User Experiences I’m Thankful For

I’ve been thinking about the experiences I have as a user (not a designer) and the ones make my life simpler or better in some way. The trend for me seems to be less separation between my online and offline experiences and that trend seems to be hot right now (hello, augmented reality).  They aren’t perfect, but here are the user experiences I’ve benefited from this year.

 

1. Facebook

I’m connected to old friends and far flung family members on a daily basis. It’s wonderful to share pictures, thoughts, and links with people I know without having to actually make time for it. Picking up the phone (or writing letters) feels impossible most days and I’m so thankful I can check in when it’s convenient.

2. iPhone

Having my e-mail, the web, and my favorite apps with me wherever I go has given me an amazing freedom. In 2008, i I was waiting for an important e-mail, I had to sit at my desk. In 2009, I can be anywhere — the grocery store, the park, the car (not while driving, of course.) I feel much more productive and in control.

3. Runkeeper.com and the RunKeeper Pro App

Running is a new-found joy of mine and Runkeeper puts so much information at my fingertips. During a run, I know how fast I’m running, how far I’ve gone, and get audio cues reminding me to speed up or slow down. After a run, I get a map of where I ran, a calories burned estimate, my splits, elevation and more. And having a single place to see all my runs over time helps me to see my progress and motivates me to keep going.

4. Active.com

This website has its flaws and usability issues, but it seems to be the best way for fitness-based events to collect registration and payment information. All 5 of the 5Ks I’ve signed up for this year have used Active.com. I’m thankful for the convenience of searching for events on their site and the ease with which I can sign up. If each organization used a different platform, the experience would be much more difficult for them and for me.

5. Twitter

My favorite part off Twitter is the sharing of news and information. I follow a variety of new sources, bloggers, and other media people. As a result,  I rarely visit Google Reader anymore. I like the combination of selective filtering (choosing who to follow) and currency (based on what time I am looking at my stream). To me, consuming information this way feels much less overwhelming that RSS feeds.

6. Freshbooks.com

For the first time in my career, I’ve needed to create and send invoices this year. I was a little overwhelmed about how best to do this and went to Google in search of some templates. What I found was a great, free site that makes invoicing so simple. It’s easy to get started and the customer service is great.

Old New Media Still Matters

Last week, I was looking at some social media stats and was struck by how low on the list “use a social networking site” was on the list of online activities. They’ve clearly made rapid gains in the last two years, but still, e-mail, search, e-commerce, e-government– the old new media– are clearly running the show.  I admit, I’ve been drunk with excitement over the business applications of things like Twitter and Facebook, but the data is sobering.

I’m certainly not saying that you should stop focusing on social media. Depending on your audience, social networking may be much higher on the list. And understanding the new opportunities to engage with your audience is important. I just don’t want the excitement of social networking to mean that the best user experience people are drawn away from the key experiences most people are having online.

For instance, I’ve had quite a bit of experience with traditional .com and .gov websites. Lately, I’ve felt like that was sort of a negative. I’ve had much less experience with social networking sites than some of my peers and I’ve been afraid I’d be left behind. But, looking at these statistics helps me to understand how important traditional websites still are. They should and will evolve, but they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

And marketers should think about these numbers too. Clearly search optimization is still one of the most important things you should be doing online. Depending on your target, display advertising on news, weather, and e-mail portals can’t be forgotten. So, while you’re listening and engaging with your audience on Twitter, don’t forget they are a small (albeit engaged) portion of your audience.

Twitter is powerful and has become the way I find and consume a lot of information. It may just be who I choose to follow, but it seems like Twitter users love the service and love to share posts about how great it is. So, if you’re a Twitter user, it feels like everything and everyone that matters online is using it and getting fantastic results. Inversely, anyone not using it (particularly businesses) is missing out on the best thing ever.

Maybe one day, but not yet.

 

What Do We Call Ourselves?

I’ve had 3 titles over the years: information architect, interaction designer, and customer experience architect. Despite the title, I’ve been doing basically the same things: creating siteflows/sitemaps, wireframing, conduction usability evaluations, providing user experience strategy, and communicating with clients and internal teams. There just doesn’t seem to be a great, all encompassing term for this work that doesn’t step on or get confused with the work of others.

Here’s a breakdown of the issues:

Information Architect

First of all, it’s a simile. What we do with information is sort of like creating blueprints for a building. That’s troubling for some and it’s also limiting in that it doesn’t take into account the things like usability evaluation and rich transaction/interaction based elements of the job. Worse, there are also people on the development site of software and web projects with the title Architect. I know this is a problem from needing to hire IAs and getting techical architect resumes.

Verdict: I no longer consider this title to be a good fit for what I do. I think this title is best used by those who are working primarily with large amounts of content that needs to be organized, named, and tagged.

Interaction Designer

I like this one because it does take into account the richer interactions we’re now documenting in our wireframes and siteflows. I’m not just organizing content into pages, I’m creating experiences. But again, this one gets us into trouble because graphic designers don’t consider user experience people to be designers and there is a particular sensitivity to the overlap between interaction designers and interactive designers (those who create the actual interface elements that will be visible to users). It’s getting more and more common, so maybe that will help with some of the resistance from the graphic design community, but again, what about the usability evaluation, heuristic analysis, and other research focused aspects of the job?

Verdict: Unless there is a separate group doing the research portion, you are probably and interaction designer plus a usability analyst.

Customer Experience Architect

I like this because it has the customer/user right up front. And rather than limiting me to the information or interaction design, it expresses looking at the entire experience. Putting customer and experience before architect seems to do a better job explaining what we do — information is such a vague term on its own. One criticism is that you don’t always have “customers” particularly if you’re a government agency or non profit, but to that I’d say that we all have internal and external customers of our work.

Verdict: This seems to capture more of what I do and overlaps with fewer, more established development team roles. I’d like to see it used more.

At the end of the day, it’s the work we do and the value we provide to projects and teams that keeps us all employed. What we call ourselves isn’t as important as ensuring that our deliverables are standard enough to be recognizable and understandable, but are also innovative enough to capture details of projects using the newest technologies. From what I’ve seen, that appears to be happening (or have happened). Now is really the time to think about how we want to brand the profession and what qualities we want to make our central focus.

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.

New Media Atlanta Organizers: It’s Not Too Late

I’ve been thinking about the situation the organizers of the New Media Atlanta conference are in today. They held an event last Friday that was well run, but criticized broadly for it’s misses in content and format. The use of tool called BackNoise and it’s value, or lack thereof, has been the star of the conversations.

I’m sure the organizers worked hard to put the event together and should be proud of themselves for pulling it off. I’ve never tried to organize something that large and respect those who are up to the challenge. They’ve continued to be engaged in the post-conference twitter stream and I’m glad they are. But what should they do now? What lessons should they learn?

I think companies get into these kinds of situations a lot. A product launch is good but not what you hoped. Or, you’ve made a change to a service that some like and others don’t. How do you energize your fans while admitting you could have done things better? Is it wise to defend yourself against unfair criticism and lies or do you just fuel the fire? Should you care most about your loudest critic, your biggest fan, or everyone in the middle? (A panel weighing in on issues like this would have made New Media Atlanta better.)

I’d love the organizers of New Media Atlanta to continue to show they are listening. I think they need to stay engaged with the conference’s fans and mentioners on Twitter to reinforce the good and build a following for next year’s conference. I’m not sure they should try to answer their critics now. I’d love to debate it, but I feel like the risk of sounding petty or whining isn’t worth it since your biggest critics are going to have a longer, more involved conversion path. So, I think they should wait until the negativity dies down and then do the unexpected– re-open the “In what ways did we suck? ” discussion. Only this time they’d own it.

I think they need to sit down and write a lessons learned whitepaper and offer it for free to the social media community. They should find their biggest critics and interview them. They should look at the various channels (Twitter, BackNoise, blogs, flickr, twitpic, etc.) to see what information was most shared to find out what they did right. There should be success metrics like, “65% of social media mentions during the conference were quotes from speakers” and “BackNoise was used 30% more during Brogran’s talk which 75% of people enjoyed.” Oh, and, “Speakers who used PowerPoint were 600% less popular than those who didn’t.”

They should talk about how their business sees a need to gauge audience preferences ahead of time and use social media to fine tune during next year’s conference. The title could be, “Social Media: Never be Blind-sighted.” It would be awesome and I’d definitely be back next year to see what they learned. Otherwise, I’ll probably pass.

What do you think?

Good Morning from New Media Atlanta

If you couldn’t make it today, you can watch it here: http://tv.dakno.com/live/

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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.

Social Media Addict

I thought I could quit Twitter and Facebook any time I wanted. I like both services, but I never thought I was an addict until today when both were down (or just not acting right) for most of the morning. I felt sad that I didn’t know how my friends were spending their days and disconnected from the news and information I usually consume as a stream on my phone and laptop.

There are certainly other ways to get the information I was longing for, but what I’ve realized about Twitter and Facebook (but mostly Twitter) is that if you invest the time to follow (and unfollow) the people, news organizations, and companies you care about and monitor your favorite hashtags, the information you want comes to you in short bursts you can ignore if you’re busy doing something else. You don’t have to visit 7 different news sites and watch your IM all day. It’s there when you want it.

For me, that’s what makes is so addicting. Efficiency is my drug.

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:

1. Government health care already exists.
2. It works just the same as private insurance.
3. The government is no worse at running things than private industry.
4. We already pay for the care of others.
5. 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.