Key Learnings from UI 9

October 18, 2004

So, I made it back from Boston on Friday. A few of my friends have asked me, "When are you going to post about your key learnings?" "Get it up on the blog."

I have tons of notes and key takeaways from the sessions and discussions I participated in, but based upon my motivation level from the conference and my blogs I am not sure if I will ever really post it all. Why?

The funny thing is I really don't know where to start. To paraphrase an email I sent to one of my co-workers, the UI 9 Conference had a major impact on me personally, professionally, and from a company organizational perspective. (Boy, having re-read that statement, it almost sounds like a born-again kind of statement, but it almost is true).

On a personal level, I got a clear sense of what I want to do with myself...a motivational cumbuya having been in a high energy conference. With that I have a plan of action, which is more than I can say for myself before I went to Boston.

Professionally, I learned a few techniques, such as the "5 Second Usability Test" and also got a sense that most of the usability, political, and design problems I am facing are not unique. That latter piece was very comforting considering some of the insane situations I am finding myself in the middle of these days.

Also, I came away with a reminder that the true value of Usability and User experience is not really appreciated by Senior Management. In the end usability needs to be portrayed in concepts they understand...meaning, increase revenue, shareholder value, market share, etc. So, the term "Usability Testing" is something that needs to be banned in conversations at that level because the folks don't care about it.

And then Organizationally...well, let's just say that it became clear to me that there is a need for a usability soul searching process. That's all I can say because I really don't know where it will go or where I can take it.

I will try to finish posting some of the session highlights (like I started to do while in Boston), but I am not making any promises.

How To Get The Most Out Of Conferences

September 29, 2004

I actually go to quite a few conferences, most of them are close by, but on occasion I do make it to some of the big ones around the country. Since I am heading East to Boston for UI 9 in about a week, this little tip sheet was particularly relevant.

Conferences are what you make of them. If you’re not sure why you’re going, or what you want to get out of the experience, you’re unlikely to get it. This essay gives one perspective on conferences, and how to make them more valuable and engaging experiences. I think in general professional conferences take a very conservative approach to training and education, and it demands that attendees take more responsibility for getting value from the experience than should be necessary.

The surprising thing in my experience about most conferences is that the most interesting, informative and educational moments are not spent in the sessions themselves: it’s in all of the other interactions with peers from other companies and organizations. The lectures, talks and panels might provide some useful approaches or ideas, but for the most part, the slides and papers from those sessions can be obtained later. This is not true for all of the unique, personal, and insightful conversations you might have with other people. A special thing about a conference is the opportunity for those interactions. Unless you work at a firm that specializes in the kind of job you have, much of your time back at work is spent with people who do not have the same background and kinds of interests that you do.

Quite a bit of this advice is just common sense, but I have friends that have lamented that they just don't get much out of going to conferences. I never really have delved into the why's of these statements with them, but I would venture to guess that they were more of the passive than active participant.

Read Scott's full article on UIWEB.

The myth of discoverability

Ran across this post on uiweb and it really spoke to me...the need to balance needs.

Discoverability is often defined as the ability for a user of a design to locate something that they need, in order to complete a certain task. It is common to hear programmers and designers utter the phrase *that wont be discoverable*, while pointing to a specific command or link they believe users will fail to find. The trap, and the myth, of discoverability is that in any design, not everything can be discoverable.

Read the full post.

Case Study: Three Column Layouts and Seducible Moments

September 21, 2004

Users on today’s Web are no longer just browsing, but are looking for a very specific thing (content, a job, a book) before they even hit your site. Anything that gets in the way of that task (an advertisement, a promotion, etc) not only annoys the user and reduces the probability that they will get what the wanted when they came to the site. At the same time suggesting an item of interest before the User has found the article or product they were looking for has a low probability of being converted into a desired user action.

Several people over the last few years have been promoting the concept of Seducible Moments within User Tasks. Among them, Andrew Chak has been at the forefront of this movement by putting forth the idea that sites not only need to be usable, by using elements in the design that will motivate users to make the right decision or perform a preferred task. Those elements are in many cases are strategically placed on a place to take advantage of a seducible moment within a User’s decision process.

Simply put, a seducible moment is a moment in time when a person is the most susceptible to a cross-sell. In the real world we have all experienced this type of situation on an almost daily basis:

• When ordering a meal at a fast-food restaurant – “Would you like to Super Size that?”
• Buying a car – “Do you want to get the upgraded suspension or the service contract as well?”
• Buying a movie – “Oh, I see that you like action adventure. You might this movie as well”

Each of these examples are instances where we as consumers right after we have gotten what we wanted—food, a consumer product, etc. at the check out counter are at our most vulnerable and influential state. In the retail world this phenomenon is referred to as suggestive selling and we see it everyday.

In any of the examples mentioned above an attempt to cross-sell something before or well after a person made a decision to buy a specific product would be futile. The reason this is true is because we as consumers have not gotten what we set out to get yet. We need to be satisfied we got what we wanted in the first place before being open to suggestion (Figure 1).

Now take this concept to the Web and one can see similar applications when it comes to related content, job applications or promotions. Every marketer or content author would love to promote a new feature or content item that might be of interest to his or her User. In some cases it may be a similar job opportunity to one that a Candidate just applied to or a piece of content that is related to Sarbanes-Oxley compliance issues.

The fundamental difference in meeting these desires is in the approach of seducing users with the cross-sell. It is this aspect of the user experience of a site that needs to be well thought-out and carried out in a very subtle manner. It is the difference between a hard sell and a soft sell at a car dealership. We all know what the end-result of a hard-sell is at an auto dealership, so the secret with Seducible Moments on the Web is the art of the soft-sell and timing in the User decision cycle.

In the case of Protiviti’s user experience, the concept of the cross-sell and seducible moments are completely embedded into the site DNA from the start. The site approaches seducible moments with a very subtle shift in layout and content that appeals to the use of content columns and areas of user focus that are context and page specific.

The use of a 3-Column layout (Example 1) approaches content as “zones of focus” where each column serves a specific purpose. Remembering that the goal of our user is to get the information they wanted, this center column (B) is the primary content section for any given page on the site. The other areas of the page are reserved for navigation (Column A) and tools. To gain maximum

leverage of a seducible moment, the user experience leverages a third column on the right (Column C) as a utility area that is page specific.

The 3-Column Model on Protiviti suggests related information to the user at the point of the User life-cycle when they have found what it is they were looking for on the website. By breaking up the page into these information zones, there is a greater opportunity leveraging this strategy to subtly suggest to users content and promotions that (in)directly relates to the content they are focused on (Column B). So, in a situation where a user was looking for an article about Sarbanes-Oxley compliance (for example) the best time to cross-sell a related article to them is on the page with the Sarbanes-Oxley material they set out to find when they came to the web site.

As long as the information presented in the Third Column is related to the main article in the center of the page there is an opportunity to cross-sell that item at the point where the user has gotten what they wanted. Thus, generating a new need for information via the cross-sell at that seducible moment in the user decision cycle and the whole process starts again. This is a very subtle play on suggestion that, if applied properly with appropriate related content, can lead to multiple paths of cross-selling information and cross-linking of content contained on a website.

The 3-Column Model is just one example of how you can leverage a brief moment in the User’s decision process to cross-sell related information to him or her. In a content heavy user experience, such as Protiviti, this column-based approach is very appropriate as it borrows from the news-based page layout schemes that are used into traditional print with page specific content suggestions.

However, the principles illustrated here can be easily be applied in a multitude of ways from a layout perspective without using a column based layout. The devil really is in the content development and related content strategy that an IA develops for any website.

The artwork and/or examples from commercial websites referenced in this case study are used under the terms of the fair use to illustrate key concepts described in the reference material. Any trademark depicted in the artwork is the property of the trademark owner, who retains the rights to said trademark. Displayed items may also be subject to copyright or other protection. Accordingly, the depiction here of any item does not constitute a license or permission to use such item. Downloading, copying, transmitting or any other use of the displayed item is prohibited.

Excerpt - Case Study: Three Column Layouts and Seducible Moments

September 16, 2004

Here's a little taste of our upcoming Case Study series.

Three Column Layouts and Seducible Moments

Several people over the last few years have been promoting the concept of Seducible Moments within User Tasks. Among them, Andrew Chak has been at the forefront of this movement by putting forth the idea that sites not only need to be usable, by using elements in the design that will motivate users to make the right decision or perform a preferred task. Those elements are in many cases are strategically placed on a place to take advantage of a seducible moment within a User’s decision process

Simply put, a seducible moment is a moment in time when a person is the most susceptible to a cross-sell. In the real world we have all experienced this type of situation on an almost daily basis:

• When ordering a meal at a fast-food restaurant – “Would you like to Super Size that?”
• Buying a car – “Do you want to get the upgraded suspension or the service contract as well?”
• Buying a movie – “Oh, I see that you like action adventure. You might this movie as well”

Each of these examples are instances where we as consumers right after we have gotten what we wanted—food, a consumer product, etc. at the check out counter are at our most vulnerable and influential state. In the retail world this phenomenon is referred to as suggested selling and we see it everyday.

In any of the examples mentioned above an attempt to cross-sell something before or well after a person made a decision to buy a specific product would be futile. The reason this is true is because we as consumers have not gotten what we set out to get yet. We need to be satisfied we got what we wanted in the first place before being open to suggestion.

Now take this concept to the Web and one can see similar applications when it comes to related content, job applications or promotions. Every marketer or content author would love to promote a new feature or content item that might be of interest to his or her User. In some cases it may be a similar job opportunity to one that a Candidate just applied to or a piece of content that is related to Sarbanes-Oxley compliance issues.

The fundamental difference in meeting these desires is in the approach of seducing users with the cross-sell. It is this aspect of the user experience of a site that needs to be well thought-out and carried out in a very subtle manner. It is the difference between a hard sell and a soft sell at a car dealership. We all know what the result of a hard sell is, so the secret with Seducible Moments on the Web is the art of the soft sell and timing in the User decision cycle.

The full version of this Case Study will be available on Monday 9/20

The Semantic Web - Realized

September 15, 2004

I have been looking very closely at MIT's Semantic Web browser lately. The concept of managing multiple information types and related media (whether on the web, images, text --from an email) in a structured manner that makes sense to me as a user is very appealing.

Upcoming Case Studies

September 14, 2004

There are a number of case studies that I have been working on. Hopefully we will be publishing the first of several in a series that looks at globalizing an existing user experience.

Some of the topic areas that are in the pipeline include:

• The channel metaphor and color by numbers approach to UXP
• The Evolution of Country Selection Interfaces
• One to Many Content Publishing (Theory)
• Developing User Experiences that Span Cultures
• Three Column Layouts and Seducible Moments

Keeping It Brief: Features v. Benefits Closing the Sale Series

September 01, 2004

While not directly related to User Experience, this is a really nice article on selling ideas to your customers. That is a lot of what User Experience Architects have to do in client settings. It can be a delicate balance between not telling all and "barfing on the client" with every little detail.

The Color Blue Question

August 20, 2004

A large part of what I do is sell ideas. Sure, I develop IA stuff, do usability, and design navigation systems, but it all comes down to my ability to sell an idea. I have sat through thousands of design review session with Senior Stakeholders where everything was going well until I got the dreaded "Color Blue Question"

Now, for the uninitiated there are questions that always come up in meetings such as "How does that work?," I don't agree with you, " or "I am confused by this therefore it must be difficult to use" All of these types of questions can be addressed with either further explanation, agreement to disagree but finding a path to move forward, or more importantly rebutted with actual usability data or research. Those types of questions are even under the most trying circumstances manageable--even at worst case as the facilitator of the review you can reach a compromise and maintain the heart of your design.

However, there are times (and they happen more often than you think) where people object and have a preference because they just do. Those types of instances are what I like to call a "Color Blue Question." These types of questions tend to come up most after we have already agreed to the overall user experience and design, but have not yet shown a creative design skin on top of the skeleton.

Sooner or later when we show visual comps, someone will say "I don't like the fact that a country selector is grey, I think it should be blue" or "I believe we need to have a additional graphic here..." usually these items are small, but they can at times compromise the overall user experience of the product. Unfortunately, in most of these cases "Color Blue Questions" are ones that you could probably argue against, but in the end you will never win. They are in fact stakeholder preferences that are very hard if not impossible to overcome.

So, when faced with a "Color Blue Question," I constantly am asking myself as to how much of an impact is it on the overall user experience and if it is worth the political capital to fight it. In those situations I only choose to fight if it truly compromises the heart of the design and will adversely impact the User. After all, that is who I am representing in the sessions in addition to my clients. Even if I know that I may loose the argument, if it is serious enough a single raising of the hand on a very critical item being challenged by the dreaded "Color Blue" may be necessary.

In the end this type of objection (as I said earlier), is a preference. After all it is very hard to refute a statement that falls into the genre of "I like the color blue because I like the color blue"

So say it once and say it with pride, "I like the color blue, because I like the color blue." Now, go think of a way to challenge that kind of statement while still gaining agreement on the larger issue and you will know what I am talking about first hand.

The Evolution of the PC GUI

July 09, 2004

This sort of proves that there is little if any innovation in the development of the next phase of PC GUIs...most of the stuff we are getting now on both Windows and the Mac OS X GUI was thought of back in the 1970's and 1980's at Xerox PARC and at Apple's Advanced Technology Group.

A Pictorial History of the "Apple Desktop Interface" 1979 - 2000

Why Personalization Hasn't Worked

December 04, 2003

"Personalization hasn't worked because most people don't have a compelling reason to personalize. It hasn't worked because the cost of doing it well usually significantly outweighs the benefits it delivers. It hasn't worked because managers have seen it as some Holy Grail of content management."

- Gerry McGovern

Knowledge Navigator

November 20, 2003

Thanks to a post by Alex Wright's blog, I ran across a copy of Apple's legendary Knowledge Navigator presentation (QuickTime), which was produced by Clement Mok.

Considering how old this movie is, the Knowledge Navigator really showed how a connected UI could play a central role in the user experience. They did a lot of really good work at Apple back then with their ATG.

Role of Information Architecture in Success Metrics

"Information Architecture can be applied to resolve breakdowns in site design and navigation structure. The role of good Information Architecture is to make the Website work not in the technical sense, but from a functional, organized, conceptual perspective. "

From Good Information Architecture Increases Online Sales

Building Usable Information Sites with Personas

November 18, 2003

"Personas are power tools that give a much-needed focus to interface design projects. "

From Information Today

We Are All Connected: The Path from Architecture to Information Architecture

November 14, 2003

Boxes and Arrows recently featured an article illustrating the connective tissue between Information architecture and tradional building architecture disciplines. They did a really interesting approach in showing how the process that tradiional architects approach visual design is similar to that of IA.

I am not going to start the argument that the two are one in the same... I have too many friends that are real architects, but the article is worth the read for those of us that are UXP and IA types.

Understanding Mental Maps

November 13, 2003

People coming to your website bring all their previous experiences with other web sites with them. This knowledge is what is commonly referred to as a mental map, where a user has some very well placed and preconceived notions of where to find things they are looking for on a page.

In most cases this mental map is what is their expectation of where to find things on any site. Examples of items that make up a mental map are where to find things like home, or using terms such as "Search," "Sign-In" in navigation instead of some funky term like Projects. The success and failure of a site can rest on how a user's mental map synchs to how you designed your site.

Gerry's latest article dives deeper into this notion of Mental Mapping and how it can imact a site's success.

Looking for a User Experience Job?

November 12, 2003

Looks like there is a new specialized firm focusing on placing experienced User Experience professionals. That is something that is sorely needed. Although a lot of us get into gigs through personal networks and professional associations, there are always folks that know more people.

ExperiencePeople was founded by a Challis Hodge and comes with some pretty glowing endorsements from Peter.

Anyone looking for a new UXP gig?

Pitfalls of Internationalizing Websites

I recently went through the process of moving a site from a static and U.S. centric audience to a global user experience, which required designing navigation systems and translating content for multiple languages.

The effort was a first for the company and myself. The project really awakened my understanding of the complexities involved in sucessessfully managing the internationalization of content and creation of a multdimensional IA.

We broke up our approach into several phases, with the bulk of the strategy and global stakeholder alignment done up front as we defined the user experience. As we started development, we started to comprehend how the effort of gathering assets (content, localized, graphics, and identification of local content) was multiplied with local versions in at least 2 languages per country.

This process also provided a rude awakening to the need to have content authors that can not only write in the local language for any given country on a global website, but can write well. Moreover, a having a distributed publishing model in place via a content management system would have also made things easier.

A recent article by Gerry McGovern (pop-up) really brought my experience home in his discussion about some of the big pitfalls (pop-up) with developing content on a global and localized bases for any website. His main argument is that a truly international site, whether a corporate/investor focused site or a ecommerce site, relies on well written content by folks that understand how to write content for the web. The complexities of being successful is only magnified by the number of languages a site is translated into. So, if you can't do local content at all, Gerry argues, you shouldn't do it at all.

The article is well worth the read. (pop-up)

10 Most Violated Home Page Guidelines

November 10, 2003

Although I have sort of a love hate relationship with Jakob Nielsen (some of his views on graphics on sites and navigation are just a little too extreme), he does have some very valid points when it comes to general page layout and home page design.

The man I love to hate (pop-up) recently published his top 10 list of most violated home page design standards. Jakob found the that many of the items listed had a very low percentage of being used on the web.

Here are some key examples:

• Emphasize what your site offers that's of value to users and how your services differ from those of key competitors . Compliance Rate: 27%
• Use a liquid layout that lets users adjust the homepage size. Compliance Rate: 28%
• Don't include an active link to the homepage on the homepage. Compliance Rate: 41%
• Include a tag line that explicitly summarizes what the site or company does. Compliance Rate: 36%

Some of these things are just plain obvious. For example, you would want to explain what your site is all about and the value to the user. However, what I find in my many design and content sessions is that despite the desire explain the value of the site to your users, the message gets muddled in marketing speak that means nothing to the extenal audience.

Another compliance item that drives me crazy is the embedding of a link to the home page while you are on the home page. We have examples of this phenomena on some of the sites we have online where I work. A lot of those are just legacy items or cases where the it was too much effort to conditionally write the link depending where the user was in the site.

If you are on the home page, whether the Global Home or a localized country home, you should not be able to revisit the page you are already on by clicking home. You are already home.

So, having a home link on the home page confuses users. Hell, it can confuse me at times and I design navigation systems for a living.

Read the full article >> (pop-up)

Good Design Comes from Bad Design

November 07, 2003

I was talking about this the other day in a design meeting with some key stakeholders and for the life of me couldn't remember the URL article that explained the theory. This is it, an article that was published on UIWEB. Well worth the read.

Usefull List Serve Summary

As a subsriber to CHI-WEB, I am more than often overwhelmed by the amount of information and the lack of filtering available on what should be a very invaluable list.

Thanks to UIWEB, there is now a filtered summary and best of CHI-WEB and SIGGIA-L.

It is well worth the visit and has actually replaced my daily reading of CHI-WEB.

IA Elevator Pitches

The IAFIA has some really good elevator pitches (pop-up) that can be used to explain and sell the value of IA in 2 sentences or less.

Web Design Practices

As a follow-up to yesterday's post on De Facto Web Standards, I ran across Web Design Practices (pop-up), a well-presented survey of the interface design practices of 79 prominent E-commerce sites. The site is run by Heidi Atkinson, the author of the study and article republished on Boxes and Arrows.

The site really brings the common standards and usage information to the surface. This is helpful in those discussions about what is really a "web standard" and refocus discussions on user needs.

IA Jargon Watch

Friday is typically List Serve catch up day. A day when I go through all the UXP list serves and sites I subscribe to and read up on the happenings in the user experience world. While going through the news, I ran accross a good IA jargon list from Jeff Veen of Adaptive Path that I found entertaining.

My personal favorites:

SUAC v. Acronym for "Shut Up and Color". How Marketing and Engineering departments often think (or wish) design should be done.

Boil the Ocean v. Try to solve too many problems with an overambitious project, typically resulting in a complete failure. Many Content Management projects end up this way when attempting to port an entire organization's content, process, and workflow into one new, massive tool. "Look, just help the HR teams get their forms online. We don't need to boil the ocean with this."

Deep Diving v. Giving users the ability to bookmark a page deep within the site. "We've enabled deep diving in the employee directory by changing the URL structure."

"Boil the Ocean" tends to really ring true in my experience. We go through far too many of those type of projects only to narrow scope well after it is obvious we Boiled the Ocean dry.

Read the full list >> (pop-up)

Home Page Optimzation for New Users

November 06, 2003

Nick Usborne recently published a great article on addressing the needs of new users on a home page. At the heart of his discussion, Nick argues that most sites focus on addressing the needs of returning users and give short shrift to addressing the needs of new users. This lack of focus on new users needs often fails to give this critical audience directed instructions on what do do (e.g, how to register, use the site) and information about what the site does. Nick offers a series of techniques and examples that point to how to cater to new user needs.

Read the article >> (pop-up)

De Facto Web Standards

Anyone that uses the web on a semi-regular basis will begin to notice things that seem to be "standards" online. Things like orientation of navigation (left vs. top), location of search or log in, the use of the site logo for the home buttom are some examples of such de facto standards.

The problem with user experience especially when working with clients or peers is that everyone has a perception of what is a standard. Without any imperical data folks will argue until they are blue in the face that it is a de facto standard for main navigation to be rendered in graphics or that log in should not be located on the far left. A recent article by Heidi Adkinsson with Blink Interactive Architects on Boxes and Arrows sheds some light on the subject.

In Heidi's article we get a glimpse of some initial data on what is a standard on the web and to what degree that a perceived defacto standard is real. In the study conducted at the University of Washington items ranging from the use of the logo as a home button, top or horizontal navigation, and (my personal favorite) text vs. graphics for main navigation links were examined.

Some of the results were quite telling...

Characteristic & Frequency (of sites)

Logo (upper left corner) linking back to the home page 100%

Horizontal placement of top level category links 87%

Text for top navigation rendered as graphic 76%

Breadcrumb navigation used on site 45%

Despite the numberts presented, Heidi also noted that 70% of the ecommerce sites surveyed did not use many of the design principles that were examined (excerpt above). This leads to the question of where should we derived web standards from. In many cases UXP folks, including myself, look to Human Interface Guidelines from Apple and Microsoft. The theory behind this is that people take their apriore knowledge from applications and operating systems and apply them to web. While this can be helpful, the web also has subtle differences that do not easily lend itself to the use of UI theories from a dektop interface metaphor.

Read the full article >> (pop-up)

Cognitive Psychology & IA : From Theory to Practice

August 22, 2003

Ever wonder where a best practice for designing navigation or structuring content for the web comes from? Many things like breadcrumb navigation, colors, etc., that we in the user experience field take for granted have their origins in cognitive psychology.

The challenge in developing usable and compelling user experiences is in understanding how each target user thinks about your product online. Ultimately this translates into a system that hopefully is intuitive enough to address that individual user needs. When you add in the different needs of these same users from an international perspective where language and cultural differences can get in the way, there is a need to customize the experience along multiple dimensions.

This recent article on Boxes and Arrows delves into the depths of how people think and the translation of this understanding into common best practices for global and country specific user experience design.

Users Decide First; Move Second

May 16, 2003

The use of DHTML navigation to bring content that is located deep within the site to the top in a site's Global Navigation is becoming increasingly more common (Example 1). Sites such as Crate & Barrel, MSNBC, and Cisco have employed this design element to conserve valuable space and bring all the options to the top with the aim of improving the user's experience.

Unfortunately, a recent study by Jared Spool's User Interface Engineering (UIE) has found that the rate of user success in finding content they were looking for was dramatically decreased on sites that use DHTML and Drop Down navigation than those that did not.

This in no uncertain terms means that standard layouts with a good content hierarchy did a better job of getting users to content they were looking for and to valuable information they had no idea existed. At a very high level UIE observed that:

• Users decide what they are going to click before they even move the mouse.
  
  
  
• DHTML navigation can't help users decide where to click because the information isn't available to users when they are making their decision
  
  
  
• It isn't until a user has decided where to click that they see what the element has to say.
  
  
  
• In situations where DHTML navigation is employed, users became disoriented once they realized there was more information available to them in the drop down. The user stopped, re-evaluated the whole page, and also lost confidence that they were clicking in the right places.
  

UIE's study has particular relevance here as I am working on projects that begin to deal with complex content organization schemes. We are increasingly faced with trying to present content that is increasingly organized in a very hierarchical manner that are several clicks of the home page. One answer to dealing with this challenge has been an exploration of DHTML drop down menus. Yet another way to address these needs is to understand how our clients expect to find content/functionality and address those needs by providing multiple paths to what they want based upon who they are.

Testing the Three-Click Rule for Navigation

One of the most often heard complaints from users on websites, is that it takes too long to find things. They tell us that if they didn't have to click so much to find things that they could find things easier and reduce their overall frustration. Companies have been very mindful of these complaints, given the fact that if users get frustrated and can't find what they are looking for, the competition is sure to be only one click away.

This common complaint has impacted navigation design from the beginning of the web in the form of what is commonly referred to as the "Three-Click Rule." Essentially this rule translates into a mantra that every piece of content should be no more than three clicks away from the site's home page. However, recent research by Jared Spool's User Interface Engineering sheds some doubt on whether the Three-Click Rule is really effective in addressing this particular area of user frustration.

In their research, they tested whether users will really leave a site after 3 clicks. What they found after analyzing +8000 clicks was users did not leave a site after more than 3 clicks nor did their level of frustration dramatically increase if they did not navigate to content after the magic number 3. In many cases the study found that people successfully completed their tasks after 25 clicks or more with little decrease in overall satisfaction with their experience with the web site.

So what does all this research tell us about user frustration? Users often complain about how long it takes to find things and complaining about the number of clicks is one way to vocalize their frustration. When users find what they want (whether it was 3 clicks or 25 clicks) they do not complain about the number of clicks. In the end it is not necessarily important how many clicks a user has to go through to complete a task, but whether or not they were successful in finding what they were looking for in the first place. Unfortunately, strictly adhering to the Three Click Rule will not be the panacea to address user frustrations with navigation.

Business Metrics Justify User Experience

April 02, 2003

Macromedia (pop-up) recently redesigned their web site using internal staff. What's interesting about this change in the site is not so much the flash heavy design (which I am not a fan of), but the fact that they took user feedback into account and then published the results of the changes with business metrics.

Some of the key areas they list for business metrics include:

• store conversion
• membership registrations
• Exchange downloads

As Mark from Good Experience says....

...user experience work is worthless without the business metrics. Why improve a task if it doesn't also improve the company, or organization, or some larger context? Usability for its own sake, without some larger good, is nonsense. It's like going on a road trip - with the car up on blocks. Or hiring the best chef - to cook up some gravel for dinner. It's going through the motions without some useful result.

This is just another example of grounding user experience development processes with measurable metrics for change before we even begin the process.

Challenging Usability Myths

Back in August Janice Fraser of Adaptive Path voiced support of Jacob Nielsen's claim that you really only need 5 participants to get useful usability results

"Instead of bringing in a large number of test subjects, keep the scope small. I often disagree with usability guru Jakob Nielsen, but he's dead-on when he says that you only need to test with five people to obtain good results. Any more than that yields diminishing returns, so it's usually a waste of time and money."

The problem with this approach, as was just posted on Jared Spool's list serve, is that the "5 person rule" was devloped to test small software applications and not large, complex, multi-user group web applications that are the norm today on the web. In fact, the author claims that Nielsen's paper from 1997 did not specifically specify that 5 users was enough for all user testing.

What's intersting about this contrast in reality is that many decisions about user testing from small to large web applications have been based upon the assumption that 5 users is always enough to get a good sample. Unfortunately this is not really true, and we are not necessarily getting an accurate picture of the usability of a large web application.

Expanded Elements of UXP

March 14, 2003

George Olson has come up with an interesting expansion of Jesse James Garrett's Elements of User Experience chart.

George argues that Jesse did not factor in the idea of the web being an interactive medium that focuses on sensoral richness and immersions. Thus, there are really 3 dimensions to the user experience

Take a look at his play on Jesse's diagram (PDF

Moving to Modern Layout Standards

UIE, in preperation for their upcoming User Interface West Conference in San Francisco, interviewed Eric Meyer (of Cascading Style Sheets fame). He raises some great reasons why site designers and closet code junkies (like me) should be moving to a transitional XHTML and CSS based layout scheme and ditching those embedded tables.

Using some example sites that have recently undergone major redesigns as an example (Fox Searchlite, Wired) he makes a strong case for moving in the dirtection of style sheet based layouts. The end result of style based layouts is evident by the speed in which the page loads and the ease of altering the layouts in templates by editing a single file for the entire site!

Can you honestly say you have people coming to your site with <4.X browsers? If the answer is no, then there really is no reason to wait. I made the move to stylesheet based layout for this site last year.

How a Site Looks Matters

March 13, 2003

While user experience designers (myself included) are constantly working to design sites that are designed from the ground up with usabilty in mind, the visual design aspect still matters. In fact, a recent study concluded that how a site looks visually lends greater weight to it's credibility with users than it's overall usability.

The percentage break down worked out to something like this:

• 46.1 percent of those surveyed mentioned the site’s appearance in assessing it
• information design/structure, was mentioned only 28.5 percent of the time

Definitions of "User Experience"

February 18, 2003

In a recent interview, Jesse James Garrett of AdaptivePath talks about his recent book on user experience. The interview is a really great read.

His definition of the practice of UXP is really telling, particularly in grounding user goals and ROI:

"'User experience' simply refers to the way a product behaves and is used in the real world. A positive user experience is one in which the goals of both the user and the organization that created the product are met. "Usability" is one attribute of a successful user experience, but usability alone does not make an experience positive for the user. Historically, product design and development has considered the mere existence of a particular feature as evidence that a user goal is fulfilled by the product -- with no attention paid to the experience the user has with the product while using the feature. "

The full interview is here

Centralizing the IA

January 23, 2003

Awhile back I attended User Interface East in Boston. There were many speakers there including Gerry McGovern, who has written extensively on content development and information architecture on the web.

One of the key things he has said is that because "information architecture is about organizing and presenting content, metadata and classification, navigation and search, layout and graphic design, it thrives on standards."

Case in point in a rough sample of folks at the conference, when shown a grid of a webpage and people are asked to place an X where the "Home" link would be, over a 100 people said it was in the upper left corner.

Another wonderful example that rings more bells in my interaction with non-web savvy content authors, is the naming of sections. Far too often folks want to come up with clever, cute names for things that don't mean anything to people. Could you imagine Grab Bag as a place you would go for Career Resources???

The truth is the web is about standards. The standards do not just include what the competition does, but what the entire web universe does. That concept extends to what sections are called and were folks look for media releases etc. Chances are companies that take user experience seriously have spent many hours and dollars researching what makes sense for users. Case in point amazon.com, travelocity, the list goes on. Those firms live and die by the ability of their users to intuitively understand the organization system and then be converted to paying customers.

The dot.com phase is over. I survived the dot bomb era. The web is now all about attract --> convert --> retain with users and that extends out to seemingly trivial things such as navigational nomenclature. Without that formula embedded in the user experience, the experience is not going to deliver on ROI.

Customer Experience -Travelocity's Take

January 21, 2003

Good Experience has a great interview with Travelocity's director of Customer Experience, Elizabeth Peaslee. Some of the issues discussed in her development of an experience team really ring true in my experience @ RHI, including the scenarios of doing sporadic user testing while gaining some very powerful insights on customer needs.

It's well worth the read.

Usability - Rapid Recruiting

January 20, 2003

One of the problems facing experience design in many large companies is the lack of usability testing early in the concept and design phase. All too often testing is put off or cancelled outright due to the complexity and cost. In many cases I have experienced this because it seems to upper management to be easier to push something live and then fix it later. The costs to this approach are very high on many plains — from a customer conversion to a development cost perspective.

The latest alertbox by Jakob Nielson, describes methodologies for doing usability testing rapidly, with few users, and minimal costs. Given this doctrine and the proven value of testing on ROI there really is no reason to not test before you build.

Some of the key rules to rapid testing include:

1. Get representative users
2. Ask them to perform representative tasks with the design
3. Shut up and let the users do the talking

The mantra of "know thy user" is all so important when designing the customer experience (especially in today's tight economy).

HTML as an Interative Wireframe tool

January 08, 2003

Most user experience designers do some form of prototyping in the form of wireframes to explore and demonstrate solutions to usability issues without having a polished design. The benefits to this process is the ability to rapidly test and modify experiences using paper or flat files without having to build working prototypes early on.

There is an interesting argument being made at Boxes and Arrows that presents an alternative view to using HTML as the tool of choice for wireframing. They claim the only reason they have heard why HTML is not an option for experience designers is that they are happy with the tools they are using. One thing to consider (which is what I have found) is that making wireframes using traditional paper prototyping tools prevents stakeholders from getting married to a particular layout due to the crude nature of the wireframe.

Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability

January 05, 2003

One of the things I constantly battle in designing user experiences for the web is the desire by stakeholders to throw everything but the kitchen sink into a home page. This is the desire by stakeholders to give great amount of weight and importance to promotions that generally do not support the primary tasks they want users to perform on a site.

It is a delicate balance, but what we have found in usability studies is that users know what they are looking for when they get to a site. If they don't see it in the form of a link or context those users will not search for something that is buried.

On that very same vein, Jacob Nielsen just published his annual Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability. Although I am not a 100% Nielsen fan (he is a little to radical when it comes to the lack of graphics in design), he does make some good points that are worth considering -- "A company's homepage is its face to the world and the starting point for most user visits. Improving your homepage multiplies the entire website's business value, so following key guidelines for homepage usability is well worth the investment."

Deep Linking is Good Linking

January 03, 2003

Jacob Nielsen's useit.com recently posted a great article on the benefits of deep linking to content on a site in an effort to guide a user based upon their goals....

"Links that go directly to a site's interior pages enhance usability because, unlike generic links, they specifically relate to users' goals. Websites should
encourage deep linking and follow three guidelines to support its
users."

Location of the Scrollbar

December 31, 2002

This is an interesting read [pop-up] from my friends at Human Factors International on the location of the scrollbar in computer interfaces. They looked at how users interact with a website to determine whether the scrollbars were located close enough to where they typically work.

Can experience be designed at all?

December 12, 2002

v-2's interview with Nathan of the late great vivid studios has some great arguments on why information architeture and visual design is not the end all to developing the user experience. As I have heard Nathan describe in the past, a user experience is made up of many elements that are all too often lost in the shuffle of visual design and information architecture.

In many respects, he argues that Experience Design as he has described in his book is an umbrella term that covers information architecture, interaction design, sensoral design (visual/graphic design along with audio, voice, intent, and personal experience) combined with other contexts like socialogical and pshycological to help shape an user experience solution.

AOL's approach to user experience

December 11, 2002

I ran accross an interesting interview with the director of AOL's user experience group. With over 30 million users, AOL needs to worry about the overall customer experience. They firmly believe in anticpating user needs before a AOL customer asks for a piece of content, thus making items available to users.

Balancing the needs of your user

Back in October I was in Boston @ Jared Spool's User Interface East conference. One of the topics we discussed is the balance of user needs against the needs/desires of the site owner.

Invariably what ends up happening is the user is only interested in finding the content they are looking for and will not be suceptible to suggestive selling. There is however the opportunity to pertform a cross-sell to a user at the very moment they have found what it is they are looking for on the site.

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Decision making about design is critical

February 24, 2002

I ran accross this great article about selling designs to clients. It sort of reminds us all that clients can be unpredicatible.

Bone up on your usability techniques

August 07, 2001

As usability versus design arguments go I have long been right in the middle of the debate. Despite all the arguments from the web usability purists that websites without graphics have a higher degree of usability, I have yet to be fully convinced. There are so many things that cannot be conveyed very well soley by the written word. Effective design and graphics in a delicate balance with web usability techniques can create very effective sites.

Those of you that may be interested in learning more about this delicate balance should take a stroll to usable web. As a longtime reader of this site, I can vouch for the diverse opinions and high quality articles listed there. It is well worth the read.

Buy this book

June 06, 2001

If you haven't picked up Jeffrey Veen's (of Hotwired and Webmonkey fame) latest book, fire up another browser window and get it online. Veen has finally documented the business processes and development practices that he has been discussing on the web lecture and classroom circuit the last few years.

The myth of 800x600

March 16, 2001

There was a time a long time ago (in web time) when everyone built sites for 15 inch monitors and 640x480. As time has passed everyone has gotten bigger monitors and site designs have moved into the 800x600 pixel space. I have long been believer of keeping site layouts fixed to a specific pixel dimension. There have been many heated battles with my design and functional teams on this very subject.

However, the reality is that there is no real way to control a layout in a browser due to different monitor sizes and resolutions as well as all the pixel space the extra toolbars take up in any given browser. There is a great article at web review's site which discusses this issue in detail.

A little while back I caught a lecture by Jeff Veen on the concept of the "future web" and building liquid-based sites with CSS and percentages. It has taken awhile to sink in, but I have become a convert to the liquid-pages religion. Most of the sites we are building these days at siteSatellite comform to this standard with a healthy dose of CSS.

Yep, I Still Use Frames

March 12, 2001

O.K. I'll admit it. I am a closet frames fan. In the last few years frames have fallen out of favor because of the way search engines spider sites and because so many people did some very bad frame based web sites. There is a time for a straight-lace layout site like this one and there are times where frames allow a web designer the freedom to immerse users in an "experience."

When I caught a lecture from Derek Powazek in early 1996-7 I saw the pure power of what frames could do. Derek's innovative layouts just blew my mind. Nowhere else had I seen anyone successfully align a large image on a page with the center frame for content. When I saw those types of layouts I knew that frames served a purpose and could be built so they don't suck. So, yes I am a closet frames fan, and you should learn to love them too.

Dealing with "Click Here"

March 05, 2001

As an old salt on the web I long ago learned that you don't use "click here" as a descriptor for a hyperlink. As a general rule people (even beginning AOL users) soon learn that an underlined piece of copy is a link.

Having worked with a wide range of clients , I have found myself counting to ten and grasping for examples of why "click here" sucks on a web site. Just recently I was working on a project where I found that the content group used "click here" for a hyperlink. I counted to 10 and remembered this great article by Drue about creating action words for hyperlinks.

These words of wisdom have often saved our client's sites from the dreaded "Click Here" to go here or "Click Here" to go there syndrom.

Tab based interfaces...they just suck

January 30, 2001

What's up with the popularity of tab based interfaces on web sites and the use of DHTML navigation just because its cool? PeopleSoft's site is a great example of pushing a physical metaphor to the limit of reality on the web. The problem with this approach is that as a user I don't have an idea what the most important piece of navigation is on the site.

Adding to the issue is the fact that there are more than 10 navigational elements on the header. As any interface designer with a human factors background will tell you, the absolute limit in navigation is 8 plus or minus 2 nav items. This means that the human mind can process eight distinct pieces of information without having to actively think about where they go. In navigation this translates to intuitiveness and ease of use. Unfortunately sites like PeopleSoft just don't cut it beacuse their metaphor forces users to think and thus is counter-intuitive.