Experience Planner

The iPad reminds me of the early days of the Internet, before there were established best practices. Back then, “Wild Wild Web” was a commonly uttered term. UX professionals were passionately and actively exploring brand-new features and interfaces, and continuously testing and learning to discover what was inherently intuitive and engaging for those exploratory new adopters.

The iPad reminds me of the thrill of those days, because so much is open to being discovered and explored. Of course the iPad carries through its Apple predecessors’ infamous touch scrolling, which in itself has a learning curve for new users. But once you start playing with some iPad apps, it’s thrilling to discover that each one has taken the freedom to reinvent the experience. The features, navigation and interaction of USA Today is very different from BBC News. With eReading, how the iPad’s iBooks interacts vs. the Amazon Kindle for iPad are almost polar opposites. And each game app is almost unrecognizable from the next.

As you can imagine, this could make the heads of users spin – but not if the interaction and experience are done right. In general, iPad users are incented to explore and be delighted by their new, pricey toys. There aren’t a lot of iPad apps out there, when compared to an iPhone or other popular smartphones. So users are more likely to want to pay off their overall iPad investment, and play with each app a bit, and learn a new interface, more than they would with more established media. And these users are more likely to expect something new and different is going to happen.

And there are new possibilities to explore with the iPad. Critics say the iPad is just a bigger iPod touch or iPhone, but providing about four times more real estate truly allows the iPad to revolutionize the touch pad experience. Since the iPad isn’t constrained to being carried in a pocket or small purse, users can read more easily, see and engage with more features at once, and have more encompassing interactions. Plus the user can continue to shake, tilt, blow, slide, just as before.  

With all of these factors mixed together, UX professionals have a great opportunity to ‘recharge’ themselves with iPad app design. It’s a perfect media to serve our innate passion for making experiences work intuitively.  With little best practices or standards, what is intuitive, engaging and takes full advantage of the iPad’s features requires deep training in understanding a user’s cognitive processes, without relying on the crutch of best practices. A UX professional can enjoy exploring and defining the numerous ways the user can manipulate the experience, how the interface responds, and how to take full advantage of a user’s incentives and capabilities.

As fun as it is, this isn’t to say that I’m endorsing the iPad overall. It holds lots of possibilities, but no technology is perfect. You can’t read well in direct sunlight, it’s hard to figure out some of the general settings such as sound, and it certainly ain’t cheap. But hopefully both users and user experience professionals can get a lot of fun exploration and reinvention out of this new technology, with a renewed passion that can trickle into other, more universal, digital media as well.

On the final post of this series on reputation systems, I’ll talk about how online reputation can work as an incentive for participation. I’ll provide examples of online communities that use reputation elements to promote positive behavior and engagement. Let me start with a brief story.

Last year, I traveled to Tennessee for the first time to attend the IA Summit. As a full-time grad student, I couldn’t afford staying at the hotel that held the conference. So, I went to Yelp to look for reviews about cheaper places to stay in Memphis. I ended up finding a hostel in Midtown, which had positive ratings and a reasonable price. It turned out that the Pilgrim House was exactly what I was looking for: cheap, neat and well-located. After the trip, I left a review for it on Yelp. I also sent a “Thank you” compliment to the reviewer who convinced me to stay there.

Yelp is a catalog of local businesses, designed to help people find the best services. There are over seven million reviews on the site. Someone who is looking for a hotel or a restaurant, for example, can access Yelp to look for tips provided by the community. Users can assign ratings to the reviews and they can also offer compliments to the reviewers. This is a way to stimulate participation from both sides: the reviewer, who is encouraged to keep the good quality of the reviews; and also the reader, who wants to show gratitude for finding good information. When you’re navigating profile pages on Yelp, you can see the compliments each member has received.

Communities, such as Yelp, use reputation to promote positive engagement. Reputation can be used for multiples purposes, not only to narrow choices ─ as on Amazon and BookMooch ─ but also to increase participation and to incentivize certain types of behavior. As mentioned on Reputation Systems are Everywhere, we should think of online reputation as a cycle: “quality contributions attract more attention, which begets more reward, which inspires more quality contributions”.

Here’s another interesting example: Yahoo Answers. Yahoo Answers is a Q&A site. Any user who signs up for an account can ask and/or answer questions. Users can build their reputation by accumulating points. In order to get points, they have to perform different tasks on the site. The most rewarding way to participate is by providing a good answer, which could be selected as the best one (user gets more points). Yahoo Answers benefit from reputation because as users compete trying to provide the best answer, the site naturally filters the good from the ordinary content. Similarly, users benefit from the status and authority they get by building a positive reputation with points.

This post ends the series on reputation systems. The key takeways this time are: (a) reputation can promote positive behavior and engagement within communities and (b) there are multiple types of reputation systems; some of them are more collaborative (Yelp, compliments), while others are more competitive (Yahoo Answers, points). The challenge for designers is in finding the type of system that best fits each community.

One final tip: the book Building Web Reputation Systems is now available.

(This post is part of my research for the Information Architecture and Knowledge Management academic program at Kent State University).

If there’s an old book in your house and you don’t know what to do with it, here’s a tip: try using BookMooch. BookMooch is a non-profit site for book lovers who enjoy exchanging books. The site was built with a very simple idea. Users have profile pages where they can list the books that they are willing to give away. Anyone can sign up for an account and registration is free. Once you have an account, you are able to see the inventory of other members and mooch their books. Every time you mooch a book from somebody else, you “pay” with one point. And every time someone mooches a book from you, you get one point. Books travel from sender to moocher via regular mail.

Unlike the e-commerce sites mentioned on my previous post, BookMooch doesn’t have a central authority to control the transactions. The site is based exclusively on mutual trust. Therefore, it’s important to display clues about past mooches, so everyone can see who is playing fair and who is not. Nobody wants to use a point and mooch a book that will never arrive. Each user has a profile page that lists basic information on past activities, such as overall feedback score, books mooched and books given. Members can use that information to decide which members they should mooch from.

Reputation is a fundamental part of the experience on the site. Needless to say, BookMoochers with low feedback score are less likely to exchange books than those with higher scores. Other than score, the profile pages display additional clues about the community members. Their list of books given and mooched as well as their inventory and wishlist can indicate reading habits and preferences. Those records are open to any other user on the site, and they offer more information to assist BookMoochers during the transactions.

When a member puts Huckleberry Finn on her wishlist, she is not only increasing her chances of getting books. She is also letting everyone else know a little bit more about herself, as a Mark Twain reader. In the long run, the list of books given and mooched could serve as a way to cluster users with similar preferences. As noted by Bryce Glass on his post Reputation is Identity, on the Web “visible histories reveal shared affinities and allow users with common interests to find each other”. BookMooch doesn’t rely exclusively on user feedback to build reputation. The site also tracks its members’ regular activities and makes them visible to those who are interested.

This is an interesting approach for two reasons: (a) it takes advantage of the natural actions taken by users, instead of requiring extra efforts (e.g. filling out forms to describe preferences) and (b) it offers a granular perspective of each member, which is something particularly important for new users with no transaction history yet. Transparency is an important tool used on BookMooch and it helps BookMoochers make better decisions.

On my next post, I’ll go further and talk about reputation as an incentive for participation within online communities.

(This post is part of my research for the Information Architecture and Knowledge Management academic program at Kent State University).

A few years ago, I listened to a very interesting podcast called The Architecture of Participation. It was a panel discussion that took place at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, 2004. During the talk, the Chief Technology Officer from Amazon, Allan Vermeulen, described his team’s approach for using ratings and reviews on the site:

“So our choices [on Amazon] are: either we can hire a bunch of people who sort of know how to get things done and that can write a bunch of guides and so on, on the net; or what we can do is build a technology so that everybody else out there who actually know this stuff better than we do, can go ahead and write about it and build these guides and push them out to people.”

This podcast brings up a very important fact: most online reputation systems are built with user-generated content. Amazon does not rely on experts to assign ratings to its products. Instead, the site uses a platform that is capable of capturing users’ inputs in many ways. Ideally, Amazon’s reputation system becomes more effective as more users contribute to the site. By combining multiple and diverse opinions, Amazon is able to filter the entire catalog, narrowing the list of options for each customer. As I mentioned on my previous post, ratings-and-reviews can provide guidance and therefore, improve decision making.

It is important to note that just because reputation systems allow users to send feedback it does not mean that users will actually do it. In an interesting study about ecommerce, Jared Spool compared the number of reviews for the book Harry Potter 7 on different sites, including Amazon, Target, Walmart and Barnes & Noble. One month after the book’s release, Amazon had the largest number of reviews – 1805 -  in contrast with Target, which had the smallest number -  just 3. Both sites use the same platform to offer product recommendations, despite the huge difference in the amount of user feedback captured by each.

Even though ratings-and-reviews are becoming increasingly popular and expected, designers should remember that this functionality does not rely on technology alone. Users have to be motivated in order to participate, and each community fosters participation in a different way. As noted in the example above, some communities are more active than others. And because user feedback is the foundation of most reputation systems, an early challenge for sites like Amazon or Target is in creating engagement.

Still, there are alternative methods for capturing user feedback. On my next post, I’ll talk about a smart approach for assigning reputation values to entities.

(This post is part of my research for the Information Architecture and Knowledge Management academic program at Kent State University).

On my previous post, I provided an overview of online reputation systems with some examples. Here, I’ll explain why they are important.

As we know, online shopping can be very convenient. Sites such as Amazon offer an incredibly big variety of items. A search for “laptop” on Amazon retrieves more than 450,000 results. For any item, a customer can choose the best price, compare it with similar products and create bundles to get more for less. From one hand, this is a good thing and that’s what makes Amazon so attractive to customers. But it also poses a new problem: with so many options out there, how do I choose the best one?

Unlike a brick-and-mortar store, in which customers have the ability to see and sometimes even test the products before buying them, the Internet lacks some of the crucial elements a real shopping experience has. Whenever customers go to a store inside a shopping mall for example, they are able to make immediate judgments from their interaction with other people and the environment. Customers can hold the products, ask questions, evaluate if the staff is friendly, look around and see if the store is well-organized and observe the other people that buy things there.

All those physical cues are not present on the digital space. For that reason, e-commerce sites try to minimize the problem with good design, online assistance, discounts on shipping and so on. Reputation systems are also part of that strategy and they are built to facilitate the online shopping process. Amazon provides ratings and reviews for products. This is one way of helping customers overcome 2 problems: (a) the overwhelming number of available options for products and (b) the lack of personal interactions.

In a nutshell, reputation systems can improve decision making by aggregating user feedback and presenting it in a way that allows people to narrow their options. On my next post, I’ll talk about a little bit more about user feedback.

(This post is part of my research for the Information Architecture and Knowledge Management academic program at Kent State University).

Online reputation systems have become part of the experience of many websites, helping users make smarter decisions and stimulating them to participate on a regular basis. A popular example of online reputation is the star-rating system that tells you if a book is worth reading based on users’ ratings. Amazon, for instance, uses this feature to assist customers during their shopping process. Those who are unsure about whether to buy book A or book B can look at the number of stars for each book, and then make an educated guess on which one is the best.

There are different types of reputation systems, and some of them have people as entities that can build reputation. BookMooch – an online community that promotes book swapping – uses a feedback score to help users evaluate the reliability of their peers. On the other hand, Yelp – a website that displays reviews for services, such as hotels, bars and restaurants – lets its users give badges to those who provide useful information.

Even though online reputation systems can be very useful, they may also bring new challenges to the sites that use them. An early obstacle for any reputation system is in capturing user feedback. Just because a website allows users to provide ratings and reviews, it does not mean that users will actually do it. Another obstacle is in figuring out which reputation model is the most suitable for the product or service that is being offered. Because there is no universal reputation system that will work for all sites, the choice of which one to use depends on the type of community, the site’s purpose and the technology constraints of each project.

On my future posts, I’ll try to highlight the importance of online reputation in an information-overloaded space. I’ll also pinpoint the effects that may arise from interaction under such community-controlled rules. The mail goal here is to provide a quick report of issues to be considered when designing your reputation systems.

(This post is part of my research for the Information Architecture and Knowledge Management academic program at Kent State University).

Observing a young child being exposed to digital media for the first time is an enlightening opportunity for usability professionals. We get a rare chance to observe someone who has no fear of the technology or of failure, and who is working from raw intuition. Young children possess a rare gift of an open mind, ready for exploration. Through this gift, they can provide a unique insight on how to build user experiences built on human intuition, not predetermined best practices.

Adults who are exposed to new technology or approaches most often bring fears with them, that they will break something, or fail. Adults also have preconceived ideas of how something should work, based on past technical experiences or best practices.

Don’t get me wrong, best practices are certainly useful, as they help people feel at ease and achieve their goals quickly. But it’s also essential to explore new approaches, by being reminded about what’s fundamentally intuitive. And while young children may not be your target audience, there is much to learn from their raw intuition that can be applied to creating new breakthroughs in user experiences.

Help Your End Users Have No Fear

Whether it’s typing an email that doesn’t make much sense, browsing a beloved cartoon character’s web site (and perhaps even playing a game), or snapping away pictures with a digital camera with reckless abandon, children have a passion for learning as much as they can with less understanding of any related consequences. It’s amazing to watch them rapidly learn new technologies simply because they don’t have a fear of what could happen if they go down the wrong path.

That reinforces the value of our profession. As user experience professionals, we strive to make our end users have a great experience, and hopefully chip away at any preconceived fears they have. So as we work on our deliverables, we can think about how to make our target audience forget any of their fears. And we can help transform them to experiencing that sense of wonder and exploration of a child, where small touches can make a big difference in the full experience.

Of course many of us don’t get to work on projects that naturally capture that inner child. But how can we help plan for making the ordinary into extraordinary? How can we educate our team members and project stakeholders on understanding their end user, and collaborating with them to capture that excitement in the end project? These are questions we should all ask ourselves when we start a project, and never stop.

Leverage Intuition to Explore New Opportunities

In this day and age, projects with tight timeframes and budgets occur much more frequently than projects that naturally provide time to sit back and explore our inner child, for new, creative ideas. So instead we often fall back on best practices and what’s been done before.

We can easily fall out of that habit by observing a young child, who is working with almost pure intuition to accomplish his goals online. It takes us back to that basic cognitive thought process, and what is instinctly apparent to end users–so easy a child could do it.

It’s amazing to watch a child who doesn’t know how to read, as she understands what to click on from supporting simplistic visuals and icons. And how the user interface can guide her down an intended path.

You can almost see the wheels in a child’s mind turn as he explores buttons and other functionality without hesitation. It’s also mind opening to hear the child say what he thinks should be possible before he even does it, or what he is looking for if he is stumped. It often makes the most perfect sense.

From this experience, it reminds me to always try to start with a clean slate. Try not to think about how it’s been done before, and put the logo or navigation in a location on your wireframe simply because it’s a best practice. Stop and think about your end users, and what would be fundamentally intuitive to them to explore a new approach.

Of course, the best way to gain this understanding is from user research. Gain an understanding of the target audience’s mindset, how they interact with technology, and what their fears and goals are. Then start creating. Try new approaches that will help users forget their fears, and return to exploring what’s intuitive. And then test your new approaches with users. Refine and test again.

Understanding what’s innately intuitive, first through a child’s eyes and then with your target audience, can help your end users overcome their fears so they can accomplish their goals, find delight through the extraordinary, and find their own inner child.

Last night, I read an article from Admap titled “Planning: the challenge of complexity” from R/GA’s executive vice president of strategic services Anne Benvenuto. Anne’s purpose of writing this article in May 2007 was to inspire other planners to look for a deeper meaning in their clients’ brands. Instead of earning a relationship with the customer, bring the brand alive and have it interact with the customer, create a new and meaningful experience. Anne recognizes that an experience is longer-lasting, that it requires more than just saying and listening but that it also has to interact with the customer. The experience makes things happen and the exciting part of this interaction is that the customer creates these experiences where ever and when ever they want.

Planning: the challenge of complexity - Anne Benvenuto

Well it is now closing in on Q4 of 2009 and it is surprising to still think of this as a “new” idea. Anne suggests “if there’s one thing we all know about the times we are living in, it is that they are changing far faster than ever before”. That is still true today and if this is the case then why aren’t more agencies chasing these opportunities. As planners we need to be ahead of the client, ahead of the customer, and ahead of the trends. We need to set the landscape and determine where our customers are moving next.

Anne recognizes the complexity of this type of responsibility, but she also has not suggested that we work alone. She wants us to work better with our team, with our technologists and our creative team. Learn to collaborate, pull together ideas and be ahead of the curve, and as a team, succeed.

Hello World!

Today marks only my second day with Bridge but the boss wanted me to get a head start posting to this experience blog. I join the team, a graduate of the Digital Design discipline at the University of Cincinnati’s DAAP college, with a collection of past professional cooperative opportunities in the user-experience arena. I started off in web design and development and looked toward college to compliment those skills, fortunately what I found was exactly that; only not what I had expected at all.

Going into college I had a single talent and that was building websites. They were not the greatest websites and honestly they didn’t look very good either. However, DAAP introduced me to the right-side of my brain. In today’s work force the growing industries and explosive fields revolve around creative people, people who can connect with their clients and provide them exactly what they want. A now universal example of this is Apple and how they have reintroduced care for their users in their devices, software, and services. Experience planners live through this concept and they are committed to providing a service tuned to their clients’ needs. This is why I am here and this is exactly what I plan to do.

I have recently finished reading “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future” by Daniel Pink, a book I highly recommend. Pink has dissected today’s business economy and argues that we are transitioning from a very left-brained society to a much more right-brained society. He does this tastefully by introducing six aptitudes as a framework for developing your skills in transition to the new model. My favorite of his six is “Empathy” and how we must live in other people’s shoes and understand and respect their needs and objectives. This book has really molded my perspective of my career and I have recognized the importance of having a multi-faceted skillset, being open to everything around me. To practice this I have started sketching and reading more, something I encourage everyone to do.

Working on a site with a serious Flash video sequence… and I find myself referring back to Chapter 2: Flow in Web Design from Andrew King’s book Website Optimization.

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.