User Experience Stew

Occasional posts on User Experience by Stew Dean. My company: Empathy Digital My project: mood-o-tron I'm based in West London.

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This year (2014) in September I will be speaking about the importance of embracing the 'messy middle' of a problem at EuroIA in Brussels. The talk will be about how it is vital to understand the whole of the problem to deliver the simplest solution on the surface. This comes as a reaction to working with colleagues who have tried to solve problems via the interface and uses real world examples and system theory into what will be a very condensed 25 minute talk.

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Here is a quick overview of by Jay Thrash on Design Prototyping using Facebook's Origami. More on this later.

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This is a big problem at the moment, that is UX being confused with just interface design. User Experience is not the same as User Interface Design, UI design is a small part of UX. If you're just designing interfaces you are NOT designing the UX.

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Startup Diary 2: First Sketches and Big Admin

This blog post has been moved to UX.stewdean.com

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Startup Diary 1: Rabbit Holes, Rockets and Rock Bands

This blog post has been moved to UX.stewdean.com

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A different view on the Engineering Mindset from a Graphic Design Angle.

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Seeing the Elephant: Defragmenting User Research

Silos: good for grain, awful for understanding customer behavior. Just as we favor the research tools that we find familiar and comfortable, large organizations often use research methods that reflect their own internal selection biases. As a result, they miss out on detecting (and confirming) interesting patterns that emerge concurrently from different research silos. And they likely won’t learn something new and important. IA thought leader Lou Rosenfeld explains how balance, cadence, conversation, and perspective provide a framework enabling your research teams to think across silos and achieve powerful insights even senior leadership can understand.

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UX and the Engineering Mindset (Evidence Based Design)

This blog post has been moved to UX.stewdean.com

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Recommended UX Books.

Here are some recommended User Experience Books.

Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-it-yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems

The Design of Everyday Things

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum (2nd Edition)

About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web

Designing Interactions

Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

Elements of User Experience: User-centered Design for the Web

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Speaking Appearance: UX for Skeptics:

2pm Brockwell Room, Conway Hall, Saturday 24th August. WC1R 4RL.

A very quick post to say this weekend I'm giving a talk as part of London skepicamp focusing on the evidence side of UX. I'll be talking about why systems designed without talking to users often fail and the good and bad of user research.

My talk will be one of many around general skeptic type stuff - which ranges across a number of topics related to evidence based thinking. None of the others will be UX related as this is not a UX event. The skeptic movement does draw a lot of technical minded people, so I'm expecting a bit of banter in the Q & A section.

My talk is at 2pm in The Brockwell Room. (just after lunch - I love a challenge)

Details

Saturday the 24th of August. starts at 9.30pm Tickets £5.

Conway Hall 25 Red Lion Square, London, Greater London, WC1R 4RL

Full details: http://skepticamp.co.uk/

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Lean Lean UX

This blog post has been moved to UX.stewdean.com

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This may sound like heresy but UCD is not always the best approach. My preferred approach is more Activity-Centred Design (as I have just discovered other folks call it). Here's an interesting article on this.

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Embrace the messy middle (or 'put that sketch book down').

When asked to design a new interface for a website or other project do you reach for a sketchpad?  If asked for a redesign do you first think about what new features and jquery tricks you could add?  Do you have a  desire to redesign each interface you see after a couple of screens?  Then I suggest you are not doing UX properly.

Here’s my issue. Too many people are ignoring how the overall system works (what I call the middle of the system) and focusing upon the end interface. It’s a natural thing to do but still doesn’t justify doing it. Web site projects suffer from home page fixation and there is so much talk about sketching these days you’d be lead to think that it’s a noble thing to do to start working out what goes where. In my view people have forgotten and overlooked what makes things really work – and that’s the overall system. Time to name and shame.

Just over a year ago I was working at the BBC and was called in to do some UX on a internal tool that was already a couple of sprints in. Agile can adapt so it’s not the end of the world, I thought. So we set about doing some rapid user research (which was fun and informative) and we put together some profiles and then I started to sketch out the system and think about what was needed where. I tend to do this in visio/omnigraffle after some very rough sketches and also tend to collect things together in excel / google docs.  If anything the first thing I open will be a spreadsheet to gather all the information that the system needs to look after (one of the things I was taught to do during my University course).

Except I was told repeatedly  - don’t worry about that – just sketch out how you think it should work. This didn’t feel right to me and I couldn’t work out why at the time. So I tried and came up with several takes, but I didn’t believe in them. They didn’t feel real. I attempted to go back to understanding the whole system and was told I was making things too complicated. But the system was complicated – most systems of this type are.

In retrospect I should have stuck to my guns as the project lurched form one set of sketches to another with no real sense of belonging. I left the project out of pure frustration and wanted to keep my sanity intact. I galvanised my view that to understand how to make an interface simple you have to embrace the complex – be prepared to wade deep in what data goes in and out of the world you’re playing with – to see who and what interacts with the person using the system.  In other words you have to endevour to map out ALL of the system you’re working on before you think about sketching it out.

Except what I often see are people coming up with big ideas, radical new interface solutions with scant regard for the real problem. We’ve seen them a million times before in various videos - gorgeous looking concepts that flow seamlessly from surface to surface. Large companies employ big groups to produce this wow stuff. Stake holders buy into it – they love the way the photoshop mockups look – great, we’ll have it.

Then it gets built and 2 years later everyone is wondering why it doesn’t work. It is because the focus was on the surface, on a few screens, on widgets and some nice transitions. This is like employing an interior designer for house that you drew up the plans for on the back of a beer mat. And many companies do it.

I say embrace the complexity in the design process to find out how to simplify it.  Redesigning part of  a site? Then you have to have a sitemap that accounts for EVERY PAGE. Rarely do large interactive projects have any form of blue print. It’s more likely to have a visual style guide than any guidance over how the site or project works beyond the individual pages. This is all down to human nature and it’s fear of the complex middle of a project

So put down the sketch pad (at least for interface sketches) until you’ve worked out how you project is going to work. Don’t obsess about the initial surface or the end implementation. Embrace the complex, messy and unsexy middle. Get that right and you’ve got the foundations and overall structure of your new project. No one will ever see it but it’s what separates real User Experience from any other kind of design.

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TV UX – getting the interface right means breaking down the divide.

This blog post has been moved to UX.stewdean.com

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Cloud based interfaces – a game changer (pun intended).

This blog post has been moved to UX.stewdean.com

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5 'Bad' User Experience Habits

In terms of user experience design methods, I notice that when people get into the field they diligently read up on best practice and adopt the standards of working that are out there, but not all these standards are worthwhile using. In some ways some of the practices have become bad habits. Things are passed on, books written about how to do them and they become best practice.

In this article I’m going to challenge some of these ‘best’ practices, not so much based upon extensive reading but my personal experiences of the last decade and a half working in what is now called UX.

Note: This was written quickly during a lunch break so unfortunately lacks the levels of research it could have, although I’ve tried to provide real world examples. Also forgive any typos.

I know the things I mention to many are ‘vital’ as I see them in the role descriptions and even in lists of what to look for in a UX person. To to be clear this is a personal view but one based upon a lot of work at the coal face and I’ve left most punches un-pulled. So, onto round 1:

1.  Personas

What? But isn’t UX based on Personas?  Let me explain. In theory creating portraits of the users you are using allows the team to become more user centric. The issue is that many personas used become isolated from any user research that has been done. They are assumed personas, not. If the persona is a composite made from assumptions, has a stock library photo on it and tells you what car they drive then it’s no longer an accurate representation but has been filtered by the perceptions of the person who has created it.  What I have done in the past is focus upon what I call ‘user types’ that are created from what the user does not from their goals (more on goal based thinking some other time). What the user does both in the system being designing and in the real world should give you all the context you need to design a much better system. Some aspects of personas are worth while but if your persona is 45 that is not as useful as giving a range. I call these Attributes of a User Type. Using User Types and diagrams for the users tasks and how the different user types interact with each other will give you a user based model of the system without having to create Gary who drives a Volvo. And the lastly the user research is best baked in with real world quotes and behavior examples linke to the User Types with the minimum of filtering. This comes from too many cases of asking for the source for the personas I’ve been given and there being very little or nothing.

2. Card Sorting

Card sorting for task based projects can only help you with nominclature, not for structure. You cannot validate a project using card sorting. A good information architect should always reach a better solution than a user attempting to create that solution using a set of cards with words on them. Moving on from that what about organising ‘like items’, such as items in a supermarket?  For a long time I thought this would be more useful but, when faced with improving the hierarchy of items for a leading UK department store, I found card sorting wasn’t even up to that task. It was quicker to move things around on screen than to create cards, to use the wealth of existing site and transactional data to build a starting hypothesis. For the user research we  focused on a carefully picked selection of about 40 objects which we then got users to find using a simplistic version of the site (unbranded to remove any bias). These 40 objects where broken down into ‘cows’, objects that the business saw as important and where important to the user, ‘bread and butter’ things that didn’t make much money but users relied up and ‘problem children’ –  things people didn’t buy that much and where really hard to put into the same hierarchy as other objects (a dress making dummy, for example). Through this method we created, user tested and adapted the site structure into something that performed and lead to increased sales. The only thing the sorting of cards appear to be useful now is as part of a workshop to set the prioritsation of functionality or moving around on an agile work board.

3. Eye Tracking

Unless you’re doing something radically new and different then don’t use eye tracking. You should already know that western users start from the top left and head South East picking up on faces, objects that stand out and scanning text. Eye Tracking does have it’s uses in more academic research for new kinds of interaction styles. In those kinds of areas building the theories of interaction they have a place, but not for testing sites. At worse it can be misleading with Eye Tracking specialists I have talked to telling me about the danger of ‘heat maps’ which don’t give you an accurate picture of where the user was looking at and when. Instead contextual enquirer will give you more information than eye tracking ever could. If the user fails to see something you’ll find out quicker, cheaper and with more context with the user ‘talking aloud’ than trying to work out what the data you have means.

4. Personalisation.

The current BBC front page is being redesigned, I don’t think that’s a BBC secret and I’m not going to say much about the new pages I saw whilst working for the BBC other than they are dropping the drag and drop front page. Why? After all in the research users loved it, the business stakeholders loved it, it looked like a winner. This is the form of personalisation I want to focus upon – the world of ‘widgets’ and customising the experience. In short, it doesn’t work. Rough stats for the BBC home page is that only 10% did any alteration to the front page, and of that 10% over half just changed their location in the weather widget. From a UX point of view it says to me ‘we don’t know, you sort it out’. It means that the user has to know what experience they want and do some work to optimise it for themselves. This appeals to us because we want control but, ultimately, we just want things to work.

I’ve designed one or two Intranets in my time and the customisation bug is alive and well in other solutions I’ve seen. Again these do not work for much the same reasons as the BBC website. The reason often given is that if you have a broad audience that is hard to build personas for (see above) then it’s hard to design an experience that will work for all your users. This is again rubbish. A good user experience is based upon the common attributes of people with considerations for culture, level of understanding and other attributes, but in my view the common aspects often far outweigh the special cases. So designing for everyone should be the default, not tailoring to a person. For the Intranets I designed I interviewed about 40 people each time and from that we found out the key things people wanted to see and the different things the user types wanted. We then allowed them to customise their experience using the navigation – as that’s how people choose the information they are after! A well designed navigation with a well designed page giving the right information in the right place out performs any form of customisation.

As a slight contradiction the idea of adapting the user is a good one. For example if you know where the user is and which department they are in you can bring the information relevant to them to them – but expecting the user to do it for themselves strikes me as lazy UX.

5.  Microsites

The average major brand in the UK will have worked with their favourite agencies to create many campaign focused microsites. These microsites will be dotted around their servers and are often forgotten about over time.  They are temporary, quick to build, allow creative freedom and can have catchy URLs to get to them.  Ignoring how Facebook pages may have superseded them, these dirty fixes of a site are a very bad habit many companies have gotten into. The alternative is to use campaigns to drive users first into a landing page with a campaign based experience then provide them more than just a link to the brand site as a whole. If you’ve got a new way of selecting a product or a funkier way of providing targeting information for a certain type of customer why put it in a different site?  Instead build it into one core site – make that much better.  If, as is often the case, your content management system does not allow you to implement the site you’re after or the navigation templates take up 50% on the space you’re using so you can’t have the experiential landing page you want then ditch your CMS – it’s not fit for purpose. Chances are in this case it was a ‘golf course purchase’, a purchase that came with many promises and appeared to offer an out of the box solution but in reality does less and is harder to use than a product than costs, well, nothing. I have used many enterprise level CMS systems often costing up to six figures and without exception each one causes more problems than it solves. In the cases of CMS systems it appear the less you pay, the more you get.

So Microsites – just say no. You might want to consider hosting content on popular sites, Facebook and the previously mentioned landing page solution. These will all be much better than trying to get folks to a temporary site that Google might eventually pick up.

Summing Up

This was going to be a list of 10 but I decided to end it there. Feel free to reason back at me and add your own pet hates. Just to repeat this is a personal view and not the view of the nice folks who provide me with a living.