Recap/commentary: Personas

The last Triangle UPA meeting (Wednesday 6/7, hosted by Lulu) focused on using personas in design. Robert Barlow-Busch (of Quarry Integrated Communications) presented an overview of personas: “rich descriptions of key customer groups, packaged in an engaging format and backed ideally by first-hand, ethnographic-style field research.”

Personas have many uses–not only can they inspire and guide design, but they can bring together different groups with an organization. In particular, they encourage communication and collaboration between marketing and user experience groups. Personas help UX and marketing talk about key assumptions, develop shared understandings, explore new products and feature spaces, and make better decisions about product scope and design. (For this collaboration to be effective, though, multiple roles and departments (sales, marketing, product management, engineering/development, etc.) must be involved throughout the creation and use of personas).

Robert distinguished between primary personas (who “will be unsatisfied with a product designed for anyone else”), secondary personas (less demanding, and lower priority for design), and anti-personas (used to challenge assumptions about who the customer is). UX practitioners should strive to develop clear primary personas, because these personas illuminate the key tradeoffs and compromises in a design problem. In particular, when multiple primary personas are identified, it suggests that multiple products may be needed, so that each can be tightly focused on a particular problem and type of user. Robert pointed to Geoffrey’s Moore claim that technology companies should “put all their eggs in one basket” to develop narrowly focused, but highly usable and effective products which avoid feature creep.

Once developed, personas must be “marketed” to the organization. Robert told one client “the personas have to attend every meeting” and “we should never again talk about ‘the user'”. In other words, personas should guide every element of the design cycle, including recruiting participants for usability tests. To gain this impact, personas must be credible. Therefore, they should be clearly documented–UX professionals should explain the research and analysis methods they use to develop personas.

For more on personas, see the recent book on personas, in which Robert has a chapter.

– Abe

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March UX Cocktail Hour

Date: Tuesday, March 28th 2006

Time: 6:00 PM

Address: Johnny Carino’s in Southpoint

Ready for the first UX Cocktail Hour sponsored by the TriUPA? It’s here! Same great people gabbing about UX issues over dinner and drinks!

Hope to see you there; please RSVP if you can make it.

Triangle UPA Planning Meeting, Wed 2/22, 6:00pm

The TriUPA Planning Committee meeting is coming up next week on 2/22 @ 6PM @ Motricity.

If you attended the meeting last Tuesday, you’ll remember that I announced we would have online elections. Unfortunately, we’re not going to be able to hold online elections. For various reasons, we need to incorporate the local chapter and can’t collect dues until we have completed that process. However, we are going to proceed with elections on 2/22 so that we can capitalize on the momentum we’ve generated in the past couple of weeks.

If you’re interested in running or know someone who would be a good candidate, please let me know. The deadline for nominations is 2/21. (Available offices are President, Vice President, Treasurer, and Secretary.) In addition to having the election, we’re going to discuss our initiatives for the remainder of 2006, including

• Event planning and organization
• World Usability Day Planning Committee
• Web site and blog
• Volunteer Recruitment (Regional Ambassador program)
• Cross-organization collaboration

If you are interested in helping out on any of these initiatives, come on out to the meeting next Tuesday or email me. We appreciate all the help we can get!

Hope to see you there!

—Rick

Recap/commentary: McKinney Tour / WRAL Redesign

The most recent Triangle UX meetup (and last before we become Triangle UPA) was held Tuesday, February 7th, at McKinney in Durham.

Rick Cecil (interim VP, Triangle UPA chapter) gave an overview of the new UPA chapter, which is focused on further expanding the community of user experience professionals in the Triangle. Elections for the first slate of officers will be held at a planning meeting on Wednesday, 2/22. After the chapter is incorporated and a bank account established, anyone interested will be able to join online (dues are $15/year for professionals; free for students).

Adam Blumenthal (Interactive Strategist at McKinney) introduced McKinney’s approach, advertising work, and interest in building an interactive group that will build full-scale Websites for large clients, as well as banner ads, minisites, etc. As an advertising firm with a strong focus on strategy, McKinney brings an interesting perspective to Web design. The big question for me was: To what extent does McKinney plan to include user research and user-centered design in its Web work? Adam emphasized McKinney’s process of “connection planning,” which builds an understanding of how customers connect to a brand. This is important (and goes beyond UX work in some ways), but still left me thinking “what about the poor user?” Having suffered through many gorgeous but unusable Flash-based sites developed by big agencies for big brands, I’m not eager to see more of the same. I hope McKinney takes the righteous path: hire people with UX expertise, and incorporate user-centered processes into their design work. The fact that they opened the doors of their (spectacularly designed) offices to a UX group is certainly an encouraging start.

Providing an excellent example of how user-centered design is important in practice, John Clark (Director of Technology, CBC New Media) discussed the ongoing redesign of WRAL.com. WRAL.com is a sprawling local news-and-beyond site developed by the local CBS affiliate station. It is highly successful compared to other TV station sites, both locally and nationally. It competes with both newspaper sites (locally, the News & Observer) and emerging community sites like Craiglist.

John described WRAL’s design challenges and emphasized that CBS seeks to “focus on users” and create a brand-new design (“we started with a whiteboard we wiped clean”) based on a “complete usability exercise”. The site must serve multiple audiences: users, advertisers, and internal staff. However, John noted that CBC has “never done good research on usability and information architecture.” They are working with an independent research firm to remedy this, but still face the challenge of creating “consolidation” between user requirements and business requirements.

John’s talk—and the example of a site many in the audience had used—provoked a lively discussion. Suggestions for John included:

• Incorporating multiple forms of research, including user research (interviews, surveys, observation, etc.), content research (content audits, analysis of competing sites, etc.), and log research (Website statistics, internal searches, referring searches, email and customer service logs).
• Using multiple forms of evaluation (e.g., both 1-on-1 usability tests and focus groups).
• Considering how to incorporate community and citizen journalism into the site. Questioners suggested Adrian Holovaty‘s work on newspaper websites, including Lawrence.com, as an example of innovative local news and community on the Web.

Overall, WRAL.com represents both a challenging information architecture problem (a large, diverse, regularly-updated site) and an opportunity to build local community and find other innovative ways to connect to people through the Web.

—Abe Crystal

January UX Meetup

Date: Wednesday, Jan 18, 2006
Time: 6:00 PM
Address: Johnny Carino’s in Southpoint – Map it

We’re back! Hope everyone had a nice break. 🙂 Ready to get back into the swing of things?

Note this is on a Wednesday instead of our usual 3rd Tuesday. Hope you can make it!

Corporate ticketing events

Do you have co-workers or a boss who just doesn’t understand why usability matters? Consider having that person post ticket a usability violation. That’ll get them thinking about how usability affects their lives–and who knows, maybe you’ll get that testing budget you’ve been vying for all these years, and then you’ll get promoted because of all the amazing product improvements you initiated due to the testing…a guy can dream, can’t he?

This shouldn’t take more than 15-30 minutes to execute, and it should be a lot of fun! And besides, I’m sure you could actually list several products that are completely unusable that you use every day–admit it, you’re always thinking about usability no matter what product you’re using. (Surely *I’m* not the only one!) This is just an opportunity to share your frustration and/or joy.

Recap/commentary: Trust in mobile ecommerce

The last Triangle UX meeting (Tuesday 9/20, hosted by the Council for Entrepreneurial Development) focused on designing ecommerce interfaces for mobile devices. Wendy Fischer (Motricity) gave a presentation entitled Selling Content and Building Trust using Mobile Devices. Slides are available on the Yahoo! Group.

Wendy emphasized the critical role of trust in encouraging people to buy content and services using mobile devices such as cell phones. Trust has long been recognized as a central part of ecommerce, with researchers demonstrating that many aspects of user experience design—including visual design and usability—affect trust. Wendy’s talk highlighted how trust issues can be even more pervasive and important on mobile devices. Design plays a key role in developing trust by enabling customers to feel comfortable and secure when making a purchase.

One key element in building trust is designing effective support for browsing. Some guidelines for supporting browsing include:

• Minimize clicks (“a click is a terrible thing to waste“)
• Provide rich previews of content, or direct access to content
• Provide easy comparison of different items
• Provide help and assistance, especially for novice users
• Personalize views to match device capabilities
• Make all costs and fees clear
• Make it easy to cancel a purchase or return an unwanted item

One company that implemented a “browse and buy” interface following these guidelines increased its returning customers from 18% to 46%.

The guidelines are in accord with research on credibility and trust, HCI guidelines, and browsing, suggesting that effective mobile design can build upon lessons learned in Web design and HCI.
At the same time, mobile devices, with their small screens and limited input options, make for a unique design platform. Exploring the tradeoff between simplicity and functionality on these devices, and finding innovative ways to support exploration and purchasing, will provide many challenges for mobile designers.

—Abe Crystal

Recap/commentary: Selling user experience work

The last Triangle IA/UX meeting (Tuesday 6/21, hosted by Hesketh.com) focused on the challenge of selling user experience work to colleagues and clients. Kim Ashley (Dialog) and Stephanie Perun (BlueCross BlueShield) led a lively discussion on this perennially interesting topic.

Selling UX work is much like selling any service: one has to persuade customers of the service’s value. That means making the benefits of the service clear, compelling and relevant to customers. So what’s the problem? The customers of UX work–particularly executives and other decision-makers in organizations–may not see things quite the way usability professionals do. As Kim put it, we often face resistance from people familiar with older media. Maria, an IA with Lenovo (formerly IBM’s PC division) described the challenges of having a visually intense and somewhat user-hostile color scheme imposed by marketing, regardless of its implications for usability.

Marketing and communications (marcom) specialists are often particularly skeptical of “user-centered” design approaches and user research. Stephanie pointed out that attempting to introduce user-centered approaches can be viewed as insulting by marcom folks, who see it as their job to know and communicate with the customer. The problem is that marketing research rarely provides a good foundation for design: that’s why user experience work often involves fieldwork, contextual inquiry, usability tests, and other research methods that provide different insights than focus groups and surveys. (Peter Merholz has an excellent example of the problems with trying to apply survey research to design).

How can UX folk overcome this divide? A key idea that emerged from our discussion is emphasizing collaboration and problem-solving when working with marcom (or other non-usability professionals). One can complement existing marketing research, for example, then begin to introduce the idea of using other research methods as well. Here, salesmanship becomes critical. It can be valuable to humanize usability work, by emphasizing techniques such as personas (see this excellent case study of persona use at Microsoft, which integrates market research and user research) and scenarios. Just making usability methods concrete and visible can make a huge difference–Kim reported that executives thought card sorting was “so cool,” and user tests are often eye-opening experiences for executives and developers alike. Finally, Stephanie argued that UX professionals must “overeducate” others in the organization on the value of user-centered research and design. For example, one effective tactic is to regularly distribute case studies, articles from the trade press, and other readable, compelling examples of UX work in practice throughout the organization (via listservs, bulletin boards, blogs, etc.).

Perhaps the most controversial issue in selling UX work is measuring its value. Stephanie argued that “we’re getting better at metrics” by emphasizing before-and-after studies of user-centered designs, and combining quantitative and qualitative data. Many authors (like Eric Schaffer of HFI) argue that we should cost-justify usability by making explicit return on investment (ROI) calculations. But at a panel at CHI’05, senior usability managers (from SAP, Microsoft, and IBM) argued forcefully that quantitative measures of ROI are misleading and harmful. Instead, they claimed, usability professionals should focus on partnering with management and selling “strategic” rather than “tactical” improvements. As one person pointed out, since when do advertising executives justify their work with ROI
calculations?

To dig deeper into the challenges of selling, measuring, and justifying UX work, I recommend the following:

• Eric Schaffer’s book Institutionalization of Usability, which covers as well the larger problem of integrating usability into business practices
• Rashmi Sinha’s collection of links on the ROI of usability
• Adaptive Path’s report, ‘Leveraging Business Value: How ROI Changes User Experience’

—Abe Crystal