessible
• Self evident – is it clear what the site’s for?
• Predictable – does it use known web conventions
• Efficient – is the site responsive
• Accurate

2. Analytics

This is a topic that’s not given enough attention in user experience. Looking at the stats, consider:

• Visits per unique user – are people coming back?
• Entry pages
• Bounce rate
• Referrers
• Keywords
• Navigation paths
• Registration / purchase conversions – where are the largest drop offs?
• On-site search – an underused trick. A real gold mine of understanding what the user is looking for. Test those search terms, are they finding what they want?

The real user experience process takes time. Do your business research first. It’s tempting to jump in without finding out:

• Objectives of the project
• Requirements
• Un-requirements
• Exclusions – things that cost too much or services like Flickr have sewn up

You can never find all this stuff out because it’s held in tacit knowledge. If you can never know everything, you are allowed to get it wrong. This is a relief, you don’t have to get it right first time.

The best way to be a user experience designer is to understand the culture of the company. Several warning signs exist.

1. Cash cows. Most companies have them. You won’t be able to make changes to these unless you can prove you’re going to make the company more money. These are dangerous because changes may go wrong and you might lose the company’s interest in usability. Be careful.
2. Paralysing process. It’s difficult to get new processes and new techniques into these companies. It’s only when you come up for air, that’s when people will challenge your work. Don’t be overly eager to share your work until it’s ready. If results are already positive that will skew the company’s view in your favour.

OK, real UX

You can do some quick and dirty qualitative research. Remote research is becoming a big topic in user experience. Phone your users up, yes you’ll miss some nuances, but at least you’ll get something. Speaking to your customer service staff is also useful, their insights can help you understand who’s coming to your site.

Quantitative research is also easy.

Finally, market research can give you information on psychographics and demographics. Data driven personas help you design for a particular type of user. Data driven personas don’t require much one-to-one research with users. It’s not scientifically valid, but if you treat this as a living document it’s still much easier to design for this ’person’ than a collection of numbers.

If you’ve done your research, make some small changes and see if they work, if they do you’ll start to be included in decision making discussions.

At Clearleft they use design games like divide the dollar (which I think is this) to come up with ideas.

The undercover UX designer needs to stay as low-fi as possible (e.g. pen and paper). It doesn’t matter on the tool, you need to convey as much information as possible in the smallest amount on time.

Test informally. Use a laptop and a cafe. They use Silverback (since they made it). Get people to talk aloud and explain any difficulties they have. You can even do remote testing. The videos and the output you get can be very persuasive.

You need to make sure the business is happy with the work that the user is happy with. As designers, UX people get much more then developers because everyone has an opinion. To run a quick critique session, get the stakeholders in the room. Explain the decisions you’ve made before you show them your designs. The real trick is to not get into an endless loop of changing things.

The idea is to list what needs to change to meet the clients approval and the users approval. Then get these changes signed off.

Don’t make user experience combative.

There are three tiers he uses when discussion usability decisions with clients:

1. Direct feedback from the user, if he doesn’t have that he’ll go back to the…
2. Research he did at the start. If he has neither of these he’ll fall back just on…
3. General points of good design.

Getting to know people (and beer) help the process.

Q and A

I didn’t really take notes on this except he mentioned a new service called Performable just out of beta, worth checking out. Of course you can use Google Website Optimiser as well. Of course, this presentation was also a lead up to his own book, Undercover User Experience.

He also mentioned a book by Dan Saffer, Designing for Interaction.

Andrew Shoben of Greyworld

It doesn’t take much for humans to creatve a narrative. Andrew shows off his work called Trace, at Hampton Court. The point was for people to go in and lose themselves, not to find the centre. Inside there are fragments of sound designed to add to the feeling.

The next project he showed is one they’ve just finished called ‘Words‘. Andrew likes his work to be known as public art, not sound art or any other name you put on it. The BBC came to his company asking for a project and Words was the result. It was designed to see how much a word weighs, e.g. Does the word’s length add to its weight? People were given a box at the installation. As they walk through the box begins to glow, as you walk around the space you realise there are lots of words. You realise in the space you can hear other peoples words (through headphones), words that they’ve left hanging in space. New meanings emerge between your own words and someone elses, they create a third meaning. This project was inspired by the lyrics of David Bowie.

Q. How do you come up with ideas?

They usually come up with them in the space where it will be displayed. The BBC are quite adventurous, but often push the boundaries into technologies that are still developing and may not be able to support the original artistic vision. This project was designed to be rock solid in current technology. It works on computer tracking through visual sensors. Technically it’s not clever, but it’s fulfilling the artistic vision fully. One guy who experienced it said it’s like walking through someone elses dream.

Eva Rucki of Troika

She focusses on the boundaries of technology and design.

One project took a portable projector that was used to display mobile phone text messages on street signs and random objects. Warner Bros. wanted to use it for a concert for the band The Streets. During the concert people didn’t understand what was going on because there were multiple projections. The projectors were trained on any surface, even members of the crowd. They found thst if you restrict people to a format, in this instance a text message, they are much more likely to respond and send texts. The blank canvas scares people.

BA ‘All The Time In The World’

They created an unconventional world clock for British Airways at Terminal 5 (Heathrow). It shows times across the world but by smaller city not the capitals. The idea is to get people travelling in their minds. They wanted to push typefaces, they used electroluminescent material. Their display is very adaptable, they wanted to give it a human touch, it can display caps, small caps, joined up etc. It’s beautiful.

BA Cloud

Individually controllable flip dots, magnetic components. The installation was to be hung in the space between escalators. They compared the space to an aircraft takeoff. It used 7km of wires inside. One of the most rewarding parts of the project: because it was art all the engineers and construction workers who put it in place were cynical, but as soon as it was switched on people started to take pictures and send them to their families, this was important since the art was connecting with people straight away.

Onedotzero

Installaton photo shoot. Was an interesting challenge. Troika’s brainstorming process can be random, it doesn’t work to just sit around a table without any ideas, people must come with them and discuss. Their idea was zoetropes. They figured out they could use different spacings between letters to bring different words into focus at different frequencies. This project is featured in the Decode exhibition.

Newtron virus

Uses the drop detector in the MacBook. Brilliant (however if you want to ‘infect’ your computer and have Snow Leopard, at time of writing you’ll still have to wait). Find out more about the Newtron virus.

Enrico Tessarin of New Treatment

He started by mostly talking about Sophia’s diary, a series on Bebo. However, New Treatment are known for an unfinished project called Block X. Cordless show is a project they started a year ago taking a new approach. Sophia’s diary needed a trailer to get funding from brands. They found Sophia was  compelling to the audience because she was average. Lots of teenagers could sympathise with her. Daily video diaries. The story was directed by the audience, she asks a dilemma on the Friday, then what the audeince wanted happened on the Monday.

Block X

Hammer (the horror people) approached him. It’s another online series. The project is still in development. Some ideas for interactivity include: Secret content to your mobile phone; lots of options for game play; augmented reality games. Advertising is really important to this guy. He wants to incorporate brand selling into a made up CCTV control room which is also part of the website interface, e.g. A room sponsored by Ikea?

How do you survive in a world where big brands no longer invest in web shows? Answer, could be a format like the Cordless show. It’s pretty much T4 for the web. Done on an extremely low budget. The show developed a reputation, 30,000 hits per month. Advertisers can’t ignore that. What the Cordless show unique is their branding and interactivity. “The peoples vote” feature on the site. Create your own profile and vote for your favourite performer. A few universities asked for a live version, this brought in money since people will pay for a live performance. After momentum built they got funding from the BBC.

In any web project the first question Enrico asks is why did you choose the web as the medium? If it’s only because you can’t find the funding elsewhere, there’s no point. It’s telling that the BBC and Channel 4 require an interactive plan for any new series or documentary.

Questions

Q. Will interactivity with film go any further than it has?

The methods of interaction are very different. Inevitably it will all converge. It only depends on how traceable human behaviour is, that’s where the money is going to be. It depends on the target audience, it’s generational. Young people don’t necessarily watch TV anymore. Cinema will stay as it is. The future is definately interactive. Now that we have computers and networks that can transmit a different film for each cinema screen, there’s potential for more tailored content. The big issue is where you draw the line between an interactive and passive experience. A big thing that’s happening is the semantic web (woohoo, someone mentioned it – this probably links in with the Words project).

Q. Does the message get lost? Are there other pressures from technology and commercial considerations?

(This question was mostly aimed at Enrico since he was adamant that a new project must be get financial backing from advertising). Block X, although highly commercially orientated, the story was very important. Enrico was keen to stress if the story doesn’t stay, he’s prepared not to make his project. Is it art or ‘advertainment’? He’s looking at real world considerations. He runs a company and has to pay wages. However, big brands try to influence content shot by shot. Even as a producer you have to swallow hard.

Q. What about the economics on the web, don’t people expect things to be free?

Bebo made the first web series called Kate Modern. However Bebo Originals has shut down because they couldn’t find advertisers to support them. (Personally I don’t think enough was said about funding models other than advertising. What about paying for the service? What about content in closed networks distribution channels such as iTunes?)

Apart from the BBC internet blog and backstage etc. @media 2008 had the fortune of hearing a whistle-stop tour of the redevelopment of the BBC homepage. This site has haunted many web designers since it’s launch with comments from colleagues of “Why can’t we do… {insert name of feature here}… like the BBC homepage?”. It became a shining example of what can be achieved.

Tom Cartwright and Claire Roberts presented their short piece on the development of a site that: took them three months to build; had to cater for 6 million users per month; couldn’t contain loops in the code; couldn’t process XML; had to be accessible; where 5% of users (that’s 300,000) didn’t use Javascript. This is web development at the sharp end.

A point of interest is that they managed to get 60 image requests down to just 3 using sprites. This had the affect of reducing the number of HTTP requests, a big saving on a highly trafficked site.

The size of this project is reflected in the fact that the development team recognised a need to drop JQuery as a Javascript framework and develop their own. Tom described Glow (www.bbc.co.uk/glow), a new framework that supports Safari 1.3 (apparently unlike JQuery). We were told that Glow would be available as open source software towards the end of the year, but judging by the password it looks like this still hasn’t been finalised. They also mentioned that their next project will look towards a pan-BBC identity system for users. The idea is that they’d have implicit and explicit personalisation and that, once logged into one BBC site, your credentials would follow as you traverse the sites. In support of this the BBC joined the OpenID federation, looking at becoming a consumer.

For insights into the future of the BBC homepage see www.bbc.co.uk/home/beta/. They recommended Steve Souders’ High Performance Web Sites (he really knows optimisation).

Jeff started by describing his childhood in the 1970s and how at the time the world was changing around him. At a young age he came across a pong game encased inside a table at a restaurant. For him, before then media had been a passive experience, suddenly there was interaction. He terms it as society going through a “conceptual progression in how we can communicate”.

He went on to describe how this expectation picked up momentum as data storage became cheaper and computer processing became more powerful. In his view Moore’s Law works across all technologies. The two key aspects vital to this revolution where the tools for participation and the scale of data.

In 1973 the IBM Winchester 3340  was released with a capacity of around 70Mb. On release it cost $100,000. In comparison, Google currently archives 4 – 5TB of data every afternoon. From this we see that the tools have developed massively and so has the scale of data.

Designers must turn this raw data into information. Whether or not this is achieved is a subjective judgement as it relates to perceptions of the audience. Jeff’s example was to communicate monthly rainfall based on the size of a cartoon raindrop. If the audience had been meteorologists, they’d probably have preferred a numeric representation, perhaps in inches or centimetres. So it is the job of the designer to remember to take the design of data from decorative to actionable. Success comes when the designer has managed to “convey promptly to the eye something that would otherwise require mental calculation”.

A great example of this was John Snow’s mashup of Cholera deaths and location (a street map). Just as valid is Charles Joseph Minard’s map of Napoleon’s March to Warsaw. Edward Tufte was another statistician who used chart’s to bring out the story with the crash of the challenger space shuttle. Also of interest is the air and ground traffic visualisations from Britain from Above (although mostly for entertainment purposes). All were designed to get the heart of the story without being untruthful.

Google Analytics was designed to do just this. Jeff’s tactic with this was to shelve any ideas and reassess them two weeks later. His inspiration for the final graph design was a travel montage from the film Indiana Jones. :)

The point is that the audience is all important. In his work with Adaptive Path, he would identify what people want to do, not what people want – an important distinction. They would take transcripts of user interviews and take out sections that sounded like tasks. Charting the mental model with sticky notes helps provide vital communication for designers and managers. To get the product to production, look at all the options and reduce down to only what you need at launch. What we leave out is more important than what we leave in, we must remember to tell the story.

Some further reading: The Ghost Map, Anything by Edward R. Tufte and of course the presentation.

Beyond Ajax

In his keynote presentation, Jesse James Garrett focussed on the importance of user experience and the idea that the top web products create the best end-to-end system designed from the ‘user perspective’, not the ‘programme perspective’. Sam Felder and Peter Merholz have both written articles that seem to be based on versions of this presentation (Jesse doesn’t seem to have posted any notes so far). BTW, I enjoyed the Steve Jobs quote.

The Broken World: Solving the Browser Problem Once and For All

Molly Holzschlag firstly announced that she will no longer be speaking at general web conferences, as she blogged a few days before. It’s a shame, I like her style, it was fortunate for me that I got the chance to meet her and have a chat about energy etc – a usual drunken topic of conversation for me ;) – with her in the pub that evening. Interesting points from her presentation included an analysis of the reasons why each web browser develops so differently, she described six implementation variables:

1. Development Approach – browsers have different life-cycles, non-linear iteration has been the best technique so far.
2. Working with Standards – CSS2.1 is being used in some browsers but it’s not a recommended standard yet. W3C specifications are ambiguous, especially a problem.
3. Operating Systems and Tools. (didn’t write anything for this!)
4. Extending Browsers – example is browser bugs fixed in IE6 through use of JavaScript.
5. Proprietary Development – Past examples are Netscape’s ‘Blink’ and Microsoft’s ‘Marque’ technologies. Initially both of these took precedence over implementing CSS support.
6. Fractioning Specifications – Conversation has moved from CSS back to HTML over the last year. There is no specific sensible end to creating an evolved HTML.

Pathways to success:

• Create common baselines. Consistency between browsers.
• Clarify ambiguity – her case studies described how the W3C standards state one thing, but browser developers implement behaviour very differently.
• Transparent development cycles.
• Keep an open dialogue – currently Apple is the only major browser developer that isn’t joining the discussion.

High-Noon Shoot-Out: Design vs. Implementation

Simon Collison describes his passionate contribution to @media07 better than I ever could. Drew McLellan also gave a rousing arguement. Joe Clark live blogged the whole event (and I *mean* event).

Interface Design Juggling

Dan’s presentation. I don’t think I can add much more, I didn’t write much for this one, I guess you had to be there :)

Microformats, Building Blocks and You

Having missed last years inspirational talk by Tantek (I know this because my friend Rik came back bubbling with enthusiasm) I had to see it this year. Here’s his presentation. Tantek has a tendency to write every point on his slides, so there’s not much sense in me explaining. A few useful microformat links are Operator for Firefox and pingerati.net. If you haven’t already checked out microformats (trust me they’re useful), do so first!

When Web Accessibility is Not Your Problem

The last presentation of the day. I’m going to leave this controversial (on the face of it) presentation to my next blog post, I suspect it needs a fair amount of explanation.