Back December 2011, we asked your help in naming our brand new conference. There weren’t a lot of details other than it’s a 3-day consisting of full-day workshops and one day of short talks all focusing on two separate themes – mobile design and Agile. Like all the UIE events, we’re loading this conference with field-leading, edge-defining, top-caliber speakers providing you with techniques to immediately make a difference with your designs and inspiring insights.

We certainly weren’t disappointed with the response. We received over 450 entries.

Many of the suggestions consisted of creating a new word. Mogility, MoAgile, Magile, and Magility were popular entries.

Some folks went the acronym route. Magic: The Mobile – Agile Conference, MAID: Mobile Agile Insight & Design, MAX: Mobile Agile Experience, and MoMMA:Masters of Mobile Media and Agile.

All these submissions provided ammo for another round of name brain storming in our office. These names (some submitted, some we thought of) made the final cut.

• Be Agile, Go Mobile Conference 2012
• Adaptation: The Mobile & Agile Conference
• Adapt UX: The Mobile & Agile Conference
• BAM – Best Practices for Agile and Mobile
• UIE Trends: The UX Conference for Mobile & Agile
• Scrums and Thumbs: UX Conference for Agile and Mobile
• POP UX 2012: UX in Agile and Mobile
• UX Immersion 2012: Agile and Mobile

So how do you choose the right name, one that’ll be the forefront of the event’s brand? To make our decision, we turned to the same techniques we use for prioritizing large amounts of user data.

The Process

As with any good process, we first needed to figure out how we’d know if we did a good job. We needed success criteria. So we went about identifying the qualities of a good UIE event name.

As we looked at names we sorta liked and ones we didn’t like as much, we started discussing how they were different from each other. That gave us some perspectives: we wanted the name to be remarkable, but not too cute. It needed to be easy for someone to sell to their boss, since many folks will need to ask to come.

We knew that it had to convey the theme of the conference. A name that was easy to use in promotional materials. And that it conveyed it was associated with UX. In all, we ended up with a list of 8 attributes. But it would be impossible to find a name that matched all of those. So we needed a way to figure out which attributes were most important.

(Coming up with attributes like this is the same way we figure out what makes one study participant different from another, when we’re creating personas. We make playing cards for each participant, pull out two cards, and ask “What’s different between them?” and “What’s the same?”)

We used another technique from our client work: we gave each attribute a weight. Every person on the team assigned a number from 1 to 5, where 5 is a must-have quality and 1 is a nice-to-have.

To come up with a group consensus, we used a two-step voting process. First, everyone gives a number. Then we discussed any differences. (Why did Brian give that one a 2? Why did I give the same thing a 4?) Finally, everyone voted again (because the discussion changes people’s minds) and we chose the mode average. (Some people use median average, but that creates crazy precision that I don’t think is necessary.)

We then put our final cut of names through the criteria to see how they scored. Three names all scored pretty high. Our next step was to see how a designer would use the name in the logo. After seeing some initial sketches, it became clear what to name this new conference.

And the name is…

Are you ready? Here it is: UX Immersion 2012 Conference—Mobile/Agile.

It fit all our top criteria and we liked how we can easily shorten it to UX Immersion. (In the office we’ve already shortened it to IMUX or if you want to be Yoda like – UXIM.)

The web site will be up soon. In the meantime, if you want to get updates about the conference, sign up on our email list.

The Winners of the Contest

No one submitted this name directly, however four people submitted names that started with UX. No entries had immersion in the name. Since we can only have one winner, we decided to do a drawing among submissions from these 4 individuals. Congratulations to Gary Anderson. The other three people will receive runner-up prizes of the newly released UI16 OnDemand.

Finally, as promised, we drew three email addresses at random for the virtual seminar give away: Carol Roberts, Marci Kenneda, Chris Eklud.

Thanks to everyone who participated. Be sure to follow us on Twitter for the latest updates on the UX Immersion 2012 Conference—Mobile/Agile.

Back in 1987, Apple (under the direction of John Sculley, not Steve Jobs), released a video of what Apple products could be like in the future. Called the Knowledge Navigator, it showed a sci-fi mythical tablet computer from 23 years in the future (yup, 2010) that the user talks with to get things done.

Fast forward 24 years and Apple releases Siri with the new iPhone 4S. Siri is an assistant that takes voice commands and acts on them. If you haven’t seen Siri, here’s a demo.

Now, as far as I know, Siri is only available on the iPhone 4S. However, that’s likely temporary, as I don’t believe there’s anything that prevents it from showing up on other platforms, like the iPad.

And once it shows up on the iPad, Apple will have fulfilled it’s 1987 quest. All the components of the original Knowledge Navigator are now available and for less than $500.

In ’87 — when we all used big, boxy CRTs on bulky, loud, slow desktop processors without any notion of communications beyond 9,600 baud (14.4 came in 1991) — there was no way you could have a small, tablet computer to do all the things in that video. Knowledge Navigator was complete science fiction to everyone at that point. Computers couldn’t speak. You couldn’t imagine face-to-face video conferencing across the planet, let alone collaborative workspaces. None of that had been invented yet, except as sci fi.

Yet, if we look close, it’s the path Apple has been on for 24 years. We’ve seen the baby steps. With the introduction of the Mac Book, then the iPhone, followed by the iPad, we got our table. The interwebs provided the connectivity, where Apple focused on its Airport wireless products to get the components tiny. Innovations like built-in cameras and Facetime made the video conferencing a reality.

And now Siri completes the journey. Siri isn’t quite the bow-tied dude who can order a cake for your mother’s birthday party, but it’s damn close. (And I’m not convinced we need avatars to believe the computer is speaking. I think Second-Life ruined avatars for everyone, except those who enjoy online virtual sex.)

In 1987, when Apple first released the video, they received a fax (!) with a purchase order for the Knowledge Navigator. Now they can finally fill the order.

He was a seasoned consultant himself and I had asked him what I should know, just starting out. He told me his First Rule of Consulting:

No matter how much you try, you can’t stop people from sticking beans up their nose.

That was it. Beans up the nose. Really.

At the time, I thought he was nuts. Now, I’ve come to realize those are words to live by.

The idea is blindingly simple, actually. Every so often, you’ll run into someone with beans who has, for no good reason, decided to put them up their own nose. Way up there. In a place where beans should not go.

Now, there is no logical explanation for this. There is no way to say, “Yes, I can see exactly why you’d want to do that.” They came to this decision all on their own. The way they got to this decision defies logic.

Yet, here they are. Waiting for the moment when the bean goes up the nose.

And here’s the thing: As an observer of this decision’s outcome, all we can do is cringe. We can try to argue. We can explain in the utmost rational terms why this is a bad idea. We can physically grab their arm and shake the bean from it.

Yet, if they are intent on sticking the bean up the nose, up the nose it will go. There’s nothing you can do to stop it. Pure and simple.

I’m sure you run into them all the time. You’re in a room and someone with power has decided to do something that just doesn’t make sense. You’ve tried logic. You’ve tried rational discourse. Yet, they are intent.

Beans and noses. We have beans. We have a nose. They must be united.

Time and time again, I come across situations where I think, “OMG! They are trying to stick beans up their nose!” It explains what’s happening and what I should do next.

The only thing I can do in a beans-and-noses situation (notice my clever use of flight-attendant grammar forms?) is wait. Wait until the bean is in its final resting place. Then, with a calmness only seen in yoga instructors, I can turn the nose owner and ask, “So, how is that working for you? Did it do everything you’d hoped?”

Of course, if they answer they enjoyed it and it was wonderful, then they are not someone I can relate to or help in any way.

However, if sticking a bean deep into their nostril doesn’t meet the very high expectations they’d had, I can now start talking alternative approaches to reaching those expectations.

Often, when I see an oncoming beans-and-noses scenario unfolding before me, I’ll ask about those expectations. How will they know if it’s successful? What will life be like once the bean is firmly implanted?

Maybe, by talking about the outcome, they might see alternative ways of achieving it that won’t result in the misery that comes from a nasal-based legume implantation experience. They might realize they have choices before they commit the act.

That only works half the time. The other half, the bean starts its wayward journey.

That’s when I move on. I decide I can’t be of further help and go take my skills, experience, and knowledge to others. Others that aren’t about to stick beans up their noses. There are plenty of those. And it’s much less frustrating for everyone involved.

LL Spool J & The Conference All-Stars will next appear at UI16. Get more details.

The Most Valuable UX Person In The World

She builds her wireframes with real wire from ancient hand-smelted Ukranian steel.
Her worst personas could kick the ass of your best personas.
His pattern library is now in the Library of Congress.
When she explains good design visuals, the only thing Edward Tufte can add is “What she said.”
He’s organized his wine cellar in order of awesome.
Wikileaks is ready to release her sketchbooks just because they’re cool.
He only sketches on the front of the napkin.
He built the world’s biggest web site, using only his left hand.
Last season’s American Idol featured her concept maps.
His research finds customers desire to research his behavior.
He is the only person Don Norman agrees with.
She makes her own icons out of straw.
Software bugs specifically ask for her to fix them.
He defined the damn thing, then moved on.
Her study participants screen themselves. Out.
Her interactions are the basis for everyone else’s designs.
Scalpers sell tickets to his project kickoff meetings.
He is already coding in HTML6. And has been for a decade.

They are the most valuable UX person in the world.
“Design well, my friend.”

What would you add to this list? Leave your own ideas of the Most Valuable UX Person In The World in the comments. I’ll be sprinkling your best suggestions through out my presentation, giving you full credit.

Oh, by the way, the early bird price for the Summit ends this Friday, February 18. Sign up here. I’d love to see you there.

While I actually like the solace that a non-internet-connected airplane flight gives me, I decided to give this a try. Once we were airborne, I fired up my browser and connected to the network.

On the other flights I’ve taken, there’s just been a log-in page for Gogo, the inflight internet service. It has the usual information about paying for the service and a place to log in if you’re a frequent customer. (They store your billing info, so you can just charge your account with an email address and password. It’s pretty simple.)

While United uses Gogo, it’s completely hidden behind a home page that I pretty much ignored. All I wanted was the internet access. There are two not-so-easy to find buttons (obscured because they’re identical to lots of stuff I don’t want) to hit, so I chose one expecting to be told what the outrageous access fee would be.

Crappy Survey Lesson #1: Don’t let people opt out of your survey.

Instead of a pricing and log-in page, I get a simple screen that says “Before you access the Internet, please take a few minutes to complete a short survey. Your responses will help us improve United in-flight Wi-Fi.”

There’s no option here to skip the survey. I must fill it out. I watched other passengers encounter this page and it’s there for everyone. I’m guessing it’ll be there for a while, so I’ll get to fill it out on every wi-fi flight I take until they stop the survey.

Of course, they want everyone’s opinion. However, do they want everyone’s opinion multiple times? How does that help them?

Given no choice, I started up the survey. That’s when it got really amusing.

Crappy Survey Lesson #2: Ask a multiple choice question with the wrong answers.

The first question of the survey asks why I’m logging in. Frankly, I was logging in to see what the experience was like. I hadn’t any other agenda, but I imagine I’d probably use it to keep in touch with my office and friends, along with checking my email. I had plenty of work to do, but it had been a long week and I might do something else. However, I hadn’t given it any thought until they asked.

There are four answers: working, checking email, leisure/entertainment, and all of the above. I would’ve liked to say I was just checking out United’s internet offer, to see if it’s something I’d be willing to pay for. That wasn’t a choice.

I’m not sure what they meant by leisure/entertainment. I find the Twitters entertaining, but I didn’t think they meant that.

I get that they are trying to find out what people are doing with their service, but I don’t understand what they are going to do with the information from this question.

Let’s say 30% of the users choose “Check email”. What could the United team possibly do with that information? How would they change the service or set the price? I can’t see how these answers help them. I wonder if an open text box where people describe it could be helpful.

Of course, there’s another way to get this question: watch what people do. Their analytics will tell them how many people check email (either using POP3, IMAP, or SMTP ports, or visiting one of the web-based email providers, such as Gmail or Yahoo mail). The analytics will also tell them which sites the users visit. It’s pretty easy to separate out work sites from pleasure sites. VPN usage is a good clue too.

Why ask a silly question when you can observe the behavior?

Crappy Survey Lesson #3: Use radio buttons when you mean check boxes.

I found it interesting that United thinks checking email is neither work nor entertainment. I’m curious what the United team uses their email for.

If they really wanted answers that get them closer to something meaningful, check boxes are probably a better way to do this.

Crappy Survey Lesson #4: Don’t tell me how many questions we have left.

This was just the first question and I didn’t have any clue how many of these were left. Were we almost done or was my entire six-hour flight a long survey experience?

Fortunately for United, I had no choice other than to continue or not use the Internet. There was no button to say I was no longer interested in participating.

At what point do people start choosing a random answer, just to get through the survey so they can work, check email, and/or be entertained? (I’m betting on the second or third time they have to fill out this survey, that’s pretty common.) I wonder how the United team will tell the difference between the legitimate answers and the just-get-me-online answers.

Crappy Survey Lesson #5: Use words that mean different things.

United wants to know if I used any “features” on the “United Wifi Home Page.” Are we talking about the page that first popped up when I connected? Or is this a page that describes the service that I haven’t seen? What does “home page” really mean to an average user? Earlier that day, I went to united.com to check in for my flight by clicking on a link in an email. Is that the United home page? A picture of the United Wifi Home Page might help here, assuming it was big enough I could recognize it.

What do they mean by features? On the page that came up when I connected, I clicked on a blue button that said “Full Internet Access”. Is that a feature?

Crappy Survey Lesson #6: Use Yes and No as answers.

The only two answers are yes and no. What if I don’t know know? United is forcing me into answering a question I don’t understand. If I could answer “I’m not sure”, at least they’d discover their question is confusing to people.

Let’s say 50% of respondents answer no. What does the United team do with that answer?

Crappy Survey Lesson #7: Ask about satisfaction.

My thinking went like this: I am using the wi-fi to connect to the internet. I clicked on the “Full Internet Access” button to try to get it. (Hopefully, I will get it once I’ve finished this survey.) Therefore, that button must be a feature, so I answered yes.

What then appeared was Question 3: How satisfied would I say I am about the features on the United Wifi Home Page?

First, let’s just look at the word “satisfied.” I think United is trying to find out if somehow this page made me happy, or, at a minimum, pleased me in some way. Yet, the dictionary says it means content, completely paid, or convinced. Happiness or pleasing is not a condition of being satisfied.

If I were to pick one of the dictionary definitions that could be useful, I’d pick content. Yet, content is a neutral term. Being content or satisfied is like finding a restaurant’s food edible. It’s not a particularly positive term.

Crappy Survey Lesson #8: Pick a Poor Neutral.

If United’s team really wanted to know if I was content with their home page, they could make the scale go from the extremes of “Extremely Contented” to “Extremely Discontented”. But what would the middle be? What’s it like to be neither content or discontent?

That’s the problem with this scale, which has a wacky state of “neither satisfied or dissatisfied.” If 30% say they are satisfied or extremely satisfied, 30% say they are dissatisfied or extremely dissatisfied, and the remaining 40% say they are “neither satisfied or dissatisfied”, what does that tell the team? What will they do with that information? How would it be different if everyone says they are dissatisfied?

Crappy Survey Lesson #9: Ask about things people haven’t used.

I still don’t know what United thinks a feature is, but if it’s the other buttons on the home page, those are things I haven’t used at this point. How can I indicate my satisfaction with things I haven’t experienced? Frankly, without looking at the screenshot I took of the page, I don’t even know what they are at this point.

That begs the question: what are people actually answering when they choose a number between one and five for this question? Are they predicting their satisfaction? Or are they only to answer for the features they’ve used?

Crappy Survey Lesson #10: Ask users to rank things they don’t care about

I’m sure the list of items, from movies to inflight food ordering capabilities, are a well-researched collection, not something the team just brainstormed over a beer. (Ok, maybe I’m not so sure.) However, just because they are on the list doesn’t mean they are something the respondent wants.

At least, not this respondent. I couldn’t care less about United providing me more movies, games, books, or shopping. I carry an arsenal of electronics that already house what I want in those areas. I don’t know what “destination content” is, but I’m guessing it’s tourist stuff about the city I’m landing in. If the plane actually served food, I might want to order it online (assuming it works like Virgin where they actually bring it to you within a few moments of ordering). And I might like “More United Information”, if it was useful.

That’s two things out of seven that I’m interested in. How do I rank that? Well, I tried giving a 7 to everything I didn’t care about, but the survey software didn’t like that at all. Now I have to spend effort ranking things I don’t want.

The problem is now the item I’ve ranked third (Shopping site/deals) is really something I don’t want. How does the United team know that? They would likely get the wrong impression that I would be happy with that offering.

Crappy Survey Lesson #11: Don’t give a space to learn from your users.

The item I like most on this list is More United Information. Anything United can tell me about my trip, especially connection information, could be useful to me. I’d like to know how far and fast I’ll need to trudge across the terminal to make my connection. I’d love to know if my bag is on the flight. I’d like to know what the best ground transportation options are, once I land, and where I find them in the terminal. And I’d enjoy knowing what the food options are in the terminal (and perhaps even placing an order when rushed).

Of course, I just made all that up and don’t know if the United team thinks like me. I’d love a way to tell them these great ideas (in a form other than a blog post criticizing their survey). There’s no place for me to enter my ideas, great or not.

Crappy Survey Lesson #12: Don’t give users an out.

This is definitely the best formed question so far. Yes or no. Good choices. Unless I’m not sure. Like, is the stuff on Jetblue or Virgin America, where I can chat and play games with people on other flights part of their wi-fi service?

As we learned in Crappy Survey Lesson #6, if someone isn’t really sure, their only option is to answer yes or no. If the team is going to do something with this data, it might be nice to separate out the people who are sure of their answers from the people who aren’t. An “I’m not sure” answer would get them there.

Crappy Survey Lesson #13: Make the survey pages load REALLY SLOW.

Had you been sitting with me on the plane, you would’ve noted that we’re not more than 10 minutes into this exercise. That’s because the survey pages were loading really slowly, apparently being summoned from a server that was buried deep beneath the earth’s mantle.

Had there been an option to quit the survey at this point, I’d likely would have. No such option existed (the entire page is what I’ve been showing you). It took more than 15 minutes of my life to finish the entire survey. (Interestingly, the performance of the wi-fi service matched the survey’s performance.)

Crappy Survey Lesson #14: Don’t bother with good English.

“On which airline did you last use a Wi-Fi service onboard?”

It’s a one sentence question. Convoluted grammar doesn’t help the experience.

Crappy Survey Lesson #15: Ask the wrong question.

What possible use is it to know which airline I last used wi-fi service on? I have used wi-fi on American, Continental, Delta, and Virgin America. I believe the last one I used it on was Virgin America, but I am not completely sure as it was a while ago.

However, why does it matter? For one thing, they all use the same underlying service: Gogo Inflight, just like United. The experience (other than this silly survey) is pretty uniform. It’s my understanding that I can buy an unlimited-use monthly pass from Gogo that works on any of the airlines they serve.

So why is the last airline I used it on useful? Well, it isn’t to help with the next question.

If the previous question had been checkboxes where I could indicate every airline I’d used it on, this question might be more helpful. But now, I’m rating all my previous experiences.

Also notice the scale has changed from the previous satisfaction question: I’m not allowed to indicate “Extremely Satisfied” with the competitor’s service. Only “Very satisfied”. Curious.

Crappy Survey Lesson #16: Ask how much I’d pay.

Oh, where do we start on this question? We can start with how it’s a five-point scale where 3 points will do. What is the difference between “Extremely Likely” and “Likely” when asking if someone will pay a price for a service?

The neutral point (3) is poorly labeled. What does “Neither likely nor unlikely” mean? “Can’t decide” or “Don’t care” or “It’s complicated” would be much better answers to choose from.

But those are minor nits that we’ve already covered here. The real problems come from the question itself.

First, you’re asking me about a three-hour flight when I’m sitting on a six-hour flight. United doesn’t have very many three-hour flights. They have a ton of flights that are less than three hours, like the frequent flights I make from Boston to Washington, DC. They have a ton a flights that are more than four hours, like the flights I make from Boston to Denver. However, a flight that is only three hours, no more, no less, is very hard to come by.

Second, you’re asking me about the future. If you really want to know what I’m likely to do, you probably want to know my history (beyond what my last flight was). Have I ever paid for wi-fi service on a flight less than three hours? (Yes, but will often pass.) Have I ever paid more than $5 for wi-fi service on a flight of that length? (Yes, but it makes me think if I really need it.) How often have I done those things? The answers to these questions are probably more predictive of my future behavior than any answer I could give to this question.

Lastly, (and most importantly,) I know how this question works. If I say yes, you charge me $5. If I say no, you consider not charging me $5. Guess which outcome I’d prefer? For what reason should I tell the United team that I’d likely (or EXTREMELY likely) pay that price? None that I can think of. So, EXTREMELY unlikely it is.

Crappy Survey Lesson #17: Focus on the present or the future.

I have booked flights on United.com. It’s clumsy and I prefer not to do it. Recently, I’ve only done it to book a flight with points. I much prefer Orbitz.com for my flight booking.

How do I answer this question? I don’t want to book my flights here. I haven’t in a while and been thankful.

Had this question asked me what I’d done in the past, I’d have known what to answer. However, it asked me in this weird future tense. I’m not booking a flight now. I have no plans to book my future flights at United.com. Unless they pull a move like American (who has apparently decided to stop selling its flights through Orbitz), I would be happy to not book on United.

Never is a long time. However, out of fatigue of this survey (now clocking in at 12 minutes), I decided it was the right answer here. That probably prevented another few questions.

Crappy Survey Lesson #18: Don’t ask for contact information.

What thoughts or comments should I have at this point? I could talk about how I believe this survey is a waste of time, since I had to fudge answers to make them fit. I could talk about how the connection speed was slow.

At this point, it’s still not clear if United is planning to charge me for the internet usage. I could talk about that.

Of course, being a long time United customer, I have LOTS to talk to them about. I’d love to talk about how messed up United.com is. I’d love to talk about their crappy upsell process. I’d love to talk about how I feel I’m always being scolded by United employees, even though I spend thousands of dollars on them every year. I’d love to talk about how their employees often give the impression that it would be much easier to make the airline work if they didn’t have to deal with all these pesky passengers.

I don’t think that’s what they wanted in this box. However, I don’t really know what they wanted in this box, as, once again, it’s not clear. It would’ve helped if they said, “Is there anything else you’d like us to know about how to make the best inflight Wi-Fi experience?” (I would’ve mentioned having power at the seats would make a huge difference for six-hour cross country flights.)

As is common with other United surveys I’ve encountered, they don’t ask for my contact information. If they had my contact information, they could match my frequent flyer information up with the answers I gave, which would, of course, give them tremendous insight into where I’m coming from. Even my flight and seat number would be valuable.

Anonymous surveys have their place. This isn’t one of them. There was nothing here that I’d change if I thought the United team could figure out who I was.

United could make the contact information field optional. I’m betting most folks would fill it in regardless, as that’s been my experience for these types of things. Especially if you make a compelling case for how it’s valuable to your research and how they’ll benefit from it. (However, you do need to be clear about how you’ll use that contact info from a marketing standpoint. People don’t want to sign up for more spam.)

Crappy Survey Lesson #19: Waste your users time.

I had just come from a client workshop where we went through two weeks of site visit data. With the client in tow, we visited 14 of their customers, asking a lot of questions and observing how their own businesses worked.

At the end of each visit, we thanked our research participants. However, we also took the extra effort to express what we learned that was valuable to us.

It’s nice that United thanked me for filling out the survey. What would’ve been nice is to give me a sense that it was more than busy work.

To make this worse, I still had no idea if my internet usage was free. I didn’t know if the next click would bring up a Pay-to-Log-In screen of some sort, looking for my credit card information.

At a minimum, the last screen could’ve said, “We value your input. We’re going to study it carefully and come up with the best inflight wifi experience. As a small token of our appreciation, we want you to use the service for free on this flight.” That would’ve been cool.

Instead, I felt like I had just wasted my time. (Vowing to have it not be a complete waste, I promised myself I’d document it in this post.)

My biggest worry is the next flight I’ll get on with wi-fi service will have the exact same survey. If that’s the case, I’ll probably answer all the questions differently, just to mess with their heads. After all, if they’re going to waste my time…

I was really disappointed with their 1996 approach to the salary survey. The AIGA is filled with talented designers, yet they opted for an impossible-to-use book reader to display their hard work.

Locking the survey up in a proprietary, unusable reader was a huge mistake. It’s hard to use, not lending itself to the richness of the data that’s available. It’s like looking at the entire ocean through a small porthole.

But it’s not just the reader that’s the problem. You can download the PDF (after registering), but that doesn’t make it it much more modern.

The big problem is that the book is all about the presentation of the data, but not about the knowledge within.

The salary data that AIGA has at this point is really rich. They’ve got thousands of respondents surveys, going back to 2000. It would be awesome to really dive into this data.

AIGA is all about graphic arts. But in 2010, graphic arts has a huge responsibility to communicate interactively. How cool would it be to have a Mint.com-style drill-down interface, that would let you compare variables, such as whether salaries in Austin for the last five years have grown/shrunk the same as salaries in Boston?

How about letting people doing cross-tab analysis. For example, how does years of experience play into the salary changes? Does it change for job type? Region? Are there some regions that pay off more than others? And has that changed over the years?

By presenting the data as a flat book (or worse with the silly antiquated issuu interface), AIGA is saying that the understanding of the information is secondary to how it looks when they present it.

I don’t think this is the message that AIGA wants to send about graphic artists. As the premier organization for representing the future of what graphic arts can be, it would be nice to escape flatland and get to the core of communications.

The other big missing piece from the AIGA Salary Survey is the ability to export the data. How cool would it be to pump it into IBM’s Many Eyes project, letting people come up with dynamic interpretations on their own? How cool would it be to put together a student competition that focused on new and novel visualization techniques? Such a competition would accentuate the profession while demonstrating what the new wave of talent can bring to the world.

I get the AIGA is a membership organization and, in such organizations, it’s the volunteers making things happen. But this was a funded survey. (And the AIGA has this weird position of people not doing work for free—despite the fact they regularly ask me to volunteer my time to speak for free at their events.) They should’ve funded the project (or bagged the no-spec-work policy) to get the presentation portion as part of the project.

Overall, I’m really disappointed that the AIGA is stuck in this 1996 view of graphic arts. If the goal of the survey salary is to help promote the profession and demonstrate how valuable the organization’s members are to their companies, the best way to do that would be to take advantage of state-of-the-art thinking in that presentation.

Hopefully the AIGA will see that there are huge possibilities they’ve completely ignored. I’d love to see a state-of-the-art salary survey from them soon.

We’ve launched a ton of events in the 21 years we’ve been around. But this time, we were a little stuck for the name. So we put out the call and asked you to help us come up with a name. The only information we provided was that it was a 2 day event, held in 4 cities, and the content will cover best practices for designing web-based applications with top-caliber speakers.

We figured we’d get 30 or 40 ideas to choose from. Boy were we surprised. The entries started pouring in. All in all, we received more than 650 great ideas.

Some were obvious names: Web App Series, Web App Symposium, Web Apps 2010, and Web App Conference.

Some folks went the acronym route: Another Web App Road Extravaganza (AWARE), Browser-Based Application Development (B-BAD), and Interactive Web App National Tour (iWANT).

-palooza was a popular suffix. We received more than 25 submissions, including the likes of Spoolapalooza and Web Appalooza.

And the next most frequent submission we saw had 2×4 (as in two days, four cities) in the name such as Web App 2×4 and UIE2x4.

Some we thought were really amusing: Better than TED, The Justice League of Web Apps (we guess attendees are required to state their super powers), Swiss Army Knife Web Apps and How To Fold All Your Pieces Neatly Into Place, and UIE Web Apps: The Summit Is Not A Mirage.

So how do you choose the right name, one that’ll be the forefront of the event’s brand? To make our decision, we turned to the same techniques we use for prioritizing large amounts of user data.

The Process

As with any good process, we first needed to figure out how we’d know if we did a good job. We needed success criteria. So we went about identifying the qualities of a good UIE event name.

We know that it had to work well with UIE in it. Also, since this event will focus on web-based applications, it had to communicate that somehow.

As we looked at names we sorta liked and ones we didn’t like as much, we started talking about what made them different from each other. That gave us some perspectives: we wanted the name to be remarkable, but not too cute. It needed to be easy for someone to sell to their boss, since many folks will need to ask to come. Because we’ll be in four cities, we wanted that to come through, versus an event that is only held once.

(Coming up with attributes like this is the same way we figure out what makes one study participant different from another, when we’re creating personas. We make playing cards for each participant, pull out two cards, and ask “What’s different between them?” and “What’s the same?”)

We ended up with a list of 15 attributes. But it would be impossible to find a name that matched all of those. So we needed a way to figure out which attributes were most important.

We used another technique from our client work: we gave each attribute a weight. Every person on the team assigned a number from 1 to 5, where 5 is a must-have quality and 1 is a nice-to-have.

To come up with a group consensus, we used a two-step voting process. First, everyone says their number. Then we discussed any differences. (Why did Brian give that one a 2? Why did I give the same thing a 4?) Finally, everyone voted again (because the discussion changes people’s minds) and we chose the mode average. (Some people use median average, but that creates crazy precision that I don’t think is necessary.)

By looking at the final scores, it was clear what criteria our winning name needed to meet. We poured through the giant pile of submissions and one name jumped out.

The New Name of the Web App Thingy

Are you ready? Here it is: The UIE Web App Masters Tour.

It fit all our top criteria and we think it accurately describes how great the two-day, four-city tour of web app experts will be.

The Winners of the Contest

Six submissions were all very close to this name but hence, we can only have one winner. Congratulations to Ilona Posner for submitting the winning name. The other 5 people will receive runner-up prizes of proceedings discs from UI14 and the 2009 Web App Summit.

We also decided to give out the 2009 Web App Summit proceedings to a few creative entries:

• Wicked Web (App) Wizards Conference – Bryn Dews
• Justice League of Web Apps – Josh DiMauro
• Spool’s Web App Circus of Excellence – Caroline Sober

Finally, as promised, we drew three email address at random: Tracie Scott, Mark Malamud, and Martha Roden.

Thanks to everyone who participated. Be sure to follow us on Twitter for the latest updates on The UIE Web App Masters Tour.

But it still doesn’t have a name!

Our contest for the Web App Thingy produced more than 550 submissions so far. We’ve gotten some great ideas.

Here’s some of the really interesting submissions:

• Web App-attack!
• Wicked Web (App) Wizards Conference
• Web Apptitude 2010
• Web App Expert Series
• UIE Master Web App Designers Tour
• Web App Touchy-Feely-Event
• Web Jam
• UIE Web App Caravan
• Mega Web App Days

And one of my personal favorites came with a picture: Web App Tour (WAT).

Supply The Best Name and Win!

If we pick your name for the Web App Thingy, you’ll win a free registration. You’ll have 4 different locations to choose from.

And we’ll enter everyone who submits an entry into a drawing. We’re picking 3 people at random to each receive our UI14 Proceedings and UIE Web App Summit 2009 Proceedings Discs.

So, what are you waiting for? Send those submissions before midnight EST, Friday, December 4, 2009 to
contest@uie.com. We’ll announce the winners the week of December 7.

I can’t wait to see your ideas.

Subscribe to our podcast via

We’re back again this week with more savvy and silliness from the world of Userability. But first we’d like to thank you for making our first show such a success, we’ve had a ton of downloads. Have you told your friends about the show yet?

This week the guys spoke with Jon Hartmann of Morgantown, West Virginia. Jon asked Jared and Robert,

I’m a web developer (programming), not a web designer (graphics), but I love analytics and designing user interfaces. How do I make the career jump from coding to interface design and usability?

Tune in to find out if Jared and Robert can help Jon make the jump. As a free bonus, you’ll also learn where to find coffee in West Virginia.

We’re always looking for guests to stump Jared and Robert. Send us an email at userability@uie.com with your burning design-related questions.

What’s your two cents on the advice Robert and Jared gave today? Let us know in the comments!

Subscribe to our podcast via

Friends, I’d like to introduce you to our newest creation, the Userability Podcast. No, I didn’t mistype that. As we’ve mentioned previously, each week I’ll pick a caller to ask a UX question of experts Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr., who will do their best to find a good answer. The catch is, I’m not telling Robert and Jared what to expect… they have to answer you on the spot.

Today we’re releasing our pilot episode, with guest Rob Fay, who called in from Washington, D.C. with a great question. Rob asked,

I work for an e-learning company. We have a grading feature in our product that gives teachers the ability to grade an assignment by applying a grade to a gradebook. When we designed this, because of time constraints, we only focused on a few “grading” use cases and we only came up with a few design ideas. I wish we had brainstormed more. How can I influence my team’s culture to value design exploration, even within our current constraints?

Tune in to see if Robert and Jared can answer coherently! That’s the format of our little show: one caller, one question, a handful of useful takeaways, and hopefully some fun through out.

We need your questions. Submit your real-life design conundrums at userability@uie.com.

Give it a listen, and let us know what you think of the new show in the comments!

Robert Hoekman, world famous author of Designing the Obvious and Designing the Moment, and I, Jared M. Spool, a person who co-authored a book in 1996 that you’ve probably never seen, are joining forces to do the unthinkable: We’re starting a new weekly podcast to answer any user experience or design questions you can come up with. We’re calling it Userability. Seriously.

Yup. You’ll give us a question and we’ll give you an answer. We’re not sure it’ll be a good answer, but we’re promising it’ll be an entertaining one.

(Actually, like all good user experience processes, it’s not that simple. You give us a question. We pick your question for the show. We tell you what time we’re recording and make sure you’re available. We call you while we’re recording and you get to ask us “on the air” and then we give you the answer. And we have a lot of fun while doing it.)

And here’s where you come in: We need your questions. Think of a great question. Something you’d love to find out the answer to. It can even be a serious question. Send it to userability@uie.com. Brian Christiansen, our producer, will pick the best ones and tell you how to be on the program.

Don’t worry. Once the first program is ready, we’ll be sure to let you know, even if you can’t come up with a good question..

Looking forward to your questions (and our answers),

Jared Spool & Robert Hoekman, Co-hosts of Userability
Brian Christiansen, Producer of Userability (forced into it — wasn’t his choice)

userability@uie.com

(Of course, the flow charting portion of Dan Brown’s Communicating Design: Essential Deliverables for Highly Effective Design Teams session at the UIE Web App Summit will have a lot more depth to it.)

Everyone else puts up a sign saying how they don’t want solicitors to randomly walk into their offices and sell them stuff.

But not us.

We like solicitors. In fact, we tell them so in a sign we’ve put outside our offices:

Here’s what the sign says:

So far, a few solicitors have wandered in, fairly confused. A couple have brought gifts. Not an iPod or a Prius, mind you. A can of cashews and a baguette. Not what we were expecting, but a good start.

Today, one came in asking for a copy of the sign. They didn’t actually solicit anything, except the sign. I printed it off and they left.

I guess that’s progress.

Previously, to ride the T you needed special tokens, and you bought the tokens from a booth manned by an actual person. When I showed up yesterday at the station, I noticed the booth was boarded up and there were 6 new machines strewn about the building. I missed the memo about the new Charlie Card that is now used instead of tokens (shows how much I go into Boston.) The Charlie Card is a smart card used for automated fare collection, and you can reuse it by adding more money to it. (Just to give this post a little context, the Charlie Card is named after the man in The MTA Song, named Charlie, who can’t pay his way out of the subway and spends the rest of his life beneath the streets of Boston.)

Without knowing any of this, I approached one of the new machines and was immediately taken aback. There was so much going on, I didn’t know where to look.

After scanning the interface for a few moments, I finally found where you can insert your dollar bills. I figured it would be similar to a vending machine or ATM, and tried inserting my money. Nothing happened. I moved to a different machine and did the same thing. Nothing happened. Eventually I walked over to where I noticed an MBTA employee teaching a couple how to use the machine. Turns out you had to touch the upper-right hand corner of the screen before anything happened. With this new knowledge I returned to my previous machine and completed my transaction after a few more hassles.

What do you think of this interface? Do you think it’s counter-intuitive? Do you think the designers tried to cram too much functionality into one interface? If the main screen contained a large button that said “START HERE,” my problem might have been avoided.

It didn’t look like much at first, but then I noticed the blue and white hand sensor on the top. I waved my hand over the sensor, and the toilet seat started rotating under the blue arm that extended out a few inches. The arm let out a stream of cleaner and also “squeegeed” the seat as it rotated. The same thing also happened when you flushed. How cool is that? Functional, sanitary, and unordinary. I also wasn’t so annoyed about having to pay 50 Euro cents to use it.

The rest of the folks on my tour talked about these toilets for the rest of the day. Normally you wouldn’t give toilets a second thought, or care much about them. Let’s face it, using an ordinary toilet isn’t very thrilling. They all work the same and accomplish the same goals. But, this extra feature gave the experience a touch of excitement.

Customer/User expectations and homogenous products are two things marketers, designers, and development teams can use to their advantage when creating new goods, services, and experiences…or revamping old ones. By gauging customers’ expectations and transforming homogenous products to include new features, marketers and designers and can take a step beyond the ordinary and offer a pleasant surprise.

So, what is your self-cleaning toilet? How are you satisfying your customers’ needs for delight?

A user arriving at the site, only to find it suddenly unavailable, might become frustrated. To alleviate some of this frustration, the designers programmed the site to put up this message when the site goes offline:

Recently, to announce a scheduled shutdown, Twitter’s developers posted this amusing message:

Of course, frequent outages will continue to frustrate users, no matter how cute the messages become. However, adding a little levity into the situation does a nice job of communicating the bad news with personality. Levity and personality are two elements of a successful Fairy Door.

Could you see your organization putting up messages like this?

Related stories:

Best Western’s Fairy Doors

I travel a lot. A lot. Online check-in is a feature I take full advantage of. I’m very thankful for it. Not only can get to my regular cavity check sooner, but I’ve found an early check-in can often get you a better seat on the plane. Recent cancellations open up the more desirable aisle seats, allowing me to move out of my pre-assigned middle seat. These seats can disappear quickly, so one wants to check-in at the first opportunity, to get at these juicy seating options.

All this is great. However, the airlines still have to work out some of the bugs. Over at US Airways, I recently ran into a problem when the server had a little trouble know what day it was.

It was late in the evening when I finally had an opportunity to print out my boarding pass. Very late. In fact, it was this late, according to the clock on my Mac:

My plan, at 1:14 am, was to print out my boarding pass and go to bed. I would arrive in my office the next morning, then depart directly in the afternoon to make my 6pm flight.

So, on the verge of collapsing from exhaustion, I log into the US Airways site and am confronted with this dialog:

I enter my name, enter my confirmation code, then select today, since it was past midnight. (My first reaction was to choose the other choice, tomorrow, since I think of anything on the other side of sleep as the next day. yet today seemed more correct.)

Upon pressing the Check In button, I received this error message:

What’s ironic about all this is the date is extraneous information. They have my name and confirmation number. The confirmation is only applicable for the next flight. Adding the allegedly wrong date only eliminated the one correct query result choice.

And the site knew that. It told me the problem was the date. Since there were only two valid choices, today and tomorrow, why could it look to see if there was an off-by-one date problem. Especially since the flights were east coast (so, I was likely to be in Boston) and they knew their servers were on the west coast.

Would a human operator have done this?

Operator: What’s your confirmation number?

Me: EPHZV0

Operator: And when is your departure?

me: Today

Operator: I’m sorry sir, but that’s not correct. You must tell me the correct date. Is there another day you’d like to try?

me: Um, maybe… tomorrow?

Operator: Yes, that’s much better. I’m glad you got your dates right. Thank you for being smart enough to fly US Airways.

Yah, I didn’t think so.

Are you encouraging errors by asking users for information you should figure out yourself?

Kathy Sierra has a really funny, yet pertinent post on what has come to be known as “girl code.”

What prompted this post–and it’s whimsical title–is a post by Jamis Buck titled Beautiful code, test first, which includes the following: “He was telling me how he feels like he has to sit and tweak his code over and over until it not only acts right, but looks right. It cannot be merely functional, it must be beautiful, as well.”

But the best part was a comment by “Morten” that included the line:

“As for spending too much time on making the code look right down to the last indentation – my code has been called “girl code” for the same reason…”

Kathy also outlines the benefits of creating code that’s well formatted, well documented, and easy to maintain. This post particularly struck a chord with me, as a large portion of my background is based in programming. It’s tempting to throw a bit of Java, C++, Ruby, or what-have-you around and say, “Oh, it works. Who cares what it looks like?” But, when it comes to usability, everything on the inside is just as important as everything on the outside.

You can read Kathy’s entire post here: Code like a Girl

Also, for non-programmers, you can see a quick example of some less-than-stellar code with a nice write-up explaining its pitfalls here: What’s Wrong with this Code?, by Chris Becker.

How do you handle the aesthetics and usability of your product’s insides?

The following is a visualization of US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ 4/19 Senate Testimony, as rendered in a tag cloud:

“I don’t recall” just jumps out at you, doesn’t it…

However, while reading the Doonesbury comic strip at GoComics.com, I noticed that their navigation changed from Next Day…

… to No Next Day.

While I applaud the designers for using something a little less subtle than just removing the link, the phrase No Next Day troubles me slightly. I wouldn’t mind something a little less, well, ominous. (It reminds me of the phrase I dislike hearing when traveling: my final destination. It always sound so “final.”)

So, what can we learn from In-N-Out Burger?

In-N-Out Burger does a great job of using preconceived notions to their advantage. They take a step beyond the expected and pleasantly surprise their customers. By offering fresh ingredients, outstanding quality control, and made-to-order food, In-N-Out exceeds the standards of the typical fast food joint. They don’t use microwaves or freezers, their fries are hand-cut and prepared on site, and the building is actually clean.

Going against the grain got In-N-Out Burger noticed. In their case, being the black sheep doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It’s interesting how In-N-Out offers a peculiar variety of drink choices. While they could have saved money by only offering Coca Cola or Pepsi products, they chose to offer customers Coke, Diet Coke, 7-Up, and Dr Pepper; the latter 2 produced by Cadbury Schweppes. In-N-Out strives to produce the best experience to customers even when it meant branching out to more than one beverage distributor.

Creating a sense of intrigue and exclusivity can do wonders with customers. A good story can often stimulate people’s interest and keep them coming back for more. Did you know In-N-Out has a secret menu? The customers that are aware of the secret menu feel like they are part of the in-crowd, and find great joy placing an order “animal style,” only to hear the folks around them inquire what that is. In-N-Out also doesn’t have any restaurants more than a day’s drive away from its main distribution center. While I’m assuming this is done for quality reasons, it also allows In-N-Out to remain exclusive to a certain area. Whenever I am in In-N-Out territory, I make it a point to go, as do many other people.

In-N-Out has also chosen to remain relatively small in comparison to other fast-food chains, which allows them to adapt quickly while holding steadfast to their tried and true values. I recommend to many of our clients to avoid striving for world domination, that way they can stay true to their loyal audience base. Just as Seth Godin points out in his new book, Small is the New Big, there is an advantage to being small. Small companies can do big things. In-N-Out is a family-owned chain that refuses to franchise. This allows them to foster an extremely close relationship with their associates and customers while staying true to tradition.

Finally, In-N-Out keeps their choices simple. Their menu is one of the simplest I’ve encountered. When I make my burger choice, there aren’t any complex decisions I have to make. Think about Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice. In a culture where we seem to have limitless choice, Barry argues that more choice doesn’t necessarily lead to greater satisfaction or superior alternatives. He believes more choice leads to psychological and emotional detriment. Either you want a burger or you don’t; no wasting time and effort choosing among 50 different menu items, frustrating yourself, wondering if you made the right decision. The menu is as easy as 1, 2, 3.

Leave it to me to relate everything to food…

[Photo courtesy of Christine Perfetti]

Are you annoyed by online ads?

That’s the question asked by, of all things, an advertisement on AccuWeather.com’s web site promoting ad-free usage of the site.

Of course, this ad for no advertising is wedged between a huge ad for Verizon’s new high-speed fiber service and a handful of Google ads. It seems AccuWeather is happy to collect advertising dollars while they suggest you might not want to see those ads. I wonder how Verizon and the Google advertisers feel that AccuWeather is insinuating they are annoying?

But it gets better…

When you investigate what it takes to get ads out of your weather-viewing experience, you are promised “Same Great Site Design,” “Same Great Content,” and “No Advertising” for only pennies per day.

Except…

“No Advertising” has a little asterisk next to it. What does that mean, you ask? Well, apparently it’s not exactly zero advertising. Instead, according to the site:

* All ads from external advertisers are removed. AccuWeather reserves the right to promote Premium benefits within the Premium site, or upgrades to your Premium service, or other related AccuWeather services, in empty spaces where existing ads are present on the free AccuWeather.com.

So, you’ll pay pennies a day and still see ads. Just not Verizon and Google’s ads. Only AccuWeather’s. I guess that’s what the user wants, right?

Alan has a sequel, cleverly called Animator vs. Animation II.

You can see other sites I find humorous by following the Humor tag on my Delicious bookmarks.

Present for this recording were Jared M. Spool, DeWayne Purdy, Kyle Pero, Lyle Kantrovich, Rashmi Sinha, Nate Bolt, and Joshua Porter. You can meet the crew here.

More info about what’s in this episode here.

(Here’s an RSS feed that iTunes likes.)

We’d love to hear what you think. Leave your comments here or you can write us at SpoolCast@uie.com.

Present for this recording were Jared M. Spool, DeWayne Purdy, Kyle Pero, Lyle Kantrovich, Rashmi Sinha, Nate Bolt, and Joshua Porter. You can meet the crew here.

More info about what’s in this episode here.

I’ll have Part 4 available tomorrow. Part 4 is now available here.
(Here’s an RSS feed that iTunes likes.)

We’d love to hear what you think. Leave your comments here or you can write us at SpoolCast@uie.com.

Present for this recording were Jared M. Spool, DeWayne Purdy, Kyle Pero, Lyle Kantrovich, Rashmi Sinha, Nate Bolt, and Joshua Porter. You can meet the crew here.

More info about what’s in this episode here.

Part 3 is available here. (Here’s an RSS feed that iTunes likes.)

We’d love to hear what you think. Leave your comments here or you can write us at SpoolCast@uie.com.

Present for this recording were Jared M. Spool, DeWayne Purdy, Kyle Pero, Lyle Kantrovich, Rashmi Sinha, Nate Bolt, and Joshua Porter. You can meet the crew here.

In session, the SpoolCast Crew convened to discuss a variety of topics:

• What would our dream panel at a conference be?
• Do the Comparative Usability Evaluation studies really tell us anything about the discipline of usability research?
• Is usability practice an engineering discipline or a craft?
• Is there value to conducting heuristic evaluations?
• Is it worth discussing how many users should be in a usability test?
• What can we learn from the recent Facebook controversy?

I’ve divided the recording into four parts to make it easier to listen to while commuting.
Part 2 lives here.
Part 3 lives here.
Part 4 lives here.
(Here’s a feed that iTunes likes.)

The transcript is available here.

I think I’ve solved the volume problem, having discovered how dynamic range compression can be my best friend. I’m sure you’ll let me know if I got it wrong.

We’d love to hear what you think. Leave your comments below or you can write us at SpoolCast@uie.com.

Present for this recording were DeWayne Purdy, Kyle Pero, Lyle Kantrovich, Rashmi Sinha, and Nate Bolt.

More info about what’s in this inaugural episode here. We want to know what you think. Leave any comments in the Part 1 post.

Present for this recording were DeWayne Purdy, Kyle Pero, Lyle Kantrovich, Rashmi Sinha, and Nate Bolt.

More info about what’s in this inaugural episode here. We want to know what you think. Leave any comments in the Part 1 post.

Part 4 is now available.

Present for this recording were DeWayne Purdy, Kyle Pero, Lyle Kantrovich, Rashmi Sinha, and Nate Bolt.

More info about what’s in this inaugural episode here. We want to know what you think. Leave any comments in the Part 1 post.

Part 3 is now available.

Present for this recording were DeWayne Purdy, Kyle Pero, Lyle Kantrovich, Rashmi Sinha, and Nate Bolt.

In our first podcast, the SpoolCast Crew convenes (virtually) to discuss a variety of topics:

• What can we learn from the new Brown University web site?
• What does it mean to be usable?
• Why is MySpace so successful?
• Which is better designed, the new Brown Web Site or Craigslist?
• How important is the design of a home page? (I think not so much. Everyone else disagrees.)
• The value of social networking
• The UPA Body of Knowledge project
• The design experience, as it applies to conference design

You can meet the crew here.

Lyle does a magnificent job, considering he was suffering from a multi-week installation of laryngitis. Apparently, these are the first words he’s uttered to anyone in almost a month. (His wife still doesn’t know he’s gotten his voice back. Please don’t tell her.)

Josh Porter couldn’t join us for this inaugural episode, as he was in a secret government hospital having alien implants removed from a recent abduction.

After we recorded the session, Brown University went ahead and launched their new site, which you can see here. DeWayne shared us some user feedback to the beta: here, here, and here.

We also talked about the UPA Body of Knowledge project and the DUX 2005 conference that happened late last year.

I’ve divided the recording into four parts to make it easier to listen to while commuting. I should have Part 2 available tomorrow. (Here’s a feed that iTunes likes.)

The transcript for the entire broadcast is available here.

When you’re ready, you can listen to Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

We’d love to hear what you think. Leave your comments below.

Apparently at Caesars Indiana, we find an extreme example of what happens when a design makes the customer experience a little too good:

BRIDGEPORT, Indiana (AP) — Gamblers raked in nearly half a million dollars over two days on a slot machine that multiplied by 10 the amount of money that players put in, then paid out vouchers without playing, a newspaper reported.

Caesars Indiana lost $487,000 before a player notified officials of the problem with the machine, The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Kentucky, reported Friday.

Kathryn Ford of Louisville realized something was wrong July 23 when she and her husband sat down at two of the machines, called Extra Money.

When she put in a $20 bill the machine registered it as $200. She tried another $20 bill and the same thing happened, she said.

Ford said she put eight $20 bills in the machine and received vouchers that could be redeemed for $1,600 in cash — without even playing.

Turned out to be a software problem:

Casino officials determined the machine had a switch set for use in the Philippines, instead of the United States, instructing it to multiply credits by 10.

I don’t know about you, but visiting the Philippines just became a higher priority on my list. I like the way they think there.

I couldn’t figure out why she was coming, as my I thought my session was for people who were new to information architecture. I thought she just was being polite.

Imagine my surprise when she sent me these kind words this week:

“I don’t know if you remember, but when I ran into you in the lift going down to your workshop at the IA Summit, you said ‘why are you going to this’ and I said ‘because I don’t know everything’. Truly, I learned more useful, practical stuff in that day than anything in the last couple of years. You should see my link-heavy homepages. So, thanks. Even experienced IA chicks can learn stuff!”

Wow! Thanks, Donna!

I’m giving the same presentation at the upcoming Webvisions 2006 conference in Portland, OR later this month. You can read about it here.

When you mouse over each face, it gives you a little call out:

Very cute.

• There are 4 gamers to every golfer on the planet
• 1 in 5 people over 50 are gamers
• The opening day of Star Wars III grossed $50m. The opening weekend of Spiderman II grossed $160m. Halo 2 grossed $125m on its first day. Games now generate the same revenue as Hollywood blockbusters.
• Game industry annual revenue is about $10 billion per year. ($7.6 billion is the software component.)
• Hollywood box office sales have been flat for 3 years. Gaming software grew exponentially over the same period.
• More than 10 million people play in massively multi-player role playing games (MMORPGs).
• If you look at the GDP of the world of Everquest, it comes in about $2000 per capita. China currently comes in about $500 per capita.
• In Indonesia, people earn $1 per hour farming gold in Everquest. (Looking for dropped gold and picking it up.)
• According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average journalist makes $47,000 per year. School teachers make $39,000 – $44,000. According to Castronova, the average gold farmer makes $57,000.
• 35% of game players spend more time playing online than they spend at work.

Me thinks the world of gaming is something we’re gonna have to pay more attention to.

In the letter for yesterday’s UIEtips, I wrote the following analogy:

“There are few things more frustrating in life than trying to get a drinking glass in someone else’s kitchen. You have to open every cabinet door to figure out where they put the empty glasses. For a few moments, we feel like we’re invading a very private space, searching for something innocuous by opening every nook and cranny.

“It’s an interesting phenomena, since, in our own house, we have a cabinet with glasses. Chances are the glasses are in a cabinet near the kitchen sink. Yet, when we’re in unfamiliar territory, we’re on a search and rescue mission of immense proportions.

“In the 21st century, innovation has finally arrived. Cabinet manufacturers have come up with an amazing invention: windows. Yes, they now put windows in the cabinets so you see the glasses without opening every door. Simply brilliant. I wish I’d thought of it.”

to which I got a response from Steve (male):

“What a great analogy!

“I’d take it one step further — when you start redesigning a site, it’s like moving in with someone. ‘What do you mean the glasses go in THAT cabinet. They should go in THIS one!’”

and this response from Robin (female):

Very bad analogy.

• At least 3/4 of women would not search all over. We would look around the kitchen and say “I would put the glasses near the fridge” (if there is a water dispenser on the fridge) or “I would put the glasses between the sink and the dishwasher”. and lo and behold, most of the time we are right. So I don’t think of myself doing this. I gather this doesn’t come naturally for the male of the species.
• Windows aren’t a new invention, you just discovered them I can show you pictures of 50s kitchens that have them. They are rare because they have a lot of downsides. Ignoring what happens in the earthquake (oh, you didn’t think of that….), they expose one’s internal messiness and they are a bitch to keep clean. I’d trade off getting rid of those problems against my guests doing a bit more hunting any day (and I don’t need the glass door to find the glasses, though I’ll bet my husband would still benefit from them

Next time, feel free to run your domestic metaphors by me.

Feels like gender perspectives to me. (Having two data points gives me 100% correlation on this inference.)

My old friend, Barbara, added her two cents:

Hmmm, my glasses are never in the cabinet near the sink–well maybe a few. Then, there’s a couple in my office, a couple in my bedroom, one on the living room table, a few in the dishwasher and some more in the sink. Oh, you meant clean glasses. I wouldn’t know where to find them….

I don’t know if all this attention to the analogy means the message is getting through or it’s getting lost.

According to this fascinating study done by Marco Iacoboni at the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, whose team used fMRI to record and analyze the brain waves of a small group of people while they watched on Sunday, Disney had the best ad while Sierra Mist came in 2nd.

This study is interesting not just because we all seem fascinated by the Super Bowl commercial phenomenon but because it demonstrates that recording the brain waves of people and analyzing them with an incredibly fast turn-around is possible. Presumably, you could extend this to do studies on people using web sites as well.

But what do the results really say? Was the Disney commercial the most effective, or did it just pique our interest the most? Are those two things the same?

Yes they are, according to Iacoboni, who equates brain activity with success for the ad. He writes:

“The Disney ad elicited strong responses in orbito-frontal cortex and ventral striatum, two brain regions associated with processing of rewards. Also, the Disney ad induced robust responses in mirror neuron areas, indicating identification and empathy. Further, the circuit for cognitive control, encompassing anterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, was highly active while watching the Disney ad. We consider all these features positive markers of brain responses to the ad.”

Here’s a shot of that technical jargon in action, illustrating neuron activity in the right posterior inferior frontal gyrus – indicating identification and empathy:

Even so, I would want to see how many people actually go to Disney World as a result of watching the commercial. I know it didn’t change my travel plans in the near-term. But I have to wonder, did it effectively imprint happy thoughts in my head, so that the next time I’m in Florida, I just might be more likely to go?

“Over the holidays, Amazon processed at least 108 million orders and shipped on time 99% of the time, the company says. “

1% of 108,000,000 is 1,080,000. That means more than a million people didn’t get an order on time.

In the world of the internet, it’s not unusual for numbers to be in the millions: users, orders, pages, products…

Even when 99% of whatever is perfect, that 1% imperfection is still a pretty big number. Almost perfect isn’t perfect.

It’s just something to remember when we’re making all those compromises in our designs.

I’ll admit I’ve never eaten at the Century House before. But now that I’ve seen how they choose to describe their food, I’m not all that eager to try out the restaurant anytime soon. Even when I visited the Century House web site, the designers chose to display the ‘Unexcelled Food’ description prominently on the home page.

If the designers of the Century House’s site had tested the copy, would users have found the description persuasive? So far, I’ve asked more than a dozen people what their impressions are and many assumed unexcelled was a negative term meaning that the restaurant’s food was poor or ‘not excelling’. Actually, the term has a very positive meaning: not capable of being improved on.

While the copywriters intended to persuade users to dine at the Century House, the words didn’t seem all that persuasive to the people I surveyed. This is why it’s so important for design teams to test out the effectiveness of the site’s copy with their users. By testing your own site, it really brings home the huge importance of words on the web.

The feature is simple. You type in the name of a band/artist that you like, Last.fm spits back related ones, and you learn about bands that you may not have known about. Here is a screenshot:

The designers at Last.fm have recognized that the best way to get people excited about their service is to let them try it out for free. So they’ve placed this handy tool smack-dab in the center of their home page, giving something for nothing in the hopes that folks will enjoy it enough to sign up for the service.

This is a common trend. The amount of time and energy it takes to try out the myriad of services on the Web is increasing. What can you provide for free that is as irresistable as this music recommendation tool?

Here’s a challenge: go to Last.fm and resist the recommendation tool. I dare ya. If you possess any ounce of curiosity you’ll need a whole lot of willpower, too.

Click here to see the Canon Support’s Frequently Asked Question page.

To check out the Frequently Asked Questions, Canon needs you choose between two choices: “search for solutions based on specific words or phrases” (Keywords) or search “a wide range of solution based on general categories”

What happens when the user just wants to know why their printer isn’t being recognized by the operating system? Is that specific? Is that general? What’s the keyword? What’s the category?

Inquiring minds wanna know…

Not long after I wrote about Fandango’s recruiting approach, I hopped in my car and turned on my iPod to listen to a podcast I previously downloaded. (I don’t listen to the radio anymore. Only podcasts.) This morning, I chose NPR’s All Songs Considered.

At the beginning of the recording, the charming announcer enticed me to help NPR learn something about it’s podcast listeners (me!) and suggested I visit www.npr.org/research to fill out a brief survey. As I was in the car, I couldn’t do this immediately. However, as soon as I got to my desk, I typed in the URL and got this:

Granted, the recording I was listening to turned out to be a few weeks old. However, NPR lost a great opportunity. I was eager and willing to give them some feedback and they basically sent me away.

There’s nothing else on the page — not even a link to other parts of the site. More importantly, there isn’t a chance for me to indicate I’d be interested in helping with future research efforts.

I wonder what results they’d see from a simple enter-your-email-and-we’ll-contact-you-next-time form.

Serendipity lost.

What is HomeLab?

Philips HomeLab looks and feels like a regular home with modern furniture in every room, Van Gogh prints on the walls, and even a fully stocked kitchen. While no one lives at Philips HomeLab, temporary “residents” can stay at the facility for anywhere from 24 hours to two weeks, depending on the type of research being conducted. During their residence, individuals or families will go about life as usual, while interacting with the new technologies Philips has installed in the facility.

Some innovations that Phillips is testing in the lab:

Interactive Mirror

The Interactive Mirror enhances a mirror with a display function, while adding interactivity by sensing user input. The Interactive Mirror demonstrates several application concepts for domestic and professional use, supporting and enhancing our daily activities by providing new possibilities. A set of applications specifically developed for the bathroom enables you to check the latest weather forecast and traffic information, examine your weight, try on new hairstyles, and control ambient lighting. A new application called “Double Vision” allows the mirror to act as a magnifying mirror and show your back view. It also offers an intuitive user interface for adjusting light settings that simulate different lighting conditions, e.g. ‘Outdoor’, ‘Office’, etc.

The lab itself sounds like something CBS would show during prime time. Do participants get voted out?

(Ok. I wrote this before I saw Dan Saffer’s writeup. So, I guess we think similarly…)

I’m not sure if the hotel intended that I would look out my window with it:

Deere & Co, which according to Yahoo, has a market cap of $15 billion, makes most of its money by selling tractors and harvesters. So, it’s ironic that they have a retail store right here on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, in the same block as my hotel.

What’s most amazing is that the store doesn’t sell a single tractor or harvester. (The clerks laughed when I asked if I could buy one.) Instead, they’ve created a huge market for clothing, toys, and other paraphanalia, such as light switch covers.

Could your business come out with a line of toys and make money selling them?

Click to see entire error message page.

It has such clever sentences, such as my personal favorite:

The error occurred while processing an element with a general identifier of (CFQUERY), occupying document position (1271:5) to (1271:67) in the template file F:\WWWROOT\PORTAL\V6\POPLOGIN.CFM.

Damn! I hate when that happens!

ACM isn’t the only site victimized by problems like this. This page appeared while trying to make a reservation on Marriott’s site:

No! Not Line 209 again! Oh, the humanity!

So, what is the user supposed to do with this information? What is the next step? Sure, you could (somehow) message the information to the site administrator. (And why doesn’t the system just automatically do that?) Then what?

If we can’t be sure we’ve eliminated all the error messages from our site, we need to ensure we design the experience we want a user to have when encountering one. Do we want them to go away? Do we want them to try an alternative approach or a workaround? Do we want them to come back when we’ve fixed it? (And when will that be?) What, exactly, do we want from them?

If we don’t tell them, it’s likely they’ll just give up on us. Is that what they were supposed to do?

U.S. President George W. Bush writes a note to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during a Security Council meeting at the 2005 World Summit and 60th General Assembly of the United Nations in New York September 14, 2005.

Reuters

(Nope! Ain’t gonna get me to comment on the fact that he posed his request as a question. We’re not goin’ there.)

On the day *I* go to work for Microsoft, faint oinking sounds will be
heard from far overhead, the moon will not merely turn blue but
develop polkadots, and hell will freeze over so solid the brimstone
will go superconductive.

No “Hello Raymond,” though…

I’m guessing he never made it to the interview.

If Microsoft Word can tell some text (like “http://www.microsoft.com/randomlink”) is a URL (and thereby automagically make it into a link), why can’t it avoid trying to spell check it?

Inquiring minds really wanna know…

But, I just can’t keep it to myself: I received another email from Ms. Julie. (See here and here if you are new to this saga.)

Frankly, I never replied to her previous email. I meant to, but I’ve had several deadlines that I was catching up on and didn’t get the chance to tell her that I took her question seriously and put it out for discussion before giving her a thoughtful response.

So, I was surprised when I heard from her again. This time, with an apology:

From: “Julie Stingham”
Subject: My sincere apologies

[ at this point in the email, there's a broken image with the id "Microsoft" -- J ]

Dear Jared,

I am writing you in regards to the email I sent you on 8/25/05 with the subject “Microsoft User Experience needs your expertise.” In the first email I sent you, I addressed you by your last name and am responding to apologize for this mistake. It was an unintentional error and I sincerely am sorry. As you can imagine, we all run into technical difficulties now and then, and even those of us who work at Microsoft are not exempt! I personally value the relationships I build with people in the UX industry and want to make sure I am addressing everyone properly. If I have still addressed you incorrectly, please make sure to correct me for any future correspondence we might have.

Thank you in advance for your patience and understanding.

Warm Regards,
Julie Stringham

P.S. If you have already responded to my first email, I have received it. I am currently reviewing responses and will be back in touch with you in the next two weeks.

P.P.S- You have my personal permission to address me as “Hello Stringham” any time you wish!

At first I was confused. After all, she already apologized in the last letter. Then it occurred to me: This is another mass mailing! She’s apologizing for her last mass mailing by sending out another mass mailing.

Her letter says she wants to build a relationship with people in the UX industry. Can she (or any of us) build relationships through mass mailings? Is this an instance of a powerful tool in the hands of someone who doesn’t quite know how to use that power? Or is building a relationship through a broadcast mechanism an unattainable holy grail?

As someone who sends out a lot of broadcast mail (though only to people who have requested to get mail from UIE), I can sympathize with Ms. Julie’s dilemma. I just wonder if this type of approach is really that different that the hundreds (actually, approaching thousands) of messages I get every day to have body parts enlarged.

Update: Kevin Cheng, of OK/Cancel fame, points out that Ms. Julie misspelled her last name in the header. (She left out an “r”.) Between that and the broken link, we see Ms. Julie is more of a relationships person than a details person.

Hi Julie,

I find it hard to believe that I’m even close to Microsoft material.

But, thanks for thinking of me, anyways.

Jared

I was going for the honest and sincere approach, letting her down easy from the massive disappointment I’m sure she was about to experience, realizing that she couldn’t add me to her list of assimilative successes. Of course, I was thinking of my track record (having been fired from most of the jobs I’ve ever held) and the fact that I’ve developed a reputation for not scoring high in the “Plays well with other” category. I would think that Microsoft (or anyone else for that matter) would not find either of those qualities attractive. (I’ve often felt that, if I applied for a job at UIE, I’d not come anywhere near close to meeting the qualifications of working here.)

Note that I didn’t mention anything about her nifty way of addressing folks in her initial query.

She sent me this exceptionally warm response today:

Hello Jared,

Thank you for your email. I sincerely apologize for the mistake of addressing you by your last name. Not a great user experience and very insincere to say the least. It was not my intention and was due to a problem with the mail merge function from the list I created for the mailing.

I’d like to clarify that I researched you online which is where I found your information, not a resume. Your name is mentioned often within the User Experience community and I wanted to reach out to you. I understand that you may not feel that Microsoft is not the right employer for you. However, if you are interested, I would appreciate any insights you might have to share as to why Microsoft is not a top employer choice within User Experience.

Again, my apologies! I am looking forward to hearing back from you.

Warm Regards,
Julie

(It’s neat that Microsoft employees have as much trouble with MS Word’s mail merge functionality as I do. It reminds me of the time when I was doing a presentation at the Redmond campus for an army of Microsoft developers when, all of a sudden, my machine crashed with a “This program has conducted an illegal operation” error message. The entire audience moaned as soon as they saw the message and one guy shouted out, “You get those too?” I guess they don’t get out of the bubble too often.)

I’m not quite sure why Microsoft isn’t the Top Employer choice amongst User Experience. Now, my lack of knowledge in this area might be because it’s been 17 years since I last looked for a job. So, I’m hoping you’ll help me answer Julie’s question. Why isn’t Microsoft the Top Employer? What would you look for Microsoft to change for you to be seduced by Julie’s gracious invitation? Inquiring minds want to know…

Update: Ms. Julie followed up with yet another email.

In this morning’s inbox:

From: juliest@microsoft.com
Subject: Microsoft User Experience needs your expertise
Date: 25 Aug 2005 04:06:50 -0400

Hello Spool,

I came across your information online and would like to reach out to you regarding career opportunities in the area of User Experience at Microsoft Corporation. Please feel free to reply to this mail with an update on your current situation. If you are interested in learning more about our career opportunities, please also attach an updated version of your resume.

I look forward to your response,

Sincerely,

Julie Stringham
User Experience Talent Scout
Microsoft Staffing

P.S  Please check out our exciting new design at Microsoft site http://www.microsoft.com/resources/design/ and our Usability site: http://www.microsoft.com/usability/default.mspx

I last updated my resume in 1988. I have no idea where the file is.

I’m guessing I’m not Microsoft material, anyways, as I tend to enjoy addressing people by their first name.

Update: Christine reports that Ms. Julie sent her a “Hello Perfetti” email. Josh, on the other hand, has escaped Ms. Julie’s web…

Update: The saga continues…

Update: And there’s more…

(Maybe that’s why they haven’t accepted any of my submissions for the conference in years.)

From O’Reilly’s weekly email: (Emphasis mine)

*** O’Reilly Network Top Five Articles Last Week ***

1. What Is FireWire (and How Best to Use It)
FireWire is a high-speed, data serial interface that has many practical
uses. In this article, you’ll learn the ins and outs of this powerful
technology, plus some inside tips to take advantage of its unique
features.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mac/2005/07/26/firewire.html

***
2. Rolling with Ruby on Rails
The Ruby community is abuzz about Rails, a web application framework that
makes database-backed apps dead simple. What’s the fuss? Is it worth the
hype? Curt Hibbs shows off Rails, building a simple application that even
non-Rubyists can follow.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/20/rails.html

***
3. Web Services Messaging with Apache Axis2: Concepts and Techniques
The messaging strategies needed for web services vary, and Apache Axis2
has addressed this problem by creating basic building blocks from which
many messaging schemes can be built. Srinath Perera and Ajith Ranabahu
show how it works.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/onjava/2005/07/27/axis2.html

***
4. Privacy Policy
The O’Reilly Network privacy policy

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mediakit/privacy.html

***
5. Using Perl to Manage Plist Files
A common question is how to manage complex Plist files with scripts. The
defaults command, which is often used to manage simple values in Plist
files, does not easily manage the nested arrays or dictionaries that are
present in most Plist files. In this first article of a two-part series,
James Reynolds pulls together a little Perl and Cocoa to solve this
problem.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mac/2005/07/29/plist.html