Article: The Road to Recommendation
January 6th, 2006
UIEtips 1/6/06: The Road to Recommendation
“Affecting positive change is our end goal. Having solid recommendations is how we make that happen. Ensuring we’ve done our diligence to produce those recommendations is absolutely critical.
By the time we’re producing a recommendation, we want to have a bundle of recommendations to support it. We’ll have formed an army of inferences, only to pick and choose those that the evidence tells us are the strongest and most likely. If we’re not sure, well, we go back to the well and get more evidence.”
Read the article here.
Do you have a different process for producing recommendations? Have you seen design teams jump to the wrong conclusions? If so, we’d love to hear your thoughts. You can leave a comment below.
Tweet
January 6th, 2006 at 3:50 pm
This sentence: “We want to change the design for the better”, I’m not ok with that.
You may want people to find faster certain articles, or may them to read the whole page before going to the next page, or may want to have them have fun, or may want to make them click in your ads.
If you have a clear and distinct goal, recommendations get better. Trying to get a “better” design has usually driven me to changing a button to the top of the page, and one week later moving it again to the bottom of the page. With no clear goals, I found myself trying to infer anything and everything from anything the user did.
More over, if you have clear goals, you may find that small localized changes are enough to accomplish them, which allows you to add an small extra step checking wheter the small change actually helps to accomplish your especific goal, instead of having to re-check everything at every step.
Recommendations like “fit all the page in one screen” simply attempt to solve too many things, they force you to re-check the whole design and they may break all the things that worked before.
With small changes, you may only need to check the small change and the interactions it may have with the rest of the unchanged design (for example, is it replacing other elements as the most visible element).
January 6th, 2006 at 3:59 pm
Oooooh, dear, I stopped scrolling when the Farge Wells screenshot was at the bottom of the screen, because I thought that it was the end of the article
You know, I thought it was the “other UIE stuff, go to the UIE roadshow/conference/talk” stuff, which they place very near to the end of the article so that we are tricked into reading it every time 
Fortunately, I noticed the article was longer when I looked at the newsletter.
Placing before each big image a warning like “the article continues below the image”, is a small localized change that i would recommend
January 6th, 2006 at 4:36 pm
I couldn’t agree more that designers are eager to make a change for the sake of showing some form of progress. Our team has created a simple method which has proved very successful in ROI terms. In the end, any design is just a collection of content ordered into a logical framework, but how do we determine what content is the highest priority?
Essentially we get users to rank the most important content to them. We get the business stakeholders to do the same. Then we compare the two. The best content for both user and business rises to the top – eliminating other non-essential or biased (for either group) content for second-level pages. This has worked time and time again for us.
We call it the Customer Value Exchange and it removes pet projects, design bias and most interpretive errors.