Stopwatch graphic by Casey Marshall

Recently, I watched a series of people observe informal usability tests.

Two of the observers have recently graduated with Masters degrees in HCI or an adjacent field.

Both recent graduates used a watch to record time-on-task and completion of the task. One actually broke out a stopwatch while the other referred to his wristwatch.

While these stopwatch fixations livened my day, I do wonder about graduate education in the usability field.

I recall that for the first half-dozen website usability tests that I moderated, I also recorded time. Then I realized that timing tasks obscured more important observations, and I haven’t bothered with timing since then. Besides, we can get times off the recordings.

Is the working world really that far off from graduate studies?

So why did these two graduates pull out timers?

Well, I think they were parroting “proper” methods they were taught without understanding when it is useful. If, in grad school, they only practice for ideal research situations, they’re missing out on the realities of the work world.

I’ve worked in an Agile development environment for the last couple years, and for the decade prior to that I worked on fast-moving projects that used whatever SDL I applied to them. The mission: Deliver value, ASAP.

With that charge, decisions are made that don’t allow for insight from in-depth, long-term studies with huge numbers of participants. I’m grateful for even the small, quick sessions of user and design research.

Regardless, I got a chuckle out of seeing these two bring out timers for a completely informal, one-off usability test. As expected, they both missed seeing key interactions because they were watching the clock.

When to be concerned about time, usability-wise

Okay, I’d hate to give the impression that time doesn’t matter. I just find that a long time to complete a task on a website is rarely the issue, instead it may be a symptom of other issues which become apparent during research.

However, I do find response times of a system to a user’s actions to be very important because too much delay in a system’s response can really hurt the user’s experience and even distract people from completing whatever they set out to complete. Still, this class of problem is often noticeable during observation. (Unless you missed it while you were fiddling with your stopwatch.)

With that in mind, I’ll gesture towards Nielsen’s take on response times.

View from top of Yerbe Buena Gardens, San Francisco, March 2010.

Saturday PM: Sunshine!

I actually began to sweat under my blazer from the warm sun shining brightly through the window.

I had arrived in San Francisco a little early on Saturday, dropped my suitcase off at the Intercontinental Hotel, and walked around the corner to a sandwich shop for a bite to eat and to get online. As I draped my coat over the back of the chair, I decided I really like San Francisco. It’s the sun, I admit it. Oh, and I had already noted that the two billboards I noticed on the taxi from the airport were pure tech: one for an enterprise search system and another for PGP. Billboards talking to me? Amazing.

After settling in at the hotel, I had dinner with my old colleague Chris Burley and his girfriend at a nice Italian restaurant. Chris is awesome. I love talking with him because he has such passion for what he does, which currently is to help lead efforts like urban farming in the Bay area.

Sunday AM: 3 good things

The next morning I woke early due to the time zone difference, and I had three excellent experiences:

1. In the aching fog of caffeine deprivation, had the best cup of coffee of my life, thanks to the Blue Bottle Café. (I admit, I ordered a second cup to go.)
2. Paused in the Yerbe Buena Gardens where some elderly practiced tai chi and parents snapped photos as their little children hid behind a waterfall. I stood on a bridge and watched the morning sun ripple on the glass of San Francisco skyscrapers.
3. Crashed a church service at a music venue called Mezzanine put on by a group that calls itself IKON. I was the oldest person there, amidst a crowd of art school students. We sang, we listened to a teaching from the Word, we had communion. It was good.

Sunday PM: MX day 1

Sunday afternoon saw the start of the 2010 MX Conference.

MX2010 is largely focused on managing user experience and less on the tactical end of UX practice, and there were some thought-provoking presentations from people who have been managing user experience for a number of years, in a number of different types of companies. Off the top of my head, presenters represented firms in financial industries (Vanguard), publishing (Harvard Business Review), retail sporting goods, and online media (Youtube).

The series of talks was fantastic, and was kicked off with a keynote by Jared Spool in which he shared insights like that Gallup’s Customer Engagement (CE11) metric has high correlation to the quality of user experience. Spool’s keynote actually turned out to predict some themes that carried throughout the many presentations. Among them were the importance of establishing a vision for user experience and that experience ultimately must be addressed well across multiple channels (web, mobile, physical space, etc.).

Spool talked about three core attributes necessary for great user experience: Vision, Feedback, and Culture. He posed three questions that UX managers should ask.

1. VISION: Can everyone on the team describe the experience of using your design 5 years from now?
2. FEEDBACK: In the last six weeks have you spent more than two hours watching someone use your design or a competitor’s design?
3. CULTURE: In the last six weeks have you rewarded a team member for creating a major design failure?

After the conference reception, I wound down the evening by taking a walk around a few blocks and ending at a nearby bar. I ate a burger and watched the Academy Awards for a while. Back at the hotel I watched the end of a Clint Eastwood Western flick and fell asleep.

Monday AM+PM: MX day 2

I woke at 4 in the morning. I checked analytics, email, and my usual RSS feeds. I stretched, washed, dressed, and still had time to kill. I read a few chapters in The Shack, a book Adam gave me last week.

I chatted throughout the day with Haakon, a usability specialist attending from the design company Tarantell in Norway, and as he sipped his coffee, I decided to not mention my mere three hour time difference.

The rest of the day was another series of excellent presentations. Themes: customer (more than user) experience, vision that guides the business, new models for working in the network, UX leadership stories from Youtube, customer experience in renovation of thinking at Harvard Business Review Online, understanding the holistic customer, data-driven design decisions (and when not to rely on data for design decisions), experience design as business strategy, and operating as a chief experience officer in your company.

It was great to hear first-hand the stories from these user experience leaders. Now, for what to do with it all when returning to the office.

Tomorrow and then

Tomorrow morning I fly back to Michigan, and need to get my head back into product owner and user experience work. But I also need to hold onto the ideas from this conference, and shift into actively leading user (or is that customer) experience work at Covenant Eyes.

Too strong? With WordPress, you can try to use custom fields or innovative hacks like Bill Erickson’s approach to multiple content areas using H4 elements in his excellent theme “Thesis”. Unfortunately, neither of those approaches really deals with the depth of the design problem that often requires multiple content areas for pages.

As an information architect/user experience designer, I’ve been involved in many projects that required more types of content on any single screen than WordPress is designed to handle.

Let me draw out what I’m talking about here.

Exhibit A: Page content that WordPress is designed to handle

In a standard WordPress page or post, you’ll see these author-controlled pieces of content.

• Post/page Title
• Body
• Excerpt (often not-used)

Standard WordPress content fields include the title, excerpt, and body.

There are other sets of data for a page or post that an author can control, too, but these are meta-data such as tags, categories, slug (shows up in the URL), and possibly search engine optimization information like title, description, and keywords.

For a normal blog, many online trade journals, and a lot of basic websites, this really covers the bases. The body contains the bulk of the content including images, video, and audio that can be intermingled with the text itself. This model is very flexible, and it has definitely proven itself.

Exhibit B: Page content that pushes WordPress too far

In 2009, there was a small project at work to develop the website Covenant Musicians, and because the person who would keep the site updated was already using WordPress, we made the decision to build this site with WordPress too.

Well, if you look at one of the destination pages for this site, the musician profile page (here’s one for example), you’ll notice some different pieces of content which may or may not be present on any particular musician profile page. When they are present, they need to be in certain places and sometimes with certain content.

This custom WordPress page uses fields in addition to the standard options: Musician Image, URL, and Video.

The problem is, to control those extra pieces of content: the video, the band image, the link to the band’s website, the site owner needs to use WordPress’s custom fields in very precise ways, without the benefit of WordPress’s content editing tools. What a drag!

To make life easier for the site owner, we ended up recording screencast instructions on how to use these fields and delivered those help files with the site itself. (We used Jing by Techsmith, by the way.)

It would’ve been better had the interface been clear enough so that we didn’t feel the need to document the process of updating these destination pages, but that’s the trouble with stretching WordPress beyond its default content fields.

Ask too much of WordPress and ease-of-use is the casualty

Do you see the difference? When an effective design solution requires multiple types of content per page, using WordPress will actually make your website difficult to manage. WordPress is usually so easy to use that when you hit this wall, it is very apparent.

When you’re at that point, WordPress is probably not the right CMS to choose.

Should WordPress improve in this area?

Whether through the core application or through an excellent plug-in (is there one already that I missed?), if WordPress is going to grow in the content management systems field, this shortfall will need to be addressed.

However, WordPress is really excellent at what it does already, and the better course might be to decide to keep the features in check and let other systems compete in the mid-to-enterprise scale CMS arena. Scope creep never stops, and a good application strategy knows when to say “no.”

Am I wrong?

Am I off-base here? This is just one aspect of WordPress that should limit its use. Another that should cause designers to think twice is when dealing with faceted-navigation which requires more than one dimension (tags can probably handle one dimension). But, again, those are more complex design requirements.

I’m not a WordPress consultant, and I’ll bet some of you would like to point to the errors in my thinking. Let’s hear it.

When I was leading many design/development projects at a time, I’d write a creative brief for each—it helped me and the team stay clearheaded about each project. An experience theme seems like an alternative to a creative brief.

The following thoughts apply Chastain’s article to my work at Covenant Eyes.

Covenant Eyes is rich with stories

At Covenant Eyes, Inc., we have a full-time blogger, Luke. As I see it, Luke’s job is to draw out the stories surrounding Covenant Eyes and to share them using the Internet. He’s our storyteller.

What are the roles? There are so many stories, from people in so many places in life.

• husbands, fathers
• wives, mothers
• children
• pastors, rabbis
• counselors
• porn addicts, recovering porn addicts, people who have beaten the addiction
• and the list continues

What are some theme concepts?

• For people fighting a problem with pornography: Learn to be honest again (These words come from Michael Leahy’s mouth while he was visiting our offices.)
• For mothers with children who use the Internet: Protect my family
• For fathers with a teenage son: Teach him to be responsible for his actions

Experience transcends our services

What work do we do at our company? Although others I work with may claim we deliver software, I think we deliver information. Our software allows us to provide information-rich reports on Internet usage that can be used within relationships. I think of these as “accountability relationships.”

The theme concepts listed above have little to do with software or even our service. The real value we provide is that we can provide the sense for people that what could be their little secret is not actually hidden. That little bit of knowledge has proven its ability to change lives, and relationships, for the better.

The hard part is carrying the experience theme across our touch points with users

I recently helped put together a spreadsheet to inventory the automated emails we send to users at various points. There were over 60 emails, and they fulfill needs ranging from billing concerns to helpful reminders after a few weeks of being a customer. Many of these messages should be revised, and keeping the theme in mind will help create a coherent experience for our users.

Covenant Eyes has multiple touch points with its users.

Beyond these emails is a myriad of other touch points:

• sign up form
• help documents
• filter settings controls
• accountability reports
• tech support phone calls
• blog posts
• and so on

Taken all together, these communications can benefit from an experience theme.

I suspect the key to pulling this off is to have all those involved with crafting these touch points understand the experience theme and leave it to them to carry it through. As the company’s user experience lead, my job may be to facilitate the definition and adoption of an experience theme, and motivate and lead by example so others will carry the vision.

The Vignelli map smartly acknowledged that for passengers of the subway focused on navigating the subway system itself, above ground geography was nothing but a factor of added complexity. So the map instead was oriented around the subway lines and stops themselves, abstracting actual geography. This was a keen simplification from an information design perspective.

But consider this observation from Bierut’s article.

To make the map work graphically meant that a few geographic liberties had to be taken. What about, for instance, the fact that the Vignelli map represented Central Park as a square, when in fact it is three times as long as it is wide? If you’re underground, of course, it doesn’t matter: there simply aren’t as many stops along Central Park as there are in midtown, so it requires less map space. But what if, for whatever reason, you wanted to get out at 59th Street and take a walk on a crisp fall evening? Imagine your surprise when you found yourself hiking for hours on a route that looked like it would take minutes on Vignelli’s map.

The concept of designing the seams between systems has become apparent within the user experience design community over the last couple years. This is an example of that problem of seams.

Passengers of the subway system are also navigators of the city itself, so their context of use spans beyond the subway and the end of their decisions are not merely which stop to get on and off of, but where they are going once they get out of the subway.

Bierut makes the point:

The problem, of course, was that Vignelli’s logical system came into conflict with another, equally logical system: the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan for Manhattan.

How can designers consider the seams between the subway system and the city plan to result in a better-designed subway map?

NYC, of course, has a functioning subway map. Is functionality the only litmus test?

(I’ve taken the subway in New York City only once, and managed to get from Point A to Point B successfully, although with some anxiety.)

The morning sessions were spot-on, and some of the afternoon talks were good as well. However, it was clear that some panelists didn’t understand their audience of usability and accessibility practitioners. Their talks were still interesting, but they didn’t understand the user experience industry’s take on words like “accessibility” and “sustainability,” which was this year’s theme.

So, here’s a quick recap.

Assistive Technology Expo

I attended the Assistive Technology Expo in the morning. I posted yesterday about comments regarding CAPTCHAs gleaned from that talk.

The two presenters work in the technology field providing technology support for people with various disabilities and are themselves blind. They demonstrated how they use screen readers to accomplish various tasks online, like checking the weather, tuning into a football game streamed online, checking stocks, buying groceries, and buying a computer.

I appreciate observing and listening to people with disabilities who use the Internet, because it helps counter what I know about the technology with what is clear about people. That is, people adapt and make things work to the best of their ability. These two presenters were gracious about technology-related problems that I know many sighted people would be upset with. They also pointed out that most websites are at some level usable by them, but of course they prefer ones that are more accessible. We did see a number of examples where they simply wouldn’t have been able to overcome some technical roadblocks without significant additional effort.

One part of the presentation included them showcasing how they use an iPhone. An accessibility feature on the iPhone causes a single tap on the touch screen to say the name of the application (or letter if it is the keypad), while the double-tap will activate it. So, they have audible feedback to find the function they need, plus the capability to then activate it. This seemed to work very well for them.

Another point made during the session is that these assistive technologies like screen readers and electronic braille devices are quite expensive. Some screen reader programs are more expensive than the cost of the computer itself. However, the presenters voiced hope because the prices are coming down. They cited Apple shipping Macs that have built-in accessibility features at zero additional cost. Also, for Windows, there are some screen reader programs that are only a few hundred dollars.

Special Session: Contemporary Issues of IT in the Sustainable Global Knowledge Economy

This panel session had presenters on the topics of:

• delivering broadband across the state of Michigan even to rural areas (George Boersma)
• ITEC, a center in Lansing that provides after-school programs to help youth learn about technology, science and math (Kirk Riley)
• IT accessibility (Sharron Rush)
• global knowledge economy (Mark Wilson)

All the presenters were well-spoken and interesting. Sharron Rush seemed to be the one presenter that is part of the usability and accessibility profession, though the others shared important information and perspectives.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to provide more details on these presentations.

Hybrid Technology for a Sustainable Future

Shane Shulze of Ford Motor Company presented information on what Ford has been working on in regard to battery powered cars. His talk was focused on battery technology, and it was interesting to see the audience’s response.

One participant spoke up and asked about how these new cars will address the safety issues with quiet-running cars. Shane’s answer was that Ford is aware of the issue. I suppose we can look to future prototypes to see how what they do with this issue. (From a UX perspective, I think that is a really interesting question: what are the design concerns in regards to the volume and appropriateness of the audio.)

e-Government Services for a Sustainable County

Salina Washington of Oakland County and Constantinos Coursaris of Michigan State University presented on how Oakland County has transformed their delivery of services to citizens of Oakland County with the eGov department of the county government.

This presentation was inspiring. We know that good, usable technology can improve service delivery and decrease costs, but this was an actual example of that happening.

The take-away from this was that when faced with a challenge, like a massive cut in budget, instead of going the traditional route of laying people off, think creatively and as a group come up with ideas on decreasing costs and making the most of the resources that each part of the government agency uses.

Sustainability and Agility: UX Designs for Eforms

John Rivard spoke about integrating UX and Agile development at a bank. He shared examples of their workflow, like work-ahead, follow-behind. This was also an excellent presentation and it seems that the way John is working is similar to how we operate at Covenant Eyes.

That’s all folks

All-in-all, it was a good day with some unexpected, but enjoyable talks. Good job to the organizers from the MSU Usability & Accessibility Center! Also, check out Tom Schult’z posts on his blog.

An interesting point in the discussion was that problems with CAPTCHAs for people with visual  impairments. One of the presenters went through a process at the DELL website, selected a computer and went to purchase it, but on the way to checking out, he had to pass a CAPTCHA that asked him to enter the characters he sees in the image into a text box.

Of course the problem was that he could not see the image and there was no alternative available. No sale.

Someone else brought up Google’s use of audio as an alternative to the visual CAPTCHA, but the presenters pointed out that for someone who has both visual and hearing impairments, this is still insufficient.

(You can try the audio CAPTCHA on the first page of the sign up page for Blogger. Try it out!)

They pointed out that a CAPTCHA that used reasoning could be a more accessible approach, and another idea was to send an email to verify that the agent is, in fact, a human (that’s the point of a CAPTCHA).

I’ll probably post another update from this conference later.

In the 90s I’d quickly sketch different ideas for overall design, narrow it in, and then sketch out the plan to create the layout with tables, complete with pixel dimensions for each cell and notations on margins, borders, and padding. I’d annotate the sketch with hexidecimal codes for colors to use. The process placed ink before pixels.

As CSS gained ground and the industry left table-based layouts behind, I sketched fewer details, but usually still rapidly drew thumbnails of page layouts on paper before settling in.

For a time, I thought I could do most of this work with computer programs as my primary tools: Word, Excel, Photoshop, Fireworks, Flash, Dreamweaver, and straight textual coding tools like BBEdit. Later, OmniGraffle joined the toolbox, and I did first-round design digitally.

Ink before pixels again

Over the last six years paper and ink has again become my first tool. Hand-drawn sketches and notes are fast and fluid—far moreso than code or Photoshop.

With a quick sketch in hand, the coding can leapfrog some easy-to-make first mistakes. For instance, last week I needed to create some screens for a 3 page sign up process. I spent about 30 seconds drafting two quick page layouts on paper before I jumped into Photoshop and Dreamweaver to create the graphics and code it up.

By doing the second sketch, I was able to make better use of a design grid and utilize white space more effectively. That’s 30 seconds well-spent, and it means I didn’t have to waste time in Photoshop or with code on a design that had whitespace problems.

Good paper is worth it

When I started my latest job, I asked for some paper to sketch with. I was provided with some cheap cardboard-backed white notepads. Each pad fell apart within a week or two of use, and was better suited to ripping sheets off then holding together. Irritating!

I started to use my own notebooks for work, and just a couple weeks ago purchased a set of Moleskine Volant notebooks. They are softcover notebooks about 5 by 8 1/4 inches, and are well-bound with excellent ruled paper. I think they’re the best notebooks I’ve ever had.

Please, take the 18 minutes to watch it, then continue to read.

Watching this talk brought to mind two thoughts related to user experience work.

First, in a recent edition of Interactions magazine there is an article “Stories that inspire action” by Gary Hirsch and Brad Robertson, that has planted the desire in me to uncover the stories of the company I work for, Covenant Eyes. There are so many ideas we have of ourselves, set by the expectations of management, employees, and so forth. But there are also stories of our customers, and by telling many of these stories, I suspect we will hear some stark contrasts that will cause us to reckon with ourselves.

Have we stereotyped our corporate self?

The second thought is in regards to personas. At Covenant Eyes, my colleague Jackie has taken the lead on creating a set of personas that we can use during our design and development work. This is a first for us. This week as we were reviewing the current set of about 16 personas, we were working on writing in various scenarios for each persona. I think the point of each scenario is to enrich the story of that persona.

But perhaps more important is that across the full set of personas, however large it may get, that we have properly balanced the stories that are represented by each persona. I think, at its root, that is part of why personas are valuable in the first place. To challenge the stereotype, the single story, that we might have in development about our “user.” These personas will be valuable if they can help us tell the many stories of our customers and users.

This particular story concerns a navigation system that utilizes pagination in what at first seems an obvious choice, but upon observation it is clear that this is a very poor approach.

Background: Company setting

Covenant Eyes, Inc., is an  8 year old software company in Michigan with about 50 employees. About a dozen are customer service representatives, some for enterprise customers and some for individual or family accounts. There are about 10 in the IT team, which includes myself.

Background: What service does our company provide? Internet accountability.

Take 2 actors, George and his friend Paul. George is addicted to online porn, but he really wants to beat his addiction because he feels it is wrong and could really mess up his life. To attack his problem, George installs our software on his computer. The software keeps tabs on George’s activity, and once a week sends a report of that activity over to Paul. Paul can then talk with George about George’s Internet activity. It seems simple, but removing the anonymity of his addiction is powerful.

The point, in a nutshell, is accountability. If George is trying to kick some bad online habits, his friend Paul now has information in these reports that he can use to hold George accountable.

The current design calls for pagination

These Accountability Reports are like executive summaries that include links over to what we call the “Detailed Logs.” This log is a full list of URLs that George visited.

Depending on the amount of activity, the log may have thousands of entries for Paul to navigate.

When these logs first became available, customers’ download speeds were more of an issue than they are today, so the developers knew that they could not simply put all the entries on a single page because the pages would take far too long to load.

Pagination to the rescue! The developers broke up the long list of URLs into pages, each page having 50 URLs. To help Paul navigate this long series of pages, numbered page links and “Previous” and “Next” links were placed at the top and bottom of each page.

So, let’s say Paul is looking at page 50. He would see something like the pagination navigation shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Pagination

This seems a good approach on two fronts.

1. Paul won’t wait to download one page with over 8,000 URLs on it, but if we divide that time into, in this case, 165 separate downloads, each page will seem pretty quick.
2. Pagination will work for Paul because he uses pagination on nearly every search engine results page. It’s nothing new to him.

Bingo. Problem solved. Right?

But why does it take so many clicks to find the right info?

I was standing next to Mike, one of our Customer Service Representatives, and asked him a seemingly simple question. “Mike, can you bring up that log and show me what was going on last Tuesday at 11:32 AM?”

I did not intend it to be a usability test, but it might as well have been. Mike helps people every day by walking them through reports and logs, so he is as expert as anyone gets at navigating these logs. Yet, the basic task of finding a page with a specific time on it was accomplished by a series of guesses, each slightly more informed than the previous guess. It took 8 tries before Mike got us to the right page.

Since then, I have seen people repeatedly click the “Next” button, flipping through each page to find the one page they want. With 165 or so pages in a log, this can take far more than 8 clicks.

If someone knows the date and time they want to view in a Detailed Log, shouldn’t they be able to get to that page without guessing on the first try?

20/20 hindsight: Why is it so hard to find the right page?

Pagination is a valid interface design pattern, and is perhaps most often seen on search engine result pages. Still, it does not work well here.

So, why doesn’t pagination work here? Thinking in information architecture terms can help answer the question.

Pagination is a metaphor from the print world

We’ve all grown up reading books and magazines, and so page numbers are a tool we take for granted. In print, they are used to keep track of where we left off so we can pick back up at the right point. They are also used as non-digital hypertext, like in a magazine where we see “continued on page 58.”

On the web, pagination has become something slightly different, but the metaphor carries over well enough to work for us. On search results pages, we now expect to see a pagination interface at the bottom of the search results to allow us to continue to the next page of 10 or 20 links. One difference on the web is that we expect those links on the first page to have higher relevancy than those on the following pages.

So, on the web pagination is an answer to a finding question, and is based on an underlying organizational system of quantity ordered by relevancy.

However, in this case, the list is ordered by time but paginated by quantity. In this case, people want to find by time, but quantity is not metered evenly against time. So, page 1 might have 50 entries that cover 5 seconds of activity, and page 2 might have 50 entries that cover 32 hours of activity. There is no predictability of how much time will be represented from page to page of results, and that is why people are left with so much guess-work.

Match the interface to the underlying information architecture and users’ information needs

In recent work, we’ve shifted to a time-based pagination (Figure 2) from a quantity-based pagination (Figure 1). We think this will go a long way towards helping people find what they want without having to guess.

Figure 2. Find-by-time instead of pagination.

I’ve observed a few users have their first contact with this revised interface, and it has worked well so far. We may have introduced other usability issues in the process, but this is a step in the right direction.

Moral of the story?

Before implementing a user interface design pattern, be sure you first understand the information architecture and users’ information needs. Otherwise you risk using the wrong pattern, hurting your users’ experiences, and missing out on an opportunity for innovation and good design.

It allows us to view and record a user’s screen, and save it as a WMV or Morae file. Additionally, it can record a phone call you have with the user. And, you can have colleagues at other computers observe the session and they can take part in an observer chat and submit notes along the way.

There’s that saying, “Hunger is the best sauce,” and I think the user experience design community has been very hungry for a tool like this. So, at the moment, I’m quite happy with UserVue.

It was quite easy to use, and it worked well.

Now, to save others some frustration, let me tell you about how it didn’t work well.

When I first tried it, everything seemed to be going great. I conducted a 1 hour interview, and at the end it seemed to save the recording. Then, when I went to view the recording, I realized that the phone call was not included in the recording! The best part of that interview was, go figure, in what was said. I was distraught.

Why? UserVue only works on Windows. I was running Windows XP Pro in a virtual machine on my MacBook Pro laptop, using VMWare Fusion. Apparently, there is a problem with that configuration.

I tested UserVue on that same computer, but instead of in a virtual machine, I booted into Windows using BootCamp. UserVue worked fine that way, including recording the phone call.

So, some time has passed, I’ve read the book, and before I pass it on to someone else, I feel a need to record some personal notes about it, in case I lose it.

The blunders (titles of the 1st 7 chapters of the book):

1. Exposure Anxiety: The Fear of Being Seen as Weak
2. Causefusion: Confusing the Causes of Complex Events
3. Flatview: Seeing the World in One Dimension
4. Cure-allism: Believeing that One Size Really Fits All
5. Infomania: The Obsessive Relationship to Information
6. Mirror Imaging: Thinking the Other Side Thinks Like Us
7. Static Cling: Refusal to Accept a Changing World

From the last chapter, Shore mentioned 5 ways to prevent blunders.

1. Mental flexibility
2. Willingness to question majority view
3. Rejection of reductionism
4. Development of empathy and imagination
5. Embrace uncertainty

I don’t have the time that writing about this book deserves, but in relation to user experience design, these lessons certainly apply and complement what I’m sure many UX pros already have learned. The historical perspectives in the book made it interesting and provided realistic narratives to explain the various cognition traps.

As a designer and a product owner in scrum, this is an important read. Advisors and executives should read this book, too.

There are some bits of information that I try to memorize in order to encourage my mind to recall them as needed. Some proverbs, usability heuristics, certain interaction design “laws”…and now these blunders I will try to add to this list.

Asparagus! Credit to Esteban Cavrico on Flickr.com.

I am not a foodie. Okay, now that that is out of the way: Whole Foods is amazing.

One evening at last week’s IUE2009 conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan, my colleague Jackie and I breezed through the local Whole Foods store. From a user experience perspective, my Whole Foods experience was really great. But, let me digest it a bit further.

As author of “Neuro Web Design” Susan Weinschenk explained, our “old brain” triggers on 3 questions: can I eat it, can I have sex with it, and can it harm me.

Upon entering Whole Foods, we were first met with luscious fresh fruits and vegetables. They appeared and smelled a factor better than the normal produce at the grocer in my village. I walked in with the intetion to buy one item: baking powder that uses potato starch instead of corn starch, so when I realized I was gazing lustily at the asparagus, I swallowed my mouthful of saliva and steeled myself with the rational part of my brain. Discipline! I would not succumb. Still, it was delightful to walk around and see the beautiful cuts of meat, the great selections at the deli, the desserts, the wine, the cheeses.

We had circled the store and were approaching the checkout and realized that we hadn’t seen the baking section.

So consider: We were in an unfamiliar store and had not located the item I was seeking. I was not irritated by this. The general happiness of walking through this great store put me in a very tolerant mood. I actually looked forward to seeing what other great things we’d see on the way to finding the baking powder, and I had high expectation that they would, in fact, have the baking powder. They did have it. I bought two cans of it, at a premium price. And, I ended up buying some turbinado sugar that was in the same aisle, since I was nearly out of demerrara sugar that I use for baking (and in coffee and on oatmeal…).

Designers! If you haven’t yet, read “Emotional Design” by Don Norman. Oh, and Weinschenk’s book too.

Whiteboard ideas cluster from IUE2009 conference. Click to view larger version.

Now comes the after-conference exhalation. (And I just attended! Imagine the organizers.)

My employer, Covenant Eyes, sent a small crew of people to the conference…8 of us in all. For all but me, it was the first time at any UX conference, and I think we all learned quite a bit.

So now the question becomes, what did we learn from all these tutorials and sessions, what ideas will help us do better work, and how can we make sure to build these ideas into our daily work.

I understand that most of us will gather on Monday to start hashing out those questions, but in the meantime I thought I’d share my initial map of ideas, recently jotted onto my whiteboard. Click the photo for a larger, more readable version.

Concepts on the board:

• Use Cases
• Field Research
• Personas & Persona Maps
• Rapid Iterative Design, “Kleenex Tests”
• Branding+Content+Search Engine Optimization
• Social Web (Podcasts, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) But Be Real!

The last day was built on parallel tracks of presentations, most were about an hour-long. I’m only going to write about 3 of the ones I attended.

1. Now That I See It, Dan Klyn, Flannel
2. In-House Recruiting, Cora Bledsoe, Quicken Loans
3. Grown-Ups Guide to the Social World of Web 2.0, Jan Welborn-Nichols, Market Arts Creative

Now That I See It

Dan Klyn’s talk was enthusiastic and thoughtful. He asked the question about information architecture, is there more we can learn from “regular old” architects? Of course, the answer is yes.

One idea he garnered from architecture is the spectrum of architecture work. Which level should it meet?

1. Shelter
2. Comfort
3. Convenience
4. Prestige

Ask that about any Web project. What an excellent model for thinking about the aims of a project! Associated with each is the level of customization, the speed of delivery, and the reliance on established patterns of use. E.g., for many sites that need comfort or convenience, building a site using WordPress (or another blog CMS) would be fine. However, if you need certain convenience or prestige, more custom approaches/implementation of information architecture may be needed. An out-of-the-box CMS may not be able to reach that level of work.

I suspect most of us make these strategic calls at the early stages of projects, but I found this spectrum of shelter to prestige to provide a nice frame.

Dan also talked about some discussions he’s had with Richard Saul Wurman, who wrote a book a published in 1997 with “Information Architects” as the title. I’ve not read the book, but been aware of Wurman by references from a number of authors in the IA field. My general take is that he pushed thoughts on the topic forward, but that the book was focused more on what today we call information design. Funny, I’ve watched a number of TED presentations, but had no idea that Wurman was behind that project.

It’s been so long since I’ve been in a room with other information architects. I love IAs.

Dan is working on a book called “Now That I See It.” I’m looking forward to seeing it!

In-House Recruiting

Cora presented one of the most immediately applicable ideas of the conference. In short, it is the idea to create a place for people interested in participating in user research to gather, so that when Quicken Loans needs to recruit participants, they have an existing pool of possible participants to pull from. See a core part of the answer at feedbackcentral.quickenloans.com.

Awesome idea. Perhaps we’ll do this at work.

Grown-Ups Guide to the Social World of Web 2.0

Jan presented a fast-paced survey of many Web 2.0 sites out there, and gave her review of many of them. She shared many recommendations on making the most of each one. Her talk was great and entertaining…and I need to get to work. Read LOTS more about her talk at Zach’s blog, and visit her company’s site at market-arts.com.