Delays

It's been longer since I last posted than I thought but I still haven't got anything for you. I need a couple more weeks of rest and peace and then I'll be back online. Look for me again June 1st!

MinneWebCon 2009

MinneWebCon was full of amazing talks and inspiring discussion on various web topics. Here are my notes from the day:

The Intention Economy
Doc Searls

• "I'm a born procrastinator."
• Check out Mona Shaw, Comcast customer who trashes office because of poor customer service.
• Wife asked long ago, "Why can't my shopping cart move from one site to another?" This continues to be a problem more than 10 years later.
• Ridiculous terms of service never change and are never read.
• Loyalty cards fill your wallet and keychain. Everyone has them. Why should you have to be a member?
• Trader Joe's - no coupons, no loyalty cards, but good food. Good experience.
• Managing coupons and loyalty programs is a lot of overhead.
• "Your own personal barcode."
• These aren't relationships. They're data in someone else's database.
• Help the customer. Guide them to the products they want efficiently.
• Stay anonymous. Log in with phone number. No name. No address.
• Facebook is AOL 2.0. It's temporary. It's an experiment.

UX for Community Building
Jason Sack

• Jason was inspired by Doc Searls' talk this morning.
• Wants to talk about the big picture today.
• Experience design is an emerging discipline that's hard to define.
• Look to medieval cathedrals as an example of participatory design and "experience design".
• Immersion, illusion, exclusivity, educational, inspirational, interaction
• Hybrid Design Experience - zipcar, Kiva, One Laptop Per Child
• Interaction drives community experience.
• Think globally, act locally.
• Challenge old ways of thinking.

Standardizing Web User Interfaces
Zach Johnson

• Web UIs aren't standard and don't meet user expectations.
• Need to standardize functionality.
• Display of error messages is inconsistent.
• Inconsistent UI is hard for users to figure out.
• Accessibility: must have labels (tags). "What am I signing up for?"
• It's too expensive to compete without standards.
• Developers need guidance on best practices.
• Always provide permalinks to content.

User Experience
Santiago Fernandez-Gimenez & Julia Schrenkler

• Workshop on usability and user experience.
• Audience shares what works for them.
• PR people know components of relationships - mutual understanding, trust, committment.
• Get stakeholders to be part of the UX process, watching and observing.
• Find an employee who's unfamiliar for easy, quick testing.
• When stakeholders see problems, solutions often pop into their heads immediately.
• Let participants write notes on screenshots of the system they evaluated.
• Better to hear complaints than to hear silence. Silence means they don't care.
• Use card sorting for site organization. The user might know a better term for something.
• Repeat testers get more opinionated as they are more familiar with the testing process.
• Try being a user so you learn what it's like. Will make you a better moderator.
• Give goals instead of tasks.
• "Yahoo's number one search term is Google."

Web Culture & Privacy
Bruce Schneier

• English town blocked Google's streetview van for privacy concerns.
• Greatest threat to privac is that there is no greatest threat.
• Threat is combination of sources of information.
• Easypass transaction records show up in court.
• Twitter vs Phone - records have value.

Fact or Fancy? How to Make Fact-Driven Decisions for Your Website
Southerton, Bungum, Kupritz

• How can we help users make good choices?
• If you don't understand the target, you will always splash.
• Always ask why they're making the design effort.
• Users are people. "I like to call them people. I know it's shocking."
• It's cheaper to find problems before the solution is made.
• Your competitors learn from your mistakes.
• 80% of maintenance is spent on unmet user needs.
• Common to usability test vendor choices before purchasing a package.
• Who uses your site?
• People don't complain that content is too easy to read.
• Don't assume. It'll get you into trouble.
• Make good business decisions.
• Follow standards.
• Don't let egos get in the way.

Celebrating Ada Lovelace Day through Mom

For Ada Lovelace Day, I pledged to blog about a woman in technology whom I admire. I don't just admire one woman, but one has stood out as someone who has influenced my interest in technology for many, many years - my mother.

My mom has worked in the technology field since 1985, first as a tech writer for Turning Point, moving through the world of engineering at Digital, Sun Microsystems, and now at a leading computer networking company. I remember being about 10 years old and feeling proud of my mom's accomplishments working in robotics. The company was working on a robotic arm that could pick up a glass without breaking it. I can't say whether they were successful but I know that mom worked incredibly hard to support her team and they respected the work she did.

As technology evolved, mom evolved with it, always taking classes, learning from her peers, and demonstrating that it is possible to transition from a writing role to software engineering and management. Her employees admire her, her managers respect her, and she has confidence and motivation to always turn out the best product possible. Her road hasn't always been easy. While women in technology find more opportunities now than were available 20 years ago, she still believes many challenges still exist. Women often struggle to be heard and she finds it rare that she doesn't have to work to have her opinion count. My mother continues to work her way through the tech world as a leader and as inspiration to all women considering a career in software development.

MinneWebCon - April 6, 2009

What are you doing on April 6? Spend the day immersed in web trends at MinneWebCon at the University of Minnesota Continuing Education and Conference Center in St. Paul.

Go for the 12 breakout sessions with speakers including Jason Sack of space150 and Bill Heyman of CodeMorphic. Bill was recently featured by Eden Prairie News for his huge accomplishment - the #2 most downloaded iPhone app! I will be speaking in the afternoon on Achieving Stakeholder Buy-In for User Research. Want to know more? Here's the official blurb:

One of the biggest challenges faced by user experience researchers is achieving stakeholder buy-in. Fears of the time and expense required to identify and resolve usability problems prevent stakeholders from accepting user research into the product design workflow. The typical recommendation is to refine the UX sales pitch and continually push ideas on stakeholders in hopes they will eventually catch on. Unfortunately, this creates an 'us vs them' environment rather than one of collaboration and innovation. This presentation will be a chance to hear about some techniques that have helped drive stakeholder interest in user experience research and some that backfired. We'll talk about using cognitive walkthrough as a method for stakeholders to identify major usability problems, creating moodboards to communicate design ideas, and a case-study on personas that failed in a commercial software environment.

Don't miss the discussion topics on social media, web tools, and usability/user experience. If that's not enough to convince you, perhaps the two keynote speakers will. At 9am, hear Linux Journal senior editor, Doc Searls speak on The Intention Economy. Tech author, Bruce Schneier will speak on Web Culture & Privacy at 2pm.

So now that I have you interested, you should register. This day of learning includes lunch, drinks, and snacks and you can't pass up the opportunity to mingle with Minnesota web professionals.

UIE Roadshow: Developing a UX Vision

The most valuable talk at the UIE Roadshow last week was the time spent on developing a User Experience vision. If you're a UX professional, I'm sure you've heard this from your clients or business stakeholders:

"I want the [website/application/product] to be easy to use. It should be quick and users will like it."

That means a whole lot of nothing. Who doesn't want that? How is your company setting itself apart from the competitors if the vision is too general and everyone else wants to achieve those same goals in some respect? What this vision also lacks is some accountability and measurability. Five years from now, how do you measure success? You can't.

To better understand how to create a vision, Roadshow attendees teamed up and evaluated a case study problem, brainstormed the needs and desires of sample personas, and worked toward a UX vision for the case study company. To get there, my team focused on satisfying emotional needs rather than talking about features. We storyboarded a scenario that led a representative user along this emotional path:

• I'm hungry and grumpy and growing concerned.
• I am elated and thrilled.
• I feel comfortable and less stressed.
• I'm excited.
• I feel smart and satisfied.

A UX Vision First Draft
A hungry airplane passenger doesn't have time to grab a bite before his first flight of the day. He's grumpy and worried that there won't be time to eat during his short layover. On the plane, he quickly sees he can pre-order a meal from his seat to pick up as he boards his next flight. He's thrilled that he won't have to go wait in a long fast food line and doesn't need to worry about the time between flights. After landing at his layover destination, the passenger receives a message on his phone confirming his order and his next gate. He is no longer stressed because he knows where he needs to go and that his meal is waiting. When he sees the food at the gate, he's excited because it looks delicious. It's definitely not McDonald's. While eating on the next flight, he's not just satisfied, he feels smart as he looks around and realizes he made a great choice to order his meal.

Over the next several years, the company can reference a UX vision to be sure work on a product or service continues to achieve steps along the way. In five years, this airport food company can look back and see that they have created an on-board meal ordering system, a gate delivery service, partnered with cellular service providers, and solved a huge problem for airline passengers around the globe.

What's your user experience vision?

UIE Roadshow Recap

I spent February 19 at the Bloomington, Minn. UIE Roadshow, absorbing all that Jared Spool offered on user experience. I was there as a guest of UIE on a press pass, tweeting when I was able, and taking notes as fast as I was able to write.

Jared started off the session with a hard-hitting fact. Apple's iPod has 75% market share, yet has poor sound quality, the menu is sluggish, and the wheel can be cumbersome to work with. Sandisk put out the Sansa mp3 player, a technically superior product but yet few people know anyone who owns the device.

What sets Apple apart is the overall experience. Apple has stores, a fantastic website with support. You don't see a Microsoft or Sandisk store anywhere. Device vs. experience.

After hearing stories of companies that invested millions in design but failed because they didn't research their users, my motivation for solving my company's biggest UX problems increased significantly.

The morning rolled into a session on team skills. The obvious skills a UX team should have competency in include interaction design, usability testing, user research, and visual design, but Jared pointed out the importance of understanding marketing, business, copy writing, design process, education, ROI... and the list goes on. Take the time to learn these other roles to become a better UX professional. Understanding will help you communicate better and come to more holistic solutions.

I'm not going to dive too deep into the content of the Roadshow to preserve ownership of the material with UIE but I highly recommend taking to Jared about how companies/ux teams evolve in four stages from the point of being first to market to becoming a commodity. Understanding where your team is within this cycle will help you make the best research and design choices. Know that your customers determine which phase you are in, not you.

My favorite part of the day was the vision workshop. I'm not going to say much here but I'll post on this over the weekend in more detail. The time we spent reviewing concepts for developing a UX vision was some of the most enlightening and inspiring I've been involved in for some time.

Jared wrapped up the day with a discussion on the importance of magic and illusion in user experience design. Remember that complexity should fade into the background but if there are holes, the illusion will break. Users don't need to know the backend of a website. Show them what they want to see and hide anything that doesn't improve the overall experience.

For those of you unfamiliar with UIE, check out one of their virtual seminars to get a taste of what you can learn to improve your team and your expertise. If you'll be in Atlanta on March 2, register for the UIE Roadshow at the Westin Peachtree Plaza.

More to come!

UIE Roadshow - Minneapolis

I've been looking forward to the UIE Roadshow in Minneapolis for several weeks. Hearing Jared Spool speak on most any UX topic is educational, but the focus on UX teams and forming a User Experience vision is what will really help strengthen my team at work. Working on a very young UX team in my organization means we are still raising awareness and evangelizing our methods. I want to know what comes next. Certainly there is more to UX team growth than preaching.

Just a few of the questions I have:

• How else can we promote our services?
• What are some quick ways to calculate ROI?
• How can we convince reluctant stakeholders?
• What methods work for getting buy-in for a staff increase?

Awareness and Promotion
At large corporation, awareness beyond a small technology department is difficult to attain but often the business stakeholders are not technology-savvy. The outside perception of user experience risks being lumped into other departments - QA, marketing, customer service, graphic design - so establishing the team as a unique service that is as critical as QA must happen early in a team's development.

Return on Investment
Sometimes making a convincing argument is as simple as saying, "you need me on your team" but usually the pitch needs to align with a few facts. Until user research and usability testing are a process requirement, business stakeholders will be reluctant to sign on unless they can be convinced of the cost savings.

Reluctant Stakeholders
Once and a while, even after reviewing clear evidence of the benefits of a UX team, stakeholders push back. They still feel that the short term cost and time savings are more important than the potential of long-term benefits for the company. This hurdle is hard to overcome and one that I encounter once or twice a quarter.

Staff Increase
When there are many projects on the docket and the team finds itself acting as a quick-and-dirty usability test service, it feels like time for a new staff member. Since the work (albeit condensed, minimalist work) is getting done, developing a justification for more team members is more difficult than dealing with reluctant stakeholders.

I hope to answer a few of these concerns at the Roadshow on Thursday and what I learn, I'll be sure to share with you. If you are on Twitter, I will try to tweet regularly but please be aware that my live tweeting will be BlackBerry-only. I'll respond to @s and DMs during the break. If you're curious, follow me on Twitter.