Am a big fan of the Financial Times and came across this great article on design “How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company” by Robert Brunner, Stewart Emery, Russ Hall. (This is the link-http://www.ftpress.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1235623 ). I find this great article very interesting and though we are far gone with our various projects, it’s not too late to make amendments out of the information gathered from the first round of usability. “When it’s all said and done, your customer doesn’t care about your process. In the end, none of this matters if the design experience is wrong”. This quote reiterates the fact that all our effects will be in vain unless you critically analyze and take steps to solve problems that came up during your usability data collection stage. The case of Motorola Razr cell phone mentioned in the article still bring back memories of that phone when it first came out in the year 2005 but where is the Razr now. Unlike the Razr, Apple has been able to continue with that success. You will all bear with me that apple users just fall in love with their products so much that they find it difficult switching to other brands. And that confirms the quote “Effective design establishes the emotional relationship you develop with a brand through the total experience, to which a service or product provides a portal.”

“Design is everyone’s job. Doing good design takes more than good designers. It takes a commitment from everybody in the company—soup to nuts, end to end.”

This article takes us virtually through everything we have learned both in EDIT 730 last through to EDIT 752 this semester. This is purely design through observation of the user experience. I hope you enjoy the article.

Your comments?

As we have been working on usability testing this semester I have realized how much better many websites would be if usability testing had been done. Another office where I work is implementing a new site which no one in the office likes. I asked if any usability testing had been done and the answer was no. Big mistake!

I thought it would be interesting to see what information was out there on testing websites. I found an article called “OJR’s ‘five guide’ to do-it-yourself website usability testing” by Laura Ruel and Nora Paul. http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/070802ruel/ (They also have a link to the http://www.usability.gov/process.html step-by-step usability guide which is a flowchart for usability.) Ruel and Paul believe that you can do usability with only five people in five hours and in five steps. They say that five people can uncover 80% of problems. It’s a quick article to read and touches on much of what we have been doing this semester. Do you think that usability testing can really be done well using the ‘five guide?’ What do you think you have to have to make this work? Is it missing anything?

Chapter 14 provides a thorough overview of competitive research, and it should sound familiar as we conducted competitive research last fall in EDIT 730. We’re seeing once again the “R” word, research. Getting immersed in the subject matter is key to developing and asking appropriate questions. Asking and answering basic questions such as “what is the gap in the marketplace” or “what makes our product necessary” or even “how does it succeed where existing products fail or have significant shortcomings” help get us started but are not sufficient in and of themselves.

It was interesting to visit the BNET Business Network at http://www.bnet.com/2403-13241_23-60253.html and share their perspective on competitive research.
They define step one of the competitive research process as “Establish the Strategic Problem.” The goal is to define the question before beginning the search for answers. Further down under the “Big Idea” they describe SWOT Analysis and Five Forces Analysis as two of the basic frameworks for competitive analysis. Do these tools differ significantly from the processes described by Kuniavsky? Do they have utility for the type of competitive analysis we conduct as part of instructional design?

Log files and Customer Support:

Reading chapter 13 from Kuniavsky regarding information about your customer is usually an area that is overlooked, especially with small websites, however large corporations really use this information on how their new look and feel for a whole redesign will look based on feedback from certain area.

I maintain a few small websites for friends that have small businesses and I have show them how to use the back-end or log files to see where there users are going and what pages they like to visit and so on and it is helpful. My previous work I was at this huge co-op of electric business and this was very important for all decisions regarding .com area of business, for example they had a blog that no one used and after hiring a specific person just to answer blogs was let go because it was not necessary to have it on their website. On the other hand this company has a section called NRECA Youth tour and it was popular that more media features were added to retain the attention of this audience: http://www.youthtour.coop/.

Feedbacks on websites are also useful sometimes as a designer you do not want to hear anyone else�s comment because you think your design is the best but it is not and sometimes you need to get feedback from various groups , being peers, or the public.

When you create a website everything makes sense to you because you know it but another person does not, obtaining an outside person that has no knowledge of your site is a great idea.

A great site that keep track of where you been and what you looked at is http://www.amazon.com I am always amazed whenever I log on to this site and see what I might like or find interesting suggestions , like how do you know?

There was a brief information regarding AOL and how they keep track of who clicks the banner of advertisement and I found this interesting a few years ago I did research of the topics of web banners and found out there is an Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) http://www.iab.net/iab_products_and_industry_services/1421/1443/1452

I was surprised I could not believe this but it makes sense as designers we need to keep and maintain certain measurements, and what great information do they have about the measurements of the banner and also how long a interactive banner should be (15 seconds).
I thought this was interesting.

Great places where you see this apply newspapers that are online:
http:/www.washingtonpost.com

Thanks

Rossana Villalobos

User profiles and personas (referenced in Chapter 7, Kuniavsky) were always interesting to me (having been in advertising and had the experience of designing tailored messages to a target audience).

How useful have personas or user profiles been to you, either in this course or in a position at work? Consider the following resources:

http://www.nycupa.org/past_events/razorfish-2003-05-20.pdf

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/personas-and-the

The first resource is a .pdf authored by two professionals from the Usability Professionals Association, the second is a link to an article by Senior Information Architect Andrew Hilton.

Reflecting on this topic reminds me of a specific situation at work where I needed to collaborate with our IT team to help develop an application interface for our users. Unfortunately, due to cost/time/personnel limitations, we weren’t able to collect extensive information on the user’s lifestyle, needs, and usage trends, etc. but were able to identify the following characteristics before development began:

• Some demographic/geographic location and environment information data – users were spread out over a distance and relied on somewhat different processing requests, so the application had to consider global and local needs
• Some specifics on user needs/wants, but this information changed/evolved over time
• Only minimal data on usage trends, with the potential of collecting additional information through surveys, etc. in the future

As a result, we had to go back and adjust/tweak different aspects of the user interface based on trial and error. Have you experienced similar situations where you needed to design training or software for users and did not have the necessary time, etc. to conduct thorough pre-development research? If so, what happened? Lately it seems even more important to obtain this information accurately and correctly the first time due to shrinking budgets (especially within the government).

Finally, have you ever needed to adjust your user profiles or personas due to internal/external circumstances, and how did those changes affect your training design?

The New Media Consortium releases the Horizon Report annually:
http://www.nmc.org/podcast/2009-horizon-report.
It’s not a survey per se, but a consensus report of experts, created on a wiki, using iterative cycles based on Delphi methodology. (Wikipedia has a nice definition of the Delphi Method. The Horizon Report methods section starts on page thirty.)

A survey would probably not be the best method for this type of research, as it deals with predictions of future behavior, rather than the record of past or current behaviors. The project’s Delphi methods include cycles of voting. I think that would invite group think and other forms of bias. But then, haven’t we all taken surveys where we felt those conducting the survey were attempting to obscure the true purposes of the study? To me, the complete transparency of the entire process seems like a refreshing alternative. I wonder how productive it might be to consider including carefully selected users in part of the survey creation process in a
similarly transparent way, rather than just inviting them to take an already prepared survey. You might be missing questions that are more relevant for users. In other words, do we always have to ask “Does this do what we want?” Shouldn’t we more often ask “What DO you want?”

By the way, the unfiltered wiki has many more interesting links for trend watchers: http://horizon.nmc.org/wiki/Watch_Lists

My favorite among these was this suggestion that the internet will become “pragmatic,” rather than a “semantic” web:
http://www.we-magazine.net/volume-01/ten-futures_neu/

There is no doubt that social media websites like facebook, myspace and linkedin are tremendous resources for marketers, developers and instructional designers who are trying to discover more about their users. Take my facebook page for instance, on it (and like most other users on this site), I have posted personal details about what I like, where I work, what my hobbies are and who my friends are. Privacy, in the world of social media, simply does not exist and for those working on usability testing, social media is a gold mine of rich data.

Abbey Klaassen of Advertising Age magazine explains how many usability developers/designers are now looking at the social media space as a customer relationship management (CRM) tool.

Consider the example Klaassen uses about a successful grassroots fan page on facebook for fans of Nikon brand cameras remembering the importance of customer support and log files. This large community is a place for Nikon owners to discuss, chat, post pictures, videos of all things Nikon (all of this, I might add was not even created by Nikon). So not only is Nikon able to learn about how their customers use their product, they can also tap into the other bits of helpful information from the rest of the users profile page (location, age, sex, career etc). What is even more helpful is that companies are now able to use the inherent metrics features in sites like facebook and myspace to learn everything they’d ever need to know about their users. We are now able to learn the number of visits, time spent, and even enthusiasm based on how much a user posts.

What is clear is that social media is not going away, and with that means that CRM is sticking around too. In fact, Gartner announced that worldwide customer relationship management grew 23% in 2007 totaling 8.1 billion dollars. No doubt, CRM vendors are closely watching social media sites develop as noted by Sharon Mertz, research director at Gartner; “Looking forward, social networking, collaborative technologies and social software are producing a major impact on the CRM market. Enterprises face increasing challenges to determine how best to harness these trends and technologies for growth, both internally and in their customer service strategies.”

This is tremendous news for usability testing and marketing, but what does it mean to the user and the user’s privacy? It all comes back to that harmless word that many people may not understand: cookies. In his book titled “The Cult of the Amateur”, Andrew Keen suggests that as these sites become more and more popular, the user loses more and more privacy. Every time you perform a search on google (and lets face it, we all do), Google learns a little bit more about you. How? Through small bits of data called cookies that establish unique information about a users activity on web sites. Google Yahoo and AOL, who have no legal responsibility to purge old data, keep recor”ds of what subjects we search, what products we buy, what sites we surf.” Keen predicts that not too far away, we may simply do a search of “What was Joe Smith doing at 1:30 on Saturday” and get an accurate prediction.

Sources:
Abbey Klaassen, Advertising Age Magazine (only available through lexis nexus login)
Gartner: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=715308
Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: http://www.amazon.com/Cult-Amateur-MySpace-user-generated-destroying/dp/0385520816/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1237338807&sr=8-1
Nikon Fan Page group on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?sid=08b929c95f44da73df0bdb4c56d0e6e3&gid=2345858051

I was reading the following website http://www.usability.gov/pdfs/chapter18.pdf when I came across this discussion of distinguishing between severity and frequency in user research. I’ve included a portion of that discussion here as I think it is important to talk about during this first round of user research for our projects.

“The number of users affected determines the frequency of a problem. To be most useful, the severity of a problem should be defined by analyzing difficulties encountered by individual users. Both frequency and severity data can be used to prioritize usability issues that need to be changed. For example, designers should focus first on fixing those usability issues that were shown to be most severe. Those usability issues that were encountered by many participants, but had a severity rating of ‘nuisance,’ should be given much less priority.”

This is similar to the discussion we were having a couple weeks ago with Dr. Williams van Rooij regarding distinguishing between the must haves and the nice to haves. As we all doing our research are you having to assess the severity vs frequency in the data you are gathering? Where are you focusing your energy?

http://www.webpagecontent.com/arc_archive/124/5/

I found a nice little article, Web site usability testing: recommended procedures, by Rachel McAlpine. Rachel McAlpine (BA Hons, Dip Ed) is known internationally for her work in promoting quality web content. Since 1996, Rachel has been an independent consultant in all aspects of online content. Her article, (really a ‘how to’ paper, deals with many of the things we have been involved in as we have worked with usability testing on our projects. I decided to use it here because I am curious. Many of the statements she makes in the article seem very commonsense and easy to understand. Since most, if not all, of our groups have finished the usability test stage, I would like your opinions after reading the article. Is this how you handled the task? If not, what did you do differently? Did it work?
Over the years, I have been involved in usability tests on many occasions. Sometimes they went well and we derived good information; sometimes, we could not seem to reach any type of conclusion. I have always been fascinated how the product is influenced by these tests, and how the focus and perspective of the project can be radically affected. Did this happen to your project?
After reading this article, is there anything you would have done differently when conducting your usability tests? Do you think the information in this article might help you the next time?

http://www.webpagecontent.com/arc_archive/124/5/

My apologies to Nancy for missing this earlier. – Brenda

I found a very helpful online resource that is timely for groups, (like mine) that are planning on conducting a focus group for one of their data collection methods. This resource, entitled “How to Conduct a Focus Group” by Eliot Associates, provides guidelines and checklists to help prepare and facilitate the focus group. It discusses the three types of questions that you should plan beforehand and they include:
1. Engagement questions – These questions help the participants relax and become comfortable with each other so that they will be forthcoming with their feedback.
2. Exploration questions – These questions are geared toward the purpose of the focus group, whatever is being discussed or evaluated.
3. Exit questions – These questions are aimed to get participants to summarize, expound on or prioritize the feedback.
In general, questions should be short, focused, open- ended and non-threatening.

The resource also had good suggestions for the facilitator
on setting ground rules and for conducting the focus group.

http://cp0.ipnshosting.com/~focusgro/documents/How_to_Conduct_a_Focus_Group.pdf