Experience Planner

At our recent offsite for the Experience Planning team at Bridge Worldwide, each of us shared what we enjoyed best about our roles. I felt the reasoning provided was very compelling to share, as other professionals in this field could relate. Here’s what I heard:

• I enjoy making complex things easier for the intended users
• I love the moment when you know you’ve found a way to remove frustration away from your end users’ experience
• I enjoy helping to define the solution
• I enjoy solving client and user problems
• We help bring order out of chaos
• We are evolutionary, not revolutionary
• We help drive persuasion by giving people what they need to make a decision

Here are also some comments provided about Bridge:

• There’s something new every day, no monotony
• People’s egos are checked at the door
• Under crazy circumstances, people are still trying to work well together and be nice to each other

And my overall favorite comment was: “Can you imagine a world without Experience Planning”?

I certainly cannot. Experience Planning provides a unique advocacy for the end users, by understanding their cognitive thought process. We help to make the complexity of digital marketing beneficial and compelling to the end user. We match business needs with user needs, leveraging the technology. We enhance the emotional experience, knowing what compels people to act, creating persuasive design. It’s an exciting and rewarding field.

If you’re interested in Experience Planning careers at Bridge, we are currently hiring. Please see our job postings at http://www.bridgeworldwide.com/digital-agency-jobs

At a recent usability testing session, I was getting user reactions to a brand new approach to a favorite online activity. There were clear advantages to the new approach, but users had tunnel vision — they knew what they loved about the way they already do things, and they didn’t even notice it was a new approach until the very end. It was on the home page, and subtly in the messaging throughout, but their preconceived notions were creating tunnel vision, more strongly than I’d seen before.

For the sake of client confidentiality, I am not going to reveal the actual idea. But let’s say as a hypothetical example chocolate lovers were being told about “mocklate.” If you’re not a Friends TV show fan, mocklate is fake chocolate that one of the main characters, Monica, was being asked to make recipes for. Let’s put aside that the episode revealed that mocklate tasted awful, but focus on the fact that chocolate lovers are expecting chocolate–for it to taste like chocolate, have the same texture of chocolate, etc. So you have to make it obvious that mocklate is different and how.

So let’s say I’m building a recipe web site for mocklate, that requires registration (which is a bad idea for a recipe site, but let’s keep pretending). On the home page is the promise of free recipes with mouth watering pictures, as well as a clear message that mocklate is different than chocolate, and what its benefits are.

Chocolate lovers, who don’t know anything about mocklate, are attracted by the beautiful pictures and free recipes and register. They ignored the mocklate messaging and now are in the deeper site experience. They haven’t tasted mocklate yet, and expect the mocklate recipes to use real chocolate. They even assume the listing for “1 cup of mocklate” is just a typo, and use chocolate instead. But if you bake, you know that a recipe substitution often doesn’t work. So the user goes to serve a cake created from a mocklate recipe at a birthday party and it tastes like, well, you know…

While the Web site had a clear message on the home page that this is mocklate, not chocolate, you’re still going to get confused chocolate lovers. The site would better serve them if it hit them over the head, every step of the way, that this is not for chocolate and what the differences are.

We all know as usability professionals to make experiences that are obvious and highly intuitive. But when a user comes in with a preconceived notion of how things work, you have to be clear to the point of almost being obnoxious. Your other team members may say, “How can users not get this?” but they won’t.

And the longer you are on the project, and the more familiar you become with the idea you’re trying to get across, the more biased you become. So always do testing when you have preconceived notions from users that can shadow your priorities of communication.

I’m saying to make it obvious on every page, and with every engagement. When a user is coming in with a preconceived notion, even if your idea is better, you have to let them know every step of the way how it is different. Not just with banner ad callouts they probably won’t even notice. But in the main content of every page, in the captions of your moklate recipe pictures, informational hovers over the mocklate listing in the recipe, and with a clear warning when they go to print or save a recipe of what to expect. And provide obvious ways to receive flexbile and fast support when they have questions and concerns.

By setting up obvious expectations, you may then get a following of users who love mocklate. They see the product benefits and never eat real chocolate again. But it’s because you properly educated them on the differences and benefits every single step of the way, so eventually you broke down those preconceived notions into an idea they clearly understand, and makes their lives better (hopefully).

The biggest issue that I have noticed with Google Chrome is the choppiness of Flash video players… particularly on the first watch-thru. Really, really choppy. It renders funny videos not so funny.

For a little empirical evidence, compare Firefox and Chrome with this video: http://www.todaysbigthing.com/2008/11/12

This may be a dealbreaker.

It’s Monday, 01 December 2008, the Monday after Thanksgiving. For the past several years, news outlets have referred to this magic day as Cyber Monday … the unofficial start of the online shopping season. CNN Money has predicted that sales will be down this year (but is that really news?).

Unfortunately, it is to me when I’m shopping for my niece’s Xmas gifts.

Gap and Old Navy are temporarily down for site maintenance.

Oops! Someone in the marketing department is up the creek w/o a paddle… particularly as they sent many emails about today’s sale.

One of my great joys as an experience planner is to prevent outages such as this one. My recco for Old Navy and Gap (and, by extension, Banana): Do not close your doors on an important opportunity. Holidays and sales are among the gold standards of promotions. These holidays often are a yearly occurrence (exception: Leap Day) and can and should be planned for in advance.

Consider your online presence as crucial as any other channel. We see that brick and mortars get much love (although, we do see that more and more companies are moving more and more resources to web), but often consumers are researching online … or even just looking up hours and other store information. The web property should be consistent w/your stores and offer up to date information, of course … but, can we bring more of the “experience” of the holiday shopping season into the digital channel. The web property should be ready to sparkle — it should not only visually communicate “holiday sales,” but it should also work like a well-oiled machine.

One of my clients is in the baby category. Two holidays that I get to love and cherish: Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Our site maintenance/updates are scheduled to launch 3 to 5 wks prior… b/c you don’t want to miss the opportunity to connect with your users, particularly on an important day.

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!

I was chatting with a friend recently when I made a critical error and asked, What are you doing this weekend? No, no. It’s not what you think.

I genuinely enjoy hearing what people are planning on doing with their free time, but they always reciprocate and ask me what I’ll be up to. And I can’t think of anything. I run errands and go out to dinner like a normal person, but that doesn’t seem convo-worthy. Really, my weekends are often spent reading through a pile of New Yorkers or watching a movie (or in times of nuttiness, working).

However, a couple of weeks ago, I took a week off. I hung out at home, and I’m proud to say I read the following:

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell: I keep Gladwell’s books and New Yorker pieces handy, b/c they’re excellent for quick, entertaining, provocative reads.

Sources of Power by Gary Klein: I’ve read chapters from Dr Klein’s book, but not the whole chimichanga. I am fascinated by decision-making, and there is so much knowledge in this book. I have taken many lessons from it, but reading it through was even better. I think it’s a must-read for anyone who works in a team environment, develops products that other people will use, and/or plans experiences.

Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner: I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve never read the book, just the blog. Economics is fascinating, and Mssrs. Levitt and Dubner make it a thing of beauty.

Microtrends by Mark Penn: I love subcultures and little emerging pockets of interest. Very cool, especially since it’s an election year.

Tapping the Source by Kem Nunn: Surf/noir… the seedy underbelly of the California dream… cults… good stuff.

So, all in all, I had an excellent vacation. Expect to see references to some of these books in future posts.

When I learned about the release of Google Chrome, I was filled with apprehension and dread, but I was still very interested.  In my former role as a writer, my current role as an experience planner and my long-time role as a curious person, I have an LTR with Google and Google Scholar (for when I’m a nerd). I also have an LTR with Firefox, so I’m not sure if I’m ready to give that up. And getting to know another browser is not exactly at the top of my wish list.

But change is afoot, and I had to get my curiousity satisfied.

(BTW, I’ve got pretty decent connectivity [although, I'm pretty certain that I lose my connection every few minutes]. I’m testing on my workhorse, a T61 ThinkPad provided by agency X. I especially like her because when I see the “T61,” it reminds me of the Terminator–the original–who was a T-101.)

Downloading Chrome

Superfast. Supereasy. The download screen was classic Google… clean and to the point. Good balance of imagery, text, and white space. As my boss likes to say: Just enough, just in time. I opted to not help make Chrome better (you can opt-in to auto send usage stats and crash reports), but I did appreciate the opt-in/out aspect. And it installs nice and fast.

Chrome required that I close out Firefox (domination begins with the first click) so it could import my bookmarks, settings, and logins/passwords from Firefox. Awesome. (Seriously, this would have been a significant barrier to adoption. I cannot remember every login and p/w combo.)

I’m not a person who does points, but if I were: Chrome, 5; Firefox, 0.

Upon First Opening Chrome

Chrome’s first action was to show me (via a small bit of text in a little box) that the address bar is also the search field. The helpful hints continued by explaining that the empty boxes on the screen would be filled with most visited websites.

I’ve seen users access sites in many different ways, and using the address bar to perform search was one of the most used paths. For less savvy users, these little nuggets of info can be very helpful to them and can also grow adoption.

I’m not crazy about the start page. At. all.

I love my feeds. I couldn’t see how to sign into iGoogle from the start page. But, it wasn’t too painful to bring up Google, sign into iG, and then find out how to set my page as the start/home. Of course, to set iG as my start page, it took a minute or two to figure out what I needed was the wrench (icon, not the tool).

Chrome, 2; Firefox, 0.

Plays Well with Others

I’ve heard that some people are having problems with Flash (clunky) or CSS (obeying alt CSS). I’ve gone to a few sites now, and it does seem like Flash is slow. Overall, Chrome is speedy, so the slower Flash load was surprising.

I’ve not had any CSS issues though. I’ll continue testing this. 

Chrome, 0; Firefox, 5. 

Initial Takeaways

Chrome is:

• Fast
• Simple
• Blue
• Cheeky (language-wise)
• Recommended

Do you ever get requests to create alternative user flows that you know are terrible? If so, this is for you.

Source: The New York Times 

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!