Any fool can wireframe … getting it right is the trick.

A while back I wrote WTF is UXD in an attempt to explain what user experience design is, as response to bewildered looks from clients, colleagues and most of my friends and family. There’s still ambiguity around job titles, blurring the edges of user experienced designer, interaction designer, information architect and web designers (or to make it doubly-Dutch confusing UXDs, IXDs, IAs and web designers) and, in line with Ryan Carson’s “‘UX Professional’ isn’t a Real Job” there are a lot of charlatans peddling half-baked wireframes and someone else’s personas as website panaceas. However, against Ryan’s tech-heavy list of UX capabilities (I don’t have even a passing knowledge of JavaScript, but I’ve been making / saving companies A LOT OF MONEY over the past decade), Jared ‘UIE’ Spool lists the ‘Five Indispensable Skills for UX Mastery’ as:

• Sketching
  (my article:Drawing on walls: Lo-fi prototype sketching’s quick, cheap AND good)
• Storytelling
  (my article: Once upon a time – storytelling techniques for communication)
• Critiquing
  (my article: Comparing apples with bicycles – reviewing the big picture experience)
• Presenting
  (my article: Presentation is a skill, not a human right)
• Facilitating
  (must blog about facilitation, to mirror the Royal Spool flush of articles)

But there are some core attributes that set aside the common wireframe monkey from real, proper, actual user experience professionals and these are very very simple, yet very very potent and to be frank, not everyone has them:

Adding value: If you’re not understanding where to add value or remove waste it really is just boxes and arrows. This is the biggy. If you’re not focussing on this, you really are charging money for old rope. You’re just pongo-pongo pictor vulgaris*. Stop reading and go and start adding value – you disgust me.

Relationship management: Including the areas of presenting and facilitation, any UX worth their salt must be able to articulate, demonstrate and even defend, in necessary, their work and approach with clients, suppliers, co-workers and even recruiters. Trouble is, clients come in all shapes, moods, capabilities and prejudices, so in the morning you could be shining the bright light of enthusiasm onto the hitherto ignored facilities team for your intranet project, and spending the afternoon convincing The Board that you’re right, because you’ve done the research and the testing and they’re just making it up on the spot while answering someone else’s emails on their Blackberries.

Experience: Sorry kids, this is one you can’t buy, qualify in or (unless you’re unusually talented and which case you have no need of my sagely wisdom) bluff. I’ve sometimes thought that interaction designers grow up to be user experience designers, widening their scope from the page to the big picture, but this again is just terminology (death threats or outrage to the usual address please). But experience is essential. While trying to help a friend get into the digital biz, a recruiter once said to me “there’s no such things as a junior user experience role”. When someone asks “how” and you answer, you’d better have a “because” to back it up. If you haven’t put the years in, experience can be borrowed from the knowledge of others, so keep learning. You may start, but not stop at “Don’t make think”, so keep creaming blogs, books, podcasts and blagging your way into conferences.

Enquiry: While experience gives you oven ready parboiled solutions ready to finish off in workshops, you will NEVER know as much your users, your clients, their employees – the subject matter experts. Your job is to be as good as you can get as being a UXD. I’ve worked with clients in engineering, banking, pharmaceuticals, gardening blah blah blah .. the point is, I never understood as much my clients about their businesses, but I knew how to get them to tell me what I needed to know.

Get it right: Don’t be precious about getting negative feedback. Take it on the chin and change or defend. Do the research. Build up the experience. If it’s not right, you’re not worth your money.

And lastly, adding value. Again.

You DON’T need working technical knowledge of layout languages or computer scripts. You simply need to be able to understand your objectives from your clients and colleagues and find the right solutions. Whether that be some wireframes and a site map, or the education of entire team and the overseen production of working prototypes and stakeholder engagement workshops – who knows. Well, frankly, you – that’s your job. Forge relationships, enquire into the organisational goals and audience’s needs and produce remarkable products, processes and services, whatever they may be and however they may suit each individual project.

Be bold, be bloody, and be bloody bold while you’re at it.

Add value. That is all.

The Long Dog.
*Pongo-pongo pictor vulgaris: The common wireframe monkey.

Make it easy on yourself, save time and show the client something inexpensive. Sound good? Then lo-fi prototyping is the way to go. To be honest, “lo-fi prototyping” is a very fancy way of saying start with rough sketches before putting effort and client’s expense into beautiful high quality prototypes or wireframes.

I’m not going to teach you to suck eggs, as by this point, you should be able to use pens and paper but there are a few tricks that’ll make things work for you:

• If you can’t draw, make your concepts simple and use them as presentation aids or aide-mémoire rather than standalone documents
• If you can draw, don’t get drawn into the trap of spending just as much time producing things of true beauty that a client will want to take a red pen to (teacher style)
• Unless you’re producing a creative concept that needs lots of colour, keep it to monochrome with a few highlights – it’s quicker and clearer
• Aim for simplicity and clarity: If your sketch is getting complicated, it might be time to rethink what you’re trying to communicate, or that you might actually need to do some digitally produced pieces
• Get the client involved. If you can run a workshop where the client helps draw or modify sketches they’ll articulate more – and love you more too
• Lo-fi is quick, easy and – from a client’s perspective – cheap. Never underestimate the power of inexpensive in these financially strained times.

As well as sketches for presenting ideas, like the image on the right showing initial lo-fi andeventual funtional wireframe, I’ve also found lo-fi techniques excellent for experimenting with different interaction designs. And in English, what I mean is that if I’m trying to work out how buttons, drop downs and other ‘things that do things’ work on a webpage (before handing it over to a terribly clever techie to actually make happen), bits of paper and rough sketches do very for trying out ideas.

But…

For my favourite lo-fi design and workshop tool is Magic Whiteboard. Not one of those electronic smart boards, but flipchart sized sheets of wipe-clean plastic film that stick to just about any surface, by static. Trying to work out how to fit a lot of information into a few screens, brought about a series of sketches that I photographed and plopped onto PowerPoint to make a presentation flick book. And I can tell you, demo-ing these, with a colleague doing the page down, while I ‘clicked’ on the radio buttons and drop downs on the screens makes for quick and fun prototyping. Open the 350kb PPT and page and downin slideshow mode to see what I mean.

Now got get some of your own fat pens and get scribbling.

The Long Dog.

In some industries usability can mean the difference between life and death. In ‘Everyday usability: Why people don’t use things’ I looked at why some products are a success (the printed book) and why some fail (Edison’s phonograph), but what has usability got to do with tanks, helicopters and fighter jets?

Preparing for the first gulf war, American troops ran war games in the deserts of their homeland. To add to the realism, as well as combatants role-playing enemy soldiers, US helicopters were ‘dressed up’ to resemble Iraqi vehicles. This simulation was later blamed for some of the ‘friendly fire’ among American forces: The troops had been trained to recognise their own helicopters, albeit ‘dressed up’, as enemy craft. While it was the exercise that was flawed, the soldiers did exactly what they were trained to do and destroyed helicopters that looked like the ones they recognised as enemy craft.

Usability is concerned with understanding human behaviour and psychology and ensuring that websites, processes, products – whatever a human has to interact with – is usable to its highest degree. We can tweak websites and improve on them as we go, but when someone’s life depends on usability, some serious research needs to be done.

If you can understand the how people work, fit what you’re creating to how people can best use it. Bodge it and there will always be mistakes – thankfully for most of us, these mistakes are usually only minor irritations.

Recently I went to Tankfest 2009 at the UK’s Tank Museum, next to Bovingdon Camp, where British soldiers are taught how to drive tracked vehicles. Apart from the sheer boyish enjoyment of seeing massive rumbly trundly things and indulge my four year old son in the pleasure sitting in the tank driver’s seat, there was one tiny almost overlooked feature that caught my professional eye.

In old style tanks, the Commander would kick the driver in the back of his chair in different positions depending on whether he wanted him to start, stop, turn left or right. A nice little bit of non-verbal communication, but hardly what you’d expect from Her Majesty’s Finest in the 21st century. 

These days the Commander of a Challenger 2 tank now communicates with his crew (driver, gunner and loader) by computer. Instead of a clunky keyboard and mouse combo, the Commander instead uses a handset almost identical to the Xbox 360 game console handset. Why? Games companies have spent a lot of time and money finding the most ergonomically designed controllers and the military have borrowed this learning to make their systems as usable as possible. As ‘the Nintendo generation goes to war’ (thanks @Haydens30), these interfaces are also familiar to the incoming recruits, so why make them learn something new and less usable?

@fulnic also tells me that this handset interface is also being use in unmanned spy planes.

Anyone remember the Robin Williams film ‘Toys’?

If this looks like playing to a degenerated generation, I disagree. It’s about understanding human strengths and weaknesses and working with and around them. The US Air Force found that under combat stress, fighter pilots ignored alarms alerting them to an incoming missile. They tried sounds and flashing lights, but again the pilots learned to ignore these in the same was we ignore gaudy advertising banners on webpages (banner blindness). The only thing that got the pilots attention every single time was a child’s voice in their earphones saying “Help me Daddy! Help me Daddy!” – a story that still gives me goose bumps.

Understand the machine, play to its strengths and not to its weaknesses.

The Long Dog

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts”

Yesterday I was reminded of this adage, if you’ll pardon the almost certain misquoting, but how do you know if your website, your intranet or your social service is performing as well as it could? There are a number of technological answers to this, some more or less reliable than others.

Hits
This is a classic that everyone’s heard of, and time and again (especially with intranets) I get told that people (usually company seniors) are very interested to know how many hits the site is getting. What are ‘hits’? here are three explanations:

- Register of how many times a page is visited, also called ‘page impressions’: usually the explanation that creates most interest
- Register of how many components on a page load when a page is opened (i.e. the page=1 hit, each image=1 hit each etc): usually the least understood, but most technically correct use of the term
- ‘How Idiots Track Success’: the least palatable, but most accurate explanation

The trouble with measuring hits is that is doesn’t indicate whether the content the user found on a page has served its purpose. It’s easy to send floods of visitors to a page, as the flashing banner ads for poker sites, spurious lottery wins and digital camera competitions show: dangle a carrot and along trot the faithful. What a hit doesn’t tell you is if the visitor that hit represents bought the product, signed up for the newsletter, read the message from the CEO or downloaded the form.

Having said that I put my hand up to obsessively ogling the hits on this blog and see it as a measure of successful in reaching my readership. Hits are still a crowd pleaser and it just goes to show that sometimes the Preacherman is the biggest sinner of all (apologies to any blameless Preachermen reading this).

There are plenty of other technological ways to measure website traffic:

- Unique visitors: Number of individuals visiting the site in a given time frame
- Repeat visits: Number of individuals returning (faithful shoppers / readers, customer retention etc)
- Paths or journeys: Tracking the route visitors are taking through the site. Often used to measure speed and efficiently of visitors reaching important content

You can get a huge and I mean HUGE amount of data from web servers, recording innumerable activities by potential millions of visitors. The problem is that data is useless until it’s turned into information, and to do this, you need to work out what it is you want to know.

Ecommerce sites often measure conversion rates, an obvious choice, measuring visitors there to the site and how many of these buy something. What do they want to know? How successful is our site in making sure everyone who visits ends up buying something.

Social sites have much more subtle results: How many people find our service such a pleasurable experience they’ll return frequently and use it again. Off the back of this, they can sell advertising and sponsorship.

Some intranets need to demonstrate efficiency savings for people’s jobs. I worked on one intranet where I successfully proved that while ‘hits’ increased annually and dramatically, the lack of ability to complete online tasks the 20,000 employees were attempting to undertake meant tens of millions of pounds were wasted annually, paying people to fail to use the intranet successfully (never mind the additional time in contacting their colleagues, discussing their problem and having to work out or create alternative solutions).

How to measure then?

Simple: Work out YOUR criteria for success and THEN look for numbers.

Questions on a postcard to the usual address.

The Long Dog.

Traveller: Can you tell me the quickest way to town?
Local: Well … I wouldn’t start here if I were you…

Before you can design page layouts or do the fun bit of creative design, you need to know what it is you’re designing. A good way to do this is to create a ‘site map’: a plan of how all the information for a website is organised, in boringly useful groups, categories and taxonomies.

Even if your site’s a handful of pages, you still need to know what information to put on each page or, if you’re using a team of people with different roles, you need to be able to articulate your concept to the interaction designers, developers, graphic designers, web producers (et al) and not forgetting your client, peers or seniors.

Why bother?

You’ll find it very difficult to create wireframes or page designs and it’s easy to duplicate or forget information without a site map. They also make it possible to think ahead for future expansion (or reduction) and user journeys through your site can be planned to ensure your audience and customers can get to what they need easily and quickly.

How to…

By this point, you’ll have needed to have defined the purpose and business requirements and done your research to understand what information you need to include and how it’s going to be organised. A classic technique that dovetails neatly into the drawing out your site map is card sorting. Ok … so you know why and what you’re building, now it’s about laying it out for you and others to read. Use whatever layout or design package is easiest, just so long as you and others can share the output. I mostly use MS Visio, but use what you like – check out the sitemap I made for the product launch of a mobile phone  (company details removed, I’ afraid).

With layout, like the tool you use, so long as you and those you need to communicate with can understand the organisation and flow of information feel free to use whatever style you like. The most common site maps are organised in a tree structure, like a family tree, often starting with a site’s home page and branching off into the top level pages that in turn lead off. Use boxes for categories and lines to show relationships, but one tip is to use boxes to denote pages and list content separately. This way, when you’re not able to personally brief developers, they can literally interpret the number of pages instead of having to use their judgement as how content is broken down into pages.

In the same way a libraries categories books by number and then number the subcategories (Dewey Decimal Classification), make sure you number the categories and sub-categories on your site map. Again, this is useful for others to see which pages site under which – known as a parent / child relationship.

Example
- “Home” is a major category and numbered 0.0
- Beneath it is “About us”, another major so given its own number: 1.0
- Beneath this could be “Biographies of the board” a child, and subcategory of its parent “About us”, so numbered 1.1
- Also beneath “About us” is the child page “History of the company”, numbered 1.2
- “Products” is a new major category, so is numbered 2.0
- And so on….

Doing the site map is another place where you can check progress, to ensure you’re on the right track with your site.

Any questions?

The Long Dog

Usability has been around long before the web. How usable something is can mean the difference between life and death for a product or service.

When things are unusable – or at least difficult to use – people become frustrated and look for alternatives. If we don’t design for how people use things, more people will abandon our efforts and turn to other sources; in the case of internet sites, our competitors.

“If something’s not usable, I just don’t use it as much”, Steve Krug,‘Don’t Make Me Think’

There are some great ‘real world’ examples of why products have worked because they were more usable than their competitor’s offering. In ‘The Invisible Computer’, by Don Norman (of Nielsen Norman Group fame) he talks about the success and failure of the first home music systems: Edison’s phonograph and Berliner’s gramophone.

Before the advent of tape cassettes instead of loading the wax drum recording of our favourite artists we used vinyl discs – records. Why? One reason is that despite the superior sound quality of the phonograph’s wax drums, they were costly and unwieldy. Imagine the space needed for 40 drums, as against 40 albums. The discs were convenient, storable and … ‘usable’.

Unlike Edison, who decided to save money on marketing, Berliner also paid for the best stars of the day to be recorded which, while not improving gramophone per se, improved its ‘perceived’ value. People aren’t logical – we are wilful and fickle – and the audience for home music soon abandoned the phonograph for the more usable and more popular gramophone.

Q: Why aren’t we all driving around in zero-emission, electric and personal-propulsion powered vehicles first invented in the 80’s and retailing at less than £400?

A: The Sinclair C-5

Despite its undeniable environmental and cost advantages, it looked unsafe and people felt they would look ludicrous driving one (I think we all agree on this one – if not, pleeeeease check out the picture).

The only exceptions to this are covered by a usability ‘law’ which roughly says that the effort someone is willing to put into using a system or product depends on the perceived value. In other words, if I think I’m going to get a lot out of something, I’ll persevere: suffering the adverts to get free music downloads; the modern car (c’mon … pedals, levers AND a steering wheel all together?); getting married and cancelling your account with a utility supplier by automated or offshore phone service. As I write this on the train, the woman opposite meis knitting with five, yes FIVE needles – I rest my case.

Lastly, there are some things that are difficult to improve on: The Book. They’re portable, often attractively designed, they project something about us to others and for reference purposes you know that all in the information you have to search through is in your hands and not spread across the questionable quality and infinite wilds of cyberspace. How have we improved it with eBooks and the readers that accompany them? Ok, you can now carry many books in one device, but in terms of how we want it to work – we’ve upgraded the concepts of contents and index pages by adding ‘search’. Not bad for a couple of thousand years of product evolution.

OK … so … and the moral of this story is? Remember that regardless of whether it’s a website, a printed document, a face-to-face event, a new mobile device handset … whatever … make sure people can use it in the way they want or need to. If it’s too difficult … say goodbye to your phonographs.

The Long Dog

C-3PO: Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1!

Han Solo: Never tell me the odds!

How do the heroes of Star Wars succeed against impossible odds? Why does Mowgli make it to the man village without being munched, crushed or descending into beatnik monkey decadence? Leaving artistic licence and the need for a happy ending aside, one explanation is that it’s the mix of characters – of personalities.

In the workplace it’s just as important to understand the different personalities in a team, to be able to articulate the way people operate or for communicating the needs of others.

‘Insight profiling’ is a system of identifying different personality types, their behaviours and attitudes, so you can understand how you and others interact and avoid potential problems and personality clashes. I briefly covered Myers Briggs personality profiling in my post “We are all individuals … I’m not!” and while Insight Profiling can be as deep and subtle it can also be used in a quick-n-dirty way to reduce personalities to four broad types and their opposites.

I recently attended a client away day, hosted and facilitated by Colour Works, including some great Insight Profiling action. This post is unashamedly inspired by that day and is a VERY brief taste of Insight Profiling, by using Star Wars heroes and Jungle Book characters to illustrate how it works.

There are four main ‘colours’ of personality and traits peculiar to each. Choose which seems best to suit you, or predict which suit colleagues and friends:

To better understand how these work and interact, it’s possible to have a full profile done to see how each colour is represented (e.g. 40% red, 35% green, 10%yellow, 15% blue), so we can understand where our strengths are, but also how we complement or contradict others.

As a snapshot, it’s also useful to understand opposite ‘colours’ where we’ll find clashes or where we may need to rethink our approach to people (e.g.whether someone will make a good or dreadful presenter or leader). The colour wheel image shows the colours with their traits and which colour is the opposite (reds / greens and blues/ yellows). To help understand this and for a bit of fun, I’ve allocated heroes from Star Wars and some of the major Jungle Book characters to the wheel.

For those of you who’ve already or are about to ask the questions, the answers are:

- Yes, King Louie is a Yellow
- Yes, Darth Vader would be a Red and Obi Wan Kenobi would be a Green, in direct opposition to each other
- No, being an Earth Green doesn’t stop you from raining down righteous Jedi lightsabre retribution

The Long Dog (a Sunshine Yellow, but not a Jedi)