Author Archives: aaronh

About aaronh

I am a researcher, designer, and usability specialist. I take on contract work for new media projects of all kinds. I can be reached at +1.812.650.4050, or at aaronh [at] gmail {dot} com.

Initial thoughts on selling Design

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I’m going to call this selling design, but it’s equally applicable to selling any kind of ux, user study, or people-based research. Even when talking to a colleague in marketing research they had exactly the same kinds of issues.

I’m working on gathering resources on selling this particular kind of knowledge and value. In a very real way this is the topic of my PhD research, but it’s done from a UX perspective. I’m writing this because I recently read an article at UX Matters that was all about this. Of course there is also the this book that I’ve just gotten my hands on called Designed for Use.

What are the ways that people sell Design?

Well of course the most traditional ways of calculating value is ROI, when doing revision of existing work this is measurable. E.g. We’ve improved feature x and we attribute y% increase in sales to this, making our €10k usability test have an ROI of z%. Many of us would love to be able to have such a calculation. Unfortunately when you are doing innovation, i.e. bringing something new to market, then there is no way to measure such things. This is true on any kind of formative rather than evaluative project.

I’ve written about how User-Centered Design (UCD) leaves out some people, and Michael alludes to this same fact in his article when he says to “bring your empathy.” As a researcher I put out the call for UCD people to begin the study of those who actually make the decisions whether to fund UCD activities or not, or to what extent the results of UCD are actually used by the relevant parties or not. I think this is vitally important.

The question though is this: What will you do today to sell your design work? What really works? What have been your experiences?

So how do you sell it? Answer in comments!

Some topics I’ll explore in future posts:

  • Opportunities for transformation
  • Including everyone’s “language”
  • Getting others involved early
more coming in the next weeks.

Resist!

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Resist, resist I say! Do not succumb to the temptation to save a few seconds worth of effort by making acronyms.
Resist, resist I say! Think about how silly that new business program or process name will sound in a few months or years.
Resist, resist I say! Avoid jargon as if it would slowly poison you and turn you into a quivering mass of buzzwords.
Resist, resist I say! Adding more process, programs, and controls when what you need is people who are willing to be human and humane to each other united in a common goal that is worthy of them and their time.

RESIST

Image courtesy of Amnesty International

I’ve just managed to read through some of the “management approach” pages on an intranet. There are lots of good ideas and intentions there, and people who have clearly put thought into this. Command & control systems are a relic of the past. Perfecting them is, as Marty Seigel often said to us in our Interaction Design I class, “like polishing plywood.”

In this age of the creative professional, of empowered employees, and certainly in a research or design environment we need fewer processes and management and more people passionately doing what they’re best at and working together.

This is the user experience of an employee and it’s important. This goes to corporate culture and it’s important.

RESIST!

 

 

As usual this post represents my own views and not of the organizations I’m affiliated with. This is not a condemnation of an organization but a call to action by individuals of all organizations to change the way they think about work and their actions in their own work and in their own organizations and groups.

Thoughts on conferences

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In the last several weeks I’ve attended a few conferences, and this year I will have attended a total of seven of them. There are some basic rules of conferences that seem to get broken all the time, to their detriment.

Badges

Back of Badges

These are the back of the badges, I'm now in the habit of hacking the back to make the whole thing better.


Don’t screw this one up.  The most important part of a name tag is the person’s name. In western cultures it’s the first name, and it should be BIG and readable from at least several feet away. Don’t get too creative with the font. Affiliations are great to have in there, or alternately country/state (depending on the crowd), but these shouldn’t be so big as the name.  The name of the event is the least important element of the badge. INTERACT this year managed to really mess this up, with the name of the conference and silly logos taking most of the badge, and of course turning it to portrait is an awful design decision.
Front of Badges

These are the front of some of the badges. Look at INTERACT on the left.

Some things that are “nice to have” but really should be standard in my opinion: Double sided badges (never have it be the wrong way round), a way to identify different roles (such as presenters, exhibitors, organizers), a URL/twitter handle/QR Code (of the person’s choosing).

Programs

Programs should give you a quick overview of the conference on the first page. This should be easy to read and not create more questions than it tries to answer. Give the smallest amount of information you possibly can on this summary to still have it be useful. Again don’t get too creative, INTERACT again made some mistakes here. Look at the picture. I had dozens of people ask me when things were, and where they were located.  One person literally had their program was looking at the daily overview page and had no idea how to read it, handed it to me and asked where a session was.

Electronic versions in the form of an iOS/Android app are a great idea, but obviously only make sense if the conference is of a decent size. I was at IBC (International Broadcasters Conference) and they had these beautiful large touch screen displays in portrait mode that people could come up to and touch and interact with for programs/maps/information. When people weren’t using them (most of the time) they continually had QR codes for both the iOS and Andriod apps (and I think blackberry…) just scan and get it. Built into the back of the displays and hidden in the cabinet was an open wifi router that allowed one to easily download the apps along with big prominent instructions on the screen on how to connect to it. Apps should have daily overviews, and for goodness sake, make them searchable.

Food

Food is pretty easy to mess up, and people remember and complain about it long after the conference is over. At INTERACT lunches were only provided to Student Volunteers, and everyone else had to scatter and find something. With only a few hundred people this wasn’t too bad, but I know some people didn’t like having to go out and walk a ways to get something. When I was at EGOS this summer they fed all 1500+ of us, and it was good food.  I’ve been extremely impressed by most of the conferences/events I’ve attended in Denmark this year.  The food is consistently good and available in sufficient quantities. Sure there was lots of fish, but there were other things too. To this American at least it felt fairly gourmet. Avoid boring sandwiches, yes I know the Dutch LOVE boring sandwiches, but not everyone does. That is a lesson learned from DESIRE’11 just last week.
When it comes time for that conference dinner/reception/gala then don’t skimp. Personally I don’t care if it’s free unlimited alcohol (I don’t drink) but I know that most people want at least a few drinks.  Pacing things out is important but don’t keep people waiting too long.

The collateral damage of a closed ecosystem

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There are lots of people willing to engage on the debate between iOS devices (iPod touch, iPhones, iPads) and Android devices (phones and tablets of all kinds).
For me it comes down to this: the closed technological ecosystem of iOS provides a better user experience for the majority of users. Apple’s tight integration of both hardware and software create something that is beautiful to look and is seen as highly desirable. For all iOS devices there is only one UI, once you get the hang of it (and for many people it doesn’t take more than a few minutes to do all the basics). More importantly though is the fact that there is only one official application (app) store. There are others out there, but in order to use them you have to jailbreak your phone, something most people wouldn’t do anyway.  By keeping this tight control Apple exerts control over what is available, approving not only apps, but updates to them, as well as asking developers to drop some parts of them. One reason (though there are others) they do this is that every purchase made, whether for the app itself or for in-app purchases brings revenue to them. Apple takes a cool 30% off the top of all revenues.

One reason this makes for a better UX is that users know that any app in the app store will work for their device. This is not the case with Android with several different flavors of the OS available, and of course a multitude of different hardware platforms and screen resolutions. This has advantages for those creating the apps as well, but I won’t get into that.

But what happens when a well known product, and brand such as Audible (owned by Amazon) has an app that even links to their mobile site to go and purchase more audio books?  They were asked to remove it as evidenced by the email I received:

This is what I received from Audible. They present a workaround, but I wonder how many people will do it?

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes thought Audible was flouting the rules, but as one commenter said the link has been there for months, indeed for as long as I’ve had the app (since early this year) there has been a link to the mobile store.

Ideally one could search and make purchases in-app, but I can see why Audible wouldn’t want to give away 30% of it’s revenue to Apple.  The most ironic thing though is that Audible subscribers pay a monthly fee in return for credits. So I’ve already paid audible for the credits, why not be able to spend those in-app.  I suppose though that would open up the flood gates of games where you buy credits outside on the web and then bring them back into the game.

In an ideal world one could have the great UX of a closed ecosystem and situations like this wouldn’t arise. Given that it has I wonder what I would do if I were in the strategy team at Apple. Would I allow it? Where does one draw the line?

From a UX or User-centered perspective I would say it makes a lot more sense to let people buy in-app, and any who don’t want to pay the Apple tax have to deal with it. This grates against my idea of fairness though. This is a great example of how design always offers alternatives that often are in conflict with each other. This example also shows how business decisions and strategy come into play in design.  Typically designers consider the people and the materials (technology), but increasingly we need to be mindful of the business considerations involved.

user-centered design ignores some people

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User-centered design (UCD), while not perfect, stands a chance to help improve the world fairly dramatically. How many times have you bought a product that looked great, but the moment you actually got it home and tried to use it you realized the people who designed it never ever had actually tried using it themselves? You end up throwing it out, giving it away, or returning it. We’ve all seen products that make you wonder why the company that made it even bothered. Enter user-centered design (UCD), a set of ideas, methods, and really an attitude about how to create things.

Crowd, from Flikr-Victoriapeckham

Crowd, from Flikr-Victoriapeckham

Yet those who practice UCD often become SO incredibly focused on the user that we can forget about all the other important people involved in a product, service, or experience: those that need to approve the decision to make that thing. We are so intent on making beautiful useful things that people love that it’s easy to forget that we have a whole slew of internal and possibly external stakeholders that we need to convince. Some of the top people who practice UCD have the skills to sell their designs, but many many others do not. We know how to study people, but we only really want to study and understand users. That engineering guy, that management type, that head of a business unit? No way, we study people but not those people.
When will we start to understand not only those who will use the thing we are designing but those who must help create it and those that must approve it, then we are becoming more inclusive and dare I say it–more effective because those things we design are more likely to actually make it into the hands of those that will experience them.

This post is inspired by lots of conversations I’ve had with people and in fact is part of the basis of my PhD research.