SandBox

Mitigate and move on...

2011-02-25T01:14:00.000-08:00

Some of you SIG-IA subscribers might be familiar with this, but recently I've been trying to resolve a rather sticky issue with an ecom site: a seemingly critical piece of the ecom journey was taken away from the UX - descoped - during the development cycle.

Solving this challenge brought to light several issues that just keep coming up in discussion at the moment within the UX community:

1 - Deliverables. Over on IXDA there's a thread about a pattern library that covers the same ground. What should come out of IA/UX and who is it for. Part of this situation with the cart arose because IA specs defined a desirable user experience, but the detail of how this should be implemented was either unresolved or lost in a sea of other specification. When it came to the dev sprints (completed by a 3rd party supplier) pdf page designs were used as the 'specification' and reinterpreted and from the stories that emerged it became clear that the feasibility of some core functionality was very low.
IAs make nothing - we research, conceive communicate. If our deliverables are not effective, then we aren't fulfilling our role. It's more than just picking a software package, throwing it all in and hitting 'generate'. Our deliverables should meet the same high standards of being 'user-or-usage-oriented' as our solutions themselves.

2 - Process. Which brings us to the Agile issue. Dev work in sprints. The site owners have projects and programs and goals. Design and IA is done at a site section level (home page, checkout etc). By the time a sprint can be undertaken, there are already many dependencies in the designs of each feature. Retrofitting user stories to completed designs, which get built on assumptions about tech feasibility, because that gets done after the user stories. It's messy. What ought to happen (in an ideal world without clients, budgets and time-zones) is a high-level IA/UX is worked out and assessed for feasibility by all involved. Then design and dev can work in sprints on features, slowly filling in the big picture. The challenge for the IA/UX here is keeping a hold on the current state of the big picture so that coherence, user flows and consitency can be maintained - any hints!?

3 - The art of mitigation. As an IA/UX, I don't actually build anything. As such, I can't control many of the factors that effect the outcome. My job is to mitigate against and for those factors, and the value of that role has been made very clear in this circumstance. While the debate continues to rage every so often about 'who needs UX anyway' (no doubt fuelled by the massive increase in demand and the dubious skills of many presenting themselves for roles) this situation desperately needed UX. Dev couldn't have solved it. Dev could only sticky-plaster over the individual effects of the descope as they became apparent. Design couldn't have fixed it; they needed to resolve the visual display issues that arose, but that would have resolved system issues on which those displays were dependent (such as the persistence of cookies).

Autocratic or Anarchic ecosystem

We couldn't change the way it was getting built. We couldn't change the available interface elements. But we could mitigate the effects of those for the user through careful use of visual concepts (such as placement, prominence, change in state) and language to manage the expectations of the user so that they were met by the experience on offer. I get nervous when I see IA/UX specs that say 'things should always be like this'. This kind of 'benign dictator' approach is at best over optimistic and at worst damaging to the user's experience.

Apparently, a guy called Eamon Hennessy, who was an anarchist of sorts, once said of rules:

"The good people don't need 'em and the bad people don't pay attention to them, so what use are they anyway?"

He kind of has a point. If all we do as IAs is set out hard and fast, unbending rules for others to follow, then we're in danger of becoming more of an obstacle to good a UX than a creator of one. If we take care to understand the issues of the products we're specifying, in the same way a traditional architect understands steel, plumbing, soil erosion, and respects and seeks the opinions of the experts in these issues, then we can provide guidance to the people that actually do the designing, the development, the marketing, the owning of the products, and advice when things go wrong.

Over and Out.

Once a UX, always a UX - the human in the machine

2010-09-06T00:33:00.000-07:00

Right now there is a cleverly orchestrated spat going on in the blogosphere about whether the role of user experience designer is really necessary, or even if it exists. Sparked (I believe) by a blog post from Ryan Carson (http://thinkvitamin.com/opinion/ux-professional-isnt-a-real-job/) and countered by Andy Budd (http://www.andybudd.com/archives/2010/09/why_i_think_rya/index.php) as well as a flurry of tweets, essentially the argument goes like this:

1. User Experience is just a product of code+colouring in
2. User Experience is easily addressed by a diligent developer+designer
3. User Experience therefore doesn't exist.

It's obviously a no-brainer that I'm going to disagree. I've been working on the 'human factors' side of the internet for 10 years or so (I remember the days when I was keen to stress how long, now it just belies my age!). But what has sucked me in to this argument is not a need to add my voice to the yay's, but because so far the reasoning is all wrong.

UX is a valid 'profession' because...

1 - Designers and Developers are professionals, and should necessarily be immersed in the business of producing the best code / visual experience as possible.
2 - Users are not a definable or static entity. So the argument that you can learn to do 'good UX' while billing all your time for dev or design is impossible. The point of having a UX onboard is to assess the current context of the user experience and discover the particular requirements. If you pay a UX to come in and just tell you what their last client's users needed, you're not getting good value.
3 - Jack of all trades is master of none. As a UX pro, I like to keep up to date with development, hardware and tech, design styles etc. so that I can have useful conversations with these fields and anticipate issues. But I don't code and I don't draw (apologies to the design folk, I know I'm being reductive), and if I were to spend all my time learning how to and staying up to date then I would let my specialism slip. I have suspicions about any pro who claims to be such a polymath that they're master of all.

Size does matter

I've been paid by tiny clients to work on 5-page brochureware before. And I've tried to persuade them not to. In this case, there is a big argument for sharing best practice and letting the team get on with it themselves. So I'd focus on improving that client's process: best practice libraries, reusable questionnaires to elicit needs, overarching principles etc. But this is not where I earn my bread and butter.

My road to UX started at Ofsted, a high-profile UK government department responsible for the inspection of (then) schools, educational institutions and childcare across England and Wales. These reports were published on a website. Internally, a staff of thousands spread across the country and at home struggled to keep in tune. Quite frankly, it was a mess. Yes, there were developers. Yes, there were contracted designers sometimes. But the UX niche was carved to create a backbone of rational response to human and organisational need, which could be delivered by these parties.

I've heard web development and communications teams around the globe sigh with relief at the emergence of the 'UX professional' as a resource - something that can deliver the high level strategic requirements and the detailed interface and structural designs to fill in the gaps of their existing team knowledge.

It's not who you are, it's where you come from?

OK, but my biggest gripe with the current debate is to do with the background of practitioners. Way back, in the glory days of the Sig-IA list, there was an almost continuous feeling of 'show and tell' as the community emerged from a wide variety of different backgrounds. At that time, 'Web Developer' was way down the list of likely backgrounds.

The list of skills in a UX role has grown alarmingly in recent years. Now, it is not unlikely to see a job spec that expects candidates to develop and design interfaces. I'm not suggesting that a proficiency in these areas should prohibit people from being a good UX, but there is a genuine worry that the closer the UX designer gets to the 'machine' the more sympathy they may have. When we are good at something, we find it hard to imagine that anyone else might struggle. I now use a lovely Mac on a fast broadband wifi connection. But it is nice to remind myself of what it's like using an 5-year-old Dell on a dialup every now and then. Some people still don't have iPhones you know.

If what you are after is a basic level of easiness in your web projects, fine: Read a few articles on A List Apart and get it done. But if you genuinely want to deliver digital services to a population, then get away from the keyboard, walk the street, and find someone to be the advocate of the technophobe.

Developers: give yourself credit. Development is important and highly complex. You don't need to hang a fashionable UX tag round your necks to feel necessary.

CAB Direct is live

2010-05-27T14:36:00.000-07:00

I'm proud of this baby, these battles were hard fought

http://www.cabdirect.org/

Lovely database full of endless info and bibliographic references. Now all wrapped up with filters, promos, help and clear text.

Quite something for an academic site, I'll tell you :)

Hi Christina!

customer support on twitter (anecdotes)

2010-03-12T05:55:00.000-08:00

Further to IBF's and others' musings on using Twitter for an aftersales/customer service channel, here are some anecdotal comments taken from the BNM (Brighton New Media) mailing list. The demographic of the list is naturally early-adopter-oriented, but these anecdotes demonstrate the comparative (or at least percieved) effectiveness of twitter vs. telephone support:

For those with BT Broadband woes, myself (and others on this list I've
noticed) have recently been helped by the social media pixies on twitter,
@btcare.
A quick moan about BT services on there and they'll message you back and
seem to get the problem sorted quicker than through the usual channels.

I found the same with Quark - when I had moaned all morning on twitter about installation and wrong codes blah blah I had a message from a bod in California who had it sorted in an hour! Tech eventually got back to me 3 days later by conventional methods...

I get IntelliJ, Grails, and Tapestry support via twitter. All you have
to do is mention an issue you're facing and somebody (often the authors)
will jump at the chance to help.

Really useful!

Thanks BNMers (again).

Cutting out the middle-man(agement)

2010-03-09T04:41:00.000-08:00

Following on from the IBF member meeting and the New Directions in Usability report (not just yet, out in March), here are some more examples from this month's Wired (UK) mag about how work is changing.

HubSpot - ditch staff holidays
Treating employees like contractors, leaving them to manage their own workflows and productivity with monitoring processess in place. Allowing out-of-office, flexible hours work patterns.

BestBuy - Global Brand, local responsiveness
Uses twitter sales support and customer feedback to provide local service tweaks (including and all-night NY store and a 'Coffee&Donught' session in Tampa). Local teams respond locally to demand.

LiveOps - enable networks of freelancers
Telephone support operators employed as home-based freelancers make up the staff for this "call centre in the sky".

Mosaic - "not an employer, but the hub of an entrepreneuerial community"
Investment banking consultancy that 'cloud sources' its staff - creating an enabling framework (including skype meetings, yammer channels). Consultants run concurrent careers and projects, Mosaic keeps overheads low.

Cancer Research UK - transparent, relevant, responsive
Scientists directly communicate with and monitor contributions from donors - keeping them motivated and focused on the goal, and keeping donors (customers) in touch with developments and progress.

All nice examples, and a flavour of the way in which the world of work, business and employment are heading.

Wired Magazine UK - Work Smarter
Intranet Benchmarking Forum Member Meeting roundup (eek! with a vid of me!)
forthcoming report New Directions in Usability

Chaos and the art of poor presentation

2010-02-22T02:15:00.001-08:00

Last week I presented a key note to the February gathering of the UK's leading Intranet Managers at the IBF's Member Meeting.

And I was about as effective as a Llama on the London Underground.

Here's some of the feedback comments:

"too much was fit into one day and not enough exploration"

"slightly chaotic"

"maybe not forward thinking enough"

Why? It certainly wasn't the fault of the event organiser, the IBF (www.ibforum.com) who put on meetings like these year round and across the globe, sharing best practice and insights in a confidential, cooperative environment.

Nor was it the gathered crowd, who represented the cream of intranet professionals and practitioners and all arrived enthusiastic to engage and share with their peers in what, to me, was a uniquely collaborative environment.

For my part, public speaking is not an issue and I've delivered many well received sessions on usability etc. and facilitated enough meetings.

So how did it all go so wrong?

Well, beside the over exposure of being thrust into the attendees faces all day long :-) I committed the first mortal sin of usability design. Oh the irony.

Whilst preaching about the importance of envisioning the context of content, users, and goals, I completely failed to apply the practise myself.

-The content was about sharing knowledge - not broadcasting information.
-The users were expecting to contribute - not to recieve.
-The goal was to support members - not to provide for them.

Doh!

So apologies to all of the attendees - but also thanks, I could have sat there for four more days happily soaking up the knowledge and experience in that room. My failure is a credit to you all - never have I seen a room so full of cooperation between effectively competing organisations.

The IBF meeting is one example of the real best way to improve user experience for all - not through monothetic blabbering by conference-circuit professionals, but by enabling the sharing of ideas and experiences between active practioners like yourselves.

Bravo!

Deliverables: usability findings / heuristics

2010-01-18T04:54:00.000-08:00

As a part of the detailed analysis of an academic publishing portal site, this hueristic based RAG (red, amber, green) finding matrix was produced.

I built it that way, because RAG was a system familiar to the stakeholders (and our own project managers who would have to discuss the findings), and because the colour provided a quick visual indicator of the severity of problems (or not). This meant that we didn't avoid detailing insignificant issues in favour of significant ones.

Finding Matrix

View more documents from LouiseHewitt.

These are all raw files, not the polished versions that would have gone to the client.

Deliverables: User states

2010-01-18T03:33:00.000-08:00

This doc was produced to support a low-budget revamp of an academic ebook platform.

It describes the different states and tasks for the user as they move through the product, and intends to bring together the client and the developer's understanding of what's happening.

The F1 etc. formed the basis for functional requirements that were in line with the existing development team processes. (I worked with them later to revise these process and integrate IA / UX deliverables into the stream more - there was a disconnect between the IA work and the specification).

Brille Books User Pathways

View more documents from LouiseHewitt.

User testing: CABI repository redesign 2008

2010-01-18T03:19:00.000-08:00

This is the final report back slideshow from the CABI usertesting

CABI are a major academic publishing house and this work was undertaken to review the redesign of their portal. I designed the tests, the scripts, recruited participants (stakeholders, students, librarians) and analysed the findings (with Morae).

The summary video in the presentation doesn't work, but there's a snippet here (it had live voice over, so ignore the long intro):

CAB Usability Testing with Morae - highlights from Louise Hewitt on Vimeo.

In the room were 10 stakeholders, including content producers, marketing, senior management and IT representative - so the discussion was pretty interesting!

Cd2 Usability Final Presentation V1.0

View more documents from LouiseHewitt.

Presentation: eBook, online libraries & usability

2010-01-18T03:05:00.000-08:00

These are edited slides from a presentation I gave on behalf of Semantico (as a consultant). The audience included representative from Oxford University Press, Brill, Cambridge University Press, CABI, Wiley-Blackwell and Random House.

Digital Publishing And The User Experience (No Chart)

View more presentations from LouiseHewitt.

Not too pretty, and I've had to remove the core example of persona's that I created by mining stats to reveal user types, using random profiles from those categories in the product database and researching with Google, then creating personas based on the findings. They couldn't be included for privacy reasons.

I'll try and edit those down and put them up separately. The audience here was high level strategist in print and online publishing houses (mostly academic) and the presentation was supposed to be an intro into the value of user experience in digital publishing.

Crowd source your intranet

2009-12-17T05:12:00.000-08:00

I've been looking at intranets of big, big companies. Comparing them is interesting and has given me a lot of ideas about what works and what doesn't.

One of the most exciting trends I've spotted is the notion of increasing participation in content creation. UGC (user generated content). When I worked as an intranet manager many moons ago, we had a cascade of trained, monitored and weary regional and divisional 'editors' and trained them up cautiously to use a locked down CMS with rigid workflow. It was slow, thankless and pretty irritating for all involved (not least the end users who could transfer knowledge quicker by carrier pigeon).

Today, more and more orgs are starting to throw open the content doors as users become more familiar with creating and consuming content that comes from many sources. This might be limited to comments on news articles, or updating personal details on staff directories. Or it could be as bold as opening the whole she-bang as a wiki or freely contributing video clips.

Success criteria used to be measured in terms of control: "Can we stop people being rude" or "How do we make sure the information is correct". Thanks to social media and wikis in the wider web world, a lot of these arguments have been resolved. Members of a community are quite good at translating normal social boundaries into a digital realm, so users rarely act 'inappropriately' when given clear guidance and accountability. Wikipedia, for all it's detractors, has shown that in the main information is satisfactorily useful to compensate for the rare occurrence of vandalism or error.

And these are corporate environments - participants are accountable (as long as they're not anonymous) and are unlikely to upset their career or colleagues. As an organisation, getting your content made by the people you already pay has massive benefits:

lower costs (no need to pay dedicated content creators)
increase employee satisfaction (employers are 'listened to' and can see evidence of their benefit)
instant communication (knowledge from the grass routes can be spread throughout the organisation instantly)
flexible workforce (teams can be brought together around content online, collaborate, and then disband)

So what are the new criteria for success?

Engaging - The content needs to be relevant to the employees and their tasks. Let it grow, respond to activity and requests
Moderated - employees need boundaries and guidelines, and someone to turn to if they have a grievance, but not a workflow that would inhibit participation or information sharing
Welcoming - if the tools are invisible to the user, easy to use and intuitive, give good feedback and clear support, then they encourage participation by everyone and won't be seen as elitist.

So there you have it. How to cut your workforce, increase your productivity and please your staff this Christmas.

Creating Universal Metrics for Usabiltiy

2009-08-03T01:25:00.000-07:00

For the last couple of months I've been working with an international organisation to revise a set of metrics for testing usability. At times I feel like I'm breaking by own rules, but it's an interesting exercise.

On the one hand I'm a big believer that, to get benefit from any usability assessment, criteria for success should be sensitively applied according to a 'deep-as-possible' understanding of the nature and circumstance of the likely users. Creating blanket statements like "Navigation menus should appear on the top and left of a page" is not only redundant but fails to recognise the value of non-standard layout for achieving a site's goals in some circumstances (such as a innovative new product line for a web-aware audience group).

On the other hand we have applicability. This organisation tests intranets around the world, from the UK government to Microsoft, and the member expect to be benchmarked against other intranets according to stable and repeatable criteria. Some members even tie staff bonuses to year-on-year scores, so the metrics need to be incredibly consistent.

Applied Usability

The crossroads between 'best' and 'useful' approaches to interface design and testing is a common sticking point, and one where I think UX needs be a bit more honest as a community. More than once I have heard Project Managers and Dev teams bemoan a predecessor who, while undoubtedly committed, creative and right, failed to provide workable solutions for the team. While we of course always start for the ideal circumstance for a user, what we often need to achieve is an 'optimum' circumstance - one that support the user in the best way possible given the technology, skills, budget, time and other pressures.

That said, creating a list of 25 criteria for a successful intranet interface was a pretty uncomfortable experience. I've learned a lot. Not just about how to craft a metric to include enough scope to fairly and comparatively assess vastly different interfaces for vastly different users and organisations. (Some intranets are deeply embedded and include social networking, 3rd party applications and services: Others are barely filled HTML and placeholder images). I've learned a lot about how the work we do as UX professionals is used out there in the world.

Users as customers

When I first started working with organsiations, intranets, and interfaces the main driver was to meet external standards. It was about box-ticking for the stakeholders, and they wanted little more that for me to be aware of an interpret those boxes with as little disruption as possible. Intranets (and the staff who used them) were seen as 'have-to-have' extensions of the IT network, and in particular broadcast channels for the senior management and internal communications teams. Consulting with members of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum (IBF), it becomes clear that intranets are now 'must-have's'. Users are seen as customers of the intranet, and the teams responsible for the infrastructure (site seems to poor a word for some of the systems) are expected to serve their users as they would their customers. Content creation is mostly devolved to business units, service providers and teams.

Service and opportunity

Which in a way makes creating universal metrics easier. By focusing on the concepts of good and accessible service (with detail for assessors on what constitutes best-practice), the set of metrics operate as a sort of standard service level agreement between the intranet providers and the users. Instead of identifying specific solutions (e.g. "your site should have a blog") the metrics rate the ease of use of features and facilities, the inclusiveness of support and content and the coherency of the content and services through the use of design.

Intranets make for a fascinating microcosm of digital interaction - with a massive level of user participation, diversity and engagement. Whereas the internet users will always be driven by some notion of choice, intranet users are faced with only 2 options: use it or not. It's exciting to see corporate stakeholders picking up the challenges of intranet usability and I expect to see a big shift in UX work toward these internal markets over the next 5 years.

http://www.ibforum.com/

Books for the UX / IA in the modern age

2009-07-14T01:56:00.000-07:00

Sometimes a book from outside the discipline can stretch your imagination and lead to new ideas.

Not new, but 'Emergence' by Steven Johnson fits this bill perfectly. The clearly explained (I'm no mathematician) models for the growth and development of networked systems of all kinds provide excellent analogies for online behaviours, both of humans and of technologies like search algorithms. The sheer breadth of the examples is a reminder that, while we may be redesigning the wheel, we are far from reinventing it when we build new types of networked environments and tools to use them.

In a similar vein, Clay Shirkey's 'Here comes everybody' suprised me. Initially skeptical about yet another social media crit, it turns out that, while he certainly does have the 'chatting in the pub' writing style and a tendency to stretch out each point to fill the full book, there is much in the book that was well evidenced, refreshingly formulated (such as his progression through the implication of electronic communications from the banal facebook threads to the downfall of entire governments), and insightful.

Science vs Fiction

But often it is the most irrelevant reads that can kick us back into thinking like the real world, and remind us of the complexities inherent in medium that we are dealing with as interaction designers: human behaviour.

'Happy families' by Carlos Fuentes, a Mexican author with a sharp wit and a wealth of experience, is a collection of tales from the edge of family life. Sisters, brothers, mothers, daughters - all flawed, all affected, all wrong in some sense.

And it is the 'wrongness' of people that I too easily forget. The smudges and smears in people's actual existence that make their behaviour diverge from the scientific norm, or the agreed cognitive pathway. For all our skill in the science, interface design will always be a big part art as we try to 'feel' our way into the experiences of others and anticipate what they might need to achieve the goals.

People push the CPU aside

Which of course we can't. No one can ever get it right - the ultimate interface that supports all and frustrates no-one. But the more online transactions are about human interaction through the medium of technology, and less about a single human interacting with a rational system, then the more we need to accept the unpredictability of the outcomes. Sometimes, nothing beats a good novel to teach us about human nature.

Amazon can't add - is this the end of internet shopping?

2009-05-25T11:19:00.001-07:00

OK, someone explain this one to me...

This is screenshot from Amazon - selling clearance CDs. But, because I'm such a cheapskate, I only wanted to know about the ones that were really cheap, so I changed the list order to 'price: low to high'

Only, what I got was a whole load of jumbled up results, some more expensive, some less than a pound, with no discernible way to tell why - they definitely aren't in price order. High to low behaves better for a while, but then goes screwy too.

It's quite possible that Amazon is using some oddball mechanism, such as price per track or biggest discount, to create the listing. But that's far from obvious if it's true.

Could it be that the public are just too good at finding bargains if they're given the right tools? Is the retail sector undermining our google-given right to find the cheapest anything?

Or has the system just broken? If so, how long will customer confidence in these interfaces endure before we return to the better service of shops and people? ;-)

User Experience & Ethnographic research @uxbri

2009-05-14T12:14:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Yandle and the UXBri group (oh, and iCrossing) for an excellent night last night. Two really intriguing presentations into the use of field research techniques in creating user-oriented products.

Erosion or defence

Simon Johnson's presentation of how evidence from the field can drive interface designs that really meet the needs of local user communities, and moreover a client's acceptance of those designs, was pretty inspiring.

What was clear from his case study was that his was a project where the research genuinely followed through into the design and development decisions that were made, and that the evidence gathered through close and sustained contact with the user communities enabled that to happen.

The end result was an excellent pull of data (from Environment Agency sources, historical documents, local contributors) into visual display arena (a dynamic map) to create a usable interface that leverages new web techniques and interfaces (speech bubbles, zooming etc.) and traditional cartography skills (simplification, abstraction and detail). Plus an invaluable branding u-turn from 'Coastal Erosion Risk' to 'Coastal Erosion Defence'. Perfect.

And the structure of the site was one that had clearly moved forward from the original rule of the pyramid:

Through the marketing style funnel (with the search engine acting as a pointer):

To a usage-focused webbed model, where all the user has to do is locate their nearest node to access links to explore a connected web of information:

The heirachical source of the information - it's structure - is subjugated, and the point-of-request takes it's place in the architecture of the site. The information becomes a servant to the site, not it's master. Lovely stuff.

Mobile services unleashed

Next up, Miles Rochford, interaction designer at Nokia, with tales of 'rapid ethnography' around the world.

Firstly, whatever you call it, getting into the places where people use stuff is going to give you real clarity on what you need to achieve - Miles referred to the importance of empathy - especially when those people have significantly different contexts to your own.

Designing for use by demographic groups whose goals and experience differ from your own should be done with due respect(and obviously is in the case of Nokia). One very negative thing that Apple has given us is the anecdote of the 'undesigned iPod' (Basically, the iPod is presented as an example of a highly successful interaction design that was achieved without user research or testing - but the arguement is that the target user group was identical to the design team demographic, and that the prototyping cycle *is* user testing). Miles' notion of the 'self designed' interface presented the issue well: Getting out to meet users is a valuable excercise in humility.

There was clearly more to their process than just a few interviews overseas, and in allusions to discoveries about the mental models of digital space for mobile-only users, Miles and his team are clearly very intelligent and personally driven to seek out wider understandings that can be gained by narrow scenarios.

So thank you both, your work is inspiring.

Controlling vocabulary

But there still is a question? Is it ethnography.
In the room, looking at the projects, it seems fickle to care - call it cookery if you like it's all great research.

But there is a point in restraining the names of our techniques and we don't necessarily do ourselves any favours by trying to label our work as something it isn't.

Ethnography is vast. There are principles and ethics involved in conducting ethnographic research. It implies a relationship so embedded as to be potentially disruptive. And why do we need it?
Why not have 'field research', 'community personas', 'in-depth studies'. None of these are borrowed from another field - none of them come with connotations that bind the hands of the practioner or discourage the unitiated. We always push for plain English, so why use a specialised, shoe-horned in term when 'field studies' etc. is more readily understood and accurate?

And why do we, as a profession, need to appropriate all this terminology anyway? Don't we feel respected without referencing an older, more established vein?

Heuristic Evaluation - from psychology

Architecture - from software development

and now Ethnography. We use them to describe what we do, to lend it gravitas, but then we end up having to explain it to clients and colleagues amd spend endless hours online and off debating their appropriateness. If we are sure of our skills, then we should state them clearly, in our own terms.

Either way, the techniques and findings demonstrated in the talks restored my faith in 'getting things done' so, bravo!

See: http://uxbrighton.org.uk/from-ethnography-to-design for more details and images from the night (and iCrossing's plush offices!).

Art imitates life - Tate Triennial 2009 piece apes twitter?

2009-04-21T05:22:00.000-07:00

One of the first reactions I had reading about the Bob & Roberta Smith installation, Off Voice Fly Tip, at the Tate Triennial 2009 was that its form is that of a series of tweets.

According to Frieze (http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/tate_t/), the piece is updated every Friday with a new object, prompted by conversations between the artist and curator that week.

A bit like a 'what are you doing now' update with artistic merit.

I like when this happens. When a new social behaviour sufaces in an artistic field. It feels like a validation. The micro-broadcast - in online text, or art installation - of current personal experience seems to me one of the most significant changes in communication since the telephone.

Better hurry up and see it.

God, I hate hackers.

2009-04-11T05:33:00.000-07:00

They make the internet feel like living in a dodgy tower block - as if just talking to a friend is a risky operation that requires you to double-lock your door and risk having your stuff nicked.

Anyway, trying to sort out a googlemail/gmail username prob (I think someone has managed to register louisehewitt@googlemail.com even though I own louise.hewitt@gmail.com - something that gmail say's can't happen) I came across a hack post.

http://cyberwarfaremag.wordpress.com/2008/11/24/hacking-passwords-from-google-mail-account-holders/

bleurgh!

I deliberately refuse to understand most of this, but it makes me worry about everything. About my mother's pension, about my children's birthday presents, about all the money I've squirrelled into the bank (which isn't much, so don't bother hacking in to get it).

Cowardly criminals are the biggest threat to free speech. Stand up and show your faces, like Butch Cassidy and The Sunshine Kids.

Bah.

Crossover - too much of a good thing?

2009-03-25T15:08:00.000-07:00

A trend seems to be developing in the IA job listings for candidates that not only define, but also supply the user experience. That is, IAs UXDs etc that also develop code or design the pages.

IA has emerged from varied backgrounds, and wonderfully so. In trying to define what an IA does, it often distills down into 'broker respect and understanding between all the participants and stakeholders of a digital project'. So the more the merrier - IA practitioners who come from development and from graphic design can add valuable layers of shared understanding as well as new methodologies and insights to keep the field sharp and relevant (such as rapid prototyping with Flex or using colour to create powerful meaning in deliverables).

Oooh, but you can hear the 'but' coming, can't you...

But ...

While at first these new requirements made me feel vulnerable (for those of you who don't know and do care, I'm looking for work following an unfortunate dose of redundancy) as if I'd slipped up somewhere and missed a rather important boat as a result. But with a deep breath I remembered that I am constantly and actively preventing myself from building up skills that enable me to develop (not understand - it's important to understand - but the proficiency required to work effectively as a developer in a commercial environment) interfaces using any specific technology.

Here's why:

to be a representative of the user, you have to be able to put yourself in their shoes.

Whether you are an expert in Flash, .Net, XML or typography, that expertise is bound to cloud your vision of what 'normal' people perceive if you are working with those skills daily. A press officer can't read a newspaper without reading between the lines. A good CSS dev will be almost thinking in stylesheets, and so switching that off to come at a problem from a strictly User Centred perspective is hard - divs, floats and positioning are bound to come to mind, resolving questions before they've been thoroughly framed.

it's human nature to stick to what you know.

When you make a really good lasagna and you're new best friends come to dinner - do you risk that Thai curry with the tricky timing and deep fried fish? Or do you whip up your best bechamel and guarantee a good impression? Humans will want to impress, will be often risk averse, and are largely self interested. If the same guy (or girl) has to build the solution - won't they tend to design it to work best in the tech they know best, not pick the tech that best suits the user needs?

jack of all trades, master of none.

OK, it's a cliche and often not true, but "where there's smoke there's fire", eh? As Joe Public, who would you rather have specify the experience you have to use: a practitioner who is focused on understanding users, content and context and communicating these needs to other expert practitioners who design and build those requirements; or an individual whose experience, focus and application is split across activities, jumping from conception to execution. One of the biggest problems I've seen in the past is a lack of respect on the part of either designers or developers for each other's skills. Perhaps IAs should take it as a mark of recognition if we are now also being subject to this 'anyone can do it' maxim.

quality assurance.

"Two heads are better than one". Working in print you never ever had final proof of your own copy. Never. Even if you got the tea lady to read it last. Sanity-checking designs or specifications is best done by someone else - bundling the IA and Design and Development into a single role removes the useful handover stage, whereby clients, contractors or colleagues scratch their heads and ask awkward questions about what's being proposed.

Big IA vs. embedded IA (also known as common sense)

What I am delighted to see is a wider understanding of the principles and importance of User Centred Design (UCD), and a broader range of stages and people involved in digital solutions (including managers and content creators) becoming aware of and actively involved in delivering user requirements.

And IA is not necessary for every single web build under the sun. It might be beneficial, but it can easily be replaced by the term 'Common Sense' or 'Care and Attention' for smaller projects and narrowly focused targets.

I love my job - I'm proud of what I and my community have achieved. But we are magpies - we have thieved terminology, methodology and tools from everywhere we've collectively come from, evolving a distinct area of activity we call 'User Experience' (among many other things!) as we went. These porous boundaries have been beneficial to spread the word, bring people from other disciplines into the field, and create agility and speed as a community.

Will these edges become so blurred that we allow the discipline to seep back out into adjacent fields and we all return to our native environments, be that design, marketing, development, research, communications, publishing? I hope not.

The day I broke the web (2.0)

2009-02-03T07:21:00.000-08:00

That's it - I've had enough.

After many years trying to pretend that user tagging as a navigation form was a good thing, I've cracked.

Here's my straw (that broke the camels back)

GoogleTalk conversation with my brother

"Hi, did you enjoy the snow?"
"Yes, built a lovely snow man and [blah blah blah]"
"I spent the day laughing at vans skidding down Dyke Road into the kerb"
"That does sound funny - did you get any pictures?..."

So far so web 2.0 good. But, "ah ha!" I thought, "I work in a big building full of digital types, someone will have uploaded some skiddy van pics to the internet that I can show my brother.

Here, things start to get a little gnarly.

First - I have to choose where to look for pics. Which means I have to guess what the latest uploading favourite of the digitalista's is today.

User generated content will cluster into cliques, just like people do. These cliques will have cultural barriers to entry: especially they require knowledge of the groups vocabulary, an awareness of the location of the group, and the skills to access it.

I'm not cool, so I tried Flickr.

Next step: search for a picture of a van sliding around in the snow in Brighton. Enter terms 'van', 'snow', 'Brighton' into search box; hit search = 3 results. None of them of van's outside my building. Not even sliding vans.

User's can't be relied on to create sufficient tags to support discovery by others. Tagging is a self-interested act, either for publication (marketing) or personal retrieval. I tag these posts 'BNM'(a clique), UI, usability etc. - but rarely scour the content for appropriate topics that describe the content.

I tried again with just 'Brighton' and 'snow', but then got over 7,000 results. It still seemed sensible to browse this list a bit, so I clicked through 9 or 10 pages, before resorting to using the advanced search and restricting the dates to this month.

Still over 2,000 results. By now I have invested about 15 minutes of my time (don't tell my boss) trying to complete a trivial and pointless task. Stubbornly I kept going till my brain melted (about another 10 minutes). I never found the picture. I didn't have the will to try again with different tags.

Choosing the wrong tags for retrieval hides content, but gives no clues about what else might work.

Tags are nice - they make us feel involved, they help us to communicate and to describe things for the benefit of others. They are great at supporting personal retrieval (I can tag all my own stuff with my own labels and always get it back).

But tags cannot do the job of structured and mediated collections and publishing. It was a gimmick, it works for some things, but too much gets lost or left behind. Including people.

The internet has the power to be a strong democratising tool. But if we create secret passwords and premium phrases, without which you either cannot discover or be discovered, we are locking the doors behind us.

Dull Dull Dull - GUI library

2009-01-31T06:29:00.001-08:00

Blah.

3 hours today and many more tomorrow cut and pasting UI elements into a wiki for a pattern library.

Dull Dull Dull Dull Dull

Wireframes a go go!

2009-01-15T01:22:00.000-08:00

Is it a bad sign when the phrase "Collection of Wireframe examples" makes you go "WOW - great!"? Hmmm.

Anyway . . .

Thanks to guuui.com (as ever) for discovering Wireframes Magazine. Full of delicious images and descriptions of the many different approaches to drawing stuff - great for communicating concepts and for inspiration.

Enjoy!

The 4 big issues of faceted navigation

2008-12-13T02:20:00.000-08:00

Faceted navigation is an elegant and popular solution to finding a needle in a haystack. Start with a keyword . . . Present a list of results with a range of facets (categories) and how many of the results fall into that category . . . user can choose to refine the list by the facets, getting them closer to the result that they really want.

Great. And it often works really well:

Here's Ocado's shopping interface, very helpful and I don't really care (because I'm shopping on Ocado, so I've got pots of money) if I've seen all the options, just that I've got the right kind of thing. Only the 'more' link is pretty weak - I might not think to find the 13 other brands behind that link - good news for the first 4 in the list but potential disaster for anyone at the bottom - so how do they choose who goes first?

But Ocado is dealing with a small dataset that they can control. And their facets are in a pretty narrow range. What would happens when we need to search through thousands and thousands of possible items?

The facet list gets incredibly hard to use if it has many different types (category, temporal, numeric, geographical, etc.) and they are all jammed into the same interface. And list ordering of the facets can get a little crazy if the same rules are applied to each type.

Here's how ebay deals with it:

Categories are given priority, and presented as a list of links ordered by count - very sensible. Users can then pick all sorts of other ways to filter the results, from entering a price range into a form to picking the condition (new, used etc.) from with checkboxes. Each type of facet selector and display is designed according to its type and the perception of its use. To create space on the interface, other refinement options are collapsed into easily interpreted header bars that can be 'opened' by clicking on them. A > indicates there is something to expand.

So far, so good. I've found a chair in my price range and near enough to my house that will fit into my daughter's dolls house. But did I find the best one? Did anything get lost because I bypassed its category?

Faceted navigation is very good at getting users closer to better fit results, but it is also very good at losing results. Because selecting one facet tends to exclude the others, items that are in a category that users didn't think to select, didn't notice or was misapplied will be hidden. Think about your local telephone listings. If you're looking for a plumber, then you will look under 'P' and find the plumber section. Great. If you are a plumber and you accidentally get put into the 'runners' entry because you had a cold on the day you called the publishers, you will never get any inquiries. If you are are a plumber but head office's marketing department insisted on listing you under 'Water and Sewerage Service Providers' then you stand no chance.

It happens. The more we rely on faceted searching and browsing, the more we need to validate the relationships between the terms we use to categorise, and the terms used to discover. Search algorithms help, but add complexity. But the bottom line is that the tags (metadata) applied to items needs to be of high quality and consistent and the interface needs to be supported by semantic rings and thesaurii that can help users explore related categories that might also hold what they seek.

I don't have a picture of anyone doing this properly, but some of the alternative search engines go a long way to provide best bets and category hints. And go look in the yellow pages under any category and you'll notice a 'See Also' list of related categories.

So on to the issue that I struggle with most, and the one that I'm hoping to explore other's opinions on. Facet selection.

We've tackled the interface, we've got bespoke display and selection methods for different facet types, we're carefully ranking facet results and we're providing visibility into hidden facets. Now it's up to the user to narrow away, selecting facets that match their criteria and surveying the results returned.

And now I get stuck. Let's consider the scenarios.

1 - One at a time.

For each facet a user selects, the entire search is executed again and the facets recalculated, updating the display.

Good? Well, it is perhaps the best way to inform the user of the effect their choice has made on the other available facets, and prevent them from persuing invalid combinations.
Bad? For a big dataset a user can wait a long time for those new results so is it really better than just clicking through pages of results, and losing a facet that you had before can be confusing if that was the one you really want to include.

2 - One from each group.

Ok, so you might have a list of colours and a list of locations. Do you let users choose more than one colour? From a search engine perspective - no. Choosing a facet is narrowing into a bucket of results not two buckets, facets ought to be binary switches and you undo one to add another or the counts get all screwy. But what about the user? What if they don't mind yellow or blue, but they don't want green. And they might have a few locations that they can cover, but not all of them. Forcing them to dip in and out of facet results is not an effective way to deliver the range of results they are looking for and the facets quickly become an obstacle, not a tool.

3 - Lots of facets, one at a time.

This is a classic response to the issues above. You can select more than one facet, but the results are still repopulated after each. Sounds ideal, except that now the user has to choose the facets in the right order, or experiement with switching facets on and off, particularly if there is more than one type of facet. Consider this - I'm looking for information on arms production in the UK that covers the period since the 1950's or before 1930 (I don't want to know about the World War periods). A search for 'arms production UK' gives me facet selection options, and the interface puts the format choices at the top. So I choose - I switch on eBooks, journals, websites, as these are the easiest for me to look at quickly. The periods I can choose from are missing several options now, but I choose the ones that apply, and finally, the results I get list 54 items. OK, but by choosing my publication types first I missed several decades of results that I might have got value from, just because they were in the category 'books' that I chose not to select. If I had chosen the dates first, I would have seen that most of the results for the dates I wanted came from that category.

4 - Lots of facets, all at once.

So this is best, right? Well, not necessarily. Choosing all the categories that apply to my needs and then executing is really only suggesting keywords, and I still have to guess which result is in which category. We're not really 'browsing' by facets at all and the counts can't contribute to choices.

So where now?

There are 4 big issues that stand out for me:

- Category lists create a new market for real estate at the top of the list
- Ordering category lists needs to consider the type of facet being displayed and how it well be used
- Category labels need to match users expectations
- The method of selecting facets can have a significant effect on the results

Some of the issues discussed here can be solved with enough budget or improvements in technology. One thing seems certain though, faceted navigation is increasing and, as it permeates into the commercial and information retrieval environments online, there will be new challenges and priorities for information and product providers who rely on being found.

Social networks and the need for restraint

2008-09-26T01:50:00.000-07:00

I've been musing a lot recently on the implications of organisations and institutions embracing social networking as a comms tool. There has been a lot of murmering among libraries, publishers, and academics about all these 'Web 2.0' thingy's and how to leverage them.

A slide show from CILIP's ‘Oi! Get off our train’ – Web 2:0 our future, their space event earlier in the year reminded me why I'm cautious. Luke Burton (a student) gave a presentation spelling out his usage of social networks and other social web tools (like wikis and discussion boards) and how he demarcates them.

Essentially it boils down to:

- Keep out of private social spaces if uninvited.

Facebook, MySpace and other social media are private channels of communication in a sense, and should be respected as such.

- 'Web 2.0' is not a new medium, just a new bunch of techniques for using an old one.

Before deciding to adopt a new way of doing things online, like a wiki, we should think about why it is better than other methods and the potential costs of adoption.

Another key issue reinforced by the presentation was the limited scope of the tools he engaged with. This came up in a usability test recently too. While we as practitioners might get really excited about the latest tagging service or feed system, it doesn't mean that they are familiar to the users. Luke used only Facebook, MySpace, and little else. Another student I met recently in his early twenties had no understanding of Connatea or Del.icio.us bookmarking. Best to ask I suppose.

So where does this leave us? Should we incorporate social media methods and 'Web 2.0' at all for our clients? Or should we leave these spaces as private environments?

I think the answer is to think first. Continue to design the most appropriate solutions to meet the goals for the audience using the technology that suits each individual circumstance.

Commas, spaces and long lists - tagging comes of age

2008-07-31T01:58:00.000-07:00

Once we whispered in corners about the 'Semantic web'.

Next we built taxonomies and tried to package up the world into suitable drawers and boxes.

Then, as with all things, the users got tired of waiting and starting writing their own labels and tagging was born.

You know what, you can tell when a technology has really come of age because people start getting really picky about the details. Think fires and ovens. Motor carriages and cars. Spectrums and iPhones.

OK, I'm stretching it. But nonetheless, a recent thread on the Sigia-L mailing list gave me cause to cheer. Jared Spool, Scott Nelson, Ziya et al. are all busily bickering in the best way about how to delimit tags. Hurray!

Now I have my own views, and I suspect Jared hit it on the head when he said:

"The real question is "Should each form on the web be design to best
support the user's experience?" The answer would, of course, be Yes."

... but its a sign that the age of the true semantic web is coming close. If tagging is so pervasive now that we are ready to refine the details, then we can hope that soon tagging content will be ubiquitous enough to ensure frameworks can evolve to effectively share and interweave computer-generated content.

Read the list at http://www.info-arch.org/lists/sigia-l/

this wweks book

2008-07-12T12:59:00.000-07:00

this is our book for the week - enjoy!

Students, Researchers and Metrics Metrics Metrics

2008-07-10T10:24:00.000-07:00

Day 1 - JISC/CNI conference

So, OK, I'm an interloper, a maverick software representative in the heart of the e-Ed community, spying on them in their annual get together and annoying them over their coffee. But with good reason.

JISC and CNI represent some of the best efforts on both sides of the Atlantic at improving digital services for supporting learning. If you are aiming to get at students, researchers, graduates or the people that support them, then look no further. And today's sessions exposed the exact user-awareness that publishing companies need to mine if they are going to address the information seeking needs of future generations.

After an opening presentation beautifully delivered by Diana Oblinger (man, she has a beautiful voice - like a cup of warm tea) that roused the room into charging enthusiatically into the web 2.0 future, Ian Rowlins and Betsy Wilson illuminated us with their detailed research into information seeking behaviours among the 'Post Google Generation' and university users in the US.

More of that later, but what I discovered today is a desire among librarians and information managers for metrics. eLearning that broadens the experience of students and teaches sustainable information seeking behaviours is going to need infrastructure change, yes; but without good, individualised metrics and activity reports educators are going to get left behind.

Our next challenge could well be this: can we design systems that support future models of experiential learning and capture learning activities beyond formal teaching environments without bank-breaking technology investments and without infringing the privacy of students.

If we design and expect learning that takes place within user's private social network spaces and virtual environments (Facebook, Twitter, SecondLife, blah), and the goal is to bring these activities within the teaching framework, how do we assess them in a fair and non-intrusive manner.

Hmmm.

I'm off to the bar. More later.