The idea of encapsulating multiple different views of the same process is captured quite well in this series of articles on “swimlane” deliverables produced by Yvonne Shek from nForm. The swimlane provides parallel views of:

• a high-level user story (usually as a comic or photo storyboard)
• a user-experience process flow
• the relevant business processes
• the tools and systems involved in solving the user’s needs
• feature and use cases references that tie back to technical documentation

Could this be an interesting variation on some of the more text heavy functional specification / requirement documents we often see? I also love seeing the user story at the top of the diagram too.

For more info see this “more info on swimlanes” post.

-via Functioning Form

I’m excited about an initiative being developed by Steve Baty, to hold a regular book club focussed on books related to user experience. As Steve says:

Such a meeting would provide experienced folks with a chance to revisit some classics in a critical light; as well as getting an incentive to read some more current materials. And for less experienced folks it would provide them with a forum to ask those ‘I don’t get it’ questions that they might otherwise never understand.

This is a great idea, and I think this will prompt me to read more books, which can’t be a bad thing.

If you want more information on the Sydney UX book club, or any of the others that are springing up around the globe, check out uxbookclub.org which will act as a hub for all the different chapters (no pun intended).

The results of a three-year Digital Youth project have been released by the University of California. It seems like an impressive ethnographical study.

Here is an extract from the summary report (PDF 83kB):

Over three years, University of California, Irvine researcher and her research team interviewed over 800 youth and young adults and conducted over 5000 hours of online observations as part of the most extensive U.S. study of youth media use to date.

They found that social network sites, online games, video-sharing sites, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones are now fixtures of youth culture. The research finds today’s youth may be coming of age and struggling for autonomy and identity amid new worlds for communication, friendship, play, and self-expression.

Many adults worry that children are wasting time online, texting, or playing video games. The researchers explain why youth find these activities compelling and important. The digital world is creating new opportunities for youth to grapple with social norms, explore interests, develop technical skills, and experiment with new forms of self-expression. These activities have captured teens’ attention because they provide avenues for extending social worlds, self-directed learning, and independence.

I don’t think the findings are hugely surprising, but they are very interesting and do support other research that has surfaced in recent years with regard to how “gen Y” use online media to extend friendships and interests and engage in peer-based, self-directed learning online.

There is some great content on the project website, but there could be better use of multimedia in terms of communicating the findings (there is some video on the McArthur Foundation website though).

[Thanks to Christo who first posted this to the Antrodesign mailing list]

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/agile-methods.html

I found this article interesting as it spells out problems and solutions for combining UCD and agile project method - that I have had difficulty pinpointing during my project work. I wish my project team would read and understand this stuff.

This article made me realise that as an EA, I need to become skilled in, and get good at conducting fast and quick user tests. Testing could be part of my day-to-day activity, rather than needing it to be a separate task on the project timeline. Requesting project time for user testing will often be rejected, because people are worried it takes too much time.

Nielsen refers to a Tivo case study, where they ran weekly tests, but doesnt give too much detail on how. Nielsen recommends paper prototypes, but I dont think it takes much to whip up some wireframes - then at least they can be sent through to remote testers. The challenges are defining what to test and how to recruit particpants quickly and for free? Participants from our USiT team is a start….?

As for defining what to test, from my experience recently on 3 agile projects, the requirements were so undefined, and evolving, that I would have thought it would be difficult to nail down something to test. Then I read this advice:

“Keep a sense of humor and a good attitude. Have a flexible staff that’s willing to roll with the pace and unknown nature of the work. “You don’t know what you’re going to test next,” says Torres. “It was really taxing on researchers. At times, I didn’t know what we were testing until the night before, and I had to build a prototype and be ready to moderate the next day.”

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/weekly-usability-tests.html

So perhaps its not them, its me!?

On Friday I facilitated a discussion session at Enhancing Online User Experiences on the topic of “Documenting for Interactive Websites”.

As promised I have put down my thoughts from the session. The slides I presented are shown below:

(View SlideShare presentation or check out the buzz on Twitter)

These might be a tad generalised, but here are some rough notes I took immediately after the session:

• The first point of discussion was around ’scope creep’. We discussed the use of the MoSCoW (Must, Should, Could, Would) method of requirements gathering and getting developer estimates based on ’story cards’. But the consensus seemed to be that scope creep is more a project management issue than a documentation issue, and that it’s taken care of early in the project during requirements gathering.
• I was glad to hear that those using MoSCoW weren’t just creating huge requirements specifications documents, but rather using lightweight methods to capture the output of “butcher’s paper sessions” and workshops, rather than “death by Word”. Similarly, workshops are being used to output actionable user stories.
• In terms of process, most of the audience seemed to be writing a brief and giving that to an agency to do creative “concepts” (or “mocks” or “flats”) then moving into production.
• In terms of the forms of documentation used, most of the audience said they do wireframes and sitemaps, few are doing prototyping (paper or otherwise).

• One of the most interesting points of discussion was around the level of fidelity required for design documentation. If it’s sketchy and doesn’t look finished (or right) then clients and stakeholders won’t accept it. They’re “very visual”. But at the same time, if it’s more finished or realistic looking, you run the risk of them thinking it’s the real thing, and it’s probably not going to be right.
• I think that sketching can help with this, because it’s difficult to mistake a sketch for the finished product. But someone commented that that would require the reader (or the documentation) to use some imagination, which can be tricky. Perhaps a big factor here is the level of maturity of the organisation in terms of web design?
• Another factor in determining what documentation is used is the available skills and resources. For example, Powerpoint is used for prototyping and wireframes because it’s familiar and available, but not well suited to either job (you have to “grapple with Powerpoint”). Axure too hard to learn, only two had tried. Similarly need skills to use Dreamweaver etc for prototyping.
• I thought it was interesting that some people didn’t want to be involved in group sketching or participatory design sessions. They’re hiring consultants or specialists to come up with “concepts” and designs, so they don’t want to restrict or narrow them too much. I had suggested such sketching sessions might be a way of ensuring requirements are being included early on, and getting buy-in from stakeholders.
• The choice of documentation depends not only on your skills but on those of the reader. For example, using Flash to convey user personas (as had been mentioned in a previous session) won’t work if people don’t have Flash player and don’t have admin rights to install it.
• In terms of conclusions, some of the things I took away from the session were:
  1. Multiple types of documentation is usually the be best
  2. One size doesn’t fit all, knowing your audience (for the doco) is key

The audience seemed to be predominantly business and marketing folks, based on some questions I asked but also from various comments throughout the day. Only one or two people said they were designers, a few more for ‘UX geeks’ (mostly people presenting at the conference) and none for developers. This might explain the fact that there wasn’t a lot of talk about design documentation, and a greater focus on requirements gathering and stakeholder communication.

Furthermore, only a few (ie 4) said they were currently developing web 2.0 style websites or Rich Interactive Applications (RIA). So again, this topic probably wasn’t as suitable for this audience as it could have been. Not that their focus or concerns are not valid, but what I headed into the session to discuss would probably have been more suited to UX and design practitioners.

Special thanks to Werner Puchert for letting me refer to his low-fi doco case study, which contains some excellent examples. Similarly, thanks also to Chris Khalil for letting me discuss the work he did on redesigning the News.com.au home page.

Please do leave a comment below, whether or not you were at the conference.

Diagram from "Web Analytic an hour a day" by Avinash Kaushik

I’ve not made it past the first chapter yet of “Web Analytics an hour a day” yet as I don’t seem to be able to grab even an hour - this post has been a “draft” for two weeks now! But I was surprised by this diagram and one of the key points of the first chapter subtiltled “What web analytics should be” and thought it worth relaying to my fellow “Experience Architects”

I bought the book to better understand web analytics, and learn to speak their language, as I’d grown frustrated - these stats should be of immense value to understanding user bahaviour yet I don’t always seem to be able to get the value I would expect from my expeditions into our analytics packages. So imagine my surprise when he spends much of this first chapter explaining user research and testing techniques for understanding the user experience.

He describes a framework called Trinity
(pictured in the above diagram), proposing three forms of analysis that support each other to “generate actionable insights and metrics“: “Behaviour analysis” (metrics, click density etc.), “Outcome analysis” (how well the website is doing at meeting the goals of it’s existence) & “Experience analysis” (why are users doing what they’re doing). For this last one Avinash suggests techniques we are familiar with from UCD like usability testing, heuristic evaluation, multivariate testing, surveys etc.

So while I’ve turned to this book to learn to understand what user’s are doing it reccomends right back that without continuing user research methods to understand why - the web analytics I crave will not provide the actionable insights that actually make the stats valuable. Avinash even picks experience as his favourite form of analysis:

“It’s hard to choose a favourite among your children, but for me experience is without question the favourite. The reason is quite simple: experience analysis allows you to get into the heads of your customers and gain insight or an a-ha about why they do the things they do”

The author Avinash Kaushik’s weblog Occam’s Razor has some fantastically in depth posts on all things web analytics

The Google analytics interface has recently had a change in the way it does tabular data. There’s an option that’s been there for a while to determine how many rows to show:

Show rows in Google analytics

What confuses me is that in the most recent update they’ve added header rows but haven’t changed the way they count rows. In the above example when I select “5″ for show rows, it displays three header rows and two of the associated rows below them.

Perhaps they just haven’t gotten around to updating it yet but surely when I ask for five rows I really mean five… not two-and-a-bit.

Data Designed for Decisions (DD4D) looks quite interesting, in that data visualisation can be so useful in the field of user experience architecture. It’s being billed with the taglines “Enhancing social, economic and environmental progress” and “Statistics meets information design meets the user”…

A co-operation between the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the International Institute for Information Design (IIID).

The goal is to provide a platform for exchanging different views, methods and approaches to communicating, visualising and understanding data.

The conference is being held 18-20 June 2009 in Paris. You can read the DD4D blog to keep an eye on what’s happening.

It’s not surprising there’s been a lot of attention on news websites lately with the US election. Smashing Magazine has just published  Newspaper Website Design: Trends And Examples. Although the article tracks some obvious trends disappointingly it doesn’t discuss personalisation and the likes of news.com.au and the BBC online.

Elsewhere there’s been some interesting aggregation of newspaper front pages during the US election:

• Obama grabs headlines
• Andy Clarke’s Post election day news

After more than six months of careful planning the redesign of The Australian Business website went live on the 18^th October.

The new business site design was conceived through a comprehensive understanding of user needs for financial information. Contextual enquiry during the research phase lead by Dennis Nordstrom identified a clear user need for the delivery of a wide breadth and depth of world financial information in an Australian context.

Creating the site structure during the collaborative design session

In content terms the site needed to integrate the full business editorial resources of the national newspaper and in a News Corporation first be underpinned by contextual content/market data from other global properties such as The Wall Street Journal, The Times, Dow Jones and MarketWatch.

Therefore the mission from a user experience perspective was to successfully convey the huge volume of financial information available in a fashion that did not overwhelm or confuse.

Collaborative design sketch by Dennis Nordstrom & Alun Machin

The final product design concept was based around a simple contextual three column based solution for the vast majority of site sections. Editorial content is primary displayed in the left column, comparative market data/tools are placed in the centre column and supporting analysis, opinion and multimedia in the right hand column.

The final result

The site also introduces a whole new raft of features including:

• A snapshot of the key markets, currencies and commodities around the world at the top of every site page
• New areas focusing on World Business News, Financial Markets, Industry Sectors, Mining & Energy, Media, Opinion, Wealth and Executive Lifestyle
• Expanded editorial coverage and contextual market data for industry sectors such as Property and Aviation
• Interactive company charting showing key events and trading data such as dividend payments, trading volume underpinned with contextual news reports
• Comprehensive background information on all ASX-listed Australian companies plus data on stocks, stock market indices, currencies and commodities
• Suggested company name functionality when searching for stock quote information
• Display of previously searched company stock quotes
• ‘Story behind the story’ in-depth coverage on major issues such as the current global financial crisis

For further information on the new website a comprehensive guide is available to view in PDF format.

If you have any feedback (both positive and negative) or questions concerning the new site please leave a comment.