CogTool Tutorial

I get a lot of hits for CogTool, which is fabulous because it's one of my favorite quick and dirty usability tools. However, I'm not sure I am actually satisfying my CogTool visitors unless I help them find what they are really looking for. Therefore, this week's popular search term is "CogTool tutorial".

I suspect a lot of hits for "CogTool tutorial" come from human-computer interaction masters students at Carnegie Mellon, hoping to learn more about the application while putting in long hours on Intro to HCI homework assignments. CogTool is actually fairly intuitive. The tutorial helps but Bonnie John's project team has done a super job making it easy to learn without a lot of guidance.

The CogTool website offers a tutorial, but also features a user guide, instructional videos, as well as a few mockups and models to reference.

CogTool Support Documents

CogTool's Web Forum

The Art of Measuring Project Success

Ask your stakeholders how they define a successful design project and you’ll often hear:

• “It’s easy to use.”
• “The users like it.”
• “It’s fast."

When the project wraps, these requirements are quickly discounted because they aren’t measureable. The application releases without consideration of the “ease of use”, leaving no way to know if the project is really a success. Vague usability requirements are tossed in a project vision blindly because many project managers and requirements analysts aren’t exposed to user experience methodology. We can’t blame them when, as usability professionals, we haven’t taken the time to show them how to measure the experience.

Take action
Ask to help document the usability requirements for a new project. Work 1-on-1 with the person in charge of the vision and business requirements so you can will have a strong influence, and establish an understanding of your work.

Encourage open communication. Ask the project manager what success looks like and when you hear “it’s easy to use”, follow up with additional questions.

• “How would you define easy?”
• “How long should the primary task take?”
• “How much reduction in help desk calls would you like to see?”

Remind project stakeholders that “easy” is relative. When users are asked if they feel something is easy to use, they are likely to say yes, even when it’s clear they struggled during usability testing. Turn the attention from “easy to use” to measures like the number of times a user has to backtrack, the number of misclicks, how many times a user expresses frustration in testing, and the number of times help documentation is accessed.

Encourage accountability
Refer to measurable usability requirements from planning through release. Use the requirements as a basis for usability testing and iteration, tracking improvements along the way. When the project wraps, be part of the debrief session and present the results of this effort to the project team. Let them see how success can be measured quantitatively.
Imagine a project manager bragging:

• We cut call center costs by 35% by adding inline help to the application.
• Our employees are 20% more efficient when submitting a purchase requisition. This has freed up more than 3,500 work hours this year.
• We found that 27% of our customers abandoned the checkout process last year. After redesign, only 7% have failed to complete the purchase process.

Ensure usability requirements are measureable. It’s better for you, your customer, and your organization. Be proactive and provide leadership as a representative of your product’s customer. Don’t let vague requirements stand in the way of defining a project’s success.

Abercrombie Tuna

This week's popular search term is "Abercrombie Tuna". From what I could find there isn't a type of tuna called abercrombie, but there is a similarly named restaurant in New Hampshire that serves tuna stuffed tomatoes and a tuna salad sandwich.

Abercrombie & Finch: Restaurant & Pub
219 Lafayette Rd
North Hampton, NH 03862

JC Penney Customer Service Phone Number

This week's popular search term is "JC Penney Customer Service Phone Number". Well folks, there are several phone numbers that will help you reach someone at JC Penney, but I'll just share a few.   

Primary number: 

1-800-322-1189

For past phone orders or billing: 

1-800-709-5777   

To place catalog order: 

1-800-222-6161

For visitors looking for the phone number in Mexico:
95-800-336-7337

To find out more about contacting JC Penney, including inquiries from outside the US and Canada, visit their customer service webpage.

Mount Rushmore FAIL

I am thinking about taking a vacation to visit Mount Rushmore. To calculate how far the drive will be, I googled Mt. Rushmore and found that the monument has been relocated to Oregon. Good thing I checked first or I would have been upset to find the mountain is no longer in South Dakota after a 10 hour drive.

Jared Spool iPod Apple Market Share

This week's popular search term is "Jared Spool iPod Apple Market Share". As I'm certain that Jared doesn't own a majority stake in Apple and didn't design the iPod, I think my visitors are looking for a fabulous UIE article, Innovation is the New Black, published on June 1, 2006.

At the time, SanDisk had the #2 digital music player and felt they were primed to compete with the iPod. In this UIE article, Jared points out an obvious flaw in their plan - Apple has the whole experience designed, so that even if the SanDisk player offers better performance, the iPod has supporting software, an online music store, and physical stores that customers enjoy visiting.

While you are visiting Jared's site, check out the full list of articles for your user experience educational enjoyment. Call it professional development and mark it down for your next annual review because it's okay to enjoy learning.

Mobile PICOLA

Project: Mobile PICOLA

Company: Carnegie Mellon University, Department of Philosophy

Year: 2005

Challenge

Working with the CMU Digital Media Lab for Applied Ethics and Political Philosophy, I led a team challenged to find a mobile solution for a deliberative poll discussion forum that could be used by anyone of legal voting age.

Research and Design Methods

Literature review

Retrospective interviewing

Contextual inquiry

Heuristic analysis

CogTool

Wireframing

Iterative design

Think-aloud usability testing

Solution

Applying HCI and design methods to this project, the team developed a unique, tabbed solution to the small PocketPC-based product. Users may expose the speaking queue and text chat windows on demand, or leave them hidden to identify the current speaker and communicate opinion with emoticons.

Results 

• Resolution of more than 70% of major usability problems identified
• Resolution of 80% of minor and cosmetic problems  
• Concept allows participation in deliberative discussion remotely

The poster I co-authored with Zachary Sam Zaiss, Striving for Ubiquitous Citizenship with Mobile PICOLA, is available for download from Sam's project website. We received the Best Poster award at MobileHCI '06.

Mobile PICOLA Mockup

Mobile PICOLA Iteration

Mobile PICOLA Cultural Model