On Friday the 2nd of October, two of the USiT team (Pat and Alun) gave a presentation at the first day of Oz-IA 2009, the 4th Australian Information Architecture conference. The presentation told the story, in 25 minutes, of the research and design for the SuperRacing website. The slides are shown below.
There’s a short case study over on Marketing mag about news.com.au – increasing user engagement and website traffic through redesign. Here’s a snippet:
The factors that determined news.com.au’s re-design came as a result of extensive prelaunch user and industry research; requirements from a wide range of stakeholders; exhaustive testing and a study of new technological solutions.
Yet another accolade for the News redesign team, including USiT’s own Chris Khalil!
(See our own post on the redesign)
After more than six months of careful planning the redesign of The Australian Business website went live on the 18th 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:
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.
In his Alertbox article entitled When to Use Which User Experience Research Methods, Christian Rohrer gives a good overview of various research methods and when to apply them.
The field of user experience, is blessed (or cursed) with a very wide range of research methods, ranging from tried-and-true methods such as lab-based usability studies to those that have been more recently developed, such as desirability studies (to measure aesthetic appeal).
You can’t use the full set of methods on every project, but most design teams benefit from combining insights from multiple research methods. The key question is what to do when. To better understand when to use which method, it is helpful to realize that they differ along 3 dimensions:
- Attitudinal vs. Behavioral
- Qualitative vs. Quantitative
- Context of Website or Product Use
The plotting of research methods according to these three dimensions is quite handy, as is his advice regarding combining multiple methods for any particular project.
Of particular interest is the “Context of Product Use” dimension. This dimension refers to whether or not you’re asking the participant to use the product in a certain way, as opposed to just observing how they might naturally use it. This can have a big impact on the method you would employ, and highly scripted approaches risk Asking Participants to “Pretend” in User Studies (which Jared Spool recently wrote about).
While this article should be quite useful in helping people to narrow down the most appropriate design research methods to use, it might not be enough. Inexperienced readers may still not be able to decide which method to use, even assessing all possible methods using these dimensions. What’s missing is the X factor regarding which factors are best for certain situations, but this probably comes down purely to experience and is a professional preference that develops over time (and would thus be difficult to capture in an article). All in all, a very useful article.
[Chris, if it's not on the blog, it's just not on :)]