Experience Planner

Like most, I’ve gone through many a gadget. However, deleting this particular gadget was kind of a bummer.

I’ve had the Dictionary.com gadget for a long time, but recently they’ve added extremely prominent ad space to their once-fun widget. The ad space includes a large banner and a website address. It is in fact larger than the the word of the day. What an insult.

[UPDATE: While writing this brief opinion piece, I had to add dictionary.com to iGoogle. No ads... and an abridged definition was available upon mouse-over. Still, not as simple as the previous widget and so deleted.]

I was chatting with a friend recently when I made a critical error and asked, What are you doing this weekend? No, no. It’s not what you think.

I genuinely enjoy hearing what people are planning on doing with their free time, but they always reciprocate and ask me what I’ll be up to. And I can’t think of anything. I run errands and go out to dinner like a normal person, but that doesn’t seem convo-worthy. Really, my weekends are often spent reading through a pile of New Yorkers or watching a movie (or in times of nuttiness, working).

However, a couple of weeks ago, I took a week off. I hung out at home, and I’m proud to say I read the following:

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell: I keep Gladwell’s books and New Yorker pieces handy, b/c they’re excellent for quick, entertaining, provocative reads.

Sources of Power by Gary Klein: I’ve read chapters from Dr Klein’s book, but not the whole chimichanga. I am fascinated by decision-making, and there is so much knowledge in this book. I have taken many lessons from it, but reading it through was even better. I think it’s a must-read for anyone who works in a team environment, develops products that other people will use, and/or plans experiences.

Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner: I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve never read the book, just the blog. Economics is fascinating, and Mssrs. Levitt and Dubner make it a thing of beauty.

Microtrends by Mark Penn: I love subcultures and little emerging pockets of interest. Very cool, especially since it’s an election year.

Tapping the Source by Kem Nunn: Surf/noir… the seedy underbelly of the California dream… cults… good stuff.

So, all in all, I had an excellent vacation. Expect to see references to some of these books in future posts.

I was reading David Pogue’s article (16 October 2008) in the New York Times, “A Look at Google’s First Phone.”

“Like the iPhone store, this market is a gigantic development, rich with possibilities; as programmers everywhere create new programs, mostly free, this ‘phone’ will turn into something vastly more flexible — and patch many of its feature holes.

Better yet, Google insists that its store will be completely open. Unlike Apple, it will not reject software submissions if they don’t serve the mother ship’s commercial interests. For example, Apple rejects programs that would let you make phone calls over the Internet, thereby avoiding using up cellular airtime. Google and T-Mobile swear they would permit such a thing.”

The part that rang loudest was that the “store will be completely open…programs that would let you make phone calls over the Internet, thereby avoiding using up cellular airtime. Google and T-Mobile swear they would permit such a thing.”

Wow.

How often do you work on a product that is that user-centered?

To be fair, I’m not surprised that Google and T-Mobile are doing a completely open market. After all, we know the Google. I had T-Mobile for 5+ years. During that time, they launched T-Mobile wireless calls with a fairly good billing deal. (If you started a call wifi, you didn’t use any minutes; leave wireless and you still weren’t using minutes. And, if I remember correctly, the rate was $10/month.) They seem to be ok with getting their subscriber fees. I thought it was nicely done.

But, still. It’s open. Totally and completely open. That is going to make for a very rich collaboration between the companies and their stakeholders.

Google and T-Mobile: I tip my hat to you. Also, thank you. You are going to be a great basis for some rationale next time I propose a feature that is very user-centered.

Part of the experience planning toolkit at agency X is our library of POVs. We’re a fairly new discipline, so a library involves both backfill and the ongoing development of POVs. It fills our infrequent periods of downtime, but they’re handy as the basis of rationale that we provide to our client partners.

So, my assignment is to write about scrolling. To me, an argument about scrolling has its basis in the fold. And the fold has its basis in print. And the dynamics of user/print interaction has very little analogue in digital.

So, quit worrying about the fold and learn to love scrolling.

Ok. So, that would be my POV, but it doesn’t sound very POV-y.

So, where is the fold? My associates and I optimize for 1024×768. Jakob Nielsen’s post “Screen Resolution and Page Layout” says that 60 percent of all monitors are set at 1024×768 (Nielsen 2006). That data is going on 3 years old, but still seems to be applicable. [Anecdotal: I recently have performed some in-home research and found that a good number of folks from all across the socioeconomic spectrum were using widescreen monitors. I hope people continue to adopt them so that I can optimize for 1280x1024.]

However, I would say that what makes the fold argument hard for me is that there is no set fold. The ClickTale Blog has a great post on scrolling. They’ve done quite a bit of data crunching and their finding is in “ClickTale Scrolling Research Report V2.0 — Part 1: Visibility and Scroll Reach.”

In the post, they talk about the fold being a:

“broadly dispersed distribution with three peaks located at roughly 430, 600, and 860 pixels. These peaks correspond to the three most popular screen resolutions used today: 800×600, 1024×768, and 1280×1024, minus about 170 pixels used up by the non-client area of the browser. In other words, depending on the screen size, users will typically see at least 430 and up to 860 vertical pixels worth of information on their screens when they open their site, without having to scroll” (ClickTale 2007).

[BTW, I'd like to thank ClickTale for this great info and their excellent graphs. Very cool stuff.]

So, in my actual POV I’ll go into that ClickTale data more, but for this web rumination, I’m going to focus on 1024×768.

While 1024×768 is a nice chunk of real estate, with the advent of the scrolling mouse, it’s only the gateway. During in-home research, I found that when I asked users to visit a website, most would wait for the page to load and then immediately scroll. Often, it was to get that dearly-paid-for logo out of the way. A site without much below “the fold” did not often elicit a positive reaction. Granted, the sites were supposed to be topic sites meant to be deeply informative about a fairly broad subject.

When asked to go to a site with a lot junk in its trunk, users felt that the site was far more credible. The site drew reactions such as “wow, there’s a lot of info” and “I’m going to bookmark this.”

At this point, I should point at that for me credibility is huge. My work is focused on healthcare. And, there’s a lot of healthcare info out there. A lot of it is junk. For example, marketing quackery such as salves and poultices that cure lung cancer. The websites I design must cover a lot of education and “value add content.” I don’t want to just market a product, I want the consumer/business transaction to at least benefit the consumer–I want them to be knowledgeable so that they can make the decisions that are right for them.

What I’ve learned over the years is that the more information you provide to the user (depending on the subject of course), the more likely they will be to revisit the site, to sign up for the email program, and to share it out with their friends.

ClickTale, in their post, concluded that “visitors scroll in a relative way — about the same percentage of page views will reach the middle of the web page regardless of the actual page height in pixels.”

In “ClickTale Scrolling Research Report V2.09 — Part 2: Visitor Attention and Web Page Exposure,” they answer the question: sure, users scroll and scroll and scroll … but what do they pay attention to? After all, I often scroll to the bottom of the page. But, what do I really focus my resources on?

According to ClickTale,

“Visitors’ attention follows a similar pattern for pages of different heights. It peaks both near the page top, at 540 pixels, and near the bottom about 500 pixels from the end of the page…attention decreases exponentially as visitors scroll down the page…page areas near the top of the page get about 17 times more exposure than the areas near the page bottom…[However,] the footer is important” (ClickTale 2007).

Now, this is where scrolling finally gets interesting. It’s an experience planner’s prerogative to say “it depends” and then fashion a custom solution for the problem/opportunity. So, for my sites (which focus on knowledge sharing), a nice hefty page with clear, scannable headlines and text and smart use of graphics can help create a compelling experience for the user. Remember, I’m not in a hurry to sell people stuff. My sites are long-term relationship builders.

However, for experience planners who are working on more promotional sites, this may not ring true. We can safely say: Nail the important message within the top 800 pixels. For users who need more information, provide it to them … you’re not going to lose anything, and you may gain users’ trust.

My boss’s boss at agency X just forwarded an email to the team: On November 13th, 2008, LexisNexis and Elsevier Science will be hosting the tri-state (OH, KY, IN) World Usability Day event in Miamisburg, Ohio.

This year’s WUD theme is Usability in Transportation. As the event planners say in their email: “The tri-state area is lucky to have many different practitioners from many industries and disciplines so we feel it is more important to share what we do with our colleagues than to stick to the theme. This is our time to appreciate all the good work in usability, UX, and UCD in our community.”

Right now, they’re looking for participants. So if you’re in the OH, KY, IN area, be sure to come to the event or share some work… there will be refreshments and a keynote speaker.

For more information:

http://www.worldusabilityday.org/

If you were to go to the iTunes App Store and drill down to Productivity, you might come across a very lovely icon. It’s a big, orange “2″ on a blue background (seriously, that 2 is pretty). The app name is compellingly enough, “Number Two.”

As those who know me can attest to, I will be inexorably drawn to #2. 

It’s called #2! I couldn’t wait to find out what it would help me do.

So, here’s the description: “Who is your Number Two? Your Number Two is the person you call second most often. This app is the simplest dialing app in the App Store.” 

Open the 99 cent app, and it immediately starts dialing your #2. 

Of course, for another 99 cents you can call that someone in your life that is more important than #2 with the app, “Number One.”

When I learned about the release of Google Chrome, I was filled with apprehension and dread, but I was still very interested.  In my former role as a writer, my current role as an experience planner and my long-time role as a curious person, I have an LTR with Google and Google Scholar (for when I’m a nerd). I also have an LTR with Firefox, so I’m not sure if I’m ready to give that up. And getting to know another browser is not exactly at the top of my wish list.

But change is afoot, and I had to get my curiousity satisfied.

(BTW, I’ve got pretty decent connectivity [although, I'm pretty certain that I lose my connection every few minutes]. I’m testing on my workhorse, a T61 ThinkPad provided by agency X. I especially like her because when I see the “T61,” it reminds me of the Terminator–the original–who was a T-101.)

Downloading Chrome

Superfast. Supereasy. The download screen was classic Google… clean and to the point. Good balance of imagery, text, and white space. As my boss likes to say: Just enough, just in time. I opted to not help make Chrome better (you can opt-in to auto send usage stats and crash reports), but I did appreciate the opt-in/out aspect. And it installs nice and fast.

Chrome required that I close out Firefox (domination begins with the first click) so it could import my bookmarks, settings, and logins/passwords from Firefox. Awesome. (Seriously, this would have been a significant barrier to adoption. I cannot remember every login and p/w combo.)

I’m not a person who does points, but if I were: Chrome, 5; Firefox, 0.

Upon First Opening Chrome

Chrome’s first action was to show me (via a small bit of text in a little box) that the address bar is also the search field. The helpful hints continued by explaining that the empty boxes on the screen would be filled with most visited websites.

I’ve seen users access sites in many different ways, and using the address bar to perform search was one of the most used paths. For less savvy users, these little nuggets of info can be very helpful to them and can also grow adoption.

I’m not crazy about the start page. At. all.

I love my feeds. I couldn’t see how to sign into iGoogle from the start page. But, it wasn’t too painful to bring up Google, sign into iG, and then find out how to set my page as the start/home. Of course, to set iG as my start page, it took a minute or two to figure out what I needed was the wrench (icon, not the tool).

Chrome, 2; Firefox, 0.

Plays Well with Others

I’ve heard that some people are having problems with Flash (clunky) or CSS (obeying alt CSS). I’ve gone to a few sites now, and it does seem like Flash is slow. Overall, Chrome is speedy, so the slower Flash load was surprising.

I’ve not had any CSS issues though. I’ll continue testing this. 

Chrome, 0; Firefox, 5. 

Initial Takeaways

Chrome is:

• Fast
• Simple
• Blue
• Cheeky (language-wise)
• Recommended

So, I experienced an interesting problem/opportunity recently.

I was working on a project to add community to an existing website. The client is in healthcare. If you’ve not worked in healthcare before, it is a highly regulated industry. For example, getting site content approved requires several rounds of review by several reviewers. It sounds tedious, but it isn’t bad.

So, adding forums and user-generated content represented a significant step… it will be a moderated community, but one in which the approval cycle is shortened to minutes and not weeks.

So, all in all, it’s an excellent step.

However, while discussing the interactions and experience during the wireframing process, two points were brought up by the marketers:

1. Why can’t people just write what they want without signing in or registering for the community?
2. Why should we let people upload an avatar? They might upload something “bad.”

I thought these were very interesting issues… particularly because they seem to counter the idea of community and specifically the community we were creating for our personas.

Issue One: Guests

The site’s personas rely heavily on peer to peer contact for shared wisdom. Personal knowledge of the person or an understanding that the person who is providing the wisdom is or has undergone similar experiences lends a high level of credibility to what they are saying/writing. Our research indicated that this expertise was extraordinarily important to our users.

The goal of this community was to foster online social groups through shared conditions and experiences. It’s hard to foster friendships and alliances with people who are not invested in the community, who are not in the community.

Issue Two: Avatars

Let me just first say that I don’t know that I want to imagine this community without avatars.

An avatar is a simple way of saying, “Hi! I’m a person.” An avatar is quickly recognizable and gives some indication of what kind of person you are. For example, a friend of mine’s avatar is a monkey and a banana smiling, with their arms around each other. The caption says, “BFF.” Goofy, yes… but hey, so is she.

Compare that to the default avatar: the gray silhouette of a woman. What about that says there is a person with a unique identity here? Does that convey credibility?

How It Went

Fortunately, we addressed the issues and were able to re-align as a group and move on. Yes, letting the people take the reigns of the dialogue can be nerve-wracking for brands in highly regulated spaces. But, ultimately, it can also be very rewarding.

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:

My inbox was all a buzz today about the new Cuil search engine that launched, masterminded by ex-Google engineers, that, according to reports, boasts a search index that’s three times higher than Google’s. So I spent a little time checking it out.

You can tell right away Cuil looks much prettier than Google. But when you look past the pretty dressing, what do you get?

I was underwhelmed as I looked more closely at my search results. While I see the potential, the design does not lead your eye around the page to understand the hierarchy of the search results. And I missed Google’s “Did you mean … ” feature when I misspelled common search terms on Cuil. And there isn’t an “Advanced Search” feature to be found.

And while Cuil is promoting the quanity of pages they index, they are falling below Google on quality. The search results for some of the brand names I searched on appeared to be relevant, but as I went on to search lesser known terms, I got irrelevant results.

I do really like Cuil’s Explore by Category section to suggest related searches, and the tabs at the top do help narrow your search. These are great features that are easy to use.

As Google said themselves, it’s great to see more competition come into the search space. And I do like that Cuil is more concerned about user privacy. I’m looking forward to the competition pushing the industry to keep getting better.