Challis Hodge’s UXblog

Catriona Cornett has recently launched an awesome new UX blog titled InspireUX. According to Catriona:

This site posts inspiring user experience quotes on \”quote cards\” that you can save or print, to remind user experience designers of the impact that their work has on the world.

When I took my first look at the blog one of the quote cards jumped out at me immediately. It was a quote by Kathy Sierra under the post “The Best User Experiences are Enchanting.” Katy’s quote is as follows:

The best user experiences are enchanting. They help the user enter an alternate reality, whether it’s the world of making music, writing, sharing photos, coding, or managing a project.

and my response:

I totally agree…when enchantment is what the user wants or needs. In many other cases the best user experiences are invisible. The people we design for are often delighted by simply accomplishing their intended goals. We as designers and UX practitioners are commonly guilty of creating disruptions along the way. In my experience, the most successful user experiences are defined at the overlap of business goals/objectives and user wants/needs. Leaning in one direction or the other is suboptimal. Enchantment sometimes fits perfectly in that overlap but its not as often as we might like to believe. Just ask your users :)

So go give InspireUX a look. Its a great concept with potential to add a lot to our community.

Andrew Hinton wrote a great piece over on Boxes and Arrows about Personas and the Role of Design Documentation. I responded over there but thought it was also worth sharing here.

Andrew:

Thanks for taking the time to share your perspective. Obviously a lot of thought went into this piece. Couple of comments to add.

1) Cooper’s approach to personas works well for Cooper however it doesn’t necessarily transfer to the rest of us working in our varied environments with myriad different partners and stakeholders.

2) The 37signals thoughts on designing for oneself are noted. I am familiar with this line of thinking and believe it works for some. I refer to this approach as Designer-Centered Design. My personal preference is to practice User-Centered Design. Here’s the continuum as I see it.

Design for Myself (hit or miss)
I am the user (good)
I asked the User (better)
I Observed the User (best)

Like many folks who’ve been in the this field for a while I started in product design and software before the Internet blossomed. I have always been a staunch believer in User-Centered Design even before I knew what it was. Designing software using a UCD methodology meant designing for the required user groups and involving them in the process from beginning to end. The end result was a designed product guided and approved by the people who would use it. Personas were not really necessary.

That all changed when individual software products were adopted and used by masses of people. Suddenly it became impossible to design for and involve all the user groups in the process. It was personas that allowed us to construct archetypal users from these masses. These personified users were developed in a way that allowed us to design for their needs and simultaneously meet the needs of the broader user groups.

In the beginning the personas were one off creations for a specific problem at hand. They were used by the internal team for a current project. IMO we began to run into all kinds of problems when our clients, partners and stakeholders took a liking to the personas we were creating. One the one hand this was a wonderful thing because it brought everyone together in the process. On the other hand there were several negative effects…a few include:

1) The personas were interpreted more deeply than the data behind them allowed.
2) The personas were used outside the scope of their intended use.
3) We began to make the personas more and more general to allow for mixed use which meant they were less useful for specific tasks at hand.

To this day I’m still a fan of a more rigorous approach to designing personas. I do think they can be extremely valuable tools for broader audiences and as such I have moved a bit more in the direction of generalizing them for multiple uses. I think it’s also worth noting that personas are not the end-all-be-all tool. There are times when alternative outputs from research are better suited to guide design.

In a clever move the folks over at CBS apparently leveraged a loophole in the New Mexico labor law to film a reality TV show with 40 kids during the school year. They basically declared the production a summer camp.

Premieres Wednesday September 19th at 8PM on CBS
40 children, 40 days, no adults—eager to prove they can build a better world for tomorrow in the new reality series KID NATION. Settling in Bonanza City, New Mexico, once a thriving mining town but now deserted, these kids, ages 8 to 15 and from all walks of life, will build their own new world, pioneer-style. They will confront grown-up issues while coping with the classic childhood emotions of homesickness, peer pressure and the urge to break every rule. Episodes end with a town meeting in which the kids award one child a gold star worth $20,000, all leading to the grand finale, with an unimaginable test, the biggest awards and a special surprise for every child.

All kind of potential learning for these kids and all kind of potential damage. I would anticipate they’ve mitigated most of the physical risk. That leaves room for the psychological damage. Since many of these children will go on to be famous, this will be just the beginning of the psychological stress so many child stars experience. We as a society have some strange boundaries and social norms with respect to entertainment

It seems like just the other day when Jeff Bezos quit his Wall Street job and drove across the US (PDF) searching for the perfect garage from which to start his online book selling venture. In the Seattle suburbs Amazon.com was born. It didn’t take long until Bezos was certain that Amazon.com would sell everything online.

Now just a few years later (OK so maybe it’s a decade but it seemed like just a few years) I am writing this blog post with my PHP-based blog software complete with Amazon.com plug-in.

Not only are all of Amazon’s products available at my fingertips but I can recommend them to my readers with just a couple-o-clicks.

As if that weren’t enough, I get a referral payment every time a reader makes a purchase.

You’ve come a long way Bezos!

User Sciences and Experience Research. Get it! USER

Looks like an interesting position.

Position Announcement: Senior Manager, User Sciences and Experience Research, IBM Almaden Research Center

The department of Computer Science (www.almaden.ibm.com/cs) at the IBM Almaden Research Center (www.almaden.ibm.com) seeks candidates for Senior Manager of the User Sciences and Experience Research (USER) group. Almaden’s USER group consists of 30 scientists and engineers. Current areas of research include activity-centric computing and collaborative work, new forms of interfaces and healthcare IT interaction, social and relationship-oriented systems, user interface development for large and complex data management systems, intelligent and social scripting interfaces, next-generation email systems, new content protection technologies, and new personal computer system security, backup, and restore techniques.

The Senior Manager must have the passion and leadership skills essential for maximum impact in industrial research. We aim to advance both IBM’s
future capabilities and markets as well as the scientific fields. Responsibilities include enhancing the department’s reputation, finding routes to market for research ideas and results, representing the department to the IBM company and its customers, advancing the department members’ careers, and motivating them to excel in their work. The successful candidate should have demonstrated success or potential in these areas. The ideal candidate would possess a deep understanding of the human-computer interaction research area.

Please contact search committee member Tom Moran and Shumin Zhai or other members of IBM Almaden at CHI 2007 or send an email to (tpmoran@us.ibm.com, zhai@us.ibm.com) if you are interested or would like to make a recommendation.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.

The IBM Research Division conducts scientific research and develops technologies and processes for use with IBM Products and customer applications. IBM Research has produced leading contributions to the technology underlying IBM’s product portfolio, as well as to the world of science and the entire IT industry. For more information go to www.ibm.com/research

I’m sure this story will be blogged to death before I can hit publish but I just can’t resist! Some things just never cease to amaze me.

FORT WORTH — The missing clock didn’t stop postal customer Al Cunningham from noticing the amount of time spent waiting for service.

“It’s always long here,” said Cunningham, 49, an insurance adjuster and former postal employee who was standing in line at the Watson Post Office in Fort Worth.

The Watson Post Office is one of the nation’s 37,000 post offices in which clocks have been removed from retail areas as part of a “retail standardization program” launched last year. The effort is designed to give the public-service areas a more uniform appearance, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported in Thursday editions.

“We want people to focus on postal service and not the clock,” said Stephen Seewoester, Dallas spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service.

At the Fort Worth post office, the hook that once held up the small battery-powered clock now protrudes from a plaster wall. The clock was taken down months ago.

A customer-service expert at Texas A&M University was not impressed with the decision to take down the timepieces.

“It’s silly,” said Leonard Berry, holder of the M.B. Zale Chair in Retail and Marketing Leadership. “I guess they think people don’t have watches.”

Now to be fair, removing the clocks will likely change the perception of wait time for some folks. For others they may miss an appointment because they waited in line too long or simply skip the process all together.

Time has certainly become a precious resource for most people. Unfortunately the business community has been slow to respond–at least in a balanced way. Take your local family medical practitioner. They expect their patients to arrive promptly for their appointments yet they feel completely comfortable leaving the same patients sit in a waiting room for 45 minutes past the appointment time without an acknowledgment or explanation. The message they send is simple. Our time is important but yours is not. No I’m not bitter ;-)

An oldie but a goodie–my take on user experience as it relates to business.

interesting perspectives from a few others…

Nice UX overview by Kevin Mireles. A few holes and discrepencies but still nice.

Webword interview with Jesse James Garret author Elements of User Experience.

IBM Ease of Use folks answer the question: What is user experience design?

Nice PDF on User Experience as Corporate Imperative over at Hesketh. Very close to my personal definition of User Experience

What Is User Experience?
User experience is the sum of all your users’ interactions with your company, its services, and its products.

UXmatters has their definition of UX:

What Is User Experience?

user experience design
User experience design takes a holistic, multidisciplinary approach to the design of user interfaces for digital products. It integrates interaction design, industrial design, information architecture, visual interface design, instructional design, and user-centered design, ensuring coherence and consistency across all of these design dimensions. User experience design defines a product’s form, behavior, and content.

user experience
Encompasses all aspects of a digital product that users experience directly—and perceive, learn, and use—including its form, behavior, and content. Learnability, usability, usefulness, and aesthetic appeal are key factors in users’ experience of a product.

UX
Acronym—Our favorite acronym for user experience.

I’ve made some startling discoveries this week and felt like I needed to share them right away. First of all it appears Web Site Design Impacts Online Sales!

“When potential buyers come from a search marketing program and land on your site, it is important to make sure they know where to go and how to get the discounts you advertised,” said Jimmy Duval, director of e-commerce products for Yahoo Small Business.

As the dust settles on this latest season’s holiday shopping data, there is yet one more issue to consider before this time next year: conversions.

Conversions!? is this a fancy new buzz word? Has anyone heard this term before?

The recent release of the Top 40 Online Retail Satisfaction Index, a study produced by ForeSee Results and FGI Research, revealed that consumer satisfaction with most of the top 40 retail Web sites dropped over the holiday season. In fact, overall consumer satisfaction is down 4 percent from earlier in 2005.

Beyond higher holiday expectations for lower merchandise prices, the concept of designing for conversions — which refers to the percentage of site visitors who actually make an online purchase — is finding an audience with savvy online retailers. That’s because they know that while over 70 percent of e-shoppers think shopping online is easier than shopping offline, Web design played a key role in 2005 online holiday spending.

Second, it appears Bad Online Shopping Experiences Are Bad For Business!

A frustrating online shopping experience can negatively impact consumers’ opinion of a business overall, and the spillover can impact brick and mortar stores as well, according to a national consumer web survey.

Negative online shopping experiences can be bad for business, says a national consumer survey.

Allurent Inc., in a recent Web study, said 55 percent of consumers surveyed said a frustrating online shopping experience negatively impacts their overall opinion of that retailer. Nearly 33 percent said they may stop shopping at the retailer’s brick and mortar store as well.

The 2005 Holiday Shopping: Online Customer Experience Survey revealed 82 percent of respondents said they would be less likely to return to a site where they had a frustrating shopping experience. As more consumers flock to the Web to make purchases, retailers are putting more at risk.

So is it just me or did we have this knowledge ten years ago? I’m puzzled that folks are writing and researching these topics as if the last decade never happened.