Needles and Plastic

Ground Zero: where customer experience and information management intersect

2008-04-02T18:14:00.003+13:00

I consult in several areas, including usability design and information management. Sometimes this seems a little schizophrenic, so it’s good to pull back and think ‘where are the commonalities in these subjects?’

This little cautionary tale is intended to point out where some of these important commonalities lie.

Recently I had a nightmare of a time trying to claim on the extended warranty on an ipod I had purchased just a year ago. The screen cracked, by the way, which effectively means: new ipod time. But that’s not the story.

The real story is the customer (or ‘user’) experience I had while trying to make my claim. And that’s the link between information management and user experience. When the user is, quite simply the customer, and the experience is the provision by a corporate entity of adequate service across a range of communication media: then the connection between these two areas of professional endeavour is thrown into high relief.
My customer experience problem was getting any service at all, and the obstacle - which reduced me to incoherent rage over several weeks – was information management. Specifically, the fact that information was not being managed at all.

To start with, in January, I tried emailing the company with full details of my claim including my warranty reference number. An automated reply told me I had to ring them, during business hours. I’m in NZ, they’re in the UK, that’s an expensive option that happens in the middle of the night.

So I rang them and quoted my reference number. I explained the whole story. I had the wrong number: “You want Worldwide Cover, it’s another department”. But my agreement, which was a WWC one, gave me the number I had rung. So I rung the other number. Great! No problem, I just had to get a service technician to certify on letterhead paper that the ipod is jiggered, and fax them. I got the letter, I wrote a covering letter, with the reference number, I photocopied my receipt as well. I faxed it.

In the end I faxed it more than 40 times, thoughout February. In total I devoted most of a day to faxing it. I even got it to go through once – on try #18 – on the other 39 tries the fax number was busy.

When I rang to follow up on the successful faxing, I found no one had my fax: “It must be in another department” – apparently on Mars. I had this mad idea that faxes would be scanned and entered in the customer database, linked to my agreement by the reference number, so any call centre staff member could access it.

Fool!

I took the names of the helpful staff. Every time I rang back and asked for a name, no one knew the person I had spoken to: “He must work in another department”. Where were the other departments, were they really on Mars? Apparently there was no staff address book or contact database that covered all the departments.
One person, in late February, on learning of my fax debacle, gave me his email address. Apparently this was a big secret and I wasn’t to let on about it to anyone. He offered to receive an email with a scanned attachment containing my pathetic documentation, which he would print to hard copy and convey (actually walk down the hall, carrying, mind you!) to the ‘right Department’. I scanned and emailed.

I followed up by phone, but no one knew this guy either. What’s more, their database had no record of any communication from me after my first call in early January. I imagined, since I quoted the same reference number every time, that they were building up a charming picture of our history together.

How naïve – if they could do that, they’d eventually realise where the ‘black spots’ in their customer experience were, and f’ing well fix them. I was past angry by now, I was incandescent. Then I despaired. I gave up at this point. Just wrote the whole thing off as a lesson to never buy extended warranty again.

Then, two weeks later, I got the email, from Worldwide Cover, they had my letter (dated 16 January, I have no idea if it is the faxed copy or the scanned copy). They would pay out in not more than 28 days, a stirling cheque, to my address. I emailed back, even though they didn’t tell me to, just to make sure they knew I was still alive. And I waited.

Twenty days passed, and I got the letter, I ripped it open with trembling hands… no cheque. All the information in this letter was the same as in the email, except they stated the value they would reimburse (a generous sum, mind you). And they told me that I would receive the reimbursement in not more than 28 days. That’s another 28 days, by the way, and the letter was dated a week after the email, so ‘28 days’ is clearly code for ‘an amount of time we cannot or will not commit ourselves to specifying’… I assume they haven’t seen the zombie movie of the same name, or perhaps they have a better sense of humour than I imagine.

But the point of the story is… this worldwide ‘leading brand’ company have given me a ‘user experience’ that has killed their brand stone dead. It’s not even nailed to the perch, it’s on the bottom of the cage gathering dust.

And the reason for this sad demise is that they have a bunch of automated systems: customer records, staff records, call centre records, mail management - with absolutely no over-arching processes or systems to manage the totality of information received about my claim. Their staff were generally helpful, but with the tools they’ve been given, they can’t actually help anyone.

Every time I called it was like Groundhog Day, back to the first time. Not only do they not provide an adequate service, but the company don’t even know that they aren’t doing it! So from the company’s perspective the problem does not exist. When I email them the link to this blog post (after I bank the cheque, mind you!) – they won’t know what the heck I’m talking about.

But thanks to them, I now know exactly where user experience assessment and information management intersect. And I’m standing right there, at ground zero, glowing with impotent rage, brightly enough to be seen from the moon.

A web design company that talks about info design

2008-03-12T14:23:00.006+13:00

This must be one of the few web design companies I've seen in NZ that talks about information design: Click Suite based in Wellington (no surprise there - Wellington is where most of the best web work is happening in NZ, IMHO).

Click Suite were also responsible for the UI of these two cool web sites by the National Library in Wellington:

PastPapers - which "contains more than one million pages of digitised New Zealand newspapers and periodicals. The collection covers the years 1840 to 1915 and includes publications from all regions of New Zealand." You can search for keywords across the scanned papers and the keywords are highlighted for you onscreen over the original scan. Nice work.
Publications New Zealand - which gives public access to information in the huge National Bibliography of things published in New Zealand "from the earliest days of New Zealand publishing through to the present." This site is interesting in using an XML back-end and XSLT to deliver XHTML to the browser. Dat's some clever shit, and it's good to see more web people in NZ know about this stuff.

Why we don’t hide the front door handle inside the Batcave.

2008-01-25T15:00:00.000+13:00

I’ve just completed another round of usability testing for some clients. At times like these I find myself reflecting (yet again) on how deceptively difficult usable web design really is.

The key problem this time was that old favourite, hidden functionality.

I was testing a B2B online application, effectively a VERY large catalogue site with ordering and online invoice payment functions. The owners had found that uptake was below expectations, and anecdotal feedback was that the site was ‘slow and complex’.

When I did the test sessions I found that users did in fact say this. What they objected to was the ‘pick and add’ cart shopping model. This is all very well in a B2C situation, where retail shoppers might buy 2-3 items and the repetitive steps of finding items and adding them one by one to the cart aren’t too arduous. But when you’re ordering 25-50 items for a shop it’s a bit of a chore.

But in fact, I eventually realised (thanks to a really experienced user), the site had been built with a solution. Users could ‘pre-load’ a range of commonly-ordered items into any number of ‘ranges’, one for socks, one for undies… In effect, these were ‘pre-loaded template carts’. Users merely had to check items in the range to load them into an active ordering cart. No more searching across the whole site for correct styles and sizes - if users added the item to their ‘range’ whenever they first ordered it, the job was then done for next time as well.

Magic! The only fly in the ointment of cleverness was that the developers then made this crucial function effectively invisible.

The main navigation on the left side had a heading called ‘My ranges’ - which in almost all cases was below the page fold line, due to an excessive proliferation of much less important links higher up the navigation bar. As a result, few users ever saw it, and if they did, its lowly placement gave no clues that it was something everyone wanted.

Worse, the home page of the application, which appeared once users logged in, had a handy three-part flow diagram showing the main steps to making your order. The three main user steps (apparently) were:

Product search > add to cart > checkout.

Doh! What’s missing here, people? No wonder no one knew about creating a range… it’s being kept secret!
It’s easy to lampoon this kind of thing, but the simple truth is, if designers don’t spend time with users finding out what their experience of a site really is, then they’ll never realise when their ever-so-clever functionality is actually completely inaccessible.

Batman has lots of cool stuff in the Batcave, which he uses to fight crime. How useful would all that cool stuff be if the only door handle was hidden on the inside of the front door?

Why can't the farmer and the cowman just be friends? or... Why every town needs its own Marshall

2008-01-17T18:09:00.000+13:00

Plenty of organisations are starting to realise they need to clean up their websites from time to time – so they hire in the usability posse. Like US Marshalls on the lawless Frontier, they call the Pinkerton Agency and hire some detectives from ‘out East’ who sweep in, clean up the outlaws who’ve been raiding the railroad, and then ride out again. Job done.

Or is it…?

I recently went back and read over a website evaluation I wrote a year ago, and then had a look at the website itself. I was flattered, they’d implemented almost all my recommendations. Clearly my massive invoice had had an effect on them! But after a couple of minutes poking about I was forced to ask myself, is this a fully user-centred website?

Well… not really.

The problem, kids, is this. UCD is an iterative process. You do it, you wait for the dust to settle, you do it again. As many times as it takes: “How many times?”

The answer to that question is: “Well, partner, how much string have you got?”

So anyway, this site was much better. It now has one set of navigation, which shows the second level pages in each section. The page headings generally match the menu headings. The home page content focuses on user needs, rather than corporate self-inflation.

But the execution of the recommendations wasn’t done by people who know what user experience really means. The information architecture is still confusing, with 13 top level headings instead of the eight I recommended. The top level pages in each section don’t point clearly to the pages on the next level down – instead they’re as splattered with links as the survivors of a paint factory explosion.

But worst of all, apart from the homepage, the writing has not improved one jot. No topic sentences, no judicious placement of key words for SEO purposes, and more random bullets than a drive-by shooting.

Reading this kind of stuff is tiring, because your brain is doing two things at once, reading the words, and trying to remember them long enough to make sense of entire paragraphs at a time. Good online writing flows like Guinness, you don’t notice it happening at the time, but by the end of the glass, you know what you’ve been drinking.

I’m going to have to reform the posse and ride back into town to clean up the cattle rustlers we missed last time - while we were tidying up the railroad.

Maybe this time the clients will decide they need to hire their own lawman to keep the peace in Silver City when the Pinkerton Men have all gone home. There’s really no replacement for having a web content manager who can actually manage the content in a consistent and user-advocating way.

Contract resources can ‘make it nice’ for a brief period, but if the website is genuinely alive, it won’t stay ‘nice’ for long. The clients need to realise they are committed to an ongoing process, which they either manage properly in-house, or keep tap-tapping regularly on that telegraph to call the hired guns back again from St Louis.

Defining information architecture

2007-12-20T11:42:00.000+13:00

Patrick Kennedy of StepTwo has published an excellent summary of the many faces of information architecture.

Bruce and I have talked a bit recently about how IA seems to mean different things in different countries and in different industries. We've noticed that what people mean and expect when they use the term 'IA' can be highly variable, and this is one of the few useful explanations we've seen of how all these practices can be seen to fit and work together.

I'm not so sure the split between the skills and outcomes and the faces of IA are as clear-cut in this country, or other countries, as Patrick states, but it is certainly a useful tool to help people determine what skills they made need when putting together a project team, for instance.

In New Zealand the term IA seems to be connected strongly with the IT industry and systems design, which is unfortunate because it cuts off a whole raft of what I'd call 'information design" skills that organisations can benefit from in an IA person.

It would be good if Patrick's article helped change some thinking around IA in New Zealand.

Defining information design

2007-12-04T16:11:00.000+13:00

TCANZ have provided some useful definitions of information design, in the Issue 11, April 2007 edition of their Southern Communicator journal.

I was re-reading some old articles and found this good definition of information design by Greg Pendlebury and Janice Leong. The journal is for members only, so have reproduced it here.

Information design = Users + Content + Design

Information design is a discipline that focuses on communication design where the information is needed to support a user in some action, decisionmaking or process. It is a collaborative process of research, writing, design and testing.

They also provide a good definition of an information designer:

Information designers are content developers that may have a background in writing or in graphic design or in user research. They work across all of these areas in solving communication problems. Information designers work to understand the users, the context and the information required. Information designers strive to be advocates for the users.

They certainly do.

Web design is like what?

2007-11-21T12:17:00.000+13:00

Mr Zeldman has done it again. Several years ago he completely changed the way I build web sites when I read his web standards approach, and now after starting to despair that so many in the traditional business environment, tv media in particular, just do not understand the web, he has inspired me again.

This article Understanding Web Design is well worth reading, because it is so right on the button.

Usability at del.icio.us

2007-09-27T15:09:00.000+12:00

Great to see the team at del.icio.us using user-centred principles in their product improvement work their product.

They've done some usability testing, which is great to hear, and will be incorporating the results in their next version.

If you haven't come across del.icio.us before, I recommend the service. del.icio.us is a way of managing your bookmarks/favourites so that:

you can easily find something you've lost
can categorise them through simple tags
can access your bookmarks from any web-connected computer
can share them easily with someone else.

I don't know about you, but managing my bookmarks has always been a problem. I love the web and have collected links to good sites since the day I first discovered the bookmark button in Cello. Before del.icio.us, I would regularly have to re-order and purge them because I'd misplaced a bookmark to some great site I'd found, and, believe it or not, could not find it again through a search engine.

The behaviour around bookmarking interests me. I've met people who claim they don't, but those of us that do obviously don't trust ourselves to be able to locate a found site again. Even with the power of Google at our fingertips, if you can't remember what something is called, it can be difficult to find again days or months later. What makes me bookmark is that frustrating feeling when you go looking for something you know you've seen before, but just can't locate it using search.

I've been using del.icio.us for two years now, mostly just to maintain my web bookmarks. It works well and I like the simple, clean interface and the fact I can see it from any computer, at home or at work. It doesn't work for everyone, or so I've read, but one reason why it works for me is because I'm tough on tags. I don't add a new tag to my list unless I really can't use one I've already got. This has helped keep my list of tags short-ish, and I think still of use to me. James Melzer once complained that large tag clouds were useless, and I can see what he means when they get as large as his have.

You may ask how come I can easily re-locate bookmarks in del.icio.us but not find the site in Google? Good question, and I think the answer is tagging. Somehow that and the process around creating them helps me find things again.

One thing I forget to do, is use the power of del.icio.us when researching a topic. Because del.icio.us bookmarks are public, you can search the tags used by others when looking for something. This can be more useful than a keyword Google search, because you can see how many other people have tagged a bookmark and gauge how relevant others have found it. In a world of SEO smoke-and-mirrors and webmaster skull-duggery, del.icio.us can sometimes be more helpful when looking up a topic than a key-word search can. I find the Wikipedia similar in this respect, being a good first-stop for a topic.

I suspect I forget to use the social-power of del.icio.us because I mostly use it for managing my own bookmarks, rather than tapping into the bookmark folksonomy. There are other services that do this for you and let your friends or whoever rate the bookmark links. My primary need is to manage my own bookmarks, so using my mates' bookmarks, or having them rate mine, becomes second priority. In the end, this article by Long tail man Chris Anderson suggests just using yer mates to rate stuff may not the best way to do things anyway.

Usability: the elevator speech

2007-09-12T20:02:00.000+12:00

I’ve been having an interesting time recently trying to develop a knowledge base of marketing collateral we can use to sell usability services to people who don’t know what usability is. This is one tall order.

People who already get usability seldom have to worry about this. The internet, I’ve found, is full of definitions and pep talks about usability. These are generally written by people who use acronyms like UIX and UCD as though they were part of common parlance. They are not. Some of these definitions I used to think were pretty useful, till I met Keith.

Keith is many things, and one of them is a ‘sales guru’. He can really sell stuff, and like all good salesmen, he does this by reading people, working out what floats their boat, and then floating it for them. Keith and I are trying to nail the ‘thing’ that will sell usability to corporate clients, and to my surprise, we haven’t nailed it yet.

Keith’s point, and it’s a good one, is that most of the existing definitions require you to know what usability is in order to unpack the terms used to define it - and the rest of the definitions are fundamentally uncompelling. His sales targets, if they get it, still tend to go…

So what…?

Either they don’t see the point of it, or they think they already have it covered.

I’ve made a little progress – but its slow going. The good thing about Keith is that not much impresses him, because he seems to have heard it all before. So I thought I’d share the few things that are starting to gel.

Usability is advocating for real product users in the design process.

The pop-up toaster story helped here. Imagine the original manual electric toaster as designed by engineers who only made toast in the lab. Controlled conditions, no distractions, perfect toast. The pop-up toaster, on the other hand, was designed by engineers who had talked to your mother about how she actually uses the toaster. In a family kitchen – uncontrolled chaos, five things happening at once, no chance to monitor the cooking process. The pop up toaster doesn’t burn the toast because real users’ needs and actual conditions of use were made central to its design.

Usability is not the same as quality assurance.

I told Keith: “Just because it’s not broken doesn’t mean people can actually use it”. That turned on a light. People are always assuming usability is QA or accessibility or other means to ensure products work. The important thing is to stress that while that’s all necessary, it’s not enough on its own. I told Keith to imagine he had just bought a new VCR. It’s in perfect working order, fresh out of the box, but after an hour he still can’t programme it to record the final of the Sopranos that evening, because the interface and all the documentation are not designed to help real users perform real tasks. That’s not at all usable, but not because its broken.

A usable product is one that pretty well anyone can pick up and use first time.

If you want a definition of a usable product, ask: “Can you; a. take it out of the box and start using it straight away - or; b. do you need to take a class first?” If the answer is “a.” – it’s usable. Usable products are intuitive, they either show you what you have to do just by looking at them – or you can work it out by just trying to use it once. In New Zealand the best online example is the auction site TradeMe – everyone, from computer geeks to your grandmother, can use TradeMe first time.

I was starting to feel we were near having this nailed, till Keith said: “We still don’t have an elevator speech”.
An elevator speech apparently is the two minute speil you give the person in the lift on the way up to your hotel room, when they ask: “What do you do?” I’ve been trying, but I still haven’t come up with one that really has traction. The key is, can the other person go away afterwards and say one sentence starting: “I just met a guy who…” If they can’t sum it up that simply, after hearing it once, then it’s not an elevator speech.

I’ll let you know when I’ve got it.

How to spend money and make sites worse

2007-09-03T18:29:00.000+12:00

A couple of months ago I organised a comparative review of the homepages of the fifty biggest NZ companies not in state ownership. This revealed a few interesting things, including that in NZ good homepage usability is at present largely the preserve of B-to-C transactional sites. Currently NZ companies are not regarding the web as the primary, or even a major, means of investor or customer relations management. But that’s a separate story.

What I want to discuss today is what happened next. After a month or so I decided to check the sites and find out what changes had occurred, since we were getting ready to mount a bit of publicity on the back of this thing. My curiosity was roused by the discovery that five sites had had pretty major makeovers in the intervening weeks. Could we discern any trends, I wondered?

And the answer, friends, is yes we can.

The sites that had been worked on are the following:
http://www.affco.co.nz
http://www.bnz.co.nz
http://www.fisherpaykel.co.nz
http://www.guardianhealthcare.co.nz
http://www.works.co.nz

The sites themselves gave some background to this. The BNZ site was redesigned in order to introduce enhanced customer security, Works was redesigned because of a corporate rebranding exercise, and the others stated no reason. Obviously I don't know what these exercises cost, but my guess is that at least three of these were fairly expensive.

And the bad news in summary? Two went up in ranking, and three went down.

Those that improved were:

AFFCO was rated at 44%, now 86%, that's a climb from 47 to 2 out of 50.
Fisher & Paykel was rated at 52%, now 69%, that's a climb from 44 to 21 out of 50.

Those that became worse were:

Works was rated at 73%, now 45%, that's a drop from 12 to 47 out of 50.
BNZ was rated at 78%, now 69%, that's a drop from 4 to 21 out of 50.
Guardian Health Care was rated at 67%, now 57%, that's a drop from 27 to 37 out of 50.

To my mind, these results are actually fairly random, and that’s a trend in itself.

I would honestly have thought that a business that is going to expend some serious shareholder coin on revamping its website would give thought to the issue of making the homepage more usable to site visitors.

I don’t feel I have to justify or explain that – it’s a no-brainer, even if there’s an ulterior motive for the redesign, such as rebranding. And yet, whether or not their usability improved is pretty much a coin toss. If there is any trend, it’s towards declining usability.

Frankly, I find these results a little shaming. Is this how poorly our major corporates are ‘getting’ the web? Sadly, I think that’s true.

In fact, if I may be permitted an anecdote to support this contention, the case of MacquarieGoodman is even more damning. In a separate study of the NZX Top 50, I rated this homepage as second most usable of all the Top 50, on 85% [http://www.goodmanintl.com].

A week after the study was made public, they rebranded the company with a major ad agency-driven makeover. The homepage plummeted to a 56% rating, taking itself down to 49th out of the 50. You could smell the money they’d spent, wafting out of the monitor - and the net result was, you couldn’t tell from the homepage what their business was about, who the site was intended for, nor what content you might expect to find in it. It looks very glossy, but usability isn’t just a beauty contest - and this thing looks good in a bikini but can’t name the current president of the USA.

It’s really hard to credit, but so many businesses still think a good website has to look uber-glossy and utterly minimal, and consequently be completely opaque as to your actual meaning. This is a sign of terminal corporate self-regard, rather than an indication of a mature user-centred web presence.

Please work with me people. Repeat after me - in preparation for that next web strategy meeting with your managers: “What is the web? The web is a medium of communication… Stupid!”

Mission Impossible: Usability business strategy

2007-08-14T11:24:00.000+12:00

For some time I’ve been working with some web-designing friends of mine at Wired Internet Group, based here in Christchurch, New Zealand. We’ve been trying to develop a range of services around usability assessment.

This is challenging, because in the local commercial environment, very few clients see any value in spending money on usability. A few of the big B-to-C transactional players have gone into this, but hardly anyone else sees usability as either important or (I suspect) affordable.

This has presented me with a few challenges in trying to build a career in usability.

"You can do the maths: paucity of clients equals paucity of income, right?"

Right. So I’ve tried a few tricks.

First we ‘productised’ the website expert review, by building in some user interviews. Not a full round of testing, but a guided walk-through with three users, combined with a comprehensive review. This was good, but still entailed a bit of work, and limited uptake. We needed - I was told - a ‘leg opener’ to get clients on board.

So next we tried a rather clever trick involving analysing customer enquiries to some major brand sites. The idea was that this would reveal ‘stress points’ where users were asking for information that was on the site, but obscured by usability issues. Brilliant! Limited uptake: too clever for our own good.

Finally (and this does sound like the three bears, I know) we got it ‘just right’.

This offering was a short review of homepage usability issues, based on a standard assessment form that could be completed in about 20 minutes and gave a percentile score across twenty variables organised under four main criteria. The report was organised around the four criteria, illustrated with screenshots and focusing severely on a pithy summary and accompanying recommendations: in other words - saleable, action-oriented and brief.

So we had a winner – but how to sell it? Luckily the answer came from my web design service partners. A session spent uploading liquid inspiration with a PR consultant mate of theirs came up trumps.

The plan was that we identify a bunch of companies and undertake a comparative review of their homepages, using the form I had developed for the homepage review. We would rank them competitively and publicise the results in the media. Then we tell the companies that they could buy a full report detailing issues with their homepages, and recommendations for fixing them.

"Bingo – a successful usability service product!"

After this we’ll try to up-sell them to the full site assessment or the enquiry analysis products we have previously devised. Hopefully.

So far, we’ve managed to get it to the media. You can see me do this on ASB Business, as broadcast on TV1, Monday 6 August. Just follow this link… http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/411415/1273251 Look for the story headlined ‘Raising corporate awareness’.

Now we’ll start calling the businesses we’ve surveyed and try to get them interested in what they don’t know about how well their homepages are working for them. You can find out more from the Wired Internet group at www.wired.co.nz

We’ve also done a parallel exercise on the NZX Top 50, concentrating on investor relations. We’re launching this via the Stock Exchange itself, getting them to promote it as a free offering to their members – followed by a sales blitz. I’ll keep you posted.

What is an information designer?

2007-08-13T14:19:00.000+12:00

Bruce and I often get asked what an information designer is. We've had a few thoughts over some good coffee (Savoy Brown in Christchurch, if you must know), and here's our answer.

First, for us, Information Design is the discipline dedicated to making information as effective as possible.

It is a careful balance of the disciplines of graphic design, information architecture, and writing, while embracing significant elements from research into human factors, cognitive psychology, and perception. It has grown out of all these fields, along with a historical connection to technical communication.

So what is an Information Designer?
An Information Designer is an advocate for the user in the design process. They try to think of how a user would work with and use something. They think of the user's context, where and how they will use something, and for what purpose. Their aim is to ensure that all information, regardless of media is 'optimally fit for use' in this way.

An info designer understands how to write in a way that communicates well, and how to explain complex ideas in simple and clear ways. They also know how good design makes things easy to use, easy to work with, and easy to understand.

How do you become an info designer?
There are many paths to becoming one, but that doesn't make an info designer a "jack-of-all-trades" even if they might seem that way. Similarly, don't assume an info designer is master of no trades, because most info designers often have hidden and unexpected talents from their past, experiences that they bring to the role in a symbiotic and beneficial way.

For this reason, there's no one way to become an info designer, but there are some character traits that distinguish one.

Info designers often have a liking for technical stuff and understanding how things work. They can probably program your video machine for you, or connect you to the RSS feed for the BBC News on the web.

They know ways to help make the complex understandable, and how to best communicate that through good typography, layout, and illustration. Planning, content management, and analysis are all strings in their box, and they know how to manage collaborative work processes to maximise how organisations create, manage and re-use information.

Info designers know your customer is the most important thing to you, and understand that communicating information is essential to your business, so they often have skills in marketing and promotions to add to the mix.

Of course all this personality is very nice, but you also need some skills, and there are a variety of training courses around the world available to "gear you up".

Why should you use one?
Aren't they just another body, an extra cost in the development/design process?

Good question. Everyone seems to want a finger in the pie/seat at the table these days, from the usability consultant to the knowledge management specialist. All seem to think they should rule the roost, and need to drive the project. Well, actually that's project management.

In fact, the info designer is a good choice for a design project manager, or at the least a key part of a design team, as they are able to realise the IP value of everybody in a design project, and use them to create something that is truly a gestalt - greater than the sum of the parts.

They do this because they are trained to recognise the expertise of all involved is necessary to produce effective information and communication products, and because they have an understanding of all the aforementioned disciplines.

They can also help manage relations with stakeholders inside and outside the organisation, to support the good work everyone is doing but perhaps not everyone knows about.

Sounds wondrous? Unreal, even. Not really. As the working world moves more and more into being knowledge-orientated, information design as a discipline and skill-set is becoming not just incredibly useful but also essential to economic and organisational success. If you don't communicate effectively, you lose.

Information designers are now working in every conceivable industry and field, not just the information technology and technical communication fields. Bruce and I are constantly surprised at the industries our students work in, or find work in, and considering the talent of many of them, it seems like the future may well be one where information is easier to use. We all know it needs to be!

Web design for mobile devices learning from UX

2007-05-28T09:57:00.000+12:00

Interest in designing web sites for mobile devices is heating up and it is good to see large companies like Google investing in insights from the usability field. In that post, Max Lord summarises the current state for mobile web design:

Basic problem solving still completely swamps any other creative concern when working on mobile sites. A refreshing blast of Spartan usability problems, mobile site design is uncluttered with your typical mamby-pamby web problems. Can a user get the information, and fast? Answer this question and you’re far ahead of everyone else.

The lack of use of the existing web standards on mobile browsers seems to be holding us back. Perhaps until mobile manufacturers get the lesson learned by desktop software companies about making web browsers standards compliant, designing for web mobile is going to be horrible. Thankfully software like the Minomo browser (from the Firefox people) and the Opera mobile browser are leading the way, and getting good feedback from users.

Why don't mobile phone manufacturers just stop putting effort into creating their own web browsers on their devices, and use these standards-orientated third party ones instead?

Lessons from the desktop
A key lesson from the usability of web sites on a desktop is that users are comfortable with what they've seen before. It would seem with the mobile web audience, users are still very much learning how to use web sites on a mobile device, but this is probably because mobile web designers are still trying to work out how to make much of the desktop features work on a mobile. Chicken or egg?

Max says:

...browsing a large feature set on a mobile device is so cumbersome

I would recommend we stop trying to offer a large feature set on a mobile. As always, we should analyse what our audience is expecting to achieve on our web site, and make that the prime directive for the design. If they are on a mobile device, you can guarantee their use and information needs are going to be different from what they expect on a desktop.

I'm not going to use my mobile to look at the local council web site for information on building consents, but I might want to find out when the local swimming pool is open and what it costs. If you want another example, I would not want to read and view all the details about a new movie, like you can at IMDB, on my handheld, but I would want to see what time it is screening at my local movie theatre.

The first can't really be delivered on a handheld device, and probably shouldn't, while the second surely can?

PS: And I loved this comment from Max:

And in the most astonishing detail, the UX team actually gets to sign off on engineers’ work before each release. Progress!

Progress indeed. If I could get web developers to do the same, I'd be a happy man.

The stupidity continues

2007-03-29T15:14:00.000+12:00

Thanks a lot Apple. Now you've poisoned the boys and girls over the hill into thinking we should have a desktop interface metaphor on handhelds. Dudes, the emperor is not wearing any clothes!

If Sun CEO Jonathan Swartz is right, and I think he might be, then in the future:

...the majority of the world will use the internet through their phones, not through a PC."

Jonathan is not saying we won't use desktops. Far from it. But he feels the need to access information on a portable device will become a key driver of how people will want to use the internet.

With this in mind, I think it is fundamentally wrong to use a desktop interface metaphor on a portable device. The zoom and keyhole-browse features of the iPhone and Deepfish, and even Opera are very clever. But the definition of a browser is no longer based on the desktop. It could be on any device.

If I can't read the information on a web page that has been rendered like a tiny version of a PC desktop on my mobile device, or distinguish one item from another, then how the heck will I know what to zoom in on?! And looking at web pages through a keyhole? Who thought this would be a good experience for the user?

No, no, no. You should be serving me your information in a way that adapts to my device. This is called the web standards way. Did we learn nothing from letting Netscape create it's own non-standard HTML tags?

Furthermore, as a colleague of mine pointed out, people using browsers like this will have to pay for unnecessary bandwidth, because the full, desktop amount of content in a web site will be being served to the portable device, rather then being re-formatted for a handheld environment.

I still think this is a phenomenally stupid idea.

Information design for the time poor

2007-03-08T10:09:00.000+13:00

Information design, or more specifically interface design, helps us time poor individuals survive in the modern world.

I realised this the other day I when showed my colleague Bruce the new Windows Media Player 11.

For some time I'd not bothered too much with Media Player, because v. 9 drove me nuts for its poor usability (all those split windows reminded me of HTML framesets and they were just as horrible to use - urgh!) and doing stuff I didn't want. All the talk about problems with digital media rights put me off upgrading to v. 10, so I put up with v. 9 at work, but used other media players at home.

Recently someone at work showed me v. 11 and said they thought it was much improved. So I installed it and was surprised to find it was much better to use.

When I showed it to Bruce, he commented that it did look better, but did it show you a track list while running in compact mode? I'd forgotten that was how he preferred to use it, and sure enough, when we looked, v. 11 didn't either.

Thinking about this later, I realised I didn't know the answer to his question because:

I used the interface differently than him, and
I really wasn't aware of all the features in the software.

There was a time when I used to know all the features of the software I used. Not only were there fewer features, but I was one of those normans who liked to explore new software, discovering and trying out all the features, so I would know the software inside and out. I felt I needed to do that to be able to use the tool. Now I don't. Why?

In part it is because there are so many features in software these days - compare Word 6 with Word 2003 for instance, but I think it is more than this.

I think software has now become part of the current information overload phenomena, in that not only does most software do more than we actually need or use, but we have so many types of software now. Software for creating documents (notice it's not word processing anymore), programs for creating and managing data, tools for storing, creating and editing images, things for organising us and our stuff, things for storing our stuff, and more. And the expectations on many of us in our work places and homes to be able to use these things is high.

Of course with these new fangled online office applications and storage facilities (Google, Zoho, ThinkFree, gOFFICE, and many more) we have a whole different way of working with these tools to deal with.

All these software tools are created by different people who have different ideas about interfaces and the way they should work.

I don't have time now to spend discovering all the intricacies in most of the information tools I use. I need to get something done right now, and so I discover as I go. To do this, I need things to be easy to use, to be intuitive, and possibly familiar to other things I've used.

Because of this emphasis on action and immediacy, there may well be features in many of the products and software I use, that I never use or discover. I'm told the new Office 2007 has few new features, but the interfaces for Word, Excel, etc have been completely re-designed, based on feedback that users keep requesting features that have existed for several versions. Obviously the interface was getting in the way of people finding the feature they wanted.

Good information design is often about being involved in many aspects of the design of something, but the key is being user-orientated. People today work and live in environments that are short on time and high on complexity. Provide a tool or information product that works the way the user will expect it to work, and you're likely to be on to a winner.

Analysis or synthesis?

2007-03-04T21:13:00.000+13:00

I've done a bit of user evaluation of websites, and I'm starting to realise there's one major division I can propose between the way individuals behave in sites.

People either search, or they don't."

Don't get me wrong, every site above about five pages needs a search function, but not everyone will use it.

Some people are analytic, like me. They are natural taxonomists, dividing information into categories, looking for similarity and difference - these people expect to use navigation to find stuff, because the stuff will be categorised. If they're disappointed in this, they may just strike their tents and depart, never to return.

But the other class of users, the ones I didn't suspect existed until I began to observe how other people use websites - they don't think taxonomically. They see information as a mass of discrete chunks, linked by a web of possible connections, any one of the possible arrangements could be the real arrangement, so they don't expect to divine it. They go straight to the search box.

These users don't analyse information, they synthesise it, they look for connections, not divisions.

Now obviously only a head case is really 100% either of these things (but believe me, I've done my reading, and those head cases do exist). Most people are on a continuum between the two poles. The useful thing to remember is that if your site is going to satisfy as many users as possible, not only does the search have to be well-designed, well-placed on the page, and fully functional - but the navigation has to be intuitive, clear and designed with user goals in mind.

Only with both bases covered can your site hope to 'do the business'.

“Former All Black, and prostitute”

2007-02-23T11:01:00.000+13:00

Copy-editing is so old skool, isn’t it? All that guff about proper grammar [not to mention spelling] – it’s out the window in today’s world, right?

This seems to be the case with Radio NZ news these days [don’t even get me started about newspaper writing – English not a job requirement at our local rag]. In the last week I’ve heard several howlers that stopped me in my tracks – I fully expect to hear ‘piano for sale by old lady with carved legs’ before the week is out.

So what?

Well – what, actually. Emphatically what.

Clarity and correctness of expression is a benefit in any communication situation, especially in a media outlet professing to present ‘quality news’. This morning I heard the best one yet. A serving police-officer is on trial for something, the details aren’t relevant so I won’t bore you. Evidence has apparently been given on matters of fact by someone whose name I’ve forgotten, I’ll call him Joe Blow for the purposes of this rant.

A friend of the accused, Joe Blow, a former All Black, and a doctor, were called to give evidence.”

In print, that word ‘were’ stands out clearly in a way it does not when spoken on the radio. The overall syntactical structure of the sentence suggests that the former All Black is a doctor. This was how I heard it until I was able to recall the use of the word ‘were’ rather than ‘was’, and I realised that two people had given evidence on the matter. Anyone ever heard the usability principle - ‘don’t make me think”? Please!

How many listeners using only half an ear think that Joe Blow is a doctor? Does it matter? - probably not: but only by sheer chance. What if that other witness was a prostitute? Or a prison inmate? If I was Joe Blow, I’d be calling my lawyer, and Radio NZ’s head of news would be wondering how much the omission of the word ‘both’ at the start of that sentence was going to cost his or her employers.

Information design isn’t just interactivity, flash graphics and extreme software skills – there’s a lot of old skool stuff that has to be nailed down as well. And if not all the team at work has those skills, you have to wonder if its not worthwhile employing someone who can at least sometimes act as a sub-editor?

And prostitute.

Become like Newton

2007-01-29T09:00:00.000+13:00

There isn't much that Don Snowden says that doesn't hit me between the eye-balls, but his weekend post about Sir Isaac Newton and the need today for generalists like him is just what I needed today.

It blows me away that Newton can be considered a generalist, but Don's arguement seems sound to me. That Newton was interested in everything and wasn't afraid to experiment with things that others thought bogus, gives me hope and some courage to stop worrying about the fact that I can do a bit of PHP coding, but don't seem to be able to master it, have seen examples of the Document Object Model (DOM) in action but still can't understand it (and don't ask me to manipulate it), and I read heaps about knowledge management but still don't understand how to make it do anything useful.

Newton lived to be 84, which is amazing considering the time in which he lived (late 1600s to early 1700s). I'm halfway there, but reckon I've got plenty of time left to practice being a generalist.

Needles and Plastic

2007-01-22T19:06:00.000+13:00

Every time I sit in front of a PC I try to tell myself that my grandchildren will not recognise this device. In twenty years the PC will be as obsolete as the record turntable and the pulse-dialling telephone. I try to bear this in mind when I think about what is intrinsic to this communication medium, and what is not. Eventually the effort will bear some fruit.

In the meantime, there's always old Lee Perry dub productions and El Rey del Mundo cigars.

Bruce

iPhone breaks device-free web coding principle

2007-01-16T22:02:00.000+13:00

I can't believe it. Just when I was starting to think there were a few web designers out there who understood the principle of designing sites that can be viewed on any browser on any device, Apple go and break the principle on their new iPhone.

Apple claims the Safari browser built into the new iPhone is really advanced, and

...lets you see any web page the way it was designed to be seen, then easily zoom in by simply tapping on the multi-touch display with your finger."

What? How do they work out how web sites are designed to be seen? Do they mean how they look on their high-definition, wide-screen Mac machines? I hope not.

Google at least see the benefit of pushing a special web page to handheld devices, although I wish they'd used web standards and a handheld style-sheet instead of java script, but the result is the similar and it shows they are thinking about their audience.