Experience Planner

Several alternate search engines have cropped up over the last couple of years, but every time I’ve been certain that they didn’t really pose a threat to Google. These alternatives might offer an interesting interface, but poor quality of results — like Cuil. Or they work so differently that they’re not really Google competitors — like Wolfram|Alpha.

When Microsoft first launched Bing, I was just about to dismiss it as another “also ran” search engine. But then the reviews came it saying that Bing is pretty good. Actually, really good. And some mainstream tech pundits (TechCrunch) wondered if Bing could be a real Google challenger.

So I’ve been trying it out over the last couple of days, and my verdict is that it’s fine. It’s a perfectly good search engine, and if there was no other competition, most people would be very happy with it. The only real problem is battling Google’s mindshare. It turns out that some research data backs this up.

The Catalyst Group tested Google and Bing with 12 users, including focus group and eye tracking studies. They found that people preferred Bing over Google in a lot of ways, but ultimately they preferred Google because it’s familiar. This is how The Catalyst Group and TechCrunch sum it up:

Catalyst CEO Nick Gould concludes that Microsoft “created something as good as Google and that is not good enough.” Overall, the test subjects “were not swayed.” No wonder Microsoft is spending up to $100 million on Bing marketing.

Be sure to check out the chart on TechCrunch to get a good idea of how people rated both search engines.

That’s why this video from CollegeHumor is so funny. In a way, this is how Bing really should advertise.

Have you tried Bing? And if so, would you switch?

Here’s some of what I’ve been reading and thinking about this week.

Fever, a Self-Hosted Feed Reader (TechCrunch)

Here’s another example of “Genius Design” in action. Shaun Inman designed a new type of RSS reader, which actually sounds really intriguing to me and would probably match well with my own style of managing RSS feeds. Previously, Shawn created other successful web products by designing with himself as the only intended audience. In fact, in the TechCrunch article he says, “I designed Fever (like Mint) first and foremost for myself. Any money I make on top of the personal utility I get out of it is just icing on the cake.”

That’s a totally valid approach to design, especially since he’s upfront about not caring who else gets benefit from the product. But Shaun is lucky to be working only on products for himself and where he already has deep knowledge of the space. For most design projects, I would argue that insights developed through user research are critical to making a great design.

Did Chase consider the importance of the customer experience before throwing out WaMu’s “Occasio”? (AdaptivePath)

I love this story, even though it’s kind of sad. When Chase took over Washington Mutual bank locations, they redesigned them to meet their usual business objective: aggressively cross-selling financial services. But in doing so, they (probably unwittingly) destroyed a customer utopia.

Customer experience has so many parallels to user experience design online. Yes, we need to design to achieve business objectives, but not at the cost of turning off customers. The key to good product design is finding the balance between meeting business objectives and serving customer needs.

Nielsen Debunks Myths On Teens And Media – They Still Watch TV! (TechCrunch)

Would you have guessed that adults between 21 and 35 watch online videos 35% more than teens? Or that adults spend 25 hours and 15 minutes per month browsing the internet, versus only 11 hours and 32 minutes per month for teenagers? This kind of research is so important for debunking myths about our target audiences and helping us keep a clear understanding of where and how to reach them.

The Semantic Web (Adaptive Path)

The semantic web really interests me since it holds the potential for us to finally build Star Trek-like computers — ones the actually understand what we’re saying and can intelligently answer our questions. Unfortunately, discussions of the semantic web have mostly been relegated to:

1. Confused nonsense about Web 3.0
2. Detailed discussions of the technology necessary to make it work

So I was encouraged to see Chiara Fox from Adaptive Path say that the industry is making progress. The technology is now reasonably well understood so we can now get busy actually doing it. In fact, just this year at the IA Summit, some people from the BBC presented about their thorough and very smart efforts to catalog and present all of the BBC’s content in a semantically valid way. Very clever stuff!

Last April, I joined Todd Zaki Warfel’s seminar on data-driven personas at the IA Summit. In his presentation, he showed some really excellent templates for presenting persona data, which I frantically copied down. In fact, I’ve already used a variation on his template for one of my own projects.

But now Todd has shared the source files for his templates, which I highly recommend that you download. It includes the page layout in an InDesign file and an Illustrator file with his graphs. I’ve found the graphs to be particularly useful, since they’re really easy for clients and team members to scan and digest.

One of the most interesting notes that I remember from Todd’s IA Summit presentation was the amount and variety of data that should go into a persona. He recommends at least 3 sources, including a mix of qualitative and quantitative research. (e.g. in-person interviews + survey + secondary research on your target demographic)

In my own experience, I have to agree that this range of data is invaluable. When you have a complete, data-driven persona in front of you, you feel much more empowered to say that a new feature or design decision will actually improve the user experience, or drive more ROI. This confidence is good for both the agency and the client.

There has been an interesting overlap of topics between two of my favorite reading materials:

1. Seth Godin wrote about three ways to think about your audience’s background.

2. Jared Spool posted to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) email list about his view of User Centered Design (UCD) and Activity Centered Design (ACD).

Seth is probably thinking about giving presentations, and knowing how much background knowledge your audience already has. (Should you explain what YouTube is? Does your audience already know what you said on this subject last year?) And here are his three options:

• Inquire. Ask some people in your target audience so you know what they do and do not already know.
• Assume. Make a reasonable guess about what they already know.
• Punt. Don’t ask or even guess. Just pretend everybody already has all the background they need.

His point is that too many people choose the third option, and end up missing a chance to connect with their audience.

Of course, this sounded all too familiar to me, since user experience professionals run into this question all the time. Who am I designing for? What do they need to know? What do they want to know? etc.

So it’s interesting that Jared Spool recently outlined 5 ways for UX professionals to think about their audience:

• User Centered Design. Discover at your audience’s goals, needs, and context before you design.
• Activity Centered Design. Consider only the activities or steps necessary for the design to function.
• Genius Design. People who have been designing for years, and have great intuition, can just follow their instincts.
• Self Design. Assuming you were the audience, what would you want?
• Unintended Design. This represents those who did not think about their design from anyone’s perspective. They just put down something they thought would work.

You can see an obvious correlation between the options Seth and Jared both put forward.

The clear takeaway is that, just like you would never give a presentation without thinking about your audience and what they need, you should never design a product (digital or otherwise) without thinking about your audience.

Thanks to the current emphasis on Design in business, we don’t see very many clients recommending Unintended Design any more. But I have seen clients try everything from Self Design to User Centered Design. And I can tell you that we always see better results as we move along the scale that diminishes personal bias and increases our user insights.

P.S. The discussion on IxDA about User Centered Design is actually really interesting (if you’re into that kind of thing). You can jump to my response or read the whole thing.

As anyone who has tried already knows, creating community is hard. But Christina Wodtke recently explained why it’s so hard in way I thought was pretty enlightening. She refers to Lewin’s Equation, which is…

B=f(P,E)
Behavior is a function of a Person and his Environment.

Wodtke goes on to explain that, as websites turn over more and more control and content to users, we have less and less control over the environment. Therefore, we have less control over how people behave.

So I thought I would highlight a couple of unique, innovative ways to use our limited control of Environment to positively affect user behavior.

Example 1: Mail Goggles
How often have you written an email late at night, mindlessly clicked “Send” and then regretted the email the next morning? Maybe it was filled with typos. Maybe it said something horribly offensive. Either way, you wish somebody had pointed out that you weren’t thinking and should have just gone to bed.

Thanks to the new Gmail Labs program, that kind of mistake can be a thing of the past. Google engineer Jon Perlow developed an add-on for Gmail called Mail Goggles, which cleverly stops you from sending email while your brain is off.

When you send an email late at night, it asks you a series of math problems (difficulty can be adjusted) that must be correctly answered before the email can be sent. If your mind isn’t totally sharp, it prevents you from hitting that all-important Send button.

Example 2: Audio Playback of YouTube Comments
If you’re not already familiar with the web comic XKCD, then you need to get up to speed. It not only jokes about internet memes, it creates them. In fact, it sometimes has a profound impact on the web’s most influential sites.

In this case, an XKCD comic illustrated what life might be like if YouTube required everybody who writes a comment to hear their comment said back to them before it gets posted.

The people at YouTube liked the idea well enough that it’s now a live feature you can try out. It’s not required like the comic joked, but it is the first button you see after writing a comment. Even before “Post Comment”.

The Future
Do you think this is what the future of influencing user behavior looks like? Even before these examples came out, people commonly pointed to sites that use an informal tone to influence user behavior. Maybe the secret to influencing user behavior is presenting it in a way that’s fun, lighthearted, and which people choose to engage with.

Note: For more thoughts on building websites so that users choose to engage with them, check out the Marketing with Meaning blog, written by Bob Gilbreath, the Chief Marketing Strategist at Bridge Worldwide. He regularly discusses examples of how marketing can be so good that people choose to engage with it. Good stuff!

The Challenge

One of my clients is starting work on a global redesign of their registration form, across every site they own. It’s a big deal, and it has the possibility of being very contentious. Multiple areas of the company have a vested interest in the questions, so we need to have a strong justification for every change we recommend.

The client is mostly concerned about getting the right mix of questions that let us gather good, useful information about our visitors without causing drop-off. But this is also a good opportunity to build in some usability best practices that have been missing.

Since our client is awesome, they agreed to run a test. We’re going to design 3 versions of the form, probably representing small/medium/long, and see which one hits a sweet spot in terms of gathering information without causing drop-off. We’ll run all 3 forms at the same time, randomly serving 1 of the 3 to each visitor who registers.

The Solution

Thankfully, Luke Wroblewski just published a book on web form design called… Web Form Design. I picked up a copy and read it during a few short plane flights this week.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I saw Luke speak at this year’s IA Summit and even joined his lunch table discussion group, and I think pretty much everything he says is spot on. So I was predisposed to like the book. But it still exceeded my expectations.

For me, the book follows a perfect outline — exactly the format I want every professional book to follow. It deconstructs the issue of web form design into 14 discrete issues (e.g. “Help Text” “Inline Validation” and “Gradual Engagement”), and focuses one chapter on each issue. Then, within each chapter, he breaks out the various problems and solutions that he has observed within that issue.

The end result is extremely readable, and the content is very strong. Luke makes recommendations based on hard data, common-sense observations, and his own UX expertise. Also, the book comes with a digital version that links to a Flickr library of all the images he used. So it’s easy to take his work and repurpose it for your own presentations.

While researching, I also came across a couple of interesting articles on Smashing Magazine. They did their own research into the most common ways web forms are done. You can read Part 1 and Part 2 here. For me, it’s only somewhat interesting, since it’s reporting more raw data and less actual UX expertise.

Conclusion

I’ll update later with results from the form design project. Stay tuned.

In the mean time, let me recommend a site I just found called Wordle. You can enter in any text you want, or paste in a URL, and it will create an attractive word cloud based on the words in your text! You can even customize the appearance of the cloud. It’s kind of fun, but it’s also useful if you want to quickly pull out the words most commonly used in a source file.

I pasted in the text from Web Form Design and here’s what I got:

Q: What is a “widget”?

A: To understand widgets, we first need to consider the history of the word.

Originally, the word “widget” was used in business classes to describe a non-specific product. For example, business students might play a simulation game in which they were put into teams that sold “widgets”. It was their job to figure out how to differentiate their widget and market it to consumers.

More recently, the word “widget” has been adopted to describe any small application or tool, ranging from a blog badge to a Facebook application. This usage was originated by executives who were shown various small applications and tools and didn’t know how to describe them. So they used a nonsense word.*

The bottom line is that the term widget has been used to describe so many diverse things that it’s not really a useful word any more. If someone starts talking about widgets, or asks you to design one, the first thing you need to do is work with them to figure out what they really want.

*This is not actually true. To the best of my knowledge, the word “widget” was coined by the people who developed Konfabulator (now called Yahoo! Widgets), which was was one of original platforms for hosting small applications on a PC desktop. But I do think the term “widget” has been co-opted by executives and stretched to the point of uselessness.

Q: How do I help someone figure out what kind of widget they want?

A: There are three important attributes to every widget. If you define those three things, then you’ll be well on you’re way.

1. Purpose
2. Audience
3. Platform/Technology

Let’s look at each of those attributes in detail.

Purpose
It’s sometimes hard to know whether you should begin planning a widget by thinking about your audience or by thinking about the purpose of the widget (i.e. the business objective of the widget). My feeling in this case is that you need to decide on the type of activity you want to encourage in users before you go too far down the path of figuring out what your users want. But purpose and audience really go hand in hand, so you need to keep both in mind as you work.

Based on my own observation of widgets, I am proposing 4 high level purposes that a widget may have.

1. Perform a task
2. Provide information
3. Gather information
4. Connect people socially

Note: I will add a page of example widgets that demonstrate each of these purposes in the near future.

Actually, a widget might fulfill several of these purposes at the same time. The key is to ask questions that help determine which ones are relevant.

Example Questions

• Can you do something useful for your audience, like perform some calculations or sound an alarm at an appropriate time?
  Then maybe your widget is meant to perform a task.
• Do you have content that you want to push out at relevant times?
  Consider a widget that provides information.
• Do your users want to provide feedback or give you information?
  Maybe you want to design a widget that gathers information.
• Would your users find it valuable to be connected with other users? Do they have something to say to each other, or do they want to compare themselves against each other?
  Consider a widget to connect them socially.

Audience
Some widgets have only one audience and others have multiple audiences. It’s your job to figure out who the audiences are.

Possible Audiences

• The user who installed the widget
  In most cases, the widget is going to be used by the person who installs it. For example, if I add a widget to my iGoogle page, it’s because I want to see it every time I go to my home page. The widget should be designed solely to meet my needs.
• The friends of the user who installed the widget
  Many bloggers add widgets to the sidebar of their blogs. For example, on this blog I might add a widget that searches the email archives at IxDA. As the blog writer, I already know about IxDA, and I already know how to go there and search the email archives. I would only add it to my blog as a service to my readers. They are the real audience.
• Both the user and her friends
  A lot of Facebook application fit in this category. They provide some value to the user, but they also provide value to the user’s friends who visit her profile page. For example, a Facebook application might be useful to me because it helps me keep track my favorite recipes. But it’s also useful to my friends because they can see the kinds of recipes I like, and recommend more they think I would also like.

Once you have identified your audience(s), then you can start designing an appropriate UI. If your audience includes both the user and that user’s friends, then you want to enable both audiences to do the things they want to do, without making the interface confusing for either audience.

Platform/Technology
Platform is the third and final attribute for a reason. It should flow naturally from the first two attributes.

For example, let’s say you chose to design the following kind of widget…
Purpose: Perform a function
Audience: Only the user who installs the widget

In that case, you probably want to choose a platform like iGoogle or the PC desktop.

However, if the chose to design a widget more like this…
Purpose: Connect people socially
Audience: The user and her friends

In that case, your widget probably belongs on a platform like Facebook.

Since there are so many platforms, and their pros and cons aren’t well known, I’ll provide a brief overview of the most popular options here.

• Yahoo Widgets
  This is a framework that users download and install on their PC. The framework is for both Mac and PC, which is good, but it does require a separate installation process. So I tend to think this platform is only for people who really want widgets — not for average users.
• Google Gadgets
  Google Gadgets are a lot like Yahoo Widgets, except they can work in more places. A Google Gadget can be placed on a user’s iGoogle page, it can be installed as a PC desktop widget using Google Desktop (which is just as distracting as installing Yahoo Widgets). And I understand a Google Gadget can even be installed on any regular web page.
• Facebook
  Facebook is probably the most popular social network for widgets (Facebook calls them “applications”). Since so many people are already using Facebook, it’s almost ideal for any widget that needs to be social. The downside is that Facebook has been overrun by applications, so the managers are taking steps to minimize the role the applications play. Also, Facebook applications are often written in a proprietary language, making them more difficult to port to other platforms.
• OpenSocial
  Just about every social network that isn’t Facebook uses a Google technology called OpenSocial to power its applications. That includes MySpace, LinkedIn, Ning, and dozens of others. Although I haven’t seen many OpenSocial applications yet, it’s a good bet that they’ll become more popular in the future.
• Blog badges
  Most blogs give their owners a place to add “badges”, usually along the left or right hand side of the page. These badges are typically just a snippet of HTML and an image, offering minimal interactivity.
• PC Desktop
  Some PC widgets are actually just specialized applications. A common example is WeatherBug for the PC. It gets installed like any other PC application; it just has a small window and it hides in the Start bar when not in use. Alternately, you could develop a cross-platform desktop widget by compiling a Flash application, or transforming your Flash program into an Adobe AIR application, or by writing your application in any other platform-agnostic language.
• Mac OS X Dashboard
  The Mac operating system comes with a tool called Dashboard that overlays a set of widgets whenever the user presses a special key. Dashboard widgets are generally very popular with Mac users, but it does require you to build a widget just for the Mac platform.
• Vista Sidebar
  In Windows Vista, a tool called Sidebar provides a “dock” for widgets on the side of the screen. It’s actually very similar to Yahoo! Widgets, except it’s built into the operating system. However, Vista Sidebar has the same drawback as Dashboard: it only works for a single operating system.
• iPhone
  The Apple iPhone now allows developers to write 3rd party applications for the phone. Because the screen is small, these applications look like widgets, so they’ve been wrapped in under that term too.

This is not a complete list of widget platforms, it’s just the most popular options. All the same, it’s more than enough options. The good news is that many of these platforms use the same basic technologies (HTML, CSS, Javascript, Flash, etc.), so it’s usually not that hard to rebuild a widget so it works on multiple platforms. Once you’ve picked a platform (or a few platforms) that make sense for your purpose and audience, you need to talk with your developers to figure out which ones you can reasonably support within your budget and schedule.

So what do you think of this framework? So far it has made sense for my projects, but I’d love to hear some other opinions. How are you thinking about the widgets you’re designing?

Recently, the IxDA list has been discussing a couple of commercials that Ford is running. One of them is readily available on their website:

Go to the Ford “Drive One” website. Scroll down to the bottom, it’s the last video on the page.

The other video doesn’t seem to be online, but I happened to record it along with Lost last week. So I’ve uploaded it for anyone who hasn’t already seen the commercial.

Ford Focus UI Designer

Has anyone actually used one of these new systems? I’m curious to hear some real world feedback on how good or bad it actually is. At a glance, parts of it look kind of chunky and even a little ugly. But I could see how people might need big, chunky buttons while they’re driving.

In any case, major props to Jason Johnson for being one of the first UI designers to be featured in a commercial!

During today’s Design and Architecture of Social Web Experiences workshop, I took 5 pages of notes and designed a very simple, yet very cool social website. So, yeah, I’d say it was a good session.

Here are some of the highlights from my perspective…

The Webb/Butterfield/Smith Model

This is an illustration that shows 7 aspects of social networks in a way that makes it easy to describe the functionality of a social web site.

Open design patterns

Trust and monitor

The problem of the Cold Start

Group size

I arrived in Miami, FL late last night for the IA Summit, and right now I’m sitting in the first all-day pre-conference session called “Design and Architecture of Social Web Experiences“.

So far, this session has provided a grounding in what social networks are, and we’ve had our first “workshop” of the day. Everyone has been assigned a different website to consider how social experiences might be integrated. My group is considering how to design a social web experience for a non profit that helps children with cancer. First step: figure out the business goals, user goals, and overall strategy.

Most of all, I’ve really enjoyed meeting the people here. Really smart people. And people who understand what I do! What a rare thing.

I’ll update later with more thoughts from the session.