Experience Planner

Form submissions are often a key performance measure to determine the overall success or failure of a brand website or marketing campaign. Registration forms, requests for more information, contest entry forms…these experiences are often the end goal of an entire campaign.

Experience Planning folks analyze forms particularly closely to ensure that the form is usable – logical flow, clear error messages, few distractions and a clear call to submit.  A simple, clean form with minimal design elements is often the preferred approach, but is this always the best solution?

John Broady from Omniture Digital recently performed a study to compare increase in ‘request more info’ form submissions for two universities. The universities tested two versions of the form: 1) a very simple version of the form without design detail and 2) a version of the form with stylized page design, hero shot, colorful submit button, and benefits messaging.

Results were very surprising. One university saw a large lift from the simple form but not the stylized form. The other university saw a large lift from the stylized form but not the simple one.  Did audiences randomly respond differently to the two formats?

Upon further analysis, Broady and his team found a clear distinction between the two options – the sources of referring traffic.  The university that showed a lift via the simple form had the majority of traffic originating from other pages within the university website.  The university that showed a lift via the stylized form had the majority of traffic coming directly from search engines.

Why is there such a large distinction? Users coming directly from search engines are likely clicking on links and determining within seconds whether to stay on the page or keep searching. Visual impact of a page is very important to capture their attention.  Users coming from other pages on the university site have typically ready to convert. They’ve investigated other content on the site and too many visuals or fluffy messaging can be a distraction for this user.

When designing an online form, it’s a good idea to consider 1) whether a form page is a primary landing page from search, 2) whether the majority of site traffic originates from a search engine or from other site pages, and 3) ultimately which user origination type is more valuable.

via smashingmagazine.com

Wireframing is a very powerful tool in building the foundation for a website. Wireframes allow your team to visually recognize the interactions between pages and content. There are many different ways of integrating wireframes in to your process and it might be different from project to project.

Some wireframes may be very low fidelity, where the focus is strictly the layout of content and where form and button features might appear. Other wireframes can be of great detail, at times referenced as prototypes, truly representing the interactions involved allowing team members and clients to actually see movement and interaction with form and button elements. Wireframe prototypes can also provide a hint at the design of the final website, but should not distract from understanding changes may and often times will need to be made based on issues with the interaction and/or experiences after testing. Wireframes are great for agile development and are meant to be rapidly produced and polished as you tweak with the interactions.

Integrating wireframes into your design process will provide a more stable direction into the final creative and technical end of the process, with confidence all interactions are accounted for and provide that consistency for a better user experience.

For further reading, Smashing Magazine has compiled a list of 35 Excellent Wireframing Resources to inspire you to adopt this very concept.

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.

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).