Archive for Good Experiences
Filed under Good Experiences, Me, me, me!
February 9, 2010 at 12:59 pm
This past week I had the pleasure to present at Interaction 10 in Savannah, Ga. This was my first Interaction conference and I absolutely loved it. The city, the venue, the crowd and the content were all fantastic. Even the food was the best conference food I’ve ever had. The IXDA should be really proud for making such an excellent event happen.
I was excited to go but apprehensive because I was meant to present on a topic that is new to me and I had not had an opportunity to have other conversations about it across the community. Also, after seeing the first two days of excellent content one is bound to feel nervous about their own stuff! It ended up being great – I talked about key performance indicators and measuring success in the context of user experience (slides forthcoming – I’m writing notes because they are not good enough on their own as they were only triggers for my talking points).
While preparing for this talk I expected to have few people show up, precisely because of the reason why I am investigating this topic in the first place: designers don’t like numbers. I didn’t think the topic would be attractive at all (thus my “out there” title and description). The feedback I received and the types of questions asked during the event were really interesting and helped validate some suspicions about how our community sees metrics and numbers.
My main goal was to put something out there about KPIs and measures of success for UX so that we could start a conversation and really explore this topic. I have grown tired of how this topic ALWAYS ends up going into a “what is the ROI” conversation and never advances our ability to express what success means to us. Measuring success to show our value to others is a secondary goal, measuring success for ourselves seems far more valuable to me, which is why I am going to continue to explore this and try to focus the conversation on that goal.
The main theme I saw emerge from the feedback I received is that people felt validated; that I brought up the questions they all have but had not seen articulated in the community — which is precisely what I felt when I started looking into this 4 months ago. We can’t really learn and expand our understanding as a community if we don’t figure out what questions we’re trying to answer. And that is why, in my opinion, we always fall back on the pointless ROI calculation discussions.
I am very grateful for all who came, participated and found me later to discuss the topic. I am very excited about seeing what’s next.
Filed under Good Experiences, Information Architecture
January 12, 2010 at 6:03 pm
Today I watched a really great presentation by Peter Morville and Mark Burrell at UIE discussing search patterns. I have to admit that the only reason why I attended is because Peter was speaking and I always love what he has to say, because I very rarely have to actually design search interfaces.
After the presentation I actually started asking myself why the hell is it that I so rarely have to design for search behaviors. The reality is that oftentimes I’m designing for existing services where search is an existing capability and iterating it is never in scope.
One of the problems with that, which became more apparent to me after the presentation, is that treating search as a separate behavior from browse is really misguided. I thought about this problem before but could not quite articulate it very well until today.
Historically I had been taught and understood search and browse as distinct elements – which they are visually and from a UI elements standpoint – but from a behavioral perspective, they really are not, rather, they are part of a continuum. A spectrum of discovery behaviors if you will.
If we think, for example, about how faceted classification emerges in search interfaces and in browsing interfaces it becomes really clear how intertwined they are.
One of my questions to Peter during the presentation (which unfortunately did not get addressed but hopefully will be part of the UIE follow-up podcast) was if he had identified patterns of use of faceted search and if there were any emergent patterns that could help answer if faceted search is more appropriate for a particular kind of content or context — and when it might not be appropriate.
Faceted browse/search is a hot topic at work and I feel like it’s been historically a random requirement that ends up on a project brief because of process inertia. Someone saw it somewhere and thought it was cool so decided that it should be applied to the kind of content we are surfacing for our audience.
I have no good evidence to substantiate my hypothesis at this point (unless lack of examples in the wild is enough), but I suspect that for our content – namely video content, generally in the entertainment realm, frequently movies, series and other TV programs – having faceted search as a primary tool for discovery is really inappropriate.
I have definitely seen and appreciated the application in e-commerce and feel like there is a prevalent pattern there for its use. But on the content I design for, I just don’t know. If I am to rely on what I know from user behavior learned observing people try and get to the video content they want (across different platforms in a number of distinct scenarios of use) the attributes they need to make decisions are frequently few. The variation in behavior is little in terms of user motivation, and greater in content type (i.e.: people look for movies differently from how they look for series).
How can I make a compelling argument that this particular pattern is not the right fit when I am not sure what is? I’ve seen it fail in usability tests but that only makes people try to fix it and improve it, not to try a completely alternate solution that might be appropriate. Any ideas out there?
Also, I’m not on a crusade against faceted search, I am just looking for ways to 1) articulate that there might be a problem picking this particular pattern 2) explore other ways to do it (both in the context of use and content I described). Any ideas are welcome.
Regardless, I think it will help me in the future to frame the scope of what I need to design for when dealing with content discovery behaviors by thinking about them in the browse-search spectrum. At least I expect that to give me a better argument to combat feature requirements void of context.
Filed under Bad Experiences, Good Experiences, Management, Me, me, me!
July 2, 2009 at 4:29 pm
I just had a great time recording a Userability Podcast where Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman answer my questions about how UX practitioners can learn to make good decisions about which methods to employ in their work.
[I'll update this with a link once it's published]
My question is an old concern about how new practitioners are being introduced to User Experience Design and Research practices by being fed a multitude of methods and not given much support about how to decide the right circumstances to use them.
It is not sufficient just to know how a certain method works. It is also not sufficient having used that method once or twice. What is it about our experience as practitioners that makes us better or worse decision makers? How do we choose to dedicate time and money to an 8-week long project to produce personas instead of a different approach?
What distinguishes the practitioners that not only choose methods and know how to apply them, but choose the methods that are most effective for a given problem?
A few years ago, Jared himself told me a story about an experiment where two distinct research teams (unaware of each other I believe) were given the exact same research goal and employed the same methodology to achieve it, and came up with different results and findings.
When that sort of thing happens, I wonder: Can we really trust our methods? But more importantly, if we accept that our methods are not really scientific and that we can’t really have a high level of confidence about the results we end up with, how do we choose one over another?
Somehow we just do. But some do better than others. Some do MUCH better than MANY others. If you have the opportunity to work with practitioners with enough experience and knowledge, you see excellent arguments for why to do A versus B for a given set of circumstances. So yes, only experience will help one make better choices, but everyone’s experiences are different. As a way to try to educate new practitioners we coach and mentor by teaching the methods and also giving advice such as “be flexible” and “don’t marry a particular process” and “figure out what kind of problem you are trying to solve first”, which are all excellent advice, but not strategic enough and often not practical enough that it can really help someone make a decision when they are faced with a new challenge.
Jared’s opinion is that our field is still too young and we haven’t yet been able to articulate the criteria we use in that decision-making process. I agree, however, it worries me that many think they are advancing in their practice because they know more, when in fact, they just learned new methods, but don’t really have the skills to assess risks, and benefits, between choosing one over another.
Being a runner gets you to the finish line, knowing which way to run wins the race. I really hope we become better equipped to pass on knowledge about how we make choices and why because, paraphrasing Jared, knowing a lot of recipes a restauranteur does not make.
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