Lots of development teams suspect they have a UX or usability problem. But it can be hard to justify an investment in UX or usability research to upper management in terms they’ll really appreciate.

How did we figure out that a series of usability studies saved a hospital $10 million per year, not to mention hundreds of lives? How can you prove that an investment in user experience reduces the overall development and maintenance costs for your application? How can eye-tracking be used to assign a dollar value to down to the pixel?

Get the answers from Angela Schmeidel Randall, CXO of Normal Modes and user experience expert. In this webinar she’ll teach you how UX and usability testing can make direct and significant contributions to the bottom line. Learn some serious skills like:

• How to identify the metrics of success that are appropriate for your company and your industry.
• Successfully calculate and track those metrics.
• Justify UX investments to upper management in terms they understand.

If your development team is struggling to obtain upper management support or to justify an investment in UX, you can’t afford to miss this webinar.

Register Now
Tuesday, February 14
$129

Adaptive Path starting posting their UX Week 2011 Videos. Great idea and they’re free! (What’s not to like?)

UPA just wrapped up the 2011 UPA Salary Survey. We’re on pins and needles until we find out if we all get raises.

Always be open to new ways of doing things. To wit, the bacon blowtorch:

(Did you catch the bit about American bacon being insufficient? Ouch.)

And, on a more serious note, the New England Journal of Medicine just published a nice article on meaningful use of EHRs. If you’re not familiar with what’s going on these days in Healthcare IT, it’s a nice little introduction too.

A few reminders….

• The early bird registrations for the Normal Modes UX Fundamentals Workshop ends October 15. You know you wanna come improve your UX skizzles.
• UPA Conference Submissions are due October 24.
• And finally, the IA Summit Submissions for the conference in New Orleans are due October 31.

And finally, we leave you with a quote:

“Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works.” Steve Jobs

Gah, we’re gonna miss that guy.

You, too, can plan, design and develop websites and applications that fit your organizational objectives and technical capabilities while meeting the needs of the end user. Working with the same user-centered design methods used in Normal Modes’ client engagements, we’ll teach you how in this 2-day workshop.

By the end of the workshop, you’ll be able to:

Incorporate user-centered design into your organization

Identify the characteristics of your users — their needs, fears and motivations

Organize content into intuitive navigation structures

Develop intuitive user experiences by recognizing and avoiding common pitfalls

Evaluate user interface (UI) designs with research-based metrics

Calculate the ROI of user experience (UX)

We emphasize practice over theory by using one of your team’s existing websites or applications as the platform for your workshop. Led by expert UX practitioners with teaching experience, this workshop will include lively discussions and fully-documented take-away materials. Limited seating means you’ll get close interaction with the instructor and your peers.

At Normal Modes, we believe people like you have opinions that are worthy of compensation. Any chance you’d consider joining our national database of usability testing participants? It’s easy: You tell us what you think of a website or software application, and we give you cash or gift cards.

$100 Visa gift card giveaway

And that’s just the beginning. Between now and March 31, if you’ve got a complete profile in our user research database you’ll be eligible for weekly drawings for a $100 Visa gift card – just like the ones you’d receive during an actual study.

Giveaway details
In order to be eligible, your profile must be complete including optional questions. The giveaway ends on March 31, 2011 after which you’ll still be eligible for gift cards related to a study. The weekly winners will be randomly selected using your database key number and Random.org. The winners will be announced on a separate post each Monday and you’re advised to subscribe to our RSS feed so that you can be quickly notified when the winners announcement post has been published. Gift card giveaway sponsored by Normal Modes, and not affiliated, funded, or endorsed by Visa.

You’ve got answers. We’ve got questions.

Learn more about how user research works so you’ll feel comfortable with the process. And then sign up to volunteer for user research on websites and software applications.

Thanks!

And we hope you value our unique approach to creating memorable web experiences. If your organization ever finds itself in need of a such services, please get in touch to request a free user experience evaluation. We’d love to work with you.

We found three extremely helpful articles on the topic.

• The Essence of a Successful Persona Project
• Perfecting Your Personas
• Taking Personas Too Far

The Essence of a Successful Persona Project comes from Jared Pool of User Interface Engineering. Mr. Pool summarizes the importance of a well-crafted persona and identifies some techniques of confirming whether the persona is on target. Here’s a great excerpt:

Personas are a flexible and powerful tool for user researchers. They’re also one of the most misunderstood. When done well, they ensure the team focuses on the needs and delights of their users.

For the last few years, we’ve studied how a variety of design teams have tried to harvest the benefits of persona projects. We’ve explored several wildly successful persona projects and many that fell far short of their goals. We now better understand where the magic lies with personas – what the essence of a successful project is.

Once you have created a persona, the next step is testing and adjusting the persona to ensure the user is correctly identified. Perfecting Your Personas, by Kim Goodwin, touches on the importance of the function of personas. These are psychological summaries of your target user. It’s important that a persona represents behavior and not a job description. Goodwin states:

Although tasks are an important part of understanding users, a good persona description is not a list of tasks or duties; it’s a narrative that describes the flow of someone’s day, as well as their skills, attitudes, environment, and goals. A persona answers critical questions that a job description or task list doesn’t, such as: Which pieces of information are required at what points in the day? Do users focus on one thing at a time, carrying it through to completion, or are there a lot of interruptions? Why are they using this product in the first place?

Finally, it is important not to go overboard on the persona! Unless certain hobbies, behaviors or attributes of your user affect the way they will use your product, there is no value in hyper-qualifying detailed information. A tendency for those writing personas is to add less useful information to give the impression of how precise the target is. It may not matter that Betty collects stamps, enjoys “My Name is Earl,” or only eats food without trans fats if you are designing around her as a user of carpet cleaner.  There are some companies who have gone so far as to create entire living rooms for target personas in order to get ‘into their head.’ This may be going too far. Kim Goodwin addresses these dangers in the Taking Personas Too Far. She lists three types of persona communication as being most important:

• Detailed descriptions
• Quick reference tools
• Meeting to introduce personas

Ultimately, the creation of a persona to represent your user is a highly effective and sometimes revealing process. Do your homework, understand the final product and continue to delight your user!

Here’s the slideshow we used to get the discussion rolling. We tried to keep everything pretty positive and not bag on anyone. Thanks to my co-presenter Sania for putting it together. (She’s great, isn’t she?)

I didn’t anticipate having more than 50 people in our presentation, so I was surprised to run out of the handouts we shared with everyone. If you missed the handout, you can download it here:

Consider the User Experience & Usability of Your Website: 20 Do’s and 14 Automatic Fails.

Thanks to Marla, Carrie, & Laura for all their hard work putting together the conference! See you next year in New Orleans!

From the “Designing Web Interfaces” Blog

• 12 Standard Screen Patterns
• 30 Essential Controls
• 15 Common Component Patterns

And! Save your favorite patterns to refer to again and again with Pattern Tap.

As you might imagine, this project was a huge undertaking and offered the opportunity to tackle some interesting UI problems.  The first question:  how to organize the images so comparing the best and worst in a category was easy for those viewing the heatmaps.  The second question was more bedeviling:  in what way should I display the final images so we capture the nature of the content in them.  Should I display them as small image thumbnails?  If so, what size? Should the thumbnails be “clickable” and appear in a modal window, an established website design pattern?  Even then I had to consider that each image was based on the content width of the page. Egads — many questions, with many imperfect answers.  I looked at a variety of jquery plugins, including:

• Gallerific
• Notes for Lightbox
• Lightbox 2

I considered Lightbox 2 most seriously, but decided against it because the content in the hotspots is obscured when displayed at smaller sizes thus rendering the heatmap image virtually meaningless.

For now, I’ve settled on Supersized, which allowed me to display the images in their original full screen format. This solution is not without its limitations, namely that some images may be slightly distorted in some browser windows.  Most of this is owing to the variations in image size and the inability to specify a fixed resolution.  The other limitation is more minor: there’s a bar across the lower portion of the page that gives a bit of image information and allows the user to rewind, forward, and pause/play the slide show.  Because of this, a portion of the each image is obscured.  If I think (or hear) this is problematic after it goes live, then I’ll use A/B testing to see if users would be more satisfied with the Lightbox 2 solution.

The images I selected are based purely on my whims and interests. Among the homepages featured in the 51 images:

Apple (www.apple.com)

Continental Airlines (www.continental.com)

Continental Airlines Homepage Eye Tracking Heatmap

Martha Stewart (www.marthastewart.com)

Martha Stewart Homepage Eye Tracking Heatmap

Major League Baseball (www.mlb.com)

Major League Baseball Homepage Eye Tracking Heatmap

Senate.gov (www.senate.gov)

Senate.gov Homepage Eye Tracking Heatmap

Wall Street Journal (www.wsj.com)

Wall Street Journal Heatmap

To see all of them, visit the Homepage Eye Tracking Heatmap Gallery.  And please enjoy!

——

Unrelated side note: If you didn’t get to enjoy the first night of the new PBS series on national parks  – The National Parks: America’s Best Idea (A Film by Ken Burns) – check out your local listings for the cable-style repeats they plan to offer.  You’ll learn all about Yosemite, Yellowstone, the amazing John Muir, and a bit about gorgeous Alaska.  I shouldn’t really single out Alaska as the only “gorgeous” one — they’re all just breathtaking.  And if you haven’t been to any of these places, by all means go.  I’m a better person for the few hours I spent at Yosemite watching the sunrise the morning of a friend’s wedding, and my current “happy place” is a variety of scenic landscapes near Anchorage, Alaska.  Indeed, my mighty life list includes the goals of spending a summer living in/exploring Alaska and visiting all the national parks at least once, collecting a stamp in my passport for each one.

Today when I went to register for a new Alltop account I misspelled my own email address.  (I know!  I’ve had it like 5 years now. You’d think my fingers would be on auto-pilot.)  Here’s what I entered instead:

Unfortunately, I didn’t notice my error and waited for almost an hour for my confirmation to show up. Of course, it never did and, impatient to get started, I went back to Alltop in search of answers. I clicked around on the website until I found a page that would send me a new confirmation email.

Good news: Alltop will send me an new email.  And they take out all of the guess work about what I’m supposed to do next on this page. I’m supposed to click “Yes, please.”  Indeed, I did send myself a second email before I realized the underlying issue.

Bad news: It’ll do me as much good as the first email.  Alltop doesn’t allow me to recover gracefully from my email address entry mistake.  There’s no option to say anything other than “Yes, please.”  (At least they’re polite.)

To their credit, Alltop does give me contact information on the preceding page.

Of course, I’d forgotten all about that by the time I got to this page.

So, what would make this user experience better?

1. The easiest – something that can be done today in less than 5 minutes – is just to move that contact us link over to the page.

(Note, I reformatted it as a text link rather than the url link.  The url is inconsistent with the style for the rest of the links on website.)

Estimated level of effort: VERY LOW

2. Add the ability to change my email address, starting with something like this:

Of course, this will require presenting back the original information to be edited by the user.  I don’t see any reason why the original registration modal window can’t be presented to the user and resubmitted.

Estimated level of effort: LOW/MEDIUM

3. Suppose changing my email address isn’t technically possible. That’s cool – sometimes there are technical limitations that can’t be easily solved.  I get that.  Just tell me about it and don’t keep me hanging.  Something like this:

Of course, there are a few limitations to this solution.  First of all, it’s a hack.  A really bad, somewhat shameful one.  Secondly, I lose my username. What if it’s the only username I ever use and I’m lost without it?  Finally, Alltop ends up with a bunch of abandoned accounts on its servers.

This is the worst of all the solutions. Still, it’s better than leaving me hanging.

Estimated level of effort: VERY LOW

4. Avoid this kind of error to begin with by running basic email validation during the registration process.

Really, this is a no-brainer. Think offensively rather than defensively, avoiding problems before they really even begin. Validate email addresses on the front end programmatically or by asking the user to enter the email address twice.  The former only ensures that email addresses are technically correct, but would have caught my error.  The latter is a more diligent approach, but the burden falls on the users who mostly hate entering their email address twice.  And, of course, the solutions can be used in tandem to hopefully eliminate all problems.

Estimated level of effort: MEDIUM

Conclusion

Everyone makes mistakes, and Alltop’s not the only website out there who’s fumbled a bit in the area of error messaging.  This doesn’t mean the Alltop website isn’t a good – some features, like the introduction video, are great.

This is just a standard user experience weakness.  (For me, a pretty big one.)

Building in the ability to fail gracefully and recover quickly creates a compassionate user experience and keeps customers engaged. As we’ve seen here, there are multiple ways to handle this sort of error recovery, some better than others.  We can even build successive levels of handling by pairing things like proactive form validation with reactive recovery measures.

]]> http://www.normalmodes.com/blog/2009/09/17/failing-gracefully-four-solutions-for-wrong-registration-email-addresses-on-alltop-com/feed/ 0 http://www.normalmodes.com/blog/2009/08/26/sample-simulated-eye-tracking-heatmap-analysis/ http://www.normalmodes.com/blog/2009/08/26/sample-simulated-eye-tracking-heatmap-analysis/#comments Wed, 26 Aug 2009 12:00:16 +0000 angela http://www.normalmodes.com/blog/?p=1550 When we first launched Normal Modes, it was with the idea that everyday websites can take advantage of the many cost effective tools available online to measure the user experience.

One of the tools we have available is our simulated eye tracking heatmap analysis, which allows web developers to generate… read more