Why can't the farmer and the cowman just be friends? or... Why every town needs its own Marshall
17 January 2008 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.
Labels: IA, information design, usability, web design
posted by Bruce on Thursday, January 17, 2008,
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Usability at del.icio.us
27 September 2007 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.
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.
Labels: usability
posted by Greg on Thursday, September 27, 2007,
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Usability: the elevator speech
12 September 2007 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.
- Usability is not the same as quality assurance.
- A usable product is one that pretty well anyone can pick up and use 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.
posted by Bruce on Wednesday, September 12, 2007,
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How to spend money and make sites worse
03 September 2007 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.
- 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.
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!”
Labels: usability
posted by Bruce on Monday, September 03, 2007,
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Mission Impossible: Usability business strategy
14 August 2007 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.
Labels: business plan, information design, product, usability
posted by Bruce on Tuesday, August 14, 2007,
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Analysis or synthesis?
04 March 2007 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'.
Labels: usability
posted by Bruce on Sunday, March 04, 2007,
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