Experience Planner

Faceted search results differ from traditional searches by way of the facet categories which are displayed on the search results. These facets are sometimes called search options or content categories — depending on who you ask — and reflect the similarities shared between the search results. This allows you to not only search for glasses, but view all of the results that are new, or inexpensive, or blue.

Google has recently added a number of facets to their search results. You can view these by clicking Options on the search results page (directly below the Google search bar). These options (aka Facets) allow you to view the Video results of your search, or to view the results in a time line or a wonder wheel that is really fun to play with — if you’re into the whole data visualizing thing:

My favorite faceted searches stack the facets directly above the results. So to begin with, the user sees their search term and the number of results that it has produced. When they click on a facet to view all the new things, that facet appears above the search results, directly below the search term. To remove a particular facet from the top of the page, users simply need to click an X at the end of each line:

As for the facet controls themselves, remember to think outside of the standard form. You could use a map widget instead of an address form to locate an area on a map. For short numerical ranges, a slider can feel more natural when it comes to increasing or decreasing values. If you’re feeling particularly adventuresome, charts and graphs can also be used to illustrate certain facets of the results.

One final point I feel compelled to make is the fallacy of the three point click in relation to faceted searches. Facets enable users to explore the data instead of desperately searching for that one result which contains all of their answers. Just imagine a Wiki adventure where one answer brings up new questions and allows you to explore the alternatives.

For more information about faceted searches, I recommend UIE’s virtual seminar on Faceted Search: Designing Your Content, Navigation, and User Interface. They also include some handy information on design patterns that I am sure to be sharing before long! For those of you without a few hours to spare on the seminar, you can download a PDF handout of their presentation.

Too often UIs take the non-engaged user to the next action: they scan the page, don’t see what they want, so they can click on another navigation item or a banner ad callout. A good UI makes this easy to do. But what about the engaged user? The one who read every word of your advice article (or even scanned it), or filled out a contact form and is just given a short “thank you”. What is the next call to action for him?

This takes a little thought. You need to get in the user’s head, and examine each page carefully. If the user wanted to actually read (or scan) this article, what can she do when she scrolls down to the bottom? Are there clear, related calls to action for the natural next step? Or does she have to scroll all the way to the top to see where to go next?

I’ve seen in usability testing time and again where an engaged user will read or scan through the page, and then get to the bottom, and expect to be told what the next relevant step is. He doesn’t want to go back up to the top to find it. He wants it where he already is, which makes perfect sense.

Here’s a web page where we did exactly this.

You’ll see clear, flexible calls to action at the bottom of the page. They’re based on user goals, and what various user paths would be. And we also thought about what relevant items the business would want to promote to the user. Then the calls to action served both.

In usability testing and site metrics, I’ve seen users notice links at the bottom of a page more than they did the identical ones that appeared at the top of the page and above the fold, because the timing was in their favor — they were now ready to take that next step. And they were appreciative of the site guiding them to it.

But don’t just think about content based pages. Think about other instances, such as when a user fills out a contact form. The thank you page often says “Thanks for your feedback. We’ll get back to you in one business day.” But what do you really want the user to do next? If it’s an existing customer, do you want them to fill out a rating & review? Or do you want to tell them about a great new site feature they may not know about? Take them to the next step.

One final note of emphasis: That next step should be based on user needs and goals, and balanced with the business objectives. If you know the user, why she’s coming to the site, and what value she’d extract from the current page, what would be in her mind as a next step? What does the business want to promote that would be of direct relevance to her on this particular page? That’s one way to reach successful engagement.

And don’t make it overwhelming. The recommended next step could be one clear link, or as many as three to provide flexibility. And if technology can make them more personalized and relevant, all the better.

Once you’ve recommended this next step, test it with users. Refine. Work with your team to ensure the calls to action are being fully measured. Once the results are in, refine again.

And always think about what’s next.

Several alternate search engines have cropped up over the last couple of years, but every time I’ve been certain that they didn’t really pose a threat to Google. These alternatives might offer an interesting interface, but poor quality of results — like Cuil. Or they work so differently that they’re not really Google competitors — like Wolfram|Alpha.

When Microsoft first launched Bing, I was just about to dismiss it as another “also ran” search engine. But then the reviews came it saying that Bing is pretty good. Actually, really good. And some mainstream tech pundits (TechCrunch) wondered if Bing could be a real Google challenger.

So I’ve been trying it out over the last couple of days, and my verdict is that it’s fine. It’s a perfectly good search engine, and if there was no other competition, most people would be very happy with it. The only real problem is battling Google’s mindshare. It turns out that some research data backs this up.

The Catalyst Group tested Google and Bing with 12 users, including focus group and eye tracking studies. They found that people preferred Bing over Google in a lot of ways, but ultimately they preferred Google because it’s familiar. This is how The Catalyst Group and TechCrunch sum it up:

Catalyst CEO Nick Gould concludes that Microsoft “created something as good as Google and that is not good enough.” Overall, the test subjects “were not swayed.” No wonder Microsoft is spending up to $100 million on Bing marketing.

Be sure to check out the chart on TechCrunch to get a good idea of how people rated both search engines.

That’s why this video from CollegeHumor is so funny. In a way, this is how Bing really should advertise.

Have you tried Bing? And if so, would you switch?

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!

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.

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).

Here’s a link to the Flickr stream of the “I <3 Wireframes” group.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/ilovewireframes/

I particularly like Martin Kulakowski’s sketch. A lovely, hand drawn UI. Hooray for nerds!

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.

NPR’s Talk of the Nation recently did an interview w/Emily Yellin, the appropriately named author of “Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us,” a book about customer service.

The interview was very interesting … partly because of some of the work I’m doing right now. I’m preparing a business case and strategy for my clients who are interested in participating in social media, particularly that high-octane buzzword: Twitter.

The team has recommended Twitter b/c it is a very unique and very direct way for the company to interact with consumers. The best examples are @Zappos and @ComcastCares. These are my go-to examples b/c they put a face to the brand and humanize the relationship. They also take advantage of that desire to be in-the-know that early adopters tend to have. And, best of all, it’s fast and CS requires speed and freedom to respond. You may not know this, but depending on the workflow and requirements … it can take a good long while to put together a site. But, Twitter? I can drop a tweet in 2 seconds.

At any rate, during the interview, Ms Yellin mentioned that “customer service is the new marketing.” (She and the interviewer were talking about all the sharing/reviewing that is going on online with customers.)

I think that is very powerful b/c, to be honest, I do not believe that customer service is the new marketing. Great service has long been an important key to success. My personal belief is that you shouldn’t be in biz, if you can’t support the product/service usage by the customer in a civilized manner. (Which sounds really doofy and old fashioned … like it might smell like old books.)

However, digital communications platforms have not been around forever. And I do believe that they are changing the CS game.

Proactivity Rules
Take Comcast. Being a CSR at a cable company has to be rough–but they’re doing a good job chasing down complaints and irates. In addition to the Twittering, the co. also has a team that scours the internet (or at least has a Google alert set up) for any mention of Comcast. And, the resulting stories of Comcast’s customer svc are epic … nearly heroic. They’re EXTREMELY proactive–they’re going where the consumers are.

Facilitating Discussion and Listening to It
Brands/companies, in addition to participating in a dialogue with individual consumers, should also seek to facilitate consumer2consumer discussions. Sometimes, a brand doesn’t have to be talking to communicate. Listening is a key component of customer service. So, if you start a Facebook page, you should definitely tend to it and review the discussions going on.

Transparency, Honesty, Authenticity
Whatever you want to call it, social media and customer service require a firm commitment to honesty and accountability. I’m surprised too, but people take what you do and say seriously. If you hire a freelancer to write charming tweets for you, but position it as a charming, real person who really works at Brand X … someone is going to find out and say you’re a fraud.

Nothing Is Deleted
Just a little reminder: Whatever you say and do online, stays online forever and ever and ever. Nothing is ever deleted

[Note: I've not blogged in so long that I think I have a case a blogarrhea ... the next post will be more sensible.]

hello, nicely done
Wanted to give some recognition to the crew running CB2’s e-commerce site.

I’m obsessed with small design details that can help pull together a composition. And, I most definitely respect a crew that can bust those out under what I’d imagine were probably “tight timelines.”

a little background
CB2 is the cheapie sister of Crate & Barrel. Their prime prospect are those loft living, highly successful, aloof hottie 20somethings … and all of their peers out in the hinterland sub/exurbs that make up the 99.9% rest of CB2’s business. So, shake the net, and you get a design-friendly lot who may or may not subscribe to Ready Made.

so, i was saying
Knowing all of this, you can see how CB2’s background is a lovely little piece. I present to you the background via Zoom view:

CB2.com uses 5x5 graph paper as a background--equity win. Score!

stop me when i start to overanalyze
I’ve not done any research into CB2 as to how the website is put together. Likely it is inhouse, but it very well could have been put together by an agency.

Either way, the graph paper is a smart touch … it’s a simple little detail that can make a site seem like a cohesive piece.

Consider a semiotic analysis. A ruler, a pen, and graph paper are among the basic elements of design. Graph paper signifies design and design sensibility. High design, sure, sure. But it also connotes the act of design thinking and perhaps just plain thinking. Most of their consumers may never put pen or pencil to graph paper, but the background art gives them a little Moleskine Pocket Reporter of their own.