Blog: Observations on Design + Usability

November 13th is World Usability day this year, and the theme this year is on transportation.  I’ve written about some travel experiences here and here tangentially.  In Minneapolis we have a terrific UPA chapter, and the chapter is engaged in some fun and interesting activities around World Usability day.

Business is good right now, so I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to participate in the local event, i.e. I do not think I will have time to make the poster.  That said, I thought I would write in this blog post my idea and contribute to the discussion in some small way.

My thoughts on transportation relate to airline travel.  There are two ways to tackle what is for most people a consistently poor, and sometimes horrific experience.  One way is to look at the large systemic issues the airline industry has and attempt to resolve those, e.g. getting a state of the art Air Traffic Control system that will more efficiently manage air traffic.  Some of these issues are massive and will require either billions of dollars or thousands of hours in committee to resolve.

The other view is to acknowledge that delays and cancellations are going to be here and look at how to make people as comfortable as possible at the airport.  From a user experience approach, there are many opportunities here.  I recently was in the DFW (Dallas Fort-Worth) airport.  They’ve done a wonderful job of upgrading some sitting areas with new chairs, tables, and TV’s for viewing.  Yet, where do you find many business travelers?  Sitting on the floor, back against a wall, near a power outlet.  And if there are flight delays and cancellations, people huddle around these outlets the like the survivors in the movie Titanic huddle in their lifeboats.

If an airport were to engage a user experience designer to observe people in an airport, the layout would be much different, but some of those differences can be accommodated today with little expense or infrastructure change.

1. Add as many outlets near seating areas as possible where this can be done.

2. For any new construction, outlets should be accessible from any chair.

3. Free wifi: while this will definitely has a cost, the upside to the user experience would be amazing.  I used to fly to Moline Iowa and everyone would talk lovingly of this airport because of the free wifi.  The ramifications of free wifi are many, from allowing people to do work (who wouldn’t pay for wifi) during delays, to bringing people earlier into the airports prior to flights (since they can continue working).

4. Provide power strips.  When I travel I often have my laptop, a phone, and an ipod.  Others have four or five devices, and they cannot always charge via the computer.  Allowing usage of power strips at gates is also a stopgap to numbers 1 and 2 above.

5. Go Green.  I am not certain about the feasibility here, but this should be easy to do as a test case.  Virtually every gate at every airport has plenty of window space.  Airlines should put up solar chargers with various input interfaces for people to use to do a quick charge on their devices.

People will occupy themselves during delays and waits, if they can access the internet, talk on the phone, watch movies, play games, and listen to music.  If their devices are dead or dying, watch the anxiety rise.  You only have to go into the Airline Club lounges where outlets abound (as well as comfortable seating) to see the difference.

What are your thoughts for improving the user experience of transportation?  Leave a comment here, or go check out the World Usability day site and get involved.

Recently I had a conversation with a prospective client about the user experience of internal applications.  The question was about the ROI of having a good user experience of an internal application.  While I may write another article on the math side of the ROI question, the conversation revolved around how the ‘internal’ application and experience isn’t always internal.

In my last blog post, I wrote about the need for your software / personnel / any customer experience to provide a consistent user experience. I wrote about an airline attendant who was less than helpful to me.  That said, this rep was saddled by a computer system that clearly made it difficult for her to do her job.

David Armano wrote a short piece about Randy Pausch’s $100,000 salt and pepper shakers, and quoted Randy:

“If I sent a child into one of your stores with a broken salt and pepper shaker today, would your policies allow your workers to be kind enough to replace it?”

To paraphrase that, “if a customer called your call center with a problem today, would your software allow your workers to take care of the problem.” This is my single biggest reason why I believe the user experience of internal applications are so critical.  Very few applications today, whether ERP systems, time sheets, or CRM systems, are so silo’d that they only impact the users themselves.  A bad user experience, e.g. rigid rules, antiquated systems, disconnected systems, bad data, etc., for a user of the system, rarely impacts that user only.  If that user has to interact with the customer, make decisions on behalf of the customer, or provide customer data to a manager, then a bad user experience will have downstream impacts on your customers.

The next time you are thinking about whether to improve your internal systems, ask yourself how internal those systems truly are.

I just finished up a solid month of travel, and my experiences during my travels led me to write this post. Whether a personal user experience or an online one, the consistency of what you present to the user is critical.

I had flight plans with my son set up in March. Two weeks before I was to leave, I had to reschedule the flights to a day earlier, and use some frequent flyer miles to offset the large increase in price. I called the reservation desk and spoke to a customer service representative. The call took a painful 45 minutes for her to accomplish the task of rearranging my flight and applying the frequent flyer miles, but here is what she did during the 45 minutes that made what could have been a painful experience a bearable, if not pleasing, experience:

* She was pleasant. It is amazing how far this can go to help.
* Several times she had to put me on hold, but I was never on hold for more than 5 minutes before she would “check-in” on me and let me know she was still there, and still working on my request. This is critical. Think about when you are stuck on a plane and the pilot says “it will be about 5 minutes” and 20 minutes later he has not come back on the PA to let you know what is going on. Users do not like losing complete control whether on your web site or in any interaction. Her simple act of checking in with me calmed me down because I knew she would be back on in another 5 minutes to give me an update.
* She sincerely apologized. Not every time, not for everything. But for the amount of time the process took and for having to place me on hold for so long.
* She didn’t blame her company, her manager, her software application to try and get me on her side. Because I am like most users, at the end of the day, I don’t care about who is to blame, I just want my request fulfilled.

So I began my trip feeling very positive towards my airline. Those good feelings would not last the trip. On my return flight there was bad weather. The flight was delayed and I had a connecting flight. The gate agent would not provide any updates at all and said we needed to go back out to the ticket counter to get updates and reschedule. I dutifully went to the counter, waited one hour in line, and waited another 30 minutes at the desk with the agent. She was rude, and acted as though I was the problem. In addition, while I gave her all my information she could not or would not provide me with any information whatsoever about my connecting flight.

Photo owned by specialkrb (cc)

I went back to the gate (having to go through security again) hoping that my connecting flight would be delayed as well. On a whim I called my wife and asked her to do some additional research for me. It turns out that my ‘connecting flight’ was the same plane that I was on, i.e. if my plane was late, it didn’t matter, because the same plane was taking me home!

The frustration here is that either the gate agent or ticket agent could have spent one minute, looked at my information and told me that, and I would have had no anxiety because I would know I was getting home.

Now I’m not here to tell my airline horror story, everyone has them, and it’s a tough business. My point of this story is that it is not enough to have a good user experience here and there at your company, or on your site or your software application. The goodwill can be easily washed away if the consistency of the experience is dramatically inconsistent.

Occasionally I’ll take a detour on the blog and point out another site that I think is doing a great job. This is the first post on that topic. I discovered InspireUX a month or so ago and look forward to new postings.

InspireUX is “a blog that posts quotes relating to user experience (UX). Every quote on inspireUX focuses on the impact that user experience has on people, business, or the world.” (from the site) How? By asking for input from us the readers. If you know of a good user experience post, you can add that quote to the site. If that were all the site did, it would be worth a view. But the site focuses not only on the content, but the design. The quotes themselves are put into colorful blocks laid out very well, and that show up in a blog reader too.

In addition, you can print off the quotes and post them up, or share them with your team. They can be great conversation starters.

Give http://www.inspireux.com a try.

I had the chance to attend my first BarCamp, which in Minneapolis is called MinneBar.  A BarCamp is a conference about technology topics that have a very loose, informal feel that some call an unconference.

All attendees are asked to contribute either by being vocal participants in sessions or by hosting a session themselves.  I decided to dive in head first host a session.  The topic was  the continuum of the user experience.

I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed the session and really like the format.  I viewed my role as facilitator more so than session speaker.  Yes, I led the talk down certain paths, but the value is in the conversation.  We had great questions by several people, and several others chimed in with examples and answers themselves.

I have no slides of real value to post although if anyone asks I’ll put them on the MinneBar wiki.  I’m an anti-powerpoint guy, so my slides included several gapingvoid.com cartoons, and some favorite Kathy Sierra charts from her blogging heyday.

I started the talk with a discussion about what a field study is and the desire to visit users of your site/software/interface in the environment in which they actually use it.  The room (about 50-70 people, I’m a horrible judge of this stuff) was split in thirds around "I don’t know my customers at all" "I know them a little" "I know my customers very well" in terms of usage of the user interface. 

As a group we talked about what we do with that collected data, from creating personas, to focusing on specific issues.  There were some tangents, good tangents, about where content falls in the user experience (hint, it matters), and about what tools you can use to gather stats, e.g. click tracking on other analytics.  Everyone agreed that these statistics cannot be the only tool, and you have to decide what they mean.  For example, someone pointed out that length of time on a web page may not be a good thing, it may mean the user cannot find what he is looking for.

After we talked about field studies we moved on to the value of paper prototyping or quick online prototyping. The value here is in including customers during this process and the iterative process of this stage.  The other benefit of intentionally informal sketches is a participant doesn’t get hung up on something like colors at this stage when you are really trying to see if you’ve solved ‘flow’ problems.

We finished up on usability testing, from detailed studies, to remote tools like morae, to hallway usability at your firm with people not on your project.  The short answer is that something is better than nothing, and you should always get some usability testing in before you launch.

The back channel was working well I think, i.e. people were twittering the session.  Part of the nature of the BarCamp is you can get up and walk out if you like.  And while a couple folks walked out, we had a lot more wandering in and had people standing in back by the end.  The group made it a great session, as I mentioned, and every step of the way, people were adding their own examples of usability testing, or talking about the challenges of companies that don’t ‘get it’. 

I thoroughly enjoyed the day, will write up a post on the overall BarCamp over on my personal blog, and look forward to more great discussions like this in the future in Minneapolis and Milwaukee. 

In my last post I wrote about the keys to preparing for field studies.  In it, I mentioned a follow-up post on travel tips.

The main focus of the post will be my review of tripit.com, but first, I’ll give some quick tips which, if you travel frequently, are obvious…

• Just-in-time travel does not work.  And I don’t just mean arriving at the airport too close to your flight, I mean don’t plan your flight to come in one hour before your meeting.  Odds are you are going to have flight problems, luggage problems, rental car problems, etc. So give yourself plenty of time on both the front and back end of your studies.
• Document easily.  I have a separate folder in my laptop bag where I have any printed maps, confirmation numbers, itineraries etc.  If you run into a problem, you have all your travel information at your fingertips.  I also create a note on my iphone with confirmation numbers for each leg of the trip, and in my contacts, I have the phone numbers for the hotels, airlines etc.  Again, this means if there is a problem it is easy for me to call in and try to get it resolved.
• Trust but verify.  While very often my clients have the logistics ‘handled’ I never leave the logistics to them alone.  I always have my maps created, electronically or on paper, for every leg of my journey.  My contact may be less inclined technically and not print off a good map.  Also, I like to have back-up maps because I have had GPS give me directions that are grossly off of where I am going.

My Favorite Travel Site
I discovered www.tripit.com several months ago, and use it for every trip now.  The first thing about tripit that I love is that you can interact with it without creating an account.  Here’s how it works:

1. Make your airline reservation
2. Receive confirmation in the mail
3. Forward confirmation to plans@tripit.com
4. Repeat with hotel/rental reservations
5. Go to tripit.com

You now create your account, and all it wants is email address and password.  Amazingly, tripit has combined those emails you sent it, and created one itinerary for you by date.  The site has a great ‘Print Itinerary’ function, nice and clean.  There is both a summary and expanded view, weather by day, and maps from the airport to your hotel included.  It has a nifty trip clipper where I can clip items from other web pages and add, or I can simply add notes to my itinerary as well, such as specific notes about my field studies.

In addition, the sharing features are great.  I can share my itinerary with my wife so she knows where I’ll be.  I share with co-workers and my client as well so everyone can see what others are doing.  Socially, I can add friends to this as well, so they can see that I’ll be in Milwaukee at the end of May and try to get together.  Tripit has RSS and ICAL feeds. In this way you can have your travel itinerary plugged into your calendar, and share a summary level feed with friends.  (I also plug the feed into Dopplr, another site, so that my itinerary shows up there as well.)

But all that stuff is gravy.  What I LOVE is the simple act of forwarding my confirmation emails from my email to tripit and the site combines my airline/hotel/rental car reservations into one itinerary that I can share with my client.  The effort is minimal and the value is huge.  And as a user experience designer, the user experience of tripit is fantastic!

Do you have any travel tips or travel sites you love?  Add in the comments…

Whether you call them Field Studies, User Visits, Site Observations, or Anthropology 2.0, studying customer/user behavior is key to improving your user interface, and a strong suit of ours at GRD. This past year, Kate Gomoll spoke with Jared Spool to do a podcast on field studies and wrote an e-book with Ellen Story Church and Eric Bond titled “The Field Study Handbook: A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs.”

Recently, a client asked me how to prepare for a field study. As I reflected on the question, I thought it would make a good blog post.

Mental Preparation
The first thing I told the client is to be prepared for any circumstances to occur on your visit. Things do not always go according to plan. If you can relax and go along with the situation at hand, you’ve cleared a big hurdle. I once went on a field study to an institutional trading company in New York, when a fight broke out between two traders. I scurried off to the kitchen in the office until the melee was over. Another time, I arrived at a site and the person who was my contact had given notice and walked out the prior day, telling no one I was coming. The customer worked with me to find some people who were available, and I readjusted the visit to still accomplish the goal.

Another note on mental preparation: don’t cram too many visits in one day. If you’ve never done a field study before, let me tell you the most important thing you can do - LISTEN. For most people, true ‘active’ listening requires a mental focus that can be draining. You have to actively listen to what the participant is saying, observe what they are doing, keep the session moving along, etc. By the end of a day of three field study interviews, I am mentally tired. So while there is some variance depending on how long your sessions are, e.g. 30 minutes versus two hours, try to stay at three or fewer sessions.

Logistics
I don’t recommend going on a field study alone. There are two reasons for this. One reason is safety/liability. This is a bigger deal if you are going to someone’s house than to a company. The other reason is just having a second set of eyes. I generally record my sessions and take few notes (mainly sketches) so that my eye contact and focus is on the participant. If I have someone with me, that person can take more notes and share them with me, and we will always debrief between visits and at the end of the day. If you are a consultant, go with one contact from your client, preferably someone who is a subject matter expert and can bridge any gap in the conversation, e.g. the participant asks a detailed question that you are unable to answer. Three people are okay as well, but with any more, you will run into logistical challenges, e.g. trying to cram four people into someone’s cube, or around a kitchen table.

On the logistics of travel, I’ll do a future post on what web sites I use for travel planning, since part of the post will be a review of the site itself. But from a planning perspective, with all the problems travelers are having with airlines nowadays, I recommend always arriving the night before a visit. If you have a client who is actually doing the planning but hasn’t planned field studies before, make sure they build in time to eat And check to see whether the customer (if it is a business site not someone’s home) will have meals there or not. It is best never to assume, but you also don’t want to be rude if the customer would like to have a working lunch or take you somewhere. Lastly, regardless of whether you are doing the planning or not, print off directions and verify they are correct. There is not much worse for a field study than starting forty minutes late because you got lost.

In the bag
Having forgotten everything at least once (including my power cord for my laptop) I have created a checklist of everything I need and want for the field studies. Your need for level of detail will vary on your organizational skills.
• Laptop and cord - yes, I actually have both of those written down on my list as I have left both behind. If the visit is local, I don’t need these things, but if I am traveling, I need to bring them so I can upload the recordings off of my devices (see below).

• Pencils - always bring more than one. You may choose to use a pen; I like pencils in case I want to sketch something quickly along with my notes, and pencils are better for me for sketching. I really like the Faber-Castell graphite sketch set, which comes with a small sharpener and eraser.

• Notebook - While not a 100% visual person, I still like to use sketchbook paper rather than lined paper here. This allows me to make mind-maps when I feel like it, or take straight notes as well. Any sketch notebook will do, but the heavyweight paper is key for me.

• Digital Video Camera - The price point on these has fallen dramatically to under $1,000 for everything: camera, desktop tripod stand, extra battery. I use the JVC Everio. It has a built-in 30GB hard drive, small form factor, and good zoom for what I need. The extended battery is a security blanket for me and comes in handy. And the Platinum Plus desktop Tripod keeps things focused and allows me to focus on the person, not my tools.

• Digital Camera - I’m not a camera junkie so there are plenty of blogs that can go into details. My needs for a digital camera are that it needs to have decent zoom (so I can take a picture of a computer screen), have good battery life, and take an SD card for storage. Today, most digital cameras fit that bill, so I meet those needs, and then go for price

• Audio Recorder - Similar to the camera, I have pretty basic needs, so if I can meet those needs I can try and go for lowest cost. The Olympus works for me, just BE SURE to check that the audio recorder is compatible with your machine. I almost bought a device that was not MAC compatible but noticed in the checkout lane. My main needs here are battery life and storage size, so that I can go a full day without having to dump recordings to my Mac. Why do I bring all three recording devices? As noted above, you have to be prepared for any circumstance, and not every customer agrees to all types of recordings. While I try to know that ahead of time, people change their minds, spouses may object (if it’s a home visit), etc.

• User Information - This is hit or miss. Sometimes, I’ll have a lot of information about the field study participants ahead of time. If so, I’ll fill out as much information about them on my documents as I can so that I’m not retreading that ground during the visit. It also helps me warm up the visit, if I can discuss something about them at the outset. This is not critical and often I don’t have any information other than that the participant uses my client’s software. My point in listing here is, if you have it, review it and bring it along.

• Food and Drink - You never know if the place you are going, whether someone’s home or business, will offer you something to drink or something to eat. Bring along a water bottle and a candy bar or granola bar. You don’t want to have your stomach growling mid-interview with three hours to go in your day!

These are tactical items that are necessary for a successful field study. If I’ve missed any, or you have any tools you like to use, add them in the comments section. And take a listen to Kate’s podcast and check out the e-book. They are fantastic reference guides for this critical phase in user-centered design.

I work in our Minneapolis Office, but I was in Milwaukee a couple weeks ago, and had the pleasure of speaking with Larry Clarkin of The Thirsty Developer, a podcast for developers. Larry and his colleague Dave Bost host the podcast and find various topics of interest to developers.

Larry heard about Gomoll Research + Design by word-of-mouth, and decided to call on us to discuss how developers can improve their design of products, whether through tips on doing certain things themselves, or through collaborating better with designers. The podcast is about 15 minutes long, and is geared towards designers or developers who work on improving the user experience. I hope you’ll have a listen, feel free to comment here or at the Thirsty Developer site as well.
Podcast: Dev-igners and Des-elopers

I worked at a company that was a national company, but had grown as a collection of regional offices. The regions occasionally built their own software applications to suit their needs. Over time, people noticed that some applications were redundant as they had been built in multiple regions. Or in other cases, one region was out shopping for a product not knowing that another region had developed a product to meet the same need.

The corporate IT group was asked to ‘take over’ a regional application that could fill gaps in other regions as well. Our job was to make sure it was secure and put in our data center, i.e. all the technical stuff, and also to make it easier to use.

To that end, I went to the region and met with the manager of a group of users of the application. She didn’t quite understand why I wanted to go on a client visit with her employees and watch them use the software. She proceeded to give me a demonstration of the software. I sat through the demo, thanked her, but stated “we never know what we’ll find when we watch people use applications in their natural environments.”

Sure enough, within the first hour, I had my moment that I could take back to the manager. Users were working in the application, then going into MS Word, cutting and pasting from MS Word back into the application. This went on for 20 minutes when I asked them to think out loud and tell me in a little more detail what they were doing.

“Well,” the user said, “I share these reports that get printed out with our customers. And I’m a REALLY bad speller.”

Turns out the application didn’t have a spell-check function in it, so the users would use MS Word to spell-check and then cut pieces out and put into the various fields in the application.

Recently, while designing a portal for a client, I was part of a debate about whitespace versus information density in portal page designs.

I began my career designing instructional materials for Apple, where whitespace was an essential tool we used to create a clean, simple, accessible look. Since that experience, whitespace has been part of my DNA — I don’t surrender it lightly. I know that it is underused, that it is essential to helping users parse and scan content, and that it is at the core of any visual design that strives to be light, simple, and clean. I also appreciate the prominent role it plays in branding for a wide range of corporations. That said, we have learned that in portals, it can be overdone.

In a portal (as opposed to a public site or print materials), users come to the site with efficient information retrieval as their primary task. They do not want to browse or navigate or think about site structure. They want 80% (or more) of the information to be right there, on the surface, no clicking required. Portal user satisfaction is often driven directly by the ability to retrieve target information on the portal homepage. So while the layout needs to be open and clean enough to be scanned, there are higher user tolerances (even requirements) for greater information density on a portal page.

Furthermore, portal users will, within seconds of landing on a portal page — without clicking or scrolling at all — evaluate it based on how much useful information they see at a glance. If they perceive that they are on a page that is lightweight, overly branding or marketing-driven, or lacking sufficient useful information, it will impact the likelihood that they will become frequent users of the site.

Users have also developed expectations about portal designs. Based on their personal experiences with news portals, customizable portals (e.g., iGoogle, My Yahoo!), they have come to expect a certain information density. They may be critical of or question the relative value of sites that use lighter designs based on their learned expectations with other portals.

Having said that, talented visual designers can keep a light feeling in a design, minimize rigid portlet-segmentation, and vary the weight of different portlets to break up the “gray-blur” effect one might experience looking at info-packed portal screens. But it is useful to be aware of the fact that information density is a good thing for portals. And we don’t want to use a visual design that will reduce the perceived value or usefulness of such a site.