Deliverables: usability findings / heuristics

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

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

Deliverables: User states

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

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User testing: CABI repository redesign 2008

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

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Presentation: eBook, online libraries & usability

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)

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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

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

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

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.