user research

Nielsen: Move away from the bright light

Jay Small — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 18:34:02 +0000

Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox article, Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous, reminds us that fancy trick plays in site development don't always bring the same great benefits as good old blocking and tackling.

Nielsen calls out Ajax, rich interfaces, mashups, so-called "user generated content" and online communities -- noting they can be valuable in proper context, but can also distract Web teams from more important user experience objectives. One example:

"Facebook has much drama that makes for good press coverage, but most of its features are worthless for a B2B site that, say, is trying to sell forklift trucks to 50-year-old warehouse managers. Instead of adding Facebook-like features that let users "bite" other users and turn them into zombies, the B2B site would get more sales by offering clear prices, good product photos, detailed specs, convincing whitepapers, an easily navigable information architecture, and an email newsletter."

I know Nielsen has a rep in corners of the design community as being too curmudgeonly, but I read this piece twice and can't find fault in it. In my "day job" and in consulting, I find myself practically begging site and product managers to focus on the basics of their businesses, and divert their gaze from faddish bright-shiny-objects of Web development.

I'm reminded of the current IBM commercial with an interactive developer showing a product manager a digital avatar of himself.

"Can you make money?" the manager asks. "My avatar doesn't know how to do that," the developer replies.

Facebook ... faceless?

Jay Small — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 15:51:08 +0000

As I suddenly start receiving many invitations to connect on Yet Another Social Network -- in the most recent case, Plaxo Pulse -- I note the ever-astute Scott Karp contemplates the current crisis suffered by the darling of these nets, Facebook.

Karp, in considering the uproar caused by Facebook's advertising beacon, concludes technology and design of same offer less substantial and less enduring competitive advantage than ever:

One look at Plaxo Pulse validates Karp's point. It obviously apes some of the best networking features of both Facebook and LinkedIn. And it has quick processes for importing one's connections from either of those services.

So Pulse says me-too and switching-is-easy. But it doesn't give me a compelling, unique reason to switch. I'm still trying to find a compelling, unique reason to keep up with both Facebook and LinkedIn. The latter has helped me in my career; the former, not so much.

Karp nails it:

The next great internet company will not be one that makes a breakthrough with technology -- it will be one that makes a breakthrough with people.

If my chosen industry -- newspapers -- didn't already have such an undistinguished reputation (that may be too kind) with so many people, I'd say that was good news for us. We're certainly not going to win on technology.

About the changes at Small Initiatives

Jay Small — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 20:06:36 +0000

The new design of this Web site means a lot more than just a visual dust-off. Small Initiatives, the company, no longer represents just me, my blog and my occasional Internet design consulting.

My wife, Ka, has reached a point in her executive career where she has amazing advice to offer her industry -- banks and credit unions -- as a business strategy consultant.
So SI becomes a consulting firm with two primary practices. Hers covers growth strategies, marketing and operations for financial institutions. Mine covers Internet user experience, including my longstanding design efforts, but adding site architecture and development projects atop the Drupal open-source content framework.

Ka's brand-new blog joins mine, which has posts dating to 2002. Her first post dispels some popular talking points in banking, refactoring a focus on "differentiation" to a focus on "relevance" -- both of and to customers. I think it's a useful read even for my regular non-banker crowd.

So that's why things look different here, and why the attention now splits between Ka's banking practice and my user experience efforts. If you really want to know the gory details, I've tried to provide them in this handy Q&A format:

Are you both consulting full-time? No. I still have my "day job" as general manager of the Newspapers Interactive Group at the E.W. Scripps Co. Meanwhile, Ka's still a banking professional, taking on consulting projects as she evaluates choices for her next great executive opportunity.
What does banking have to do with Internet user experience? Sometimes, nothing. Sometimes, everything -- such as the time I redesigned a credit union Web site. Our practices may overlap more than you'd imagine in the areas of interactive business strategy and overall customer experience.
You changed a lot about the way the SI site works. Why? As part of opening up my consulting efforts to include site development using Drupal, I thought it best to run this site in Drupal as a living proof of concept. That's nothing against WordPress, the excellent blogging software I used before, only an attempt to put my money where my mouth is.
What else are you changing? We're in the process of incorporating Small Initiatives. We also changed hosting providers as part of the relaunch of this site -- we're now happy SliceHost customers. And I replaced my old blogroll with the Drupal news aggregator, so you can see nearly live headlines from blogs and sites related to our two consulting practices.
How can I make my [site|blog|comments|tags|feeds] work more like yours? Sign me to a contract and I'll show you.
Are those rotating home page posters done in Flash? No, they're done as regular JPEG images that a Drupal module, Views Slideshow, rotates using a JavaScript library.
I'm an RSS subscriber to SI. Where can I find a list of all your available feeds? Use the site map. I'm also trying to make sure my old FeedBurner feed addresses work with minimal upheaval. Trying, I said.
I'm trying to find [insert name of old article here]. You moved stuff around. Where do I look? All the blog posts and most of the non-blog content from the old site should be here, though the directory paths are altered slightly. If you remember the headline or even a keyword or two, try entering them in the search box.
Don't you know changing directory paths will mess up your search engine rankings? Yes, but I had to do it sooner or later, and I'm taking steps advised in Google and Yahoo! Webmaster instructions to mitigate the effects. It shouldn't take long for the path changes to be reflected in search engines' caches of this site. I hope.
SI now has two newsletters. What's the deal? Ka and I wanted to develop separate e-mailing lists for our occasional alerts and longer-form newsletter essays. I had a list before, but it has been months since I sent out a letter to those subscribers. So I thought it best to let people choose subscriptions anew. You may subscribe to either newsletter with just an e-mail address, and unsubscribe anytime.
How do you say "Ka"? Just like you'd say "Kay," as in Diane Keaton's character in The Godfather. It's short for Karen. Around the house we all call her Katie. And yes, people do chuckle and ask, "Where's L?" when we introduce ourselves as "Jay and Ka."
You didn't kill Sid, did you? No. He wouldn't like that. You'll find Sid's sayings on the right side of all my blog pages.

You didn't sign up for that abuse

Jay Small — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 13:16:47 +0000

Jared Spool nails it again with his case study on poor login/register user experience: The Sign-In Travesty.

The thing is, the example he cites is far from the worst you'd find on the Web. CollegeBoard.com pulls out all the usual tricks to allow people to log in, sign up for a new account, fetch forgotten passwords or even lost user IDs.

The user experience for authentication on the example site is so common it's practically a standard. So Spool's showing us that many thousands of sites using similar routines have the same flaws. Read it, and see your site(s) in it, because they probably are.

New research reinforces 'banner blindness'

Jay Small — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 17:29:17 +0000

Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox essay, in a nutshell, validates the concept of "banner blindness": people shown pages with graphical advertising units intermixed with non-ad content almost always focus on the non-ad content.

What elements attract attention most consistently? Plain text, faces and "private parts," says Nielsen.

But not most ads, he observes, with one exception:

"In addition to the three main design elements that occasionally attract fixations in online ads, we discovered a fourth approach that breaks one of publishing's main ethical principles by making the ad look like content."

In other words, what's old is new again. Newspapers and magazines have long dealt with advertisers who try to make their messages -- often, it seems, pushing wealth-building or holistic health products -- look and read like news articles. Many periodicals, in their ad-acceptance policies, restrict use of certain fonts that are too close to the editorial design.

That control would be much more difficult in an Internet economy where ad networks, especially remnant networks that serve third-party ads at lowest prevailing rates, deliver many of the ad messages visible on many content sites.

Nielsen's latest work supports quite a bit of conventional wisdom on this subject. It does not provide much good news for content-oriented Web brands that need to make money from display advertising. When people deliberately avoid even looking at a message, that message has no value: just another tree falling unheard in the forest.

Goodwin on personas and goal-directed design

Jay Small — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 16:56:36 +0000

The folks at User Interface Engineering have ramped up their "infomarketing" leading to the User Interface 12 conference coming in November.

I call it "infomarketing" because UIE provides moderately detailed interviews with each of the conference session leaders -- each well-known subject matter experts -- in the weeks preceding the event. The interviews themselves contain enough useful information to be both helpful alone and great teasers for the conference.

You can't say Jared Spool's gang doesn't understand how to make event marketing productive for the people being addressed by the message.

Case in point: this week's interview with Kim Goodwin of Cooper, in which she makes the case for Cooper's persona development and "goal-directed design" methodologies.

On personas:

"A persona is a behavioral model. The most effective behavioral models are distilled from interview and observation data of real users into an archetypal description of how a particular type of person behaves and what their goals are.

"The two essential components of a persona are the personaÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s behaviors and goals. For any product or service, design teams have to create multiple personas that represent the range of likely behaviors and goals."

Defining goal-directed design:

"We call our methodology 'Goal-Directed' because it focuses on accomplishing goals. It's important to note that these are not only the persona's goals but also the businessÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s goals. If design teams only focus on the persona's goals to the exclusion of making profits, the product won't be successful."

Goodwin continues to explain the process in more detail. It's not cheap, but it's smart.

I was fortunate to attend Goodwin's sessions way back at User Interface 8. They shaped the way I still think today about personifying tasks and goals. And I still refer to all the session notebooks provided from that conference. So pile my recommendation atop the informative soft-sell from UIE and attend User Interface 12 if you can.

It's also not cheap, but it's smart.

Simplicity over features -- usually

Jay Small — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 17:55:44 +0000

Jakob Nielsen pretty much validates application development practices from the likes of 37signals when he writes, "Most users have low commitment -- especially to Web sites, which must focus on simplicity, rather than features."

Less really is more, it seems. The usability maestro puts the dilemma into terms every content-site designer should take to heart:

"Users' willingness to learn is the most important factor in how much complexity you can allow in the user experience. If people are extremely excited about a user interface, they'll welcome more features and will spend the time to figure them out.

"Mostly, though, users have a low engagement level with user interfaces and just want them to get out of the way. People don't want to spend time learning, they want to spend time doing -- a well-documented effect called the paradox of the active user."

On a content Web site, maybe it's a reach but I consider blocks of categorically organized links to be, in effect, user interface features. As such, the advice might apply to the numbers and groupings of links a site might provide on, for example, its home or index pages. It's worth debating, anyway.