I’ve been thinking about this question for a while now. Something was bothering me and I think I’ve figure it out.

Instead of thinking about ‘early adopters’ and ‘normals’ as if they are two homogeneous groups, I think it’s better to look at the motivations that trigger someone to buy into a new technology or solution at various points in the release timeline.  Here’s some of our research findings, as we try to understand when people take to new stuff:

People Who Are First

In our research, we’ve found three main reasons that someone adopts a product or service early on.

Being First to Gain Social Status

Many of the answers describing early adopters are talking about a select group of people who are the first to acquire new technologies and solutions — those with the motivation to be amongst the first. In our research, there are common themes of drivers for this motivation. 

These individuals tend to drive their social status by knowing the latest-and-greatest in what’s happening in the tech space. The people we’ve interviewed tell us they enjoy the thrill of having something before others, of knowing details about what’s happening, and of partaking in the ‘insider’ community of the tech world.

For these individuals, it’s a passionate avocation, sometimes professional, to collect and promote their newest items. They don’t need the products for what they do, they just want them to be at the leading edge of use. You can think of it like movie reviewers — they go to practically every movie, to serve as an informed authority for others in their influence circles on how good it is and what the salient features are.

These folks aren’t very loyal customers. In our research, they infrequently use something once another item comes out to replace it. (Plus, if they develop enough of a reputation, they are often given the first version, so they don’t even provide the initial revenue.) They are, in effect, an extension of the marketing machine for the product.

Being First as Product Research

There’s another group we found in our research: those folks who want to be first because they need to keep up for professional reasons. They are almost always in the tech community (or in fringe communities, like financial analysts that study the tech world). They buy the new to understand the core of the innovations that are happening.

Their interest isn’t in use, but in reverse engineering, on some level. They want to see what makes it tick and how to exploit any good ideas for other projects they may have.

These aren’t very loyal customers either. They don’t really care about the product or the company that made it, beyond what salient innovations they can take away.

Being First to Solve An Active Need

Unlike the other two categories above, this group jumps at a new product or service because it promises to solve a need they find very pressing. For these folks, they’re currently feeling pain and the new product or service is a solution.

Recently, we’ve seen this with the Toyota Prius (need: be more environmentally friendly and reduce gas consumption), Apple iPod (need: have music more available), Apple iPhone (need: a better mobile experience), TiVo (need: time-shifted television watching), Dropbox (need: share files across devices and with colleagues), and Cirque du Soleil (need: a grown-up circus).

What’s interesting is the folks who buy into these products early on don’t typically buy into just any products early. They have a real need and are willing to take the risks of the early product to resolve it.

This group isn’t responsive to brands per se, though a successful outcome will strengthen brand engagement. They don’t automatically buy other products from the same brand. (For example, most strongly-pleased iPhone customers didn’t purchase Apple TV, even though it’s a sister product.)

In some cases, the active need is because their existing solution is slowly killing them through what we call the “death of a thousand cuts.” They are feeling increasing pain with their existing solution and are looking for any compelling reason to move away.

Of the three groups I’ve mentioned so far, this is the only one who actually uses the product for more than experimentation. Unlike the other groups, the folks in this group’s successes and pain points are similar to what you’ll see with later groups. These are the folks to design for.

People Who Wait

What you’re calling the “normals” are people who wait to purchase after a new product or service is introduced. Like the folks who buy immediately, our research has shown there are several types of these people.

Waiting Because Unaware of Latent Needs

Like the folks solving for an active need, these people also have a need for the product or service. The problem is that they don’t realize that need yet. They are experiencing the same pains, but they haven’t actively identified that a solution exists, let alone the product or service that’s on the market.

Often, it isn’t until someone close to them, who encounters the same pains, shares how they’ve solved it with the product or service. Since they aren’t looking for the solution directly, they often are immune to any marketing beyond word-of-mouth. Even then, they might have to hear it from several members of their cohort before they act.

For these folks, the design needs to help convert the latent need to an active need. Once these people see the benefits from the point of view of an active need, they’ll be more likely to try out the product or service. The first interactions with the product or service need to address that need directly, without any friction or interference.

Waiting Because Of Perceived Cost Of Change

Change is costly for folks. For that reason, many typically approach it cautiously. Since people remember pain more vividly than pleasure, the pain of their previous changes are often upmost on their mind. A new product or service has to talk directly to the pain from that change to reach these people.

The cost of change comes in many forms. There’s the monetary implications of purchasing something new versus keeping the old thing. Free trials and other “try me” promotions can help with the money, but don’t get over the other forms automatically.

Also, there’s a cost of moving data and procedures to the new thing. For computer-based products, people have a ton of data they’d need to migrate over. They also have routines and rituals in their life that make the transition difficult. (For example, someone moving from one email client to another has to adjust their morning-check-and-reply rituals.) Designers who plan out this transition do much better than those who leave it to the user to figure out.

Another cost of change is the loss of competence with the new product. Using their existing solution, they’ve accrued a comfortable competence level that lets the product or service disappear, while the new one they have to learn everything all over again. (One of the smartest things Microsoft ever did was, when releasing Excel 3.0, creating a separate manual called Microsoft Excel for Lotus 1-2-3 Users. This guide directly translated the competence of the Lotus user to the new product.)

Waiting Out The Product Lifetime

A small, but firm group are the folks who, once have a working solution, will refuse to change until the product or service completely dies and is no longer an option. These folks will resist any new product or service until whatever they are doing just can’t be done.

In our research on personas, we’ve found this works best when the personas are based on real people doing real things. We regularly take teams into the field to meet their users and watch them interact in their own environments. We then capture the interesting bits to assemble our personas. We know we’ve done a great job when we can point to any element of the persona description and talk about the different real users we observed, doing and saying the same things.

What happens when we can’t do the research with the real users? Tamara Adlin does something she calls Ad-Hoc Personas, where the team gathers all the information they already know without doing any new research. Kim Goodwin does something similar that she calls Provisional Personas.

Because we often already know a lot about the people we’ve been selling our product to and supporting, we can build a decent picture of what they are like and what they need. If we combine different viewpoints, like those from sales, training, and support, it’s possible to surface a lot of interesting details to design with.

However, these aren’t as rich as the fully-researched personas we started with. It’s hard to separate out the mythology that forms around users from the reality. The advantage of going into the field is we can see where that mythology breaks down.

It’s possible we could go even farther away from the research by creating personas that are complete fiction. The team could ask, “What do imagine users might be like?” and “What do we think those users might do?” I guess it’s possible personas crafted from complete fiction like this can inspire the team to innovation, but it’s likely not better than self design, which would at a minimum have checks and balances of contact with someone using it.

The “persona purists” argue that completely fictional personas aren’t real personas at all. Their argument is that when we dilute the research component that goes behind the persona, we take risks that a design built from those personas won’t fit the needs of real users as well.

At UIE, we’ve seen multiple teams go down this fictional road, then end up with descriptions that nobody believed in. The team didn’t rally around it and the personas turned out to be a wasted effort. Because they were labeled “personas”, it was impossible to get those teams to buy into a subsequent well-researched persona project. They were completely turned off by the idea of personas and were against any future investment in them.

Should we come up with a different name for those things we create from pure fiction, like “user caricatures” or “fictional users”? (When I asked Kim Goodwin if she had a name for completely fictional personas, she called them “creative writing class exercise.” That sums it up pretty well, I think.) Should we go to efforts to explain that things without research aren’t personas?

What about the Ad-hoc Personas or Provisional Personas? Should we stop calling them personas too?

We don’t want personas to become diluted so much that the term doesn’t have meaning. How do we protect the value of these tools without getting lost in semantic mumbo-jumbo?

One cause is that we tend to think of complexity as a holistic effect. We try to decide if the entire design is complex or not. However, it’s easier to realize where your design is baffling your users if you hone in on what your users do and don’t know, and what they need to know to accomplish their objective.

In today’s UIEtips, I explore a simple visualization tool we invented to help teams and stakeholders see where their designs are too complex for their users and what they can do about it. I call this tool the Magic Escalator of Acquired Knowledge and, as you’ll see, it can be quite effective for getting the entire team working on making an easier-to-use design.

Read the article, Riding the Magic Escalator of Acquired Knowledge.

We had been working on a client project, helping their team redesign their checkout process with some new user research and design techniques.

As we were watching seasoned shoppers buy products in the lab, we noticed that people were getting stuck at a screen right before the checkout process, where they had to authenticate their account. Repeat customers couldn’t remember their user ID and password combination. The site used an email address as the user ID, but many of our repeat customers had set up their accounts years before and couldn’t remember which of their email addresses was the ID.

In the lab, the customers who couldn’t authenticate would either give up or request a password reset. However, the password reset required they remember which email address was their ID, which many couldn’t do. We witnessed a remarkable number of abandonments on the password reset screen.

When the password reset was successful, the customer had to go to their email client, find the reset message (often lost in a spam folder), and click on a link in the email. In the lab, we observed that this was a complex process.

All of this led us to ask if this was only happening in the artificial environment of the lab, because we watching users in our space, not using their own machine. We set out to look at the site’s analytics to see if there were clues to this behavior happening in the real world.

The first thing we asked the analytics team was what percentage of visitors to the authentication page ended up on the reset password request screen. Turns out, they had never instrumented either page. We had to wait three weeks while they instrumented it and we collected a reasonable sample size.

We learned a substantial percentage of customers were requesting password reset, approximately 40%. Two out of every five users was getting stuck and needing their password to be reset.

We then wondered what percentage of those people actually came back to finish the transaction after the reset. Again, we discovered the analytics team hadn’t instrumented the return from the reset. That was another three week delay.

We learned that fewer than 25% of the resets were executed — the user clicked on the reset link and returned to the site. Of those who did execute it, fewer than 20% finished their purchases.

A little math and we could calculate out the amount of revenue being abandoned in the carts by all the people who couldn’t authenticate. That’s where the $300,000,000/year number came from.

Once the team implemented a guest purchase capability (which didn’t require authentication to start the checkout sequence), they saw an immediate jump in sales increase of about $6,000,000 in the first week, which remained constant. Password reset requests dropped by about 80% in that first week and remained constant too.

Authentication pages are usually owned by a different group in the company. In this case, they were owned by IT. IT didn’t have the foresight to instrument these pages.

Until we did this research and asked these questions, nobody knew how many people were dropping off at authentication. Because authentication was between the shopping-cart and the Enter-your-shipping-info pages, everyone thought they were getting a much lower percentage of users clicking the Checkout button than they really were. The site had a huge abandonment on authentication that heretofore had gone undetected.

Analytics only work when we know that they are measuring everything correctly. Working with clients, we regularly discover they aren’t capturing the entire picture, leaving out critical information.

I remember always being impressed with the pictures and talking about the Colosseum and the Roman Forum. Yet nothing could prepare me for my first trip to Rome. It wasn’t anything like the pictures.

I think this is exactly the same feeling that designers have when they visit their users for the first time. Sure, they’ve heard about users and what they’re like through the various sales and support channels. Maybe they even met one or two in their travels.

But seeing your users really work with the design is a whole different world. It changes the way you work and think about what you’re building.

In today’s UIEtips, I explain why I love taking teams out on their first site visits. It’s really exciting to see the transformation the designers undergo as they open up a new world. The metamorphosis they go through is really fun and exciting.

Read the article Why I Love Taking Teams On Field Visits.

If you’ve always wanted to go on your own field visits, you’ll want to get the best techniques from Steve Portigal, who is a master at these things. His User Interface 16 Conference full-day workshop will be a ton of fun. You’ll go on your own site visit and analyze the results – an amazing education. Check out how much fun it’ll be.

Our goal, of course, is to learn everything we can. We need to leverage the research time to ensure we’re filling our brains with the information. Then we’ll need to create great designs.

In today’s UIEtips, I look back at an article from last year. I talk about three questions I’ve learned not to ask in sessions. By avoiding these questions, we get to the information we need faster.

Read the article, 3 Questions You Shouldn’t Ask During User Research.

Dive deeper into user research with Steve Portigal’s workshop Immersive Field Research Techniques at the User Interface 16 Conference, November 7-9, 2011. Steve will show you simple and effective field techniques for a deeper look at your users.

And once you’ve learned what you need from your research, you’ll want to put it in a format that helps you speed through your design process. That’s exactly what scenarios help you do and, coincidentally, why we’ve asked Kim Goodwin to return to this year’s User Interface 16 Conference to repeat her popular workshop on Designing with Scenarios. She’ll teach us how to make scenarios work.

You can find out about Kim, Steve, and the other great UI16 experts at UICONF.com.

Have you compiled your own questions that you shouldn’t ask? Share your list below.

More and more, we’re finding ourselves in situations where the design just “has to be right.” No longer, can we just have incremental feature enhancements or small improvements in the design. Our users need to be wow’d and delighted. And adding large fonts in bright colors with rounded corners will only take us so far.

To truly delight our users, we need to dig deep into what is meaningful and valuable to them. Give them something that resonates and they will jump for our design.

We can discover those resonance points by taking our research into the field. We meet the users in their own environments, observing them as they live their lives and do their work. We bring back oodles of data, which, once we analyze and synthesize, we can reveal the delightful essence of new designs.

Steve Portigal has traveled all over the world to do just that. He’s spent thousands of hours in people’s homes, offices, and the other places of their lives, just to learn more about what will delight them. His work with design teams has taught them to mine their rich data sources and uncover a wealth of value and meaning to design for.

Steve’s full-day workshop at UI16 will take you through the entire process. Prepare for a hard day of work, which starts with a real field visit. You’ll bring back observations that you’ll work with for the rest of the day. Under Steve’s expert guidance, you’ll learn the best methods for interviewing users, analyzing the data, and synthesizing the key meaning.

You’ll be ready to head right into the field the moment you get back to your office.

See the other UI16 Spotlights:

You can catch the sneak preview of UI16 at uiconf.com. (And there’s still a few of the sneak preview $1,349 registrations left. Snag one while they are still available.)

In today’s UIEtips, Steve Portigal takes a look at how some past participants took him outside of the business questions at hand, and how their life circumstances impacted his client’s business strategy. Each of the four cases Steve describes in the article, made a profound affect on how he moved forward during the session and what his client came away with.

Read Steve’s article, What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting It.

Back in 2010, we asked Steve to present a UIE Virtual Seminar on how to make sure we’re not leaving any important information behind. We’re bringing him back on April 7 for another seminar on User Research Analysis. If you’ve had a pile of notes from the latest round of usability testing and weren’t sure what your next step was, this seminar is for you. Learn more about this important topic.

Yet we have data — lots of it. And that data is very clear. If you choose to believe the data, there’s something big that you can do to see dramatic improvements in your user experience. The results we’ve seen are impressive and immediate. It’s really hard to argue with it.

It’s all about exposure. Sure there will still be naysayers, but you can see what I’m talking about for yourself. Read today’s article about how upping your exposure hours is the fast path to enhancing the quality of your product or service’s user experience. Then decide for yourself. Did we get it right or are we completely off?

Read the article, Fast Path to a Great UX – Increased Exposure Hours.

If you’re working on web-based applications, you’ll get to hear me talk about more of our latest research, including the work we’re doing to help teams get the most using research-based design principles. Add to that the brilliance of folks like Luke Wroblewski on Mobile Design Strategies and Noah Iliinsky on Data Visualization and it’s a jam-packed two-days you shouldn’t miss. Find out about our upcoming Minneapolis & Seattle stops.

Here he tells the story of his brother and how it inspired him to look into the data of 45,000 people who are reporting their daily status with the diseases, drugs, and treatments in their lives. The end result is a “time machine”-like report that helps understand what can really improve the quality of people’s lives. I loved the 1-page summary of their health that patients can take to their doctors, to show exactly what they’ve been doing and how it’s been working.

This video encapsulates exactly what Stephen Anderson talked about in his podcast, The Quest for Emotional Engagement. If we can find a connection between the data we have and what’s meaningful in people’s lives, we can really make a difference to them.

It’s no accident that we’re talking about this at this year’s Web App Masters Tour. I think this is a critical conversation we need to have about how we bring the most out of our designs. On this topic alone, I’m pleased that Stephen Anderson will explore this idea of emotional engagement, Noah Iliinsky will how us how to create great visualizations like the ones Jamie demonstrates, and Kate Brigham will share what it’s like leading PatientsLikeMe’s UX team — making all this a reality for their 45,000+ users.

Register with the promotion code WAMT by March 11, 2011 for any of the Tour cities and pay just $795.

Do the recruiting yourself. This gives you bonus research data about your people, and you may learn things you hadn’t anticipated that will influence how you conduct the study. It also starts a relationship with people that gets them invested in taking part. It’s the start of a conversation with you and your organization. They’re more likely to trust your motives and give you a deeper, richer view of their lives.

Focus on behavior, not demographics. If you want people to use your tool to do a particular thing, look for people who already do that somehow. For example, if you want people to use your design to store their photos and music and other content, find people who have a lot of that type of content and who are concerned about losing it. If you want people to use your design to generate invoices, find people who are doing that now and observe what they do to generate invoice when they’re in the mode of doing it. If you want people to use your design to remember to take their medicines at the right time in the right dosage, find people who have persistent conditions that need medication and who have been diagnosed with the type of condition you want to help them deal with.

You’ll see that I never once mentioned age, sex, income, location, education level, marital status – or any of those things that marketers go on. Because it doesn’t usually matter. What matters for UX design is behavior. Do people do the thing you want to make a design for?

There’s a lot more insight in her answer. A must read.

Some other thinking on this topic:

• Avoiding Demographics When Recruiting Participants: An Interview with Dana Chisnell
• UIE Virtual Seminar: Recruiting for Usability Testing: Getting the Right People in the Room for User Research and Usability Tests
• Report: Recruiting without Fear

Interestingly, many web-based applications use an identical method to entice users to sign up. Every user who shows up on the site gets an instant SIGN UP NOW! form, the web app version of MARRY ME! And, guess what? It doesn’t work any better.

Recently, we’ve been seeing different approaches to the sign up challenge. These introduce the user more gradually to the application’s benefits before asking them to sign up. Because the user experiences the benefits directly, they are more likely to follow through on the sign up process.

In today’s UIEtips, our good friend Luke Wroblewski shares his analysis of the gradual engagement process that Twitter’s been experimenting with. The results are amazing (29% pickup) and Luke’s analysis is fascinating.

Read the article, Gradual Engagement Boosts Twitter Sign-Up by 29%.

By the way, Doug Bowman, Twitter’s Creative Director, is sharing his perspective on these results at the Seattle UIE Web App Masters Tour, July 12 & 13. There are still seats to catch Luke and Doug, plus the other great Masters at this last stop on the tour.

Have you tried an approach of gradual engagement on your site? What’s been your experience with its success? We’d love to hear your experiences. Share them with us below.

Until July 8, register for Seattle and get $200 off when you use the promotion code TOURBLOG. Learn more about the tour at www.UIETour.com

The best search logs contain more than just keywords. They tell us what page the user searched from and, if we’re lucky, which result the user chose. This information—where the user came from and where the user went after, can tell a story that becomes helpful and insightful.

In this issue of UIEtips, I go back to an article we published in January of this year. I walk through some of the questions we answer when we’re studying a client’s search log. We’ve had great success with both public-facing sites and intranets, yielding an amazing list of substantial improvements to our clients’ designs. I’m sure you’ll find them beneficial too.

Read the article – Spending Quality Time with Your Search Log

Finding the issues is just the first step to getting to these types of improvements. You need to know how to fix them. Which is where Peter Morville and Mark Burrell come in.

On Wednesday, June 23, Lou Rosenfeld will do a deep dive with search logs when he delivers the next UIE Virtual Seminar, Site Search Analytics. Lou will show you how to take advantage of your site’s query data to improve your users’ experience.

This is a must-attend seminar if you’re trying to get more from your site’s query data. Learn more about Lou’s Virtual Seminar.

Have you peered into your search log? We’d love to hear what you found. Join the discussion below.

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At UIE, we receive a steady flow of questions about user research. There is a staggering amount of information out in the world, just waiting to guide your designs. Best of all, it’s nearly free for the taking. We’re happy to reveal the key to unlocking this information:

Ask the right questions.

Getting out into the world and actually interacting with real people who use, or potentially could use, your product or service is incredibly valuable. We tell our clients this constantly: the organizations who are most successful are the ones who are on intimate terms with how and why their customers use their product. But how? To answer that question, we invited our friend Steve Portigal, principal of Portigal Consulting, to conduct the UIE Virtual Seminar, “Deep Dive Interviewing Secrets: Making Sure You Don’t Leave Key Information Behind”

Steve’s specialty is informing design decisions by getting on the ground and speaking directly with customers. And sharing how you can do the same. Today, we release the interview Jared Spool conducted with Steve after his seminar, following up with a number of additional audience questions. You can enjoy this interview without first seeing the Virtual Seminar, but afterwards, you’re going to want to see it. You’re in luck. You and your team can still access the recorded seminar.  (See special offer below)

Jared asked Steve, in the end, what does the interview process really boil down to for it to be effective? Steve’s answer?

You have to really, really listen.

Jared and Steve discuss several points about the interviewing process, drawing on stories from both their experiences. Here are some brief highlights:

• Understand the why behind what people are saying. This improves designs.

• Transcribe your interviews. They can be used as a deliverable for a client and they allow you to critique your interviewing technique. Steve uses Chromolume Transcription, but there are many options (see note at the bottom of this post).

• How do you deal with uncomfortable situations, like when an interviewee’s supervisor wants to observe your interview? Steve thinks this is often an indication of a failure in the planning process. When you’re in the field, there are a couple of tricks you can use to help steer the situation towards productivity.

• How do you deal with interviewees who ramble? Try not to interrupt, Steve suggests. This may be their natural inclination and you should try to roll with it. Try to keep them on track with very focused questions.

• How do you end an interview when you discover you’re talking with someone that won’t be helpful? Hopefully your planning will avoid this, but even so, you may find later that the person’s insights help you more than you thought. Stay in the moment.

• Can you interview well into the product design stage? Sure, you can even bring prototypes. Ask, “how does this work for you?” “How would you teach your (parent/significant other) how to use this?”

• How do you deal with difficult interviewees? There’s no saving some interviews, but you should attempt to build a friendly rapport that exudes professionalism. Many times they’ll open up.

Have a listen to the podcast. You’ll certainly pick up some tips for the next time you’re planning research or are out in the field.

Special offer:

For a limited time, you can gain lifetime access to this seminar at a special price. Purchase the recording before May 21 for just $99 (that’s $50 off the regular pricing). Anyone in your organization will be able to watch Steve’s seminar whenever they want, as often as they want.

Note, as an aside,

Steve mentions having had some trouble with the transcription service, CastingWords. For what it’s worth, we use CastingWords at UIE for our transcriptions, and aside from the occasional issue, we have been happy with them. Also, they now offer time stamps, for an additional fee.

(Oh, and by the way, our last event sold out, so you’ll want to Register your team early!)

When you spend time with your customers, it’s an opportunity to learn how to move your design forward. You don’t want to leave important information “on the table”—information that can give you a more complete understanding of how to move your vision forward. You might act on incomplete detail that creates risk when it forces you to guess what the users need. Worse, the partial insight you have may take your design team in the wrong direction.

User research is an expensive endeavor. Make sure you’re prepared to get the most out of every minute that you’re with your users. Come home with a deep insight into their thinking, their lives, and how you can change their experience for the better.

Steve Portigal will show your team the art of asking the question. You might visit the user in their office or home, have them come to you for a usability test, or even have a chance encounter at a trade show or while waiting for an airplane. Do you know what to ask? Do you know what to listen for, to extract the critical detail of what they can tell you about your design?

Steve will help you prepare your team for any opportunity, be it formal user research or less structured, ad-hoc research. He’ll also give you tips on how to work with your stakeholders and executives, who may also be meeting potential customers and users, so they know what to ask and how to listen—integrating their efforts into the research team. (Wouldn’t it be great if they understood why you’re doing what you’re doing?)

Get your team asking good questions, the right questions, with this fantastic seminar. Honing this skill will be a great addition to their Toolbox. Register your team before January 19, with the promotion code TOOLBOX, and I’ll also send you the link to a fabulous webinar Kate Gomoll did for us, Field Studies: The Ultimate Tool in Your Usability Toolbox.

Are you prepared for meeting someone who could be using your next design? How do you make sure you get into their head, learn what their life is all about, and get the information you need to build something truly innovative and delightful? We’d love to hear your ideas and about your experiences below.

Your users’ experience is a fluid event that frequently starts someplace like Google and, if you’re lucky, ends with them accomplishing their objective at your site. The goal is to make that event seamless and as natural as possible. Unfortunately, few sites achieve that.

In our December 16 UIE Virtual Seminar, world-renowned SEO and web-usability expert, Shari Thurow, will show you how to tie together your team’s search engine optimization projects with your site’s usability efforts.

Shari has put together a fabulous quick preview of her presentation. You should watch it now.

It’s not an accident we turned to Shari Thurow when we wanted to talk about how to optimize a site’s usability to produce great search results. She’s the leading expert on what it takes to make a web site search-engine friendly, enhancing the user’s experience.

We love her new book, When Search Meets Web usability, which she co-wrote with Nick Musica. Want your own copy? We finagled a 35% discount off of this book (plus Free Shipping!) for the UIE audience. How cool is that? Just use the promotion code SEARCH when you purchase from the PeachPit/New Riders web site.

This webinar will help you bridge the gap between the web search engine and your site. You’ll learn techniques and tricks that will increase conversions, satisfaction, and your users’ success. Register your team today!

How do you deliver the best search experience to your site’s users? We want to hear what you’re doing. Leave us your thoughts below.

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User experience research lives or dies by the appropriateness of the participants in the study. If the participants match the real users, you’re set. But if the participants aren’t like the target users, the project probably dies an ugly death. Worse, the design that is based on the bogus data croaks in public.

Earlier this Fall, I asked usability testing expert Dana Chisnell to present a UIE Virtual Seminar on one of the trickier parts of user research projects—Recruiting for Usability Testing. In her presentation, she talked about how to source and screen participants, how to compensate them, and even why you should do the recruiting rather than outsourcing it. We had more excellent questions from the audience than we could ask during the live event. So, I sat down with Dana to record this podcast and cover some of the remaining issues. If you find yourself wanting more afterward, don’t forget you can still purchase a recording of the 90-minute session, Recruiting for Usability Testing.

During the podcast, Jared asked Dana to dig into these questions, and more:

• Why recruit based on behavior, not demographics?
• How many people should you recruit (as opposed to how many you should test) for a user research project?
• How do you define recruiting criteria for a product that doesn’t exist yet?
• How do you take time zones into consideration when recruiting for remote usability testing?
• How do you word your subject lines in emails for the recruitment process?

Tune in to hear more about recruiting for your usability testing. Still have questions? Start the discussion in our comments, below.

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A few weeks back we held a UIE Virtual Seminar with Pete Bell and Daniel Tunkelang of Endeca. These guys are the experts we go to when talking about designing for facets.  As always, we had a number of excellent questions from the live audience that we couldn’t attend to during the seminar, so I got together with Pete and Daniel to record this podcast and cover a number of those remaining questions.

If you didn’t attend the live seminar, and are interested in how to make the jump from a standard on-site search to faceted search, then you’ll still enjoy this podcast. If you find yourself wanting more afterward, don’t forget you can still purchase a recording of the session for another 90 minutes of Faceted Search.

During the podcast, Adam asked Pete and Daniel to dig into these questions:

• Should we show counts for each facet? What about when using multiple selection?
• Can you elaborate on the mixing and matching of precision and recall results to construct facets?
• Is there a best practice for deselecting facets?
• Most search interfaces assume a flat list of results. What happens when you mix up different types of results, and how would you distribute them across a page?

Tune in to hear more about designing for facets. Still have questions? Start the discussion in our comments, below.

Having the participants that match the design’s audience will give the team feedback on what works well and where the design needs rethinking. By learning from the participants, the team can make informed design decisions on all aspects of the user’s experience.

However, having participants that don’t match the audience can be very problematic. The team may miss learning about critical problems while they spend valuable time and resources fixing design issues that aren’t really important in real use.

In today’s UIEtips, I take you back to an interview from July 2008 with Dana Chisnell, the co-author of The Handbook of Usability Testing. We talk about what happens when teams try to use market research demographics as the basis for recruiting their participants and what the alternatives are.

Read my interview with Dana Chisnell, Avoiding Demographics When Recruiting Participants.

We have two great opportunities for you to get more out of your usability testing. On Wednesday, September 30, Dana is presenting a 90 minute UIE Virtual Seminar - Recruiting  for Usability Testing. Dana will show you the tricks to use to maximize your time and money on the right participants to get the right results.

Dana is also giving a full-day workshop, Mastering the Art of User Research, at this year’s User Interface 14 Conference in November. Learn the user research techniques of the pros. Recruit participants easily. Analyze data faster. Communicate results effectively.

Interaction with a product is more than how it’s used or how it behaves. It’s about a connection between two sides. One side is the customer, but the other side is much more than a product or service. To many people, the character and essence of a product and its company are identical. So, what is the essence of your product?

When your product behaves like a machine, your company is perceived to be a machine. It’s just another company – rigid, mechanical, and cold. Yet when your product displays a bit of humanity, your company gains a face and becomes another human.

In this webinar, you’ll see examples of how humanity exists in the design of products and services through humor, personality, and emotion. You’ll explore how just a little extra design effort and thought beyond functional needs can enrich the experience, reveal the company behind the product, and forge enduring connections with customers.

This presentation generated quite a buzz at Web App 2009. It’s a talk that’s sure to get you thinking
about your products, and how you foster the connection between your products and your customers.

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. How do you gain an edge with your products? How does your organization show its humanity? Share your thoughts, questions, and concerns below.

UIE Virtual Seminar
New Ways to Think about Taxonomy:
The Role of Taxonomies in Your Organization
May 7, 2009, 1:30pm ET
90-minute online presentation

We’ve asked Seth Earley and Stephanie Lemieux, experts in creating and maintaining sophisticated taxonomies, to broaden your thinking about how a taxonomy can make your life easier, whether you’re designing a public-facing web site or a large-scale intranet. In this 90-minute online session, you’ll see detailed examples of taxonomy applications and how to leverage key design principles across your organization. Stephanie and Seth will provide a better understanding of your own taxonomy and the navigation of your information. You’ll get your content management system under control and improve your search results.

To help you understand what to expect out of this seminar, Seth & Stephanie put together a great preview for you:

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This week’s episode demonstrates the lengths that people will go to be a part of the Userability Podcast. Or, at least how far their Skype connection will go; a bit over 10,000 miles (16,400km) in this case! We were joined by Keith Lang, co-founder of Plasq, makers of Skitch all the way from Canberra, Australia. He blogs at UI&us.

Keith offered this question,

All of us UI designers spend a lot of time with computers and become blind to certain problems. What would you say are the most common UIs, or processes, that confuse or impede the average computer-user?

For example, I notice many people having problems paying attention to dialogue boxes, and recalling what they said. They just click OK, even on ones with brief text–sometimes with bad results.

Tune in to hear what Jared and Robert thought.

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 do you have to add to Robert and Jared’s list? What do you see confusing users? Let us know in the comments!

UIE is excited to announce our new UIE Roadshow: Secrets Behind Designing Great User Experiences, a full-day workshop, based on 10 years of UIE’s extensive research, that will deliver new insights and inspire your team to create the best user experiences. 

This winter, we’re taking this workshop on the road to:

• Portland, OR on Tuesday, February 17, 2009 
• Minneapolis, MN on Thursday, February 19, 2009 
• Atlanta, GA on Monday, March 2, 2009

Recognized industry leader, Jared Spool, will share information that previously we’ve only made available to our biggest clients. 

During the day, Jared will lead you through these sessions:

9:00 am: Designing for the Age of Experience

Jared will open the day with an overview of UIE’s research into great experience design. He’ll reveal the factors that are found in the organizations that are successful at delivering great experiences. And, he’ll show you the important criteria that you can use to measure your team’s effectiveness.


10:45 am: UX Level-Up: Taking Your Team to the Next Level


You’ll assess the critical dimensions that will pinpoint what your team needs to succeed. Jared will share how UIE measures organizations, which factors are most critical, and how to tell exactly where your group falls. From there, you’ll put together a solid action plan, describing the exact steps you need to take, to go to the next level and beyond.


1:00 pm: The Making of a UX Vision

You’ll discover the secrets behind creating a unified user experience vision that you can share with your entire organization. (Hint: it’s not nearly as hard as it sounds.) Jared will show you how, once you’ve created your vision, your team can use it to guide and focus your entire organization on a path that will yield delighted users while exceeding business objectives. 


3:15 pm: Magic and Mental Models: Using Illusions to Simplify Design

In a perfect session to end the day, Jared will use professional magic effects to demonstrate the parallels between the world of magical illusions and the world of digital design. He’ll reveal the secrets from several magical illusions, and then show you how to use the same mechanisms to create delightful experiences for your users.

Read the detailed program description.

Knowing that times are tough for folks, we’ve made a special effort to make the UIE Roadshow a very affordable event. We think it’s important to get our latest research out, so we’ve priced this full-day workshop for far less than other programs. Additionally, we’re offering a $75 discount when you register with the promotion code SHOW09. 

Do you have a team to send? We’re offering steep discounts. Bring your team and the price goes as low as $299 for each person.

This is guaranteed to be an eventful workshop, with a ton of detailed examples, hands-on exercises, Jared’s usual funny material, and, for the first time, live magic tricks! 

We hope to see you there.

This week, I had the great honor of speaking with Dana Chisnell, noted usability expert and principal at Usability Works, a consultancy based in San Francisco. Dana is also the co-author of the recently-released second edition of the Handbook of Usability Testing—a book so fine that I was thrilled when they asked me to write the foreword.

In this interview, I asked Dana what makes the best user researchers better than the pack. Dana suggested that great user researchers dig deeper into who the users are. They don’t just stop after watching novices interact with the design for the first time. Instead, they look to constantly learn about the full range of people who use the design.

Also, the top user researchers look beyond the use of functionality to the entire experience. Dana shared how Enterprise Rent-a-Car spends a lot of time and energy thinking about every interaction they have with their customers. They stand around in their retail outlets and watch individuals getting their cars and turning the cars in, looking at how the experiences fit together.

Dana had a lot more to say about what makes the best stand above the rest. You’ll want to listen to the rest of the podcast to hear her thoughts on the subject of excellence in user research.

[For even more insight, you'll want to attend Dana's full-day seminar, Usability Testing Guerilla Techniques: Collecting User Data on a Shoestring, at our User Interface 13 conference that will take place this October 13-16, 2008 in historic Cambridge, Massachusetts.]

We look forward to your questions and thoughts on this podcast. How are you integrating usability testing into your organization? Let us know what you think in the comments!

The ironic thing is, while we add account registration and sign-in features to enhance the user’s experience, in doing so, we create all manner of user experience problems. Despite its prevalence, one of the most difficult things to get right is a good sign-in and registration process.

The challenge is one of creating selective usability. We want the process to be completely usable for our customers and users. We also want it to be unusable for the bad people who want to steal our identities and disrupt our environment. Creating a design that is usable to a subset of users seems to be much harder than creating one that is usable for everyone.

Today, in our UIEtips email newsletter, we published my latest article that describes eight common account sign-in mistakes we see all the time in our usability tests. If you’re designing an account system, or already have one, this should serve as a good start to assess how much you may be frustrating your users.

You can read my article here.

Account Sign-in is just one topic we’ll discuss at the UIE Web App Summit, March 26-28, 2008, in San Diego, CA. You’ll want to reserve your seat today, as we’re filling up quickly.

Has your design suffered from these mistakes? What have you done to improve it?

Whenever a new technology appears on the scene, it’s natural for designers to experiment, often producing results that turn out to be less than desirable (“Skip Intro”, anyone?). However, blaming the technologies for these frustrating designs is like blaming your DVD player for Jim Carrey movies.

Today, in our UIEtips email newsletter, we published the first part of a two-part series on designing effective web applications. I explore seven critical considerations designers need for designing effective applications. Based on research we’ve conducted on dozens of applications, we’ve assembled an essential set of questions teams need to ask about their design to ensure they are providing the best value to their users.

Read the first part of my article here.

Once you’ve read the article, we want to hear your thoughts about it. What experience have you had with building effective applications? Leave your thoughts below.

This topic is part of what Josh Porter and I’ll be talking about at the upcoming UI12 conference. We still have a little room left for the November event, so you’ll want to register right away to hear all the great experts we’ve assembled. More info at http://www.uiconf.com

As designs and product visions become more complex, there is an increasing need to find ways that effectively convey just how people will use the product and integrate it into their lives. Recently, more and more organizations and design teams have turned to comics to communicate difficult product and design concepts to large and diverse audiences.

Yesterday, we published a podcast recording of a wonderful chat I had with Yahoo!’s Kevin Cheng. I think Kevin’s work integrating tools like comics into the development process is remarkable. I highly suggest you check out our podcast. In this week’s issue of our email newsletter, UIEtips, we’re publishing an excerpt of my conversation with Kevin. Kevin shared a lot of great information with me and I think you’ll find the conversation enlightening.

Read today’s article with Kevin Cheng.

Is your organization considering the use of comics to convey product concepts? What techniques are you using in your organization to communicate how users interact with your designs? Share your thoughts below.

Each week in our Usability Tools Podcast, I will be sitting down with UIE’s Managing Director, Christine Perfetti to discuss tips and tools for improving your site’s user experience. The goal of our weekly podcast is to share some of the most important findings from UIE’s research on web design and usability.

This week, Christine Perfetti asked me about User Interface Engineering’s groundbreaking study on download time. In this study, we found the actual download time of a page didn’t impact a site’s usability. In this podcast, Christine and I discuss:

» What users *really* mean when they say a web site is too slow
» User Interface Engineering’s methodology for conducting the study on download time
» The strong reaction of the design community to UIE’s findings
» UIE’s shift in perspective regarding download time due to the prevalence of high-speed connections

As always, we’re very interested in hearing from you. Do you have questions or comments about this episode? Do you have suggestions for future episodes? We want to know. Please leave a comment below or email us directly at mailbag@uie.com.

UIE’s Latest Research: If you’re interested in the topics Christine and I discuss in the podcasts, I highly suggest you sign up for our free newsletter, UIEtips, to read our latest usability and design research as soon as we publish it. [We first published our download time findings in UIEtips.] We’ll also notify you in UIEtips when we publish new podcasts.

New: Survey and listener drawing!
We would like to give you and your co-workers free admission to our next Virtual Seminar program, with full, lifetime access to the archived program as well! All you need to do to be eligible is give us your feedback on your podcast listening experience. Fill out the following survey and each week we’ll randomly send one survey participant a free admission to the next UIE Virtual Seminar and Archive, a $169.00 value! We appreciate your input!

Participate in our survey to win!

These days, we’re seeing more and more design teams successfully adopt personas into their design process. Personas allow teams to delve right into the attitudes, behaviors, and goals of their target audience. They’re also a great consensus building tool, helping every member of the design team understand exactly who they’re designing for.

In this week’s UIEtips, we’re publishing an interview I recently conducted with Steve Mulder after he presented the UIE Virtual Seminar, The User is Always Right: Making Personas Work for Your Web Site ( http://tinyurl.com/23w9sz .) In the interview, we talk about how to create effective personas based on user research as well as valuable tips for convincing your organization to adopt personas into the design process. I think you’ll really enjoy it.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Has your organization adopted personas into the design process? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Join the discussion below about this week’s topic.

Want to learn more about personas? Check out the UIE Virtual Seminar: The User is Always Right — Making Personas Work for Your Web Site, presented by Steve Mulder. In this 90-minute presentation, you’ll learn about the entire persona creation, and understand how personas can help you uncover the goals, attitudes, and behaviors of your target audience.

The most valuable asset of a successful design team is the information they have about users’ goals and behaviors. When teams have the right information, the job of designing a powerful, intuitive, easy-to-use interface becomes tremendously easier. When they don’t, every little design decision becomes a struggle.

One of the most effective solutions to uncover user needs and translate those needs into a design is Cooper’s interaction design methodology, The Goal-Directed Method. ( http://www.cooper.com/about/process/ ) With Cooper’s method, features of the design are directly related to user research through the use of personas and scenarios.

In this week’s feature article, we’re publishing an excellent interview UIE’s Christine Perfetti recently conducted with Kim Goodwin, the General Manager and Vice President of Cooper. In the interview, Kim gives an overview of Goal-Directed Design and discusses Cooper’s user research techniques. I think you’ll really enjoy it.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

How does your team incorporate user research into design? I’d love to hear what you’re doing. Join the discussion below about this week’s topic below.

Want to learn more about Interaction Design? If you’re interested in learning more about how to develop and refine your interaction skills, you’ll definitely want to attend Kim Goodwin’s full-day seminar, The Essentials of Interaction Design, at User Interface 12.

Over the past few years, the world of web application development has seen the emergence of a new set of approaches such as APIs, RSS, and Folksonomies that have come to be known collectively as Web 2.0. These new approaches allow developers to easily create innovative applications at a rapid pace from common elements found lying around the Web.

The speed and ease at which these new applications were built is what is keeping us very excited about the continued success of the Web 2.0 world. With a little skill and motivation, people can create new applications in almost no time at all. As the skill requirements for building these applications decreases, it opens a whole new world of possibilities for development teams.

With new sites and services popping up, such as Flickr, Del.icio.us, Digg, and Twitter, it’s easy to see how we’ve entered a new era of social networking, and we’ll continue to see the Web evolve as we realize its full potential to create optimal user experiences.

In this week’s UIEtips, we’re reprinting an article I wrote in 2005 where I examine how design teams and individual developers alike can harness the power of APIs, RSS technologies, Folksonomies, and Social Networking to approach hard problems in new and effective ways. I think you’ll really enjoy it.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Do your applications take advantage of APIs, RSS, Folksonomies, and Social Networking? Does it intrigue you? Scare you? Bore you? I’d really be interested in your thoughts. Join the discussion below about this week’s topic below.

[Want to learn more about Web 2.0? Check out the UIE Virtual Seminar, Web 2.0: The Power Behind the Hype. In this 90-minute presentation, Jared M. Spool will outline how Web 2.0 works, and discuss how APIs, RSS, Folksonomies, and Social Networking can help designers expand and improve the user experience.]

Give users what they need.

Your users probably don’t care about the history of your project. Nor do they want a flashy intro page welcoming them to your site. If this content is important to you but not to your users, it needs to be either cut entirely, dropped to the bottom of the page, or set aside in a link to another page. Knowing what your users value creates value for your site.

Cut! Cut! Cut! And cut again!

Most web users don’t want to read a lot of content. Instead, they want to be able to visit your website, grab the information they need, and move on. Read aloud what you’ve written: does it convey all the information your users want or need in a concise way? If not, don’t be afraid to cut it! Pink is the new black, iPhone is the new Razr, and less is the new more.

Begin with the key point.

I know this goes against everything you were taught in high school or college writing; trust me, I was an English major. While we’re used to the traditional style of writing as intro, body, and conclusion, this narrative style will not serve your users well. Instead, begin with your main point, and follow it with any supporting information you feel will be relevant to your users.

Ginny is an expert we recommend all the time to clients looking to write successful web content. If you haven’t checked out Ginny’s book yet, I highly recommend you take the time to read it.

Do you spend a lot of effort editing the words on your site? How does your team assess what content is valuable to your users?

In each part (part 3 is in the works,) Leisa states a way you might make qualitative research “look more scientific,” and then discusses some reasons why trying to make qualitative research more quantitative is a waste of time, money, and energy.

1) Use a relatively large sample size

The richness of the information and insight you receive even from this small sample size makes the return on investment enormous – and the small sample size makes it an activity that almost any project can incorporate into their timeline and budget. At the end of the day – those things are far more important than scientific validity.

2) Ensure that your test environment doesn’t change

If you want to quickly weed out problems with your site/application/prototype – then I recommend that you fix the problem and move on to spend your valuable research time learning about things you don’t already know about. It will certainly keep you awake as you’re researching, you’ll get rapid return on investment and excellent bang for buck as far as research techniques go.

3) Ensure that your test approach doesn’t change (don’t change the script, and stick to it)

Perhaps you can use her arguments when someone asks you about the validity of your qualitative research.

You can read part 1 here: Embracing the Un-Science of Qualitative Research Part One – Small Sample Sizes are Super

You can read part 2 here: Embracing the Un-Science of Qualitative Research Part Two – Ever-Evolving Prototypes are Ace

Part 3 is on the way.

 In his book, Gerry talks about the U.S. Government’s FirstGov, a site that understands its users’ wants and needs. Although many citizens perceive government as being slow and unresponsive, the government’s web site is anything but; knowing that benefits and grants are the top two things people search for, they are the first two links on the homepage. The design team is doing a good job of understanding their audience and what is important to them.

 Unfortunately, many design teams don’t have such a close relationship with their customers and don’t always focus on their customers’ carewords. For example, McGovern notes a trend among airline sites to use the words “low fares” in place of “cheap” because of the negative connotation associated with “cheap.” However, how many people do you know search for “low fares” when booking a vacation? When customers want a cheap flight, they will search for just that.

 Do you think about what words will best drive users to action on your site? Have you tested your users for the carewords that matter to them?

When teams make critical feature changes in their designs, there’s always a risk of backlash from loyal users. That’s what happened to Facebook, the social networking site, a few months ago. Facebook’s designers created the mini feed, an exciting new feature that promised to offer users a vastly improved experience. Instead, the feature resulted in loyal users getting angry and frustrated with the change.

How could Facebook’s designers have prevented this backlash from users? How can you ensure that you don’t experience a similar fallout when launching a new feature? In this week’s UIEtips article, I discuss what led to the Facebook disaster and how design teams can avoid similar results with their own sites.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

How does your organization handle the launch of new features or products? Has your team experienced any backlash when launching new design features? Join the discussion below about this week’s topic below.

[If you find this article interesting, you'll definitely want to attend this year's UI12 Conference, where I'll present my full-day seminar: New Perspectives in User Experience Design. In this seminar, I'll be sharing my outlook on the state of our field and discuss UIE's latest research.]

Over the past few months I’ve been writing about how design teams can continue to ensure that they focus on their users by creating an experience vision. Creating an experience vision allows the team to picture mentally what the experience of using a design will be like at some point in the future. This keeps the team on track and on the same page through each step of the design process.

As designs and product visions become more complex, there is an increasing need to find ways that effectively convey just how people will use the product and integrate it into their lives. While teams traditionally use requirements documents, personas, use cases, and storyboards to explain these concepts, these tools often yield suboptimal and unsatisfactory results. They suffer from being ignored after their creation, interpreted differently by everyone who uses them, and focus on the interface instead of the user’s actual experience.

Recently, more and more organizations and design teams have turned to comics to communicate difficult product and design concepts to large and diverse audiences. Comics depict user experiences and user interactions in an unintimidating, easy to follow, accessible, and portable way that gets everyone on the same page.

In this week’s article, UIE’s Ashley McKee talks with Kevin Cheng, a senior interaction designer with Yahoo! Maps and Yahoo! Local, and co-creator OK/Cancel, the best web comic on usability and design, about the emergence of comics as a tool to provide your team and key stakeholders with an approachable and easy to digest way of understanding product concepts.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Is your organization considering the use of comics to convey product concepts? Are you already using comics in the design process? What have your experiences been with using comics? Join the discussion below about this week’s topic below.

[If you're having difficulty communicating the concepts behind new products and features to key stakeholders, you'll definitely want to attend this year's UI12 Conference, where Kevin will present: Communicating Product Concepts with Comics. In this full-day seminar, you'll learn how to rally your stakeholders and team around a shared vision for your product by using comics as a technique to convey the key concepts behind a design's intended user experience.]

Web-based applications are quickly becoming critical components of the strategy of many organizations. In our research at UIE, we’ve seen that creating usable forms is essential to the success of these applications.

Forms are crucial for users to complete many online transactions, ranging from sign-up forms introducing new customers to your site to checkout forms finalizing your users’ purchases. However, until recently, the knowledge and skills to design a great form was still only available as scattered lore.

In this week’s UIEtips, we’re publishing an article written by Luke Wroblewski, a Principal Designer at Yahoo!, where he discusses how form layout and visual elements can have a real impact on users’ success with your web applications.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Do you have any best practices for designing forms? What usability problems have you encounted with your web forms? As always, I’d love to hear what you’re doing. Join the discussion below.

[If you find this article interesting, you'll definitely want to attend the User Interface 12 Conference this November 5-8, where Luke Wroblewski will present Site Seeing: Communicating Successfully with Visual Design. This in-depth seminar will provide you with practical insights and strategies for boosting your site's visual appeal and delighting your users.]

A few weeks ago I wrote an article discussing the 3 steps design teams take when creating an experience vision to guide the direction of design towards their users’ ideal experience. Once a design team creates that experience vision, they need to share it with everyone involved in the project to make sure everyone is on the same page as the design process progresses.

While the process of conveying the vision to key decision makers on the project and within the organization is very important, the methods used to share the vision can vary greatly depending on budget, available resources, and the pool of creative talent. Teams can use any technique, from expensive video-shoots with actors to low-fidelity stop-motion animation, as long as the vision helps the design team and stakeholders progress in the same direction and inspires team members to produce an improved experience.

In this week’s UIEtips article, I discuss how a successful envisionment that focuses on the users’ ideal experiences can lead design team’s direction for years to come, and I also explore the many creative techniques for making that vision clear to everyone involved on the project.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Does your organization have an experience vision? How are you guiding your design direction towards your users’ ideal experiences? What methods to share this vision have you used? As always, I’d love to hear what you’re doing. Join the discussion below.

[If you find this article interesting, you'll definitely want to attend the User Interface 12 Conference this November 5-8, where Kevin Cheng will present: Communicating Concepts with Comics. This seminar is an in-depth look at using comics as a technique for communicating the core concepts behind a design's intended user experience.]

Kate Gomoll is president and founder of Gomoll Research & Design. Back in March, we hosted Kate for a UIE Virtual Seminar on Field Studies. During the live presentation, we received many questions about the field research techniques Kate discussed. To delve into these questions in more depth, we recorded a follow-up podcast where I ask Kate about many of the pressing issues associated with field study research. We thought Kate’s insights were so useful that we’ve decided to share them with all of our SpoolCast listeners.

Among the issues Kate and I discussed,

• How can design teams demonstrate the immediate value of field research to management and stakeholders?
• What are the best tools to analyze user data?
• How can design teams integrate field studies into their research plan?
• What are the best ways to put study participants at ease when you are taking photographs or video of them?
• How does tag-team interviewing work?

If you’ve never conducted a field study, I highly encourage you to listen to this podcast. Kate Gomoll is the expert we recommend clients turn to with their questions about field research.

You’ll also want to check out Kate’s new report, The Field Study Handbook: A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs. Because field studies are such an essential tool for design teams, we asked Kate, along with Ellen Story Church and Eric Bond, to assemble this comprehensive guide. (There’s a promotion code that will earn you a discount, but you have to listen to the end of the Podcast to get it.)

You can also purchase the recording of Kate Gomoll’s Virtual Seminar here: Field Studies: The Ultimate Tool in Your Usability Toolbox.

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?

…It’s asking me a question ‘do you want to allow the new version to access the same keychain items (such as passwords) as the previous version?’.

Is it just me, or are the obvious answers to this question either Yes, or No. Yet this dialog box presents me with the options ‘Don’t Change’ or ‘Change All’. To which my immediate response is… Change What?! I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Let’s ignore the fact that, hypothetically, I have pretty much no idea of what a keychain item might be, the next line of text reassuringly tells me that whatever option I end up guessing at is permanent and affects all keychain items used by Adium…

Leisa goes on to point out that these types of messages have the potential to cause users to quit the application, and move on to a different application that proves to be less daunting.

This post reminded me of Jared’s recent business trip in Norway, where he encountered a serious error message displayed on a ticketing window when trying to move from the train he was travelling on to the airport. The error message showed up turned on its side, and didn’t contain any useful information for the average person. Missing little details on operations that carry some importance to people (such as getting your boarding ticket), can cause huge amounts of frustration and wasted time for your users, not to mention the employees who have to deal with the errors and complaints.

You can read Leisa’s entire post here: Dialog Boxes — Making simple things simple…

In the last couple of years, web sites and apps focusing on social interactions have become increasingly popular. We’ve been seeing more and more designs that allow users to collaborate and share what they’re doing with others, including such popular sites as MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, and Craigslist.

But only recently have design teams started to understand the complexities of dealing with thousands or millions of users who want to connect with their peers and coworkers in new and exciting ways. Several prominent incidents, such as the Facebook newsfeed blowup, have shown just how complex the social issues are.

In this week’s UIEtips, UIE’s Joshua Porter, an expert on the issues related to Social Design, has written a fantastic article outlining many of the common pitfalls that lead to failure when building social applications. Today’s UIEtips article was originally published on Josh’s blog, Bokardo. If you haven’t yet checked out the Bokardo blog, I highly suggest you take a look if you’re interested in Social Design. Josh is *the expert* we turn to at UIE when researching these types of issues.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Is your organization starting to focus on Social Design? How are you handling the complexities or connecting your users in new and exciting ways? As always, I’d love to hear what you’re doing. Join the discussion below.

[If you'd like to hear more insights from Joshua Porter on Social Design, you'll definitely want to check out his UIE Virtual Seminar, Social Design: Designing for the Social Lives of Users.]

Rebekah explains why she uses comics:

Comics are effective not only because they are essentially narrative, but also because they are unpretentious, easy to follow, and accessible. Whereas a functional specification document uses words and often “tech speak” to communicate functionality, comics use pictures and interactions to get ideas across. Comic artist and Yahoo! staffer Kevin Cheng put it best, calling comics “the universal language.”

And how she uses comics to explain the user experience in a series of steps:

Step 1: Focus on the point (forget the details) I was already well aware of our key scenarios and use cases, so I crafted brief stories in paragraph form for each one. Taking the time to write these stories before incorporating them into a comic allowed me to focus on the main points and the completeness of the message without the clutter of images and thought bubbles…

If you’re still skeptical of the value of comics, I think Rebekah’s story will give you a new perspective. You can read Rebekah’s full article, and see the sample comics here: Comics: Not just for laughs!

The most valuable asset of a successful design team is the information they have about their users. When teams have the right information, the job of designing a powerful, intuitive, easy-to-use interface becomes tremendously easier. When they don’t, every little design decision becomes a struggle.

While techniques, such as focus groups, usability tests, and surveys, can lead to valuable insights, one of the most powerful tools is the field study. Field studies get the team immersed in the environment of their users and allow them to observe critical details for which there is no other way of discovering.

While field studies are one of the most expensive techniques to implement, the value they return is tremendous. We’ve never come back from a study thinking we’ve wasted our time and resources. A quality study can produce enough information to keep a team busy for months.

In this week’s feature article, UIE’s Ashley McKee has conducted an excellent interview with Kate Gomoll, a recognized Field Research expert. In the interview, Kate shares how she and her team at Gomoll Research & Design conduct field studies.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Has your design team conducted field studies? How have they worked for you? As always, I’d love to hear what you’re doing. Join the discussion below.

[Whether you're new to the benefits of performing field research, or a seasoned researcher looking to brush up on your research techniques, you'll definitely want to get your copy of our latest UIE Fundamental Report: The Field Study Handbook -- A Common Sense Approach for Discovering User Needs, written by Kate Gomoll, Ellen Story Church, and Eric Bond.]

As part of our research to understand what techniques truly help teams produce better designs, we’re still constantly surprised by the number of teams successfully using personas. Teams report that using personas has increased the satisfaction of their users, producing more usable designs that better match the needs of their audience. We’re also hearing that using personas can reduce development time and keep costs down.

When teams use personas well, every member of the team really does seem to be on the same page about who the users are and what design will work best for them. We haven’t seen any other technique come close to getting this kind of result.

Our research has surfaced obvious benefits from the technique, such as better designer agreement on important features and an in-depth understanding of the user’s motivations. But, it’s also unveiled some benefits that we still don’t see discussed very much. In today’s UIEtips, we are republishing an article I wrote discussing some of these unrecognized benefits. I hope you enjoy it.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

As always, please share your thoughts with us. Has your design team created personas? What benefits have you seen? Join the discussion below.

[If you're thinking your team could benefit from using personas, I highly recommend you consider attending Steve Mulder's UIE Virtual Seminar this week covering the basics of how to create and utilize personas for your designs.]

In just the past couple of years, we’ve seen more and more designs that allow users to collaborate and share what they’re doing with others. Web sites and applications such as MySpace, Flickr, and Craigslist, are becoming increasingly popular.

One of the underlying reasons for their popularity is because they all focus on Social Design, an area of design that deals with the activities, behaviors, and motivations of people who work and play together through software interfaces. Each of these social applications connect users in new and exciting ways.

In this week’s UIEtips, we’ve republished Joshua Porter’s recent Brain Sparks blog post discussing how organizations can benefit from incorporating social features into their designs. I’ve decided to share the post with all of our UIEtips readers because I think Josh’s commentary on the importance of Social Design is just too important to miss.

As always, please share your thoughts with us. Have you ever wondered why sites such as MySpace and Flickr are so popular? Have you considered incorporating social features into your design? Leave your thoughts and join the discussion below.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

[If you find this article interesting, you'll definitely want to attend the User Interface 12 Conference this November 5-8, where Joshua Porter will present at UIE's Showcase Seminar, Usability 2007: The Latest Perspectives. In this seminar, Josh will share his latest research on Social Design practices.]

I particularly took away the idea of the Elastic User. This is where stakeholders make statements about what ‘users’ want, what ‘users’ do, what ‘users’ prefer, and because the ‘user’ in that context is so undefined and broad, they are able to say almost anything they like and there is no real way to contradict that opinion.

The creation of personas means that user groups are much more defined, so broad sweeping statements about what users want can actually be tested against something. Rather than having a free pass to do anything to the requirements or design by just using the word ‘user’, these assertions can now be tested and validated against more closely defined user characteristics and goals.

You can read Leisa’s full article here: Yes, you should be using personas.

If you’ve installed a wireless network, then you know it can be one of the most trying experiences for any technology consumer. David Pogue, a technology expert, author and tech columnist for the New York Times recently had a run in with a couple of wireless networking products.

Installers are an interface that no consumer or reviewer ever really thinks about. Unless it’s a poor experience. Then your latest product that you’ve staked the company’s quarter on might get 1100 words and a video on how bad an ordeal you put them through.

David was so infuriated with his experience that his wife implored him to stop reviewing wireless routers altogether. Inclined to agree, he wrote up just one small piece of the experience in a blog post:

Home networking remains one of the world’s most frustrating endeavors; 30 percent of home-networking gear winds up getting returned to the store.

I’m about to illustrate one reason why.

Here, as thanks to Netgear for its hours of help during my router-hell week, is a free consultation–a design overhaul of its software installer–a $50,000 value.

Don’t be the design team who gets free consultation in the New York Times.

David goes on to describe his 15-step process to install just one part of the wireless network equation, a USB WiFi adapter. He was attempting to install the brand-new adapter on a virgin Lenovo ThinkPad Windows notebook.

Although not a usability expert by trade, David is certainly an experienced user (he has his own line of how-to books), which makes you wonder if he has trouble, who are installation experiences tested with?

Routers and wireless gear are an interesting example here since outside of the installation, if the product works as designed, it’s invisible to the consumer. Failures will be highlighted much more than successes. You might want to add the following to your spec sheet:

» UX team: Avoid the wrath of David Pogue.

Every time I give a talk, someone always asks, “That’s all good and nice that helping users learn is the key to creating passionate users… but who’s going to do all that extra work? Who’s going to make the extra tutorials and better docs?” Answer: your user community. Think about all the things a strong user community can do for you: tech support, user training, marketing (evangelism, word of mouth), third-party add-ons, even new product ideas.

You can read Kathy’s entire post here: User Community and ROI.

How are you engaging your audience?

Present for the call were Jared Spool, DeWayne Purdy, Lyle Kantrovich, Kyle Pero, and Nate Bolt. You can meet the crew here.

You can fin the first episode and more about what’s in this episode here.

Here’s a feed that iTunes likes.

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

Present for the call were Jared Spool, DeWayne Purdy, Lyle Kantrovich, Kyle Pero, and Nate Bolt. You can meet the crew here.

You can fin the first episode and more about what’s in this episode here.

Here’s a feed that iTunes likes.

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

Present for the call were Jared Spool, DeWayne Purdy, Lyle Kantrovich, Kyle Pero, and Nate Bolt. You can meet the crew here.

In this episode, the SpoolCast crew convened to discuss:

• the impact of the pending Target Suit
• mixing automated and in-person testing techniques
• multi-variate testing
• designing tasks for testing
• moderated vs. unmoderated testing methods
• using Flash and AJAX on home pages
• the importance of validating inferences
• the interface paradigm of the Nintendo Wii
• the impact of new devices, such as the TiVo, Wii, and Guitar Hero on future interface design

We’ve divided the recording into three parts to make it easier to digest…
Part 2 is available here.
Part 3 is available here.

(Here’s a feed that iTunes likes.)

Sorry it’s taken so long to get this one out. It’s been crazy ’round here!

Production assistance on this SpoolCast from Brian Christiansen.

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

Stepping back a bit, however, it is clear that these sites are not only interesting in and of themselves, but they’re also an excellent source of discussion in terms of user experience design. After all, most of what folks like us in the UX industry do is to try to get as much insight as possible into the minds of our users in the hopes of designing systems that they’ll not only use, but be delighted to use. Often we have some idea why people might use software because we can easily relate it to our own lives. Social web applications, and more specifically social networking sites, are often an exception.

That’s one of the differentiators of social web design. It deals with the social lives of the people participating, not just the everyday tasks that anybody can relate to. When we’re studying banking applications, for example, it’s easy to talk about a user transferring money from one account to another because anybody who banks has probably done that at least once or twice. But when we start talking about social issues, like say a couple doing their yearly finances together using a web application, then the context changes completely into something that we might not understand at all. This is because the social lives of this couple, their relationship, is completely unique to them. We don’t understand how they interact, make decisions together, and deal with the aftermath. Designing a system that will delight not just one of them performing a task but both of them performing an activity at the same time is another hurdle altogether.

As a result of this, we’re seeing renewed interest in user research. More and more folks are telling us that they’re dedicating resources to finding out how people use their web applications in the context of their lives, not just in the context of their tasks. This is a great thing! Maybe the social networking sites are useful to us afterall.

We’re just beginning to get started down the road of social web design. The social networking sites are just a beginning, a great starter in a conversation that will be going on for quite some time.

A ton has already been written about the privacy aspects of this, so I’m not going to touch on that in this post. If you somehow missed all this controversy, I suggest you read this excellent discussion of the privacy implications by Danah Boyd and MoBuzz’s 4 minute YouTube video. Then you’ll know all there is to know about the privacy perspective.

What I’m interested is, as designers, what we’re going to learn from all this, with regards to how we design for change.

From the Facebook Blog on September 5, the day the feature was added:

You’ve probably noticed that Facebook looks different today. We’ve added two cool features: News Feed, which appears on your homepage, and Mini-Feed, which appears in each person’s profile.

News Feed highlights what’s happening in your social circles on Facebook. It updates a personalized list of news stories throughout the day, so you’ll know when Mark adds Britney Spears to his Favorites or when your crush is single again. Now, whenever you log in, you’ll get the latest headlines generated by the activity of your friends and social groups.

Mini-Feed is a new part of the profile that shows all the latest stuff someone has added on Facebook. Mini-Feed is similar, except that it centers around one person. Each person’s Mini-Feed shows what has changed recently in their profile and what content (notes, photos, etc.) they’ve added.

and

These features are not only different from anything we’ve had on Facebook before, but they’re quite unlike anything you can find on the web. We hope these changes help you stay more up to date on your friends’ lives.

Users didn’t react as positively as they’d hoped. From the NY Times article:

But within hours of the new feature’s debut, thousands of Facebook members had organized behind a desperate, angry plea: Make it stop.

“You pretty much are being tracked with every movement you make on Facebook,” said Emily Bean, a pharmacy major and Facebook user at Ohio Northern University who signed an anti-Facebook petition on Tuesday, when the new feature made its debut. “It’s like someone peeking in on my conversations. People now know exactly when you became friends with somebody. When you hook up with somebody is now documented. Before it took some extra effort.”

Facebook added a new feature without doing any work to prepare their users for the change. One day, they logged in and the world was different. Not better, just different. It seems the Facebook design team felt it was much improved, but that feels like it was the result of groupthink, not an actual assessment of the people who mattered: the users.

The lack of preparation for change is not a new problem. I talked about it 18 months ago when I wrote the article Designing Embraceable Change. We knew back then you don’t just have to design the change, you have to design the process of introducing the change and ensuring it’s embraced by the users.

While the Facebook controversy isn’t signalling a new type of problem, it is telling us the ramifications of when we get it wrong. Design changes are like organ implants — the host can reject the new organ and bad things happen. Facebook found itself in damage-control mode : “Calm down. Breathe. We hear you.” (from the blog entry by the CEO).

I think this is going to happen more and more. Whereas, in the olden days, the user had control when an upgrade happened, that’s gone away. My Tivo now upgrades itself while I sleep. Windows XP has updates it’s constantly trying to get me to install:

This morning, my version of AOL’s AIM instantly was sorely out of date:

And apparently I needed a new version of iTunes today:

Not to mention whatever changes I might run into over at Amazon, Yahoo, or any of the other dozen sites and services I use on a daily basis.

None of these do anything to help the user adapt to the new interface. The iTunes installation has all sorts of new features, but they don’t tell you how to use them (or that all your settings will go back to factory defaults). The Microsoft updates often introduce new behaviors in applications you weren’t previously aware were changed. It’s a take-it-or-leave-it scenario, with no real thought given to how users will react.

Which is why it’s not surprising that the Facebook users had such a strong negative reaction. (Interestingly, it was the news feed feature that propagated the news about the petitions against said feature.)

I’m a big proponent of making frequent changes quickly. However, as Uncle Ben reminds us, “with great power there comes great responsibility.” We have the power to introduce changes, we need to take on the responsibility of designing the process of change.

I wonder how many times we have to see the Facebook controversy play itself out before people start to take this seriously.

As we do in many of our studies, we allow our test participants to create their own tasks. This way, they’re much more likely to be shopping for something they’re truly interested in, as opposed to going through the motions for testing purposes. We also give users real money, which makes the incentive to purchase very strong. If someone is truly motivated to purchase, then any problems we uncover that prevent purchasing directly affect the bottom line.

Despite the freedom we give test participants to create their own tasks, we have to be more strict about which sites they visit. The reason is straight-forward: we’re testing the effectiveness of particular sites for a particular purpose. In order to see what works and what doesn’t, we need to watch several people on the same site (especially the site of our client). Otherwise, we wouldn’t have a large enough population to be sure that we weren’t just seeing outlying issues that only affect one or two people.

Amazon.com, however, can make this difficult. When we test sites that sell similar products as Amazon does, (a list that is always growing, as Amazon seems to sell everything nowadays), we always get testers who want to go to Amazon before they go to the site we ask them to go to. “Can I just check out Amazon first?”, they ask. Because we’ve already included Amazon in the testing, we must remind them that we are also interested in learning about other sites, and that they may or may not be asked to visit Amazon later in the test. “OK”, they say reluctantly.

I call this the Amazon Effect. Amazon is so strongly rooted in people’s minds that it overrides their desire to try out other sites, even if it’s during a test! And it was funny at first, when we would have to say things like “well, we may or may not ask you to test Amazon today, but either way, you can go there on your own after the test”. This always seems to make folks feel better.

But our biggest insight into this behavior came when we started questioning why Amazon was so powerful. Why do people have such an urge to visit Amazon before they go anywhere else? This wasn’t happening with other sites, only Amazon. What makes Amazon so special?

One of our first hunches was that people were so strongly leaning toward Amazon because they already had accounts there. It turns out that this isn’t the reason, though. Even though their credit card information is stored on Amazon’s servers, the few moments they’ll save not having to type it in again isn’t the reason why they want to go to there. It’s not the prices, either. People expect low prices at Amazon, but they don’t seem to think that Amazon has the lowest prices.

In fact, the testers don’t necessarily want to purchase at Amazon. They don’t say “I would rather shop for this on Amazon”. What they say is, “Can I go to Amazon first“. This subtle difference in wording turned out to be the clue to what drives them there.

The real cause of the Amazon Effect is research. Amazon has become the Consumer Reports of the Web. The primary reason people go to Amazon is to do product research. They trust what they find there and it heavily influences their purchasing decision. Some people we’ve tested claim that they go to Amazon and read the reviews there before every purchase they make. They want to be sure that what they’re buying has been positively reviewed.

Another interesting behavior we’ve seen is that some people only read the negative reviews, as if they’re looking for a deal-breaker review that just makes it impossible to purchase. We’ve heard comments like “I know what the positive reviews will say, but I don’t know what the negatives ones will say”.

The Amazon Effect is very strong, and we’re continually faced with it. However, it doesn’t seem to affect the usability of the site, as we find just as many problems on Amazon as on other sites (especially with third party sellers). But even with its own usability problems, Amazon has an effect unlike any other site we’ve tested.

When I set out to design a website, I do it backwards. I start with the design of the smallest, deepest element: the story page or search results. Then I work backwards to design their containers: section pages, indexes. Then, lastly, I work on the home page.

Derek’s approach to site design is consistent with what we’ve seen work most effectively. All too often, clients tell us they spend the majority of their time focusing on the design of the home page when we’ve found that it’s actually the least important page on the site. As Jared mentioned in his post, Is Home Page Design Relevant Anymore?, the home page serves only two purposes for users: it delivers the content, or it provides strong scent to get users to the content page they want.

We’ve seen that the most successful design teams focus on designing the content pages first, ensuring they have all the information that users need on those pages. They understand that the content page is the most important page to users for a very simple reason: this is where users find the information they’ve been seeking.

Does your team spend a large amount of time and resources focused on the homepage? Which page gets the highest priority with your team?

Advertising is all about disruption. TV ads disrupt users from the content. Billboard signs can disrupt people from focusing on driving. Online ads function similarly — they disrupt users from the content they’re looking for.

That’s why it’s always a surprise when I encounter online advertisements that actually work effectively. This happened to me today on Rotten Tomatoes, a site where users can find a summary of the movie reviews from top film critics.

When users arrive, Rotten Tomatoes often disrupts them with ads even before they’ve had a chance to enter the site. When I visited today, I was exposed to an ad for the popular movie, Grizzly Man.

The ad disrupted me from looking for the content I came for — the reviews for George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck (a movie I really want to see.) But I wasn’t annoyed or frustrated. The ad supplied me with information I am actually interested in: Grizzly Man is showing on the Discovery Channel tomorrow night. I now have my TiVo all set up to record the movie.

We often remind our clients that users don’t want to be disrupted from their tasks. But disruption can actually work sometimes. Have you seen any effective online ads recently? How did the site get you to pay attention to the ad? Was the disruption acceptable?

Though we’ve only been at it since July, we feel that blogging has been a very positive experience. So I want to put it out there and see if you have had similar experiences or not. Are you blogging, or thinking about it? If so, do you think that it has been worth it? What has happened as a result?

If you have recently added blogging to your repertoire, we would love to hear about it!

The Million Dollar Homepage is an innovative site created by college student Alex Tew to help raise money for his college education. Alex’s business model involved selling the one million pixels displayed on the home page for $1 per pixel. The business experiment turned out to be a huge success — Alex sold all of the ad space.

In his post, Seth is impressed with Alex Tew’s strategy but is bewildered by all of the sites attempting to duplicate his success:

When I see the 10,000 copycats out there, all I can do is sigh. Why do they believe this is a new trend? Why do they think it’s going to become an important part of the marketing mix, and are they really so naive to believe that they, and they alone, will earn even more than Alex did?

I agree. I have serious doubts any of the sites trying to duplicate the concept will be successful. The Million Dollar Homepage was a novel advertising campaign that generated attention for many of the site’s initial advertisers because people wanted to see who was willing to participate in this experiment. But I find it hard to believe the site generates much value for advertisers now that all of the pixels have been sold.

The concept fails as a marketing strategy for a few reasons. Online branding is not just about exposing potential customers to the organization’s logo. We’ve seen in our research studies that indirect messaging such as logos rarely works effectively unless users are repeatedly exposed to them. Plus, the Million Dollar Homepage is so overloaded with images and impressions, it’s unlikely users will pay attention to one particular logo.

Successful online branding also involves a user forming an emotional association (such as a feeling of excitement or happiness) about an organization or product. In the case of the Million Dollar Homepage, customers are exposed to a page of cluttered advertisements. There isn’t a real relationship or emotional association being built.

Finally, advertisements tend to work best when they are in some way related to the task users are trying to accomplish when they visit a site. Without understanding the users’ context when they arrive at the Million Dollar Homepage, is any ad on the page guaranteed to resonate with them? I don’t think so.

While the Million Dollar Homepage is an innovative idea that paid off for the site’s creator, it really hasn’t paved the way for a new approach to successful advertising.

In a recent study described in the scientific journal Nature, Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa describes her research examining how long it takes users to form impressions about the visual aesthetics of a web site. From the Nature article:

Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly jarring, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal. Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny.

(To get an idea of how long 50 milliseconds really is, take a look at an experiment comparing Bank of America’s home page for 50 milliseconds versus 500 milliseconds.)

All of our research examining users’ snap judgments is consistent with Dr. Lindgaard’s findings. We’ve seen in testing that users make important judgments very quickly when they arrive at a web page. That’s one of the reasons we use 5-second tests as our primary technique for evaluating users’ first impressions.

While I agree that users make very quick judgments about a site’s visual appeal, I disagree somewhat with the implications suggested by the study’s researchers:

Unless the first impression is favourable, visitors will be out of your site before they even know that you might be offering more than your competitors,” Lindgaard warns.

From what I can tell, the researchers didn’t find any actual evidence that users will leave a site after 50 milliseconds if they find a site visually unappealing. The problem with Lindgaard’s conclusions is that the research didn’t study how users behave when they’re trying to accomplish their tasks.

For example, CraigsList is a site that has tested very well with our users. Users loved the site. Why? Not because the site was visually appealing. CraigsList succeeded because the content surpassed their users’ expectations. The site makes its users happy despite what some might consider poor aesthetics. And none of the users left the site because of a “bad design.”

In all of our research studying user behavior, we see that visual aesthetics play a role in users’ judgments — but they take a backseat to the site’s content.

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.

Here’s Amazon‘s account login:

As you can see, the messaging says that ordering from Amazon is quick and easy. Placing this message here is a good idea. (unless it’s not true, of course) Then we see something rather unique, a set of radio buttons that allows the user to choose whether they are a new customer or a returning one. If they are a new customer, then they must sign up for an account. If they are returning, they need to enter their password.

We have seen users have difficulty with this particular feature in the past for several reasons. One is when registered users enter their password but neglect to click the radio buttons. The other is when new customers, after entering an email address, enter their password too, thinking that they’re going to create an account with that password. (despite the helpful text that says you create your password later)

Here’s the redesigned Circuit City web site:

The Circuit City design starts out by asking users if they are registered, and if so they can sign in to speed through checkout. Like Amazon, the designers at Circuit City are touting the benefits of signing in, which we’ve seen as critical to getting users further along the Customer Sieve.

But, unlike Amazon’s radio buttons, the choice isn’t a clear this or that. In the Circuit City design, both registered and non-registered users need to complete the questions on this page. The only difference is that those users who are registered can click the input button labeled “sign in” first, and then they’ll be brought back to this page to continue filling it out. In effect, there is no choice between either signing in or creating an account. It doesn’t state that explicitly, however.

Contrast that to the Best Buy checkout:

The designers at Bestbuy chose a different approach. They make it explicit that users can checkout without signing up for an account. In our testing we’ve seen users really appreciate this option. In addition, users can create an account during the checkout process to speed future purchases. You can’t tell if that’s possible on the Circuit City site. In general, we’ve seen approaches that make these details like this as clear as possible work better than those that don’t.

And then there’s Yahoo, who seem to desperately want users to create a Yahoo ID:

Like the others, Yahoo is providing a choice and touting the benefits of sign up: “It makes ordering easier and will provide access to your new Business Edition service”. Unlike Best Buy, however, sign-up is not optional.

I’m interested in how this plays with users. Do they want to sign up for a new business service, or do they want to simply check out this one time? While we haven’t tested this Yahoo feature specifically, our experience testing checkouts has suggested that people often shy away from “fringe benefits” like this, especially if those benefits are not explained fully. (and much moreso if they have a choice not to)

The choice that Yahoo does provide is rendered in text, instead of input buttons or radio buttons like on Circuit City and Amazon. They do it with a link called “Create one now” and a sign-in box to the right. This is similar to Amazon and Best Buy, who include the text boxes directly on the page. Circuit City, on the other hand, takes users to another screen to enter the sign-in information.

So how do you handle sign-in? As you can see, there are as many different ways to handle sign-in as there are web sites. I stuck to e-commerce sites for these examples, but the basic problem is the same for all sites: articulate the choices that users have, explain the benefits or drawbacks, and guide them through making their decision. Do your design projects take you in similar directions as these four sites, or completely different ones?

What is a 7-11 Milk Experiment? Here’s the scenario: Imagine I had a way to identify when someone has run out of milk. I pick them up in my car and drive them to the nearest 7-11. And just to make sure everything goes well, I give them the money to buy milk. How likely is it that that store can sell milk in this scenario? When I’ve asked people this question, almost all respond that it’s close to 100%. If the store does not end up selling to the user, there’s clearly something wrong with their experience on the site.

In our research, we mirror this type of experiment online. We find people who need products, bring them to sites that have the products they want, and give them money to buy the products. What did we find?

In our latest study, users only purchased 30% of the time! So, what was happening here? We found that on most of the sites, users just couldn’t find what they were looking for and that the site’s organization was to blame.

From watching users shop, we’ve seen that they use a progressive process. Users move from one stage to the next, as they try to purchase a product. One of the biggest priorities in our current research agenda is to identify where in the purchase process users fail, such as the Home Page, the Product Lists pages, or the Target Content pages. By understanding how these different stages and types of web pages work, we hope to learn a lot more about building usable sites.

The designers of UNI.edu have put considerable time and effort into sharing the experiences of people associated with the university. The site has more than 40 detailed profiles of students, faculty, staff, and alumni.

There’s a huge amount of information users can glean from these profiles. For example, since visiting the web site, I’ve already asked three friends, “Did you know Entertainment Tonight’s co-host, Mark Steines, attended the University of Northern Iowa?” With my addiction to t.v. shows and movies, I found the tidbits about Mark really interesting.

Why did the designers of UNI’s site invest so much energy in these profiles? One reason is that they knew users really needed this type of content to make a decision about where to attend college. Before deciding whether UNI is the school for them, prospective students visited the web site with one main goal – to see what other students had experienced.

At UIE, we coined the term “inukshuk” to describe the type of content in these UNI profiles. The term comes from the Inukshuk stone figures created by Inuit eskimos as guide markers. These figures signified to other hunters that others has already passed through and experienced their same journey. The main purpose of the inukshuk was to provide reassurance and empathy to others.

In our research, we’ve seen that, just like the Inuit hunters, users on the web want reassurance that others have shared their experience. In the case of UNI, the inukshuk content was very effective at offering the content users needed to make a decision about whether to attend the university.

You can find inukshuk content on many sites. It’s seen in web site discussion boards and testimonials, where users want to be informed through other users’ experiences. We’ve seen that inukshuk content is an invaluable way to share information with users.

The premise of Blink is that we think without thinking, that our brain is always working even if we don’t realize it. We make split-second decisions about things with very little data. That new neighbor? We already have an opinion about him. That person’s clothes? It does affect our impression of them.

What about web sites? What about our first impressions of using them? Does the story in “Blink” carry over to our life online?

A simple example is how well a web site says “hello” to readers. Is it friendly? Is it indifferent? Does it dress nicely, or poorly? Does it assume that the reader knows something that they don’t? Does it tell people what they need to know to feel confident that they’re in the right place?

Here are three sites that offer a very similar service. But they each have a very different way to say “hello”, and they each produce very different split-second impression. Take a look at all three for a moment and see for yourself:

• BillMyClients
• Blinksale
• Thomson Elite

Now, knowing what you know now about these sites (which isn’t much), if you had to recommend one of these services, which would you choose?

Is there any doubt in your mind?

So, how can you find out how well your site is saying hello? Well, we call a more formal method of investigating initial impressions a “5-second Test”. Christine described the 5-Second Test a few weeks back in good detail.

The 5-Second test is a small part of our ongoing research into what we call “just-right” information. Just-right information is information that is not too minutely-detailed to be useful nor is it information that is too sparse to be helpful. It’s just-right, and part of delivering The Right Information is that it makes a good impression when it says “hello”.

That’s why, in the past few months at UIE, we’ve been really intrigued by the work that Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg have been doing with Persuasion Architecture. The Eisenbergs have created a promising process that helps design teams incorporate persuasive elements into their site’s design. We’ve seen it’s a great way to map your sales process to your visitor’s purchasing process.

Bryan recently wrote a fantastic article describing some of the key factors that affect a user’s persuasive momentum. He gives a concise summary of the four factors (Knowledge, Need, Risk, and Consensus) that determine how complex your organization’s persuasive process needs to be.

More and more lately, we’ve recommended our clients focus on Persuasion Architecture to help convert their prospective users into paying customers. The Eisenberg’s process seems to be a great way to help boost your site’s conversions, whether your objective is sales, lead generation, or disseminating content.

As you can probably tell, we are big fans of Bryan and Jeffrey’s work. We think their book, Call to Action, is an excellent resource for folks looking for an introduction to Persuasion Architecture. You can also see Jeffrey and Bryan present here.

When we conduct a study, we ask our participants a ton of questions. Some questions prove to be completely unrelated to anything we learn in the study. But other questions, well, they provide some interesting insights.

We’ve always asked questions relative to other web experience. We started with the usual gamut: How many hours a week do you use the web? How many years have you been using it? What sites do you visit? Do you ever shop online?

The answers to these weren’t very interesting. Our participants’ answers never seemed to predict any of the results from the testing. In other words, it just didn’t matter what they said. So, we kept changing our questions, hoping to find something that could actually predict a test outcome. And we found something, in the weirdest place.

In a study we were doing with online shoppers, we asked a simple question: What was your largest purchase on eBay? Because most people have never shopped on eBay, they typically answer $0. But, in our study, some of our users put in a value, ranging from $15 to $2,500.

So, we dutifully entered this data into our modelling tools, along with the 300+ other variables we collected from each participant and we set our analyzer off and running. And what we learned surprised us:

• eBay shoppers are more likely to read policies (privacy policy, return policy)
• eBay shoppers are more critical of the site. (They rate various subjective measures lower.)
• eBay shoppers find shopping online more frustrating
• eBay shoppers are more likely to feel the shopping process takes too long
• eBay shoppers tend to find the site content more confusing
• eBay shoppers tend to dislike the layout and appearance of the site
• eBay shoppers tend to feel the images are not helpful
• eBay shoppers tend to feel the site wasn’t fun
• eBay shoppers tend to feel they won’t return to the site to shop again

Now, we asked the same question of Amazon shoppers, Wal-Mart shoppers, and about 20 other different offline and online shopping experiences. None of them showed the same kind of bias as eBay shopping.

We call this attitude bias eBayness. The more you spend on eBay, the more eBayness you exhibit. And the more eBayness you exhibit, the more attitude you show about the shopping process.

(Here’s an interesting by-product of our analysis of eBayness: it doesn’t seem to effect perceptions of price. Folks who have spent more on eBay do not think any differently about a given retail site’s pricing as anyone else. So, they aren’t any more likely to be bargain hunters than anyone else.)

Now, what can we do with eBayness?

Well, when testing e-commerce sites, we can start to use eBayness as a way to refine our testing. When testing a new design approach, we could focus on users who have a strong eBayness to whittle away at the coarse edges of our design. Once we make it acceptable in those users eyes, we can then move on to fine-grain refinements with users who have little-to-no eBayness.

Controlling for eBayness in our testing now becomes a priority. And it begs the question: what other user groups display particular attitude bias? How are we controlling for them?

But there still isn’t just one right way to conduct a usability test. Every usability team has their own unique testing method. They have their own techniques for creating tasks, recruiting users, facilitating the tests, and disseminating test results.

Over the past several years, we’ve been excited by Rolf Molich’s research at Dialog Design. Since 1998, Rolf’s conducted four Comparative Usability Evaluation (CUE) research studies to investigate the many different usability methods employed by teams.

The CUE studies are the first of their kind. Usability practitioners from all over the world are asked to evaluate the same interface, using their standard practices. Rolf compares the different results of the study participants, looking to see which practices are most effective at discovering and reporting usability practices.

The most famous study, CUE-2, had nine teams conduct usability tests of Microsoft’s Hotmail interface. Last year, CUE-4 had 18 testers (using both expert inspections and usability testing) looking at iHotelier’s Flash-based hotel reservation system.

Through the CUE studies, Rolf Molich has collected the methods, reports, and results of dozens of usability teams, pulling the best practices. At UIE, we’ve found this type of research to be very informative. We learn so much when we compare our own methods against our colleagues and peers.

This October, members of UIE’s usability team are looking forward to participating in Rolf’s CUE study at our User Interface 10 Conference. I expect we’ll learn a great deal comparing our own methods to our colleagues in the field.

That’s right. We conducted a usability test where the same participant worked on the same interface for five 4-hour sessions. In fact, we did it 8 times over a four week period, with 2 participants each day.

We were testing application development tools in an integrated environment. We wanted to see a developer take a project from concept all the way to completion. The project involved building a database, creating screens, and writing code. No way we could do that in a 60-minute session.

The sessions were amazing. We learned a ton about how developers create applications. We saw the programmer make mistakes, then use the debugging facilities to discover them. We saw them read the manuals and the online help (or make guesses instead of reading them). The tests gave us tremendous insight into the software development process.

Recently, I saw an email discussion concluding that you shouldn’t run usability tests for more than 60 minutes because the participants get tired and stop giving useful information. However, we had no problems with our users during the 20-hour test. They never tired out.

Why? Because they were doing what they normally do, 40+ hours every week. They were doing their jobs and, for them, that isn’t tiring. Of course, they took breaks and made frequent pauses to answer our questions. But, at the end of the week, they seemed very pleased with themselves and very anxious to keep answering any questions we had.

Not every test we run is 20 hours. Most only last 2 or 3 hours. Occasionally, we do one as short as an hour.

We believe that getting a user into the lab is a very costly and difficult process. Once we get them there, we want to have as much time with them as possible. That’s why we tend to go for the long tests. And, since we’ve carefully screened users in the recruitment process, we rarely run into the problem of them tiring out and reducing the quality of their feedback.

In fact, we have more problems with observer stamina than we do with user stamina. Observing a 3-hour session can be exhausting. As a facilitator, I’m more concerned about my observers losing focus than my users losing focus.

When observers lose focus, they find it hard to pay attention. They start to drift off or talk amongst themselves. Or worse, they get silly. Since we don’t typically use a real usability lab, unfocused observers can distract the user and create an additional burden for the facilitator.

To ensure observers stay with us, we take frequent breaks, even if the user doesn’t feel they need it. These are planned into our session.

A client recently told me that they scheduled six 1-hour tests in a single day, back-to-back, with only a 45-minute break for lunch. At the end of the day, the team was so loopy that they couldn’t concentrate on anything the last participant did.

We try not to do more than an hour without a 10-minute break. When we have more than one session in a row, we give ourselves a minimum of 30 minutes to rest.

When we conducted our 20-hour tests, we left 90-minutes between the morning and afternoon tests to get lunch, go for a walk, check up on email and generally have “away time,” in addition to the 10-minutes breaks we took every hour with the participant. The days were long, but the breaks were very helpful.

Even when we do field studies, we make sure we have time between visits to regroup and get a sense of what we learned. We found that if rush from one site visit to the next, without a break, we aren’t as effective as we are if we take breaks between each one.

So, in our work, we don’t worry about tiring out the participants. We worry about tiring out the observers. If we take good care of them, everything seems to go really well.

We often recommend that our clients test surrogate users when the design’s actual users are unavailable. For example, we were recently tasked with testing a sophisticated medical application designed primarily for surgeons. Because the surgeons’ time was too valuable to be pulled away for hours of usability tests, we found it nearly impossible to recruit them for testing.

To combat this problem, we chose surrogate users for the usability tests — medical students. While these students were not the target audience for the application, they helped us find some some of the biggest problems with the application’s functionality early on in our testing.

While it’s ideal for design teams to test users who directly match the target audience, we use surrogates any time our primary users are inaccessible. We try and recruit users with profiles as similar as possible to that of our target audience. In any instance where the surrogate medical students were missing the necessary domain knowledge to complete a task, we prompted them with the information any surgeon would possess. This allows us to provide the surrogates with the same knowledge as the target users.

By testing medical students, we found several major usability problems not related to domain expertise, and didn’t eat up any of the surgeons’ time.

While there is a clear benefit to using surrogates, we’re careful not to base all of our design decisions on this testing. We test with surrogates early on in the development process, understanding that the user behavior may not completely reflect the behavior of the actual target users. When we make major design decisions about an interface, we’re still careful to test the target users later on in the development process, adding what we learn to the information we gathered from the surrogates.

While surrogate testing is less effective than testing target users, getting some information early is much better than waiting to test the target users late in the development process.

If you’re recruiting people for usability, what typically do you pay them “for their time”?

The short answer is “What is their time worth to you?” After all, these folks are helping you create the design you need. How valuable is their information? (If it’s not valuable, why are you wasting your time?)

The medium answer is that it depends on many factors:

In one study we did recently, we paid some users as much as $1,700 for the 3-hour session. We were asking them to use that money to buy the laptop computer of their dreams. (Many actually purchased laptops that were more expensive than the money we gave them.)

$1,700 is extremely high for a 3-hour session. Most users can get much less than that. The long answer is what we wrote in our report, Recruiting without Fear:

At some point in the planning process, you’ll have to decide how much to pay each participant you recruit. A lot depends on your budget — but you should offer them something. Many companies that undertake usability testing pay participants in cash, often between $25 and $50 per hour. Other companies give away gifts. For example, Microsoft typically doesn’t pay participants cash, but gives them their choice of select Microsoft software.

Whether you pay in cash or in mugs and caps, the fee is symbolic. These sessions are hard work, and you will be asking a lot of each participant. It would be easy for people to conclude that whatever you can afford to pay them is too low for what they contribute, and they would be right. Unless the session itself is the motivator, no amount of money will make it work.

Even though most qualified participants want to take part, busy people still like to hear why you want them for a particular session. They also want to know what they’ll get out of the experience. You can tell them:

“Your colleagues are working on this product.”

“You’ll meet the developers producing the designs you depend on.”

“You can see, and even influence, what’s new in your field.”

For some participants, it makes all the difference just to know that their contribution will count.

In a recent intranet test, we didn’t pay the users anything. (We did offer them a beverage of their choice, but none took us up on the offer.) Instead, the real reward for the users was (a) time away from their day-to-day jobs and (b) the chance to guide improvements to the much-hated internal network. We got complete cooperation just by asking nicely. Politeness is an amazingly powerful influencer!

You have to be careful about going cheap though — some people will think you don’t value your their time, thereby thinking you don’t value their opinion. As a result, they’ll refuse to participate and it will make recruiting harder, since you’ll have to talk to more potential candidates. When we do pay our users, we tend to pay higher-than-average rates because recruiting time is far more expensive than the increased remuneration fees.

p.s. Recruiting without Fear is a pretty cool resource, if someone on your team spends any time recruiting users (says a very biased co-author).