World Usability Day - November 13

World Usability Day 2008 is quickly approaching on November 13.

The theme for this year is transportation. The Sydney Chapter of UPA (Usability Professionals Association) is focusing on how to improve the design of transport systems and
infrastructure to:
• Better support the people that use them
• Move towards more sustainable forms of transport in the future

Here’s what’s on and how you can get involved:
• Guest speakers / transportation experts
• Interactive workshops & discussion questions
• Photo and design exhibition highlighting transportation challenges
and solutions

Cost: FREE!!! Just come along - no registration required
Who: Everyone is welcome (including students, usability professionals, people who work with or use transport)
When: Thursday 13 November 2008
Where: University of Technology Sydney
More information: http://tiny.cc/tML6j
Questions: events@upasydney.org

Speaking in Tongues

“Speak the users language” is a great design principle. One sure way to put customers off is to litter your communications with marketese, legalese, corporate and tech speak. You might as well be speaking in a differing language.

However of equal importance is learning to speak in business language and pitching your case at the right level. You can bet your last dollar that general managers and senior stakeholders will clamouring for the door if you start preaching about the intricate usability benefits of a specific drop shadow treatment on a button control.

Anyone reading this, will probably at some point in their career, will have experienced the uphill struggle to convince clients or colleagues about the benefits of taking time to develop a usable product. But we need to learn to practise what we preach in all dimensions. We need to take time to understand the business need, the perspective of the business manager and be able to talk to them in their language.

For a long time we have evangelised about the need to talk to users and I think that there has been a propensity amongst some practitioners to go to far in the customer direction. Of course we need to talk to customers to create good customer experiences, because without happy customers there is no business. But equally if we don’t help to improve the business situation, then especially in these financially uncertain times, then it could very well mean the end for the business.

You need to learn to understand and speak strategy. How will what you do in customer experience design contribute to achieving the strategic or project goals? You need to constantly ask yourself value you are adding for the business as well as the customer.

When you are talking to senior managers you need to always be able to tie your efforts back to their direction and measures of success. Ask if there is a justifiable business case? At the end of the day it really doesn’t matter if you’ve applied Fitt’s law correctly if your design is not facilitating the business objectives to increase sales.

Assuming the Customer Experience

I work with a lot of blue chip organisations and the one trend that has been increasingly noticeable over the last couple of years is how executive level strategies are driving increased profitability through customer experience improvements. They wax lyrical about how projects need to be customer-centric and how operationally and tactically they need to put the customer in the centre of everything.
This is great right? Well, it’s a step in the right direction. However, the problem I’m finding though is that while the like the big management schools are instructing the executives to improve their customer experience no-one has truly defined what that means or how to go about it.
At worst most of these organisations do nothing more than pay lip service to improving customer experience. Just because you mention the phrase ‘customer-centric’ in a power point deck to senior managers and include a slide on customer segmentation does not in any way mean that you are being customer centric.
So here’s my definition: “The customer experience is the process of interacting with systems* which stimulate emotions and shape perceptions to influence consumer behaviour.” (*systems can be people, processes and machines)
To be truly customer-centric and to be able to influence consumer behaviour you have to stop presuming to know what’s best for your customer and actually engage them before, during and after the process. That mandate should be applied at all levels of business from the people on the front line who are responsible for sales through to the people who plan the delivery projects that will affect the way yours customers interact with your business.

What do comics, UX and a new Google browser have in common?

So I stumbled across http://blogoscoped.com/google-chrome/ today and loved it. Well in my opinion it's hard not to like things that Scott McCloud does.
One of the reasons this resonated is because it's a technique I recently used that seemed to work really well. I was working with a client to analyse the current customer experience with a view to see what opportunities there are for improvement. When it came to presenting to the stakeholders I was really keen that we presented the full story. The problem of course is one of attention economics. To give the full details of what I found would have produced a tome of a document that would have gone unread, gathering dust on some exec's desk before it was replaced by the next consulting organisations tome. Also being a fan of Tufte and Presentation Zen I was somewhat loathed to try to condense the message into a few bullet points and risk loosing the impact of the message.
So I produced a comic strip of the current experience. There was 12 comic-styled images that told the day in the life of a customer during their interactions with my client's brand in storyboard format.
They say that a picture speaks a thousand words, so imagine what 12 little picture did to explain the situation? Without investing hardly any time at all the execs and stakeholders were quickly able to identify with their customers and see the pain points and opportunities for improvement. What's more it was an easily portable document which the stakeholders could use to communicate both up and down the command chain and make 'stuff' happen.
I particularly like Scott's illustration of the development of 'chrome' for the same reasons. It talks to everyone, not just techs and devs and it doesn't require much time investment to understand and you get multiple viewpoints in the one story.
Yey to comic books...off to the comic store to buy more

Wordsmithing

I’m just going to take a slight aside from the usual UX content and wax lyrical about words. It’s interesting how with every new life-style revolution a plethora of new words are invented to describe new world terms because the old-world syntax and etymology is no longer sufficient.
The atom-world markets are straining under the pressures of the credit crunch, yet judging by the gazillion articles I read or presentations I attend that evangelise about emerging trends, it seems there is a boundless energy and a relentless stream of new ideas for improving your real and second life, online. And with this information revolution a new vocabulary is born.
We’re all familiar with Google and how it’s a brand, verb, noun and adjective all at once, but I thought I’d share this short collection of words and phrases that I’ve come across this last two weeks:
• Digital Native – someone born AI (after internet)
• Digi-audience – a bit lame but you get the gist
• Crowd Clout – folks get together to negotiate discount or apply pressure
• Meetups – atom-world get togethers by online groupies
• Meatspace – real world
• Atom (prefix) – something real-worldy
• Infophrenics – data junkies
• Sofademics - exceeds the couch potato, they’re pop-culture junkies
• Sponges – absorb but don’t contribute to UGC
• Digital Consumer Activists – these guys got bored with Fantasy Football, they bought a real team!
• Attention Economics - it's all about your eyeballs baby

So then back to UX, what interesting challenges will arise when designing for the digital native? How can we get better, smarter, bigger and quicker in the ways that we talk to and collaborate with our digi-audience? I’d be interested in your thoughts…

There are many reasons why Lotus Notes sux...

here's 2:

• Shortcut keys provide quicker access to common functionality. Why therefore is Ctrl/Apple N associated with 'create a new database'? I send 100s of emails daily but have never used Notes to create a db once!
• Infinite, inescapable loops - I decide not to bother sending a note with a meeting acceptance, so I hit Escape (keyboard) - a universal command for 'get me the hell out of here'.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  This alert box appeared with the options:
  'Click Yes to send as is,
  Click No to send without comments,
  Click Cancel to continue editing.'
  
  I'm sorry! Didn't I just say escape? As in 'go away, I don't want to send this at all?' So I click the onscreen cancel button and go back to edit mode and when I try to close the window I get the same dialogue box. Ad infinitum. Ad nauseum! Guess what? I can't even quit the damn application without getting the same alert! I had to force quit the application to kill this continuous causal effect!
  

How to make greats ideas fall from the sky…

As a backlash from the ‘irrational exuberance ’ of the dotcom era, true innovation has been squeezed out of the process by the “immediate needs of the shareholder and the financial mindset of the senior managers” . However there is resurgence in innovation and ‘design thinking’ and having a great idea can make the difference between success and failure.
But where do great ideas come from? Well contrary to popular belief they don’t hit you like a bolt of lightening from the far side of the universe. Ideas are solutions to a problem. The problem might be a need unmet or a need met badly. So in order to generate solutions we need to understand the problem context. Some of the best ideas can happen just by actually taking note of your sensory experiences (when was the last time you truly listened to anything?) and asking child-like ‘why?’ questions.
So this morning my hubby is looking at the calendar. There’s only 5 days left in the month and he flips the calendar over, which is something that neither of us ever do normally until 3 days into the new month. He sees a family birthday on the 2nd of September, which had he not flipped the calendar, we wouldn’t have seen and we’d have been too late to send a card. Anyway the net result was he said “there should be a forgetful man’s calendar, that has a few days for the next month at the end of the current month”. OK so it’s not going to win any product design awards but it is one way of solving the problem that is not addressed in everyday thinking or design.
So before jumping into idea mode, take time to understand your problem context. If necessary frame your problem in terms of the people who are either the most impacted by the problem or the people who will benefit most from the solution. Turn this into a problem statement and see how many ‘ideas’ or ‘solutions’ you can generate…