Noise Between Stations

Category: Design

  • Equifax Opt-Out Language

    Privacy Policy and Opt Out: By clicking below you may exercise your right to instruct us not to provide your non-public personal information to non-affiliated third parties, except as permitted by law.

    [checkbox checked by default] I choose to opt out.

    Huh? They must not have had my 7th grade teacher who warned us against using multiple negatives. Yup, I’m sure that’s the reason.

    Here’s my attempt to interpret: ‘non-public personal information’ is simply ‘private personal information.’ ‘Non-affiliated’ should be redundant when modifying ‘third parties’ if we’re referring to an institution with special privileges to collect my credit history. When it comes to the default check status it comes down to their philosophy of business and how they regard their customers, but I know which way I, as their customer, would have it. So re-written it’s simply:

    [checkbox checked by default] Do not provide your private personal information to third parties, except as permitted by law.

    But I probably don’t provide them as much income as the endless list of businesses who query my history, so I don’t expect them to modify that option anytime soon.

  • Web Practices and Decentralized Companies

    Developing Best Practices for Distributed Networks of Sites: Heuristics, Design, and Politics (PDF) by Jeffrey Veen of Adaptive Path and Carolyn Gibson Smith of PBS sets a great example of improving web design and encouraging certain practices across a large, decentralized organization. One particular aspect I like is that by distributing templates and building examples they offer the affiliates carrots rather than attempt a futile effort of waving sticks, which often fall under the auspices of governance or compliance in contemporary corporate environments. Even when there is top-down authority to enforce these standards, it’s rarely done happily.

    The process used heuristic analysis, stakeholder interviews, and UCD to…

    • Examine the issues affiliates faced
    • Find internal best practices
    • Build prototype using best practices
    • Test prototype

    They delivered

    • Printed best practices report
    • Working prototype
    • Templates and code
    • Guide for conducting usability tests
    • Case studies
    • System-wide report card

    ‘We’ve heard from Web teams that they are using the recommendations not only to build their sites, but as justification for funding. The report is being used as ammunition for designers and developers as they seek to convince their internal stakeholders of the value of a strong Web presence.‘

  • The Goal of Usability Testing

    What is the goal of usability testing? Let’s say it’s to improve the user’s experience.

    The user’s experience will improve when designers have the skills and resources to design well.

    The designers will improve when they have a better understanding of the users.

    Usability testing offers us some understanding of users. The direct goal of usability testing is to yield this information, but the indirect goal of educating designers is ultimately more important (until someone devises a test that automatically tweaks the product without a designer, which won’t be anytime soon).

    This struck me recently when I thought more about the various usability testing methods available to us and realized some offer us information about users without making us better designers, mostly because the information isn’t as rich, visceral, or immediate as with other methods.

  • Usability Testing

  • We’re All Out In The World

    In Tekka, Cathy Marshall addresses a topic that’s been stirring in my mind lately…

    ‘…do scenarios and personas actually help, or do they just create a warm illusion of user-centered design?‘

    She spends some time illustrating how products can drive personas…

    ‘Want to make personal security and encryption a necessary feature for [our persona’s] email application? Let’s just give her a secret life in which she’s rekindled a dormant college romance via email.’

    But we know that’s not a problem with personas, that’s just people creating personas improperly (personas, unlike guns, don’t shoot unsuspecting children, it requires a designer to do that). Research drives personas, and personas drive design, and design leads to products. Reversing that is incorrect practice, not a flaw in the practice.

    I’ve also seen a tendency to focus the scenario too much on how a persona uses the website to the exclusion of other activities. When Marshall writes, ‘Notice, for example, that people use other communication channels besides their computers‘ it reminds me that personas should capture how people arrived at the site, what other sites they’re looking at, and what they do when they leave.

    We know that to do this work properly one needs empathy with the users. And yet, people are, as George Bernard Shaw observed, bloody apes. People, some of them, can be nasty, messy complainers and it’s easier to just not interact with them. And this is why user-centered design is such a hard sell, because business people don’t want to deal with their customers. It’s easier to keep them at arms length – or further – with surveys and other market research. Personas and scenarios too help us keep people at arms length. Of course, they assume we’ve done our contextual inquiry yada yada beforehand, but that shouldn’t stop with the personas. In the tradition of the best industrial design it doesn’t stop, designers are always working with users. Researching and testing is ingrained in the process, not separate steps in the project plan. Marshall says,

    ‘Don’t just use scenarios and personas. Pay attention. Observe. Reflect. We’re all out in the world we design for.‘

    Which, to me, implies participatory design. It means working more closely with those bloody apes that drive us crazy. This is the hard work we have to do to arrive at a great product. It means I don’t believe personas can substitute for interacting with users during post-research project phases. I don’t know a lot about participatory design yet, but I think it’s time to learn.

  • Personas & Scenarios

  • RUP and UCD

    Dave Cronin’s new Cooper article, RUP & Goal-Directed Design: Toward a New Development Process is a great look at the intersection of conventional user-centered design practice and systems-focused processes. Although he focuses on the Rational Unified Process, the ideas can be applied to any big software development project, and is helpful in understanding and communicating with developers.

    He also hits one of the practices that currently drives me insane, gathering requirements…

    One problem in effectively defining high-level requirements up front is that many development organizations understand requirements as something to be “gathered.” This “gathering” activity often manifests itself as customers and users volleying “requirements” emails and phone calls to the help desk, salespeople, and engineers. Often, these are then translated into line items in requirements documents. There is little thought given to reconciling requirements from different sources, and this reconciliation is often done at construction time, which can have all sorts of dire consequences, ranging from confused developers (who rarely have enough information to make educated choices between two apparently reasonable requests) to a confused interface (that is not grounded in a coherent and cohesive product definition) to confused users (who wonder why a function they never use is front-and-center on the screen).

    Learning more about RUP recently, I realize I had some of it thrust on me before. Back at Razorfish a friend sneakily introduced aspects of RUP into our usual process while planning Tolerance.org. While activities like rating risks can be done anytime, we broke up the sections of the site into use cases. For many websites this approach wouldn’t work, as sites often need to work as a coherent whole, with changes in one section effecting other sections. In our case the sections differed significantly by subject matter and audience, so it wasn’t too harmful. I’m about to embark on another such situation, we’ll see what happens.

  • Geekcorps

    Not too long ago I wished for Designers Without Borders, a SWAT team-like organization that would drop designers into third world countries and give them help with technology no one else could offer. Brainheart magazine reports (albeit not online) on something close to this, Geekcorps: A US-based, non-profit organization, we place international technical volunteers in developing nations. We contribute to local IT projects while transferring the technical skills needed to keep projects moving after our volunteers have returned home. Here’s your big chance to go help the Rwandans.

  • The User’s Experience

    At the IA Summit, Peter Merholz commented that one issue with the phrase user experience is that it’s often misused as synonymous with user interface. I’ve heard this as well, and feel it’s only a matter of time before we start hearing, ‘The user experience is too green, can you make it more blue?‘

    Perhaps simply adding an apostrophe-s could rectify this, speaking in terms of the user’s experience. Suddenly it is the user that has ownership and not the designer. It turns out Peterme already thought of that, but we haven’t given it a thorough try. I’m starting to.

  • Talking about Design

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  • Design for Older Adults

    Went to a great half-day seminar run by AARP the other day, thanks to Mike Lee and his wife Amy. They have a great initiative to spread research to designers about how to design for older adults. Of particular note is the AgeLine database of ‘books and articles about like at 50+.’

  • Accountants and Visionaries

    In David Stutz’s resignation letter to Microsoft, he despairs of the toll the downturn will take on management: ‘Being the lowest cost commodity producer during such a recovery will be arduous, and will have the side-effect of changing Microsoft into a place where creative managers and accountants, rather than visionaries, will call the shots.’

    I expect that’s the situation in many places, it’s an economic necessity. The question is: when the economy swings back up can the company re-institute the visionaries or is the culture irreparably altered?

    Link courtesy Mark.

  • Building New Mental Modals

    The new B&A article What’s Your Idea of a Mental Model? reminds me of an idea that’s been circling my head lately. In some respects, many of our most nicely designed products address the physical shape and perhaps the hardware-software user interface, but not the way the technical architecture contributes to our mental model. Sometimes advancing technology demands we adopt mental models that reflect the underlying technology rather than allow us to design user interfaces that mirror the old models that reflect the old user interfaces.

    For example, we pick up a landline phone, hear a dial tone and dial. Now we look at our mobile phones to see that they are on and have a signal, then dial, then press send. It’s as if we combined the action of addressing a letter (punching in the number) with the act of opening a connection (pressing send/picking up the receiver).

    Perhaps this transition was made generally understandable by the in-between step of cordless phones which introduced the modal states of being on or off, but once on immediately present a dial tone. Once we adapted our mental model to handle that modality the idea of dialing first was only one more step.

    Of course, mobile phones bring a host of new issues such as audio quality, service coverage, and the ability to transmit data in addition to voice. These qualities may be understood by migrating our mental models of radio and computers. And because we’re basically using the electromagnetic waves of radio and the digital circuitry of computers, our mental models are following the actual underlying technology, not the grand vision a designer set down.

    [ Bill Gaver’s work suddenly appears as an anti-example ]

    This differs from the way I was taught mental models, which is that you first learn the models your users have, then reuse them in new ways. With our current pace of consumer technology we alter and combine more than we merely reuse.

    Basically, I’m saying people are perhaps better at developing new mental models to fit the situation than we designers sometimes give them credit for. Sure, it’s not easy, but consumers have gotten used a certain degree of satisficing and ambiguity. This adaptability will only increase as the world becomes more complicated and each field of technology spawns new and more specific fields that we will accept without understanding.

    A colleague recently tried video-on-demand (VOD) that is now offered on cable television in New York. For $4 you obtain the ability to play your choice of movie repeatedly for a span of 24 hours. The mental model was problematic, but it didn’t keep him from using it successfully. ‘Like Tivo,‘ he explained, ‘you can rewind and forward. But what are you rewinding and forwarding?‘

  • Why We Love James

    ‘Of course — If I’m going to have a watch, I’m going to have a watch that can make graphs. Yes I realize this is funny. ‘

    And via James: ‘the fly affords being peed on.‘

  • Measuring Delight

    Not content with measuring the ‘satisfaction‘ or ‘initial quality‘ of automobiles, Strategic Vision seeks to measure ‘Total Quality‘ including the customer’s perception of delight.

    Dr. Edwards developed a consumer-friendly scale that allowed them to register their response to the vehicle in highly discriminating ways. Called the Strategic Vision Delight Scale™, it allows a series of judgments to be made. Any aspect of the vehicle can be "A failure," "Unsatisfactory," "Satisfactory," "Excellent" or "Delightful." Owners have been able to discriminate easily between the levels on the scale. "Delightful" is clearly more positive a response than "Excellent."

    nswered is this: how does the system affect the entire experience for the driver?

    Hopefully the emergence of product research firms focused on measuring user experience will nudge corporations to think more about the customer and not just the product.