I like music as much as the next person; I enjoy a really varied range of genres and styles but I don’t think I am as involved with music as most people I know. Everyone always has their iPod with them and they are always talking about this and that new thing they just downloaded. I tend to listen to the same things I listened to 10 years ago, though my interest is always piqued when someone recommends something to me.

But Concrete Blonde is in a different category for me. I’ve been listening to them since I was 12. There is really no good temporal reason for me to like Concrete Blonde. The band started in the early 80s when I was but a toddler and I did not hear them for the first time until 7th grade. A friend of mine had an album from her older sister, I believe, and while hanging out at her house one day she just happened to put it on. I was hooked immediately.

Johnette Napolitano’s voice is something out of this world. But more so are her lyrics and the emotions she expresses through music. I grew up listening to Ella Fitzgerald and opera, heavily influenced by my dad with a non-stop diet of The Beatles and 80’s pop from my mother, but Jonhette revealed a whole different world to me in music.

A year after my Concrete Blonde devotion was instated, I learned that the band dismantled. I was a crushed teenager when I realized that the first band I really ever felt a connection with was no more just as I found them. How sad that I would never get to see them again.

Luckily, they did get back together in 2001, which – believe me – caused me to jump and scream with joy and brought tears to my eyes the day I found out. I managed to see them live several times both back home in Brazil and abroad after I moved to the US, including Johnette’s solo concerts. The excitement is inexplicable.

Another side bonus of this experience was meeting and getting to know other fans from around the world who felt equality fervent about their love of Concrete Blonde and followed them around at every opportunity. It’s a fantastic relationship. Just today I wrote someone I saw last in 2004 during a concert to make sure we were going to meet this June. I didn’t even have to ask if they were coming too, I just asked which cities they were going. Fantastic people who I would not have otherwise met, if not for this common appreciation of Concrete Blonde and Johnette’s art.

So, this June, I am planning to go to as many concerts as I can during the 20th Anniversary of Bloodletting tour. I have never done this before and I have no idea how I’m going to make it happen, but I think it will be a fun experience and (since the band broke up again and is only reuniting for this tour) an opportunity I just can’t pass.

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Simple, straightforward and embraces all dimensions that are relevant about meetings. I love how she used the hand-washing analogy. If you’re interested, join the Facebook page.

I translated it to Portuguese, just to exercise my language muscles. Download the PDF:

I came to this presentation from Google on their Quality Score measure because someone referred to it by saying “Quality Score is a measure of user experience”. It obviously peaked my interest because it is precisely the qualitative characteristic of user experience that makes it hard to measure.

When you get to slide 4 you realize that Google knows better and defines Quality Score as “an automated measure of how relevant each of your keywords is to your ad text and to a user’s search query.”

It has nothing to do with measuring users’ experiences with anything whatsoever. I realize it sounds naive to be cranky about attention-grabbing people but it baffles me that people do this: misuse the notion of user experience to mean anything at all that they want. It is such a coward move. Be bold, say what you want to say!

More than that, I worry that people just have no clue what they are talking about. Because it that is the case, it is even more worrisome. If people engaged at this level of discussion (i.e.: what measures to use) don’t understand a basic thing such as what user experience means (at its most basic what PEOPLE experience when they INTERACT with something), then we’re all very far from being able to have progress in advancing the conversation about measuring success in the context of user experience.

If we agree that quantifiable data, specifically the ever popular web analytics, provide you with rich detail to tell you WHAT is happening, it is comforting to realize that it is the type of data gathering that we already do – design research – that provides the qualitative color to answer WHY said things are happening.

What I am finding, however, is that it is more valuable to START with the quantitative work and get to the WHATs and ask WHYs based on those findings, rather than trying to figure out WHYs in exploratory mode (even if the WHAT’s are going to emerge at one point or another in this quest).

My point is that it’s not sustainable as an approach. It’s inneficient to start digging deeper to answer the WHY questions if you don’t have a baseline of WHATs identified.

The problem is that it is not intuitive for designers to start where they are uncomfortable. We are super comfortable with qualitative approaches – they are our go-to tools because that’s what makes sense for design research. However, quantitative research instruments really help narrow stuff down, but they do require you to understand those pesky numbers in order to a) dig in and get to concrete answers and b) understand what it’s saying so you can ask “why”.

In short, WHATs before WHYs are more efficient than WHYs before WHATs, but that requires designers to start with unfamiliar tools to then apply familiar tools. If it was the other way around I think it would be much easier for designers to bridge both approaches and come out the other end with more useful insights.

In other words, since we don’t particularly feel an attraction to numbers (to put it lightly), why would we start there? It’s such a leap from how we think about problems that it is counter intuitive. I don’t believe designers reject the notion of starting with Quant approaches (WHATS) to expand with Qual approaches (WHYs), but it’s inherently counter-intuitive to think that way.

How can I help designers do this when it goes against their nature? That’s what I’m working on right now. More on this later.

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.

The bigger problem is that if I am not providing updates to other people than it is likely I am doing a bad job keeping track for myself. That really should be the central reason for doing it in the first place but without external accountability I’m just a lazy ass.

Today I had 5 minutes so I decided to write my boss an email just to give him a glimpse into where I am with things. I used this model:

I am working on 7 projects at the same time right now at different stages of development so I wanted to give him just a taste of what is going on where.

Project name and a one liner about the last thing I accomplished was the bare minimum I thought was necessary. Two bullets indicating what is going to happen next and what risks may be incurred seemed to be the additional two most relevant pieces of information.

Finally, the red/yellow/green flags are really just to make the one page scan-able so he can see that I have 2 projects on green, 1 on yellow and 4 on red and without my whining – but knowing what the issues highlighted are – see that there are blockers or resource problems making that happen.

How do you keep people up to date about what you’re working on on a regular basis? How do you provide project updates to your peers and bosses?

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.

Per the project’s page:

Project52 is a personal challenge geared toward getting fresh content on your website. The goal is to write at least 1 new article per week for 1 year. Because we all know what it‘s like to procrastinate on our content. A website is not just a fresh design that can be uploaded to the web and forgotten about!

Let’s see how I do this thing!