From my perspective it is our job as analysts to educate companies to the possibilities of a solid, methodical, researched-based development process that has as its goal, better allocation of system resources, increased user-conversion and improved brand value. I wonder how many companies out there don’t know what is possible? Or how prevalent the perception is that usability is a non-quantifiable, shot-in-the-dark process where you allow users to get involved in the decision making process in ways that they should not be?

One of the comments that I especially agreed with from the “User-Centered Analysis and Conceptual Design” course was; usability is about gathering accurate user information to help make informed decisions for the development team and stakeholders. If we can get that message out there, maybe firms will start lining up at our doorstep. Maybe

To me, my role as an analyst is to provide accurate user information to stakeholders for establishing project requirements that in turn make better use of development resources that result in generating increased brand value and profitability. Maybe I should make some bumper stickers? Maybe

Don’t get me wrong, I completely support usability testing and this potential client really is ahead of the curve, but let’s take a look at the purpose of usability testing. According to Human Factors International (HFI), a usability test is to, “investigate methods to determine the ease of use of a product, primarily involving observation of potential users actually interacting with the product and measuring the results”. Usability testing is critical at step 5. And to carry this concept of the different steps a little further, it might also be said that persona development is important for step 4 and user profile development is a good step 3.

I think the cow gets out of the barn around step 2. For me, it’s kind of like when in the middle of measuring your project effectiveness you sit down to establish your project vision. This is very important step to do, but it’s a lot better if it is done earlier in the process. My I suggest, step one, sit down with your coffee, step two, sit down with your end users. I apologize at the attempt at humor. Talk with your users early and often.

I have a question (hint: the answer is yes), what do you think usability testing would more of? Confirm you are headed in the right direction or, discover what isn’t effective because users have absolutely no idea of how it works if; you never spent much time talking with them while they were still in the barn? Again, my apologizes to any users or cows who I have just offended.

Talk early and talk often with users. One comment regarding the definition of a user, a usability analyst, a subject matter expert, a stakeholder and/or a member of the development team, they are not the user. A user has no insider knowledge of the product. A user almost always does not work for the company providing the product. And, talking to users is not the same as allowing them to make your decisions for you. I was quite surprised when I learned that someone I knew gauged the success of our conversations by how well they were able to change my viewpoint to match their viewpoint. And from their perspective, I was not listening if I didn’t see things their way.

Talking with users is critical for gathering information to help guide the development team and stakeholders in making informed decisions. Usability testing is critical and makes the most use of company resources if it is preceded by frequent user interaction. For me, the cart and the horse is like direct user interaction and then usability testing.

Web Site: http://www.purepro.net/products.htm

Quick Description: On this product page they list four categories of systems:

• Economy RO Systems
• Typical RO Systems
• Pump RO Systems
• Countertop RO Systems

Quick Explanation: I understand Economy, Pump and Countertop. But how does Typical relate to Economy? If I as a user have my “mental model” set-up by the first category being Economy then if the next category is related but different give the user a category name that is also related. This is an example of not paying attention to your ontology and taxonomy. And then the second problem, labeling a category “typical”? What does the word typical do for brand value? Also, what would encourage me to pay more for something that is typical?

Quick Suggestion: I think that a positive or at least neutral category name could be “standard” or “basic”. At the very least, drop the value associated with typical, standard, basic and adopt a naming convention of EC series, RO series. Better yet, don’t leave money on the table and hire a usability analyst.

Quick Solution: Hire Art Zippel, 1.714.357.7578

Web Site: https://ocapps.occourts.org/ejuror

Quick Description: Forcing manual entry of year introduces several problems.

Quick Explanation:

• Takes the user out of the mental model of the already established drop-down control mode
• Forces the user to to expend additional cognitive resources
• Allows the user to enter a non-valid date generating an error message

Quick Suggestion: Reconfigure the year control to be a drop-down rather than an open text field. There are a host of other problems on this page like:

• “Juror Badge Example” is blue and underlined. The user’s mental mode is, if the text is blue and underlined, then it is a link. OK, I get the concept, someone wanted to explain what the below image was. That’s great, I completely support captions as being user-friendly. But don’t choose a method to achieve that goal with visual-affordance for a link if it is not a link.
• Stay away from body copy in blue. Blue is reserved for links (although that is changing) the same way that electric wall receptacles are reserved for electrical cords. Don’t use blue text and don’t put fingers in a wall receptacle. Just don’t.
• Don’t center body copy, research has shown that in most cultures justified left is the easiest to cognitively process. OK, I get it, maybe they thought just a few lines of text in a very wide format would be difficult to read. Fine, center a new DIV with a confined width, say 400 px.

Quick Solution: Hire Art Zippel, 1.714.357.7578

I believe projects are fluid meaning they change during their course of development to an extent that I believe is the nature of the web. It is dynamic. There is such a thing a scope creep, but there is also a point where some “things” are integrated because it would be counter productive to not integrate them in the long run. If I didn’t believe in the value of an iterative, dynamic process then I would be a print designer.

Once I was asked if I am ever unhappy with a project I have delivered. The answer is both, yes and no. I always deliver a professional product, so no. But, by the time a project is wrapped up I already have a dozen ways I know I could have improved it, so yes.

In a sense it’s the same as my perspective on usability:

• What we are not curious about will never prompt us to ask questions about
• What we do not ask questions about, we will never know
• What we know is predicated upon what and how we ask
• The quality of the answers we receive are casual to who we ask
• Our ah-ha moment of discovery frequently will come from qualitative data
• Our experience has a bearing on turning qualitative data into a crystal ball
• Part of every decision should utilize quantitative data or we run the risk of repeating past mistakes
• We present, explain, convince and get sign-off from stakeholders every step of the way
• We test with “real users” everything we intend to build with prototypes
• Then we build it and test it again with “real users”
• We understand that stakeholders, subject matter experts (SME) and well meaning involved third parties are not “real users”
• We communicate with every team member, honest, accurate data so they have the best information for their options

So you take all of that, cross your fingers and believe you have done enough do diligence to…”Beep, Beep, get this train down the track”.

After all, you have at least four options and then combinations between those four.

Option number one, you follow the signs and never look back. There’s only one place you need to go and all the freeways have signs. So you gas up the disco bus and away you go taking care to observe all the signs in front of you. What’s behind you is just that what’s behind you.*

Option number two, you are profoundly aware that your uncle Carl from California worked for Caltrans in the 70’s and Carl was creative, very creative. With this option you are going to want to pay attention to all the signs both in front and to the each side of you. Why, because you might need to pick several routes to ultimately arrive at your step-sister Sandra San Jose’s brand new house. In fact, you have decided to take a map with you so you have access to all of your options. I mean after all, Carl was very, very creative.**

Option number three, your grand mother Debbie Denver has just finished listening to every record Ray Charles ever recorded. For anyone else their experience with the wonderful music of Ray Charles would just be a wonderful experience. But for your grandmother Debbie Denver that is just not enough, you see Debbie is a method actor and a very controlling one at that. She insists that you take her entire Ray Charles CD collection with you on your trip and drive blind-folded just to enhance your experience of driving to San Jose. Because driving in this manner could have grave consequences if you error in your driving you follow the suggestion of your next door neighbor Harry Highway Patrol to walk you through every step of the way.***

Option number four, you grab your GPS device and enter in the exact number of every freeway needed to arrive at exactly at the door step of your step-sister, Sandra San Jose’s new house. In fact, you are able to enter in the GPS the exact height on the front porch to guarantee your hand is positioned just in front of the door bell.****

Do you know the way to San Jose? I would say yes you do and that it is sure to be an error free task for your quite entertaining scenario.

* Hierarchical

** Persistent

*** Sequential

**** Search

Are wire frames like moving furniture? I think they are just like moving furniture.

Or how about this one, “Well, I’m not sure exactly what I want, but I’ll know it when I see it.”

That’s fine with me. I’ve done wire frames since 1995, in everything from Visio, Photoshop (don’t tell anyone), Illustrator, Quark, InDesign, OmniGraffle and Axure RP Pro. Oh, and then there’s paper, matchbooks and cocktail napkins. I think once we even did it in the sand at the beach. Wow, that could have a double meaning.

When it was time to go functional I’d jump into Dreamweaver and bang out something fast. So those are the confessions of a 15 year wire frame geek.

Things are calmer now, for most stuff its Axure these days. What I like about Axure is I can push the generate button, dump the files it makes on a server and we are off and running as long as we have an internet connection.

I understand the concept of “I’ll know it when I see it” and that works great with usability testing and users if we’re talking about navigation. It has worked with project managers when we needed to figure out task flow/analysis. And how about scenarios and my famous line, “Can you tell me how you would sign up for a newsletter?” And off they go happily clicking away and we haven’t spent hardly any time in development.

I think husbands and wives should move furniture with wire frames, there just might be less, er, how do I say this…discussions?

I am reminded of an episode of “I Love Lucy”. Ricky is in the bedroom and yells out to Lucy in the living room, “Honey I can’t find my socks, do you know where they are?” Her answer was, “they are under the bed in the blue box”. It turns out that in an effort to help Ricky, Lucy started organizing everything by color. If you are in a paint store looking at samples, then possibly that could work for most people. If you are in a bedroom looking for socks, then maybe less possibly.

Card sorting is about learning how people group, sort and link…things, tasks and ideas together…in all sorts of different priorities by all sorts of people with different ways of doing things. And on a good did it is just that simple. On a day when they are rushed or less invested in what they are doing, well, let’s just say that the different ways of thinking that all of us have…could become more different.

I have tested with individuals that almost appear to click first and then read the label. Individuals where the first label which looks like it might contain the information is clicked on rather  than the label that seems to be more related than any of the other labels.

So maybe individual and cultural, impulsive and analytical traits come into play with how we try to find what we are looking for. Maybe organizing the navigation for the Smithsonian web site would be done differently rather then say, how Google has done their navigation or lack thereof depending on the holiday. My suspicion is that Google already knows that. Possibly that could explain why a web site for the upcoming movie “Transformers 3” would draw different individuals than the Microsoft web site and how those individuals would expect to find information would be organized differently to match their expectations.

All in all, at the end of the day, trends emerge and the world is saved from chaos. I just wish it could be saved from bad navigation. If I was in the running for a beauty pageant my answer would be world peace through card sorted navigation.

Card sorting is one method that is inexpensive, simple to administer and reliable to base decisions on. It’s kind of like a road map on how to herd cats.

“A heuristic is a mental shortcut that allows people to solve problems and make judgments quickly and efficiently. The rule-of-thumb strategies shorten decision-making time and allow people to function without constantly stopping to think about the next course of action. While heuristics are helpful in many situations, they can also lead to biases.”

-          http://psychology.about.com/od/hindex/g/heuristic.htm

Depending on your education, experience and objectivity your common sense could be worth or cost you more that just pennies. And while the phrase, “A penny for your thoughts” might call up warm and fuzzy feelings for those who have emphatically asked for your thoughts in the past, when it comes to developing web sites with the user’s goals in mind; our intuition or gut feelings that are elicited at the drop of a hat are best left to professionals.

I am always amused (to put it very, very lightly) when in the course of hammering out usability issues to be assaulted with the cognitive lynching rope of “Trust me” as an effort to grab a sense of presumed authority in the hopes of terminating, a constructive, passionate discourse at the users expense. Viewing heuristics as a shortcut to making judgments quickly brings to mind an individual caught in their “terrible two’s” being able to instantly respond with either “why” or “no” to every parental statement uttered in their direction. Quick responses conjure up the potential for “Haste makes waste” in my mind.

But to be fair I am also reminded of the concept, “Be fast to think, but slow to react”. I think of the all wise, master Jedi himself, Yoda and his frequent response of “Hmmmmmmm”.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in the value of mental shortcuts by highly trained professionals acting on solid, established principles. Like a firefighter who knows just when it’s time to get out. Or a lifeguard when they grab the buoy knowing it’s just not looking to good. I trust Kobe Bryant to know when a bob is better than a weave on his way to the basket.

So let’s hear it for those seasoned individuals who are able to look at user interaction design and just knows that when a stakeholder insists that the best place to put a search box is not in the footer. As a UI and UX geek, I have spent countless hours reading books and posts by other seasoned professionals as we have discussed best practices. You know best practices as in unless there is a really good reason why the search box should not go near the upper right-hand corner of a web page, it maybe should keep going there, since after all that is where most users go looking for it, or when to begin challenging how something has been done in the past, that was based on past technology. But you know; now we have new technology that appears to provide additional user functionality, so we should consider using it right? Well, it depends. Or as Yoda might say, hmmmmmmmmmm.

Could turning on a dime be worth a dollar? Or could it cost you a dollar? Well, it depends on who’s going to be left picking up the tab.

Editors note, as always, I write to explore ideas and process applying concepts to situations. Reading what I write could involve tremendous resources of cognitive multitasking and require a desire to embrace ambiguity and ambivalence.

If, then statements; there’s little wonder why they came into being. As a broad, general statement, individuals tend to seek resolving the unknown in their lives. Individuals have different motivations powering this behavior. An accountant could use a software program to help ensure the bottom line amount is error free in its computation. A psychologist could seek to resolve the unknown to help in better understanding why certain behavior is chosen and for what expected result. Accountants are frequently stereo typed as black and white, while a common perception of psychology professionals is they are nothing but shades of gray, and you would be hard pressed to get a direct answer from them.

“Individual perceptions do not reality make” is what I can hear Yoda saying at this point. Stereo types, are, how we shall say this, nothing more than stereo types themselves.

I whole strongly support, intelligent, well researched, unbiased, “non-leading-the-witness-Judge-Ito” usability testing. Since I have already confessed that I hear voices in my head (Yoda) I feel moderately confident in hearing one of my old psychology professors discussing a famous phrase that Mark Twain popularized “Lies, damned lies and statistics”.

So, to put everything together, if relates to perceptions, then relates to statistics. Meaning if all of the individualized perceptions of users are tested and analyzed, statistically speaking we can come up with lies about how individuals perceive stuff. Seriously, I’m being partly serious.

Usability testing, in part is about discovering perceptions outside of ourselves. Usability testing, in part is about inviting a two year old to dinner to hear 243 no’s to anything you suggest. Usability testing, could be, in part, asking your beloved to marry you, hoping for a yes, and dreading a no.

Or usability testing could be likened to people like Louis Pasteur, Albert Einstein, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Groucho Marx or Julia Childs who share in common a willingness to throw the spaghetti against the wall and see it sticks. Because bringing something to market that users can’t use and therefore don’t want, is probably a perception that every company hopes, strike that, wants to avoid.

Maybe Hollywood has a comment on testing perceptions. Do you remember, “I know what you’re thinking. Did he fire six shots or only five? But to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I have kind of lost track myself…You’ve got to ask yourself one question, do I feel lucky.”

Ah, thank you Clint Eastwood for putting usability testing in a light where most individuals can see at least some value. When to engage in usability testing? Might best be answered with another question, “when do you want to find out if you are going the wrong way? Which hole is easier to climb out of, one that is 12 inches deep or one that is 12 feet deep? When do you want to discover if the dam might have a leak, after 12 ounces is found on the floor or 12,000 gallons is found on the floor?

Usability testing, it just depends on when you want to find some things out. And sometimes, just sometimes, the things, are really, really important.

Editors note, as always, I write to explore ideas and process applying concepts to situations. Reading what I write could involve tremendous resources of cognitive multitasking and require a desire to embrace ambiguity and ambivalence.

It is challenging to say the least to design functionality for a diverse group of users who are constantly being subjected to different ways of doing some of the same things online.

Take a simple registration form. We have been taught to expect certain questions to be asked online. First name, last name and our email address. We might not be surprised to be asked for our middle name, but if the middle name text field box has the dreaded-red-asterisk-of-death next to it, meaning required – we just might see a higher than expected attrition rate. “You are demanding my middle name, why?” That’s not what I expected, so I’m leaving.

Most of our interaction expectations have been taught to us and to more or lesser degrees we have accepted them. After all, how can we build a wonderful web application and provide wonderful features if we can’t check to see if you have signed up with your wonderful , unique personal information so we know what wonderful content to show you? The dog is wagging the tail.

But when you provide an interaction path with no options and you ask for something the tail doesn’t understand or it matches something the tail has been told by other tails as sketchy; well, the tail just might bail. If enough tails bail, then the dog might have to remove the dreaded-red-asterisk-of-death or face a severe loss of new tails registering. At a certain point the tail could win. The dog can get smarter and try to find out the same information in a less conspicuous way, and, the tail can also get smarter and give a phony middle initial in response to it.

What’s the tail and what’s the dog? What works today in a registration form might be different from what works in a year from now in a registration form. It depends on how many dogs listen to tails, how many tails find dogs that will listen to them and what dogs think it takes to make tails happy.

I am reminded of when we could gain access to privileged information by giving a phony email address. Tail gives the email address, dog opens the door, tail gets what it wanted and is gone before dog knows that it has captured yet another Fred Flintstone its database to match the other 1673 Fred Flintstones already on file. So the dog gave away the goodies and is stuck with higher admin costs to clean up the duplicate phony tail records in the database.

Ah, the tail was getting away with it. Now the dog got smarter and asks the tail for its email address and then on the confirmation page informs the tail that it must reply to the email to confirm the authenticity before being granted the keys to the kingdom.

Darn, the tail had already given the phony email address not knowing the dog had changed the rules. The dog has yet another Fred Flintstone, and the tail didn’t get what it wanted either.

The dog gets smarter yet and tells the tail next time that entrance will only be granted upon confirmation of an authentic email address before the submit button. If the tail wants the goodies, then it will have to play by the dogs rules. If tails and dogs come with different IQ’s, then possibly opposites will attract and smart dogs will find less smart tails, and vice versa. But in the overall mix of things it can get really frustrating for tails to sort out how information is served up and what is expected by all the different dogs out there. Life is difficult for both dogs and tails. And psychologically, the interesting thing for me is all dogs are tails in other situations.

What is my approach to user interaction? Be aware that there are accepted existing conventions, both tail-friendly and not so tail-friendly. Take advantage of best practices of engaging tails. Challenge dogs in the areas where they are not being nice to the tail. Be aware of where the tail wants some wiggle room and try to sort out if the area’s where the tail is hesitant might just lead the to a better way of dogs doing dog stuff.

The dog can teach the tail and the tail can teach the dog.

Editors note, as always, I write to explore ideas and process applying concepts to situations. Reading what I write could involve tremendous resources of cognitive multitasking and require a desire to embrace ambiguity and ambivalence.

The reason I call myself a User Experience Visual Designer in stead of a User Interaction Visual Designer is that draw from the larger container of experiences we as users are exposed to. Anytime I can adopt conventions that are successfully used outside of the web I do. Our experiences as web site users is only part of our total experiences, so l always look outside of our web site experiences for conventions to use whenever possible.

An excellent source of information on the treatment of breadcrumbs is “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug which can be found at Amazon.com.

Editors note, as always, I write to explore ideas and process applying concepts to situations. Reading what I write could involve tremendous resources of cognitive multitasking and require a desire to embrace ambiguity and ambivalence.