Eye tracking measures unconscious behavior—and provides data that people simply cannot verbalize in other common user research methods, especially TA usability testing protocols. Decades of psychology research show that much human behavior occurs at an unconscious level.
Despite Jared Spool's protests, I think the authors capture what I've seen as we've done eye tracking studies - namely that you get unique data (e.g., what is seen first) that you simply can't by asking someone.
eBay boasts some of the most engaged users on the planet and this makes for fertile ground. Have a listen to what Julie and Richard have to say and think about how it applies to your own organization.
Interesting discussion on social interactions from the eBay team. Worth a listen.
Fantasy: Social media shouldn't live in a silo, so we are adding these responsibilities to your existing job.
Reality: Day jobs will always win and moonlighting only makes you tired.
Fantasy: Let's use latest social platform X
Reality: They don't actually use latest social platform X, but they've read about it on a blog.Fantasy: People love coupons!
Reality: People do love coupons! And they love you only as long as you give them freebies.Fantasy: It's all just media.
Reality: It's actually about interactions—and media needs to work in tandem with those.Fantasy: People need to be educated.
Reality: Online, people educate themselves.
Fantasy: It's another place where we can tell our story.
Reality: Participants care more about their story than they do yours. Stop deleting their comments.
Fantasy: They will tell friends!
Reality: Getting someone to tell a friend about you requires being remarkable. Are you?
Many of these sure ring true. I think the two most important are: (a) Its all about the interactions (not the media - its the humanity attached to the interaction that is interesting); and (b) Its NOT a place to tell OUR story - people are looking for solutions or fun, not to learn more about you. Help them and then they'll be interested in your story.
Are location-based social networks privacy disasters waiting to happen? Or are the supposed "dangers" simply being overhyped by those without a thorough understanding of what these new networks can and cannot do? Today, these questions are the subject of a serious debate among early adopters - the group of people who are first to sign up for and try out the latest technology innovations, testing everything from iPads to mobile apps.
There are currently a number of location-based social networks clamoring for your attention, including earlier contenders like Loopt and Brightkite as well as the later to arrive game-based networks like Foursquare and Gowalla. Even user review site Yelp is getting in on the action. So is Google. And so is Facebook, apparently.
But is sharing your location with your online "friends" asking for trouble?
Please Rob Me? OK! Says Burglar
Not too long ago, a social experiment called PleaseRobMe launched, displaying the aggregated real-time updates from Foursquare users who used the service's social sharing feature to broadcast their updates publicly on Twitter. Although that site has since been shuttered, the point they were trying to make still resonates: sharing your physical location with a public network is a dangerous and really dumb idea.
Want more examples? How about the story of the Twitter user who broadcast his vacation only to find his house robbed when he came home. Or more recently, a women's Facebook status update alerted a burglar that her home was empty and ready to be robbed. (The thief got away with $10,000 in stolen goods).
Social Networks and Privacy
However, the above incidents take place on a somewhat public stage. (The Facebook woman, for instance, had collected around 600 friends - surely not all of them were truly personal contacts?)
The new mobile social networking services allow for a bit more privacy. On these networks, you can control who you "friend" and, in some cases, who can see your exact location. Brightkite, for example, lets you choose to share updates with either just friends or with everyone. Foursquare lets you check in to locations "off the grid," meaning checking in privately without letting your friends know where they can find you.
Redefining Friend
Unfortunately, the issue with all these networks comes down to how someone defines the word "friend." Ever since the days of MySpace, it seems the goal has been to accumulate the most friends. This mindset has carried over to many other social networks, including Twitter, the social aggregator FriendFeed and Google Buzz, all of which publicly track and expose how many people follow you, an indication of popularity...and who doesn't want to be popular?
The truth is, an online friend may or may not be worthy of the same level of trust as someone you know in real life. Sure, they might be - in fact, odds are they are lovely people - but without a history of interaction that extends beyond sharing a few links and comments on Twitter, you can't possibly know that for sure.
This article is right on. There seems to be great promise in location-aware apps, but I agree that it requires a re-definition of what is a "friend". Looking forward to the future of these apps. Love the "please rob me app". Can't help but thinking the same thing.
Contrast—the secret sauce
Contrast is the perceived difference in colors that are in close proximity to each other. Using contrast effectively not only differentiates your design from others, it’s the essential ingredient that makes content accessible to every viewer. People who are fully colorblind, those with specific types of colorblindness, and people with low-vision need to access content on the web. As designers, we must ensure that every viewer is able to perceive content on the sites we create. What’s more, we don’t have to limit ourselves to the high contrast combination of black and white. We can embrace our big pail of colors and create websites that unabashedly employ color with appropriate contrast.
I think this article is right on. We need to emphasize the importance of visual contrast in design. Even color-experiencing people use a black-and-white version of a scene (from their rods) to determine WHERE to look.
Instant Utility
What this means is the service is instantly useful to you. If you build a service and the user has to spend an our configuring the service, setting it up, importing contacts, doing a lot of data entry, I don’t think people are going to – most people aren’t going to put up with that. The service has to be useful right out of the box.
We see a lot of people make this mistake. There are a lot of tricks you can use to create instant utility and then go from there. A good example of that is if you’re building an information service, you can crawl the web to populate the service initially, even though long term you expect to get the data some other way. You have to give people something right off the bat that is useful.
I think these are always good principles - but I want people to really understand an apps value as soon as they view it. If it can't produce results right away, then you need to set up a mock example so people can see what it does. Good point Fred. Probably right to put this as #2 to speed.
One comment Shirky made really resonated: “Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does.” And then he went on to underscore the power of content sharing—the kind, says Shirky, “where people are trying to create civic value to change the culture the participants are embedded in.” His message was no less than the fact that the free and frequent exchange of information has the ability to catalyze revolution.
Shirky notes several examples of groups trying to come up with a public solution to a societal problem by freely distributing content, only to draw the ire of established institutions. One was the case of PickupPal, a ride-sharing service in Ottawa that was providing information for commuters to more easily use the service. It became so easy to use that the City of Ottawa, whose public transportation system was at risk of loosing market share, passed a law making carpooling and ridesharing unreasonably difficult to do. PickupPal was deemed “too efficient.” A local movement to save the rideshare company began and the uproar in the community caused the city to rewrite the law.
Shirky called this type of distribution “jackhammer sharing,” which he called powerful enough to destroy the existing environment or even promote human rights.
This sometimes feels far fetched, but I think the promise is there. Let's think about how to persuade not only people to participate, but also get the current institutions to go along with it...
Presentation: Revealing Design Treasures from the AmazonOn its surface, Amazon.com just seems like a large e-commerce site, albeit a successful one. Its design isn’t flashy, nor is it much to write home about. But deep within its pages are hidden secrets — secrets that every designer should know about.
If you haven't heard Jared's talks on Amazon and its explorations, you should check this out.
iPhoney – Not an iPhone simulator, rather a pixel-accurate web browsing environment—powered by Safari—that you can use when developing web sites for iPhone.
Interesting that I can completely live without any of these. However, I was curious about iPhoney - nice to see another way to build for iphone.
there is a growing sense that user experience design should be – not merely intuitive – but evidence-based. The emphasis on user testing in all its forms is a manifestation of this.
Partially because the way we test our designs resembles a traditional psychological or ethnographic study, it’s often assumed that the kind of evidence required is statistical evidence. I want to suggest that this may actually be a misunderstanding – itself a result of a naturalistic bias inherent in our society – and to suggest an alternative view.
Justin Tauber thoughtfully suggests that there is more to UX than statistical significance. Rather - its the phenomenon that we're trying to capture - not a "capture-able" trend. It can be measured and documented, but not necessarily statistically validated...
5 Guiding Principles for Experience Designers
- Understand the underlying problem before attempting to solve it
Your work should have purpose—addressing actual, urgent problems that people are facing. Make sure that you can clearly articulate the core of the issue before spending an ounce of time on developing the design. The true mark of an effective designer is the ability to answer "why?". Don't waste your time solving the wrong problems.
Don't hurt anyone It is your job to protect people and create positive experiences. At the very minimum you must ensure that you do not cause any pain. The world is filled with plenty of anguish—make your life goal not to add to it.
Make things simple and intuitive Leave complexity to family dynamics, relationships, and puzzles. The things you create should be easy to use, easy to learn, easy to find, and easy to adapt. Intuition happens outside of conscious reasoning, so by utilizing it you are actually reducing the tax on people's minds. That will make them feel lighter and likely a lot happier.
Acknowledge that the user is not like you What's obvious to you isn't necessarily obvious to someone else. Our thought processes and understanding of the world around us are deeply affected by our genetics, upbringing, religious and geographical culture, and past experiences. There is a very small likelihood that the people you are designing for have all the distinctive qualities that make you you. Don't assume you innately understand the needs of your customers. How many people do you think truly understand what it feels like to be you?
Have empathy Empathy is the ability to understand and share another person's perspective and feelings. Step outside your box and try really hard to understand the world from another person's point of view. Go out of your way to identify with their needs. If certain things just don't make sense to you, ask more questions. Ask as many questions as you need to until you finally understand. When you really get what makes people tick and why they do what they do, you'll have a much easier time going to bat to make their lives better. If you aren't trying to make people's lives better, what are you even doing here?
#1 is #1: Figure you the underlying problem - not what users are telling you - to learn how to truly help them and ensure the success of your project.
a left-brain/right-brain divide in the field of customer experience
Peter has a point. Its interesting to see the distinction between the big-picture plans of designers and the Six-Sigma improvement mentality in the trenches. I think Peter is right that we need to engage both sides to hit on customer experience properly.
My presentation discussed:
- Examining new strategies, tactics, and applications of the Service Profit Chain model
- Applying theory to practice in banking
- Expanding how such concepts might be applied to any retail or customer facing business.
A copy of the presentation is here.
Interesting to see how banking groups are seeing a real revolution in how banking is being presented and the need for great customer experience.
Check out his slides from his talk. Interesting to see the Service Profit Chain ideas in this.
This is worth remembering. This is why we need a clear strategy and keep the client committed to that strategy...
Programmer and journalist Andy Baio, of Waxy.org and Kickstarter, spoke at SXSW about games bleeding into real life, the workplace and the marketplace. Using games as psychological motivators isn't a far-fetched idea. Both the Ford Fusion and Honda Insight have dashboard graphics that show you how efficiently you're driving via growing leaves. The Obama team understood this and leveraged the power of a leader board and achievements during the presidential campaign. Nike realized this earlier with the hugely effective Nike+ where it used real world data and visualization to get people exercising, a notoriously difficult thing to get people to do regularly. Nike+ users can track their own performance, compare with friends, and even compete in virtual races and marathons.
Nice example of encouraging positive behavior. Feedback, challenge, competition.
Smartphone ownership in the United States has grown from 15% of US consumers in October 2006 to 42% in December 200
Interesting to see how few smart phones there are in the Asia Pacific area...
Interesting things discussed regarding game design, persuasive design and experience....
As the world slowly emerges from the economic gloom, and the “hyper-social real-time web” requires new organizational designs, it’s clear that business as usual will not be so usual anymore.
Interesting thoughts about what empathy is and how brands embody them.
This is a nice presentation putting together the paradoxical of games and how making them virtual and relating to reality - "authenticity" - is crucial in our increasingly virtual world. The psychology of persuasiveness, combined with a tie between the real and virtual, and "authentic reality" are the key. Interesting idea.
Less than a week has passed since the interactive portion of SXSW, a Mecca for the world's digerati, wrapped up. Some have written scathing reviews vowing never to return and others provided a more balanced look. From a sociological point of view, I'd argue that events like this serve up insights by the pound, if you are willing to look for them. Here are a few things I noticed and how you can apply these insights to the business world.
Give People The Tools To Organize: Reward Participation.
Each year SXSW spotlights a technology. This year it was the local/mobile platform Foursquare. The service let people within the local network sniff out which events and locations were "hot" by who and how many people were checking in. If you managed to find yourself at one of these trending locations you were rewarded with a "swarm" badge, a special limited badge that acts as a memento of the event. Foursquare allowed participants to manage the chaos to some degree and provided incentives to "check in." In the business world, these principals can be transferred to initiatives such as loyalty programs or internal collaboration networks.
Create Scarcity, Curate Lists.
SXSW hosted lots of parties. People complained about the lines and everyone wanted to be on a VIP list (who doesn't?). While exclusivity has a downside (people feel left out), it also reinforces that those who have social connections don't get left out and reap the benefits. This was reinforced even in the small but tech-saturated petri dish in Austin and ensured that the people who are considered "magnets" would attract others to the right venues. Organizations can leverage this dynamic as well and typically do, through "influencer outreach" programs or singling out the accomplished such as Microsoft's (disclaimer, Edelman client) MVP program.
Standout With A Service.
The SXSW convention center reminded me of Times Square. Hundreds of vendors, brands and companies vie for your attention. The toll this takes on the average attendee is visible after a few days as many of us sought refuge in quiet places. The sensory overload was substantial and resulted in everything blurring into each other which made it difficult to stand out. One company managed to stand out in an understated way. Chevrolet sponsored all of the power supply stations providing adapters for every mobile device conceivable and power strips at every turn (disclaimer, Edelman client). Chevy was ubiquitous without being obnoxious. If you really want your business to stand out amongst the noise, do something useful.
Make People Feel Unique.
SXSW is one of the most informal conferences, with the dress code to match. But it doesn't stop there--attendees looking to set themselves apart from the crowd wear unique t-shirts, bring props such as a garden gnome and hand out business cards that double for bottle openers. The venue supports a sociological truth that human beings want to feel they are one-of-a-kind. You only have to walk through the halls of a high school to see this in practice. This insight proves to be especially relevant in marketing. Provide an experience where you can help people get noticed and they will reward you for it.
Crowdsource With Caution.
In a recent article by Roberto Verganti on the Harvard Business Review website, provocatively entitled "User-Centered Innovation Is Not Sustainable," he writes:
"…one thing is certain: User-centered innovation has helped conduct us into an unsustainable world. The reason is sustainability is not embedded in the anthropology of our existing culture, society, and economy. Yes, people are starting to be concerned about the environment. But their concerns about many other things — their budgets, health, safety, well-being, and emotional fulfillment — are increasing, too…"
The crux of his provocative article is that vision-centered processes, conducted in tandem with users when possible, are the proper way to cultivate sustainable behaviors that have lesser impact on our world. This new paradigm, for both designers and executives, would require less pure observation and "propose new scenarios and solutions that are meaningful for people, good for the environment, and profitable for businesses."
Interesting ideas on "Human-Future" interaction and UX
Late last year, Ustream and qik launched iPhone applications that let you stream videos from the iPhone to the web and allow others to watch them as they’re being recorded. And now there is an iPhone app called TwitCasting Live
(iTunes link
The free app is essentially a live streaming app and Twitter client rolled into one. TwitCasting Live splits the iPhone screen in half, allowing you to view your Twitter timeline, update your status, access the web etc. on the bottom half, while recording (broadcasting) video on the top.
Yet another interesting thing you can do with your iPhone
The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
I guess 1 out of 3 ain't bad...
We just posted our 100th video to Johnny Holland TV. To celebrate, we collected the ten videos that we think are the best of the bunch. So without further ado, and in no particular order…
I think these are all really good. I'd include something on persuasion too... I like the creativity of the sketch-a-move
[Companies must integrate customers behavior on social networks to their corporate website to increase relevancy, word of mouth, and trust]
The secret sauce is determining how to make these co-mingle well.
