Endangered Species?

It’s always an exciting event when an animal, long thought to be on the brink of extinction, is glimpsed in the wild. These rare and sometimes odd species are often on the brink of slipping into memory and mythology when they rear their heads to the surprise of onlookers.

I recently had the opportunity to glimpse the rare and dreaded Engineerknowsbestisaurus in its natural habitat – the support forum. (Names have been changed to protect the innocent).

Observe:

Hello all,
I updated to your new version the other day and since then my video cameras stay on whenever [product name] is on, as I have [product name] on for 12hrs a day my cameras stay on for that long
This did not happen with any of the previous builds so was wondering if it is a fault with the current build.

Thanks
Bill

Hi Bill
Simply close the video tray after launch.

It's quite annoying having to manually close it every time I launch the [product]. I don't remember this happening in the version previous to [version #].

Thanks,
Bill

The drawer is open on launch by design. There is no way to change the operation in the free client. If you want to open with no drawer open, you would have to purchase [paid product] or [more expensive paid product].

Isn’t it fascinating how the Engineerknowsbestisaurus tries to get the user to change his behaviour? Surely it’s the most natural thing on earth to repeat a pointless and annoying task ad nauseum.

This is certainly an interesting approach to product development. I have read the feature list for both paid products and haven't found anything that they offer that is so different from the free product to justify paying for them. It would appear that instead of improving the paid products to the point where users would be willing to buy them, the company has chosen to make the free product so annoying that users will want to use something else. It seems to me that the only flaw in that reasoning is that there is no guarantee that when users switch products, they will be switching (or upgrading) to the company’s paid products. They could simply choose a similar free product from another company – a company that listens to and understand their users.

I would suggest that they conduct some true user research to understand what features users really need and find valuable. Some competitive analysis is in order to understand what features users would expect to pay for and which they would expect for free. Finally, some decent interaction design is needed so that the user experience sets the product apart from the competition and not just the price.

... but that's just my $0.02

There, but for the grace of a mouse click, go I...

Rather than having to suffer through some of life's lessons, we can avoid those embarrassing moments through the generosity of the internet and engaging authors like Derek Powazek...

The most interesting, and the most credible, blogs are written to entertain and share in an open and honest way. So, my preference for blogs has always been to follow those with a distinct air of truthiness (it's a word - look it up!).

Read: Derek Powazek's Things I Learned the Hard Way.

You can't afford not to...

With all of the economic doom and gloom being reported in the news media on a daily (….oh alright…hourly) basis, everyone is reacting by buckling down and tightening their belts. Any expenditure considered a luxury or “nice-to-have” is being cut off or put off indefinitely. Don’t get me wrong…I’m not about to argue otherwise – now is the time to cut frivolous spending and focus spending on initiatives that will have long-term and lasting benefits to the organization.

If you are a product company or online service delivery company, that means taking a closer look at your product or service value proposition. I am here to tell you that usability (be it design or user needs research) is NOT a luxury – in fact usability can help you refine your value proposition, make your product more competitive and positively impact your bottom line.

I’m always surprised to find that organizations follow the same process time and time again but continue to expect to get different results…build feature list, implement feature list (often without proper user research and testing), deploy product and then spend 200% more money fixing problems post-product release when users start using the product. This is a costly cycle! According to the Standish Group, only 28% of software projects actually succeed. By succeed they mean ship on time, within budget and with all the features. This % is likely lower when you take into consideration user satisfaction and product/service abandonment rates. Projects and products fail and become costly because of lack of contact with users or understanding of user requirements.

You may be asking… “Exactly what can companies do to stop this trend?” The answer (at least part of it): incorporate user-centered design methodologies/activities into your product development process. Think of usability as a form of risk management. Usability allows you to balance business requirements, user needs and technical constraints. Consider this – we recently conducted user research and testing which indicated that users wanted to be able to do multi-dimensional filtering on two separate databases AND they wanted the results within a 30 to 60 second time frame (not the 5 to 10 minutes it was currently taking). This was identified as THE most important aspect of our client’s product that needed to be fixed. Of course, when we took this to the client they said “no way”. Technically there were issues, time was a consideration (especially given they had other “features” they wanted to include), and even if they could figure out how to do it, they said it would be impossible to meet the 30 second requirement. So our usability experts worked with the client to overcome some and work around other technical constraints. Without giving too much information away, we helped the client prioritize their product feature list (some things got dropped) so that the developers now had more time to focus on what users were identifying as a major shortcoming in their product. In addition, we got over the 30 second hump by immediately displaying the results as the software was working away in the background. In the end, the users and client were both happy. By employing a user-centered design process, you can reduce churn (that ever-changing feature requirement list), focus on high value/high priority requirements, reduce the number of change requests, and save maintenance costs.

Still don’t believe me. Let me provide you with another example. (I’m quoting statistics from an article published in the January/February 2005 edition of ProductMarketing.com; you can read the full article here: http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/publications/magazine/3/1/0501bh/?searchterm=McAfee).

McAfee Inc., decided to take a different approach when they developed and deployed their “Protection Pilot” software. Their main goal was to reduce antivirus management time for their system administrator users to one hour or less per week. To do this they made user-centered design a priority throughout the project. Guess what happened? They reduced their customer support calls by 90%! According to the case study, within 10 weeks, users downloaded 20, 000 copies of the software but McAfee received only 170 calls to their support lines. Now we weren’t involved in this project in any way, but we can tell that this case study is just one example of what can happen when you focus on the user experience design.

Here’s a short list of things we recommend our clients do when they are trying to save costs associated with product development (and ultimately improve sales and customer satisfaction):

• Collect user requirements (before you start building) – this means finding out who your users are, what their specific goals and needs are, and the context within which they are using your product/service. Let’s take the iPOD as an example…I am a music lover (user), and I want to access and listen to my music (goals/needs), at home, at the office and while I’m enjoying my daily run (context).
• Retain focus on the user experience design – Your user requirements should inform the overall design of the product. This includes everything from defining the “feature list”, designing the architecture, user interface and visual design right down to coding and deployment.
• Test early and test often (if possible)…and by “test” we mean conduct one-on-one usability tests with representative end users or potential customers. Don’t be afraid to put product concepts and wireframes in front of your users. This will allow you to identify issues and fix them before you get too far down the product development road.

Is Usability free? No, but the return on investment can be huge. Focusing on usability will help you increase overall usage of your product or service and save you time, money and heartache in the end. As Jakob Nielsen remarks in his latest post (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/intranet_design.html), “good user experience doesn’t require size or humoungous budgets; it requires talent and emphasis on meeting the user’s needs.”

Happy Holidays!

We are signing off for the holidays -- have a wonderfully festive break, and we see you in 2009!

Bridging the academic-industrial barrier

Recently, we have been lucky enough to collaborate on a project with Kevin Bailey and Neal Cowan from Design 1st, a product design consulting firm. During one of our project meetings, the discussion briefly turned to the potential for using varying types of vibration to indicate different kinds of alerts on a physical device.

‘Haptic’ research by Professor Karon MacLean at the University of British Columbia directly addresses this topic. Having taken Dr. MacLean’s course on physical user interface design during my graduate studies, I didn’t hesitate to step up onto the soap box to share my knowledge of Karon’s research in general and on haptic icons in particular.

Encouraged by Neal and Kevin's interest, I emailed them links to Karon’s website and publications. But links and web pages were not enough: Kevin set up a teleconference in order to learn from the expert herself. Since then, the three of them have spoken over the phone about the potential for implementing haptic feedback solutions. Come January, Design 1st’s hardware units incorporating Karon’s haptic icons concept will be operational and will hopefully convince the client of the necessity for variety in silent alerting in their product.

This chain of events was exciting for a number of reasons; the first being the potential for haptics to make interaction with technology a richer and more effective experience. I left academia for industry because much of the exciting Human-Computer Interaction research I see so often gets put aside without industrial follow-through. There is not only a lag, but a block, in bringing new UX innovations and technologies from research to development. Typically, compelling academic research is put on the shelf after publication--as the researchers move onto their next project--without any push from academia to get it out into the market. At the same time, there is no real pull from industry to capitalize on innovative results coming from academia.

However, this experience provided potential for Karon’s haptic icon research to make that leap sooner rather than later. The lesson here is that we can do our part by acting as a link between academia and industry to bring people and ideas together and make things happen.

The dialog that has been created between these three talented innovators has real potential to break the academic-industrial barrier, and this is fantastic news. Furthermore, it has provided us with inspiration to not only keep our eyes peeled for the next opportunity to bridge academic and industrial contacts, but also to continue to look for opportunities to bring research from academia into the work we do here at Macadamian.

"Who am I?": The importance of ecological validity

Usability testing is at its most effective when the people who participate in the user testing are ACTUAL users! This seems so simple that it's silly to talk about it. However, it's surprising how often this principle does not translate into real-life user testing.

For a research study to possess ecological validity, the methods, materials and setting of the study must approximate the real-life situation that is under investigation.[1]
At the far end of the spectrum, we know that asking employees to "pretend" to be customers while they complete the usability test is an ineffective (and risky) substitute for the real user. This type of quick-and-dirty usability testing can provide false results, and can involve a significant amount of time and money to be spent on a concept or an interaction design that simply doesn't work for the real user.

A less-noticeable type of user substitution happens more often, when one participant is asked to play multiple roles. This is common when there are multiple user groups and there is not enough time and money to test individuals from every single user group. So, one participant is asked to complete 2 or 3 tasks that are relevant to them personally, and then they are given tasks for other user groups. Here are some examples: "Suppose you are a manager. What would you do now?" or "You are a truck driver, and you are looking for a map. Please show me where you would find that." In the latter instance, one participant said, "Well, I was looking over here, but then I remembered that I am a truck driver. I had forgotten." Hearing these comments is evidence you are asking the user to role-play, which will leave you with unreliable data regarding user behaviour and user needs with respect to your absent user group.

In a recent round of user testing, I was able to use actual material that the user group sees on a daily basis. The research was for a stock photography site, and the user groups were designers and researchers who spend their time on stock photograph sites, looking for specific photos. These individuals receive “creative briefs” from clients which are basic descriptions of the type of photo they want, and other supplementary information (such as other photos that approximate what they want, or a tagline if the assignment is an ad). A frequent user task involves sorting through various photos from stock sites to find ones they think fit the requirements. When testing with this user group, I was able to use these “creative briefs” in the user tasks – it was a task that this group of users performs on a daily basis, so their search behaviour and their interaction with the test system is almost identical to their real life scenarios ensuring results with a high-degree of validity.

This high degree of ecological validity is mostly applicable to traditional usability testing. When conducting walkthroughs with a prototype or testing conceptual ideas, there are often no “real-life” tasks since the product does not exist yet. But the more the proposed tasks resemble “real-life tasks” for “real-life users”, the more reliable the results that fuel the creation of a more usable and useful product

[1] Brewer, M. (2000). Research Design and Issues of Validity. In Reis, H. and Judd, C. (eds) Handbook of Research Methods in Social and Personality Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Usability... South of the Border

Did you know that the American government has a site dedicated to promoting usability and user-centered design for government websites?

Here is it: http://www.usability.gov/


While it is a high-level overview of the implementation of the User-Centered Design process, it still provides a lot of helpful resources for government webmasters (and non-government ones too, as it is a site that is open to the public).

They have included a visual diagram that maps out the process: http://www.usability.gov/process.html. The diagram displays more of a waterfall methodology than an agile or iterative process, but hey -- it's a step in the right direction!

Incidentally, it falls under the purview of the Department of Health and Human Services. I suppose this simply confirms our belief that user-centered design IS good for you.