Category Archives: ucd

human-centered design toolkit from IDEO

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IDEO have created a free downloadable toolkit for NGOs and Social Enterprises.

The Toolkit is divided into four sections:

The Introduction will give an overview of HCD and help you understand how it might be used alongside other methods.

The Hear guide will help your design team prepare for fieldwork and understand how to collect stories that will serve as insight and inspiration. Designing meaningful and innovative solutions that serve your customers begins with gaining deep empathy for their needs, hopes and aspirations for the future. The Hear booklet will equip the team with methodologies and tips for engaging people in their own contexts to delve beneath the surface.

The Field Guide and Aspirations cards are a complement to the Hear guide; these are the tools your team will take with them in order to conduct research.

The Create guide will help your team work together in a workshop format to translate what you heard from people into frameworks, opportunities, solutions, and prototypes. During this phase, you will move from concrete to more abstract thinking in identifying themes and opportunities and back to the concrete with solutions and prototypes.

The Deliver guide will help catapult the top ideas you have created toward implementation. The realization of solution includes rapid revenue and cost modeling, capability assessment, and implementation panning. The activities offered in this phase are meant to complement your organization’s existing implementation processes and may prompt adaptations to the way solutions are typically rolled out.

via Human-Centered Design Toolkit – Case Studies – IDEO.

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e-commerce project: current state analysis

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This article is part of a series about our e-commerce redesign.

I had some quiet time over Xmas and did some current state analysis of the online shop then. I’m so glad I did this. As per usual, as soon as the project actually kicks off there is limited time to do this sort of thorough research.

One of our business analysts has done a formal “as-is” review of the back-end processes but I’ve been concentrating on the front end user experience, particularly browsing the catalogues.

For my current state analysis I identified all the existing features. To do this:

  • took lots of screenshots, of all the screen variations I found
  • made a sitemap
  • annotated the documents, identifying each separate element

Now just because we have all these features now, it doesn’t mean we want to keep them. That said, during the website redesign we missed things that are working really well on the existing site. The site looks clunky and old-fashioned but there’s some nice features in there. So I wanted to make sure I genuinely knew the site inside out.

The functionality basically breaks down into:

  • arriving on site (including via search engines)
  • finding and choosing items
  • information about purchasing
  • registering
  • adding to basket and purchasing
  • tracking/cancelling

I’m going to concentrate on the first two areas for now.

Within the main shop (i.e. not the book shop) there are

  • a store homepage
  • category pages (including sub-categories)
  • product pages

There’s also a sitemap, terms and conditions, product news, pricing information, contact forms, and help information but the other three are the main page types.

The project already has a product backlog from an earlier attempt to kick it off. After I have annotated all my screenshots, I compiled a list of features and then compared that to the product backlog.

The backlog was missing the following elements:

  • link from product page to product instructions
  • link from product page to other product guide/pages
  • link from category page to product category guide e.g. choosing a mobile phone
  • information about product size
  • offer product variations e.g. colour and size
  • product image
  • product image enlargement
  • seasonal offers and selections e.g. Xmas
  • alternative ordering information e.g. call this number
  • vat price + non-vat price
  • login as different types of shopper
  • links to t&cs
  • communicate different delivery prices (free, special + xmas)

This flagged up for me a problem with the way the backlogs were generated. Stakeholders contributed ideas for features they wanted to see but tended to assume they would automatically get all the functionality they already have. Even with this process, I almost missed out search from the list, as it is part of the main website navigation and I was ignoring the standard page “furniture”.

Some of these gaps would indeed be obvious as we built the site but a number are not standard e-commerce functionality and it is entirely possible that the project team wouldn’t have thought of them independently. So for me the current state analysis catches functionality that might otherwise have slipped through the net.

Next: business requirements

are there times when user experience doesn’t matter?

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One of the blogs I follow faithfully is The Simple Dollar. In  The Variables of a Purchase: Is Price the Ultimate Bottom Line? Trent says

I place a significant extra value on buying local produce and dairy products versus buying items that are shipped in. I place a slight premium on the ethics of the business, but I often find that companies with questionable practices often have many competitors and it’s trivial to simply use more ethical businesses. I have something of a minimal standard for customer service and shopping experience – if a company doesn’t meet that standard, I just don’t give them my business, regardless of price, but above that level, I view all competitors roughly equally.

So  Trent has a ‘minimal standard’ for shopping experience but there are other factors that he places higher value on.

I came back to this thought when reading yet another perplexed UX blogger, wondering why the field isn’t sufficiently respected or valued.  As usual, I thought of iPlayer.

The user experience team that worked on iPlayer had many anxieties about the product that launched.  The UCD process hadn’t been followed as faithfully as it could have been. Everyone felt the UX could be better (although we didn’t necessarily agree about what was wrong).

And yet, iPlayer has been a massive success for the BBC. And appears to have turned the guy in charge into The Man Who Saved the BBC and gave him the opportunity to say in print “I only do things for the user”. Those users were delighted to get their favourite shows for free,  so appear to have put up with the clunky bits of the UX.

(Now Five On Demand. That’s a different matter. The UX sucked, I was only mildly interested in the product and they were expecting me to pay. No thank you.)

With free services, I definitely put up with some rather undesirable user experiences. Google apps are a mess when used on my EEE and the keyboard shortcuts are patchy but I stay faithful. I use Swapshop all the time and that’s a shocker.

But is it different when I’m paying?

I like the user experience of Waitrose way more than Morrisons. But I go to Morrisons. Mostly because it is near my house and a bit because they stock the things I buy regularly.

We also buy meat direct from farmers and I can assure that the user experience of that process is absolutely awful. But we persist. We like the pigs.

When travelling I buy the cheapest, direct flight and then complain about the customer experience when I get home. I can’t stand American Airlines but when my parents lived in North Carolina I flew with them many times a year. I still get mad when I talk about their flight attendants but they were the only airline that flew direct from London.

Some services I do care about how good the UX is.  Others it isn’t the deciding factor.

It isn’t enough for UXers to say “UX matters”. Because sometimes it doesn’t matter enough to stop someone making money. You have to have a developer otherwise you won’t have a site. But it is possible to launch a successful website without a UX designer and even without a particularly good UX.

Not always, but sometimes.

So when does UX matter? And how do you know if this is one of those times?

Bruce Sterling in interactions magazine

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I’m never quite sure I’ve ‘got’ what Bruce Sterling is getting at…but there’s always something in his non-fiction writing that I feel the need to capture, come back to, mull over. I never read his sci-fi, I picked up one of his novels in the charity box at work and flicked through it. The prose didn’t seem like something I wanted to spend my time with. I’m not sure if that was hasty.

Still, his article in interactions magazine has the usual hints at possible wisdom. Or maybe just comforting statements of the obvious, although he almost certainly doesn’t intend them to be comforting!

“Below the professional level of for-profit publishing, the subculture of science fiction fans exploited early, DIY duplication technologies: Gestetners, hectograph. There were letter-writing campaigns, amateur press associations, local writers groups, regional science fiction conventions galore. One might even argue that contemporary Web culture looks and behaves much like 1930s science fiction fandom, only digitized and globalized.”

“Digital media is much more frail and contingent than print media. I rather imagine that people will be reading H.P. Lovecraft-likely the ultimate pulp-magazine science fiction writer-long after today’s clumsy, bug-ridden MMORPGs are as dead as the Univac.”

“Experience designers are a tiny group of people with a radically universalized prospectus”

“I scarcely know what to do about this. As Charles Eames said, design is a method of action. Literature is a method of meaning and feeling. Hearteningly, I do know how I feel about this situation. I even have some inkling of what it means”

via interactions magazine.

my mum couldn’t use that

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One of the goals of personas is to challenge stereotypes and preconceptions. This worked nicely when we were working on persona creation for the redesign of bbc.co.uk.
The personas were all based on research from our audience research team but the team was questioning the pensioner profiles for using too much technology, complaining that “my gran is nothing like that”. This is when you have to point out that the pensioners AR were talking about were 65. That makes them most of my colleagues’ parents not our grandparents. And reminds us all we’re getting old.

The research was nicely validated by an interview we did a few weeks later with a recently retired librarian. She was using digital television (including catch-up TV), mobile phone (texting and taking photos), digital radio, PC (internet & email), digital camera & skype with a web-cam. She’s wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about technology but was heavily influenced by her children and her need to stay in touch with family elsewhere in the world.

But even when we’ve recalibrated our understanding of who pensioners are….it is still a common cliche to hear web workers challenge something complex in a product on the grounds that “my mum couldn’t use that”.

Now my mum and dad are retired computer programmers. They’re seriously old school. When I was a kid I played with abandoned punch-cards and that green bar printout paper. Dinner time conversations involved mainframes and COBOL. I thought this was all normal for grown-ups.

Given how extraordinarily geeky you needed to be in early days to get into programming, they’re probably more technically able than many of today’s geeks. So my mum could almost certainly use that. If she wanted to.

Now my sister… she thinks the rest of us Harvey’s are weird. She’s a much better touchstone for the real world.