Designing for Experience

Most people know what they like.  When they see a car, website, face, or bookcover they can usually make a judgment in a matter of seconds whether they like it.  I know what I like, and I can usually tell you the reasons why I like it e.g. I like the symmetry, juztaposition of textures, openness etc.  I don’t always know what everyone else will like though.  When I’m getting dressed for the day, it’s really more about what I like to wear, what I think looks good (with some caveats obviously if you’ve ever seen What Not to Wear, you know some people think certain things look good which are ridiculous), but when you are designing a website for a business that is not just about a single person, then the website will not be nearly so personalized.

This has come up working with a partner who was playing around with a CMS that had a number of really great looking template designs.  She chose one that I personally loved and so did she, in this case it was one of those things that reflected out personal sense of taste, but was not appropriate for a business.  Through informal feedback avenues it was obvious that we had made the wrong choice, and it was nice that before we had really started into developing the look and feel of the site any further we were able to make that major course correction early.

So what’s the take home? Critique early  & often. Involve potential clients and cusomters early in the process both informally and formally through simple conversations, getting feedback, focus groups etc, and usability testing.

The disclaimers to the short post are many: I love what IDEO does, I think they do great things.  I have VERY MUCH enjoyed the clarity of Tim Brown’s recent article in the Harvard Business review, an excert of that is:

“Design thinking is an approach that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods for problem solving to meet people’s needs in a technologically feasible and commercially viable way. In other words, design thinking is human-centered innovation.” —Tim Brown

WOW is all I can say to that. I have Bill Moggridge’s book, Designing Interactions, and it is reccomendable. Yes IDEO and the people who work there are awesome.

All that aside, I must protest to their new homepage.

IDEO just launched a new website. Here is a portion of the homepage here:

As you mouse over the text boxes it highlights certain of the other pages by taking away the pink.  If one should click on a text box it keeps those pages highlighted as well as bring up some other links you can click in those sections.  You may then click on any one of those highlighted pages or those links. You CANNOT click on those boxes themselves to go to that section.

I don’t understand why one would want to click on one of those teeny tiny pages.  With the exception of the one with the bikes it is totally unclear what those things are.

The whole look and feel of the site is radically different once inside the site creating more of a mismatch.  The whole thing is a confusing and not very usable, I sincerely hope that IDEO is using human-centered methods to test the website.  If it turns out that people love it, then more power to them, but I just can’t imagine that this is the case.
EDIT/UPDATE on 8-12-08:
I had someone comment that they loved the website (See trackback below) so I went back to the website with a fresh pair of eyes, and most notably a larger monitor.  The big plus is NOW I can see the navigation elements on the bottom, which helps make the site somewhat more friendly.  Even on the larger monitor (22″ widescreen) the lower navigation elements disappear on many pages throughout, giving rise the the disjointedness between homepage and the rest of the site.
I understand going for fresh, new, unique, but only time will tell if this will actually be appreciated. Leave feedback below.

For those of you who don’t know, a formal usability test involves a person sitting down at a computer and doing predefined tasks on a website and the screen as well as the person being recorded.  We look at how fast it takes to do a task, where they did well, and where the website failed to help the person.  It is a huge eye opener for many. For an overview I recommend Steve Krug’s fine book Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability.

So I’ve been doing a major usability project for a client and happily using screenflow for recording my sessions on my MacBook Air.  I really prefer taking the testing to the person’s own environment or at least a neutral environment where they will feel less like a ginea pig and more like just a person using a website, albeit in a structured way.  Let me say that unless you are going to use Morae (which is highly recommendable especially for large scale testing where you want statistically relevant time to completion and failure rates on tasks, although windows only and fairly expensive) I would go with screenflow instead of camtasia. There is at least a couple reasons for this.  One is that recording is super simple, and even on me less-than-super-powered air it never hiccups, slows, or has any problems with recording the WHOLE screen as well as the webcam.  The real beauty of Screenflow though is when it comes time to watch or edit videos.  You can move around the two media sources (the screen and the camera), you can easily zoom in on part of the sceen if you want, make clicks visible and audible, blur parts of the window, change opacity and I’m sure more.  Some of this is possible in Camtasia, but it is really straight forward in screenflow.  The other thing I really like is using it on a mac laptop with built in isight.  It is VERY unobstrusive.  The participant is less likely to be self-conscious, even at the start when most people are without a visible camera pointing at them.  I understand you can even hook up another camera, though I have not attempted to do such.

OK now for the big tip, something I’ve learned which has helped, and would apply to any screen recording: Use a monitor that is larger with higher resolution when reviewing footage and editing video.  This makes it much easier to see al the fine textual details on the screen as well facial expressions that can be very small otherwise.  I do this quickly and easily by plugging in an external monitor, but you could conceivably put them on a share on the computer and open it through the network or copy it, though these are large files and that would be cumbersome and tiring.

I like to take notes as I watch, and taking notes on an open document one the smaller sceen is a nifty way to keep it all there, plus I type much faster than I can write by hand.

That is all for now, carry on.

It’s true, today is the Usability Challenge 2008.  I have chosen this page:

Higher Education Resources

This is part of an ongoing project I am working on with the Lumina Foundation for education.  This page is a new way of visualizing and finding a large amount of information.

Lumina has amassed a large amount of publications over the last several years that all are related to their mission which is helping people achieve their potential though education.  People who work in this area directly with youth and adults who want to go back to college are called college access professionals, and my hat is off to these hard working people.  Of course there are plenty of researchers who also work in this are, usually in education departments.  I have met many in both groups.  What all these people including Lumina’s staff members rely on is high quality resources like the ones that have been gathered, but how does one search through these?

Instead of search all of the resources have been tagged (with multiple tags for each item, usually including the year of publication).  These tags have been presented in a tag cloud, where larger text means more things with that tag.  The really new thing is that if you click on one item, it shows you how many things are in that tag, and you may keep on clicking on tags to narrow your results.  The total number is shown at the top on view results tab.  When you are ready you can click on that tab and see all the items.  It is a very cool way of browsing, and the reaction of people once they understand how to use it is very positive.  The problem here is that it is a new convention, with very few affordances.  There is a “view demo” but most users don’t see it, and many users often have the volume down on their computer even when the video comes up.

The solution I am proposing for this particular page is a short lightbox popup that shows the user to click on a tag, then a second and then click view results, showing it graphically, textually and then quickly fading to a point on the screen with a question mark on it.  Clicking on the question mark will replay it slower and have the option for sound as well as givign a link for an even lengthier explanation (which would be around the length of the current demo).

It will be important to use cookies so that once a user has successfully clicked on the view results tab the lightboxed pop-up will no longer show, and that the whole strategy be evaluated regularly to see if it can be improved and when people understand it well enough we can eliminate the lightbox, but keep a pulsing question mark or something like that.

I am also emailing the results of this to Lumina so that it can be implemented. Usability Challenge 2008 is in the can.

When I was at WorkshopONE and talking to a fellow participant about the evolution of media and how old media are often driving new media.  This is what I’m talking about: in our house we don’t watch TV but we watch House, Lost, and Smallville online.  While these are old media, we watch them via new media.  In addition each show has it’s own website and of course Lost has a great wikipedia site, and many other fan sites and facebook pages, Smallville has countless sites, and I assume House has a bunch as well, but haven’t sought them out personally.  All these websites and Facebook pages, and blogs are driven by the old media artifact.  Much of the action that happens online is about old media stuff.  Those that own old media have diligently tried (and often failed, but often they are getting better) to increase viewer’s engagement with their shows and brand online, but usually the most engaging things are what the fans themselves are creating.

Then came Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, a three act miniseries, a creation of Joss Whedon and his brother.  It debuted online first, with a really transparent marketing plan and integrated social media efforts that seemed very genuine (or Authentic as Gilmore & Pine would say).  Why is this important? This is new media driving new media, and the real proof of concept and tipping point for what will become an explosion of already established and aspiring content creators going online first or online only.

I’m not saying that Dr. Horrible is the first, but I believe that it has been the most successful to date to start online and make some real money.  How much exactly remains to be seen, but being in the top purchases since it became available on iTunes means some major cash, and DVD sales haven’t even started yet. A cursory search online reveals that there are many people creating a ton of content online like getting lyrics online.  The lyrics phenomenon on that link deserve their own post, if you look a fan simply  posted them as best he or she could, and then as people got on and saw errors they commented, and he responded by taking all the edits.  Great group collaboration, and probably at a faster rate than you would imagine.

I have been interested that  BitTorrent downloads are super fast of Dr. Horrible, both of the videos and the songs.  I think this is because fans love it so much they want to share it.  While this may be at odds with a content creators need to at least pay for costs and ultimately make money, I believe though that if people like it they will pay for it in some form (I fully intend on buying the DVD).

So what will happen from here? We will see more things starting online and and moving to old media, and even better, we will see more high quality online only productions.

I must disclose that I’m now what may be called a fanboy of Dr. Horrible, and that there is a dearth of hard numbers (though you can see some guesses on revenues here and here) on viewership and purchases so at least some of this is speculative and educated guesses. That aside I couldn’t resist writing about this today, haven’t seen it yet? Download it today!

PS The above link is NOT an endorsement of using iTunes store, which I personally detest and have NEVER personally purchased from, though I have benefited from using my wife’s account.  I believe that the manner in which they lock down content is unfriendly at best, and the quality of sounds files is, well… it leaves something to be desired.