Bigger Ideas Blog

Bigger Patterns in the Data

2011-06-27T13:37:00.000-07:00

The nature of marketing is to collect data and analyze the numbers. As a user researcher, I have reviewed endless pages and reports of this raw data to uncover that magic questions every company wants to know, "What is driving our customers' behavior? It is so easy to go down rat holes with each little piece of data. It started me thinking once again about ways to make research actionable in terms of creating a better user experience. From my experience, marketing and user experience don't collaborate much primarily because marketing is looking for different data than the behavioral data collected by user experience specialists. But, a good user experience secret is to use marketing data as an entry point for much bigger patterns in the data. From a big picture perspective, it is a chance to first re-examine the high level goals (macro insights) of the Website and discuss with the stakeholders. Having context to the data is important to understanding where opportunities exist.

1. Why does this Website exist?

2. What are the top Web strategies?

3. What do you expect users to do on your Site?

Looking deeper into the data is like examining rings on a tree trunk. First you have to look at the parts of the tree for the particular purpose they serve. The trunk of a tree serves many purposes:

· The tough fiber tubes made from cellulose that form the trunk provides support.

· The dead outer bark provides protection from weather, insects and other damage.

· Inside the trunk, various parts of the wood transport nutrients and water move the food made by the leaves back down to all the branches, and provide new wood growth year after year.

The good years and the bad years are seen in the relative width of the rings. Each ring represents a year of growth and patterns become evident. The same goes for the relativity of the data. Often times the stakeholders’ goal is to reduce support calls. It is often my job to uncover the reasons why their users were not finding their answers to their support questions on the existing site. This is like looking overall at the tree rings, based on what you see in the pattern, you can tell there was some force influencing or interfering with the growth of that tree. In the marketing data, you can also clearly see shifts in users' behavior due to changes on the Site.

The content and navigation behavior will help give more context to the story of conversion rate. Most marketers often drill down to the smallest data points, but completely miss the bigger picture.

Getting in the Mood

2010-06-18T16:06:00.000-07:00

For a designer “Mood Boards” can help a client visualize abstract concepts which are too difficult to represent through words. It usually fits into the process somewhere after wireframes (a low fidelity version of how the product elements might come together) and before higher fidelity design mockups. Elements that can be explored in the mood board include photography style, color palettes, typography, patterns, and the overall look and feel of the site. They also can help to create emotional attachment and a frame of reference as well as to identify missing cultural contexts or branches of generating or exploring new ideas.

Visual design is most definitely a part of the user experience process but it is often only utilized in a distict phase in development, usually at the end. I see the necessity of visual design as becoming a part of the whole picture. The boards could be used in context of user research focus groups to help elicit needs beyond the functional design research or they could also be used in a way to identify unknown aspects of the product and market -- to identify, research and define. Ongoing visual design engagement throughout the development lifecycle can also help to personify brand and avoid some wordy marketing speak statement. You should be able to identify your brand without a logo.

It is common for a development team to rush straight into the production of a detailed specification, without a strong understanding of user needs and the benefits that the project will deliver to the business. Mood boards can help define visual values to those elements of the product which are intangible and are not always quantified and measured. This also helps to build consensus and generate a shared vision of the product within a team.

Mood Boards, however, are not just used in design, they can be used in multiple disciplines. It is useful for big picture thinking by creating a collage of people, places and ideas with similar look and feel to represent a direction. Because it’s loose, clients won’t get hung up on details. However, some clients will want to see the detail instead, so you will have to interview or even work collaboratively together to get a sense of this. Often times it is easier to start with a list of adjectives and build multiple boards to create distinct differences. This process is a visual way to help communicate the user experience to a client who may not know how or where to begin and will help to include them into what they may consider a “magical” process.

This technique helps to facilitate:

• A defined direction

• A bridge to close the gap of unknown processes

• A saving of time and money

Flickr has a dedicated group demonstrating mood boards for inspiration:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/inspirationboards/

Utilizing Mood Boards in your next client meeting may be a useful strategy and result in a better engagement with people who relate better to a visual than to a verbal conversation. The visuals on the board will create energy paths or an interrupted path by color and contrast of graphic elements, but either one will help to facilitate better communication.

It Takes a Piazza

2010-06-02T21:43:00.000-07:00

There is an old Italian song with lyrics I have discovered through a Portland writer, Jay Walljasper, “If you don't hear voices in the piazza when you wake up in the morning, then you know something is wrong.” The buzz in the piazza is human connectivity.

In ancient Italy, the core structure of life and architecture was built around these central public squares deeply connected to the daily life of cathedrals, government buildings and today, sidewalk bars and cafes. Afternoon siestas or leisurely evenings are often spent strolling in these squares, catching up with friends or sipping potent cups of espresso. Children chase pigeons and the elderly lean on their canes as they contemplate their next chess moves. If Italy is a body, the piazza is its heart.

Every day I am always online; most of it for work purposes, but I also connect with many of my friends and family through my computer and programs, because it's the easiest way for all of us to keep in touch. In that way, social networking provides a means to stay connected to people you actually know in "real" life, without having to live in the same neighborhood. If you are like me, it’s so easy to get into mode of doing everything online such as talk, collaborate or play games. It seems the more I have signed up for, the more I have to check up on things and be online. More often than not it’s more convenient than doing something in person. It’s social, but it’s a different kind of social.

The truth is that social networking, while great in many respects, does not fulfill a fundamental human desire: To be in the actual presence of other people.

Ten years ago, this boundary did not even cross my mind while I was chatting with people online from Italy. For me, it was an amazing experience to learn about new cultures and make new friends. I distinctly remember one conversation because the “friend” I was chatting with after a few minutes politely excused himself because he said he needed to leave for the piazza to meet his friends. He explained to me that the Internet was just a muse but his friends in the piazza were “real”. At the time I knew something was missing, but what could I do, this was, after all my culture and something I identified with because I live and breathe this world of technology.

In some ways, I think the virtual social world is helpful to many of us, myself included, who are shy in real life. But, despite the gratification one gets from doing his or her socialization strictly via the internet can make it seem like actually hanging out with people isn't necessary, which I have realized has become my problem. I feel too isolated from the world beyond my computer.

Ray Oldenburg suggests in “Celebrating the Third Space” that we need to gather back our sense of community. He says social life in most societies rests on three elements: home, work, and the "third place". If we mindlessly destroy the third place -- the piazza, the coffee house or sidewalk cafe -- we end up expecting home and work to fill this big, gaping hole.

Recently my Mom was reminiscing about life in the 1950’s era. She described a strong sense of community where everyone in the neighborhood would simply abandon their regularly scheduled lives and gather together to have a barbeque and socialize with each other every weekend. She said it was never a question of what you were going to do, but rather with whom. I realized the “piazza” was actually here at one time. What happened? This sounded like the “third space”, the piazza, I have experienced many times in my foreign travels. In Sardegna, my Husband and I discovered that if you linger for more than five minutes admiring a garden for example, you will be ushered into someone’s home for dinner without even time to realize that you are in the company of a perfect stranger. But then you realize you are never a stranger in Italy.

Our lives have become very private and competitive. I believe we need to reconstruct the infrastructure of our human relationships. I suggest shutting off the computer and help create opportunities for people to care about each other again by learning, connecting and sharing. Italians say, “Chi trova un amico, trova un tesoro (who finds a friend, finds a treasure). This plays out in everyday life in the Italian piazza, which carries greater depths of meaning. Piazzas serve as a community center, market and town common all rolled into one. People are the treasures of the piazza.

Many architectural students are instructed, while studying abroad, to read a piazza landscape for its meaning — either in their parts or the way they have been stitched together through the years to create a whole. Piazzas are layered, complex and interesting puzzles where connections are not always that apparent at first. Every piazza holds the belief that all of life should be approached as a work of art, not simply as tasks to rush through on the way to the next thing.

In the user experience discipline, I feel privileged to be the one to uncover the complexity of human needs when it comes to technology. Sadly this part is often overlooked as a “nice to have but not necessary” in requirements gathering. If we slow down to actually think about our projects as models of wholeness like the piazza, the results will be like a work of art revealing the true purpose. Traditionally, business models follow three principles:

1. Analysis

2. Strategy

3. Change

What most businesses don’t understand however is that knowledge itself rarely leads to change. If we want our products and processes to be useful and change peoples’ lives, then we have to put people first. When we can make them see something first, understand how it makes them feel, then change can happen. The secret of success to any project is to put human feelings first.

The results of our work should be like a piazza in which they create possibilities like watching water spout in a fountain, the feeling we get from looking up at an astonishing ancient church, relaxing at a café, soaking up the human drama unfolding all around, and where you feel intensely linked to the flow of life and engaged in the world.

Just Showing Up

2010-02-05T20:21:00.000-08:00

Being a designer is more of a way of life and not just my profession. To be innovative and creative, you have to always look at the humor and the ordinary details that no one else pays attention to. “Life is too important to be taken seriously.” For me, Oscar Wilde’s quote reflects the humor I always see in life and about myself.

I remember when I was first out of college; I put a bullet on my resume stating, “Ability to inspire creativity in others.” It’s funny how some things sound so good when they are in your head, but no one understood this and I couldn’t explain it back then. The older I get, I realize that Woody Allen’s quote “90% of life is just showing up” is also pretty true.

I have been a User Experience Professional for twenty years in Seattle, WA. I knew I always wanted to be a designer since I was a kid because I would redesign everything and it was very satisfying to take ideas and change them into something usable.

Making things usable is what I want to talk about. When you interact with very ordinary things say a door handle, a light switch, a subway ticket machine, an elevator or a cell phone you are developing a seemingly surface level relationship with these things but, in reality, it is your interaction with these things that shape your attitude or behavior on a sub-conscience level. These interactions fuel your motivation to use or to buy them. If a door handle or a light switch doesn’t behave like you think it should, then you get frustrated and try another alternative, maybe a window or a candle. But when it comes to a product, you have a choice and you would choose not to buy something that doesn’t work. This is what real people experience all the time with software, hardware or mobile devices and development teams are so perplexed why something fails. The concept is pretty basic and this is why UX professionals test with real users. Depending on the audience, they can have extreme feelings of failure with these tools, especially when they are forced to use them for their jobs, for example. We have to look at the details that no one else pays attention to about failed experiences and hopefully prevent them from happening for the users of our products.

Wire Rings

2010-02-05T20:09:00.000-08:00

Little did I know or ever realize how much I would need “Boy Scout Survival Training” while I was spending all those wasted hours in Campfire Girls. We spent, long and tedious hours making bookmarks endorsed with our names made out of alphabet soup letters and those useless wire rings! I have spent a lot of time pondering what wire rings ever had to do with fostering a sisterhood of play, work, and healthy values to shape us into active, modern women. My wire ring collection includes just about every size and color a person would want. The closest I came to learning “real” survival techniques were weaving together strips of newspaper to make a forest mat which we neatly enclosed in a garbage bag tapering the excess edges to fit the size of the mat by taping or stapling the edges. But, with the newspaper industry virtually disappearing into online formats, it is highly unlikely we will carry our personal stacks with us deep into the forest ever again.

From these early experiences, survival never had a personal meaning. As an adult, my husband always compensates for me wherever we go to make sure we never forget anything because he was a boy scout. I have often teased him about bringing the kitchen sink but just last weekend we were out on an unexpectedly long hike at Cougar Mountain because we became lost on one of the 67 acres of trails. As the brief dusk abruptly went to dark, it quickly overshadowed all the fun we were having. Several moments of fear and panic overtook me as I realized I had absolutely nothing except the house key and one tissue – not water, not an ounce of food and certainly not a light. As bats started diving over me, I threw on my hood and quickly ran frantically up the trail looking for any familiar trail names which may tie back into the ones we knew. I was imagining all that could go wrong and all of the animals lurking in the shadows waiting to attack us. This fear all comes from a part from our most recent experiences in the jungle. I can see survival is becoming a reoccurring theme for us. After a while I settled into knowing there were no any deadly snakes or wild animals ready to pounce on us, rather just the woods we grew up in and know well. Our very own Northwest woods became the marked turning point in my personal survival responsibilities. Here is where I want to pass down my lessons to you. Learn to be prepared even if it doesn’t seem natural. You could be out on a hike like us, expecting only to be out for a half hour which could turn into much more than you bargained for. Heed the Boy Scouts’ motto: Be prepared!

While most people probably follow some of the suggested basics, this could be new territory for others who may have shared similar experiences as me. It’s not even that I haven’t been aware of them, it comes from a belief like, “We are only going for a short hike -- I really don’t need to bring anything” until you find yourself in unexpected circumstances. REI suggest the following 10 essentials for day hiking for safety, survival and basic comfort.

1. Navigation like a compass and map

2. Sun screen protection: lotion, glasses, hat

3. Insulated clothing and shoes

4. Illumination: flashlight or headlamp

5. First aid supplies

6. Fire: matches in a waterproof case or a fire starter

7. Repair kit and tools: knife, tape

8. Nutrition: energy bars, trail mix

9. Hydration

10. Emergency shelter or blanket

Going beyond just day hiking into thinking about emergencies or natural disasters, I have found some great advice from the Survival Center:

Planning is important, but rehearsal is when you will test your plan and identify flaws. Rehearsal is simply pretending you are in a survival situation and acting accordingly. Here are some survival examples to try:

1. Try living for a weekend without electricity. You can do this the real way by shutting of the breaker (to prevent cheating) or the easy way by just "pretending." If you do the latter, you should fine each other for violating the rules. The exercise will teach you that boiling water over a camp stove or a fire in the back yard just to make you're morning coffee can really wreck your normal morning routine. But hopefully the experience will also help you identify missing supplies, bad ideas and develop a new, stronger plan.

2. Try to evacuate your family to another location (anywhere from a friend or relatives to a motel 100 miles away). Give yourselves 20 minutes to pack. Once you've reached your destination make a list of everything you forgot and then add it to your bag. Once you've settled in at your destination, take a minute to think how you would feel if everything you left behind was destroyed by a fire or if everything below the second floor was damaged or destroyed by a flood. Revise your storage and survival plans accordingly.

3. Go for a drive one Saturday in the fall. Pull over in a remote area (if it's safe) and spend the night there with only the supplies on hand in your car.

4. Try eating only your survival foods for a weekend or even a week. This is a good one if you're ready to rotate out some of your food. It also has the added benefit of letting you identify any dishes you can't stand or to realize you need to add some spices and a cook book to your stash.

Lastly, to develop a survivalist mentality, you must think through scenarios. Play scenarios through your head and rehearse your options and actions. For example:

• If you are stuck in traffic, imagine what you would do if a large earthquake struck. Where would you go? What would you do?

• If you're traveling out of town or in any unfamiliar area, think about what you would do if you were stranded due to a breakdown or if the area was suddenly hit by a flash flood. What would you do to increase your chance of survival?

Perhaps through my survival exploration, I will eventually find a purpose for all of those useless wire rings, but at least they hold a strong reminder of what to keep in my head next time we are out on another hike or deep in a jungle in another country. Don’t get rid of those perceived useless relics you may have, they may hold a key to helping you change your behavior and become a survivalist.

Breaking Codes

2010-02-05T19:53:00.000-08:00

My favorite “meaning of life” answer was given by Curly in “City Slickers” when he held up his index finger and Billy Crystal said “Your finger?

It would be convenient if everything packaged up nicely to explain the meaning of things. It is, after all human nature. There are more answers, however, in studying the complex and messy details of everyday life. Right now there is a growing interest in the marketing industry to get to that “one thing”, the essence of what will motivate to users to buy. The answers are in the details of life.

For user experience professionals, like myself, to understand users can help predict the human behaviors in almost anything. We study users to understand their emotion, context and meaning of their motivations because motivations shape behaviors. Motivations can lead to the triggers that lead to desirable user behaviors which help drive what is really important.

Recently, I was told about a researcher, Dr. Rapaille who has brought science to the business world through his work in archetypes. He has been profiled in many national media outlets, including 60 Minutes II and on the front page of the New York Times Sunday Styles section and works for fifty Fortune 100 companies.

An Archetype can be thought of as a path that is imprinted in our unconscious and guides our actions. The emotional energy created during your first experience with a given product/concept determines the pattern of behavior to be used throughout your entire life in relation to this product/concept. These experiences, which are the essence of all our behaviors, vary from culture to culture. The permanent underlying structure of these experiences, deeply rooted in our unconscious, is the key to understanding fully what people do and why. This structure is the Archetype.

Dr. Rapaille began as a child a former child psychologist specializing in Autism. Imprinting is a rapid learning process that takes place early in life and establishes unconscious behavior during a critical time of life after it is next to impossible to imprint.

He believes individuals with common cultural backgrounds will share reasonably convergent mental models, ideologies and institutions. People with different learning experiences will have different theories to interpret their environment.

He moved science into the business market by breaking “codes” like that of culture, luxury, leadership, globalization, etc. His work has proven successful into providing guidance into meeting the unanticipated needs of users; this is a powerful way to differentiate products. These codes reveal which elements can be used successfully by companies to trigger a “premium” perception in consumers’ minds in the case of luxury.

For me, this research is fascinating and can be applied across disciplines. In user experience, archetypes, or personas, are also models of behavior which are strongly rooted in cultural codes. If there is a shift in these mental models, it is “Curly’s index finger to the meaning of life” response. Cultural forces are powerful and are a strong platform for identifying change, improvement, new product design and innovation.

The logic of emotion derived from Dr. Rapaille’s “Cultural Code” Study breaks down the following cultural descriptions that drive consumer choices:

Chinese: Symbol – womb, verb: Entitlement
French: Ideas
British: Class Structure
American: Autonomy, verb: Just do it!

From a user experience perspective, using these codes will enable us to deal with strong uncertainty at the individual level and will help to us to understand user motivations and behaviors on an even deeper level.

Two Paths To Determine a Direction for a Design

2009-07-13T22:38:00.000-07:00

The following questions are representative of the two paths in User Experience to determine the direction for a design.

Architecture

1. What are users’ primary goals, and how can they achieve them using the application?
2. How do users get from place to place?
3. What rules exist that users have to work around?
4. How are product features and components branded?
5. What is the optimal scope of the application’s feature set?
6. How does the UI roadmap and product roadmap position the application?
7. What is the application’s search mechanism?

Interaction

1. What layout pattern would work best?
2. Which features and information are of higher importance, and how do I draw users’ attention to them?
3. How should I incorporate the user feedback I am getting from user research, user surveys, and formative and summative usability testing?
4. What behaviors occur on dragging and dropping, on mouse over, etc?
5. How can I communicate the strengths of a feature or application?
6. How can I satisfy users’ primary needs and support the tasks that let them achieve their goals?
7. How can I draw on users’ intuition to get them to the next step?
8. How can I ensure users are aware they’re performing a subtask that’s part of a greater task they’ve started?
9. How can I use the UI components that are available to me—such as grids, tabs, and panels?
10. How can I maintain consistency throughout the application?

On Creating a Conceptual Model

2009-07-13T22:22:00.000-07:00

Albert Einstein once said, "Make it simple, as simple as possible but no simpler." This is the goal of user experience. As easy as it sounds, it is not easy. I usually start by looking for visual representations of problems and solutions and draw only the essential items of the system and the relationship they have to other elements. The tasks themselves begin to reveal themselves, that is where the workflows begin and end.

The challenge is to get developers to view the solution from the users perspective, from the task rather than from how the software will function. Once I can do this, the question becomes, how do I present this functionality in a way that is obvious to the user, perhaps through a familiar analogy. This, by the way, is clearly the most difficult job of user interface design, creating the balance between the obvious user tasks and the system functionality. Analogies usually become the basis for the UI conceptual model.

A map is the artifact resulting from the conceptual model and is used for extracting information from the user's task domain as well as the implementation domain. It is useful in so many ways including a tool for tracking unnecessary features, inappropriate assumptions as well as unnecessary functionality. In interaction design, I transpose this model into a visual communication of wireframes as a communication tool. As a designer, I find the structure in information that is useful for an intended audience.

With or Without a Flashlight

2009-06-28T13:05:00.000-07:00

“What is that? Hurry, hurry, hurry turn on the flashlight I said to Michael who was almost asleep and to myself, too stricken with fear to find it in the dark when it had mysteriously disappeared. It felt like the climax to a suspenseful movie, where you are on the edge and holding your breath. Don’t move, did you hear that? It sounds like everyone below us is eating everyone around them!” Night blindness can leave you uniquely vulnerable as we discovered. We were staying in a jungle lodge with only paper thin boards separating us from ‘them’. The Amazon’s sudden, inexplicable sounds can be terrifying at night, especially the first one and, well the rest of the nights as well.

Life in the jungle is immediate in every sense of the word. It certainly is not a ride in Disneyland even though you want yourself to believe it. Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey – The River of Doubt describes the jungle so vividly, “So complex and interdependent was the ecosystem he and his men had entered that the jungle itself could appear to take on the attributes of a living being…the screams, crashes, clangs, and cries of the long Amazon night were all the more disturbing because they often provoked apparent terror among unseen inhabitants of the jungle themselves. In the fathom canyons of tree trunks and the shrouds of black vines that surrounded the men at night, the hum and chatter of thousands of nocturnal creatures would snap into instant silence in response to a strange noise, leaving the men to wait in breathless apprehension of what might come next.”

Those are the perfect words to describe what we felt when we experienced the Amazon Jungle on trip last September. We had excellent guides who knew exactly what to do in every situation. We realized we knew very little about real survival. It was also amazing to us how easy it was to let go of the stresses of our jobs and lives when we found ourselves on high alert to our immediate surroundings.

We are sure you are now asking yourselves, why go there – there are safer, more relaxing places to go on vacation. That’s true, there are, but how alive do you feel everyday in your safe routines? This trip heightened our senses, forced us to face our fears and gave us an extreme view of different cultures and survival. It was exhilarating. Just as Theodore Roosevelt realized the unexpected magnitude of their trip and how unprepared they were, we too were in the same dugout boats they used back then and still use today. BIG REVELATION: Without our guide, I’m not sure we still would have a chance of surviving by ourselves in the Amazon.

Despite all of the surprises in the jungle, the opportunities of fringe travel, as I call it, increases the opportunity you have to really live in the moment. These life skills sharpen your senses and help you operate in the world on a different level. My personal experience in the jungle gave me a gift of a new kind of empathy about perspective. Rather than using a negative judgment about something, understand the principles of the context in which something exists rather than judgment based perhaps solely on fear. This new metaphor of being in the jungle is a new perspective of surviving and not at the lowest level in Maslow’s hierarchy but in self-actualization.

Maslow learned to distinguish “special talent creativeness” from “self-actualizing (SA) creativeness," which springs more directly from the personality, and showed itself in the ordinary affairs of daily life. Self-actualizing humans “do not neglect the unknown, or deny it, or run away from it or try to make believe it is really known…they do not cling to the familiar, nor is their quest for the truth a catastrophic need for certainty, safety, definiteness, and order.”

This year, I believe we have all been provided these kinds of opportunities, especially in the economic conditions and the uncertainty in which we live. I have used these lessons from the jungle in business to help focus on being in the moment by visualizing the bigger picture while examining immediate things going on underfoot. The corporate world is a lot more primal than you could have imagined!

Using Information in Bigger Way

2009-06-28T12:09:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered how a Website captivates you? It is more than likely it is because the content on the site looks like a good meal and indicate that it’s an easy catch. This intent is very purposeful from the designers who want their site to be caught and visited. Web designers who know about the foraging theory, or adaptive strategies understand how to make your interactions faster and stronger.

Pirolli was one of the founding fathers on the Information Foraging Theory and worked at Palo Alto Research Center in 1992. The idea a few years back was deliberate in trying to keep you on the page longer. Now, as the Web audiences have matured, Website content has also changed:

· Support short visits to your website
· Be a snack (fast downloads and create stickiness)
· Address user's immediate needs

Like animals foraging for food with time and energy constraints, humans forage for information looking for answers. The problem is that we in a glut of information with no time to sort it all out. Humans have naturally adopted adaptive strategies to optimize their intake of useful information per unit cost. The Information Foraging Theory aims to model and predict our evolutionary behavior in adapting to an increasingly complex world. The book both models our behavior in mathematical formulae and validates its predictions empirically to refine the model. Armed with this knowledge, designers can make informed decisions on web designs before they make a heavy investment in implementation.

What Is Information Foraging?

Unlike cognitive engineering models of the early 1990s where tasks were analyzed in well-defined domains and user interfaces, people seeking information are largely shaped by the structure of the content, that is, their information environment. People routinely sift massive volumes of information under deadline pressure to make complex search decisions under uncertain conditions. We are constantly evaluating the expected costs and benefits of our actions in this largely probabilistic textured information environment (Brunswik 1952) to maximize our gain of valuable information. Pirolli calls this behavior information foraging.

Information foraging strategies optimize the use of our time and effort to gain valuable information. We satisfice, getting a good enough outcome under uncertain and limited conditions (bounded rationality). As in the real world where animals forage for food, the online world of the Web is a patchy environment with information arranged into clumps. Patches of useful information reside in different websites, it is our job as "informavores" to seek out the richest patches and extract useful information. As we forage for more information, it becomes harder to find additional useful information as we pick off the "low hanging fruit." Diminishing returns cause us to "feed" at a patch until our rate of gain of useful information falls below the perceived average. Once we think the grass is greener in another "patch," we switch pages, websites, or search criteria, seeking out more fruitful patches of information. Pirolli's mathematics describe the environment and predicts with some accuracy our behavior in the Web's patchy environment.

The optimal information forager "maximizes the value of knowledge gained per unit cost of interaction." We select designs that improve our returns on information foraging. This natural selection implies that sites that have high information scent and usability would fare better than sites that have lower scent and usability. This gives an entirely new meaning to the survival of the fittest when applied to the Web.

Experts in the usability industry: Spool, Perfetti, and Brittan (2004) have also supported that users searched for a scent trail and followed it toward their content. "As the scent got stronger, they grew more eager. When they lost the scent, they backtracked until they picked it up again."
Spool and his colleagues recommend using trigger words that will be recognized by the user. Here are some of Spool's recommendations from the "Tao of Scent" (2004)

Communicate information scent through explicit links, those which match the information found in the link
Trigger words cause users to click, users expect these words on the destination page
Link text should be between 7 and 12 words long
Links should lead to information that is more specific
Links should accurately describe what the next page contains
Provide feeback about where the user is in the site structure
Avoid jargon and cute marketing terms (use short words)

Use Search Analytics

Using search analytics helps to "close the loop" between designer and user expectations. Giving users what they are searching for, in the terms they are searching with is one way to ensure higher conversion rates. Regularly analyzing search results is one way to ensure you are not missing topics and "trigger words" that your customers are searching for. Scent is as much an issue in search as it is in navigation."

Learning to Speak a New Language

2009-06-21T10:29:00.000-07:00

The most amazing experience for me is coming into a new awareness in how to express my ideas with others. Recently, a friend of ours invited us to attend a "Nonviolent Communication," or NVC Session with his practice group. I am always open to new exploration and ideas so we joined him. But, I couldn't help but wonder what nonviolent communication had to do with us. I have never thought of myself as a violent communicator, nor anyone I know.

What I have since come to realize is that the very structure of our language is static. We rarely use our emotions to describe our true needs, nor can we hear others. When we combine observation with evaluation, people are apt to hear criticism. Although we spend our time with other people, we rarely stop to think about the defining characteristic of their behavior or our own. While this has great implications in our personal lives, I am focusing on relationships at work. In observation, our criteria for judging an event as behavior is not just about the complexity, but on the context. It is through the differences that we can view contrast.

As Semanticist Wendall Johnson points out, "We create many problems for ourselves by using static language to capture a reality that ever changing." Our language has conditioned us to speak about constants, similarities, quick fixes to simple problems with complete and final solutions." Yet, our world is quite different from all of this. The reality is the opposite. It is about process, change, differences, interaction, complexity of relationships and learning. The root of the problem is this mismatch in communication.

NVC is like learning to think and speak in a different language. A perfect application in user experience is to think about the ways we deliver design critiques. Design critiques can be exhausting if done in the wrong way. They can immediately become personal. In applying the NVC language, the first step is to separate our observations from our evaluations. The goal of a critique is to identify what we are building and secondly to figure out how close we are to finishing it. User experience evaluations and critiques are done in the spirit of the end user, trying to match intent of the design with the behavior of the end user. It is also done within the perspective of another designer.

I think the best critiques will happen in separating observation from the evaluation. We must identify and observe the strengths of how close the design is from meeting the goal and secondly, raising more questions to inspire directions and paths to get to the final goal.

Welcome

2009-06-20T21:50:00.000-07:00

Since design and training are our passions, we hope that blogging will give us a way to express our observations and translate our experiences to bigger ideas. For us, it's really a chance to step back and look at the bigger picture, reflecting on the lessons we have learned or the different perspectives of others on the challenges we encounter in our work. Learning and sharing is what life is all about.