Experience Planner

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.

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).

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.