Author: Five Sketches

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Researching usability research

I’m conducting ethnographic research into how usability analysts regard usability research.

How will I conduct this research?

How will I conduct this research? I’m conducting a form of community-based participatory research, so members of the community—the research subjects—will help me set the questions or lines of inquiry and will influence the research methods. This is appropriate since I’m researching people who research—people who likely have a greater awareness of research epistemology and the range of methods that can be used.

Want to participate?

If you have conducted any usability research at all, and you want to participate, please contact me by commenting. (Look for theimmediately below.) These comments are private. I’ll be at the 2009 UPA conference in Portland this week, June 8-12, if you want to meet in person.

Replies so far: 3. I have slots for only 8 more.

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Fat finger fone oops backspace

How tiny does the keyboard on a handset or smartphone need to be?

Data-entry trouble for fat fingers

If you ask me, I’d say: “Not anywhere near as tiny as they are.”

I’d also say: “If you make an app for iTouch or iPhone, ensure that the keyboard flips into a larger, wider version when users rotate the device on its side.”

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Photos help user personas succeed

If your user persona includes an image, which type of image helps the team produce designs that are more usable?

frank-long-style-user-persona-pic

The illustration on the left?  Or the photo on the right?

According to Frank Long’s research paper, Real or Imaginary: The effectiveness of using personas in product design, photos are better than illustrations. Teams whose user personas include a photograph of the persona produce designs that rate higher when assessed with Nielsen’s heuristics for UI design.

Frank Long compared the design output of three groups, drawn from his students at National College of Art and Design (NCAD) in Ireland, in a specific design project. Over the five-week project, two groups used user personas of different formats. One group was the control group, so they worked without user personas. The experiment looked for differences in the heuristic assessments of their designs.

Photos—versus illustrations—are one of the ways I’ve engaged project teams with the user personas that I researched and wrote for them. Here’s a teaser:

A card game to help an Agile software team learn about their product’s user personas.
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Last century’s disk-folder-file legacy

My friend Donna, who is in her 50s, asked me to help her with her photos. (Donna is not her real name.)

Here are the things Donna wanted to do:

  • Move photos from the camera’s memory card to somewhere else.

    • Previously, when the camera’s memory card was full, Donna would delete unwanted photos by using the camera’s delete function. At some point she wouldn’t want to delete any more photos, so she’s replace the memory card.

  • Use the digital photo frame that she received last Christmas.

    • She once removed the digital photo frame from the package, but never plugged it in. She had no idea how to get photos into the digital photo frame.

  • Show her photos to her friend, Barbie, but she doesn’t know how.

    • She’s seen other people use a slideshow-style photo viewer, but Donna doesn’t know this feature starts by default when she clicks a photo. Without any photos on her laptop, she hasn’t had the opportunity to discover this.

    Photo and Fax Viewer

This is not a simple problem. I showed Donna how to plug in her camera’s memory card to the laptop. I showed her the My Folders folder, how to create subfolders, how to multi-select and rename photos from her camera, and then move them into a folder on her laptop. And I showed her how to use a USB drive to load photos into her digital photo frame. Since I’m a good instructor, I used scenarios (“You go to Barbie’s house. How will you show her your photos?”) and, after she learned each task, I gave her the chance to confirm what she learned by demonstrating the task. We did this repeatedly.

The next day, I got a Facebook message from Donna saying that her photos were nowhere to be found. Her adult daughter later confirmed that the photos had been unintentionally deleted.

Donna’s not stupid. During our one-hour informal session, she knew to ask performance-oriented questions. For example:

  • How do I get here, next time?

Translated into Windows XP jargon, her question was:

  • How do I start Windows ExplorerWindows Explorer, to view my files?

Exploring files is alien to people who haven’t done it before. Dragging-and-dropping is easily grasped. Creating folders is manageable. Folder hierarchies (putting one folder inside another folder) takes longer to grasp. When it comes to mapping the objects in the GUI to physical objects like the camera and the laptop’s hard disk, it’s a challenge.

Since I’m an expert user of Windows Explorer, throughout our informal training session I kept wondering: “Am I showing Donna the way Microsoft intended a novice to work with files?” I tried to show her the easiest possible way to manage her photos.

I feel awful that Donna lost her photos, and it’s a good reminder for me that not every user is an expert user. Except for the products we use daily, most of us are perpetual intermediates—we’re people who master certain skill areas and then continually backslide due to our intermittent use. With every software upgrade, we’re transfer users—people who know conceptually what they want to do, but who cannot get it done in the new interface. With every first experience, we become novices again—people who don’t know what’s possible and may not be able to put our questions into words. People who lose their work, waste time, and mess things up.

If it happens to one user, that’s too bad. If it happens to lots of users, it that’s not the user’s fault; it’s a design problem. The thing is—and before you conclude that my point is “Windows is poorly designed”— Donna uses Windows XP, which was released in October of 2001. That means Windows XP would have been designed last century. The imagination and research needed to foresee how an operating system would be used 10 years into the future is staggering. And, even if you could have predicted that, some of your options might have been restricted by the legacy code (existing programs) you inherited.

Actually, it sounds like fascinating and challenging work. It also has me thinking that there’s something to the built-in obsolescence of SaaS. But most of all, I’m thinking this model of files, folders, and disks needs to be examined closely with an eye to improving usability.

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Informing what you design and build

I was recently invited to join a design-specification review for a feature I’ll call Feature X.

As I listened to the presentation, I thought: “There are pieces missing from this spec.” When the time came for questions, I asked about the project’s scope. “Your spec is titled Feature X, but I see very little X described in this document. What does X mean to you?” Sure enough, there was a gap between the title of the design specification and the content of the design specification. And the gap was deliberate, on the part of the Development team.

What we're building

The company in question makes software, not cars or bicycles, but the gap between the spec’s title page and the spec’s content was just as great as the one in the illustration. The company’s potential customers say they want Feature X. The Development team says they only have the resources to build Feature Non-X. Non-X is missing some of the key features that define the X experience.

Except for its sleight-of-hand usefulness to sales staff, Feature Non-X may be a non-starter. But there’s one more thing to tell you:

  • Customers say they want Feature X, but the vast majority of users who already have Feature X, don’t use it.

Apparently—I say “apparently” because the evidence is anecdotal—one reason customers who have a competitor’s X don’t use it is because X is complicated to set up and complicated to use. This is, of course, a golden opportunity to make a simple, usable feature that provides only what customers will use.

If this small company is lucky, their Feature Non-X will sell well and the company will leap-frog their Feature-X competitor. With a little marketing- or ethnographic research, the company would have some certainty about why Feature X is requested but not used—and the team would have information to help them design Non-X. Unfortunately, a lack of resources may leave the team’s designer and developers guessing, and the company will have to take this uncertainty in stride.

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Twitter whining or shared experiences?

Recently, one of the new-media gurus characterised Twitter as a place where people whine about the annoying or unexpected things that happen to them, in microblogs of 140 characters or less. Here are some examples:

  • davidcrow tweeted “You can’t blame a guy for trying.” Ugh, you wasted 90 minutes of my day dude, and for trying to waste my time I blame YOU!
  • scottallen tweeted: RT @Mike_Wesely “Twitter has their heads up their butts” @replies still not fixed.
  • feather tweeted: To the girl on my left as I turned to swim back: you weren’t supposed to be there—your fault my hand went into your bathing suit, not mine.
  • sladner tweeted: Omnigraffle, what was life like before I met you? Did people really have to nudge objects using CTRL-Arrow?
  • dezign999 tweeted: Plastic container opener fail? http://twitpic.com/5y64d
  • TheDaveCarlson tweeted: sony email fail… i only need to send one. come on server!
  • jessmcmullin tweeted: I’ve never heard of a customer happy with Vaio support

The people I pay attention to on Twitter usually post positive or informative messages. But there’s nothing wrong with a little griping. We can all relate to a situation that’s gone wrong. Twitter is about shared experiences through a social network.

It’s often also about products, services, user experience, and design. In order, the above tweets say things about salespeople, Twitter, lifeguarding oversight, Omnigraffe, OpenIt scissors, and Sony’s site. Two thirds of these name or link to the company or the product in the message. And they do so via a social network.

Social networking is the equivalent of a reception. It’s a roomful of people, some of whom you know, some of whom you don’t. At this reception, the chatting happens asynchronously and it’s entirely free of geography. This is important to understand, because it’s the kind of world in which and for which we’re designing and building software and websites. Anyone, anytime, can comment on our products and sites, and others can search for—and be influenced by—those opinions. Consumers can get opinions from people they don’t know about a product or service, before they buy. For example, you can find opinions about a phone company by using these keywords in a Twitter search

or by visualizing the keywords or tags that people type in their Twitter messages about the phone company. Check this tag cloud for tweets that contain the words “Telus” and “phone”. Are the tags positive? negative? neutral?

A tag cloud of words that appeared in tweets from 2009 that contained the words “Telus” and “phone”. The tag cloud was generated by the service ouTwit.me.

Would any of this influence my decision to purchase a mobile-phone contract from Telus?

Finally, just to show there’s nothing new under the sun, here’s a blog post that has already said a few of the things that I just thought of.

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How many user personas?

If you’re creating user personas, How-To articles often tell you that you only need two or three personas at most. That’s fine for most web-design projects. However, if you are working on an enterprise-wide system that has modules for different types of professionals who each perform distinct and substantial tasks, then you will have a larger number of user profiles.

How big is the feature set? Imagine a product suite the size of Microsoft® Office that actually consists of very different pieces: Excel, Word, Access, PowerPoint, and more. Usually, the only persona who is involved with every module of a suite is someone like Ivan the IT administrator, whose tasks are very different from most users.

That may sound obvious, but I really struggled for a while with the notion that I was “doing it wrong” because I couldn’t squeeze the user roles and needs into a mere three user personas—or five, or seven, for that matter. When you have a dozen user personas, it’s challenging to keep them all apart, but most teams only need a few at a time. Likely, the only people who need to know all the user personas are on the user-experience and product-management teams. And the alternative—to have a catch-all user persona whose role is to “use the software”—is of no help at all.

If, by chance, you find you need many user personas, then beware once the projects wrap up and the teams turn to their next projects. They may have incorrectly learned to begin a project by creating user personas (“…well, that’s what we did last time…!”) instead of re-using and tweaking the existing user personas. [Not everyone agrees with re-use; see the comments.]

User personas will influence your product design and affect how people throughout Development and Marketing think, strategically and tactically, about their work. So you need to get the user personas right. Getting a series of user personas reviewed—not rubber-stamped but mindfully critiqued—is a challenge; nobody ever makes time to do it well. Here’s my solution: after you research users and then write your draft user personas, review them together with some subject-matter experts, Marketing staff, and developers, in a barn-raising exercise. Pack them all into one afternoon for the initial review. Then meet the first Friday of the month until you have agreement about each user persona. During one such meeting, one of my subject-matter experts said to another: “Oh, this user persona is just like [a customer named H—]!” The user persona was so on-target that that it reminded her of someone I had never met or researched. That was a nice way to learn that I got it right.

For detailed How-To advice on developing user personas, try these readings:

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Learning from a poke in the face

During usability testing, I’m always fascinated to see how creatively users misinterpret the team’s design effort. I’ve seen users blame themselves when our design failed, and I’ve seen users yell at the screen because our GUI design was so frustrating.

One Wednesday, over a decade ago, the tables were turned.

I unintentionally “agreed” to let Facepoke—that social-networking site—invite everyone with whom I’d ever exchanged e-mail. Think about all the people you may have exchanged e-mail with. Former bosses and CEOs. Your kid’s teachers and the principal, too. People you used to date. Prospective business partners, or people you’ve asked for work but who turned you down. Your phone company, car-rental company, bank, and insurance company. Government agencies. The person you just told “I’m too busy to volunteer,” and your teammates from that course in 2005. Your e-mail records are full of people that you simply wouldn’t want on your Facepoke page.

How could I be so stupid?

See paragraph 1:  User blames self for poor design.

Facepoke had been interrupting my flow for several days, offering to help me find Friends by examining my Gmail records.

  1. I gave in, chose three Friends, and clicked Invite.

    2. The screen flashed, but the list was still there.

  2. I clicked Invite again.

    3. Then came the moment of horror: I saw that the list had been changed! Switched! It was now a list of every e-mail address in my Gmail account that was not already associated with a Facepoke account.

    With that second click, I had “agreed” to let Facepoke invite everyone with whom I had ever exchanged e-mail. There was no confirmation, no “Invite 300 people? Really?!?”

  3. I sought in vain for a way to Undo.

With each passing minute, I thought of more and more people who would have received this inappropriate inivitation to join me on Facepoke.

FacepokeWhy wasn’t there a confirmation?

See paragraph 1:  User emotes in frustration.

Note to self: Always do better than this

In my usability- and design work, I will continue to ask: “What’s the worst that can happen?” I will promote designs that prevent the worst that can happen. I will not present two apparently identical choices back to back, one of little consequence, one of great consequence. I will allow users to control their account and to Undo or recover from their unintended actions. I will not make users feel like they’ve been misled.

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The business case for design: ROI

Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path explained his view that customer experience is an investment, not a cost, in an article this week on Harvard Business Publishing’s site.

I adapted one of the “linking elephants” illustrations in the Merholz article by adding another row of boxes and text to illustrate what Merholz says: it is design that motivates people to modify their behaviour. I also added an ROI or return-on-investment calculation.

merholz-linking-elephants

Design makes the difference. By “design” I don’t just mean how it looks; I’m including the mental model (how the site visitors or users think the site meets their needs), the workflow and interaction (how users complete the task), the experience (including how users feel about using the site), and the prototyping and formative usability testing needed to validate the proposed changes. Your business case needs to include the cost of all this design work.

Making a business case can be intimidating, but the above illustration shows that it’s conceptually easy. In your business case, you predict the benefit to the company of a project, using the best estimates you can come up with. What would be your organisation’s goal? What behavioural change on the part of site visitors moves you toward that goal? What is that behaviour worth, either in revenue or in reduced costs? How many site visits do you get per week? What’s the potential impact to your organization of redesigning part of your site? After you implement the new design, you use summative testing and comparisons to get feedback on the assumptions of your business case.

I recommend reading Merholz’ article on the Harvard Business Publishing.