We’re a bit light on this week, we must be busy :)

These are your users, read and be horrified

(contributed by Melissa)

Over on UX Magazine, Jonathan Anderson tells the story of the “RWW Facebook login” debacle…

ReadWriteWeb recently published an article titled Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login. Being an interesting, timely article, it rose to the top of Google searches for “Facebook login.” Then: chaos and confusion. Lots and lots of the people who use Google instead of their browser’s address bar to access sites began confusing the ReadWriteWeb link with a link to Facebook itself, and began posting angry comments wondering why Facebook had been redesigned and asking when they’d be allowed to log in again.

…and then makes the link to the vox-pops video showing “users” don’t really know what browsers or search engines are, nor the difference between them. It’s like Funniest Home Videos for UX professionals! (Part of me thinks UX vox-pops are genius, the rest of me recognises they are cruel and embarrassing. Watch the video and enjoy lulz.)

Capturing storytelling on video (like Clint Eastwood!)

(contributed by Pat)

Shawn Callahan from Anecdote shares some tips for capturing stories on video:

A few nights ago I watch Changeling starring Angelina Jolie. It’s directed by Clint Eastwood (has he ever directed a dud movie?) and I was fascinated by a short documentary we found in the DVD extras where Clint explained why he never calls out ‘Action’ when directing a scene. As an actor Clint found a director’s call to ‘Action’ off putting. He was immediately reminded that he was an actor, acting and his performance suffered. Instead Clint calmly and quietly says things like, “OK, in your own time …” or “when you are ready …”

Simple but useful tips from a guy who knows a lot about getting stories out of people. It’s an increasingly popular method of getting under the skin of an issue (the storytelling…or technically story listening) but getting candid video of the story is also being used more and more. It’s a great form or emotive/persuasive communication and I’d really like to start producing more little video snippets to share with our internal clients.

How to create an experience that sells – and do you want that?

(contributed by Pat)

A great piece from Mark Hurst on the conundrum we all face: who should we be designing experiences for? He opens with the question:

Which would you rather do…

• create a experience that, even if you don’t particularly care for it yourself, becomes wildly popular and puts your name on the map?
• …or… create an experience you firmly believe in, no matter how popular (or not) it becomes?

And the difficulties in answering that question…

Because here’s the thing: the larger culture can’t decide which to value. Sometimes a “good experience” is the thing that makes a boatload of money, because it serves some consumer desire, no matter the intrinsic value or integrity – “the customer is always right.” And if enough people buy it, it makes for good copy.

On the other hand, sometimes the “good experience” is the thing that is most authentic, and often popular to a small minority. The scrappy restaurant with cuisine for the foodie palate, the indie film refusing to dumb down its plot or characters, the neighborhood or book or community “keeping it real” – it’s practically a cliche, given how obsessed the culture is sometimes with finding the real or authentic thing.

Mark goes on to discuss how this choice can affect how commercially successful the resulting experience might be, but just this conundrum is something that is a real issue within the UX field. We say we should always listen to the customer, but we know that often the best results are achieved through dogged determination and passion for something the designer/creator/owner believes in. Which way would you go?

Hunters and Farmers

(contributed by Pat)

I really liked this post by Seth Godin on the topic of realising there are different skills for different roles and that some people may have one skill-set or the other. And that’s OK.

Clearly, farming is a very different activity from hunting. Farmers spend time sweating the details, worrying about the weather, making smart choices about seeds and breeding and working hard to avoid a bad crop. Hunters, on the other hand, have long periods of distracted noticing interrupted by brief moments of frenzied panic.

It’s not crazy to imagine that some people are better at one activity than another. There might even be a gulf between people who are good at each of the two skills.

Seth applies this model to other situations, such as students in a classroom, and of course marketing. And I think it’s very relevant to UX: horses for courses, different strokes for different folks, know thy audience yadda yadda.

It really makes me think the way in which a lot of our society is structured, or governed, is often a “one size fits all” or “lowest common denominator” or “majority rules” arrangement. To think that someone’s potential is being wasted simply because of the way in which the challenge, environment, opportunity or system is framed, is quite sad.

The example I keep thinking of is the (all too common) story of a dyslexic child, in a time gone by where people didn’t understand such conditions, brought up to feel as though they are stupid, but they go on to achieve brilliant things in their life; if only their condition was recognised, understood and appropriately catered for (treated like “hunters” instead of “farmers”), would they have achieved even more brilliant things?

Why do users share?

(contributed by Melissa)

In his article titled Will You Be E-Mailing This Column? It’s Awesome, John Tierney asks what sort of articles do users share and what motivates them?

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, checking it every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page.

You can also check out this link within the post to a blog which asks readers to comment on why they comment: tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com

Sadly, we skipped a week last week (did you miss us?). But now we’re back.

Domino’s Pizza: Be Inspired By Your Harshest Critics

(contributed by Angus)

Whitney Hess has a great post about a Domino’s video campaign promoting a new pizza they apparently created in response to user feedback. Includes video excerpts from the campaign. While it’s easy to be cynical I agree with her the customer reactions in the video seem authentic and demonstrate the benefits activities like design research and user testing can give an organisation if they take on board and act upon what is discovered.

While the cynic in me sees their Pizza Turnaround “documentary” for what it is — a marketing campaign — there are still many customer experience lessons to learn from their story.

Designing for experiences across channels

(contributed by Angus)

Brandon Schauer has created a single page diagram on designing multi-channel user experiences. Lot’s of new to me terminology which I think will prove useful.

Organizations are channel-bound. Customers aren’t.

This outlines components and practices necessary to deliver great customer experiences across more than a single channel.

Bringing User Centered Design to the Agile Environment

(contributed by Angus)

Anthony Colfelt on how User Centered Design and Agile processes can be reconciled. Good overview of the positives and negatives of the two processes and some advice on how to get the best qualities from both processes by adopting “Agile UCD”

Remember, Agile does not mandate how to define concepts or overall design direction, but it is a great way to execute on solid design research and well laid plans. UCD needs to be flexible enough to respond to the reality on the ground when the implementation team encounters issues that mandate a different design solution. Document only what is needed to get the message across and co-locate if at all possible, because cross-disciplinary collaboration and face to face communication are vital. Working a sprint ahead of the development team is helpful in allowing the design team enough time to test and iterate. If these rules of engagement are followed, the two approaches can work very well together.

Forgotten passwords an overlooked problem for subscription based revenue models?

(contributed by Angus)

In a long, colourful rant titled “Subscriptions are the New BLACK” about business models for startups, Dave McClure touches upon a user experience issue that apparently caused PayPal a lot of problems:

PayPal was one of the classic stories of viral growth, however in this instance we also experienced viral growth in customer service: at one point more than 2 in 3 employees worked in customer service. And i’m guessing somewhere between 10-20% of first-time customers never used the service again, primarily because they forgot their password.

He suggests that this misleadingly small problem will cause subscription/digital product based businesses problems & that the only way around it is to create services that people need/want to use frequently

… as we transition to a Startup Ecosystem driven by direct payment & subscription business models, I want to make it clear how IMPORTANT it is to make sure users don’t forget their passwords. If they forget their password, and/or can’t recover it, then guess what MoFo — YOU DON’T GET PAID.

Which means you don’t get Laid, you don’t get Acquired, and you sure as friggin’ hell don’t get to Go IPO.

So listen up & i’ll share a little secret with you — there is one very simple way to avoid forgotten passwords. Basically, it’s this:

Make a Frequent-Use Product.

But perhaps authentication services like Facebook Connect will help alleviate the problem this time round.