UsabilityNews

User testing within the video gaming sector is fairly uncommon, however with the introduction of next generation consoles and gaming technology such as the Microsoft Kinect and Sony NGP (Next Generation Portable), it is essential that it becomes more and more widely adopted.

In the gaming world user testing is not focussed entirely on the conventional ‘usability of interfaces’ but also looks into other aspects of the games. The key reason that year on year people pay in the thousands for games is because they find them fun, engaging and compelling. Any user testing which is to be conducted on games should not just focus on user interface design but also the level of fun and engagement a game provides. The user experience or ‘Playability’ of a game can be identified by seven facets:

1. Satisfaction –degree to which players are content with the overall game play of the video game.
2. Learning – difficulty of learning to play and interact with the game. Games will not be ‘fun’ if they are too difficult to master. Capcom’s Street Fighter was a success due to the ease in which players could quickly pick up how to play the game. Novice players could tap random buttons and still manage to win games.
3. Efficiency – time taken for players to feel satisfied with the game e.g. unlocking an achievement, reaching a checkpoint etc.
4. Immersion – degree to which players get involved in the virtual gaming environment e.g. World of Warcraft has been a huge global success because it offers players a very immersive experience through challenges and the depth of story.
5. Motivation – degree to which players are encouraged to continue playing the game. Xbox and PS3 have both added to the level of motivation by introducing the concept of ‘achievements’ – this is something which was lacking in handheld consoles but is also now being introduced into the upcoming Sony NGP.
6. Emotion – levels of emotion evoked when playing games such as fear and happiness can further enhance the experience of the game e.g. Resident Evil was enjoyable because of the fear factor and the build up of tension involved when playing the game.
7. Socialisation – degree to which the game allows for co-operative or competitive game play, be it an option within the game or an online mode e.g. death match modes in shoot-em up games. The majority of games currently in the market do allow for online game play against contacts or random players, however, it is essential that multiplayer games provide varied modes to still add depth and offer a variety of gaming options to enhance the experience e.g. conventional multiplayer shoot-em up games tended to only provide death match however this has now further evolved to modes such as ‘capture the flag’, ‘team death match’ etc.
Current consoles such as the Sony Playstation 3 and Microsoft Xbox, which have been around for 4 to 5 years, both provide relatively the same gaming experience because the controls, story lines and general game play within video games are established.

However with gaming manufacturers vying for greater recognition amongst gamers, both novice and more experienced, they are starting to create unique products such as the Kinect, NGP and N3DS, and are increasingly breaking outside of the norms and conventions that are expected. With these advancements, game developers are also trying to capitalise and are quickly releasing games into an unknown territory which will ultimately lead to issues in the overall playability of the game.

One to One Insight feel that it is becoming increasingly important for games developers to seek out user experience practitioners during development phases in order to discover any issues which may hinder the playability of the game. Even prior to the development it is paramount to understand gamer expectations so that the right foundations are laid to aid playability. If a game does not offer an enjoyable experience then it is guaranteed to end up in a bargain bin on sale for a fraction of the value within months of release.

Open the Door on Design Ethnography

The MSc in Design Ethnography at the University of Dundee provides a unique opportunity to add to your skills portfolio as a designer, engineer, or design thinker.

Our one year (Sept to Sept) masters offers in-depth study of experience research, ethnographic data-gathering, analysis and insighting, strategic design thinking, design research, strategic information design, and HCI.

We work with an extensive list of industry partners who provide students with live project experiences - past clients include Swisscom, Intel USA, Intel Healthcare Ireland, NCR, brightsolid, Capability Scotland, and the BBC. Graduates are working in user research, design, engineering and marketing roles in the UK, USA, and India.

If you are not sure whether Design Ethnography is for you, take a look at the profiles of our current students at http://www2.idl.dundee.ac.uk/desethno/students and see if anyone sounds familiar!

For more information our group blog is:
http://www.designethnography.dundee.ac.uk

Full application information is available at:
http://www.dundee.ac.uk/postgraduate/courses/design_ethnography_msc.htm

(Please note although we accept applications up till August, applications for scholarships close on July 1st.)

Introduction – to remote usability testing

Traditional in-person usability testing involves an evaluator and a participant being in the same location at the same time and looking at the same screen. The participant in the usability testing session is then asked to perform certain tasks and vocalize their thoughts. Most usability professionals will tell you that usability testing is an invaluable tool in identifying and understanding usability issues. The method does, however, have certain weaknesses - such as:

* Personal investment - Participants are often not personally invested in the tasks, no matter how hard you try and recruit relevant groups (i.e. they are not really considering buying this brand of car, they are just pretending).
* Geographical limitations - The evaluators have to be in the same room as the participant, which means any truly international usability testing will be quite expensive.

Remote usability testing is a technique which seeks to address these issues. It does this by observing real-world users as they voluntarily use your site for their own purposes. Remote usability testing usually involves:

* Participant and evaluator being in different locations
* Observation and communication being mediated by technology

Benefits – of moderated remote usability testing

Although each method of remote usability testing has different characteristics and is best suited to answering different kinds of questions (as discussed in the next section), they do all share some benefits. Here are the benefits of almost all types of remote usability testing:

* Audience diversity - You can easily run usability testing sessions with participants from different regions and/or countries.
* Technical environment - People will be using their 'real-life' devices in their normal environment. This could, of course, have a large impact on participants' behavior.
* Personal investment - You can recruit participants as they arrive on your site, or are about to start a task you want to study. This means they will be personally invested in what they’re doing and have ‘real world’ questions that they want answered.

Note – Ethnio is a tool (currently free) which allows you – with the addition of 1 line of JavaScript to a page – to present potential participants with a DHTML pop-up screener layer (that cannot be blocked by a pop-up blocker). You can control the questions in the screener and users’ responses are immediately available for follow-up.
Types - of remote usability testing

There are 3 main types of remote usability testing. Each has their strengths and weaknesses and may be appropriate to different projects at different times. The 3 types of remote usability testing are:

* Moderated - Similar to in-person usability testing, this involves the evaluator watching the participant complete tasks using a screen-sharing tool, and asking them to vocalise their thoughts (over the phone).
* Unmoderated – user reported - Participants enter feedback and answer page-specific questions in a browser frame as they navigate the web site. The results are then collated (automatically or manually).
* Unmoderated – automated statistical - Evaluators define the idealised, error-free performance of a task. Data is then automatically collected on users' actions and compared to this idealised model (either manually or automatically).

Making a choice – selecting a remote usability testing method

A good general guide is that Moderated is usually the best choice of remote usability testing method if you want to develop a deep understanding of participant behaviours. Due to Unmoderated’s potential to allow you to run 100s, if not 1000s of remote usability testing sessions quite cheaply, it is often used to identify potential problem areas (for further investigation through Moderated methods), or illustrating the scale of an issue identified during Moderated sessions.

Please note: 'Unmoderated – automated statistical' remote usability testing is best for simple and easily-definable tasks.
Moderated – issues with remote usability testing

As we have discussed, Moderated remote usability testing is a great method for developing a deep understanding of participants’ behaviours. There are, however, some particular issues concerning this method of remote usability testing which you will have to consider before planning any remote usability testing session:

* Tools for screensharing, recording & communicating - It is important to find tools that give you the data you want, but it’s equally as important to find tools which are easy for the participants to install and use. Another factor to consider is the bandwidth which a tool requires, as this may limit your potential participants.
Note: Most remote usability testing practitioners relate good experiences of using ‘Reverse Morae with GoToMeeting’, which allows you to use Morae’s features to tag participant behavior).
* Facial expressions & body language - Non-verbal cues are crucial in real-world usability testing, as they often portray a participant’s un-vocalised thoughts/attitudes. Unfortunately, these are normally not present in remote usability testing.
* Personal connection - It is often harder to establish rapport and trust with a participant during a remote usability testing session. For this reason, it is often worthwhile to spend a little time at the beginning of the session introducing yourself and 'breaking the ice'.
* Supporting users - Helping a user to overcome a problem (for example: when they don't know what to do next) can be difficult within a remote usability testing session. We have found detailed instructions are better than taking keyboard-control (because this breaks the unity of the participant's experience).

Unmoderated – issues with remote usability testing

When using Unmoderated remote usability testing methods, it is important to try and capture how successful the site was in supporting participants' goals. The issue under consideration is this: participants might be able to find the page which should answer their question, but does the page itself actually succeed in this goal?

One of the best ways of dealing with this is to ask participants a question, such as: "Which car has the largest trunk space?" We would advise that you never rely solely on Satisfaction Surveys and always include such questions in your Unmoderated studies.

Please note: 'Unmoderated – automated statistical' remote usability testing is best for simple and easily-definable tasks.
Incentives – issues with remote usability testing

We have found that the most convenient incentive to offer participants is an Amazon gift certificate. These certificates have the advantage of covering a wide range of goods and only requiring the participant to provide their email address.
Summary – remote usability testing

Remote usability testing offers several advantages over in-person usability testing. These include a greater degree of audience diversity and a higher fidelity to real-world users’ technical environments and motivations. Moderated remote usability testing is best-suited to developing a deep understanding of an issue, whereas Unmoderated is best for getting large volumes of data.

The Moderated method of remote usability testing can not, however, be considered to completely replace in-person usability testing because of its limitations in the personal interactions between evaluator and participant. We do, however, believe that remote usability testing represents a very cost-effective opportunity to explore a site's usability.


This article was written by Tim Fidgeon, of Spotless Interactive – a leading usability consultancy offering both remote usability testing and traditional in-person usability testing.

During our recent Asia-Pacific tour, we took the opportunity to conduct several usability studies. Sometimes we tested regular websites to update seminars such as Fundamental Guidelines for Web Usability. But we spent more time on issues where we expected to find bigger regional differences, such as mobile usability and social user interfaces.

One of the mobile sites we tested was AllKpop.com, which covers a topic of seemingly great fascination in many Asian countries: Korean pop stars.

AllKpop does many things right:

Most important of all, it supports a task that's perfect for mobile use: celebrity gossip. We've known since our first mobile usability studies in 2000 that killing time is a killer app for mobile. Many other tasks make little sense in the mobile scenario; no matter how great the design, the mobile versions wouldn't get much use and creating them is a waste of time.

Almost as important, it has a separate mobile version. Desktop computers and mobile devices are so different that the only way to offer a great user experience is to create two separate designs — typically with fewer features for mobile.

Because the server auto-senses whether they're using a mobile or a desktop device, users don't have to manually choose their version. As we know from testing, usability drops dramatically when the mobile and full sites have different URLs because users often end up with the wrong user interface.

Touch targets for each headline are fairly large.

Content-carrying keywords usually appear at the beginning of the headlines. For this site, the pop star's name is the most important information for users, and it typically appears first.

However, the site doesn't follow all the guidelines for mobile usability, so we decided to create an alternative design that did:

Today's consumers are demanding more from companies. Customers expect products, services, and information that are timely and catered to their specific needs and desires. Traditionally, companies develop and market products based on market segmentation and demographics, assuming that the features, functionality and messaging will meet the needs of all of the customers in that demographic—a "one size fits all" mentality. However, as the marketplace shifts from a mass manufacturing to a mass customization model, customers needs and desires are more accurately identified through the development of personas rather than through demographic data.

"What Is a Persona?
A persona represents a cluster of users who exhibit similar behavioral patterns in their purchasing decisions, use of technology or products, customer service preferences, lifestyle choices, and the like. Behaviors, attitudes, and motivations are common to a "type" regardless of age, gender, education, and other typical demographics. In fact, personas vastly span demographics.

How Are Personas Built?
Personas are built by first conducting one-on-one interviews with a wide demographic of the targeted audience(s). Patterns in the data gathered from the interviews begin to emerge after approximately 30 interviews for a typical project focused on one brand or product. These interviews work best when conducted in-context, such as the respondent's home or place of work. This way, ethnographic research techniques may be employed to gather information about the users' environments, providing insight into their behaviors, motivations, and attitudes that may not otherwise be uncovered in a survey, focus group, or one-on-one interview in a market research facility. Typically, the researcher begins with a broad conversation that ultimately narrows in on the use of specific products or services.
Analysis is then conducted on the research data over the course of one to two weeks. The researchers identify extremes in user behavior and group similar respondents together. Patterns of behavior define each user type and provide a clear understanding of how they relate to each other within the extremes.

From here, it's essential to launch another round of research. This time, the recruiting is done according to the behavior and motivation criteria that represent each user type, rather than by the demographic criteria used in the first round. Recruiting five to seven respondents per persona is sufficient to see patterns of behavior. Recruiting additional users may offer some additional insights, but rarely enough to justify the cost. It's possible to conduct these interviews in a market research facility, or even online; however, qualitative data and observations are always more robust when gathered in context.
This round of research validates the persona characteristics and fills in any gaps from the first round of research. More importantly, this is an opportunity to ask specific behavioral questions to better understand how the personas relate to products and messaging. This yields valuable information on how to customize the user experience to specific types of people based on their attitudes, behaviors, and motivations, regardless of demographic information.

Where Does Persona Development Begin?
The first step is to define the customer lifecycle and understand all of the corresponding touchpoints. Each touchpoint will have a corresponding key department that must understand the personas in order to provide an optimal customer experience. Getting buy-in from leadership within each department early in the persona process is key to socializing the personas—spreading the knowledge of the company's customers throughout the organization.
It is a common mistake to wait until the personas are finalized before beginning the socialization process. Socialization attempts within an organization without buy-in are often met with resistance. Getting all of the key stakeholders involved early in the process involves them in informing the initial understanding of the customer and, therefore, helps define the research. Informing these stakeholders of the project's progress will keep them interested, provide opportunities for feedback, ensure a higher quality persona deliverable, and generate greater buy-in throughout the organization.
If there isn't buy-in or, at the very least, usage of the personas across multiple divisions of an organization, the success and longevity of the personas will be limited. The company may create great products based on the personas but lose customers on poor acquisition, unresponsive customer support, or other problematic areas of the customer lifecycle. A consistent and customizable user experience across the entire customer lifecycle is the key to adoption, usage and loyalty, increasing ROI exponentially.

What Is a Typical Persona Investment?
There is no shortcut to creating personas; they are an investment. Strategic, forward-thinking organizations can build personas as a subset of other research, but when conducted properly as a standalone project, the investment in persona development is somewhere between $80,000 to $120,000.
Full-fledged personas must go beyond the demographic data. Demographics are temptingly easy to collect from various sources in an organization, but persona work yields a much deeper understanding of why customers do the things they do and what they expect from an organization within any given context. This knowledge about customers' motivations (the why) makes it possible to create innovative solutions, products, ad campaigns, and customer support (the what) that cater to customers on a personal level.

Some advertising and design agencies offer inexpensive, shortcut methods of defining personas, but these marketing profiles lack the specificity and substance of true personas. An inability to plot the personas in relation to each other and heavy reliance on demographic data for the interpretation can be indicative of personas done on the cheap.
Good personas make the difference between doing the upfront work to get it right the first time rather than spending the same money or more with multiple redesigns, increased customer support costs, etc.

How Can Companies Optimize Their Investments in Personas?
Personas can and should be shared and utilized across the entire organization, and within various product development, marketing, customer support, and sales departments. Each department can use this persona information; for example, product managers can use the information to design a product that better meets the needs or desires of a particular persona, and marketing can use them to craft messaging that resonates. Holding such rich customer information within just one business unit because of political struggles and posturing within the organization is the quickest way to lose the investment in a persona project. Sharing and maximizing the persona work across divisions increases the realization of an ROI and the initial research costs can be shared across different budgets.
Personas should also be updated frequently. Innovation and competition may significantly shift the attitudes and behaviors of a company's customers. In order to keep personas current, companies should maintain a consistent dialogue with customers and commit to maintaining the personas as living and breathing documents. A centralized process for communicating new user research and updating the personas accordingly is critical.

What Can Companies Do If They Don't Have the Budget for Full-Fledged Personas?
If a company is collecting behavioral or qualitative data on its customers, it can spend some time and money mining that data to get a strong understanding of who its customers are and why they do what they do. Such data can help to inform the persona research and can reduce the costs.
Companies that conduct regular research on their products can piggyback that research with specific questions about behaviors and attitudes. While it will take longer to get answers this way, it's at least possible to leverage other research dollars to eventually get to a base understanding of the personas.
If there hasn't been any meaningful initiative to collect qualitative data on customers, it will be necessary to begin a persona project by conducting 24 to 36 contextual interviews with customers. This can be done over the course of three to six months rather inexpensively using a consultant for about $35,000. This will not yield full-fledged personas, but it will start to reveal clustering and patterns of behaviors that will inform user types.

These user types can, in turn, be leveraged in every type of customer feedback initiative going forward. The company can build upon this knowledge until, finally, enough information has been compiled to cluster the customers into personas.

Improving website usability is consistently a challenge for companies whether a start-up or a large enterprise. Theres a plethora of information and healthy debate on what user experience research methods should be used and when. When it comes to quantitative versus qualitative research, best practices suggest a mix of qualitative and quantitative approach to effectively capture a more holistic perspective.
A challenge, however, is how to combine qualitative and quantitative testing in a cost-effective, productive way to rapidly obtain usability data to drive user-centered design.

Thats where TryMyUI and Loop11 partnership comes in. When TryMyUI and Loop11 are used in tandem, designers, researchers and marketers have a powerful set of tools to optimize site and user experience.

What’s the difference?

The difference between quantitative and qualitative approach is often explained using contrasting terminology, like hard vs. soft,numeric vs. non-numeric, statistics vs. insights, measure vs. explore, what vs. why. The quick contrasts are useful to highlight both the strengths and limitations of each approach if used solely without consideration of the other.

Broadly, quantitative research can provide path and performance analysis by capturing the what of user behavior. Loop11 is a remote usability testing tool that provides quantitative measures of real user's behavior through clickstream analysis. Loop11 delivers quantitative metrics such as task completion rates, number of clicks, time on tasks, and detailed path analysis. To get started, researchers use Loop11 to create tasks or questions that are then presented to real users. Loop11 supports unlimited tasks and questions, and as many as 1,000 users can participate. Data generated from users clickstream are automatically presented in real-time reports.

The quantitative measures from Loop11 is especially useful if researchers want to
- identify any usability problems
- measure task efficiency and success
- compare against competitor usability metrics

In contrast, a goal of qualitative research is to gain valuable insight into the thought processes behind the user's actions or clickstream. TryMyUI is a remote usability testing tool that captures the voice of the customer via a video recording and a written summary documented by the user. As users navigate a website, they think aloud, verbalizing their thoughts as they complete the tasks or questions posed by the researcher. For example, a user may express surprise to find the
register button in a particular location on the site. Quantitative research tracks that the user clicked register and what the user clicked on before and after. For researchers, the additional insight that the user was surprised augments the analysis of the user's behavior, and the researcher observes this first-hand by viewing the narrated video delivered by TryMyUI.

What you can learn from the qualitative measures from TryMyUI:
- how does the user experience match the user's natural expectations about how things work
- why is the user experiencing this with in-context feedback

What's the linkage?

Loop11 provides the quantitative measures through metrics and reports, and TryMyUI delivers the qualitative insights via narrated videos and written answers to survey questions. With these two easy-to-use, on-demand testing tools, any researcher or marketer can simultaneously gain insight into both the what  and the why of user behavior.

Although there is no single usability tool that provides this powerful combination, the combined functionality can be replicated by initiating a project in Loop11 and then augmenting the testing process in TryMyUI. To get started, open an account on TryMyUI.com and Loop11.com. Both sites offer a free trial for the first project to help marketers get started and become familiar with the process and results. Once the accounts are created, the process is straightforward:

1)At Loop11, create the test scenarios, invite user participants, and analyze metrics and reports
2)At TryMyUI, copy the project URL generated upon launching your Loop11 project. In Create a New Test, paste the Loop11 project URL in a Web Site Address. There's no need to re-enter the test scenario and tasks in Scenario and Task sections, as that information is already captured in the Loop11 project URL.
3)Use the default Survey Questions or customize as needed. Select the demographics. Select number of testers.
4)TryMyUI handles the rest, and will deliver videos of each test user navigating the website with the think aloud narration. Users will also provide written answers to Survey Questions, for example, what did you like about the website.

Use It Better provides advertisers and digital agencies with an affordable, fully hosted web analytics service that works with real users in real time. It is the first tool on the market that records users’ visits on AdobeŸ FlashŸ websites making it possible to replay them later as if they were videotaped. Watching how visitors interact with an interface, where they navigate, what they click helps analysts to understand user experience, detect flaws in information architecture, graphic user interface or even debug the application.

Use It Better allows to switch between analyzing individual visits and aggregated data with powerful filtering and multiple reports including trends, funnel analytics and even social media buzz.

A short video showcasing Use It Better can be found here: goo.gl/tqIEy

Use It Better web analytics for Flash can be leveraged at any stage of the project to test design mockups, debug flash movies, run focus group tests and even detect frauds and cheats in games.

It is offered in monthly and yearly subscriptions, with no setup fees and 30 days money back guarantee. Basic plan costs $99 a month and allows to record up to 5000 visits a month. It can be extended with extra recordings bundles to analyze high-traffic websites. There's also a free plan available, with limited functionality and low but extendable recording limits.

More information about Use It Better can be found on http://www.useitbetter.com

In honour of Jim Thatchers important and continuing contribution to making the web a more accessible medium, I have worked on an update to the Web Accessibility Toolbar for Internet Explorer, which includes new features that he has developed.

Today At CSUN 2011, Jim Thatcher is being presented with a life time achievement award. Here at TPG we join the many others in the Accessibility Community that wish to thank Jim for his continuing leadership, insight and guidance on web accessibility.

Jim has been a supporter of the Web Accessibility Toolbar since its initial release back in 2004. Of late, I have not had the time to work on developing the WAT. Jim emailed me last year with some scripts he had developed that provide additional features for checking web content. I had not incorporated these new features into the WAT, but thought the honouring of Jim at this years CSUN as the perfect excuse to pull my finger out and release an update. Its a leaner version than WAT 2.0, I have removed outdated, obsolete or buggy features, and added some new stuff.

The VP of a Fortune 100 company recently asked for some advice. They were heading into their peak selling season that would last only three months max, and they only had an ability to measure revenue from the website, nothing else. They did not have any web analytics tool.

Her question was: Which analytics tool do you recommend because we want to improve our website and increase sales.

My answer: Don’t implement a web analytics tool, implement a short website survey that would have just three questions.

Surprised?

There were a number of factors behind my recommendation but one of the main ones was that if you want to move really really fast and you don’t know anything then it is better to ask the customer what you should do rather than implement a tool and try to figure it out based on clicks. You will get better insights, faster than you can imagine.

Web analytics is awesome (you do expect me to say that don’t you! : )), is has to be a critical part of your web strategy because it can yield great insights. But for the fastest way to understanding customer problems there is nothing like asking the customer herself / himself (and yes it will lead to improved revenues).

Given the time crunch going to the customer made the most sense, implementation of the Web Analytics tool would happen and after a month or so and slowly over time ClickStream data would play a increasingly important part in decision making. In due course it would achieve parity with the Qualitative data (but hopefully never overshadow it).

Ok so survey got the nod, what questions to ask?

[UPDATE: 04 Mar 2008: You can now implement this survey 100% for free, a true onexit survey with no strings attached. Please see: 4Q - The Best Online Survey For A Website, Yours Free!]
Here are the three questions no survey can live without (and often a survey can be pretty awesome with just three questions):

What is the purpose of your visit to our website today?

It can also be framed as "what is the reason for your visit today" or "what task are you looking to accomplish on our website today" or "why are you here today".

Few website owners have a good understanding of why people visit their websites and this is one of the best possible ways for you to find out that critical piece of information. Answers that you will read, the distributions you will get between different primary purposes, will be eye opening for you, and they will help explain so much of the "weirdness" you see in your ClickStream data (and yes even your path analysis).

Were you able to complete your task today?

If you like conversion rate and revenue then you are going to love this one. An extremely simple question that asks the survey takers to self report their own perception of your website's effectiveness in helping them complete their tasks.

With this question we don't have to rely on our hypothesis such as if the visitors saw this page then they might have gotten their question answered or if I am measuring conversion then I can understand how effective my site is or our site is doing great because we just launched a massive quarter of a million US dollars redesign. We have the customers voice telling us exactly how well the website is performing when it comes to delivering the goods.

Now in case you want to know exactly what you need to do to improve the numbers in the graph, you'd ask a third question:

If you were not able to complete your task today, why not?

It can also be framed as "If you were able to not complete your task please explain" or "Why were you not able to complete your task on our website today" or simply as "How can we improve our website to ensure you are able to complete your task", etc.

The answer to this question is open text VOC, Voice of Customer. It is optimal to refrain from making this a drop down with choices like: Improve internal search, Update the navigation, and Provide more product information etc etc. Let the customers talk, give them a chance to tell you in their own voice the reasons and provide you with suggestions. It works better than you guessing what the answers might be and suggesting those.

Analysis for this question is done by categorizing the responses into common themes and then rating the % of times each theme is occurring in the open ended VOC for those who are not able to complete their task. This is your simple and direct to-do list of issues directly from the horse's mouth about what you should work on in order to improve your website experience for your customers.

These three simple questions that will be the source of a wealth of insights when it comes to helping your deliver on your customer centric strategy. [Want more: Got Surveys? Recommendations from the Trenches.]

ClickStream data is often missing the context, in that absence we overlay our own opinions / experiences / perspectives to make sense of it all. But with answers to these simple questions you’ll have the context to make sense of it all.

What do you all think? Have you tried surveys? Do you have a golden question or two that you use? Please share your own tips and feedback on my question suggestions above via comments.

The London 2012 Olympic ticketing website is ‘75% good for 75% of applicants’ reveals user experience agency Foolproof in an extensive review conducted on the first day of tickets being made available.

Tom Wood, Foolproof Partner and co-author of the report, summarises the experience of the London 2012 ticketing website as a mix of the good, the bad and the ugly.

“The ballot system was a very sensible move given the predicted traffic levels and looks to have had the desired effect in terms of withstanding the initial barrage of applications”, commented Tom Wood. “However the separation into two sites has diluted the user experience and made the application process more complicated and less intuitive than it needed to be. Visa’s exclusivity – especially the way it is communicated – seems to us to be a major mis-step.”

“The ballot system is also good because it creates a six week window for thinking, planning and applying. But what the site doesn't provide is rich information resources to allow you to make the most of this. Also, the messages on the site don't draw attention to the fact that you've got the ability to chop and change your application right up until the 26th April.”

Foolproof has come up with 5 handy tips to help people when booking their London 2012 tickets:

1. Use the main london2012.com site to plan your sports, venues and dates before going to the ticketing site - particularly if you need to know about access issues for older people or children.

2. Pick some less popular sports that are great to watch live - like Handball, Judo and Weightlifting. You are more likely to get tickets in the ballot. There are blogs and fansites out there that can give you an idea of what's fun to watch.

3. Think about how much you are prepared to risk to get the tickets you want. Set an upper limit to the total cost of all the tickets you will apply for - and stick to it.

4. Have your Visa card ready. The ticket site is 'proud to accept only Visa'!

5. If you change your mind after you have gone through checkout, up until 26th April you can 'withdraw' your application. This puts your application back in your basket so you can add or remove sessions - or start all over again if you want.

Usability testing can be used to quantify usability. This can allow you to compare a site's statistical performance before and after a re-design, in order to find out if it has improved. This method is not perfect, but can be very useful.
Introduction – a useful application of usability testing

Usability testing is mostly used to identify and explore usability issues on a site. This normally employs the 'talkaloud' method of usability testing, where a user is asked to complete a task and then verbalise their thoughts during the usability testing. Such a use of usability testing is very valuable and almost all significant web development projects will conduct this kind of usability testing before launch.

Usability testing can, however, be used in a different way. The 'benchmarking' method of usability testing allows you to get a statistical measure of a site's usability during a usability testing session. This is a very powerful idea, because it allows us to use usability testing sessions to statistically compare the usability of different designs and/or sites.
How it works – using usability testing to get a measure of usability

The generally-accepted definition of usability is that provided by ISO 9241, which states that usability is "the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use". So, in order to use usability testing to get a quantification of a site's usability, we need to find a way of statistically measuring effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction.

In the 'benchmarking' usability testing we have done for some of our clients, we have measured these on a per-task basis. Here are the ways we have found to statistically measure these parameters during a usability testing session:

* Effectiveness - This is usually the simplest one to measure during usability testing. For most tasks, you will be able to use a pass/fail measure of whether the user has managed to complete the task successfully. The percentage of users that manage to complete a task successfully therefore becomes a measure of the design's effectiveness.
* Efficiency - A useful way to measure this characteristic can be timing the user on a task during the usability testing. The average task completion time of all the users participating in your usability testing therefore becomes a measure of efficiency.
* Satisfaction - The easiest way of measuring users' satisfaction is normally in the form of a questionnaire. This questionnaire is typically administered after the usability testing session has ended and asks the user to rank their experience of the site (along a number of parameters) from 1 - 5 (1=poor, 5= good). The questions can relate to the entire site experience, or ask specific questions about each task.

Using these simple techniques you can get data which tells you (in a quantified way) how usable the site was found to be during usability testing. It should also be noted that during 'benchmarking' usability testing sessions, users are not encouraged to verbalise their thoughts, as this interrupts their thought-process and slows down task completion.
Conclusion – a good use of usability testing

Using usability testing to quantify a site's usability is a very good idea. If you measure your site's usability in this way before and after a re-design, it will help you ascertain whether the re-design was a success. It will not give you a 100% guarantee that your re-designed site will perform better in the real world, but it's a good indication. After all, it's normally a good thing when more people can complete tasks, in a shorter amount of time and are happier doing it!

This article was written by Tim Fidgeon, of Spotless Interactive – a leading a leading usability consultancy offering usability testing

The issue includes a farewell from Avi Parush, who started the journal and served as editor in chief for its first five years.

We are pleased to have a stimulating editorial from Misha Vaughan. In it, she describes her personal journey learning how to communicate the value of user experience to internal sales representatives. Perhaps the most important lesson for user experience professionals is questioning the assumptions we sometimes make about ourselves and about what motivates our colleagues in sales.

The first peer-reviewed article, by Carl Turner, focuses on a Balanced Scorecard approach to creating metrics to show the value that user experience provides to an organization. He proposes that user experience professionals go beyond simplified return on investment analyses to quantify the value we add to products.

The second article, by Jen Hocko, describes a case study showing how user experience professionals can smooth the introduction of a new product in an organization. When an organization has purchased a product and attempts to roll it out without any support from user experience professionals, end users often resist or rebel. Jen describes the steps in learning how we can add value to a team managing the roll out.

We are pleased to present the third article, by Brian Wentz and Jonathan Lazar. It is a carefully planned and executed usability comparison of email applications by users who are blind. The test sessions with blind participants provide data showing that they have unique problems with email and calendaring tasks. In addition, there are design flaws that cause minor problems for sighted users but become barriers to task completion for blind users. The authors urge us as a profession to include samples of blind users in our evaluations of products. This paper provides a blueprint for how to include a sample of disabled participants in a product evaluation.

The contents of the latest issue of:

International Journal of Mobile Human Computer Interaction (IJMHCI)
Official Publication of the Information Resources Management Association
Volume 3, Issue 1, January-March 2011
Published: Quarterly in Print and Electronically
ISSN: 1942-390x EISSN: 1942-3918
Published by IGI Publishing, Hershey-New York, USA
www.igi-global.com/ijmhci

Editor-in-Chief: Joanna Lumsden, Aston University, UK

EDITORIAL PREFACE

Joanna Lumsden, Aston University, UK

To read the guest editorial preface, please consult this issue of IJMHCI in your library or click the link below.
http://www.igi-global.com/bookstore/titledetails.aspx?titleid=47740

PAPER ONE

Evaluating the Visual Demand of In-Vehicle Information Systems: The Development of a New Method

Ainojie Irune (University of Nottingham, UK)

In-vehicle information systems (IVIS) provide a variety of driver support and infotainment functionality; however, there is a growing concern that the resulting engagement with IVIS could present significant sources of distraction to drivers. This paper summarises the PhD thesis of Dr Ainojie Alexander Irune, which was awarded at the University of Nottingham in December 2009. The primary aims of the research were to develop a framework to aid the selection of an appropriate HF/HCI method, for use at particular stages in the design process, and to develop a novel method (with a focus on glance duration) for assessing the visual demand afforded by IVIS. Five empirical studies are reported in the thesis. In the first study, interviews were conducted with subject experts and the results were combined with the literature to provide guidance regarding the appropriate use of human factors methods. The remaining four studies present an iterative development of a novel method capable of predicting the visual demand imposed by an IVIS.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-global.com/bookstore/article.aspx?titleid=51654

PAPER TWO

Classic and Alternative Mobile Search: A Review and Agenda

Matt Jones (Swansea University, UK)

As mobile search turns into a mainstream activity, the author reflects on research that provides insights into the impact of current interfaces and pointers to yet unmet needs. Classic text dominated interface and interaction techniques are reviewed, showing how they can enhance the user experience. While today’s interfaces emphasise direct, query-result approaches, serving up discrete chunks of content, the author suggests an alternative set of features for future mobile search. With reference to example systems, the paper argues for indirect, continuous and multimodal approaches. Further, while almost all mobile search research has focused on the ‘developed’ world, the paper outlines challenges and impact of work targeted at ‘developing’ world contexts.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-global.com/bookstore/article.aspx?titleid=51655

PAPER THREE

How Do People Use Their Mobile Phones?: A Field Study of Small Device Users

Tianyi Chen (University of Manchester, UK)
Simon Harper (University of Manchester, UK)
Yeliz Yesilada (Middle East Technical University, Northern Cyprus Campus, Turkey)

The usability evaluation of small devices (i.e., mobile phones and PDAs) is an emerging area of research. Compared with desktop computers, designing a usability evaluation for small devices is more challenging. Context of use, such as environmental disturbance and a user’s physical activities affect the evaluation results. However, these parameters are usually ignored or excluded from simple and unnatural evaluation settings; therefore generating unrealistic results. This paper presents a field study that investigates the behaviour of small device users in naturalistic settings. The study consists of a series of unobtrusive remote observations and interviews. Results show that small device users normally use the device with just one hand, press the keys with thumb and make phone calls and send text messages while walking. They normally correct typing errors and use abbreviations. On average, small device users switch their attention between the device screen and the surrounding environment 3 times every 20 seconds, and this increases when they are walking.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-global.com/bookstore/article.aspx?titleid=51656

PAPER FOUR

Evaluating the Readability of Privacy Policies in Mobile Environments

R. Singh (University of Alberta, Canada)
M. Sumeeth (University of Alberta, Canada)
J. Miller (University of Alberta, Canada)

Recent work has suggested that the current “breed” of privacy policy represents a significant challenge in terms of comprehension to the average Internet-user. Due to display limitations, it is easy to represent the conjecture that this comprehension level should drop when these policies are moved into a mobile environment. This paper explores the question of how much does comprehension decrease when privacy policies are viewed on mobile versus desktop environments and does this decrease make them useless in their current format? It reports on a formal subject-based experiment, which seeks to evaluate how readable are privacy policy statements found on the Internet but presented in mobile environments. This experiment uses fifty participants and privacy policies collected from ten of the most popular web sites on the Internet. It evaluates, using a Cloze test, the subject’s ability to comprehend the content of these privacy policies.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-global.com/bookstore/article.aspx?titleid=51657

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For full copies of the above articles, check for this issue of the International Journal of Mobile Human Computer Interaction (IJMHCI) in your institution's library. This journal is also included in the IGI Global aggregated "InfoSci-Journals" database: http://www.igi-global.com/EResources/InfoSciJournals.aspx.
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CALL FOR PAPERS

Mission of IJMHCI:

The primary objective of the International Journal of Mobile Human Computer Interaction (JMHCI) is to provide comprehensive coverage and understanding of the issues associated with the design, evaluation, and use of mobile technologies. This journal focuses on human-computer interaction related to the innovation and research in the design, evaluation, and use of innovative handheld, mobile, and wearable technologies in order to broaden the overall body of knowledge regarding such issues. IJMHCI also considers issues associated with the social and/or organizational impacts of such technologies.

Coverage of IJMHCI:

Topics to be discussed in this journal include (but are limited to) the following:

Case studies and/or reflections on experience (e.g. descriptions of successful mobile user interfaces, evaluation set-ups, etc.)
Context-aware/context-sensitive mobile application design, evaluation, and use
Design methods/approaches for mobile user interfaces
Ethical implications of mobile evaluations
Field-based evaluations and evaluation techniques
Gestural interaction techniques for mobile technologies
Graphical interaction techniques for mobile technologies
Issues of heterogeneity of mobile device interfaces/interaction
Lab v. field evaluations and evaluation techniques
Lab-based evaluations and evaluation techniques
Mobile advanced training application design, evaluation, and use
Mobile assistive technologies design, evaluation, and use
Mobile commerce application design, evaluation, and use
Mobile HCI lab design/set-up
Mobile healthcare application design, evaluation, and use
Mobile interactive play design, evaluation, and use
Mobile learning application design, evaluation, and use
Mobile technology design, evaluation, and use by special (needs) groups (e.g. elderly, children, and disabled)
Multimodal interaction on mobile technologies
Non-speech audio-based interaction techniques for mobile technologies
Other emerging interaction techniques for mobile technologies
Other related issues that impact the design, evaluation, and use of mobile technologies
Speech-based interaction techniques for mobile technologies
Tactile interaction techniques for mobile technologies
Technology acceptance as it relates to mobile technologies
User aspects of mobile privacy, security, and trust
User interface architectures for mobile technologies
User interface migration from desktop to mobile technologies
Wearable technology/application and interaction design, evaluation, and use

Interested authors should consult the journal's manuscript submission guidelines at www.igi-global.com/ijmhci.

All inquiries and submissions should be sent to:
Editor-in-Chief: Joanna Lumsden at ijmhci@igi-global.com

HCI 2011 - Workshop programme announced
Posted by: "John Knight" john.knight@intiuo.com creativesciences
Fri Feb 25, 2011 4:04 am (PST)



Great set of workshops at this year's conference:

"We are pleased to announce an exciting and diverse programme of workshops to be held in conjunction with the 25th BCS conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI 2011). HCI 2011 will be held in Newcastle upon Tyne from the 4th to the 8th of July 2011, hosted by Northumbria University (seehttp://www.hci2011.co.uk/ for more details).

Workshops will take place on Monday the 4th and Tuesday the 5th of July, the two days preceding the main conference. Workshop participants will be required to pay a £90 workshop fee; a reduced fee of £60 will be granted to those who also register for the conference.

The workshop programme for both days is given below. The general deadline for position papers is the 1st of May 2011, although please check individual workshop webpages for specific attendance criteria. Please note that in a couple of instances the webpages are not yet live, where this is the case we have included placeholder URLs for your information.

We look forward to an exciting series of events.
Siân Lindley and Peter Wild (HCI 2011 workshop co-chairs)"

***Workshop Programme for Monday 4th July 2011***

*EuroHCIR2011 - The 1st European Workshop on Human-Computer Information Retrieval*
Max Wilson, Tony Russell Rose, Birger Larsen, James Kalbach
This workshop aims to stimulate the European industrial and academic interest in Human-Computer Interaction with Information Retrieval, matching the ongoing series of workshops taking place in the USA.
http://fitlab.eu/euroHCIR2011/

*HCI4WELL2 - The 2nd Workshop on HCI for Wellness: Using computers to improve mental wellness*
Rich Picking, Julie Doyle, Christopher Buckingham, Stuart Cunningham, Ann Adams, Alan Newell, Paula Alexandra Silva Paula Fraunhofer
Continuing from the first HCI4WELL workshop at HCI2010, we consider user interface design for wellness, an area of health which recognizes a person's physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual and social needs.
http://www.glyndwr.ac.uk/pickingr/hci4well2.shtm

*When Words Fail: What can Music Interaction tell us about HCI?*
Katie Wilkie, Rose Johnson, Simon Holland, Grégory Leplâtre
This workshop aims to explore research on any aspect of Music Interaction, and to collectively consider lessons for HCI in general.
http://mcl.open.ac.uk/workshop

*Sixth International Workshop on Ubiquitous and Collaborative Computing (iUBICOM 2011)*
Rahat Iqbal, Jacques Terken, Dzmitry Aliakseyeu, Anne James
We aim to discuss challenges for design that arise from the vision of Ubiquitous Computing. The workshop theme is 'balancing technological and human factors for better design of ubiquitous computing.
http://www.coventry.ac.uk/ec/research/dsm/iUBICOM/iUBICOM2011.html

*UXCF2011 - Common Curriculum Workshop for UX*
Tom McEwan, John Knight, Chandra Harrison
This workshop builds on UXCF2010, which kick-started definition of UX competency, and aims to define UX model curricula for short courses, modules and degrees.
http://www.uxcf.org

*Designing Cool*
Janet Read, Daniel Fitton, Russell Beale, Linda Little
This workshop examines cool in the context of interaction design and the extent to which technology can be appropriated for cool. Only cool people should attend :)
http://www.chici.org/cool2011

*The Second International Symposium on Culture, Creativity and Interaction Design*
(this two-day workshop continues on Tuesday)
Shaowen Bardzell, Ann Light, Jeffrey Bardzell, Mark Blythe
The symposium seeks to strengthen the dialogue among the disciplines contributing to culture, creativity and interaction design research, providing a lasting forum for interdisciplinary analysis and experiences of digital media.
http://ccid2.wordpress.com

***Workshop Programme for Tuesday 5th July 2011***

*The Second International Symposium on Culture, Creativity and Interaction Design*
(this two-day workshop continues from Monday - see above for full details)

*Integrating Ambient Information into Healthcare Environments*
Ruth Dalton, Nicholas Dalton, Paul Marshall, Rebecca Cain, Christoph Hölscher
This workshop will focus on the overlap between hospital building design and information design to examine how embedding context-specific, ambient information in healthcare buildings may support and guide the patient/visitor.
http://ambientinfomationhealthcareworksho.blogspot.com/

*Delivering User Centred Mobile Design: Commercial realities and UCD methodology*
Chandra Harrison, Charlotte Magnusson, Benjamin Poppinga, Sam Medrington, Whan Stransom, Ginger Claassen
Practitioners and academics will discuss methods to translate and communicate user requirements to stakeholders, to encourage best practice and to address commercial limitations to improve delivery of user-centred mobile designs.
http://ducmd11.offis.de

*PPD11 - Workshop on Coupled Multi-display Environments (MDEs) in Classrooms*
Aaron Quigley, Alan Dix, Sriram Subramanian, Stephen Brewster, Miguel A. Nacenta
Classrooms present particular educational contexts for Interactive Display Ecosystems or Multi-Display Environments we aim to explore in this workshop.
http://sachi.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/ppd11

*Beyond Mobile Context: New and unexplored practices in mobile interaction design and research*
Michael Leitner, Johann Schrammel, Manfred Tscheligi
This workshop invites mobile interaction designers and researchers to discuss current and future mobile technologies and to scrutinize the design and evaluation methods in that area.
http://beyondmobilecontext.wordpress.com/

*Supporting Collaboration through Multimodal and Cross-modal Interfaces*
Oussama Metatla, Nick Bryan-Kinns, Tony Stockman, Fiore Martin
With growing possibilities of using various modalities in interaction comes new opportunities for supporting richer, more effective and engaging collaborations. This workshop examines the issues associated with the design, implementation and evaluation of multimodal and cross-modal collaborative systems.
http://ccmi.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/hciworkshop

*The 3rd Workshop on HCI and Services*
Peter Wild, Emma Pickering, John Knight, Stefan Holmlid
Services are considered one of the key areas to focus on for growth and innovation within economies. Approaches to service design have emerged that share HCI commitment to working with and for people, the workshop will continue the exploration of the links between the two fields.
http://www.peterjwild.org/workshops/HCI&Services3/

*Health, Wealth and Identity Theft: Designing usable privacy and security mechanisms for happiness online*
Lynne Coventry, Paul Dunphy, Ivan Flechais, Tristan Henderson, Mike Just, Linda Little, Karen Renaud, Melanie Volkamer
Exploring the design and evaluation of usable security and privacy mechanisms for protecting users online.
http://di.ncl.ac.uk/bhci-securityprivacy/

*Online Patient Experience (PEx) and its role in e-health*
Sue Ziebland, Pamela Briggs, John Powell, Liz Sillence
This workshop aims to discuss the rise of patient-generated content on the Internet, in the form of online patient experiences (PEx) and to share new approaches and findings.
https://sites.google.com/site/opex2011/

*HCIEd 2011 - Ten years on! What's going on?*
Gavin Robert Sim, Janet Read, Lynne Coventry, Lars Oestreicher
It has now been 10 years since the beginning of the HCI Educators series. To celebrate this moment the HCI Educators workshop at Newcastle is encouraging participation around reflection on practice, and innovation for the future.
http:/www.hcied.org/

By Paul J. Sherman
Published: July 10, 2007

“The current US patent system—in combination with the litigious nature of many high-tech companies—make it likely that, somewhere down the road, something you design might incur the wrath of a patent troll.”
Imagine, if you will, that you’re working for a small Web-application startup. For the sake of argument, let’s say the company wants to build a Web-based application to help product marketers and brand managers—the primary user group—manage and maintain the digital assets for their company’s products and services.

Further assume the application would also allow users to publish updated digital collateral to the distribution channel—that is, resellers such as retail stores and ecommerce sites who sell a company’s products.

The startup has asked you to create a user interface for this Web application, and you’ve struggled for weeks to come up with an elegant, efficient way for users to quickly and efficiently upload, manage, and publish a wide variety of digital collateral, including product box shots, spec sheets, warranties, coupons, rebates, and so on.

Once you’ve carried out your contextual inquiries, identified the customers’ terminology, and done some participatory design sessions, you design the interaction models and create workflows and some medium-fidelity wireframes. Of course, you do some formative testing with a lo-fi prototype and find that your design does well. Really well, in fact.

You’re elated. Just a couple of optimizations to the workflows and some terminology tweaks, and you’re ready to apply a visual design. You hand off your detailed wireframes and functional specification to the visual designers and development group, feeling satisfied that you’ve done a great job of meeting users’ needs and satisfying your stakeholders.

Fast-forward a year and a half. You receive a notice from a law firm. You’re being subpoenaed. It turns out the now-successful startup is being sued, because certain aspects of the application’s user interface—your design—have “infringed” on several patents that purport to have “invented” the process of managing large groups of files and publishing them to various locations via the Internet.

Why Should You Care About the Chaos in the US Patent System?

“Companies often file for and the US government actually grants patents for user interface and interaction design “innovations” that are either strikingly obvious or have appeared before in other systems.”
Could this happen to you? Absolutely. How likely is it to happen to you? Probably less likely than the chance you’ll hear your favorite song on the radio within the next year, but much more likely than the chance you’ll win the lottery.

The current US patent system—in combination with the litigious nature of many high-tech companies—make it likely that, somewhere down the road, something you design might incur the wrath of a patent troll.

The sad fact is that companies often file for and the US government actually grants patents for user interface and interaction design “innovations” that are either strikingly obvious or have appeared before in other systems—that is, when prior art exists, as someone in the field of intellectual property would say. This means, as user experience practitioners, we are at risk of litigation every time we design an application. Each time we fire up Visio or Photoshop, create a new design, then put it out into the world, there’s a good chance we’re infringing on someone’s patent.

In a perfect or just world, the government wouldn’t grant patents for the obvious or overly broad patents in the first place. But we’re not living in an ideal world, and the government often grants dubious patents. When they do, the patent holder then has the legal right to sue companies they feel are infringing on their patents.

Unfortunately, in this situation, it is incumbent on the infringing company to establish that they are, in fact, not infringing on the patent or the court should invalidate the patent because it is vague, based on prior art, or overly broad. This is generally much harder to prove than it is to defend a patent. Because the US patent system so strongly favors the patent holder, once the government grants a patent, the patent holder generally need not continually prove the validity of the patent.

How have things devolved to this sorry state?

A Quick History of the US Patent System

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, nations have afforded some measure of protection for inventors’ technology, methods, and processes. English kings granted patents to inventors as early as the 1500s. In the United States, the law establishing a patent system appears in Article 8 of the United States Constitution. The actual text reads:

Congress shall have power… To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

The U.S. government established the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in 1790. It issued the first patent, incidentally, to an inventor named Samuel Hopkins, for an invention that improved “the making of Pot ash and Pearl ash by a new Apparatus and Process.” The USPTO has issued over seven million patents since its inception.

In its first two centuries, the USPTO generally functioned as intended—that is, it provided inventors with legal protection and recourse, so they could capitalize on their inventions without fear of others copying or appropriating their work.

“The patent system in the United States was generally effective until the pace of technological innovation began to accelerate in the late 1970s and 80s.”
The patent system in the United States was generally effective until the pace of technological innovation began to accelerate in the late 1970s and 80s. As software development companies created and marketed more and more commercial software, they naturally began submitting their creations to the USPTO.

Whether software should be patentable at all has been hotly debated. A number of individuals and organizations have made the case that, because software is simply a set of commands in a computer language, it should not be patentable, and that allowing software patents stifles innovation. Others have argued that software functionality shouldn’t be patentable, but the actual algorithms developers employ to implement the functionality an application provides should be. In point of fact, the USPTO makes such arguments academic, because it has issued thousands of software patents, including patents for algorithms, functionality, and user interface designs.

The controversy surrounding the issuance of software patents had already led many to begin questioning the US patent system in the early 1990s. Then the US patent system seriously went off the rails in the late 1990s when Congress reduced funding for the USPTO and required the USPTO to submit 10% of all revenues from patent filing and issuance fees to the US Treasury—effectively taxing the USPTO—while at the same time, the pace of filings increased. A perfect storm for the patent system. So like any good self-perpetuating bureaucracy, the leaders at the patent office decided to make up for the funding gap by increasing their reliance on fees from patent applications and issuances.

Not surprisingly, this created a strong incentive within the USPTO to accept more patent applications. This has increased the workload on individual patent examiners. In past decades, a patent examiner would carry out a fairly comprehensive, independent search for prior art when evaluating a patent application—not simply rely on the applicant to describe and report any prior art in the application. Searching for prior art obviously takes time. Today, it is less and less likely that a patent examiner will conduct anything more than a cursory search for prior art.

By the beginning of this decade, the USPTO was essentially granting patents to anyone who asked nicely. The decline of the US patent system and the USPTO is almost laughable. Some ridiculous and controversial patents include the following examples:

Some clueless patent examiner awarded US Patent 5,443,036,“Method of exercising a cat,” to an “inventor” who claimed that having a cat chase the beam from a laser pointer was a patentable process.
In 2005, the USPTO issued US Patent 6,960,975 for a “Space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state.” Inspection of this patent by physicists outside the USPTO called attention to the fact that the patent essentially described an antigravity machine, a physical impossibility.
In 2002, the father of a five-year-old boy, acting as the boy’s patent attorney, filed for and was awarded US Patent 6,368,227 for a method of swinging on a swing sideways. Presumably, all other kindergartners now owe this child royalty payments.
Imagine if the patent office had acted like this in the early 1900s. What if an automobile manufacturer had successfully patented the user interface elements of a car? The consequence would have been that no other manufacturers could create a car with the familiar configuration of steering wheel, gas pedal, clutch, and shifter. How Rube Goldbergesque would our cars be today?

While these outlandish examples are entertaining, they call attention to serious issues. When the government issues patents that are overly broad or for that which is obvious, they can stifle innovation—because either the patents have chilling effects or, when other inventors create things of value, holders of patents for the obvious or overly broad patents have the legal right to tie up the inventors in civil court.

How Bad Is It Really?

Just to show how out of hand the patent system is in the US, here are some ridiculous patents on user interface and interaction designs.

In 2005, Creative Laboratories went after Apple Computer—now Apple Inc. —alleging that Apple infringed on a patent it held for user interface elements of the Creative Zen MP3 player. Because of the patent Creative Labs held for “Automatic hierarchical categorization of music by metadata” (US Patent 6,928,433), they claimed they owned the patent on “a user interface that enables users of portable media players to efficiently and intuitively navigate and select tracks on a portable media player.” That’s right. They claimed they owned the patent to a hierarchical menu system.
In 1999, Amazon.com received US Patent 5,960,411 for “A Method and System for Placing a Purchase Order Via a Communications Network.” What had Amazon patented? Their one-click purchase button. In their filing, Amazon claimed that their one-click purchase process was truly innovative, because other online retailers used the shopping cart process funnel model of completing an online purchase. Many people, including a programmer who was an Amazon founder, feel that the one-click purchase is the pinnacle of obviousness. (For a good overview of the Amazon one-click patent issue, see “Amazon One-Click Shopping.”
Just think about this last example for a second. Amazon holds the patent for making a purchase on an ecommerce site via a single click. This is like GM patenting, say, the method that allows drivers to turn a key and start a car. What would life be like if patents had prevented all other car manufacturers from using an ignition-key system and instead intentionally had to design the interaction so it was more time consuming and onerous to avoid litigation?

What Does This Mean for UX Professionals?

“Trends suggest we will have to be increasingly vigilant when we design user interfaces.”
Unless the US patent system undergoes comprehensive reform, these trends suggest we will have to be increasingly vigilant when we design user interfaces.

In their groundbreaking 1993 shareware e-book “Task-Centered User Interface Design,” Lewis and Rieman provided some guidelines for designers to consider when deciding how to meet users’ needs by providing user interface and interaction elements. They grouped their recommendations into four categories labeled “things you certainly can copy (unless the rights have been sold),” “things you probably can copy,” “things you probably can’t copy,” and “things you certainly cannot copy (unless you get permission).” What’s interesting are the things they cited as probably safe to copy:

Sequences or arrangements of menu items, commands, screens, and so on—You can copy their order if, in the original application, the designer clearly ordered them to improve their usability. For example, if the order were alphabetical or most-commonly-used-item first, or if there were only one way or a very few other ways items could be arranged.
Obvious icons, ideas, commands, menu items, or words—You can copy words or graphic images when they are such obvious choices for the functions they represent that usability would be reduced if you used other words or images. For example, using the word print for printing or an icon depicting a mouse device that lets users select mouse options..
While these guidelines have been extremely useful to practitioners over the past dozen or so years, I fear that those items I’ve cited above likely now belong in the “things you probably can’t copy” category. The USPTO has issued too many overly broad and obvious patents on user interface designs for me to feel confident following Lewis and Rieman’s guidance anymore.

The US patent system is broken, and because of this, we’re all vulnerable.

So what can we as a community do about it?

A Call-To-Action

The first thing you can do is educate yourself on this issue. I’ve given you only an overview in this article. You can learn more about the patent system and the controversy surrounding it from these online resources:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)—The EFF is a nonprofit organization that advocates for free speech and individual rights in the digital domain. Its Patent Busting Project is an initiative “to protect innovation and free expression” by fighting against vague, obvious, or overly broad patents.
Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII)—Based in Europe, this organization currently runs the NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign, which has as its aim stopping enaction of a US-like patent system in the European Union.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF)—Founded by Richard Stallman, the FSF promotes and supports the free software movement. The FSF supports a less restrictive approach to patenting intellectual property. Founded as a US-based organization, FSF branches have opened in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
Another advocacy group is the Software Freedom Law Center, which Eben Moglen founded in 2005.
“Become an advocate for open standards and patent system reform.”
Next, you can become an advocate for open standards and patent system reform. This means supporting the propositions that neither software nor its user interface representations should be patentable. One can make a case for software code being copyrightable as a publication, with “all rights reserved” or a Creative Commons license that reserves some rights, so others can’t copy source code character for character unless the author grants permission. Ultimately, the goal is to get to a less restrictive patent system, in the US and worldwide.

For those of you who are learning about this issue for the first time, you might feel that railing against patents is somehow anti-free market or anti-capitalism. Nothing could be further from the truth. Despite what the intellectual property lawyers and patent-squatter holding companies claim, many studies across many industries and domains have established that patents inhibit competition and stifle innovation. A 2004 report by the European Union’s Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development cites and describes these studies.

In short, a restrictive patent system is antithetical to a free market. Open standards and narrowly scoped patents that cover unique solutions to limited problems encourage healthy competition and help build vibrant, free markets. And they would also lead to greater opportunities for all of us who work in user experience.

Reference

Lewis, Clayton, and John Reiman. Task-Centered User Interface Design. Clayton Lewis and John Rieman: Boulder, CO, 1993. Retrieved July 6, 2007.

Faceted classifications are increasingly common on the World Wide Web, especially on commercial web sites (Adkisson 2003). This is not surprising—facets are a natural way of organizing things. Many web designers have probably rediscovered them independently by asking, "What other ways would people want to view this data? What's another way to slice it?" A survey of the literature on applying facets on the web (Denton 2003) shows that librarians think it a good idea but are unsure how to do it, while the web people who are already doing it are often unaware of S.R. Ranganathan, the Classification Research Group, and the decades of history behind facets.

This paper will attempt to bridge the gap by giving procedures and advice on all the steps involved in making a faceted classification and putting it on the web. Web people will benefit by having a rigorous seven-step process to follow for creating faceted classifications, and librarians will benefit by understanding how to store such a classification on a computer and make it available on the web. The paper is meant for both webmasters and information architects who do not know a lot about library and information science, and librarians who do not know a lot about building databases and web sites. The classifications are meant for small or medium-sized sets of things, meant to go on public or private web sites, when there is a need to organize items for which no existing classification will do. It is certainly not the intent of this paper to show how to build another universal classification, nor to describe how a library that uses a faceted classification scheme can put their catalogue online.

There are four main sections to this paper: when to make a faceted classification, how to make one, how to store it on a computer, and how to make it work on the web. I will concentrate on the middle two sections. The question of when to use facets is not particularly difficult (leaving aside general questions about the purpose and usefulness of classifications). Detailed advice on the design and implementation of a good web site is beyond the scope of this paper and requires a companion web site, with examples, to be best understood (but see Nielsen (2000) for excellent advice). In the final section I offer some guidelines on what to consider when putting facets on the web, but the discussion is not lengthy. The two middle sections about how to make and store a faceted classification receive a much fuller treatment.

What are facets? Consider a common example, wine. Each wine has a certain colour. It comes from a certain place. It is made from a particular kind (or blend) of grape. Its year of vintage is known. It has been guaranteed to be of a certain quality by its country's wine authorities. It comes in a container of a given volume. It has a price. A list could be made of all wines, but it would be enormously long and unwieldy. On the web, it would mean scrolling through screen after screen of endless subdivisions— hard to use, and hard to search. With facets, we can set up a handful of categories that will combine to fully describe the wines: colour, origin, grape, year, appellation, volume, price. Each category is populated with the right terms and organized in an appropriate way. Then each bottle of wine is classified by picking and choosing the right terms from each category. This is a faceted classification: a set of mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive categories, each made by isolating one perspective on the items (a facet), that combine to completely describe all the objects in question, and which users can use, by searching and browsing, to find what they need.

Facets and the web go very well together. Barbara Kwasnick (1999, 39) said, "The notion of facets rests on the belief that there is more than one way to view the world, and that even those classifications that are viewed as stable are in fact provisional and dynamic. The challenge is to build classifications that are flexible and can accommodate new phenomena." And after they are built, the challenge is to make them easy to use. With hypertext and the web, dynamic views are only the click of a button away. Facets make a multi-dimensional organizational scheme, and web browsers are an easy and familiar tool for navigating many dimensions. All of the benefits of faceted classifications can be realized on the web. Before we can discuss how, though, first we must see when to use facets.

London, February 2011

The UK user experience market grew by 5% in 2010, and will grow by an estimated 8% year-on-year in 2011 to a value of approximately £222 million, according to Econsultancy research published this week.

According to Econsultancy’s User Experience Buyer’s Guide 2011, the market is maturing, as more companies think about the strategic importance of customer experience.

Econsultancy Research Manager Aliya Zaidi said: “It’s an exciting time for the user experience industry, with much technological innovation in this space. The web is becoming more social, and this is resulting in the online environment becoming broadly more ‘human’.

“New devices and formats, such as touch-screen technology add a whole new dimension to the user experience, but they represent both an opportunity and a challenge for marketers. The introduction of new web standards, such as HTML5 will also make the user experience more immersive, interactive and engaging.”

Econsultancy’s valuation takes into account the slowdown caused by the recession. Although businesses are recovering, the economic outlook remains unpredictable. Given the uncertainty, there will be a continued focus on demonstrating ROI from user experience.

Zaidi added: “The good news for marketers is that it is getting easier to benchmark success, thanks to analytics technology becoming more sophisticated. There is now a wealth of site monitoring, testing and optimisation tools, which allow marketers to place a tangible value on user experience.

“However, what is clear is that analytics alone do not provide the whole picture. The data must be combined with qualitative insights, such as user behaviour to deliver actionable information.”

The publication of this report follows on from the Econsultancy / Foviance Multichannel Customer Experience Report, which found that more than two thirds of companies (68%) recognise a strong link between long-term business performance and customer experience.

Key market trends in 2011:

- Companies focus on strategy as market matures
- Companies recognise the link between business performance and customer experience
- Humanisation of user experience online
- Analytics becomes important – but not the silver bullet
- Wider range of new formats and devices available
- The evolution of search impacts user experience

About this report

Our 2011 User Experience Buyer’s Guide assesses the UK marketplace for user experience services from the perspective of the buyer.

The report contains an overview of market trends, tips and pitfalls for buyers and profiles of 27 companies offering services in this space.

Which companies are featured in this report?

The report contains profiles of the following suppliers:

Amberlight Partners, Bunnyfoot, Clearleft, Cogapp, cxpartners, Experience Solutions, Flow, Foolproof, Fortune Cookie, Foviance, Human Factors International, Nomensa, One to One Insight, PRWD, RedEye optimum.web, Serco ExperienceLab, SimpleUsability, Spotless , Interactive, Super User Studio, System Concepts, The Usability Lab, User Vision, Userfocus, we are: london, Web Usability Partnership, Webcredible, Your Mum

Download Econsultancy’s User Experience Buyer’s guide today.

Report URL

http://econsultancy.com/reports/user-experience-buyers-guide

Journalists

A free report is available to journalists and bloggers. Please email for details.

Media contacts:

Aliya Zaidi, Research Manager, Econsultancy
(e: aliya.zaidi AT econsultancy.com t: + 44 (0) 207 269 1466)

Linus Gregoriadis, Research Director, Econsultancy
(e: linus AT econsultancy.com t: + 44 (0) 207 269 1465)

About Econsultancy

Econsultancy is the leading source of independent advice and insight on digital marketing and e-commerce.

Our reports, events, online resources and training programmes help a community of over 80,000 registered marketers make better decisions, build business cases, find the best suppliers, look smart in meetings and accelerate their careers.

Econsultancy is an award-winning online publisher of reports covering best practice, user experience benchmarking, market data, trends and innovation, and supplier selection aimed at internet professionals that want practical advice on all aspects of e-business.


Aliya Zaidi
Research Manager
aliya.zaidi@econsultancy.com

T: +44 (0)20 7269 1466 | M: +44 (0)7806 625 649
Twitter - @aliyazaidi | LinkedIn | http://econsultancy.com

I saw a post the other day on Linkedin that asked the forum about developing an in-house Usabilty Lab / Department and it reminded me of an earlier part of my career when this as the topic of choice amongst aspiring and practicing Usability and Human Factors professionals.

It was so topical that we got together with Lesley Trenner and Joanna Bawa in 1996/7 and a large number of practitioners, myself included (Alan Arnfeld) contributed our experiences and practical advice to a book published in 1998 by Springer called The Politics of Usability. During preparation I was working with Janet Saunders running a group at Thames Water focussing on Usability and Product so we were glad to contribute a Chapter focusing on how to make usability part of the culture.

I decided to reflect on those themes and the guidelines provided then are still as relevant today as they were 15 years ago. So then I was thinking what could I add to the discussion. Since working at Thames water I have moved through a series of other organisations and at each one I have introduced Usability and user centred design best practices – but each time a little differently.

This post is a personal reflection on some of the key activities that took place in those organisations and is my personal opinion of the situation at the time, it of course is not an official communication of those companies.

At Sema Group plc, at the time of working there it was a 20,000 european consultance firm with consultants all over the place. It has seen moved through several aquisitions and a large part of it is now within the ATOS Origin group. I was a consultant, one of 20,000! How could I influence best practice? At Sema I worked with another senior manager and we set up a working group across the company of professionals interested in Uasability and Product Design. e produced guidelines and best practice documents that became available to all 20,000 consultants. Was that a great success? Well – to be honest I would say no. It was run very much as a part time activity, even for me between assignments and it was not the focus of activity for any of the participants. We did not achieve a senior champion and we did not achieve a milestone case study project that we could hang the business benefits from. In short we did not follow the advice from the book!

At Yahoo! Europe – the experience was completely different. I joined Yahoo! in 2000 in the European Headquarters. At that time it was relatively small and did not have the resources available in the mother ship in the US. In the US HQ Usability design and user centred best practices were well established with a substantial Design group including Usability Professionals , Labs and all the equipment you could imagine. In Europe, although we had this best practice model to follow, we were really working as a start-up in other respects and so Usability practice had to be sold to management and shown to be the right investment choice.

We started with some relatively simple studies by Survey across the consumer network in 8 European countries and this worked well to show that with a small amount of effort we could gain substantial insight into user behaviour for our flagship product – Yahoo! Search. In Europe there are some international and behavioural differences as well as different competitors and markets. European insight into search was well received.

At Yahoo! Europe this was followed up where I invited a sample of our customers to come the London office and carry out some standard Usability exercises. Without a lab and other high equipment we made a makeshift set up by converting an office and borrowing some recording equipment and cameras. This worked and Usability testing as part of product design and development gradually became standard practice.

We still had to keep costs desperately cheap but with high deliverables. One of the solutions I introduced was to cut out the time consuming and expensive recruitment process by going out into the field and carrying out large numbers of test in one day. I arranged a partnership with an internet cafe chain – called Easy Internet Cafe. This used to be part of the Easy Group but has since been devolved to its franshisees.

We had an arrangement that for a small fee 2 Yahoo!s could take a station in one of their London Cafe’s, we had a poster to explain Yahoo! were carrying out user tests and we wore T shirts to explain and authenticate who we were. We simply recruited visitors to the cafe as they left and had finsished their visit and asked them to stay for 10-15 minutes longer for which we wouold pay them £10. It worked extremely well. One of the projects this was especially good for was a development of the Yahoo! mobile service to download Logos and Ringtones. We were trying to find a way to enable Yahoo! to take a fee from the mobile phone of £4.50 and at that time it was only possible to take a £1.50 at a time. Every week we would return to the internet cafe with an alternate design and try it with members of the public until we got it right.

Across Europe we were also able to carry out cut price contextual studies visiting peoples homes in Germany and carrying out trials in Spain, Germany and UK. We used interpreters and a portable suitacase containing cameras and recording equipment.

When back at the office we always completed the cycle of test planning, stakeholder review before a test, carry out test, write up and share results with the stakeholders with both a quick wins report within 2 days and then a fuller report and highlights videos a little later.

I later joined Cheapflights – a price comparison site for flights. This as a much smaller organisation of 50 people. As site director I was responsible for conversions and so it was key that we understood and improved the user experience. Again taking a cut price approach, we converted one of the 3 meeting rooms into a private meeting room and invited members of the public to try out our website so we could see in more detail what was happening. In this case the meeting rooms all had glass walls so we covered the walls with brown paper. As is often advised for getting buy in, we got the COO and CEO to sit at the back of the room and observe. The actual user behaviour was a real eye opener for them and this , as had become a pattern now, enabled the development of an in house team and investment in carrying out research also in the US office based in Boston.

At Achilles Group, a B2B organisation, I was faced with a new challenge. Achilles focusses on B2B services throughout the world. We have introduced Usability but as with a name that is perhaps more acceptable to the environment we find ourselves. Usability is everyone’s responsibility. At Achilles I am responsible for a Product Team or Product Managers and we have allocated one of those people to be concerned with Business Validation. This is to ensure that our Business Units and customers accept and contribute to the product development process and through a process of evaluations we collect business input along with product and usability enhancements. We operate Business Validation in a similar way to a Usability test, following the preparation process, test plan, stakeholder review before and after the test along with production of quick reports and follo up documents. Where we have extended the usability model is to take the findings from a study and then review every single one of them with the product and IT teams and find a home for each item. A home may be to extend the defect list, to add an item to the product roadmap/ backlog or to carry out further research.

The studies are carried out as trials and generally involved 10-30 people in 5-10 countries around the world. Participants are given different roles to conduct wach with a bespoke pack. We have become quite adept at making these packs a little more automated and this has become part of standard practice, for every release of the product platform we will run 2-4 business validation rounds on average.

Very recently we have also introduced remote testing of non Achilles staff using a remote testing tool provided by a www.usertesting.com , there are a number of providers in this space but we have found again a new way to promote and ember usability best practice into the organisation. By using this remote testing service we are able to carry out micro studies for around £100. These micro studies are proving enormously useful and again allow us to have a usability department – but we do not call it that.

One of the key learnings from my journey through these companies is that it is better to focus on the business need and readiness of the organisation to accept the new processes rather than focus on naming a specific department. Allow the department or sub department to grow organically as a result of introducing key usability interventions. the days of presenting a huge business case for a large team and laboratories are over, and now we can lead other team members – interested in the field to take on Usability activities and make it truly part of the culture.

From unskippable cutscenes to galvanic skin response, we investigate the world of videogame user research.

Difficulty spikes, unreliable checkpoints, context-sensitive buttons that might open a door, but might bounce a grenade into your lap instead: these things matter. “Every moment in a game, you’re bleeding players,” says John Hopson, Bungie’s user research lead. “Hopefully, you’re bleeding them as slowly as possible. The most powerful thing I ever did on Halo was make a graph showing how many players we lost each mission. We had these people: they bought the game, they wanted to play, and we failed them.”

Usability testing didn’t start with videogames. It started with product development of a more domestic stripe: with teapots, toasters and car dashboards. Although designers have always spared a thought for their audiences since the days of Jet Set Willy – it’s hard to make even the simplest videogame without thinking of what the player’s going to do or see from one second to the next – it’s only become a serious issue in the games industry relatively recently. Yet with no bespoke track at GDC, no standardised terminology, and no agreed best practices, usability may be gaining respectability, but it’s still one of the least understood aspects of design. That poses some interesting questions. How does the industry approach user research today, and why has something so fundamental waited so long to be taken seriously?

Usability is made up of two elements: user testing, which investigates whether people can understand how to play a game properly, and playtesting, which then looks at whether they’re actually enjoying themselves. Playtesting has been taking place on an unofficial basis since Spacewar. User testing, however, has been far less common.

“The problem is that user testing is complex,” says Chris Viggers, the development director at Blitz Games Studios. “It’s about the psychology of how people interact with a computer and with different control systems. It’s about what they’re expecting out of a game and how they think it should react. You’re working out how to factor it into the game, and making sure that testing sessions are as objective as possible when it comes to what kind of questions you ask. You can quite easily skew your own results by approaching your testers incorrectly.”

That said, certain developers began thinking about usability a lot earlier than others. “Because Microsoft was a conventional software company, they were used to doing usability for Word and Office already,” says Hopson, who worked for the platform holder prior to joining Bungie. “They just transferred that philosophy across. We had to bend the process around quite a bit, though. When you’re testing whether a spellchecker works, you don’t have to worry about whether it’s fun.”

Speaking of processes, while there are currently as many approaches to usability as there are developers, there’s one golden rule everyone can agree on. “Start early,” laughs Dr Graham McAllister, the director of Vertical Slice, the UK’s first game usability studio. “Come to us earlier and we solve more problems. We almost always have fundamental changes to make and, at the moment, most companies come to us at the end. When they get our report and we say: ‘Here are the five things that are absolutely critical and must be changed or there’ll be an impact on the review score,’ it may be too late.”

“Now we do usability as soon as we can get something for people to play,” says Jason Avent, a game director at Black Rock Studios, the creator of Pure. “That can sometimes mean it’s not even first playable for the game: it’s a prototype in XNA or Unity. That gives you enough data to make more committed choices. With Pure, we started user testing early. We had a fairly early version of a track with a couple of massive jumps in it, and just one guy on the track. We had some art, but it didn’t look great. The most important thing was that we had the handling, the collision response, and the rider response. Those were the aspects we were testing. At that stage, you can change stuff, but as you go further and further it gets harder.”

Here’s a question for you: would you agree that creating a great user experience should be the primary aim of any Web designer? I know what your answer is… and youʼre wrong!

Okay, I admit that not all of you would have answered yes, but most probably did. Somehow, the majority of Web designers have come to believe that creating a great user experience is an end in itself. I think we are deceiving ourselves and doing a disservice to our clients at the same time.

The truth is that business objectives should trump users’ needs every time. Generating a return on investment is more important for a website than keeping users happy. Sounds horrendous, doesn’t it? Before you flame me in the comments, hear me out.

The Harsh Reality

Letʼs begin with the harsh truth. If an organization does not believe that it will generate some form of a return on an investment (financial or otherwise), then it should not have a website. In other words, if the website doesn’t pay its way, then we have not done our jobs properly.

Despite what we might think, our primary aim is to fulfill the business objectives set out by our clients. Remember that creating a great user experience is a means to this end. We do not create great user experiences just to make users happy. We do so because we want them to look favorably on the website and take certain actions that will generate the returns that our clients want.

User Experience Is Important

Let me be clear. Iʼm not suggesting that user experience is unimportant. In fact, I believe that creating an amazing experience is the primary means of helping a website fulfill its business objectives. A well-designed website makes it easy for users to complete the calls to action we have created.

Happy users also provide many other benefits. They can become advocates for your website. A happy user is considerably more likely to recommend your services and is more patient when things occasionally go wrong. Enthusiastic users can also become valuable volunteers; they have innumerable ideas about how your website and products can be improved. They are far more valuable than any focus group!

The point, though, is that happy users generate a return on investment, so spending the time and effort to give them a great experience is worth it.

When Business Objectives and User Experience Clash

You may argue that this is all semantics and that business objectives and user experience actually go hand in hand. Generally, I agree, but there are occasions when the two clash, and at these times we need to be clear that generating a return on investment should trump user experience.

Let me give you an example. We Web designers often complain when clients ask us to add fields to their online forms because they want to collect certain demographic information about their users. We argue, rightly, that this annoys users and damages the user experience. But we need to ask ourselves whether those additional fields would make users not complete the forms at all—as we fear—or would just slightly irritate them. If users ultimately complete the form and the company is able to gather valuable demographic information, then the slight irritation may be worthwhile.

Do You Have The Right Balance?

Iʼm a little nervous about this post because I realize that many people could misinterpret what Iʼm saying. But I passionately believe that the Web design community is in danger of becoming blind to all else but user experience. Iʼm convinced we need to spend as much time and effort on understanding and achieving business objectives as we do on creating a great experience.

I’ll end with this: during your last project, how much time did you spend creating personas, testing usability and generally improving the user experience? How does that compare with the amount of time you spent learning about the client’s business objectives and creating great calls to action?

Ask yourself whether you got the balance right.