Experience Planner

Establishing Priority of Communication on a Page – Beyond the “F” Pattern

Emily Charek — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 19:55:17 +0000

I recently had an opportunity to participate in a usability/eye-tracking study for a new brand website. Our creative team brought a very non-traditional design prototype to the table which encouraged content exploration more than the existing conservative product site. The design had a large amount of content/callouts on the home page paired with unconventional layout/navigation scheme; usability testing was a necessity. The standard “F” viewing pattern did not apply in our non-standard design. We needed to understand initial user reactions to the site as well as where the user’s eye was drawn so that in the future the brand could effectively place callouts in order of priority.

As the usability sessions progressed, it was clear that the users felt overwhelmed and unsure of where to look first and had no clear call to action. The site design encouraged exploration but felt overwhelming to some users and did not allow the brand to prioritize messages effectively.

Upon studying the eye-tracking results more closely, we noticed a common set of factors and order in which the users’ attention was drawn. Individually it seems obvious that each of these factors would draw a user’s attention to a particular element, but the testing indicated a clear order in which these factors impacted the user:

1) Items that loaded first on the page. It seems like a no-brainer. We were having some technical difficulties that caused the site to load more slowly, and of course the user’s eye was first drawn to the callouts that loaded first. (Google has done this for the past year by displaying their search function alone until a user mouses over the page, then the secondary navigation options fade in.)

2) Animation. Any type of movement on the page draws the eye even if very briefly.

3) Color. Brighter, bolder colors drew the eye more so than muted colors.

4) Recognizable imagery. Close-ups of faces and images depicting happiness/fun/high energy seemed to draw the user’s eye most. Smaller, more muted images were less effective.

The testing proved to be very beneficial as we came away with a variety of options to control prioritization of content:

- Control the order and speed of elements loading on page

- Use a fade-in feature to indicate new content appearing on page, considering speed of animation (usually 0.25 – 1 second; faster will be more eye-catching)

- Use brighter color in higher priority items or dim secondary items (consider that dimming in conjunction with a slow fade in will draw less attention)

- Use bolder, recognizable imagery in higher priority items

Our team has a challenge ahead – how to implement the right balance of display order, animation, color and imagery to design an experience that is less distracting to the user and provides messaging priority control for the brand. Our industry as a whole has a challenge as we move more and more toward uniquely dynamic interfaces. Tried-and-true patterns like the “F” shape may not always apply. Usability and design concept testing become all the more important for these innovative interfaces.

PersuasiveUX community on Twitter

Cris — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 02:38:29 +0000

User experience professionals passionate about Persuasion Design can now collaborate on Twitter by following persuasiveux

This new community focuses on persuasion design, and all of the essential elements that go in it, including the art of useful persuasion, building trust with your target audience from first engagement to ongoing, as well as evoking deeper emotions based on true cognitive understanding of your target.

In my role optimizing user experience for the digital marketing industry, the elements of persuasion design are essential for success with our target audiences and for our clients. Therefore, I a very excited to be sharing and learning from others who are as passionate about this topic as I am.

Emotion design is of particular interest to me, because I truly believe it elevates user experience to a higher calling, of leveraging our understanding of the user, to delight them. That’s an ultimate user experience that can create deep relationships.

I invite you to follow persuasiveux, and contribute to the hashtags involved with this promising community.

iPad Opens New Frontier for UX Professionals

Cris — Mon, 03 May 2010 05:20:13 +0000

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.

Creating Engagement with Reputation

Thiago Franco — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 15:43:02 +0000

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).

A Smart Approach for Building Reputation

Thiago Franco — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:58:06 +0000

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).

The Importance of User Feedback

Thiago Franco — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:45:21 +0000

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).

Too Many Options, no Personal Interactions

Thiago Franco — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 23:06:21 +0000

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).

Reputation Systems

Thiago Franco — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 16:39:44 +0000

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).

Experience Planning at Bridge

Cris — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 05:10:34 +0000

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

UI Inspirational Resources

Matt Lewis — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:50:19 +0000

We were in need of some UI Inspiration. I went out and found some fantastic galleries that provide up to date patterns and trends that we are seeing around the web. Below are the best libraries I found.