World Usability Day with NEOUPA

NEOUPA

On November 10, 2011 I, Emily Winters, attended the Northeast Ohio Usability Professional’s Association’s (NEOUPA) World Usability Day Conference.  It was an interesting event held at Dave and Buster’s in Westlake, Ohio.  I regret to say that I didn’t play any games while I was there, but I did learn a lot and met some very intriguing people. The following are my notes from the day and the pointers that I picked up from each speaker.

What Makes Them Click?

The keynote speaker at the conference was Susan Weinschenk.  Susan has a Ph.D. in Psychology and has been working in the usability profession for over 30 years.  She presented, “What Makes Them Click?” a workshop all about helping you make changes to a site that will get clients to use it.  The key things from her talk were the three sections of the brain and the list of things that you must go through, and include within a site, to see if you are providing customers with user-centered design:

• 3 brains
  • Mid – where we deal with social interaction, memories and emotions
  • Old- being afraid to make the wrong decision, instinctive
  • New- where rational and logical thought happens

Making people click involves these:

• Choices
• Social Validation
• Reciprocity and Concession
• Scarcity and fear of loss
• Food, Sex, danger
• Pictures and Stories
• Similarity, Attractiveness, and Association
• Commitment and Consistency
• Social

My favorite of these topics was the idea of concession, which is asking for more then what you want from the beginning.  The example that she used was asking random people for a one-time 2 hour commitment vs. asking for one hour a week for a year.  The people will often say no to the yearly commitment, but if then asked about the one-time 2 hour commitment they feel indebted to you to say yes because they have already rejected your idea once.  This principle only works if the requests aren’t too outlandish.  The tricky part of concession is that you are manipulating the outcome in your favor.  Is that an ethical thing to do in business?  Susan did not have an answer for that, nor do I, but it is something to think about.

During Susan’s workshop she mentioned several books that she recommended we all read. In no particular order I will share that list with you:

- The Psychology of Influence  by Robert B. Cialdini

- Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious by Timothy D. Wilson

- Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change by Timothy D. Wilson

There were a few books that she suggested we look at to find out more about her presentation topic.  Those included:

- Neuro Web Design: What makes them click? by Susan Weinschenk

- 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People by Susan Weinschenk

- The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar

- How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer

The “Ability” to Achieve Social Media Success

Presented by Kurt Krejny, Director of Online Marketing, Fathom Online Marketing. You can find him on Twitter at: @KurtKrejny

Kurt talked about how to design sites with cross channels in mind as well as incorporating Facebook and Twitter into your webpage.  He pointed out that there are a number of abilities that you need to be successful in this.

The four main points were:

• Use-Ability: Must make things easy for the user
• Like-Ability: Must design so that people will “like” it.
  Do not be afraid to ask your users what they want!
  Good example of this is the Facebook page for Zappos.com
• Share-Ability: Can or will people re-post your information?  What do you want to be shared?
• Find-Ability: Can people find you? Are you branding your pages?  Have you filled out your information completely on Facebook and Twitter?

The Relationship of User Experience and Search Engine Experience in Website Redesign

Presented by Laura Cameron, Senior Search Strategist, Metrics Marketing Group

In her presentation the main thing that I got out of it was thinking about search engines as users.  She went over the fact that if you want your website to perform well you must take into account the needs of the search engine as well as your human users.  The two users think very differently, but if you incorporate the needs of both, the website will have a greater chance of really succeeding.

• Key takeaways
  • search engines are users
  • inform the user experience
  • collaboration of SEO and usability improves category names, content migration/development and conversion
  • Google: Webmaster Central Blog- good basics

eWord-of-Mouth  Web Design for Maximum Virality

Presented by Mike Wise, Founder of WebWisedom, LLC

The main thing that Mike wanted us to take away from his presentation is that eWord-of-Mouth is a powerful tool to have on your side.   It comes from bloggers, people posting on Twitter, e-networks, raving fans, and viral videos/presentations.  Many of the people using social networking sites are between the ages of 35-44 years of age with the second largest group being 45-54 years of age.  The target audience is not teenagers but more mature adults.

Data: The Building Blocks of Good E-mail

Presented by Chris Serger, eMarketing Director at C. TRAC and Ashley Szeremet, Step 2

I happened to have the good fortune of sitting next to Chris Serger at the conference.  He was a very engaging speaker and a nice person to share conversation with.  His presentation was the first of two on e-mail marketing.  The points that I took away from his talk were that you must gear your e-mails to the audience.  He created a “good” and “bad” list of things to collect and to not collect when you are getting people’s information that I would like to share:

During the presentation, Ashley Szeremet explained that you should always update your information so that you can stay current with what you are sending out.  Gear your mailings towards the information that you have- ex. gender specific and age appropriate.

Don’t Make Your Subscribers Think: How to Optomize Your E-mail Usability

Presented by Tricia McCune, Director of E-mail Marketing Strategy, Fathom  Find her on Twitter: @CLEMeetup

While her presentation was directly after the only other E-mail marketing presentation, she still managed to keep the topic new and different from what had just been introduced.  Her key points were:

• send e-mails out from the most recognizable name in the company (not from the mascot or an employee)
• keep track of when you send out the e-mails to get the best response.
• Sending them out on the weekends will be a bad idea for businesses only open during the week
• Best times to send out e-mails are Monday or Tuesday at 9:00am
• Shorter headline type subject lines are best
• E-mail design and any offers must be reflected on the landing page.

Information as Opportunity

Presented by Karl Fast, Professor at Kent State University E-mail him at Kfast@kent.edu or on his personal page http://about.me/karlfast

His presentation was very interesting.  I think he was trying to get us to consider the ways in which people use their bodies to figure out problems and how this will affect the way we design for the user.  Rather than trying to explain his ideas in depth I will direct you to this website: http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/

The Union of Agile and UX

User Experience (UX) and Agile are natural partners in developing quality products. Both are user-centered and both have a dedication to using (and reusing) what works well. With technology changing at an ever increasing pace, developing with methods that take years just isn’t practical. A union between the two makes sense!

However, the people involved in projects where UX and Agile are mixed don’t always see an easy way to integrate well and deliver on-time.

UX professionals prefer the luxury of time to prepare and conduct research to understand users that can takes weeks or months. They perhaps follow that work with the creation of prototypes based on the findings, then test those prototypes and iterate them based on the new findings. All of these activities can take time to plan, recruit users and conduct.

Agile teams on the other hand need to move forward quickly and complete releases within weeks, not months or years (G-d forbid!). They are invested in the user’s ability to complete scenarios, but are confident that the team’s ability to constantly iterate is enough to safeguard against major issues.

I had the pleasure of participating in many discussions regarding these differences as well as our shared focus on users at Agile 2010. One of the most productive conversations was with Derek W. Wade of derekwwade.net. He described our initial conversation in his recent blog post “The UX and the SM Should Be Friends.”

Derek’s blog also hints at what our future conversations will be covering. We hope to help to bring these two sometimes disparate groups together in understanding. Derek stated it beautifully:

“Let’s us UX and Agilista people listen to one another.  We’re not truly in competition, we both want the same things.  We just have different ideas of how to go about it.  And it’s in the union of the two that true value will be created.”

Agile UX

The Agile2010 conference was a wonderful learning experience.  I presented “Getting Started with User Research,” an intro-level session, and I quickly found out that many people attending the UI/UX Practices Stage were already very experienced in UX and Agile (not just the presenters). I was thrilled to find so many more people that I could learn from between sessions, which just added to the overall feeling of a very friendly and welcoming conference.

I’ve included some comments in this post about the presentations I felt were most thought provoking and fun to attend.

Beyond Sprint Zero: Using Collaborative Product Discovery to Plan Agile Projects

Jeff Patton was perhaps the most exciting speaker I had the pleasure of being in the audience for. His views on integrating Agile practices with UX are spot on. One slide showed a puzzle with a piece in the middle taken out. The removed piece was the solution and around the “hole” were all of the pieces that make up the context of that solution. The context he described included: business strategy, users and goals, product stages, and regulatory constraints. Yes!

Jeff also spent a great deal of time emphasizing that the target solution needs to be outcome (solutions that create maximum positive impact and happy customers) and output (ideas, features, capabilities, specifications, requirements) needs to be minimized. This is of course in an environment of constant, incremental, development. What a happy place the world would be if there was less output and more happy outcome!

I was drinking the Kool-Aid strong until he introduced “simple lightweight “pragmatic” personas to learn what you don’t know about your users.” The idea of doing this didn’t bother me as much as using the word “Persona” to describe the result. I totally agree with the method of gathering everything you know, putting it into a template for a persona and seeing what you are missing. But the idea that someone might refer to that as a persona does bother me, because a well-done persona is based on research and traceable to that research. Many of my clients are uber concerned about using the correct corporate terminology for various UX activities, that it has caused me to get very tied up in semantics. In the end, what is really important is that people realize that talking to users is extremely important, regardless of what it is called.

Improving Customer Conversations

Esther Derby helped attendees to improve their interviewing skills. While this was review for me, it was extremely helpful to hear how she presented the topic and what techniques and activities people were familiar with. Esther has a great approach to interviewing, is a wonderful presenter, and gave conference attendees a bag stuffer that included questions that would help them to change their organization by changing their questions.

The Right Way to Wireframe

Todd Zaki Warfel presented “Opening the Kimono“, which included a brief exercise and explanation of the 6-8-5 technique (6-8 small sketches in 5 minutes) for sketching wireframes. It was wonderful to see many of the techniques I learned 10 years ago and that I feared were perhaps out-of-fashion, are still being recommended by those the IxDA community reveres as its best.

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I hope to attend Agile2010 again in the future. I met many fun, smart, people and learned a lot as well. I highly recommend it if you are looking for a good conference that mixes Agile and UX.

Style Guide Template

Recently a discussion on the STC Usability and UX discussion group allowed me to share my thoughts on Style Guides. Below is an excerpt from my post to the list on that subject.

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Every style guide is different – below is a list of contents that I prefer to use when beginning a web site style guide. With every style guide I find that I need to include different levels of detail and many times the end product does not match what is below. When a lot of technology or standards need to documented I put them into an Appendix or a completely separate document.

Brevity and usefulness is key. Make supporting documents that can be easily referenced for colors, fonts, etc. – that will help to encourage adoption by your team. Test the documentation with developers, project managers, etc. to make sure you have created something they will use.

I have seen beautifully done 10 page style guides. Don’t provide a book – just give them what they need. Work with a designer if possible to make it as attractive as the work you are documenting.

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Style Guide Contents

1. Introduction (1 page or less)

• Project Description
• Document Purpose
• Overview of Design Direction
• Definitions

2. Standards and Guidelines (refer to other documents as needed)

• Site Wide Guidelines
• Document Guidelines
• Application Guidelines & Requirements

3. Site Structure and Organization (keep structure separate from design when possible)

• Page Structure
• Page Titles
• Heading Tags, Keywords, etc.

4. Page Layout and Templates (specify for: Home Page and Landing Pages; Non-Landing Page; Error Pages; Header; Left/Right Column; and Footer)

• Width and Length
• Areas for text vs. words
• Areas for Site Elements

5. Standard Site Element Specifications

• Header
• Main Navigation
• Left/Right Column
• Footer

6. Site Design and Appearance (more likely to be changed than the previous items)

• Standard Style Sheets
• Color
• Text Specifications
• Application Look & Feel Guidelines

7. Content

• Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Links
• Home Page Content
• Multimedia

8. Modification History
9. Appendix A: Additional Resources
10. Appendix B: Accessibility Resources

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