Extra! Extra!

Mark Ryan, VP of Client Services and COO, and Meg Davis, User Experience Strategist, are speaking today at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in San Francisco. We’ll be covering 10 Techniques in 50 Minutes – Using Web Analytics to Inform Website Redesigns. Come by to see how we’ve applied analytics, SEO reporting, and user experience techniques to improving web experiences.

If you’re in the session, let us know what you like by tweeting @Extractable with #eMetrics.

These are 5 of the user experience books that have helped to shape my creative practice and that I find myself going back to for inspiration. May they bring inspiration to your user experience practice, too!

Read up!

• Sketching User Experiences (Bill Buxton) – I love Buxton’s style of writing in this book and the accessible metaphors he uses. There are some beautiful photographs and examples of actual sketches, prototypes, and approaches to problems. He’s not afraid to expose the process and the “dirty” work that shows how ideas unfolded.
• Change by Design (Tim Brown) – You know when you open the first page of this book that it will be something different. Brown uses a graphical flow chart table of contents to express how different ideas in the book are related to one another. As a consultant, this book has helped me understand how our agency’s engagements with an organization can go beyond just the web experiences and can truly spark process change and a change in organizational thinking.
• The Design of Everyday Things (Donald Norman) – This is a great introduction to user experience design. Norman analyzes several objects that are used in day-to-day life, showing the importance of design thinking. It truly drives home how much design thinking has gone into even the most mundane products.
• Contextual Design (Beyer & Holtzblatt) – Although a drier and more instructive book than the others listed here, this book lays out an important (and often overlooked) methodical process for discovering user needs through user research. It details out how to conduct user research, understand and see patterns in user research, and drive research directly into design. There are a lot of thoughtful insights into team dynamics and process as well.
• Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products & Services (Kim Goodwin) – This is a comprehensive book of different methods and approaches to interaction design challenges. It’s very practical for professionals and serves as a great reference instead of a front-to-back cover read. It includes some great examples from the real world and never fails to hold me accountable to hard and fast methods.

Picture Credit: http://books.google.com

You’d think with powerful digital wireframing and diagramming tools like Visio, Axure, and Omnigraffle available to me, that I’d spend most of my time on the computer clicking away. However, one of my most valued tools as a user experience designer is simply pen & paper sketching.

Why should you sketch?

• Sketching stimulates and activates the visual areas of your brain
• Sketching allows for easy abstraction of ideas so that you can focus on big concepts
• The rough format of sketches allows others to critique the big ideas you are communicating, not the way in which they are communicated
• Sketching lets you move fast through several iterations (and it’s cheap!)
• Sketching enables you to convey movement and interaction, as well as show interactions in context of an environment
• Sketching doesn’t limit you to the components in any digital stencil library

When should you sketch?

• When you’re stuck and you need to work out an idea for yourself
• When you’re introducing a complex idea and want people to focus on the idea, not the form
• When you need to build consensus within a group and can use a sketch to build off everyone’s ideas
• When you need to show the context of use around an interface or product
• When you’re dealing with an interaction or system that is novel and non-standard

What do you need to get started?

• Mead Wirebound Academie Sketchbook (or any paper you can get your hands on)
• Sharpie Extra Fine Point Permanent Marker
• No formal training is necessary, but there are opportunities like Sketchcamp that can help you get started.
• Most importantly, NO FEAR!

How do you get started? Here’s a list of a few techniques and approaches to inspire you:

• Sketch flows through screens in an interface:

• Use sketches to continually refine and iterate on one idea. Set a timer to give yourself 5 minutes to sketch in 6 boxes as fast as you can:

• Sketch scenarios of how a user will use the interface, with the focus on the context of use:

• Use sketches to test out complex interactions that are hard to prototype; instead use paper prototypes with sections of the interface cut out:

In a recent FastCo.Design article about brainstorming, Cliff Kuang discusses how criticism during group brainstorming can actually improve the flow of ideas. I agree – as long as the criticism is productive and generative. Here are 10 methods for ensuring your criticism makes ideas flow during the next design or wireframe review you attend:

1. Establish Goals First. Make sure there’s consensus around what the goal of the design, interaction, page, or product is before starting to review it.

2. Ask Questions. Ask questions to understand the intentions behind decisions. Give the designer the benefit of the doubt by asking questions like, “Did you think about…?” and “What would happen if…?”

3. Discuss only after Understanding. Ask clarifying questions readily until you feel you could explain the idea to someone else. Wait until you understand the full idea and concept before discussing changes. When you do discuss changes, build off someone else’s idea instead of going in a complete 180 direction.

4. Use Sticky Notes to Comment. Actually putting sticky notes on the design gives everyone in the group an equal opportunity to offer insight. Sticky notes are also removable and movable!

5. Move through the Design with Scenarios. Returning to scenarios brings the user to the forefront and asks, “What would the user do?”

6. Explore the Pros and Cons of Alternative Approaches. Talking about alternatives helps to eliminate assumptions and ensure that each member of the design team holds the same priorities.

7. Project the Design on a Whiteboard to Allow for Writing and Sketching in Context. This activity gets everyone up and moving during a critique and captures all of the feedback in context.

8. Compare the Design against Nielsen’s Heuristics. Heurstics serve as a great reminder checklist of basic principles of usability.

9. Use Metaphors to Express Criticism and Ideas. Metaphors can be easier to talk about objectively than the brainchild of the design team. They also focus the attention on the broader sentiment of the design.

10. Don’t Forget to be Positive! Constructive feedback is a as valuable as criticism. Plus, it shows your respect for the design team’s ideas and work.

Designing and moderating usability tests requires the specialized skills of understanding how people’s brains work. Even more so, interpreting the results from usability testing requires the specialized skill of switching between meticulous details of interaction and broad strokes of experiences across participants.

Here are 5 tips to avoiding pitfalls when interpreting usability test sessions:

1. Suspend judgment. While moderating usability tests, it’s easy for me to get caught up in the moment. I feel so close and empathetic towards each user that it’s easy to take what one person says and run with it. However, I have to remind myself that I’m not designing the system for one user or even one type of user most of the time. I force myself to suspend judgment until I can go back and review the recordings of the sessions. I recommend both video capture of the participant’s face as well as of the computer screen.
2. Look across users. As a moderator and human being, I find I have biases in terms of what I find interesting in a usability session or what I take notice of during a usability test. Having a partner in crime watching the usability test is the best insurance that our team will get unbiased results. Another good technique I’ve learned for eliminating my biases is lining each task of the usability test in a column on a spreadsheet. I go through each participant and put details from each participant’s experience in the rows corresponding to the column tasks. This way, all the participant’s details (including completion rate, portions of the task they struggled with, quotes, etc.) are lined up and easy to scan for patterns.
3. Listen, no really listen, to participants. If it is clear to us that we missed the mark on an interaction, it is very helpful to play/rewind/play/rewind the video tapes to listen to how participants talk about the interaction. It’s so valuable to see what participants do, but it’s equally valuable to understand their mental models and how they see the feature through the language they use to describe it. Recording quotes from each participant can offer some surprising insights into how to course-correct a feature to match people’s mental models.
4. Know the limitations of testing. I’m an advocate of usability testing, but I know there are limitations for how realistic it can be. Sometimes our prototype doesn’t provide the same flexibility the real system would. Sometimes we are testing something new that might change people’s workflows over time. When looking at the results of the usability test, I have to remind myself what we were testing and what we were NOT testing. This helps remove some of the confusion and noise of the data.
5. Understand trade-offs. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. As a user experience designer, there’s no such thing as a perfect design. When making decisions about what needs to change from a usability testing session, I have to remember that each feature does not exist in a vacuum. Changing the details of one feature could negatively impact another feature. Before making recommendations, I consider all the implications of changing something in the ecosystem. If there is time, iterative testing is a great way to really understand these trade-offs.

One of the primary motivations for creating personas is building consensus internally within the design and product teams about customer goals and motivations. So why do personas go wrong so often? Why do people not use the personas that you labored to create from your research? Here are 5 tips to ensure the personas you create will indeed facilitate consensus.

1. Goldilocks Principle: Use not too much, not too little, just the right amount of detail to empathize with while avoiding conflict. Persona descriptions should be dense with details from user research. However, the details need some rounding out with characteristics and traits that will help make the persona seem like a real person that the design team could get to know. The trick is restraining the use of extraneous characteristics and traits that will either distract or create conflict within the design team. Stick to the facts and sprinkle in some stories and characteristics that you saw in your user research.
2. There is no “I” in team: Develop personas as a team. You need everyone’s buy-in for personas to be effective. The best way to build this buy-in is to involve everyone in the creation process of the personas. Gather the troops around a whiteboard and start mapping out the qualitative, quantitative, and colloquial knowledge about customers. This is a great time to also fill in gaps in team member’s knowledge about the customer research that has been done.
3. Use a 360-degree view: Think about the personas from different perspectives that the business has about the customer. Personas will be better accepted by stakeholders outside of the design and product teams if they resonate with how stakeholders view their customers. I’m not implying that personas should reflect back stakeholders’ current views of customers; rather, they should tell the story of the customer interacting with the stakeholder’s business unit. For example, the Support team will be more likely to use a persona if they see the persona description talks about how the persona struggled with the online user forum. Make the persona relevant to stakeholders.
4. Average isn’t good enough: Avoid filling personas in with average demographic content. While quantitative research gives you hard numbers about behavior, qualitative research helps you understand why that behavior happens. Don’t base personas solely off of the numbers. When creating personas, use dichotic analysis to map out the range of values and behaviors seen in research. Then make sure the personas represent that range. If your personas are just the market research with a little bit of character, people will feel as if there’s nothing new and interesting to digest about customers and will de-value the personas.
5. The power of one: Keep the focus of the personas narrow. Personas take a lot of work, and it can be tempting to try to use the same persona for different websites or products. However, trying to encompass all of the company’s products or offerings with one set of personas can dilute the effectiveness of the personas. Keep the persona narrow and tailored to the relevant design and product teams, and your team members will also stay focused on the website or product at hand.

It is essential for companies to start viewing their customer’s behavior from a holistic point of view – integrating data from both online and offline channels. However, many companies lack even a complete picture of what their customers are doing online. Companies need a way to measure how customers are engaging with social media and their website.

What do social media analytics track?

• Influence (Number of Twitter Followers/Facebook Fans/etc)
• Engagement (Number of Retweets/Likes/Comments/Interactions with Content/Number of Clicks)
• Social Media ROI (Conversions from a Social Media channel or Assisted by Social Media Channel)
• Audience Demographic and Location

Here’s a review of 3 social media analytics tools that integrate with Google Analytics – so there’s not excuse not to use them!

These tools range in functionality – so they can be used for one-man social marketing ninjas or larger PR teams. No website or brand is too small for social media analytics.

This feature analysis is based on the information found on the companies’ websites:

• http://sproutsocial.com/
• http://argylesocial.com/
• http://www.socialreport.com/

Find out more about Google Analytics integration on Google Analytics’ website: http://www.google.com/analytics/apps/results?category=Social%20Media%20Analytics

As a data-driven firm, we are always looking for ways to understand exactly what people are doing on websites and what’s motivating them to look at or interact with certain parts of the website. Web analytics can give great visibility into that. However, click heatmaps give us better insight for large data sets with hundreds of interactions on any given page. Click heatmaps can tell a story that analytics or conventional usability testing never could.

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What are click heatmaps?
Click heatmaps show the aggregate frequency of clicks on a page. Have you watched any Superman lately? Superman has “heat vision powers”…and would be a great UX professional. The orange/purple/red/yellow images that Superman sees are similar to the click heatmaps that we use to analyze websites. In a place on the page where more of the visitors have clicked, the click heatmap shows deep red. In a place on the page where fewer visitors have clicked, the click heatmap shows a light blue color.

Why do click heatmaps matter?
Click heatmaps are especially good at revealing what users are drawn to interact with on a specific page. This can help us understand two things:

• What content users are looking for or are most interested in
• What components of the visual design are helping to direct users to that content and what components of the visual design are distracting users from their goals

With that understanding, we can re-order content to make the most-used content more accessible, and we can tweak visual cues.

When should click heatmaps be used?

• With any page with heavy interaction, such as heavy searching, filtering, and sorting to understand how users are using tools and interpreting information
• When discovering opportunities in a new project by running click heatmaps on a current site
• When validating that a new design is directing people to the right content

Let’s recap on the benefits of click heatmaps:

• Cost-effective: More cost-effective than eye-tracking and has a 84-88% correlation in results (http://blog.clicktale.com/2009/11/23/eye-tracking-for-everyone/)
• Time-saving: Can be generated from the current site and does not require recruiting of users
• Session playback: Many click heatmap companies also include playbacks of sessions to discover the order and time in which interactions are performed by individual visitors
• Accessible: Easy for clients to understand the data
• Contextual: Looks at interactions in context of a whole page

*Photo credited to K2_UX at http://www.flickr.com/photos/k2_ux/5497508975/in/photostream/

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