Giving Feedback: UX Deliverables
I was talking with another experience architect yesterday about how often we get feedback on our deliverables that contradicts either other items in the same feedback document or feedback we received earlier. Sometimes, feedback is so cryptic that we aren’t sure what’s even being requested. It’s frustrating because we want our clients to feel like we’re listening to and acting on their feedback.
Thinking back to previous projects, we found that some processes work better than others. Here are some tips for helping your client (or yourself) give good feedback on UX deliverables.
Use a Feedback Template
What seems to work the best is provide your client with a feedback template. We’ve done this in Excel with success, but don’t always remember to set up the process ahead of time. The idea is to have each page of the wireframes (or section of the sitemap, feature of the prototype, etc.) listed with columns for the requested change, the change requester (so important), priority of the change, and an area for the person receiving the feedback to respond. What’s great is that over the course of the project, you have a full picture of changes that have been made. That way, when someone who has been involved sporadically on a project says, “Why’d you change x?”, you can say, “That change was requested by y on this date.” It also helps to be able to say that feedback you’re getting in a round 2 review contradicts feedback in round 1. You’ll probably still end up making the change, but it helps to show your clients them these instances. Maybe next time they’ll be sure to hear from a senior manager in round 1 instead of waiting. One can dream.
Don’t Tie Feedback to Page Numbers
This happens so many times that you’d think I’d never forget to mention it to clients. Unfortunately, I do. I receive a lot of e-mails that request a change or two on a page referenced only by it’s page number. What makes this problematic is that often you end up re-order, adding, and deleting pages over the course of a project and it can be unclear which page actually needs the change. If you don’t want to spend your time digging up older versions and trying to figure our what pages were numbered before, use a unique reference for each page (or item in a feature and functions list) and never, ever change it. Never.
Consolidate Feedback Before Making Changes
Let’s say you get some feedback in person at a review session and will then be wating a few days before you get your feedback spreadsheet back from the client. Should you make the changes you’re sure about? If you get feedback from some stakeholders ahead of the deadline, should you start revising? Deadlines always make us do crazy things, but the answer should be no. I find that unless something is just so obviously wrong that it must be changed, this leads to a lot of rework. For instance, you might hear that some wording needs to change, so you make a first attempt at changing it. Then, you get one stakeholder telling your it should be something else and then another suggestion for the change. You could end up making the same change 3 times when what you really needed to do was ask the client to look at the two suggestions they gave, look at your recommendation, and tell you their preference. In the long run, time is saved.
Be Explicit About What Kind of Feedback Will Be Implemented and When
I worked with a team within a company I worked for on some translations for an international marketing website. Round after round, we would get more and more changes on text that had previously been reviewed an approved. Unable to read the text myself, I wasn’t sure if the translations were wrong or if the reviewers just didn’t like it. As we got closer to launch, I had to draw a line in the sand. I told them that each requested changed needed to me marked as inaccurate translation or preferred wording. We’d make the translation changes before launch and do a preferred wording fix post launch. This gave reviewers more time to think about exactly what they wanted to say and let us launch on time. In other situations, I’ve had to ask specific reviewers to focus only on items which they are responsible for so that a developer isn’t wasting time commenting on marketing copy that has already been approved by a subject matter expert.
Help the PM Help You
If you are fortunate enough to be working with a PM on a project, let them know how they can help you collect and clarify feedback. You might ask them to take a first pass at consolidating feedback and finding any contradictions. They can also help you push back when the requested change is out of scope or, because it will be the 3rd time you’ve changed the same thing, needs a change order. I find that PMs often aren’t sure how to support UX work, so let them know how you see the process working and where they can help the most. For me, feedback that starts with, “We need to find out, ” or “Is the system able to support…” is clearly for the PM. When you’re on a tight deadline and need to make lots of changes, let the PM get the answers and focus on the things you can do now. Otherwise you might be dragged down a rabbit hole and end up very frustrated at 3 a.m. making mistakes you normally wouldn’t.
Couch-to-5K: How I Spent My Summer
A week ago, I ran an entire 5K . It’s no marathon and my time (38:40) isn’t going to break any records, but, for me, it’s real progress. I remember being forced to run laps in elementary school and just hating it. I remember the Presidential Physical Fitness test’s 1 mile run feeling like agony in middle school. In high school, I started to find the joy in running, but always found a way to hurt myself and stopped. Now, I can run over 3 miles pain free miles up hills and without having to stop or walk. And I like it.
I started the Couch-to-5K program after seeing a friend mention it on Twitter. I read the intro paragraph, scrolled down to the plan, and in a few minutes decided I was going to do it. I’m not sure why I felt so strongly about it, but I had been walking and going to the park most mornings and it felt like I could fit it easily into my life.
I downloaded the iPhone Couch-to-5K app so I wouldn’t have to think about the timing and started the very next day. Then the next day, I ran again, and then the day after. I was wearing old running shoes. I started to get knee pain. I had failed to read the article about the plan in detail and missed the part about resisting the urge to skip rest days. Oops. But, I had made noticeable progress anyway.
A trip to Fleet Feet in Sandy Springs fixed the shoe problem. I had a great fitting and spending the money on shoes plus orthotics probably helped me overcome any thoughts I had about quitting. I hate wasting money on things I end up not using. I decided to just run every other day (as suggested) and keep going. By the next week my knee pain was gone and it hasn’t returned.
I also decided to create some external motivation. I decided that I would run a 5k before my 31st birthday which meant that last weekend, August 29th or 30th, was my window. I went on to active.com and signed up for the closest 5k — the DI Dash in Marietta. I told my friends, family, and fellow Twitterers about it. Like you, I am not a fan of public failure, so now it wasn’t just me wanting to do it. I had to do it. Sure it was a situation of my own contrivance and it’s not like it would have been very embarrassing to fail, but it worked for me anyway.
I work and have a young son, so I don’t exactly have “leisure” time that I could easily convert into running time, but every time something could have kept me from running, I didn’t let it. It’s the kind of dedication I usually only have in my work life. If that meant getting up earlier than I’d like and pushing a 30ish pound William around in a jogging stroller (which is almost always did), I was going to do it. The external motivation/deadline couple with my genuine desire to be healthier put it in the Important/Urgent Covey Quadrant. At home, I’m only moderately effective, so I almost never get to things in my Important/Not-Urgent quadrant.
The plan also really works. It’s just difficult enough for you to feel progress. There’s the first time you run 5 minutes without walking, then two 10 minute runs with 5 minute walk in-between, then a 20 minute run, then 25 minutes, 28 minutes, 30 minutes. I thought, “that’s going to be a challenge” and it was, but I felt like the program had prepared me for it. If you’ve been thinking about running, you should check it out. A lot of people are doing it and tweeting about it with the hashtag #c25k, so you don’t have to take my word for it.
So, with a great plan, the right equipment, a deadline, and strong commitment, I was able to run the DI Dash in my best 5K time ever. And then yesterday, I ran 3.2 miles despite feeling tired and having a sore throat. I thought, “I better run today in case I feel worse tomorrow.” Before Couch-to-5K not feeling well would have been all the excuse I needed not to run, but now I have the Doug Kessler Lightning 5K to prepare for.
**I bought the rights to use the photo, but haven’t received the unwatermarked file yet. I’m not pirating it. Also, Kris, pushing stroller,and William, in stroller, are in the background.**
FriendFeed vs. Twitter: What’s in a Name.
I read that Facebook bought FriendFeed today. Mentioned in the Mashable article is that fact that while Facebook and Twitter have exploded in popularity, FriendFeed’s traffic has remained flat over the last year. I’m not very familiar with FriendFeed, but sometimes I click on a link in Twitter and am directed to a FriendFeed post. On the face, it looks like the service is very similar to Twitter.
So, why is Twitter winning the popularity contest? I’m sure it comes down to tactics used to create an organically-growing community of high-profile users– celebrities, authors, artists, bloggers, musicians, reporters, athletes, and politicians– who bring their real-life followers to the service. My very first experience on Twitter was reading Barack Obama’s profile and I signed up because even well-known late-adopter John McCain was using it. Very smart people at Twitter have done a lot of very smart things.
At the top of the “smart things” list was to create a name that is fresh sounding, communicates the service succinctly, and is strengthened through metaphor and curiosity.
The first social networking site I used was Friendster in 2001 or 2002, I think. I had used Naptster and I remember thinking, “it’s like Napster only instead of exchanging music, you exchange pictures and stuff with your friends.” The name wasn’t exactly fresh, but it did the job. I never really go into Friendster and over time just sort of forgot about it. FriendFeed reminds me of Friendster in a lot of ways.
The name FriendFeed is very similar. I use RSS feeds and when I first heard the name I thought, “it must be RSS for friends,” but also, “it reminds me of Friendster.” RSS (as much as I love it) and Friendster are not the two things you probably want to be top of mind when introducing a new service. I’m sure the people at Friendfeed (and Friendster) were both very excited about their new services, but they chose tie their names to concepts in the recent past. Why start off stale when you can be fresh?
Twitter sounds fresh and exciting. When I first heard the name Twitter, my first thought was, “oh, like all a-twitter: all chatter-y and excited.” Instead of communicating the essence of the service in concrete terms (a feed of friends), Twitter’s namers went for metaphor. The name intrigued me and made me curious to learn more.
To my delight, the service matches the metaphor. To me a Twitter user is a bird on a tree tweeting away. She can listen specifically to her own species (those she follows), fly over to the trees where the most birds are (trending topics), and listen for specific messages is the tweets of other birds (search and hashags). It’s a strong metaphor and Twitter emphasizes it with it’s bird logo. For extra points the bird is blue to make you think, “blue bird of happiness.” People like to feel happy :)
I wonder if the FriendFeed name will live on or if it will be folded into Facebook.
Government Run Health Care Since 1956
I’m not sure why it hasn’t been reported much in the mainstream media, but the government has operated a single-payer health care system for over 50 years. I guess we don’t want to have a real debated about the merits of the system. We’d rather call each other socialists and talk about care rationing. It’s ridiculous to me because I was covered by a government run health care system from birth until age 21 (because I stayed in school).
It was called Champus, later TriCare and it worked exactly how Aetna, Cigna, and Blue Cross/Blue Shield work as far as I can tell (as the insured). There was very low cost care available on military bases (in Network) and the option to choose your own doctor and pay higher co-pays (out of Network). When I was 7 and got sick on vacation, we went to the emergency room and it was covered. When I got tonsilitis in college, I went to a non-military doctor in Tallahassee and it was covered. Prescriptions were covered too. When I got my first job and private insurance, I didn’t notice any difference between it and the system I had grown up under except that I think my parents paid less in co pays and premiums (TriCare may be free, I’m not sure).
Did some government bureaucrat decide which doctors I could see and what procedures I could have? I’m sure, but some private-sector Cigna bureaucrat decides that for me now. Are government employees agents of evil trying to prevent Americans from getting the services they need? Really? Because I think that’s a very unpatriotic attitude. Government employees are Americans working in civil service to make sure we have schools, roads, a military, clean water, and a million other things we take for granted. Why do we presume they’d be any worse at health care than the insurance companies?
Do you love your insurance company? I doubt it. I think everyone has a story about how a claim was erroneous denied and it took weeks and multiple phone calls to straighten out. When I had my appendix out, someone at Aetna accidentally classified the appendectomy as elective surgery and out of network so that it looked like I owed several thousand dollars. A few hours on the phone fixed it, but, come on, that isn’t exactly a flawless system that the government couldn’t operate just as well.
Also, if you don’t want to pay for every one else’s health care through taxes, consider this. Your insurance premiums do that now. I’ve paid thousands of dollars in premiums and some years I only make one trip to a doctor’s office. The insurance companies never sent me a refund. They used that money to pay for someone else’s care. And what about all those uninsured Americans? Do we really have to pay for them too? Again, we already do. Uninsured people tend to use ER services as their main medical care. That is very expensive. When they can’t pay the bills, they often declare bankruptcy and the hospital doesn’t get paid. Hospitals can’t afford to do that unless they raise their rates for everyone else. Higher prices at hospitals mean higher insurance premiums. So, one way or another, those of us who can afford to pay carry the higher financial burden.
Sure, it’s not exactly fair. Maybe you worked your way out of the slums, got an education and a good job, and never took a hand out. I didn’t. I attended schools that were paid for by tax dollars, drive on roads paved by tax dollars, take my son to a city park every morning, and am kept safe by police, fire fighters, and military personnel paid through tax dollars. If you don’t like it, buy an island somewhere an have fun. But, if you’d like to stay in America and are one of the lucky few for whom the system has worked, you owe it to everyone else to pay back in. It’s not fair, it’s right.
So in summary:
- Government health care already exists.
- It works just the same as private insurance.
- The government is no worse at running things than private industry.
- We already pay for the care of others.
- We owe it to each other to make sure everyone has access to health care.
It’s time, America. Let’s do the right thing.
Has Adobe Ever Heard of Irony?
I got an e-mail inviting me to download an Adobe whitepaper about customer loyalty and the reasons why customers don’t complete purchases. Let’s call those reasons, “conversion barriers.” Despite my great interest in the topic, I have not done so yet.
Let’s run down the list of conversion barriers Adobe has placed in my way:
- That’s a lot of required fields. I know there is lots of valuable information in the whitepaper, but I’m not sure I want to take the time to fill in all the fields. I’d probably just make stuff up anyway.
- I hate having to opt-out of being contacted. It’s slimy, Adobe, and you should know that. Besides, I came to this page from an e-mail you sent me, so I’m pretty sure you’re going to be contacting me again.
- The page has no visual priority. The landing page is bland, boring, and when I first arrived, I wasn’t sure what to look at first (aside from all those form fields). Nothing is enticing and my eyes just swim all over the page.
- I doubt Adobe’s expertise. It’s unfortunate, but Adobe is synonymous with Flash in my mind. Flash is great when used well, but so often it is used gratuitously and user experience suffers. The best interfaces feel natural and Flash often feels forced and confining. This coupled with the ironically bad design of this landing page is enough to make me think the whitepaper isn’t worth the amount of time it would take to fill out the form.
It’s not just Adobe. Except for item 4, this could be a list of my pet peeves in landing page design. At least the form is actually on the landing page. The extra click to form pages is something I realize is often a system limitation (content and transactions not living together nicely in many CMS environments), but certainly a big barrier to conversion.
A little more time on my hands
The realities of the current economic crisis hit close to home this week. A client I had been working with is in serious financial straits and it looks like we’re putting the project on hold. I’d be more specific, but I want to wait until there is an official statement from the company to link to so that this post doesn’t attract too much attention.
I may be able to help out on some other projects in the meantime, but I’m anticipating a bit more free time. You may remember, I recently started working 40 hours per week instead of the 20 I had been working for the last 6 months (until I was laid off). It’s been a great 4 weeks, but definitely a change in my work-life balance.
To put a positive spin on things, this will give me more time to read and write about user experience and social media. I’ve fallen off the blogging wagon recently and hope to get back up.
Talk to you all soon.
Paid Engagment: Win for all!
Do you want thousands of engaged brand evangelists out there reading and sharing your content online? I’ve decided it’s very easy: pay them.
Not in actual money– that just makes everyone feel dirty. There are other ways– free offline subscriptions, gift certificates, concert tickets, etc. Whatever your audience wants, give it to them for helping you spreading your brand. It’s not Pay-per-Post (SocialSpark) or Sponsored Tweets per se. It’s that and more. Reward your most engaged users and encourage others to be more engaged. Barter with them for their attention.
Take Real Simple magazine, for example. I’ve subscribed for years and I feel like they know what I want– clean design, efficiency tips, and a little bit of aspirational voyeurism. I visit their website to look up recipes I’ve seen in the magazine or to help me remember when to throw out condiments. I’ve been known to send articles to friends when I think they’d be interested. I wouldn’t mind visiting more, but it’s just not a part of my normal Internet routine.
There are a lot of sites like this– full of engagement potential and not taking full advantage of their great content. I’m going to continue with the Real Simple example and leave it to you to imagine how it could translate to different industries and brands.
Let Me Earn Points
I like to earn points (e.g., airline miles, cash back bonuses) and get things for “free.” I don’t want to have to collect things, mail them in, or redeem codes– that’s for kids. The system I’m proposing would keep track of all your points for you and alert you when you were eligible for prizes. For the Real Simple brand it’s got to be simple!
Create a system that keeps track of users actions on your site and rewards them for the interactions you value most. For instance, if I visit your site, I should get 1 points. If I sign up for your newsletters, I should get 3 points. If I share a link to an article or website via e-mail or Twitter, I should get 5 points.
Show me clearly when opportunities to earn points exist, but don’t over do it. I should be able to use your site passively without feeling like a pushy salesperson is breathing down my neck.
Convert Points to Stuff
Real Simple has great advertisers with products and services I want. Real Simple also finds speciality items that I never knew about, but now want. In summary, they know what I want and where to get it. If I were following them on Twitter, I’d love to see them say, “Earn 60 points between now and July 31st and receive the cool cake cutter/spatula from this month’s issue of Real Simple. (link).” That thing is cool and I’d like to have one, so I’m going to work on earning the points.
Obviously, there would need to be some ground rules. Maybe you shouldn’t be able to earn more than 10 points a day. And you shouldn’t be able to combine points across acounts. Don’t try to stiffle me too much, but if you want legitimate brand engagement, you have to try to weed out the riff raff.
Remind Me to Earn Points
I’m more busy than I’ve ever been. I’m sitting on my bed with my laptop while my son sleeps right now and in 20 minutes my in-laws will be here. So, there is a chance that I’ll forget about that cake cutter/spatula quickly. So, let me opt in to reminders via e-mail, SMS, or Twitter. And give me an extra point or two for doing so because I’ve just given you permission to talk to me on a daily basis for the next month.
Mega-Opportunities
When I sign up to become a point earning, ask me if I blog and use Twitter and Facebook. Then make me a brand ambassador by asking me to share things with my network. E-mail users with blogs and say, “Emily, we know you blog and we’d love it if you shared our latest issue with your audience. Add this code to your site for 30 days and earn enough points for your cake cutter/spatula instantly.” I tell you right now, if I ever get an e-mail like this you’ll be seeing an add for Real Simple in an instant.
Win-Win-Win
It’s the trifecta! The audience is choosing to engage more deeply with a brand they already like– and are getting great gifts. Real Simple has an engaged user visiting your site on a daily basis, viewing ads and sponsored content, and sharing it with others. The company that makes the great gift is getting more awareness and likely sales (because I might have to get another cake cutter/spatula to give as a gift!)
Expensive to Implement?
I know it probably sounds expensive, but the gifts themselves would come with a keep discount from the advertiser (who is a winner in all this as well). Building the point tracking system is an investment, but if built correctly, would quickly become a marketing asset used over and over. Real Simple would need some staff to monitor blogs, audit Twitter accounts, and craft the giveaway campaigns, but I’m sure they have a great marketing team already. I really think it could pay for itself very easily.
Measuring Success
I wish I had access to Real Simple’s metrics, but let’s just imagine that they get 1,000 referrals per day from Twitter and another 1,000 from blogs. If the giveaway was enough of an entincement, I could see that easily quadrupling. I know I have at least three friends who wouldn’t mind the cake cutter/server, so if they see I’m earing one for free, they’ll sign up as well. Page views from unique visitors should rise steadily as a result and that means ads and sponsored content are being viewed more often– ca ching! Onsite conversions to the actual magazine might not increase as dramatically, but the free trial issue Real Simple already has on their site coupled with the giveaway seems very promising.
