Read Frank Garofalo's article on UX Magazine entitled: "Capturing What You're Not Implementing" (http://www.uxmag.com/strategy/capturing-what-youre-not-implementing). The article discussing methods for retaining concepts and ideas from projects and the potential benefit they can provide for use in future work.

UX Magazine (www.uxmag.com) is an online magazine to "deliver a central place to discuss the critical disciplines that all enhance user experience."

Cyber View is excited to announce a new consulting service, Signature UX, for companies to address growing expectations of customers to receive higher qualities experiences.


For more details visit: www.signatureux.com. Inquires about consulting opportunities can contact Cyber View at: www.cyberviewsites.com/go/inquire

"Treating Users as Customers: Designing the end-to-end" (what a brilliant concept), is the title of an article by Steve Workman, a consultant at PA Consulting Group in London, UK. Workman begins his article with a discussion about how for web designers it is easy to divide elements of the user interface and/or the user experience into small parts. He states: "Breaking an experience into small parts allows the details to be worked through and perfected." This is true. However, only looking at the situation with a magnifying glass can miss details seen at the big picture level, as Workman describes: "It's rare that web designers think of the bigger picture - not just the end-to-end journey of a user, but the entirety of a customer's experience." The full span of the customer experience can take numerous weeks to occur, or "it can be as immediate as someone being told about an app, downloading it, playing with it for five minutes, and leaving a review." I strongly agree with Workman's point of: "...the need for designers to think big in order to deliver customer experience has never been so important."

The path a customer takes to arrive to your user interface can greatly affect the expectations they will have of your interface/system. Workman breaks these path/expectation combinations into three categories, to quote:

• Search gives the lowest expectation because relatively little information is contained within search results.
• Advertising often paints a rosy picture of products or services so expectations are higher.
• Social networks produce the most realistic expectations, as this is the only channel where both negative information and independent praise can be found.

Trying to match what a customer is expecting with methods to develop the interface/system to meet those expectations, UX professionals usually turn to generating use cases. Workman states:

Many designers simply view this touchpoint as a single use case, and attempt to group people into buckets to predict what they will do. If customers expect more than a use case can describe, it is entirely possible that they won't be happy with a product or service - their expectations won’t be met.

With the increased number of web sites and mobile apps available on the web, customers' standards for customer support have also increased. I agree with Workman's thoughts on this:

A few years ago, a frustrated customer would simply sigh and give up on a difficult product, or try to accomplish the same thing using another service. More recently, though, people have been treating web sites and "garage-made" apps as if they were products from multi-national corporations, expecting the same level of service from a one-man band as they would get from their electric company.

This is now presenting one-man bands as well as companies of all sizes with several new challenges; "...expectations for support are also going up, often faster than the companies can keep up with," says Workman. He goes on to make the observation, which I agree with, of "...many companies, both large and small, are not providing the same quality of customer service that they provide for their core services as for their mobile apps... they make the mistake of assuming their application is good enough and their customers are technically savvy, so they don’t have to put much effort into customer support."

Looking at the big picture there are several actions that can be taken to improve the full experience of interacting with a company. Workman describes this as:

The customer's experience must be considered at all stages of UX design; the big picture should always affect in the design of the small picture, as each touchpoint in the ecosystem is crafted. Marketing teams must be involved in designing the customer experience, so that the holistic experience of using a service or interacting with a company conveys the right message every time.

Once again, the discussion leads towards collaboration with user experience, information technology, marketing, operations, and customer support. Customers today are expecting an open dialogue with a company to resolve any issues they may encounter. Not only are customer support departments being called upon to help resolve these issues quickly, but information about the issues need to be communicated efficiently to the other departments within the company so that the company can learn from these issues and better respond to the customers' needs thus moving towards the continual goal of providing the best experiences.

I'll wrap up this post with the last paragraph from Workman, which ties the idea together very well:

Thinking of the customer experience, rather than just the user experience, leads to a more complete product, one where customers’ expectations are met before, during, and after their journeys. Thinking of the big picture leads to happier customers, not just happier users.

Read Steve Workman's full article on UX Magazine at: http://uxmag.com/strategy/treating-users-as-customers

Introduction
Planning, designing, developing and building the user interface for a system has a plethora of parallels to constructing a house. Just as an architect for a house needs to plan the structural support for the house as well as the aesthetic design of the house, the same applies to planning the user interface for a system. Planning must occur for the functional development of the system, as well as for the aesthetic design of the system. But it isn't just that simple. There are business and consumer needs which factor into the equation, so the architect has to work within the threshold of the construction company's needs as well as meeting what the new home owner will want. Again, parallels exist from an architect for a house to planning a user interface. Considerations for the user interface need to be made for the business needs as well as the needs of the consumers. Overall, throughout the process there is a concept lying in the center trying to find this balance; that concept is called "information architecture."

The two primary items on either side of the balancing act for information architecture are 1) creative design, and 2) functionality / interaction. The other smaller players in the game at varying levels can typically include, but are not limited to: marketing, software, engineering, language translations, copy writing, and upper-management.

Planning for Information Architecture
When building a house, there are usually blueprints, material lists, schedules/timelines, and budgets. The same documents need to be generated when building an interface. Each of these documents are very important to have listed and detailed. This allows the key stakeholders for the project, in addition to the individuals actually working on the project, to know exactly what needs to occur. Sounds like another field is involved here… called project management. However, for this discussion I'm not going to focus on project management in relation to user experience and/or information architecture. Let’s further dive into the process of drafting blueprints in regard to information architecture. To quote renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright, "You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledge hammer on the construction site." Planning and concept development are essential, or perhaps you need to invest in a large quantity of sledge hammers (which from another aspect could result in a low morale among workers since now they are tearing apart what they just built).

User Experience vs Information Architecture
The two concepts of user experience and information architecture go hand-in-hand. However, if a "high-level" of one exists, that doesn't automatically mean that a "high-level" of the other will exist. I think Oliver Reichenstein, co-owner and manager of Information Architects (MA Philosophy; former senior brand consultant at Interbrand), describes this well in his following quote: "Architects design houses that lead to a spectrum of experiences, some foreseen, some not. But they do not design all possible experiences one can have in a house." In other words, an extravagant house can be designed and constructed; however, just because the architect designed for a room to be the dining room, the home owner could place a billiards table in that space instead of a dining room table.

The same is true for user interfaces. A quality interface can be produced with excellent information architecture, however all the possible use cases that could occur when in the hands of a consumer are almost impossible to conjure up. Yes, I'm stating that in my opinion, even a leading user experience expert would be challenged to account for all possible use cases for a given product or system. Although, through user testing and observing individuals, better use cases can be generated. To further explain, just because a team of designers and developers define a list of use cases, this does not mean that the consumer will use the system exactly as the use cases had described. This introduces a whole other topic where I've observed numerous occurrences of users essentially forming "hacked" methods of using an interface or system to achieve what they want the system to really be able to do in comparison to what the designers and developers plan with the use cases.

Recap
During the blueprint phase of planning, designing, developing, creating, and/or building a user interface, try to work out as many ideas and issues as possible. Build prototypes to test the concept and observe people interacting with the prototype. This is a cyclical, iterative process… make changes with a "pencil" and try to reduce/avoid the need for a "sledge hammer."

Find a balancing between what is visually pleasing on the screen and what is a natural interaction… in other words a middle ground between creative design and functionality / interaction with the goal to achieve a strong information architecture.

I recently read an article on TechCrunch.com by David Barrett titled "Why Products Suck (And How To Make Them Suck Less)." In the article he discusses how making a product not suck (and to avoid the "tar pit" of sucking) is actually a complex challenge - if it was easier, more products would be on the market that didn't suck.

Barrett's 5 key points are:
1. It only takes one person to make your product suck
From Barrett's discussion on this point, I liked the following statement: "Convey to your team and the world that not sucking is your primary goal."

2. Nobody ever got fired for sucking
In other words, hire intelligent people - Barrett shares the quotation: "A people hire A people, B people hire C people."

3. It's easier to suck more than suck less
This point made me laugh, especially when he elaborated and said: "Sucking is like a tar pit: once you step in, your struggles only pull you in deeper. After you make that one product compromise to satisfy some crazy customer, then you’ve got to support that setting." We certainly have run into that issue. Customer A wants specific features as a solution to their current challenges. But the feature is so specific to Customer A, now whenever you have to upgrade the system for all your other customers you have to upgrade these small plug-ins specific to Customer A. It causes such a headache...

4. There are more ways to suck than to not suck
Barrett's states for this point: "If sucking is like a tar pit, then building a product that doesn't suck is like walking a tightrope over La Brea (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Brea_Tar_Pits)."

5. Customers demand sucky products
Ok so no offense to customers, but we all do it as customers without even realizing it. We want products to align exactly with our needs, but do those needs actually span across all the customers of the product? One strive we are taking towards remedying this situation is to make our web-based products more adaptive and anticipative to what the customer needs at the given moment. I certainly agree with the following statement made by Barrett: "…not all complaints are equal: complaints that you don't support feature X are far better than complaints about how feature Y sucks."

Read Barrett's full article at: http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/06/why-products-suck-and-how-to-make-them-suck-less/

Adobe MAX 2010 - Day 2 Keynote video

I had difficulty determining which topic to place this post since it spans several topics.

Recently I've been reading a book by Donald Norman called "The Design of Future Things." I'm not one to do much pleasure reading often, however I have found this book to be: insightful, entertaining, and informative.

On page 93 he discusses the interaction between humans and machines. Through the various interactions that occur between humans and machines, there are all sorts of indicators that machines have been designed to use to attempt to inform their user with some type of information. Now that last sentence may sound very vague - but think about it from beeps to buzzers, LED lights to digital displays - there are a variety of indicators. Norman refers to this in the book as the "human-machine social ecosystem." For example, on my Android phone the same LED light will illuminate green for a text message, voicemail message, and Gmail message. However that single LED light doesn't provide me with information to distinguish specifically what it is trying to bring to my attention - and honestly at times this is frustration. Norman expresses the point that with the design of devices today - some devices try to adapt to the user and on the flip side, the user usually has to adapt to the device. This can be a strong positive and a strong negative at times. To quote Norman, "Combining implicit communication with affordances is a powerful, very natural concept" (pg. 71). Norman goes on to suggest that a "symbiosis of machine and person" is a form of "human-machine interaction at it's best" (pg. 90).

So from a user experience perspective, how can devices and interfaces be designed to benefit the user. Norman shares details regarding how devices today are trying to adapt to a user's behavior pattern to predict what the user will want. The primary goal to achieve is to not cause an annoyance or dangerous situation for the user, but rather to support the user. Predict and give the user suggestions. The device can then adapt and become better at predicting the suggestions to give the user without completely automating the process by making a selection for the user. To support the user information provided, according to Norman, must be "voluntary, friendly, and cooperative" (pg. 130). I certainly agree with Norman especially when he describes the concept of "informate," which he defines as "impact of increased access to information afforded by automation" (pg. 133).

There is a challenge between making a device completely automated and making a device completely manually controlled. The middle ground, as Norman suggests, can be a very complex and potentially dangerous combination. However overall, devices and interfaces need to "provide a user with tools to work and live smarter" (pg. 128).


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