Compete on Usability

Thinking visually

One reason I haven't been blogging often is the graduate course I'm taking in information visualization.  Not only does it consume most of my free time, it's raised my mental bar for blog posts. There are several reasons I want to have better visuals to encompass my posted thoughts.

Usable information visuals break you out of text's serial tyranny.  It's the nature of verbal information to be linear, but visual encourage divergent, nonlinear thinking. As a consequence of this, techniques like mind mapping are great visualizations for creativity, even if they're composed of pure words. On the other hand, linear outlines are fine for organizing one's thoughts when writing a paper, but they're a poor way to take notes or categorize information for learning.

Unfortunately, one thing holding me back is poor drawing and sketching skills. Multiple books I've read claim that you don't need drawing skills to communicate and persuade with sketches. But I've endured one too many patronizing smiles from peers over my stick figures, spindly lines, and lack of perspective. There's nothing for this except a little guidance and learning, and a lot of practice. Perhaps over the summer, I'll convert this blog to documenting some self-assigned drawing work.  I hope I still have readers left by September!

There's nothing wrong with pencil and paper, but if you want to share sketches with your work team, it's helpful to create them directly on a computer. Some of my coworkers use slick tablet PCs for this, but I need a more conventional, powerful PC laptop that can run Visio and Photoshop at the same time without bogging down.  (As an aside, why isn't there a multitouch tablet Mac?)

Why I miss my deadlines, often

In my new job, I've been doing a lot of interaction design for a highly capable rich Internet application. It's a great job so far and I'm really enjoying it, except for one thing: I am almost never on time finishing things.

I did a fair amount of project management in my previous jobs, and missing deadlines bothers me.  As a result, I've been feeling pretty stressed lately at work.  Thinking about the problem over the winter holidays, I realized I've been underestimating two important learning curves.

The first is what I need to learn about the system.  After four months, I've learned a great deal about how everything works, but there's still a lot I don't yet understand.  There's no documentation to review -- I have to experiment with the system and talk to developers to get up to speed. Typically, the biggest problems arise from questions I didn't know to ask.

The second issue is how to document interaction for rich Internet applications.  Up to now, I've used annotated storyboards to document for stakeholders, developers, and QA.  There are good, well-received articles online describing how to do this, but in my work I've seen problems.  With some interactions, even the best description possible doesn't quite convey what you want to see in moving, 3D, real life.  In these cases you need an interactive prototype.

Specific tools exist for interactive prototyping, but what I'd really like is to learn Flash better, and use that to illustrate how UI such as drag-and-drop should function. I could learn Axure, or another interactive prototyping tool, but with Flash I'd have a much more flexible skill.  The problem is making the time to become proficient in Flash!  As a stopgap, I've been messing around with interactive prototypes made from Visio and Acrobat, and even from Powerpoint. 

Factors for success in the field, part III

In parts one and two of this series, I wrote that successful user experience professionals need to have passion with perspective and wield implicit authority across the org chart.

The third trait common to the most successful UX folks is being cognizant of their workplace values.  Organizations and individuals both have ways they like to work, reflecting what they find most important. Often unspoken, these choices and habits nevertheless can lead to frustrating cultural conflicts that really 

At one of my first job interviews out of college, I came armed with interview questions cribbed from books.  One of them met with a surprising response:

"What is your vision as a company?  What do you see as your overall strategy for success?"

My response?  "Well ... (pause) this really isn't a 'vision' type of company. We aim to be profitable and succeed in our markets, while still being flexible enough to pursue new opportunities. Does that answer your question?"

It answered me, but it wasn't the right answer for me. I was looking for a vision company with a clear identity.  In the emerging Web space, I believed that would help them develop a consistent business strategy, while establishing them in the minds of customers as standing for something.  I took the job, and learned a lot in different roles.  But afterwards, enduring reorganizations and new bosses every year, I thought back to that interview and wondered if I should have kept looking.

User experience is an organizational value. Either the organization understands and values UX, or it doesn't ... and it can be very, very difficult to "bubble up" a corporate value. Now, you may still choose to do usability at a company that doesn't hold the customer experience as a core value.  The important thing is to recognize that going in, and temper your expectations accordingly.

Factors for success in the field, part II

Following up on my earlier post, the second thing I've seen common to successful UX practitioners:

Wield implicit authority across the org chart.  Managers have to get their subordinates to do work -- that's basic.  But the most successful people can inspire and convince their peers, clients, and bosses to jump on the bandwagon with them.  Implicit authority in the workplace springs from confidence in oneself, and effective communication.

In my career I was slow to realize the importance of this trait.  There wasn't a single "eureka" moment of clarity, but at one job, I saw my respect level increase dramatically once I started user testing and presenting results. I quickly went from chasing after coworkers with unsolicited interface tips, to having people come to me every day asking how to solve their user challenges.

It’s particularly important for a user experience professional to have this kind of influence, since UX is a new discipline in many organizations. A finance person can reasonably expect business processes that will involve them at the right time, but in user experience, often one isn't involved until it's too late (too expensive, too time-consuming) to address an issue.

Unquestionably, it helps to be comfortable and familiar with your coworkers. New managers can start bossing people around on day one, but implicit authority often must be earned through time and trial.

The negative side of wielding implicit authority is people who express too many opinions about areas outside of their responsibilities, or who stridently complain about the same issues repeatedly.  These are good ways to get yourself ignored.  To successfully promote user experience, start by asking questions and listening.

Three factors for success in the field, part I

I find a few key traits tend to characterize the most successful people I've worked with in the web and software business. Actually, they probably generalize to many fields, since they don't come directly from job skills and competencies.  These success traits transcend simple requirements like:

• Are you good at your job?
• Do you work hard?
• Can you get along with coworkers?
• Do you manage your time effectively?

These are necessary to stay employed, but not sufficient for success.  Consistent winners have other things in common.  Here is the first one I've seen:

Passion with perspective.  "Passion for your work" is something employers add to almost every job posting in the industry.  Without an emotional connection, it's difficult to persevere through challenges and deliver good results. Indeed, many people self-actualize through work and invest plenty of themselves into the job.

At times, however, despite heroic, inspired efforts, you won't succeed.  Or even get to finish what you started! The market may change, your client may run out of money, or your company may reorganize, and suddenly your project is no longer part of the master plan. I've seen many people become bitter and cynical at this stage, mourn what might have been, and remain unable to apply themselves to the next big thing.

Keep perspective about your company and project, so you don't take passion too far and burn out. The most successful people can immerse themselves into the current thing, yet when it's time, quickly shift their passions to something else. From the outside this behavior seems dissonant -- almost hypocritical. But in an industry that's always changing, it's critical for long-term success.    

Okay, then what's the solution?

Usability practitioners invest much study, time, and effort in clearly, conclusively documenting usability problems. So it can be a little shocking to deliver a carefully researched report, steel yourself for argument or denial, but instead hear the impatient response, "Okay, then, what's the solution?"

In business, you should not raise problems without a solution. Even specialized usability test engineers are likely to be asked their opinion on fixes.  At this point, however, you're stepping out of strict usability and into the creative sphere, a space you share with designers, developers, and product, among others.

Recommending a solution to usability issues is easier with training in cognitive psychology, human factors, or human-computer interaction.  With the right background, you can identify exactly what part of your audience's needs is not being met.  It's also necessary to be creative, a process not ideally suited to businesses run by the cliche, "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it." Some organizations quantify their usability tests as much as possible, but you can't always quantify possible solutions.

The old business process is changing, however. Businesses are waking up to the unique value of creative ideas and they are helping creative flow happen.  Finally, sometimes you just need to get lucky, which itself is also a process often dependent on consciously creating fortunate circumstances.

 

Working with designers

Jakob Nielsen's recent post The Myth of the Genius Designer coincided with a marketing class I'm taking. My grizzled, veteran marketing professor distrusts designers. He punctuates criticisms of TV and radio ads by reflexively blaming "the creatives" for any shortcomings in the message.

I'm a positive guy, so my guidelines for working with designers are not so cynical. Just as you must know your users when building a system, to work best with designers you must understand their challenges.

• Everyone has an opinion about your designs. People who work in engineering, finance, and marketing rarely have colleagues from other departments wander by and offer unsolicited opinions on their code, accounting methods, or ad spending plans. Designers can look forward to this kibitzing every day.
• What are your qualifications? Other professionals can point to their MBA's, CPA's, or MSCE's as evidence of their expertise. On the other hand, designers are disrespected for their lack of business credentials. Few people understand how an art school curriculum prepares people for a design career.
• You're always compensating for other people's constraints. The design must accommodate the limitations of a system's functionality and shift to fit copy changes. But designers never can say, "My design doesn't support that code."

As a user experience specialist, you sometimes can be another source of headaches to designers who don't want more work supporting accessibility, affordance, or the results of user testing. Here are some ways to work better with designers.

• Support your recommendations objectively. Don't be another kibitzer to the designer. Back up your design ideas with human factors principles and user research.
• Present usability as part of design. Communicate to all that usability studies are not about judging or rejecting a design. Collecting and applying user experience is an integral part of the design process.
• Prioritize and work to deadline. If you have a perfectionist designer who fiddles with details too much, help them out by continually returning to business priorities. Never ask for a set of changes without clearly explaining the most important and then asking when they will be done.
• Ac-cen-tuate the positive. Start with mentioning the design's best aspects. Also, keep in mind that while it's easy to poke holes in a design, creating a new, original display or interface is much more difficult. Acknowledge your colleagues' efforts.

First Human-Powered Search?

When I first came upon Mahalo, the new Hawaiian-themed search site, its description immediately gave me reason to doubt. They are FAR from the "world's first human-powered search engine." The major 1990s search engines, including Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, and LookSmart, built custom pages for popular, high-revenue terms like cars, travel, and tech. Even today, sites like the Open Directory have far more human-edited content.

Mahalo's information architecture is suspect too. Its ten main categories are listed in no particular order -- alphabetizing them would be nice, like other directory sites do. The hierarchy is also unclear. Why do they give Music and Television their own categories, but bury movies under Entertainment? Why are there seven top link picks for each result ... no more, no less?

The site makes more usability mistakes:

• Ratings and ranked lists that don't necessarily correspond to users' needs
• Breaking the Google paradigm with no helpful metadata for recommended links
• No breadcrumbs

It's very difficult to see how Mahalo can compete with either Google's machine-based search breadth or Wikipedia's human-edited depth of content.

Agile and Social Networks Challenge Usability

On Wednesday, I attended the 2007 Boston Mini-UPA conference. There were over 300 user experience professionals in attendance, and believe it or not, more hiring companies than job seekers! This is a great time for the field.

One conference meme was the growing use of Agile development methods, and the increased pressure Agile can place on usability. Deadlines are forcing practitioners to conduct less formal usability testing, and to fall back on quicker methods such as heuristic evaluations and user surveys. Fortunately for interaction designers, two tools I saw for rapid prototyping are improving to keep up the pace.

Jared Spool of UIE brought up another interesting usability head-scratcher. When evaluating social networking sites, where the whole experience revolves around people interacting, how can you test the site one participant at a time? You might need hundreds or thousands of other people rating, responding, and creating their own content, or it's not a valid test. It's another reason why Web 2.0 companies might conduct less formal usability testing in the future.

Usability reports?

At a party the other night, I met a software developer who happened to be looking for a usability consultant to evaluate his startup's web-based application. This is the first time that's happened to me! I believe it's a sign the usability field continues to mature and gain legitimacy, although that may be confirmation bias.

Anyway, he believed the application needed improvement, but he was very wary about asking for help.  He'd commissioned heuristic analysis with usability consultants in the past but their "Word documents with mockups," (said disparagingly) were not what he was looking for. I didn't understand at first because what he described sounded like a very typical usability report.

After a long discussion, we clarified the problem with the reports. Because he and his development team only can think about usability intermittently, the reports tended to sit around awhile before they were ready to refer back to them. And without lots of extra context, it simply took too long to decipher context and meaning. It seemed like a classic cognitive overload moment.

Do you have a standard report template you use successfully?  And have you ever needed to come up with something more involved to meet client needs?