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!

I particularly like Martin Kulakowski’s sketch. A lovely, hand drawn UI. Hooray for nerds!

I’m particularly taken with this quote:

“Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor and former chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago, pioneered the study of flow. He wrote that flow is the ‘holistic sensation that people feel when they act with total involvement.’”

And, this one:

“People who have experienced flow consistently report the same nine dimensions:

• Clear goals
• Unambiguous and immediate feedback
• Skills that just match challenges
• Merging of action and awareness
• Centering of attention on a limited stimulus field
• A sense of potential control
• A loss of self-consciousness
• An altered sense of time
• An autotelic experience

Flow depends on how we perceive our skills and the challenges at hand. We may feel ‘anxious one moment, bored the next, and in a state of flow immediately afterward.’”

The chapter goes on to break out “experiential” and “goal-directed flow,” and it goes on to say:

“Less-experienced users tend to see the web in a hedonic, playful way, while more experienced users tend to view the web in a utilitarian way, or a means to accomplish tasks. The authors found that telepresence/time distortion, exploratory behavior, focused attention, and challenge/arousal correlated with recreational web use, while skill/control, importance, and experience correlated with task-oriented activities, such as research, work, and shopping.”

Which to me is very interesting. I’ve long noticed that some people “play” with websites. They look at the layouts and how  “pretty.” Other people “engage” with websites. They’re actually interacting with functionality, leveraging features to do what they gotta do. Flow is giving control to the users, responding back to them, and providing outs and multiple paths.

King A. Website Optimization. O’Reilly, 2008.

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.

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!

“Like the iPhone store, this market is a gigantic development, rich with possibilities; as programmers everywhere create new programs, mostly free, this ‘phone’ will turn into something vastly more flexible — and patch many of its feature holes.

Better yet, Google insists that its store will be completely open. Unlike Apple, it will not reject software submissions if they don’t serve the mother ship’s commercial interests. For example, Apple rejects programs that would let you make phone calls over the Internet, thereby avoiding using up cellular airtime. Google and T-Mobile swear they would permit such a thing.”

The part that rang loudest was that the “store will be completely open…programs that would let you make phone calls over the Internet, thereby avoiding using up cellular airtime. Google and T-Mobile swear they would permit such a thing.”

Wow.

How often do you work on a product that is that user-centered?

To be fair, I’m not surprised that Google and T-Mobile are doing a completely open market. After all, we know the Google. I had T-Mobile for 5+ years. During that time, they launched T-Mobile wireless calls with a fairly good billing deal. (If you started a call wifi, you didn’t use any minutes; leave wireless and you still weren’t using minutes. And, if I remember correctly, the rate was $10/month.) They seem to be ok with getting their subscriber fees. I thought it was nicely done.

But, still. It’s open. Totally and completely open. That is going to make for a very rich collaboration between the companies and their stakeholders.

Google and T-Mobile: I tip my hat to you. Also, thank you. You are going to be a great basis for some rationale next time I propose a feature that is very user-centered.

I’ve seen attorneys, baby boomers, moms and Millennials, with different incomes and interests, all ask for the same thing–images they can relate to and text that tells it to them straight. In fact, I was recently in usability testing where the headline “Looking for Straight Talk” ended up drawing a lot of eyes, even though it was in a low place of prominence on the page, because yes, in fact, they were looking for straight talk.

So how can we make things real? There are a few common elements.

Give More than Pretty Pictures

People like to see themselves in images on a site, which can often be a challenge. That’s why one person in an image usually doesn’t work, because it limits the site’s ability to reach to a diverse audience. Most designers have mastered representing diversity so well that consumers have come to expect this.

But the other part of helping people see themselves is by keeping the models in the picture doing something the user can relate to. Usually this isn’t perfectly posed and smiling models, or a far reaching fantasy of how they’re using the company’s product or service. For example, if a company is selling a beach vacation, a perfect couple smiling for the camera and walking along a private beach doesn’t seem as real as a couple snorkeling with a small group–wearing goggles, big fins and all.

No ‘Marketese’

When marketing a product or service, marketers naturally want to spin the text to make it sound great. But this often means diluting the meaning and leaving the user with nothing but “fluff”. Rather than hearing how great a product or service is, users value how it works and why it works much more.  They’re rather figure out if it’s great themselves.

Here is a comparison with text from two music sites:

From the “About Us” page on MyPlay: “When you shop at store.MyPlay.com, you will not only find your favorite SONY BMG artists and titles but you’ll also have access to special offers such as autographed merchandise from your favorite artists, limited edition gifts with purchase, electronics, video, books and much more. Whether you’re searching for the latest releases, trying to track down an old favorite song, or looking to discover something new, you’ll find the largest collection of SONY BMG titles online right here at store.MyPlay.com.”

From the first page on iTunes: “Shop for music, movies, TV shows, audiobooks, podcasts, and games. For Mac + PC.”

Not only does the MyPlay example contain a lot of fluff while the iTunes example gets straight to the point, iTunes also does a much better job of informing users what the site is from the first page of their site, while MyPlay doesn’t even mention what the site is until you dig deeper by finding the “About Us” link in the footer on the site.

Converse with Users

When a customer calls customer service, hopefully he will get a live person (eventually), voice his concern, and get resolution to his problem. But the new customer complaint is often posting a blog, a message board, or a video for all to see.

No matter if the content is posted on the company’s Web site or on a neutral third party site, the worst things a company can do is not be aware of the post, ignore it, or try to discredit it. The best thing is to address it with a straightforward response. Even if it is “Thank you for alerting Company Y to this problem. We’re going to work toward improving this.” can turn a critic into an advocate when the company does improve it.

Another way that companies can discredit themselves is by dismissing public criticism, and not addressing the issues head on. For example, after the recent media scare about BHA in plastic products for babies, I visited several sites. The best treatment was from companies that put a link on their home page, with FAQs and straight information on their sites. The worst treatment was from a company that didn’t address the issue on their site, and when contacted dismissed it because the FDA approves of BHA in plastics.

I’d like to know more, what are other ways marketers can be real for their customers?

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

“We used to be able to do this type of website in a month. Now it takes seven.”

There are a few things that have changed in the three years that I have been with Bridge–all of which run through my mind and, as most who know me know… if it is on my mind, you’ve got a 78 percent chance of hearing it. Things like: We’ve instituted rigorous process; we’ve added subject matter experts from several disciplines; we’ve made large, complex websites the focus of most of our engagements.

But, mostly I think that 1) it never took a month, it took six, 2) those six months made a lot of people run away (and by run away, I mean cry, yell, or quit–and sometimes I wanted to run far, far away), and 3) the hours ran away. They really ran away.

Not that I want to start a trend or anything, but Jeff sent an email a little while ago w/the subj line: AdAge on becoming a TRUE interactive agency. The story went something like this: One firebrand initiates a digital revolution at his agency. Agency adopts senior technology leadership to shape direction, begins a deep love affair with IA, and reengineers process to become a TRUE interactive agency. Agency successfully becomes TRULY digital. (I’m not sure what’s with the TRUE, that might be Jeff making a pt or AdAge.)

Well, Bridge is on that very same road. When I started at Bridge in April of 2005, there were three centers of excellence that drove client work: Account, Creative, Research, and Technology (let me make this clear: that was in alpha order). And we were nutty. Technology was… I don’t know, either Flash or the support desk. Anyone could do a site map. Sometimes, it was the client. Often it was creative. Sometimes it was technology. As for process… well, we had process?

And then Uncle Chally came. I don’t know if he knows this. Frankly, I don’t know if anyone else realizes it either–but I’m blown away by CH and Bridge. Overnight we went from, “User experience is like … uh, usability and junks right?” to “Hey, this is not the optimal experience for the user. How can we fix it?” We went from designing for the client and what made sense to us to… well, designing for the user.

We adopted a complex and rigorous process. If I could digitally snap my fingers to show you how fast, I would. But, it was an intensely different philosophy and approach to the work, and everyone jumped on the 5D process.

And finally, IA. Well, I’m a senior experience planner. There weren’t any XPs walking around, loving on IA 2 years ago.

We even have SEM guys–three of them.

Yes, all of this takes time. But, it adds focus, thinking, strategy, tactical and executional excellence, risk mitigation, and outstanding results.

This is not the agency I started at. Thank god.

Viva la Revolution!

* Are we allowed to swear on this blog?