Webnographers

There’s some great stuff to be found over on webnographers.org for anyone interested in virtual ethnography. Here’s their blurb…

Cyberanthropology is but a fetal field, far from defined. This website was developed in the interest of providing a central hub for those interested in ethnography of the internet. Created by and for webnographers, its success in contingent on your participation.

Ethnography is not constrained solely to anthropologists, and indeed the barriers that divide the various social sciences are at once arbitrary and collapsible. Any individual interested in the complex social, cultural, and psychological facets of humans relating with and through the internet is encouraged to join in this nascent community. Webnographers unite!

This is a very interesting area of research, and an area in which our team is expanding with each and every project.
(forwarded by Pat)

The 10 dos and don’ts of website development (that every CEO should know)

Over on the FatDUX blog, Eric Reiss shares his top 10 list for management:

[...] the web has become more important than ever as a means of communicating with customers/clients/membership. But I have yet to meet a CEO who likes website development. It makes business leaders uncomfortable. The web experts speak in a cryptic language – CMS, KM, XML, CSS. The site seems to take forever to build, costs more than expected, and invariably provides less value than the organization had hoped.

No one likes signing a big check without some idea as to what they’re getting. So if you’re a business leader, here are a few basic, non-technical tips that will significantly increase your chances for online success. And they let you do what you do best – lead.

There are some good points in there, and the central point of reminding business leaders to not get caught up in the detail, but rather to be leaders is excellent. These tips were obviously learned and refined over many, many client engagements!
(forwarded by Pat)

Ridiculous User Interfaces In Film

Over on Gizmodo, John Herrman discusses Ridiculous User Interfaces In Film, and the Man Who Designs Them…

Designing a fake dashboard for an imagined supercomputer or a hovering control panel for a worldwide surveillance system is a different process than creating a genuinely usable UI. Your goal is to imply things: that a machine is powerful; that a villain is formidable; that the software is intuitive, but that the breadth of its powers borders on unknowable. At no point does real-world usability factor in, and nor should it—this is pure fantasy, for an audience raised on Start Buttons, desktop icons and tree menus

He forgets to mention the “Unix system” from Jurassic Park, possibly the most ridiculous of all of these movie UIs :)
(forwarded by Angus)

Dimensions of design/Against ahistoricity

Adam Greenfield talks about looking beyond the obvious sources of insight and inspiration, including those who have come before us…

Let’s face it: brighter and more sensitive people than us have been thinking about issues like public versus private realms, or which elements of a system are hard to reconfigure and which more open to user specification, for many hundreds of years. Medieval Islamic urbanism, for example, had some notions about how to demarcate transitional spaces between public and fully private that might still usefully inform the design of digital applications and services. By contrast, the level of sophistication with which those of us engaged in such design generally handle these issues is risible (and here I’m pointing a finger at just about the entire UX “community” and the technology industry that supports it).

Even if you don’t like Adam’s writing style, this is a thought provoking piece. Especially interesting was the introductory quote from the book Responsive Environments: A Manual for Designers which outlines how design can actually make people do things – as suggested by Jon Kolko and argued against in the recent Sydney UX book club.
(forwarded by Angus)

Walt Disney’s Creative Organization Chart

Delphine Hirasuna writes about the typically unique way in which Disney went about things, in this case the humble org chart…

The Disney org chart, on the other hand, is based on process, from the story idea through direction to the final release of the film. All of the staff positions are in the service of supporting this work flow. Perhaps the question now is what should the org chart of the future look like, given the global workforce, telecommuting personnel, virtual employees, outsourced jobs and contract workers who sometimes outnumber salaried staff? In an idea-based, rather than a manufacturing-based, economy, how should a business organize itself?

(forwarded by Angus)

Content Strategist as Digital Curator

On A List Apart, Erin Scime examines the role of curator in digital media…

When a site launches, your audience arrives to learn more about what you know most about. It’s critical to create a content experience with purpose, that is consistent and contextual. This helps to assert your brand’s authority, establishes relationships with your audience, and secures a return visit based on your content’s value. The content strategist-as-curator is the one who makes this happen. How?

(forwarded by Angus)

Landline phone numbers in electronic forms

Jess Enders shares the results of her research on how to best format phone numbers…

The research findings: one long string is the clear winner. Like the mobile phone numbers, one long string of digits—including area code—was the most common method of data entry: out of 640 landline phone numbers provided by interested research participants, 39% were entered as one long string of 10 digits (i.e. no spaces and no chunking).

(forwarded by Angus)

4 Out of 5 Viewers Leave If a Stream Buffers Once

Janko Roettgers reveals some interesting video-related user behaviour…

More than 81 percent of all online video viewers click away if they encounter a clip rebuffering, according to a new study by Tubemogul. The Emeryville-based video distribution and analytics startup took a close look at 192 million video streams over the course of 14 days to figure out how much rebuffers matter. The result: 6.81 percent of all streams rebuffer at some point, and around 2.5 percent rebuffer twice.

(forwarded by Angus)

How UCD and Agile can live together

David Farkas sets out a framework in which UCD and Agile can work together:

Diagrams are pretty, Gantt charts set expectations, but reality is far from perfect. At the end of the day, a project manager must own the project and there must be some sense of reporting. Depending on the project manager’s background and personal goals there will tend to be a focus towards the needs of UCD or Agile… Finally, friction exists from misaligned expectations from UCD practitioners forcing their methods too late in the game or agile practitioners trying to wean out hard requirements before purpose is fully understood.

(forwarded by Sophie)

Huffington Post wants to add paid tweets to its articles. Will advertisers bite?

(or, an alternate headline offered by one commenter, “HuffPo Sells Remaining Fraction of Soul for Ongoing Revenue Stream”?)

In Advertising Age, Nat Ives reports…

The Huffington Post has started offering marketers the ability to inject their own paid comments among reader comments and place paid Tweets among the live Twitter feeds the site assembles around news subjects and events.

Marketers haven’t bought in yet, but they seem likely to be intrigued. The biggest question is whether marketers and the Huffington Post can execute the program without marring visitors’ experience reading and interacting with the site.

(forwarded by Sophie)

Should journos have their Twitter profiles taken from them if they change job?

And, on the subject of journalists tweeting, Mumbrella asks whether journalists should have their Twitter profiles taken from them if they change jobs:

There’s an argument both ways. You could view it in the same way as when a reporter changes newspaper, they’ll take their contacts book with them. I’ve now got business cards and contacts books stretching back 20 years. I’m not sure what use the private phone number for Farnborough ambulance station in the UK would be for me now, but I’ve still got it somewhere.

(forwarded by Sophie)

I was attempting to catch up on my overflowing Google Reader account recently and I came across this post entitled How Not To Sort By Average Rating by Evan Miller. He starts by describing several simplistic ways in which web designers approach ranking, and how they are far from adequate. He then offers a superior method, the essence of which is:

Score = Lower bound of Wilson score confidence interval for a Bernoulli parameter … We need to balance the proportion of positive ratings with the uncertainty of a small number of observations. Fortunately, the math for this was worked out in 1927 by Edwin B. Wilson. What we want to ask is: Given the ratings I have, there is a 95% chance that the “real” fraction of positive ratings is at least what? Wilson gives the answer.

This is a nice little tip for something that we are including in user interfaces more and more these days; ranking content based on the ratings/scores given by users. Anyone who has designed user ratings into a website will know that it can be easily thrown out of whack by one or two odd ratings.

As one of Evan’s examples illustrates, you might find an item with 2 positive ratings and 0 negative ratings appearing above another item with 100 positive ratings and 1 negative rating. This isn’t fulfilling the spirit of user ratings, which is to show what the audience thought was better (or more valuable) overall.

I freely admit I don’t have the knowledge of mathematics and statistics to full understand the recommended algorithm. But that’s the beauty of it, you don’t have to, you just let the code do it’s thing and you will have well ranked content.

[via Anu Gupta]

New book: Digital Experience Design: Ideas, Industries, Interaction

Way over a year ago I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in a project initiated by my friend and former colleague Dr Linda Leung from the Institute for Interactive Multimedia, University of Technology, Sydney. Linda is the a Senior Lecturer, course coordinator and one of the founders of the Masters of Interactive Multimedia offered by the Institute and I used to teach with her in the subject Digital Information and Interaction Design. The subject

encourages students to critically engage with interdisciplinary approaches to information and interaction design

and to apply their own interpretation of these theories

to real-world design project in which students work with a client, with advice and input from industry professionals.

Typically the real world project was developed for iTV and that in itself required students to translate the principles of web design and information architecture to the development of interactive television (iTV) interfaces.

I was one of those industry professionals involved with teaching the subject (during the time I was also working at Information Architect for the Institute). One of the challenges Linda identified when teaching aspiring experience designers is (in her own words)…

the awkward rise of a discourse and discipline finding its feet and which still needs to grow with the support from its older cousins. Indeed, the necessity of turning to other design disciplines is acknowledged by Shedroff (2001:2 in Leung, 2008): simultaneously having no history (since it is a discipline only recently defined), and the longest history (since it is the culmination of many ancient disciplines), Experience Design has become newly recognised and named.’

So that is where I came in. I was one of ten industry professionals working in digital media who came from backgrounds diverse as education, feminism, fashion design, architecture, cultural theory, film-making who had moved into experience design. Linda recognised that these backgrounds had significant impact on the approach we as experience designers had towards the work we now did and provide a framework for understanding our discipline in a multidisciplinary way and so she set out to write a co-written book with the nine of us.

My own background is in fine art and although I don’t often make the connection consciously, my early training in fine art (I now recognise) has helped me along the way in understanding users particularly in relation to how they interact with the visual and aesthetic properties of digital media. It’s also helped me understand and work with visual designers. My contribution to the book can be found in chapter ten entitled Art and Articulation: The Finer Points of engaging the User in Abstract Concepts and Lateral Thinking. To give you a taste…

Fine art challenges its audience to engage with abstract concepts that may not be easily articulated and require introspective reflection. The art gallery offers a rich metaphor for conceptualising digital experiences: just as the gallery is the space where the spectator engages with works of art, digital worlds represent the interface between users and content. Furthermore, the art world creates experiences that enable uses to tackle challenging content, and elevates content to the level of the sacred. This can be applied in digital design to contexts where ideas take primacy. However, conceptualising an online environment as a gallery and its content as “art’ can mean contravening web usability principles which assume task-orientated, utilitarian and time-constrained online interactions.

This chapter examines the ways in which art is presented, and the design of experiences of art. The instruments which ‘frame’ an artwork and scaffold the experience for the spectator are discussed in relation to how such techniques can be translated for digital contexts.

I’m excited to announce that tonight Digital Experience Design: Ideas, Industries, Interaction (Edited by Linda Leung) is being launched by Dr Elaine Lally, Senior Research Fellow and Assistant Director Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney and  is available from Intellect Books and Amazon.

It’s been an amazingly insightful experience for me to work with Linda and gain some knowledge into what it takes to turn an idea into a book. I have utmost respect for her determination and academic resilience to the writing, editing and review process and thank her immensely for the opportunity it has given me. It’s exciting also that the book will be utilised as the set text for two subjects: Digital Information and Interaction design and Digital Sound and the Moving Image in the Graduate programs for Interactive Multimedia at UTS. I’m dying to read all the chapters as collection and ponder the mulit-disciplinary realm of our practice myself. If you are reading this an happen to go on to the read the book I’d love to know what you think, maybe post a comment here on our blog. In the meantime I’ll leave you with Linda’s summary from the back of the jacket.

Digital Experience Design chronicles the diverse histories and perspectives of people working in the dot.com world, with contributors from a wide range of different backgrounds offering autobiographical accounts of their careers in the digital experience design and interactive media industry. This is a book of ideas about digital experience design expressed through the voices of practitioners and seen through the lenses of the disciplines in which they originally trained. From the perspective of older disciplines such as education, fine art, and cinema, this volume investigates how dot.com practitioners balance the ’science’ of usability with the ‘art’ of experience design and  the more abstract, emotional and atmospheric elements of users’ digital interactions. Digital Experience Design seeks to borrow from alternative fields that have richer traditions and longer histories in experience design to assist current online designers and practitioners. Covering  a range of forms of digital experience design, be it computer games, DVDs, touchscreen kiosks or mobile phones , this edited volume is a valuable resource for industry practitioners and students and teachers of interactive media.

Steve “Doc” Baty,  contributor to many of the comments threads on this blog, has written an interesting article on how he went about the process of analysis for a large intranet project that he has been working on. It’s a good read because it makes concrete a lot of the processes that we go through when we are analysing any data and transforming it into information.

He asks an interesting question at the end of his article, is “reflection” part of the process of analysis. From my perspective I’d say that for a lot of the in depth research we do at News Digital Media, involves a fair amount of reflection. Specifically reflexivity, understanding how your perceptions affect what you are seeing and how that subsequently reflects on what your analysis tells you.

Being more reflexive allows you to unearth and be aware of a range of assumptions that you are making when you are analysing. Ultimatley this give you further opportunities to try and examine your data from different perspectives (using a different set of assumptions).

Can focus groups be useful for design research? That is a question I hear a lot (be it in my own head or from actual other people).

A discussion along these lines has played out recently on the AnthroDesign mailing list. I’ve captured the gist of the discussion here. Bridget kicked off with:

…a client wants to conduct focus groups to get people’s reactions to different web sites and web functionality. There will be 8-10 people in the room and the web site projected with the moderator driving. Has anyone had experience conducting a group like this? Are there any tips into making this as successful a session as it can be? I’ve typically conducted usability sessions or concept testing one-on-one.What kind of tasks and questions have built into the discussion guide?

The very smart Steve Portigal replied with (emphasis added by me):

One thing that we find helps us when given these constraints is an individual workbook. We make ‘em with really big text and activities like a Likert scale etc. And at every point of evaluation, have people do the workbook FIRST independently and then discuss it. Then you have an artifact afterwards you can collect. We try to do exercises to help move people along to a meaningful place of evaluation from just “hey you are sitting in a room and here’s something new and do you like it?” to something closer to a realistic personal evaluation. We might try to get people to do something like “build” what they want instead of evaluating the thing we put in front of them. Or we might do an exercise - be it theatrical or other - to help move the group into a bit more relevant context (i.e., break into two groups and one group is the IT department and the other group is managers who then have to present to each other why this is or isn’t a good idea).

I will note that every time we come up with a really interesting and potentially most effective use of the format, it seems like we get shut down by our clients who have engaged us to use this format because they want something safe and familiar, methodologically, and if you spend five minutes building up a role play activity in order to get more context from their evaluation, that means there’s five minutes less to cram full of questions about something else that’s hard to answer in a focus group room.

Although I’ve not actually used this myself, I really like this technique. Preetham has a similar suggestion:

Want to echo Steve’s comment about workbooks where participants give individual feedback. They are extremely helpful to negate the effects of one or two outspoken individuals.

We have had very good success sending a homework workbook that makes people immerse themselves in the context of use. This also allows them to come into the session with a point of view; makes their feedback so much more valuable and actionable. The cost to make one and send it before hand is negligible when compared to output…

There’s a bit of research coming up where the USiT team might be able to employ this technique. Hopefully we can blog about it afterwards.

Care to share your own thoughts or experiences on this technique?

Update: some more useful stuff from AnthroDesign…from Christina:

…One thing I did that worked very well and was very simple was to have blind votes about each design, with each respondent quickly jotting down one MAIN reason for their vote (Repondents’ comments included, “clean design,” “no contact information,” “Not enough info” etc.). I then collected each vote and discussed with the group why they voted how they did (the votes for respondents were not revealed to other respondents).

This helped to not only get something solid for the client in terms of “yes/no” feedback, but also helped to mitigate for the hated “alpha respondent” influencing the meek during groups. It also served as a cross-check to compare the private vote against the public discussion, and allowed everyone to have an equal voice in this area…

Nancy suggests:

This is a situation where I promote the use of design games, to get the players to interact with artifacts and with one another. People are unlikely to tell you anything unexpected in a presentation format. Plus all the critiques of focus groups as a method are likely to be demonstrated, as you’ve obviously anticipated.

In a similar situation (e.g. getting feedback from existing customers to several candidates for a new visual symbol set), we gathered people for “focus groups” and provided each draft symbol set to a different small team, asking them to mark up a webpage with the symbols corresponding to the meaning distinctions intended. Then the small teams presented to one another and commented on what they preferred about their own solution versus another team’s solution (layout, text+symbol vs text alone, size, color, shape, etc.). We got some striking responses, including where a small team was not satisfied with the symbols we provided and they created distinctions on the spot to communicate the meanings we’d requested. Their solution matched one of the other candidate sets of symbols (though of course less polished) which provided additional support for that one. And the client stakeholders were in the room to watch and listen, as observers, during the event.

The USiT team has had a running conversation of late about prototyping techniques and tools. We have been debating the value of sketching, both in terms of quickly producing and documenting ideas as well as for prototyping (where low fidelity can be a useful attribute when putting designs in front of a user).

Some of this was exposed through the comments on a recent blog post regarding wireframes, in particular Chris’ comment on a sketchy wireframe stencil. So we’ve collectively been thinking about documenting and prototyping and how important “sketchiness” is.

To further fuel the discussion, I want to refer to Russell Wilson’s review of 16 user interface prototyping tools. I like how he categorises his “picks” into “Low fidelity mockups for idea exploration and communication”, “Interactive prototypes to test and communicate interactions” and “High fidelity drawing tool”. This is much more useful than saying one uses Axure (for instance) to prototype, like any one tool or technique could ever fit all situations. There are some interesting comments on Russell’s post too.

Also on this topic, Todd Warfel is running a survey on prototyping tools for his upcoming book. Be sure to check it out and have your say, this is adding some clarity around the various characteristics and pros and cons of prototyping techniques that will be of use to the entire community.

And it will help answer the question raised in the title of this post :)

Will Evans has written a piece entitled Shades of Gray: Wireframes as Thinking Device, on the role of wireframes in the UX design process (for an upcoming book on UX design by Russ Unger).

The whole post is interesting, but I like this bit in particular:

I think it is quite common for UX folks to view design as problem solving. For me, designing through the use of wireframes is a search in a problem space of alternatives; it’s a process of problem setting as much as it is a process of problem solving, which means that I always start with the context.

I like this; “problem setting” rather than “problem solving”.

The whole piece can be found on Will’s blog, along with wireframe examples he has created for the book.

(This may just prompt me to finish a long-running draft on “the truth about wireframes” which I have been working on for some time. I guess wireframes—or more accurately how they are abused—are a pet hate of mine :)

Just a quick link to some software developed by some folk over at Microsoft that looks pretty interesting. The software developed by “Julie and Sumit” allows you to affinity diagram on your screen. The really cool thing is that it lets you export your data in CSV, but also lets you import CSV’s.

This is all part of the Microsoft office labs experimental set of tools. It’s good to see MS use the lab concept to build a bunch of neat prototypes and monitor how people use them, A great idea for gathering information on new products / features to put into future releases of office.

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.

I may be a bit slow on the uptake, but I’ve just discovered Mechanical Turk. It’s a service offered by Amazon, described as “artificial artificial intelligence”. Here’s the blurb off their site:

Get results from Mechanical Turk Workers. Ask workers to complete HITs - Human Intelligence Tasks - and get results using Mechanical Turk…

As a Mechanical Turk Requester you:

• Have access to a global, on-demand, 24 x 7 workforce
• Get thousands of HITs completed in minutes
• Pay only when you’re satisfied with the results

My interpretation is that by paying them a small amount for each task assigned to them, Amazon have a huge pool of people at their disposal.

Could this be used for certain kinds of online usability testing? Has anybody tried using the service for that? I wonder how precisely you can specify which workers are assigned to your HITs?