So many times Interaction Designers forget about all the other technology that we interact with on a daily basis and focus solely on the web design.

Angela started by telling her story of a flight cancellation on Southwest airlines last summer during which she interacted with over half a dozen systems including 2 separate IVR systems, outbound text messaging, inbound mailboxes, website, customer service, the airport kiosks, and mapping out all of these experiences. She explained how the failures of the systems, though not terribly expensive on a customer-by-customer basis, can add up to millions of dollars in costs and lost revenues in the event of large-scale cancellations due to weather, mechanical issues, etc.

She then drilled down on each of the systems IVR, kiosks, and alternative displays to give examples of what works and what doesn’t work, and provide tips for improving the customer experience on these platforms that all the participants could use and apply to their daily work weither designing for the web or for other platforms.

Check back soon for more details and the slideshow presentation that Angela gave at the conference.

Here at Normal Modes we are finally settled in at our new offices on Kirby Drive with everything up and running (including us).  We are looking forward to our next usability study coming up in a week – stay tuned for more details.

Here’s some good reading to keep you busy this holiday season:

• Puzzled about what to get the geek in your life?  Try our 8 Holiday Gift Ideas for UX (and related) Geeks.
• Here’s a cool idea that lets everyone comment on your web designs – right on the screen.
• As we know, the customer is king – here are 5 tips to help you this Christmas.
• Was Sears.com trying to pull a fast one by upselling appliance warranties seamlessly in the website UX, or was their balance of business objectives and user goals too heavily tilted to the former over the latter?  (We can think of a few better methods for accomplishing the same goal without alienating users.  Can you?)
• We all hate to remember them, but they are a necessary evil in our lives, here are some tips to setting easy to remember passwords.

Farm Anatomy: The Curious Parts & Pieces of Country Life

($11.45 at amazon.com)

Such a sweet story to accompany artist Julia Rothman’s celebration of rural life in Iowa.  While Rothman’s a New York City gal, she wanted to understand the intricacies of farm living that framed her husband’s childhood.  She set about doing so by illustrating every aspect of farm life, grouped by subject (must have been some card sorting activity to figure out the information architecture) and detailed in gorgeous and informative infographics and process flows.

As a former Iowa farm girl, a tear came to my eye as I compared her Longacre Farm in Tabor, Iowa with the Jessup, Iowa farm of my early childhood.  (My first pet was a cow, and I fondly remember sitting in the dirt rows of our garden to eat fresh vegetables right off the vine.) Honestly, this is a delightful read for just about anyone, but in particular UX geeks, designers, architects, foodies, children and former Iowa farm kids.

—

“I fight for the users” T-shirt

($16.99-$18-99 at ThinkGeek.com)

I’m a huge fan of political propaganda, so this shirt sings to my heart on multiple levels.  The iron fist is very communist-era propaganda, while the slogan is classic modern-technology; a perfect blend of past and future.  Guaranteed to be a huge hit.

If it’s irony you’re going for, might I suggest the gifting this shirt to your favorite Sharepoint expert?  (With any luck, they’ll get the joke.)

 —

Money: A chart of almost all of it, where it is, and what it can do
yenoM

($15.00 for 36″x34″ poster / $95.00 for 72″x48″ Huge Poster)

A feat of both research and design, Money  ”started as a project to understand taxes and government spending, and turned into a rather extensive research project. With upwards of 200 sources and 150,000 tiny boxes, it’s best appreciated in poster form.”

True that.  I spent upwards of 45 minutes reading every section, but fear I wasn’t able to appreciate the full effort because I wasn’t able to view everything in context.  There’s just so much data.

In addition to your UX geeks, also a great gift for your economist, mathematics and Republican/Libertarian friends.

 —

Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock T-Shirt

($16.99-$18.99 at ThinkGeek.com)

As popularized by The Big Bang Theory, rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock is a twist on the traditional roshambo game meant to reduce the chances of a tie – but only if everyone doesn’t choose Spock.

For reference, the rules are:

• Scissors cut paper
• Paper covers rock
• Rock crushes lizard
• Lizard poisons Spock
• Spock smashes scissors
• Scissors decapitate lizard
• Lizard eats paper
• Paper disproves Spock
• Spock vaporizes rock
• Rock crushes scissors

—

Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock Paper Garland Banner

 ($14.00 at RitaVanTassel/Etsy)

Maybe the T-shirt isn’t enough.  There’s always a the rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock garland – perfect for adding a certain decorative charm to any geek desk.

Handmade with brilliant graphic design, any design-oriented geek will appreciate the both the craftsmanship and the theory.

 —

Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock Counted Cross Stitch Pattern

($5.00 at Robin’s Design/Etsy)

Perhaps the t-shirt and garland lack a certain je ne sais pas for gifting.  What about a convenient rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock cross stitch explanation of the rules? At only $5.00, you’ll have plenty of coin leftover for the thread and 14 count Aida fabric.

Worried that cross stitching is just for Grandmas?  Never fear – cross stitch is the new knitting for the design geek set.

—

Goodnight iPad: a Parody for the next generation

($10.17 at amazon.com)

For those of us who get too much screentime, we need a gentle transitional object.  Goodnight iPad reminds us that our fully charged gadgets await us in the morning, but for now we can settle in for a good night’s rest.  Printed on old skool paper, for a bit of a retro feel.

—

Rewined Candles

($27.00 at Rewined.com)

And finally, this isn’t so much related to UX as it is related to two of my other favorite things: wine and relaxation.

Cleverly branded and designed “Rewined” candles use recycled wine bottles as the container for soy candles that come in a variety of fragrances.  Choose Cabernet for your deep red loving friends, Champagne for the fun time folks, Pinor Noir for the wine geek.  (Pinot Noir’s still cool, right?  Of course it is.)

—

Our favorite holiday is Thanksgiving.  Remarkably unencumbered by commercialism, Thanksgiving is all about the experience:  of giving thanks and of lovingly prepared seasonal dishes.

Are you ready for Turkey day?

While you prepare, here are a couple of things we thought you might enjoy:

• Super awesome and just in time for overeating:  edit your food with iPlates
• Why would someone forge fine art just to give it to museums?

Happy Thanksgiving. We hope you enjoy the experience!

How are you?  We’ve been busy bees this week conducting user interviews on a business-to-consumer signup process.  Lots of great findings and a quick reminder for everyone:  don’t forget that roughly 50% of internet users don’t know the website logo will take them back to the homepage.  On websites where “Home” is missing in the primary navigation, it leaves people terribly confused.

Have you made plans for Thanksgiving yet?  We’ll be going full-force until late Wednesday, followed by some time off for everyone to enjoy the holiday weekend with family.

While we have visions of turkey dancing in our heads, here are a few things you might enjoy:

• This hit home:  ”One of the biggest challenges in the transition from designer to director is the reality that your job is to often assign work to others that you really wish you could assign to yourself.” Seriously, everyone – not just agency folks – should read Assuming Leadership in Your Design Agency
• Patagonia’s new campaign to have you buy less, while they make more.
• Feeling overloaded? You’re not alone… how can we better design experiences for smart, but busy, people? (Clean, simple, elegant!)
• An interesting perspective on brainstorming.
• And finally, we love how make-up artist Derrick Rutledge works with his clients:

Winfrey never sits still in the chair. Rutledge moves with her as she bends, talks, laughs. He’ll stop, inhale deeply and continue. Also challenging: If Winfrey has eaten the wrong thing (salt) or has been traveling, her face will be bloated or worn. “I just sit in this chair and watch Derrick do his reconstructive surgery with the brushes, and I get my face back,” she says.

The right makeup is critical for these women. It “immediately creates a level of assurance,” Winfrey says.

Here’s wishing you a wonderful pre-holiday weekend.  Next week’s a short week – woot!

Another busy week at Normal Modes with the How to Think Like (and Design for) Your Customer: User Experience Workshop kicking off on Thursday and then celebrating World Usability Day with a happy hour at T’afia Restaurant and the inspiring words from owner and celebrity chef Monica Pope. Thanks, Monica!

 —

Notable and Newsworthy: Interesting stories from this week:

The death of flash (we are keeping our fingers crossed), and another story on this from CNET.

Photo: Mike McCready

 —

More on responsive design, this is the future people – check out the Boston Globe website for a great example (make sure to play with all the browser sizes you can think of).

—

Call of Duty: Modern Warefare 3 was released today and turns out that there were a lot of sick days and vacation time called in.

—

A thumbs up from Consumer Reports for the new iPhone 4s, see it was not that bad.

Just for fun:

It’s all about using the right tools to get the job done.

One year from today voters will hit the polls to elect our next president. While the GOP field is still undecided, we wanted to take a look at the campaign websites to evaluate how usable they are for potential voters and if voters are finding what they want.

From October 21 – 24, 2011 our team conducted a usability study on the websites of six of the GOP presidential candidates. Our study took 15 voters of all different ages and voting histories and put them up against the campaign websites two at a time in a head-to-head match up to see how voters interact with each of the websites to identify trends and patterns during a series of “tasks.”

Surprising enough we found that the campaign websites seem to place campaign objectives before the actual needs of the voters.

How it works

We conducted competition experiments (like a cage match!) between six Republican presidential candidate websites with 15 undecided voters.  The candidates selected for this study were:

• Michele Bachmann - michelebachmann.com
• Herman Cain – hermancain.com
• Jon Huntsman - jon2012.com
• Rick Perry - rickperry.org
• Mitt Romney - mittromney.com
• Rick Santorum - ricksantorum.com

Participants were instructed to complete a series of structured tasks, from signing up for a campaign newsletter to finding out info on the candidates biography. 

The study was structured as a standard qualitative usability study.  Some have asked why we don’t need a large sampling like we see in polling. It’s true that the number of participants is smaller than those found in polling. But this is nothing like polling which relies on surveying large numbers of voters to get quantitative data – numbers based data that can be measured.  Our study isn’t a survey and we aren’t looking for quantitive data.  We’re  looking for experience-based observations found in qualitative studies.  (More information on the difference between qualitative versus quantitative.)

In human factors, we can uncover the majority of problems associated with a task on a website after 4 to 6 participants.  Since we were looking at problems common to all candidates, the fact that we had 15 participants – with a total of 30 visits to campaign websites – only gives us more information to work with.

Each candidate’s website appeared in one round with every other candidate’s website.  At the end of each round, the participant was asked to select with candidate’s website had the best overall experience.

What we found

You will have to check out the report page for all the details but here are some interesting tidbits from the study:

• The Bachmann and Cain campaigns had the best overall user experience. Bachmann’s and Cain’s campaign websites both won four of the five rounds in which they participated.
• Considered an political industry standard, the email collection “splash” pages positioned before every candidate’s homepage are annoying and confusing to participants often to the point that they leave the site entirely. (All participants over the age of 60 believed they were on the wrong website.)
• The Romney campaign website suffers from mission-critical failures that are relatively easy to resolve such as lack of a homepage navigation item and hard to identify secondary navigation in important areas like the “Issues” section. These problems kept participants from accomplishing their tasks, believing that content they sought did not exist.

Additional findings, along with comments from participants, are recapped in this presentation.

Don’t forget the voter

The most important thing that the campaigns have to learn from this study is that campaigns cannot leave voter wants, needs and motiviations out of website development process. Many of the basic functions of the campaign websites are focused towards the campaign goals: sign people up and raise money.  However, what they don’t realize is that many people who will be visiting their websites view their interaction with the campaign in a traditional funnel process.

Our advice remains the same for political campaign websites as any other organization: design for the user and you’ll meet your organizational objectives quicker, cheaper, and easier.

More Information

What the People Want:  (Full Report)

Republican Presidential Sites (Largely) Fail Usability Test (ePolitics.com)

Coverage of the report on Campaigns & Elections

Join Normal Modes on Thursday, November 10, 2011 from 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM at T’Afia Restaurant.

Normal Modes is leading the effort to establish the Houston chapter of the Usability Professionals’ Association, and what better day to hold our first event than World Usability Day? Join us at this Normal Modes-sponsored happy hour. Network with your classmates and folks in the Houston UX community as we discuss this year’s themes:

• Designing with Intent: How to spark change in the way people behave and communicate the world over; and
• UX Culture Club: Anticipating cultural differences and how they affect usability

Normal Modes hits the web with the results of our usability study on the 2012 GOP Presidential Candidates websites. Find What the People Really Want by reading the full report.  You can also read about us on the Campaigns & Elections website.

—

Smashing Magazine recently published their Comprehensive Review of User Experience and Usability Testing Tools. It’s a great list that someone obviously put a lot of work into.  Just remember, choosing the right tool for the problem at hand is an important part of the process.  An experience UX designer or usability specialist should be able to help.

—

MIT looks at new ways to interact with the digital world…only time will tell if any of these catch on, although I still prefer to cook myself.

—

Continuing to keep an eye on the iPhone 4s and the Siri personal assistant, it seems that life is not so wonderful in Apple land with outages causing the Siri service to stop being so helpful. We have learned that for things to be useful and function to the user, they have to work first.

—

UPDATE:  Remember last week we mentioned Samsung is relaunching a Windows Phone, Yes, you read right, A Windows Phone. Well CNET has the first look at the phone which turns out will be launching in the US on AT&T sometime this fall.  Turns out they don’t announce it DOA, but it doesn’t get the greatest ratings.  How will it match up against iPhone and Android?

Happy Halloween

Just in case you missed out…don’t ask if it works…

—

A reminder….

• Last chance to register is now for the Normal Modes UX Fundamentals Workshop. You know you wanna come improve your UX skizzles.

Just for fun

This is really hard, matching font names to their shapes, especially when you have to fix the shape.  Post your score if your not too embarrassed.

November 10, 2011 is World Usability Day, this week Elizabeth Rosenzweig the Director of World Usability Day remembers Apple visionary Steve Jobs as as a role model to learn from when it comes to designing for the customer.

Out there on the web

With more and more mobile users each day, its time to make sure that you have the skinny on how to design a mobile responsive website  for your mobile apps.  It’s the future with over 25 million tablet users alone predicted.

—

Maybe they were so focused on doing it, they never stopped to ask anyone how they would use it?  The new Lytro Camera was released this week but already the enthusiasm has curbed with some major shortcomings being voiced.  When you’re dropping $400 bucks on a camera, people expect a lot.

lytro.com

—

iPhone 4S Siri – has a new age of how we interact with the digital world been born? David Daw looks at the success of Siri and how Apple has opened the floodgates to new ways of interacting with electronics.

—

Nokia tries to revive the Windows Phone with the launch of a new phone loaded with the Windows 7.5 mobile.  Windows tried getting back into the SmartPhone market about a year ago with a Windows Phone from HTC and Samsung but with a heavy and sluggish operating system it was not well received vs. the iPhone and Android market.  It is also interesting that this will be a Europe only launch – maybe the’ve given up on the good ole’ USA.

Happy Halloween

Just for fun…

A few reminders….

• Registration is still open for the Normal Modes UX Fundamentals Workshop. You know you wanna come improve your UX skizzles.
• And finally, the IA Summit Submissions for the conference in New Orleans are due October 31.