Experience Planner

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!

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:

With screens in their living rooms, on their desktops, laptops and hand-held devices, Americans are watching more TV and video than ever before, according to the Nielsen Company. The media research firm today released figures showing usage across the “three screens” — television, Internet and mobile devices.

Nielsen says the average American watches more television than ever at 127 hours, 15 minutes per month, while also spending 9% more time using the Internet (26 hours, 26 minutes per month) from last year. At the same time, a small but growing number of Internet and mobile phone users are watching video online (2 hours, 19 minutes per month), as well as using their cell phones to watch video (3 hours, 15 minutes per month). Source  http://marketplace.publicradio.org/