Author: Elyse Sanchez

What Goes on at Work Stays at Work

Elyse Sanchez, Thursday, October 4, 2007 @ 1:38 pm

On a discussion thread to which I subscribe, a friendly
debate about whether we prefer the term “Information Architect” or “User
Experience Architect” as a job title took an interesting—but by no means unrelated—turn
towards the subject of drinking wine. This prompted a post by IA Donna Maurer, who
offered one of her blog entries describing the detailed taxonomy of her wine
rack. In her explanation, she states that “I thought I should show just one
aspect of my obsession with organizing stuff. People always laugh at me when I
tell them about this. Not sure why – after all, I do organise messy content for
a living.”

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User Experience Design

Social Networking from Cradle to Grave

Elyse Sanchez, Thursday, August 9, 2007 @ 1:20 pm

According to a pair of articles on BusinessWeek.com, the
social networking site Facebook.com attracted 11.5 million individual visitors
over the age of 35 in June, more than double the number a year before. The
growth of this segment is remarkable, given that the site was not open to all
until late September 2006, and the increasing “graying” of Facebook is
predicted to change the site’s character and content.

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On the use of “user”

Elyse Sanchez, Monday, July 30, 2007 @ 11:40 am

“I’m sick of users,” announced Josh Bernoff in
a recent blog entry, leading one to initially believe that he has joined the
ranks of indifferent (or outright hostile) developers, clients, and other uninterested
parties reluctantly associated with producing applications and websites. However,
Bernoff’s distaste is semantic, not social. He argues that the term “user”
emphasizes technology over relationships and encourages a flattened and skewed
view of the people interacting with the products. He challenges the readers to “try,
just for a day, to stop using this word. You’ll be amazed at how differently
you think about the world.”

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Second Story: Walking the Walk

Elyse Sanchez, Friday, July 27, 2007 @ 1:38 pm

Second
Story Interactive Studios, in its own words, “creates informative and
entertaining interactive experiences in the form of media-rich storytelling
presentations, online collections, interpretive installations, and
database-driven applications.” The company comprises a diverse team of creative artists,
writers, producers, animators and programmers who enjoy a work environment that
boasts both a screening room and a technology lab for experimentation,
prototyping and testing of their projects.

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Integrating UXD with Agile–free whitepaper

Elyse Sanchez, Thursday, July 5, 2007 @ 3:36 pm

The Pathfinder User Experience Design team has written and published a whitepaper that was recently distributed at the annual Software 500 Conference in Boston, MA. The paper will show you how to combine Agile and UXD practices to get higher acceptance, fewer support calls, and return customers as well as define four key places in an agile development process where you can improve project success by integrating UXD practices into the Agile software development cycle. These techniques include the use of personas, taskflows, rapid prototyping, and iterative testing, among others, depending on the stage of development.

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Agile Usability Testing

Elyse Sanchez, Friday, June 15, 2007 @ 2:05 pm

Even in waterfall-based design and development projects, formal usability testing at the time the system is being finalized is essentially “too much, too late”: a time-consuming, labor-intensive activity yielding results that are frequently unactionable for the current release. Several iterative assessment techniques, however, can be employed throughout any process, providing timely insight and direction. These techniques are readily adaptable to the Agile methodology, and, with some minor adaptations, can in fact be regarded as “agile” usability testing methods. Low-fidelity testing, using paper prototypes (or even hand sketches) can provide a quick benchmarking, and can be incorporated into a scrum meeting.

Why is usability testing important in the Agile environment?

A crucial component of the Agile methodology is the practice of obtaining customer feedback after every iteration and then making functional changes accordingly. Introducing usability assessments at key points in the process can ensure that the users’ requirements will also be recognized and accommodated within the development process, at a point when any potentially off-course decisions can be corrected and improvements implemented.

The nature of Agile development is to focus on individual features and although the project “epic” attempts to preserve the big picture for the product, this view is nevertheless focused on the functional and business requirements, rather than on the holistic user experience. Usability testing can document and validate issues that may only be the opinions of the team.

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Grounding the Portable Usability Lab

Elyse Sanchez, Wednesday, June 6, 2007 @ 1:46 pm

Usability studies are experiencing a shift in geography. For some time now, there has been some consensus that a traditional, dedicated usability lab is an unnecessary expenditure for an individual organization. Of course, since we specialize in User Experience Design, including usability testing, it’s a moot point for us. But we’re not exempt from the cost factor, either.

The main driver for this movement is the availability of software such as Morae and Spectator. Even Mac users are getting into the game with a product called VisualMark. These products turn a couple of laptops into a portable usability lab at the fraction of the cost of a full, fixed installation.

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Usability Testing Techniques

Elyse Sanchez, Thursday, May 24, 2007 @ 1:30 pm

Too often, usability testing is judged to be a “nice-to-have,” but dispensable within the time and budget constraints of a full design and development project.

This activity is often incorrectly perceived as being solely a formalized study that is time and labor intensive, with the potential to threaten the timeline and swell the budget. This is especially the case with the increasing dominance of Agile development methodologies, in which usability testing is thought to be a hindrance to the rapid iterative process.

However, there are many methods to elicit user feedback, both during development and pre-release. Here are the pros and cons of a few.

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Usability testing in the agile environment: an overview

Elyse Sanchez, Wednesday, May 16, 2007 @ 9:15 am

The growing partnership between user-centered design practices and the array of agile methodologies faces an impasse when it comes to usability testing. In a traditional waterfall approach, a formal usability assessment generally occurs close to release and is structured--and often perceived by clients--as a culminating Big Event. Consequently, the attempt to insert traditional usability testing events into the iterative agile process is viewed by developers as antithetical to their process.

Several interesting articles have been written that explore this topic. Uzanto's Jonathan Boutelle takes the novel approach that usability testing should be taken out of the hands of specialists, whom he feels filters the user insights and often fails to communicate them to the design team. His strategy is to solicit "a constant drip drip drip of insights" by recruiting a small number of participants from Craigslist and having them assess the system remotely. This, he feels, allows the developers to experience the insights first hand.

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The boundaries of personas

Elyse Sanchez, Friday, May 11, 2007 @ 2:36 pm

Leisa Reichelt has recently published a thought-provoking post on her site, disambiguity, titled "Yes, you should be using personas." She states that she's "come to the opinion that personas are incredibly valuable, but not for the reasons many people think they are."

Instead of functioning as a tool to justify design, she argues, personas should serve as the vehicle to communicate the user centered process to stakeholders. By involving the members of the project team in the creation of personas, as well as involving them in user research and testing, they will gain first-hand experience with the design process. And that is, I think, more compelling than having the UXD team create beautifully formatted artifacts in isolation and then present them with a flourish (and extended explanation).

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This is a test

Elyse Sanchez, Monday, April 23, 2007 @ 2:50 pm

The fundamental rationale that underlies the direct and observational techniques of user research is that a user’s actions speak louder than their words. As a matter of fact, as usability specialists we are trained to go beyond the surface of a comment and probe for the motivation that spurred the verbal reaction: if, for example, a user encounters an obstacle during a usability test, is the cause a design flaw or a unique characteristic of that individual? In my experience, many participants have an almost palpable desire to please the facilitator and avoid making “mistakes” during the assessment.

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Recommendation Search Engines: Liveplasma.com

Elyse Sanchez, Tuesday, April 17, 2007 @ 9:51 am

Similar to Amazon’s suggestive selling, e.g., “people who bought X also bought Y,” these sites group recommendations around a target book, band, or film. Liveplasma.com bills itself as a “discovery engine,” providing searches in multiple languages (English, French and German) as well as multiple English-speaking cultures (US, Canada, UK). The three English-language searches yield identical results; the distinction lies in the localized Amazon site that presents products associated with the search results.

After entering search criteria, consisting of keyword(s), category (artist/band, movie, director or actor), and country, liveplasma presents a detailed and visually compelling graphical “galaxy” of related products. The music search displays linked spheres, whose size indicate the relative popularity of the band or artist. Colors of the spheres link related bands. Movie maps display miniature images of the movies along with the titles.

Although liveplasma maintains that “data is grouped according to interest, style, epoch and other criteria that suggest somebody will like it,” I found the movie search disappointing: I selected a favorite film of a specific genre, and was presented with a tightly-related cluster whose commonality was that these highly disparate films had the same director. Peripheral links were akin to a six-degrees of separation connection, with the outer rings of the galaxy presenting some truly farfetched choices. I was hoping for a more three-dimensional group of recommendations that would also take genre into account. Clearly, the database is not nearly as extensive as that of the interactive movie database (imdb.com). The music search, as well, grouped bands and artists in self-evident and obvious relationships. I would find it difficult to discover new things I would like using liveplasma.

Usability of the site is compromised by the existence of a fixed search box/menu/product display that obscures part of the left side of the display. Although the user can zoom in and out, reducing the entire map to bypass the left panel leaves the data too small to be readable.

Next, the family of gnod: "A search engine to find things you don't know about."

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Alternative Search Engines, Part 1

Elyse Sanchez, Friday, April 13, 2007 @ 9:26 am

Two days ago, Hitwise released statistics showing that Google accounted for 64% of all searches in March 2007. I would have assumed the percentage was higher, given the sheer ubiquity—and utility—of Google, whose name, like Xerox, has become synonymous with its function. The competition lagged far behind, with Yahoo search claiming 22%, MSN trailing with 9%, and Ask.com bringing up the rear with 3%. That’s 98% of all searches conducted during the period, and the significant factor is that all four of these search engines operate in essentially the same way, producing flat, one-dimensional lists of results.

Charles Knight, of Read/Write Web, writes a monthly article on the other 2%, offering his admittedly subjective lists of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines. He’s careful to explain that these search engines are not to be considered head-to-head competitors to the multifunctional Google, but they make his list because they do perhaps a single aspect of search better than the behemoth. I decided to take a look at some of his picks.

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The new market research is the old user research

Elyse Sanchez, Thursday, April 12, 2007 @ 9:43 am

The objectives of user and market research (should ideally) differ dramatically, the data combining to create a multifaceted profile of the audience as both customer and end-user of a website or application. User research traditionally begins with a discovery phase, in which existing market research is evaluated in order to determine high-level user groupings. This market research is traditionally quantitative, based on large-scale surveys and supplemented in some cases by focus group data, which is a richer source of information by virtue of providing actual verbatim, which is, in some cases, indirectly relevant to the usability specialist. However, user research is far less concerned with what a person says about a product than what they actually do with it. Thus, behavioral analysis—actual observation of the user, ideally in the authentic environment of use—is the most powerful research tool in designing an optimal user experience. A well-designed study, facilitated by a skilled usability specialist, yields layers of information that would be unavailable from a survey or group conversation.

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Avoiding the edge in redesign

Elyse Sanchez, Wednesday, April 11, 2007 @ 10:16 am

Commenting on the debut of a recently redesigned metropolitan newspaper, blogger Steve Rhodes articulated a concern that certainly must strike a chord with many IAs:

. . .[T]he real problem is one that every redesign faces - that old lipstick on a pig thing. Unfortunately, nobody wants to improve the pig. It's not that hard to understand. Campbell's can change the label all they want, but if their soup still sucks, their soup still sucks. . .Redesigns always work around the edges.

My work at Pathfinder has been about evenly divided between working on new products and redesigns of existing sites and applications. The differences are considerable, both on the project level and in my individual approach and the tasks and challenges I face. Most clients seem to be under the impression that revising an existing product is a lesser undertaking: after all, they’ve got something built that hasn’t yet crumbled and collapsed. In discovery meetings, I’ve too often heard stakeholders say that “all we really needs is a facelift.” In other words, put some lipstick on this pig—slap a little look and feel on the GUI, maybe reposition a few buttons, and success is inevitable.

What they don’t realize is that bling therapy alone will probably damage the user experience more than it helps. Visual design is not simply creating concepts in Photoshop for the client to cherry-pick (“Oh, I like the navigation on Concept 1 with the color palette on Concept 3. Could you combine them?”). Visual design is as integral to usability as a solid, defensible, well-conceived architecture and flow: the two disciplines complement and strengthen each other. Invariably, an analysis of visual redesign brings deeper structural issues to the surface.

Fortunately, most clients understand—or can be persuaded—that a paint job, however skillful or artfully applied, does not in itself lead to a considerable improvement in usability. But colors and visual concepts are things that everyone can have an opinion on, and the appearance of a product makes the initial, most powerful impression to the stakeholders--especially the marketing department. It’s somewhat more of a challenge for us to engage them in taskflows and wireframes, but some of the most rewarding projects I’ve participated in were in the cases where the clients became true collaborators in the entire process. Understanding what makes their product or site better for users brings them closer to their audience and more sensitive to their needs. Ideally, everything we design should look good and work well, but if it doesn't work well, it really can't look good.

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