Hidden Gems

Designers Don’t Like UCD

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 10:04:00 +0100

I read an article recently that blew my mind. It lamented that three principles of user-centred design – focusing on users, measuring the effect of your designs and using an iterative approach – were being ignored by most designers.

What blew my mind was it was written in 1985. 1985! I thought, from the way everyone talks about them, that these were modern ideas. Yet here were two academics describing the same problems we face today, right down to a passionate call for more prototyping, five years before the web was even invented.

How utterly depressing.

Which got me thinking. What if something else is going on? What if these are still problems because designers never wanted to do them in the first place? That despite all the talking and writing and speaking and podcasting and tweeting about user-centred design, when it comes down to it, designers avoid user-centred design like the plague.

It sounds crazy. So I wondered whether there could be any truth in it.

Why Don’t Designers Like UCD?

Let’s start with focusing on users. It’s a gospel that every user experience designer preaches, yet often when you speak to them, and dig around a bit, it turns out that everyone has a different excuse for why they don’t do actually do it very much. Often revolving around time, or money, or difficult clients.

To me the truth seems far more stark. Talking to users means taking their views into account when you design, and actually designers would rather not do that. It’s much easier to throw up your hands and say, well, there’s no budget for that, so let’s just do the best we can in the circumstances. Which turns out to be very close to, let me just design this as I think it should work.

And don’t get me started on measuring your designs. It seems designers love anything that means they can avoid measuring things. Whether it’s the pervasive idea that you only need to test with five random passers-by or yet another UX missionary saying that analytics can only tell us the what, not the why, designers latch on to anti-measurement ideas like a pitbull with lockjaw.*

Why? Because measuring the effect of designs risks that the numbers will show the designs don’t work. So if designers want to just design things like they think they should work, measurement is a threat.

See? There’s a theme developing. Designers avoid principles that clash with their own interest in just making things like they want to.

So finally to iterative design. Seen from the perspective of a designer who only wants to make things like he wants to make them, iterative design is the biggest threat of all. While talking to users and measuring the effect of designs have an indirect impact on your work, using an iterative approach means explicitly acknowledging that the designs are wrong before you start. And worse still, you probably have to listen to someone else telling you exactly what’s wrong with your work.

So the little fantasy world where your design is great, and perfect, and right, comes crashing down.

OK, So What Am I Saying?

Basically that a lot of designers want to design things as they want them to be, that these three principles of user-centred design are a direct threat to that vision, and so consciously or not they avoid using these principles.

Because let’s face it, designers are persuasive. When we want something to happen, or something to be included in a project, or a process, we’re good at getting it. Look at how much time and money has been wasted on pixel-perfect wireframes over the last decade!

Ergo, if user-centred design principles are missing from projects, it must be because designers don’t want them there in the first place.

* And we wonder why no one gives us a seat at the strategy table…

Let me know what you think on @myddelton. If you want to blow your mind with some history read Designing for Usability (1985) and Myth of the Intuitive (1990). Or just come to the London UX Bookclub.

3D Dot Voting

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 10:36:00 +0100

I love dot voting. Although telling people to stick dots on their favourite concepts may sound more like playschool than work, it’s a great way to reach group consensus at the end of a workshop. I use it all the time.

But sometimes dot voting just doesn’t work.

Say you’re dealing with senior business people used to making complex decisions after considering lots of data. The simplicity of dot voting feels like a fraud to them, not empirical, not grounded in their world of numerical analysis.

Two modifications can make it work. First, allow them to score ideas against multiple criteria. Secondly, give them immediate feedback on scores to help inform the final dot vote. And all on a workshop timescale.

Is it possible? I think so. Welcome to dot voting in three dimensions.

Scoring Is Easy Enough…

The fundamental principle is to score each idea against multiple criteria.

My example had seven criteria – cost, effort, legal issues, user needs, differentiation, business goals and personal liking – each of which could be scored None / Low / Medium / High.

To capture the scores, make a simple, colourful and appealing scoresheet. After each idea is discussed, hand out the sheets, give people a minute and then collect them. It sounds fussy, but it works fine.

…But You Need The Magic Spreadsheet

12 people scoring 10 ideas and against 7 criteria is 840 datapoints! It’s hard to visualise the data quickly enough to use in the workshop.

This is where you need the magic spreadsheet:

the first worksheet contains a matrix for entering all the scores for each of the ideas – the goal here is super easy data entry.
the second worksheet averages scores into three groups – feasibility (cost, effort, legal issues), customer impact (user needs, differentiation) and business appetite (business goals, personal liking).
the final worksheet is a chart showing each idea in three dimensions – feasibility (x-axis), customer impact (y-axis) and business appetite (bubble size).

You need two people, one to facilitate and the other to enter scores in the spreadsheet as you go. Once the data’s in, adjust the axes to fit the data range and you’re left with a striking visualisation of how ideas map to criteria.

People Love Talking About Pictures

The visualisation is the killer element. It prompts great discussion.

Are there any obvious winners? Should we focus on ideas with most impact, or biggest feasibility? Which ideas were written off altogether? Are there any interesting outliers? Is it what we expected to see? Where are all the ideas that are easy to do but also have a massive impact?

Only now, having (i) discussed the ideas (ii) scored the ideas and (iii) discussed the aggregated scores, is everyone ready for…the final dot vote.

Fine, But Why Would I Go To This Much Trouble?

There are many benefits to dot voting in three dimensions:

generates confidence – it’s not scientific or objective, but it means looking at the problem from multiple angles and leads to a more rounded decision
fosters understanding – group discussion allows raising of technical worries so specialist concerns (e.g IT and legal) get reflected in group scores
contains feedback loops – discussions influence scoring, scoring influences prioritisation – which captures some of the magic of the Delphi method
gives the group ownership – the facilitator doesn’t take part in the voting, so the group is wholly responsible for making the decisions
harnesses visualisation – the abstract representation of scores focuses the group on characteristics that matter most to the business
allows segmentation – run it with different groups and compare the results to see differences between, for example, marketing and IT viewpoints
accommodates introverts – no matter how strident the discussion, each individual scores alone (although extroverts can still influence discussions).

There are pitfalls of course. You need a balanced group so scores aren’t skewed. You need good criteria and sensible dimensions. And you might have to kill your favourite ideas when the group throws them out!

The Final Analysis

Does this work any better than simple dot voting? Maybe, maybe not.

In my example there was an extremely strong correlation between ‘personal liking’ and final consensus. Perhaps not surprisingly, considering (a) we all know dot voting works and (b) cognitive psychology suggests that many ‘rational’ decisions are really just manifestations of our emotional responses.

But it’s a good tool for when people don’t trust a dot vote. And, if you like that kind of thing, the data visualisation reveal is pretty fun too…

Let me know what you think about this on @myddelton. Feel free to adapt my scoresheet or spreadsheet to use your preferred criteria, dimensions and labelling. These ideas owe a debt to @leisa and @petegale.

We Made Mistakes

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 10:26:00 +0000

In 2007, my DJ brother Gabriel asked me to build him a website. I didn’t know at the time, but it would turn out to be the best thing I ever did.

It took ages to build. I had to learn HTML, CSS and Expression Engine. Five years later Gabriel’s a full time DJ and I’m a user experience designer.

But the best thing about building your own site is the mistakes. Our biggest ones taught me unforgettable lessons about information architecture.

Names Are Not Just About Clarity

Our first mistake was naming. He plays music that people LOVE to dance to. Not shoe gazing indie – raucous, irreverent Jamaican dancehall crossed with UK club music. What do you call the section about their shows?

Don’t call it Events (like we did). It’s clear, but it’s dull.

Events doesn’t sound like fun party music. Events doesn’t even sound like music. Events sounds like corporate functions in conference centres with delegates drinking terrible coffee and talking about ‘getting visibility’.

What should it be called? Parties. Raves. Jams. Gigs. Dances. Shows. Anything that communicates some excitement alongside the clarity. Your global navigation is on every page so what you choose to include, and the words you use, are a huge opportunity to tell your story. Use them wisely.

Not All Content Is Created Equal

Our second mistake was a classic. We structured the site to match our mental model by splitting the Music section into original productions, mash-ups, remixes, refixes, mixes, live shows and radio shows. Clear. Logical. Wrong.

Why? People only care about two categories. Good music. Bad music.

Only publish the good stuff. Don’t hide it in subsections. Put the very best on your homepage so people can get at it within two seconds of arriving.

Truthfully, very few organisations have enough high quality content to justify complicated hierarchies. Much better to publish a stellar subset and leave your users wanting more. Or you risk overwhelming them with choice.

Humans Beat Computers (Sometimes)

Our third mistake – and this one is an all time favourite pastime of mine – was getting carried away with the content model. We designed our events to have titles, venues, locations, prices, addresses, concessions, web links, booking offices, artists and plenty more. We were exceptionally proud of our design.

This pride was misplaced.

Within two minutes of entering the first event we realised we didn’t have all the right information. We made some fields optional, which broke the visual design by leaving gaps where content was previously. We hacked the code with if/else statements for millions of data combinations. And it still never worked properly.

In the end, three years later, the solution was stupidly simple.

For rapidly changing content where you can’t predict the shape of the data, just have a page that a human can edit by hand. We’re good at that.

Huge Mistakes Can Bring Huge Benefits

We saved the biggest mistake until last – last year Google killed the site for being infected with malware. We hadn’t updated Expression Engine for four years and deserved what we got, so we started over. (Losing a thousand pages overnight was easier and far more effective than a content audit!).

But this isn’t about Gabriel’s site anyway. It’s not even about information architecture. It’s really about how I learned to learn from my own mistakes.

Owning up to my bad decisions was horrible at first. It made me feel like I had given bad advice and often felt easier to argue back. The turning point was a conversation where Gabriel pointed out how much it took to maintain the site and I was practically shouting in denial. He, the client, was right.

Over time, I got better at admitting mistakes and started to relish finding flaws in my own thinking. Welcoming criticism is the hardest thing I’ve ever learned to do – and I’m still working on it – but nothing has improved my work quicker.

Let me know what you think on @myddelton. Thanks to Gabriel for putting up with me, @MagsHanley for encouraging us to share IA war stories and @Mike_FTW and @slowtext for their great podcast, Let’s Make Mistakes.

Escaping The Vacuum

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 08:36:00 +0000

Before 2007, I lived in a vacuum. The internet was overwhelming me.

I bookmarked interesting websites and completely forget to check them again. I read life-changing articles that disappeared into the ether. I constantly felt like something important was evaporating behind the currently-open tab.

Google Reader changed everything for me in 2007. It remade the internet at a human scale by connecting me to real life designers and developers. In six months I learned HTML/CSS, discovered Don’t Make Me Think, found Avinash Kaushik and got a job running the websites for a government agency.

Three years later the iPhone, Twitter, Reeder and Instapaper did the same thing. Just in time, because 2011 was another crazy year.

It’s Play Or Get Played

Even with the right tools it’s never easy to stay ahead of the game. Twitter, Instapaper, Google+, Reeder, Flickr, even email – they’re all out to crush you.

All over the internet, people are panicking and making big statements about unplugging. As if that’s a solution! Far better to think intelligently about your own strategies for consuming and sharing infomation. If you want to start somewhere, try listening to Kip Voytek’s amazing insights on Radio Johnny.

My advice? Police your sources. Ruthlessly unfollow, unsubscribe and unread anything you find boring. Constantly tune your setup. Remember to start from scratch in a new area every now and then.

And your desire for completeness? It’s harmful. Let it go.

There are hidden shortcuts. Each day I link to two things that I think are amazing on Twitter, so follow @myddelton and let me know what you think.

Radiolab and Other Podcasts

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 11:19:00 +0000

Podcasts have the power to transform mundane tasks into enjoyable activities. Why? Because unlike books, tv, videos or websites, you can do other things at the same time as listening to them.

Exercising, cooking, cleaning, shopping, commuting or just lying awake with jet lag are all a million times better with a good podcast between your ears. But like most things online, sorting the great from the merely good is hard.

Want a head start? Try listening to these, my all time favourite podcasts.

Radiolab

Few things in this world are as good as Radiolab. Seriously. It believes ‘your ears are a portal to another world’. And it’s right.

You get sucked in by the sound. After the acoustic purity of BBC Radio 4 or the earsplitting compression of commercial radio, the sonics in Radiolab are mind-bending. Original music drifts in and out. Voices are stitched together. Scratches, gurgles and vortexes appear – and silence becomes a weapon.

But the secret of Radiolab is the storytelling. It takes the deepest, weirdest, scariest subjects – death, artificial intelligence, morality, animal rights, tumours – and tells beautiful, emotional, unforgettable tales about them.

Radiolab is the DJ Shadow, the Aphex Twin, the Miles Davis, of radio.

In Our Time

In Our Time has three British academics discussing a single topic over 50 minutes. Sounds dull, but it works thanks to the wide range of topics like:

Philosophy - David Hume, Malthusiasnism, Free Will
Science - the Moon, the Neutrino, the Age of the Universe
Religion - Shintoism, John Wyclif and the Lollards, Islamic Law
History - the Siege of Tenochtitlan, Custer’s Last Stand, the Iron Age
Artistic works - Delacroix’s Liberty, Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Bhagavad Gita

Melvin Bragg’s a great host too. He never gets out of his depth when cajoling, prompting, hurrying and even correcting the academics into covering the topic. And although he can be brusque, he usually extracts a compelling story.

Which, knowing academics, is a special skill.

Seminars About Long Term Thinking

There are multiple Stewart Brands. They show up in documentaries about Ayn Rand, ecological science, NASA, cybernetics and the Whole Earth Catalog. One even came up with ‘information wants to be free’. But my favourite Stewart Brand is the one who introduces the Seminars About Long Term Thinking.

You might learn that some organisms are thousands of years old, that you can pick up any language in three months, that governments should use historians to predict the future, or that the South is falling prey to deviant globalisation.

Yes, the ideas are often a little crazy and yes, Kevin Kelly asks ridiculously long questions at the end. But conventional wisdom is rarely this thought-provoking.

The Straight Dope

Finally, when you’re not up for dealing with the big questions, you might prefer five minute answers to the little questions. Enter The Straight Dope:

What would it be like walking around on a cube-shaped planet?
Did firemen once use nets to rescue people from burning buildings?
Are bananas about to become extinct?
Whatever happened to that plan to grow square trees?
Could I take down a T Rex with my Beretta 9mm pistol?

Funny stuff. Perfect for walking to the bus stop and learning something new.

Let me know which podcasts you love on @myddelton. Thanks to @sjors and @gabrielheatwave for the original recommendations.

…

Updates

Podcast recommendations from other readers include:

Triangulation and Just Like Honey via @thompsonsimon
The Big Ideas from The Guardian via @sjors
The Zero and Lovelace shows from In Our Time via @lucy_luge
This American Life via @nicprice and @katheaton

Keep them coming!

The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 10:42:00 +0100

For years I’ve been hostile to branding. It felt like smoke-and-mirrors, a relic from the golden age of advertising with no place in our brave new online world.

The Brand Gap changed my mind overnight. It bridges the gap between strategy (logic) and creativity (magic) and is structured around five activities – differentiate, collaborate, innovate, validate, cultivate.

But the twist comes with Marty Neumeier’s (re)definition of branding:

“A brand is a person’s gut feeling about
a product, service or company”
Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap

This focus on feeling makes it a call-to-arms for user experience designers.

Convince People to Focus

User experience people are fond of saying that if you design for everybody, you design for no one. This question of focus is one of our key battlegrounds and, let’s face it, one where we often lose.

The Brand Gap tackles focus head on. Marty admits that focusing means giving up on potential customers. But if this lets you dominate a small category instead of trailing the leaders in a big one it’s worth it:

History has shown that it pays handsomely to be number one in your category – first, because of higher margins, and second, because the risk of commoditization is almost nonexistent.
Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap

More money with less risk of fighting to the bottom on price? Sounds like a convincing business strategy to me.

Make New Friends

The parallels with UX design go beyond focus and differentiation though:

for brand research, qualitative techniques like 1:1 interviews, ethnographic research and field tests are preferred to focus groups and quantitative studies.
branding uses prototypes – in the form of creative briefs and mockups – to quickly test and refine the gut feelings necessary for success.
a clear visual hierarchy – or ‘natural reading order’ as it’s called here – is important in everything from packaging design to websites.
brand people need to be natural facilitators, as creating a charismatic brand needs thousands of people to work together over a long period.

These shared techniques should make branding and user experience people natural allies – a refreshing change from the idea that marketing is the enemy.

Discover A New History

User experience designers know plenty about the history of design but rarely talk about the story of branding and advertising. Which is a shame, because advertisers were talking about designing experiences back in the 1950s.

The Brand Gap positions itself within this wider tradition. Marty Neumeier even provides a list of “rewarding and true” books at the back, saying:

The ideas in The Brand Gap are like a group of islands whose foundations extend below the surface of the page:
What you see are only the peaks.
Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap

If Positioning and Selling the Invisible are typical, learning about the history of branding will be extremely rewarding for user experience people.

Why You Should Read It

The Brand Gap is a perfect introduction to branding. Marty Neumeier combines ideas you already love into a story you won’t forget. Read it.

Let me know what you think about this review on @myddelton. And if you liked this, take a look at what else I write about.

The Hidden Business of UX Design

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 07:31:00 +0100

User research often throws up problems beyond the scope of designing websites and applications. Awkward things like corporate focus, content freshness, customer service relationships and database quality problems.

All affect the user’s experience, yet addressing the business processes responsible is rarely seen as part of user experience design. Which is a shame because failing to address business issues can undo all our design work.

Redesign the organisation

My first exposure to user research was the CABE redesign in 2008. The big (unsurprising) finding was that people wanted to find content by themes like housing, health or sustainability.

It didn’t take long to design the information architecture, but three years later we still had problems with creating the content. Sections like sustainability, which had a dedicated internal team, had great content. Areas which required cross-team collaboration, like health or housing, were poor.

The lesson? It’s not enough to redesign your website - sometimes you have to redesign your organisation. CABE should have created new teams, or refined their editorial processes, to populate our shiny new information architecture.

Forget the front end (sometimes)

Another site that I worked on had serious usability issues. Frustrated at my failure to convince people of their importance, I did some user research to show the need for change.

But none of the research findings related to my usability concerns.

Instead, the real user issues touched on multiple areas of the business. Addressing them involved difficult conversations, serious data analysis, renegotiation of contracts and even culture change.

The lesson? User research throws up some issues that can’t be addressed with wireframes and prototypes. (Also, don’t do research to prove yourself right!).

Fight for better processes

You might wonder whether these issues matter to user experience designers. They sound suspiciously like things other people should be sorting out.

Maybe. But many managers aren’t digital natives, let alone advocates of user-centred design. They won’t make good strategic or operational decisions without good advice and, weird as it seems, our research is often the first time they find out what users really think. So, for now at least, it falls on us to fight for the better business processes our designs deserve.

And if we don’t? The beautiful websites and applications we design won’t work for users. No matter how good they are on paper.

Let me know what you think on @myddelton.

Concatenate Rules

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 13:06:00 +0100

Normal people don’t usually thank you for teaching them Excel tricks. Unless that trick is the Concatenate function. Then they love you forever.

Concatenate joins together text from multiple cells. Let’s say you have two cells containing “Hidden” (A1) and “Gems” (B1). Here’s how to combine them:

=CONCATENATE(A1,B1)
results in “HiddenGems”

But Concatenate is a long unusual word which makes it hard to remember. So it’s good you can use an ampersand instead, just like you use plus and minus:

=A1&B1
results in “HiddenGems” as well

You can add your own characters into the formula too. Insert a friendly space (or any character string) by putting it in quotation marks:

=A1&” ”&B1
results in “Hidden Gems”, which is much prettier

It’s difficult to explain how useful Concatenate is. I use it to build greetings from title/firstname/lastname (mailouts), construct working URLs from unique identifiers (content audits), add HTML tags to list content (CMS uploads) and export quotes to Wordle to make pretty word clouds (data visualisation).

If you liked this you should read about PureText. Let me know what you think on @myddelton and follow @wizardofexcel to supercharge your Excel skills.

Why Can't I Shop By Meal?

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 13:45:00 +0100

Online grocery shopping in the UK is underwhelming. It’s the same old process (write a list and locate the items) with a few tweaks (favourites and search).

It doesn’t take much to imagine big improvements:

Find a recipe online and click a link to get the ingredients
Jump from wine review to buying a bottle (or case) in one click
Buy a chef’s cookbook with QR codes throughout to fill your basket
Email all the necessary supplies to that friend who loved your last meal
Open a government PDF linked to ingredients for a week of healthy eating
And my personal favourite - enter number of party guests, pick your party food and then watch the website spit out a mathematically-precise party hamper.

All you need is a robust system so that anyone – food blogger, publishing house, civil service mandarin, software developer – can populate a shopping basket with items via a simple weblink. The internet will do the rest.

Everyone benefits

The first supermarket to introduce a great API will reap the benefits. (An API lets websites talk to each other – in this case, any website would be able to create and fill up a basket on the supermarket’s website, ready to order).

Normal people benefit because transcribing and hunting down ingredients for recipes becomes a thing of the past. You can find a recipe on your favourite site and order the ingredients direct from the supermarket.

People using the API get income, like book reviewers do from Amazon. Food bloggers might make enough to buy white truffles. Larger sites could reduce their display advertising (yay!). Government could even get kickbacks from supermarkets through encouraging people to eat more healthily!

Supermarkets benefit most. An API drives customers from new sources, not just existing store visitors. Profitable third party apps give you great design without investment risk (think Twitter and Tweetdeck). Hundreds of niche uses open up, so the mass-market supermarket becomes a powerhouse of differentiation.

Groceries are not books…

Of course it’s not as simple as creating an Amazon for food. Grocery products are fast moving consumer goods and they come with their own challenges:

The sheer volume of products make it hard to build good affiliate bundles.
Products are launched and discontinued at a bewildering rate. The same product, same quantity, same manufacturer, can change from month to month.
There are stock issues. A popular recipe exhausts a rare-but-perishable delicacy. Items like Brussels sprouts are seasonal. Stock levels are so volatile that delays between basket generation and ordering cause problems for users.

…but the hard part’s been done already

Although these are big problems, we’re talking about giants. Tesco is the fourth largest retailer in the world. And whereas Amazon has spent a decade building their stock infrastructure, the Big Four supermarkets already have it in place.

The challenges are about design, not infrastructure. A great microformat for ingredients so the API could make appropriate substitutions (make it open and the world will thank you). A beautiful front-end to help normal people put together baskets for their own links. Interaction design that deals elegantly with stock issues. Service design with real humans doing real quality checks.

The future will have a better connection between the internet and our groceries. The only question is, who’s going to get there first?

OK, I know Tesco has an API, but I’ve can’t find any examples of the uses I want to see. Let me know what I’ve missed on @myddelton. And thanks to Leisa Reichelt’s workshop in January for the inspiration…

Coasthopper Service Design

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 13:10:00 +0100

The Coasthopper bus in North Norfolk is a fantastic service. It proves you don’t have to be a huge corporation to do great service design.

If you’re tired of hearing the same old service design case studies, here’s an example of a simple public service delighting its users by meeting their needs.

Frequent, Cheap, On Time

In Selling the Invisible, Harry Beckwith advises that the first step in service marketing is to “get better reality”. For a bus service like Coasthopper this means you need to be frequent, cheap and on time.

It turns out Coasthopper already has great reality.

Buses run at least twice an hour throughout the day, which is exceptional for a rural timetable. A 90 minute journey along the Norfolk coast costs less than a 10 minute hop into Bristol’s city centre. And in catching eight buses over three days, every one arrived within three minutes of its scheduled time.

Word Gets Around

You can’t get near North Norfolk without hearing about Coasthopper.

A huge part is the name. “Coasthopper” communicates the whole service in three syllables – it runs along the coast and you can hop on or off at any point. Word of mouth matters in service marketing, so helping users form an accurate mental model of the service in a single word is a killer tactic.

The buses look distinctive too. You only need to see the cheerful yellow and blue colour scheme once to realise what’s on offer.

But it’s more than that. We first heard about Coasthopper in the Guardian. Our King’s Lynn hotel had timetables on reception and in our room. The tourist guide had a timetable in the back. Someone at Coasthopper is doing fantastic work with the national press, local businesses and the regional tourist board to get the word out at every possible touchpoint.

Communication Matters

My favourite thing about Coasthopper is the clear, friendly communication.

Timetable design is a tricky business. Coasthopper’s is clearly laid on a large square, with Monday-Saturday on one side and Sunday on the flip. It lists every time, for every bus, at every stop, but the text is large enough for the many pensioners using the service. The (difficult) decision to stick to a single linear route helps, an example of how constraining your service can reap rewards.

The writing is even better. Just compare the empty marketing drivel for First’s Bristol fares with the friendly and informative text for Coasthopper. You can’t fake it – the writer was thinking about who reads it and what they want to know.

Even the drivers are great communicators. One calls out personal introductions to “Sunny Hunny” (Hunstanton) and “Chelsea By The Sea” (Burnham Market) as you pass through. Others make polite, friendly and well-received interventions when people have music too loud or eat on the bus.

Everybody Loves Special Treatment

But what makes Coasthopper exceptional is they clearly know their users and cater to their needs. Some examples in their own words:

“If you are walking in a large group and you want to use Coasthopper, then please let us know at least seven days in advance, so we can do our best to make sure you’re not left behind!” (incredible service for walkers)
“Wheelchair users have priority over all other passengers in using the dedicated space” (unambiguous inclusion of people with disabilities)
“Dogs are welcome on board Coasthopper, and we do not charge for them” (explicit acceptance for people with pets)
“Coasthopper Rovers come in 1, 3 and 7 day versions, so you can hop on, hop off as much as you wish” (perfect for holidaymakers without a car like me)

“If you have any further questions, please email us or call us on 01553 776980” (real contact details at the top, not the bottom, of their FAQ page)

Coasthopper wins awards and carries over half a million passengers every year. Their service does more than take people from A to B – it gives you a reason to return to North Norfolk. Did you think a bus service could do that?

Let me know what you think about this on @myddelton. You can find out more about Coasthopper on their excellent website or, preferably, by going to the North Norfolk coast yourself. It’s beautiful…

The Hidden Powers of SurveyMonkey

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 07:30:00 +0100

Twice I’ve joined companies to find professional researchers laughing at my use of SurveyMonkey for user research. They assumed it was inadequate compared to their costly enterprise software.

But most surveys don’t need advanced features. When they saw how easy it was to do surveys with SurveyMonkey, the researchers never looked back.

In their honour, here’s my guide to the lesser-known features of SurveyMonkey.

Super Simple Data Sharing

The whole point of a survey is getting responses. But enterprise tools put so many barriers between writing the survey and getting the responses that it’s easy to forget why you were asking the questions in the first place.

This just isn’t good enough.

So my top reason to use SurveyMonkey is it only takes 30 seconds to create a password-protected URL for your survey results. Now anyone can access the data without being able to modify the responses or mess up the survey itself.

And what does quick and timely access to user data equal? UX converts.

One Survey, Multiple Collectors

SurveyMonkey lets you create a single survey with many different URLs (‘collectors’). You might put one on your website, another in a mass email to registered users and a third on your Twitter account.

All collectors gather responses to one place, but the trick is you can view data in aggregate or segment it by collector. This lets you easily see differences between your audiences at the same time as gathering overall data.

And that’s just the start. Segmentation lets you test your hunches (do people respond differently when incentivised?) and compare feedback over time (one set of feedback questions with a different collector for each time you speak).

Conditional Logic That My Mum Understands

You don’t have to create many user surveys before you find that you want to ask different follow-up questions depending on previous answers.

The classic example is the satisfaction survey – ask one thing to users that failed to complete their task (‘what prevented you doing this?’) and something else to users that were successful (‘what do you most value about our site?’).

Although this sounds simple, in practice it’s dangerously close to programming. And, ouch, debugging. But SurveyMonkey has an interface for branching surveys so straightforward that my mum can (and does) use it.

The Creepy Part

Finally, you can pass information into the survey via a personalised URL.

Using something like Campaign Monitor you send personalised emails to all of your registered users, each with a survey link that contains their email address as part of the survey URL. When users complete the survey their response is logged alongside their email address. Without them doing anything.

Now you can contact users about issues raised without ever asking for an email address. Fewer fields to complete, and no input errors either. Win-win.

Just don’t claim this is an ‘anonymous’ survey…

It Doesn’t Do Everything (But In A Good Way)

Of course, many great features are missing from SurveyMonkey. (Although the refusal to bloat it with features just makes me love it more).

You can’t drag and drop when designing your survey. Or allow respondents to upload their own files. Or completely retheme your survey with CSS. If you want to do those things then check out Wufoo.

You can’t get an RSS feed of responses. Or do computation and scripting. ~~Or use strings from previous answers in subsequent questions~~. If this sounds fun, you should look at SurveyGizmo.

But SurveyMonkey has been ever-present in my arsenal for the last five years, and no other tool can make that claim. It’s solid, easy, powerful, friendly, usable and cheap. If you do user surveys, you should definitely try it.

I’m not affiliated with SurveyMonkey – I just love using it. Let me know what you think on @myddelton – particularly if you know something useful I’ve missed.

Update: SurveyMonkey introduced the ability to use strings from previous answers in subsequent questions in February 2011.

My Name Is A Geolocation

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 07:30:00 +0100

My name is Will Myddelton, but you won’t find any other Myddeltons in my family except my brother. Why? Because my mum and dad made a stand against centuries of tradition when they named us.

They felt that, women and men being equal, it wasn’t right to name me after a distant ancestor on my dad’s side. So they decided not to call me Haynes after my dad. They could have named me Welch after my mum, but this rights one wrong with another. (And my mum’s name came from her dad originally too).

Double-barrelled surnames bring their own problems. Welch-Haynes or Haynes-Welch? What happens when two people with double-barrelled surnames have their own childen? Four surnames is ridiculous, which takes you back to the problem of choosing which name is more important.

So they sidestepped the whole issue and named me after the location where I was born and grew up. I became Will Myddelton from Myddelton Square.

Frequently Answered Questions

We all know you can choose whatever first name you like for your child. But the surname convention is so deeply ingrained that you’re probably wondering if you’re allowed to change it.

You can call your child whatever you like, surname included.

You might ask whether having a different name from my parents makes me feel less close to them. Plenty of others have. But I feel close to my mum and dad because, well, they’re my mum and dad.

The most difficult question you can ask me is what I’ll call my own children. When I was younger I liked the idea of starting a Myddelton dynasty. Now I’m less sure. Some friends of mine changed their names when they had kids so that their whole little family started afresh with a new surname. I like that.

A New River Runs Through It

But the thing I love most about my name is it connects me to where I’m from.

Myddelton Square is named after Hugh Myddelton, who built the New River to bring clean water to London in the early 1600s. The New River flows from Amwell Springs near Hertford into Clerkenwell. And I’ve never lived far away.

I grew up where it terminates at the New River Head, shared a house close to its course through Clissold Park, lived near to it in Finsbury Park and now my flat in Haringey is less than 200 metres away from its sluggish flow.

Instead of making me feel alienated, my name connects me to my city.

I Love A Well-Designed Taxonomy

There are people who think that what my parents did was pointless, even stupid. The political-correctness-gone-mad brigade mostly.

I think it was an extraordinary and beautiful thing to do.

My mum and dad made a political statement about our society while hurting no one, least of all me. And my information architect side is proud that not only did they recognise how important names are, they sat down together and worked out a system that solved the design problem they faced. Perfectly.

I’ve been answering questions about this my whole life, so if there’s anything else you want to know feel free to ask me on @myddelton.

Becoming A UX Designer

Wed, 18 May 2011 07:24:00 +0100

This time last year I was a web editor. Today I’m a user experience designer. If you’re thinking about making a similar transition then this post is for you.

A word of warning. This isn’t about shortcuts or changing your job title to make more money. This is for people who already love improving things for users, who lap up design theory wherever they can find it and who use user-centred design techniques despite these not being in their job descriptions.

If that still sounds like you, here are the lessons I learned. I hope they help.

Calling Yourself A Designer Is The Hardest Part

For me, the biggest obstacle was learning to call myself a designer. I can’t create beautiful layouts. My sketches look like a spider fell in an inkwell. I’m red-green colour blind and I last studied art back in 1991.

In my mind I was no more a designer than an astronaut.

But it turns out that design is about solving problems within constraints and communicating the solutions, not creating pretty art. UX designers come from many disciplines - for example, I’m a history graduate (like the Guardian’s Martin Belam), come from a content background (like Jesse James Garrett from Adaptive Path) and spent my 20s as a musician (pick one from many!).

My advice? Get comfortable calling yourself a designer because it’s hard enough to switch to a new career without second-guessing your own job title.

Networking Is Essential

I’ve had a dread of networking ever since I first heard the term. So imagine my surprise when after forcing myself to attend a UX meetup I found a crowd of kindred spirits – warm, welcoming and passionate about the things that I loved.

Meeting UX designers makes you realise they’re mostly just like you. Talking with people who employ UX designers helps you find strengths and weaknesses quicker than you would on your own. People, even strangers, naturally tell you about unadvertised job openings and their favourite recruitment agents.

And don’t forget existing contacts! One work colleague observed a personal quality that I’d missed completely – and which I’ve used in every interview since. Another convinced me that I had what it took to make the switch.

Treat Your CV Like A UX Project

I’ve always approached my CV in the way that most businesses approach the web, throwing everything possible at it in the desperate hope that something would stick. It was a mess until a close friend put me straight:

Your CV is a record of what you want to do, not of what you’ve done.

This simple advice helped me rethink my CV as a UX project. Stripping out irrelevant experience felt less like erasing my past than leaving space for core competencies to shine. Focusing the entire first page on my last job didn’t feel disproportionate, it felt like establishing a proper visual hierachy. Fitting it all into two pages was the right thing to do for my users, busy employers.

I solicited feedback, iterated mercilessly and got a job on version 17.

Portfolios Make Interviews Easier

Creating a portfolio terrified me. I’d never done one and I didn’t know what it should look like. So I kept it simple: four pages, four projects, each with a description alongside thumbnails of sketches, photos and screenshots. I was trying to show my whole process rather than specific details.

I also took a paper copies to interviews rather than a digital version. This caused a few raised eyebrows but had some advantages:

the interviewer can skip around on their copy, scribble on it or read it in detail
the higher resolution lets you present a whole project on a single page
you get to leave a physical artifact in the hands of your interviewer
there is no risk of being flummoxed by technology.

The best parts of my interviews were the portfolio discussions. Rather than responding nervously to questions about hypothetical situations you end up having a proper, substantive conversation about your real work. (This is why you should avoid sending a digital copy in advance – if it works as a prompt to conversation, chances are it won’t work as a standalone document).

Look at my portfolio if you like – but trust me, you’d be much better off reading Jason Mesut’s guide to selling yourself.

No Research, No Excuses

The worst moment of my experience came when an interviewer asked me what I thought of their recent work. I hadn’t looked. It’s not a mistake I made twice.

Researching a potential employer is easy on the web. I wandered through corporate websites, press releases, trade media stories, products and client work to build up a rounded picture before interviews.

It doesn’t stop there. Companies might check employees out on Facebook, but what about employees checking out interviewers on LinkedIn? Knowing the background and interests of your interviewers is, well, kind of a big deal.

But the most useful research task was evaluating a company’s web products before interview. If the portfolio allows a conversation on your terms, turning up with questions about their design decisions is the opposite – your interviewer can assess your design views in the context of work that they know. Just be careful not to force your opinions on them.

You Don’t Get What You’re Worth,
You Get What You Negotiate

So you’ve convinced yourself you’re a designer, networked furiously to find openings, used your CV to get an interview and solicited a job offer with the help of your portfolio.

It’s time to talk about the money.

Yes, like most Brits I hate this part. But after years of moaning about not being paid what I thought I was worth it was time to try out a strategy. Mine was:

Set a minimum salary in advance – speak to colleagues about what is reasonable, set a figure and don’t go below this whatever happens.
Decide on your opening bid – be prepared with an opening figure higher than your minimum and practice saying it out loud (seriously).
Be ready to walk away – the first time I walked away was awful and made me feel like a loser, the second was easier and the third felt completely normal.

Which hubris brings me neatly to my final point.

Switching career to be a UX designer, or anything else for that matter, requires you to put your humility aside and sell yourself hard. It’s OK, that’s part of the game. Just don’t forget to go back to being humble afterwards.

Feel free to ask questions or tell me what you think on @myddelton. Thanks again to Andrew Travers for incredible advice, Jason Mesut for portfolio wisdom, Matthew Solle for the recruiter tip, Ben Clarfelt for finding my job and Leisa Reichelt for the Peter Drucker quotes.

UX By Numbers

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 07:29:00 +0100

User experience designers are fond of saying that although web analytics can show you what users are doing, it can’t show you why they are doing it.

True enough.

Yet some designers use this idea to avoid engaging with analytics data completely. It’s understandable – many bright people are uncomfortable with numbers – but it’s a shame, as analytics offers many insights to UX design.

Analytics Improves The Research Phase

Data provides valuable context for your research documentation. Adding pageviews to a content audit shows which areas are most popular. Plotting visit share on an information architecture shows whether it’s working. Recording drop-offs in a registration flow shows where users are having problems.

It’s not all numbers either – qualitative data is a great starting point for user research. Find words and phrases signalling intent in search logs. See which tasks people are doing, and how your site frustrates them, with the 4Q survey.

Analytics data also lets you quickly test your research conclusions. At CABE, user interviews suggested that people thought in subjects (‘housing’) rather than formats (‘policy papers’). We confirmed this with analytics. Being able to validate a single user’s opinion against a large dataset is very powerful.

Data Helps With Prioritisation

Whether you are putting together a wireframe or a prototype you need to make tough decisions to create a great visual hierarchy. Analytics can help. Historical data shows which interface elements people use most and current data shows how people interact with the live design.

At a larger scale, analytics can help you choose which design projects to actually do by quantifying their potential impact. Without this you risk wasting precious resources on projects that only benefit a tiny percentage of users.

Of course numbers never tell the whole story – there are still business goals, strategic aims and brand requirements – but they should always be in the mix.

Testing Reduces Risk

A/B and multivariate testing help you make design decisions because they take the risk out of getting it wrong. Instead of prevaricating for days over the copy or placement of elements you can make a best guess and test the alternatives.

Testing is great for building consensus too. Gather suggestions from colleagues in workshops or even placate the local HiPPO by including their preferred version. People invest more in the design process once they feel part of it, but prepare yourself for when their version converts better than yours!

Analytics Speaks The Language Of Business

Business people feel more comfortable with numbers than opinions, so using analytics is a great way to sell ideas to the people who fund your projects.

A proposal based on increasing unique visitors is more convincing than one based on intuition alone. Better still would be to quantify the change in revenue gained or expenditure saved by calculating how much the extra visitors are worth (assign a goal value, see how many visitors reach the goal and multiply).

Yes, it’s tricky to make accurate predictions but you get better with practice. And when you deliver the promised increases, people start to trust your design work regardless of whether you quantify the impact upfront.

Getting Started With Web Analytics

Like any new field, getting your head around web analytics can be daunting. If you’re interested in learning more, here’s my 5 step guide to getting started:

Read Avinash Kaushik
Avinash is the god of web analytics because he focuses on the difference between analysis (actionable insights) and reporting (‘puking’ data). Read his excellent blog and devour both of his books.
Try out some tools
Play with free tools like Google Analytics (traffic data), 4Q survey (qualitative feedback), Crazy Egg (heatmaps) and Google Website Optimizer (A/B testing) to get a sense of how they work.
Focus on what matters
In particular, conversions/goals/funnels (how many people do things you want), audience segmentation (splitting data based on characteristics) and event tracking (logging clicks on parts of the interface).
Avoid the red herrings
‘Time on site’ is a not measure of engagement. ‘Visits’ or ‘pageviews’ on their own are bad metrics (traffic costs money – you want conversions). Path analysis rarely leads to useful insights. Never use the term ‘hits’. Ever.
Communicate the data properly
Insight is useless if no one ‘gets’ it. Read Show Me The Numbers by Steven Few (practical advice), Visual Display of Quantitative Information (theoretical classic) and Information Is Beautiful by David McCandless (inspiration).

Web analytics isn’t an answer to every question and it’s never a replacement for talking to your users directly. In particular, data-driven design may never be able to improve your site beyond a theoretical local maximum.

But if you’re avoiding web analytics because it looks too complicated, chances are that you’re losing out on some great design insights.

Let me know what you think about this – particularly if I’ve missed any obvious uses or if you disagree with anything – on @myddelton. And big thanks to Katarzyna Stawarz for asking the question that inspired this post…

Tactics For Government Websites

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 07:30:06 +0100

You hear bad things about government websites. The £585 icon at the Information Commissioner’s Office. BusinessLink’s £2.15 cost per visit. The website for Birmingham City Council that cost three million pounds.

Easy targets. And never the whole story…

I ran the websites for a government agency called CABE and the truth is that it’s a difficult job to do well. The main problem is that the big decisions are often made by people who don’t use the web, so projects end up driven by whims, internal politics or even something someone saw on TV.

It took me many false starts to work out how to get things done. Now that I’m moving on, here are my top 5 tactics for running better government websites.

1. Be An Editor That People Want To Hug

Most government sites rely on content from people who aren’t trained writers. Their work needs to be edited, which is a brutal experience for them if they’re new to the process.

You cannot alienate these people – they are the foundation of your site. So you need to explain how the editing process works, show them why your edits are necessary and be prepared for some give and take. It takes more time but it builds trust, helps them improve their own writing and creates a lasting bond.

If you don’t believe me, read the acknowledgements at the front of any book. As Frank Chimero says, ‘writers, hug your editors’.

2. Stop Writing Big Reports

It was clear that our web strategy needed an update. We meticulously researched the issues and wrote up recommendations in beautifully formatted Word documents. After all, civil servants love Word. How could this fail?

It failed because nobody read the reports.

The breakthrough came when we presented the same data using information graphics shamelessly ripped from Information Is Beautiful. Senior managers could now see the research data visually. They understood what was going on and quickly adopted our recommendations.

3. Each One, Teach One

There are people in your organisation who love technology. Harness their enthusiasm by helping them understand the issues that matter on the web.

My favourite weapons are books, particularly Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug and Letting Go Of The Words by Ginny Redish. Get copies, lend them out and watch how the quality of the conversations you have is transformed.

And don’t be afraid to teach! People want to learn techniques, even complicated ones, if they make their life easier. I worked with a string of events and marketing officers who now wield Excel techniques like concatenation, IF statements and VLOOKUPs with unabashed glee…

4. Don’t Build It!

Avoid the temptation to build functionality from scratch at all costs. After all, if software companies struggle to make good software (they do) it’s not surprising that government wastes huge amounts on trying to do the same.

Most of what you need already exists. It’s cheap, well-supported and has incredible usability because it’s already being used by millions of people. Yes, this is about using best-of-breed web applications and services.

At CABE we needed a website (Drupal), email marketing (Campaign Monitor), event booking (Eventbrite), surveys (SurveyMonkey), custom forms (Wufoo), file transfer (Yousendit), video (Vimeo) and analytics (Google, 4Q, CrazyEgg). The savings from using existing products rather than building your own are huge – and you deliver better services for users.

5. Design Your Design Process

Design can get very expensive because everyone loves to get involved.

My first web project went through six costly iterations because designs were sent to stakeholders without proper context. They made poor decisions because they had no information about why decisions had been taken. As soon as they were given the reasoning behind designs, their decisions improved.

Another problem is that it’s standard to ask for three different design concepts. Agencies get to bill more and stakeholders feel that they’re making big decisions, but what inevitably happens is that the starting points get merged into one horrible mess. Instead, insist on a single design route and then iterate.

Finally, it can help to leave deliberate mistakes in the text and images used in design concepts. This is because some managers always feel the need to change something in the design to justify their pay grade – and this way they get to make a change without destroying the fundamental design.

And Finally…Play Politics

This isn’t so much a tactic as a statement. In large hierarchical organisations it matters who you know and what you know about how they operate.

If you want to change anything, you have to play politics – whether it’s doing people favours, making people feel good about their work or knowing how to phrase a request in just the right way. It’s not evil, it’s not manipulative and you don’t have to be nasty. But to get things done you need to get involved.

Despite the challenges, running the CABE sites was an incredible experience. Although being made redundant by an inept coalition was less enjoyable.

Now I’m off to the private sector – how many of these issues will I find there?

I’d love to know what you think about this – you can reach me on @myddelton. I want to thank the government web people who inspired me, particuarly Steph Gray, Dave Briggs, Simon Dickson and Neil Williams. And last but never least, Andrew Travers, who showed me the way when I knew nothing…

Open UX University

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 11:59:00 +0000

You don’t have to pay tuition fees to get a UX education in London in 2011. Everything that you need to educate yourself is already out there.

I’m not downplaying the value of an academic education. The Human Computer Interaction courses at UCL and City University are amazing experiences and their students will graduate with skills that are impossible to get elsewhere.

But there are alternatives thanks to the generosity of London UX professionals. Their work provides educational resources of such good quality that many ‘real’ students are using them to supplement their existing courses.

You don’t believe me? Let me talk you through the Open UX University…

Enthusiasm creates unforgettable lectures

The best lecturers are people so excited about their subject that they simply cannot contain their enthusiasm.

London is full of these people. And they love to talk.

Jason Mesut ripping apart the interaction design of music tech at London IA. Martin Belam showing how digital communications smashed boundaries between the media and audiences at World Usability Day. Cennydd Bowles, Harry Brignull and Jonathan Kahn at Lightning UX. Bruce Lawson talking us through HTML5 at London Web and Mark O’Neill explaining the government skunkworks at UK Govcamp. Plus genuine academics – the best talk this year was Dan Lockton’s whirlwind tour of choice architecture (London IA again).

To this you can add world experts via podcast such as Karen McGrane, Stephen P Anderson, Luke Wroblewski, David Rivers and Peter Morville who contribute their thoughts on dealing with the challenges they face every day.

Passionate experts giving great talks free of charge means plenty of material to create a lecture series tailored to your specific interests.

It’s good to talk

The second staple of a university education is the group discussion. This is all about participation, an area where the UX community excels.

First, people want to be there. No one goes to UX Bookclub London to get credits or pass a semester. You go to talk about books like Gamestorming and Sketching User Experiences. So discussion flows much more than it ebbs.

Secondly, there’s a heady mix of experts, beginners and everything in between. If you’re new to Agile you can go to Agile UX and hear from people who use it all the time. Whereas in a university, the only real expert is the tutor (and possibly a self-appointed ‘expert’ who hasn’t actually done the reading).

So in many ways these discussions are even better than university seminars.

Practical work develops your skills

Of course university is more than just lectures and discussions. You have to put serious effort into team projects, presentations, essays and practical assignments. Who on earth would give up time to set this kind of work for free?

Design Jam London for one. Designers come together and work to solve a design challenge, honing their team working, practical techniques and presentation skills in the process. And it’s not only Design Jam – Global Service Jam London took place over three days and there are hackdays everywhere.

And essays? You’re reading one. It doesn’t take as long (or provoke the same dread) as 5,000 words on the causes of the 100 Years War. But blog posts help crystallise your ideas and the feedback you get – both qualitative from friends and quantitative from analytics – is amazingly useful.

You can make websites too. Whether it’s for your blog, a favourite band or your friend’s dad’s charity, building a site helps you put your learning into practice. You can even arrange a placement by taking time off to work as an intern.

The opportunities are there – it’s what you make of them.

The best careers advice

But the area in which the Open UX University really outperforms traditional universities is in careers advice. It’s just incredible.

What better way to find a job that suits you than to listen to people who are already in those jobs? Or better still, recruiting for those jobs? Learn what your portfolio should look like. Discover which skills are worth talking about and which are not. Find out what kinds of jobs are out there.

It’s never a replacement but…

None of this is to say that choosing to go to university is a bad choice. It’s never a bad choice and I loved my university education. And there are some things – like learning to appreciate design criticism as part of your process – that a specialist university course seems better placed to deliver.

But there are more opportunities now to learn your craft outside university than ever before, particularly for disciplines related to the web. It feels like we should start to recognise how powerful these really are.

Just remember – it may be free, but you still end up in debt. The difference is that you owe this debt to your community and not the government.

This post is a massive thank you to everyone who has helped educate me over the last year. Let me know what you think on @myddelton and follow @ukuxevents to keep up to date with what’s going on out there. And finally – I studied History which might (or might not) explain a lot and I’m talking about London because I know London, but I get the feeling this applies worldwide…

If you liked this post, you might also like Solve Any Problem.

My First Design Jam

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 19:10:08 +0000

Design Jam London 2 challenged 10 teams to create a mobile service that helped visitors to London feel more like locals. This is the story of Madeleine, our team’s idea for a mobile service to meet the brief.

In case you’re wondering, a Design Jam is where designers gather together, form teams and work on a design challenge. Like a hackday with no code.

This was a challenge where it paid to step back and consider the problem in the widest possible sense. Even though the strict time limits made it tempting to dive straight into features and interactions…

Research Always Pays

We started by brainstorming things that made us feel like locals in our own cities, from obvious ones like transport and orientation to more interesting ideas like knowing where the house parties were, experiencing the London rush hour and having moments of serendipity. Linda Sandvik, who flew over from Scandinavia especially, chipped in with some amazing real-life observations and got us on the right track.

User research (SurveyMonkey!) supported our initial ideas and added plenty more. It turned out that people strongly associated feeling local with knowing where to eat, getting around easily and being aware of ‘hidden gems’.

But most interesting was that 40% of users mentioned “people I know” as being the most important factor in feeling local. And most surprising, all respondents were in favour of meeting up with tourists that shared their interests, provided that they knew them in some way beforehand.

Value Propositions Rule

The research showed that it’s impossible to ‘feel local’ if you never hang out with residents of the city you’re visiting. So our value proposition was easy:

Madeleine is the only city guide created entirely by your local London contacts.

Why write a value proposition? Because when you have limited time you desperately need a way to decide whether ideas stay in or get jettisoned.

And we jettisoned a lot.

By lunch, we narrowed Madeleine down to a service that lets tourists use their existing contacts and personal interests to make connections with London locals to call upon during their trip. It felt like a great start.

It’s Fatal To Fixate On Details

After lunch we got bogged down in details. How would tourists connect with locals? Would locals be overwhelmed by meeting too many tourists? Could we use Facebook and Twitter? Gowalla and Foursquare? What about serendipitous moments? Should it be HTML5 or native?

The mentors saved us. Aral Balkan pointed out that it sounded like a great web service, but that we should focus on the mobile part (RTFM basically). And Tim Brooke stopped us disappearing down a known-contact-only rabbit hole.

This changed everything.

We captured assumptions about the data that the web service would supply – a group of local contacts and a list of their favourite locations – and got on with the mobile application design. With about 45 minutes left.

Crossing Disciplines Gets Results

We had been warned to carefully consider the context in which the mobile app would be used. I was out of my depth here, but luckily our team ran deep.

Richard Dron had a strong background in ergonomics and started us thinking about scenarios and storyboards. He led us to this sequence:

After a day’s sightseeing, the tourist opens Madeleine to find a place recommended by his local contacts in which to spend the evening.
Finding that the recommendee shares his interest in music, the tourist invites that local contact along using Madeleine.
Although that local contact turns out to be unavailable, he uses Madeleine to invite his friends along that share similar interests as the tourist.

This neatly covered the core functionality of our mobile service. At which point Diane Faidy, an interaction designer from OrangeLabs, sketched the whole thing in about 15 minutes! Including some beautiful work showing the tourist and locals in context alongside the mobile screens they were using.

This is exactly what I hoped to get from Design Jam. Serious learning from people that know much more than me.

Final Thoughts on Design Jam

We did our final presentation using a Visualiser, which lets you show paper sketches on the digital projector. Like an OHP on steroids, it removes all barriers between sketching and presentation. Incredible.

Other teams had great ideas and presented them brilliantly. My favourite warned you in a Ray Winstone-ish voice that you were entering a dangerous area. With a video. And serious props go to the teams that actually mocked up their applications on paper and in Flowella.

Design Jam London 2 was a fascinating learning experience. I would have loved more criticism from the mentors, especially on final presentations, but that takes nothing away from what was a wonderful way to spend a Saturday.

I’d love to hear what you think about this on @myddelton. Big hat tips to Leisa Reichelt and Gamestorming for the stuff about value propositions – I’m using them in everything I do these days. And, of course, massive thanks to the organisers of Design Jam London and the amazing Team Madeleine.

The Alternative Vote System Explained

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 12:07:00 +0000

Few people outside politics, myself included, understand the Alternative Vote system. Yet on 5 May we, the people of the UK, will decide whether to adopt it in our first national referendum since 1975.

I researched how it works. It took me ages. To save you the same pain, here is the simplest explanation that I could come up with.

The Simplest Example Possible

The Most Familiar Real World Example

So What Changes?

The basic electoral system will not change - there will still be constituencies and each constituency will still elect a single MP.

What will change is the process. Instead of voting for your favourite candidate with an X, you will rank the candidates by preference (you can choose to leave some candidates out if you want to). And instead of the candidate with the most votes winning, the winning candidate must get more than 50% of votes. Which can lead to several rounds.

That’s the Alternative Vote system. Now you just have to decide if you like it…

I’d love to hear what you think about this on @myddelton. You can read more about the Alternative Vote system at the Electoral Reform Society.

Improve Your Web Writing

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 08:30:00 +0000

The quickest way to improve your web writing is to focus on structure – not style, language or grammar. Clear structure is a sign of clear thinking.

People think that if you can’t “write”, you can’t write. But writing’s real value is in channelling your ideas into a single, coherent message. Good writing is mostly about structuring your thoughts, and it’s easier than you think.

This is a guide to a simple structure for writing content pages. It’s not for everyone, but if you’re ever asked to write a web page it might just be useful.

The Headline Says It All

The headline should tell the reader what they’re about to read. That’s it.

It has the biggest text on the page, so it’s your biggest chance to hook a reader. Say clearly what you’re writing about – if this doesn’t sound compelling, maybe it’s not worth writing about. Remember that it will get used as link text from other sites, especially Facebook and Twitter, so make sure that users get what they are expecting from these links. Otherwise they’ll leave.

Don’t be too clever. Avoid jargon. And recognise that if your headline is saying two different things, you should probably write two different pages.

Open With The Conclusion

Your opening paragraph should summarise the whole text. In 25-ish words. Don’t set the scene. Don’t write a whimsical introduction. Above all, don’t start with the start. Instead, tell your reader what the page is about and let them judge whether they’re interested (readers do this anyway, so help them out).

Think of the headline and opening paragraph as an inseparable couple walking arm in arm across the web – alone on your page, with their friends in your listing pages and with their enemies in the Google search results. Give them the love they need to survive in all contexts.

Subheadings Are The New Body Text

People read subheadings first. Sometimes that’s all they read, so use them to tell your story too. Ginny Redish put me up on the four ways to write them:

Statements – ‘Subheadings Are The New Body Text’
The clearest, most useful type of subheading. They are difficult to write, but it gets easier. If you struggle then maybe your ideas are not yet clear enough.
Instructions – ‘Create Subheadings That Tell A Story’
Great for writing instructions or talking someone through a process. Begin with the verb, either imperative (‘create’) or gerund (‘creating’) and don’t mix.
Questions – ‘How Many Ways Can I Write Subheadings?’
This puts you in the user’s shoes and is a fantastic way to get started (list and answer all possible questions). But you risk answering things that no one asks.
Nouns – ‘Subheadings’
Simple nouns work well as short, descriptive labels for navigation – but they’re not great for subheadings as they carry no extra information. Avoid.

Micro Structures Matter Too

Edward Tufte talks about using macro and micro to your advantage in information design. This applies to writing too. Your individual paragraphs (micro) should be structured just as carefully as your overall page (macro).

Start every paragraph with its main idea. People skim the starts of paragraphs like they scan subheadings. Anticipating this behaviour will help your readers and get your message across.

Use single sentence paragraphs to add emphasis.

Break lists of items into lists. But be careful. Lists stop working when there are too many on a page and they break if you put too many items inside them. The way to get the balance right is to write out your text and read it back (critically).

Formatting Is Not Acceptable

Lazy writers use bold and italic to emphasise their key points. Great writers use placement (as in starting a paragraph with its main idea), sequence (like putting the best ideas high on the page) and grouping (using lists and subheadings).

Avoid bold and italic. Try using your text flow and structure to provide the emphasis you need. Of all the techniques here, this is the one that can improve your writing most in the shortest space of time.

Links Go At The End

Just because you can link to any page on the web doesn’t mean you should.

Web writing is a hand-crafted experience. You are taking your reader on a journey through your text – whether they’re reading every word, skimming paragraphs or scanning subheadings. Interrupting that experience with links to other sites is a great way to undo all your hard work.

Place your links at the end of your page. Make it clear why they are worth following. Take the time to really think about what you include.

Break All The Rules

These techniques are not hard and fast rules. There are great writers who use clever headlines, whimsical openings, nonexistent subheadings and heavily linked text. And there is terrible writing that follows all of the above guidelines.

But sometimes it helps to learn a simple structure first. It certainly helped me.

I’d love to hear what you think. Have you got anything to add? Let me know on @myddelton. And if you want to improve your writing for the web, the best thing you can do is to read Letting Go Of The Words by Ginny Redish.

Solve Any Problem

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 08:30:00 +0000

The most useful thing I learned last month was “a technique to solve any problem”. Seriously.

It’s called the KJ Method and it came to me via Leisa Reichelt, but it dates to the late 1960s and a man named Jiro Kawakita. It’s also called an “affinity diagram”, but I used this term at work and was told off for using technical terminology when plain English would do. Fair enough.

The KJ Method

I’ve done two workshops with Leisa recently, Hands-on UX and Strategic UX. Featuring strongly in both was a method that she convinced me could be used to solve (almost) any problem. The KJ Method.

Chances are you’ve already used the KJ Method or one of its many subtle variations. It’s a group activity that works like this:

Brainstorm lots of ideas for your problem (individually)
Sort these ideas into groups and label them (collectively)
Rank them in any way that makes sense
Make a decision based on what you’ve done
Clearly articulate what you’re going to do next.

If that doesn’t sound familiar, imagine writing ideas on post-its, grouping them, naming them and then prioritising. That’s the KJ Method as most of us know it.

Creating A Business Case

But does it really work for any problem? I’m ashamed to say that I tested it on a friend. When she had a work crisis. Yep, UX designers need empathy…

She runs a project and her budget is being cut by 50%, so when she had 24 hours to write a business case, I made her brainstorm ideas for cuts. She hated the ambiguity. “I don’t have time. Where is this going? Why are we doing it?”.

But as the walls filled up with post-its, we discussed her ideas and started grouping them. Relationships between ideas formed – if one thing is cut by 50%, you need less of this other thing. We talked about how individual cuts would affect her project, which helped to prioritise the cuts into 3 scenarios. This led to a final decision, and suddenly all that was left was to write up the chosen scenario into a business case.

She turned to me. “But how did you know to do that? How did you know that it would work?” The truth is that I had no idea it would work. But after being told twice in a week that this technique could solve any problem, I reached for it in a time of crisis. And it did work…

Simple and Complex

Of course, this isn’t really going to solve any problem. But it works for more than you might expect. After all, I thought it was only for category-and-label issues, but I was wrong.

The power of the KJ Method is in its similarity to the concept of emergence, where “complex patterns arise from many relatively simple interactions”. In the work that we do you need simple interactions to make it easy for people to engage with problems. But you also need complex patterns to emerge, because most problems are anything but simple. The KJ Method combines these two needs into a single, repeatable system.

Next time you’re stuck, try it out.

I’d love to hear what you think. What other problems have you solved with this? Has it ever failed you? Let me know on @myddelton. And check out Jared Spool’s introduction to the KJ method for a fuller description.