Suze Ingram

This is what happens when you ignore user experience design

2009-08-26T21:28:00.009+10:00

Wired have published the results of an extreme makeover design-off between NYTimes, SimpleScott, Studio8 Design and Pentagram. All were asked to redesign the craigslist homepage (it’s currently a awful dog’s breakfast, but they aren’t interested in redesigning it – gawd knows why not!).

The good, the OK and the shocking
So the results of the design-off are more than a little interesting. The redesign by NYTimes and Studio8 Design show real thought and consideration for users has gone into the design. SimpleScott’s redesign is a good improvement, but lacks the sophistication of the others. Pentagram’s on the other hand made my jaw drop. This is their redesign.

Image from wired.com

Where's the...
This is what happens when graphic design dominates the user experience. The redesign looks nice, but it’s far from usable! Where’s the hierarchy (of information and visual elements)? Where’s the information scent? Where’s the interaction design, for Pete’s sake! Pentagram said they "decided to do something about the cult of Craig". Why?

Don't ignore user experience
This design perfectly demonstrates the importance of user experience design. Pentagram’s design shows the end result when the information architecture, user research, interaction design, usability aspects of user experience design are ignored. This is like design101 to me. I thought everybody "got" this.

Big hit tip, gold star and employee of the month award for my esteemed colleague @kalsop who passed Wired's article on to me. Thanks @kalsop!

About Suze Ingram

I'm a User Experience consultant from Sydney, Australia. I'm passionate about designing better user experiences that engage customers, empower employees and bring real benefits for businesses. If you'd like to get in touch, drop me a line at suze.ingram@gmail.com.

Want more?

Is it time to ban lorem ipsum?

This is what user experience consulting looks like

You say personalisation, I say customisation, let’s call the whole thing off

Sketches don't have to be pretty, you know (here's the proof)

2009-08-25T13:18:00.002+10:00

I read Bill Buxton's Sketching User Experiences earlier this year. I loved the book and the value Bill puts on sketching as the foundation of user experience design.

Scared to sketch?
I've always been a sketcher. I doodle and draw a lot so I'm pretty comfortable doing it. But I know others aren't. Some people I know feel really intimidated by sketching. They prefer to go straight to Axure or Visio to start their designs. When I ask them why, their response is always something along the lines of "I'm not a good drawer". Which is so disappointing. Using sketches to design user interfaces (UIs) is never about how good a drawer you are! It's about getting ideas down. Seeing how they work on paper. Scubbing things out and trying again. Cutting things up and sticking them back together in different ways.

Take a look at my sketching
To prove just how unimportant *drawing* skills are when it comes to sketching early ideas for a UI, here's a sketch of mine. I did this sketch on the whiteboard in a meeting with 3 clients. They ended up taking the marker from me and adding their own bits to the sketch. It was such a great, energetic exchange.

See. It's not a pretty sketch by any stretch. But it worked. The people I was working with were able to see what I was thinking. And then we all collaborated and made improvements together.

Relax! It's just a sketch
Sketching is so powerful. If you aren't a great drawer, it doesn't matter. Just sketch. Don't worry about how "good" it is. Sketching will always help you clarify your thoughts and ideas to others...and yourself!

About Suze Ingram

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How to take great notes during user testing sessions

This is what user experience consulting looks like

You say personalisation, I say customisation, let’s call the whole thing off

Inspiration and words of wisdom from UX idols

2009-08-16T20:16:00.013+10:00

New York's School of Visual Arts recently asked a bunch of UX luminaries to pass on their advice to aspiring designers. The result is a bunch of 30 second videos each with a tiny, golden nugget of advice.

It's a really inspirational collection, some of my favourites are:

“You have to be empathetic to your users, toward your clients, to the people you’re working with on your team” - Jennifer Bove from Kicker Studio.

“Fully understand the problem before you attempt to solve it” - Whitney Hess.

“Having a camera, taking it everywhere, and taking pictures” - Michael Mandiberg from Eyebeam.

“Seek and out embrace different perspectives from your own and to solve for those perspectives” - Steve Portigal from Portigal Consulting.

“Find the middle ground between clever and stupid” - Jared Spool from User Interface Engineering.

And more from the comments section of the blog post:

"Don’t forget a designer can do anything. Your skill is solving problems, and there are trillions of them in thousands of industries" - Jeff Ferzoco.

"Be weird and have a good sense of humor about it" - Kevin M. Scarbrough.

"Learn how to tell a great story" - Wade Burch.

"Don’t use the word user, or client. You are designing for people" - Michael

"Eat it, Do it, And Love It As Part Of Your Life!" - Edward.

Mine would be:

"Try to avoid thinking about the solution for as long as possible. Learn as much about the problem from as many different angles as you can" - Suze Ingram.

What would you words of advice be?

You can see all the Video Notes from the Field blog post.

About Suze Ingram

I'm a User Experience consultant from Sydney, Australia. I'm passionate about designing better user experiences that engage customers, empower employees and bring real benefits for businesses. If you'd like to know more, drop me a line at suze.ingram@gmail.com.

Want more?

Is it time to ban lorem ipsum?

This is what user experience consulting looks like

You say personalisation, I say customisation, let’s call the whole thing off

How to take great notes during user testing sessions

2009-08-14T21:06:00.000+10:00

Taking notes during user testing sessions is hard. Things move quickly. You've got to listen, write and watch for the whole 60 - 90 minutes. It's hard. Did I mention it's hard? It's really hard.

I've developed some strategies that help me take great notes during a session. These tips help to make analysis and synthesis quicker and easier.

Create a shorthand system so note taking is quicker.
Before you head into the sessions, choose some shorthand codes to use. For example, if I know some of the test will focus on an advanced search interface, I'd use "AS" within my notes. If I'm testing an information architecture, I'd number each IA category so I can avoid writing out the full category label every time.
Use one A4 page for each task.
You've probably planned to run tasks with users during the testing session. Before the session, create an A4 page for each task with the task printed at the top. As you run testing sessions with each user, put all your notes for each task on a single page. When you come to analysis, all your notes for each task are togehter on one page. I used to take notes by particpant, rather than task. Notes by task works much, much better.
Use different coloured pens.
Take enough different coloured pens with you to the testing sessions so you can use one per participant. This helps you later on to see who did what and who said what. My favourite pens are Uniball Eye (available in black, blue, red, pink, light blue, light green...I love them).
Capture quotes from participants.
Quotes straight from the horses mouth are like gold. I use them in presentations to clients, documentation and team meetings. During user testing, keep your ears open for quotable quotes. Then jot them down. I usually put quote marks around them so later on I can find them quickly in my notes.

Here's an example that brings it all together. These are notes I took recently during user testing of an information architecture prototype. I used a shorthand system, an A4 page per task, different coloured pens and quote marks around quotes. Take a look:

Please share. How do you take notes during user testing sessions? What little "tricks" do you use to help yourself? Let me know in the comments below.

About Suze Ingram

I'm a User Experience consultant from Sydney, Australia. I'm passionate about designing better user experiences that engage customers, empower employees and bring real benefits for businesses. If you'd like to know more, drop me a line at suze.ingram@gmail.com.

Want more?

Is it time to ban lorem ipsum?

This is what user experience consulting looks like

You say personalisation, I say customisation, let’s call the whole thing off

How to spot a great user experience designer

2009-08-06T13:35:00.002+10:00

Fred Beecher from Evantage Consulting recently wrote about the 9 characteristics of good UX designers. It's a great list...even if #9 is a bit corny and predictable.

How many of the 9 characteristics do you (or your UX designers) have?

#1: A Deep Understanding of Human Psychology & Research Methods

If you don’t understand people, you won’t be a good UX designer.
You must be able to see things from another person’s perspective.
You must also be familiar with psychological research methods designed to elicit and elucidate people’s perspectives.

#2: Competence in the Basics of Graphic Design

You don’t have to be a graphic designer to be a UX designer
You do need to be competent in the most basic of basic graphic design principles: layout, color, and typography.
You need to know how to use colour to draw the user’s attention to important user interface (UI) elements (you also need to know how not to draw attention to unimportant elements).

#3: An Awareness of and Interest in Technology

You should be able to understand technology well enough to communicate with developers (but you don’t need to be a coder)

#4: Verbal & Visual Communication Skills

You must be able to clearly communicate your ideas and research findings.
You must be able to verbally describe everything from squishy user motivations to rigid, detailed sequences of events.
You need to be able to supplement verbal communication with visuals. You don’t need to be an artist but you do need to be able to sketch your ideas on a whiteboard and create clean, clear prototypes and wireframes.

#5: Moderate Familiarity with Business, Deep Familiarity with Your Business

You need to understand the basics of how the business world works in order to effectively elicit and understand business goals.
You do need to be very familiar with what your particular company or client finds valuable, though.
On top of that, you need to be familiar with why your customers find your products or services valuable. To do that, you need to deeply understand the context in which they work.

#6: The Ability to Quickly Learn a Subject Matter Area

UX designers, whether corporate or consultants, are thrown into situations that they must understand from multiple perspectives. And quickly!
Key to this is the ability to quickly master a subject matter area. This allows you to generate useful insights from user research and uncover hidden business goals by asking the right questions. This deep knowledge of context guides your design and allows you to make effective design decisions.

#7: Mediation, Facilitation, & Translation Skills

Mediation, facilitation, & translation skills are necessary to ensure that everyone’s perspective is accounted for. While user goals can be uncovered through empathetic, open-minded research, business goals are often much harder. Different departments or business units often have different or even conflicting goals.

#8: Creativity & Vision

You need creativity and vision to take all of the above and mold it into a system that helps a business achieve its goals by making it easy and enjoyable for its users and customers to achieve theirs.

#9: Passion

Passionate UX designers constantly watch people do what they do and analyze why.
If a passion for UX is all you have, that’s a good place to start. That passion will drive you to cultivate the rest and success will soon follow.

Do you think Fred has missed anything? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

This is what user experience consulting looks like

2009-08-03T20:41:00.009+10:00

I need a nice, simple little way to explain user experience consulting. I want something snappy to say when curious people ask “What do you do?” followed by “What is user experience consulting?”

User experience consulting can be defined in so many different ways. To help explain user experience consulting I looked at a bunch of other companies to see how they explain what they do. Then I threw all those explanations in Wordle to see what came up.

And this is it. This is what user experience consulting looks like. Pretty cool, huh?

It’s so interesting to visualize the definition of user experience consulting. It’s no surprise to see “experience”, “user”, “design” and “usability” in there. I’m really pleased to see “help” up loud and proud in the word map. But I’m totally surprised that “strategy” isn’t prominent. Where's the strategy!?

How do you explain what you do to polite and curious strangers?

About Suze Ingram

I'm a User Experience consultant from Sydney, Australia. I'm passionate about designing better user experiences that engage customers, empower employees and bring real benefits for businesses. If you'd like to know more, drop me a line at suze.ingram@gmail.com.

Is it time to ban lorem ipsum?

2009-07-29T12:18:00.027+10:00

I'm sure, like me, you've had to decide many times what sample content to use in wireframes. Do you use lorem ipusm? Or should you use field names (like [FIRSTNAME-12]) to represent content? Or do you use a bunch of XXXXXXs or #######s?

Those numbers don't add up!

Representing content in wireframes always causes some sort of issue: clients get distracted because the content doesn't make sense to them ("those numbers don't add up!"), developers aren't sure if your content is alphanumberic, numeric or both, or worse still, people can't understand the wireframes (I'm looking at you, lorem ipsum).

5 types of wireframe content

Dan Brown has put together two excellent resources about representing content in wireframes.
Dan has evaluated the five types of sample content: actual (like Marilyn Walters), dummy (like Jane Doe), labeled (like [FIRSTNAME-12]), symbolic (like XXXXXX) and lorem ipsum (you know what he means). His work is really interesting and I've compiled the two together into one summary:

Actual content

Example - Suite 42, 215 Waverly Road, Frankston, Victoria 3293

Advantages	Stakeholders understand it. Accurate indication of what users might see.
Disadvantages	Difficult to get enough actual data for all wireframes. May not address all possible variations.
What stakeholders say	"Does the same data appear every time?" "That kind of information wouldn’t appear like that." "Do all the possible values look like this?" "You spelled "Waverley" wrong."
Hints and tips	Avoid using actual data for numbers or dates because scenarios often change and evolve. Keeping track of dates during the iterations is difficult. Actual data is good for product information (just make sure stakeholders won’t get distracted by details or inaccuracies). Use caution with actual prose, or you might be making editorial changes in the wireframes.

Dummy content

Example - 123 Smith Street, Smithville SM 2222

Advantages	Resembles what users might see
Disadvantages	Stakeholders may confuse dummy content with actual content. May not address all possible variations.
What stakeholders say	Is this real data? Would the interface look the same if the data were longer? How long are each of these fields?
Hints and tips	Dummy data works best with addresses or other variables that are predictable or follow a specific format. If you need to demonstrate a process involving dates, use dummy data. To maintain chronological order, be sure to identify key scenarios and milestones and stick to the story through out the wireframes.

Labeled content

Example - [FIRSTNAME-12] [LASTNAME-12]

Advantages	Describes the content
Disadvantages	Some stakeholders don't "get it". Different content may be represented by the same labels. Wireframe doesn't look realistic.
What stakeholders say	I have no idea whatI’m looking at here. What are the business rules? What are all the possible formats for the data?
Hints and tips	Labeled data is the best all-round technique for representing information. It can indicate both the type of data and the length of the field to expect. When using labeled data, be sure to include notes on the business rules and provide examples. Labeled data is also great for navigation. If the wireframes are meant to show the generic structure of the site, show the page level in the label.

Symbolic content

Example - $X,XXX.XX or XXXXX or ######

Advantages	Shows "shape" of the content. Quick to add to the wireframe.
Disadvantages	Difficult to distinguish between types of content (alphanumeric or numeric?).
What stakeholders say	This interface looks terrible! What would it look like if the data isn’t as long? What kind of data goes here?
Hints and tips	Symbolic data is best for numbers, currency and dates since it can represent the format. Include examples of each, and if the numbers are subject to calculation, supply the business rules. If the sequence of dates is crucial (like in an event scheduling application) consider using dummy data.

Lorem ipsum content

Example - Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.

Advantages	Quick to add to the wireframe. Good to represent sentences and paragraphs of text.
Disadvantages	Some stakeholders don't "get it". Represents prose well, but not other types of content.
What stakeholders say	Is that Greek? Is that Latin? How do I know I like the design if I can’t read it? What kinds of things would appear here?
Hints and tips	Use lorem ipsum as a placeholder for prose. Lorem ipsum is not appropriate for navigation because wireframes showing multiple levels of a website need to be very clear about the structure. Consider rendering the lorem ipsum in gray and superimposing a description of the content.

So which to use?

It depends. You need to consider your stakeholders and who needs to use your wireframes. I've worked on projects where the main purpose of the wireframes was for senior stakeholders to "road show" them around an organisation to get support for their vision. On other projects, my wireframes go straight to a devloper.

Should lorem ipsum be banned?

No, unfortunately not. Lorem ipsum is great for representing prose in a wireframe. Try not to use lorem ipsum for other types of content because it really doesn't do the job well.

Dan's original poster and his Boxes and Arrows article is well worth the look.

Want more?

Tabs for navigation are OK (there, I said it!)

An obituary for the 3-click rule

You say personalisation, I say customisation, let’s call the whole thing off

Book Review: Subject to Change

2009-07-24T09:36:00.007+10:00

I recently read Subject to Change (as part of the UX Book Club). The book covers some interesting areas but I wouldn't recommend it to my fellow UX practitioners. I would recommend the book to marketers, product mangers, strategists and R&D teams. I know many UX devotees give Krug's “Don’t make me think” to their clients and colleagues. This is the new book to give instead: it's a great introduction to experience design, is easy to read and is short (just a nudge over 160 pages).

Some of the key points from the book are really interesting, but not new to any UXer worth their salt. Yup, we know products are all about the user experience, and yup, we know design efforts should be focused on the user experience, and yup, we know customers only care about their experience of a product or service. Oh and yup, we know that qualitative and quantitative research are both really important. But, for product managers, marketers et al, this could be a great "see, here it is in black and white" resource to take up to the head honchos.

The examples given are the most interesting parts of the book for me. The revolutionary "you press the button, and we do the rest" design of the Kodak camera is a great example of a company recognising the importance of customer experience way back in the 1880s (although the book does keep bringing up this one example a lot).

The discussion around designing a "system" of products that work together instead of one product with all features crammed in is great and stuck with me a after finishing the book. They refer to Apple's iPod + iTunes + computer combo as an example of this product ecosystem approach. I would have liked to see some extra, non-Apple examples of where this ecosystem approach has been successful (is anyone else tired of Apple always being the only exemplar? I know they are great and all that, but....a bit of variety, please).

So, if you're a user experience designer/architect/consultant, do a quick scan of this book yourself, then pass it on to a marketer, manager or strategist in need.

Persona Template (based on Adaptive Path's version...but prettier)

2009-04-13T17:15:00.010+10:00

This persona template is succinct and straight forward. It's useful when you need a template that's quick and easy to read (I have another persona template that's in a narative style).

Here's a preview of the template:

You can download this template for free. Yay! All I ask is that you Pay With a Tweet:

Give back some love
If you download the template, let me know what you think. I would love to know what you use it for or how you intend to use it. Please leave a comment below...it's quick and easy - there is no capture image thingy to annoy you. Your comment will appear immediately.

Thanks Adaptive Path
I've used Adaptive Path's persona chart as the foundation for this template. Their template is great: it's simple, concise and easy to read. But it's not very pretty.

Hey Google, Where's My Free Interaction?

2009-03-03T22:07:00.002+11:00

I recently read a great article by Chris Noessel at Cooper Journal. Chris writes about the playful little “twitches” that many of us have as we navigate and explore a system. He calls these “free interactions”.

Whare are “free interactions”?
Chris says: “They’re “free” because they have no consequences. They affect only the interface and don't touch content. It's interactive because there is some small, quick cause and effect”.

Three types of free interactions
Here’s a few items from Chris’ list of free interactions:

Snapback pages – In Safari on an iPhone, when you use your finger to scroll above the top of a page or below the bottom of a page, it pulls away from the edge of the browser. When you lift your finger up, the page snaps back into place. It doesn't do anything more than that. It's just a fun little thing that people like to play with.
Flying numbers - in Quordy on an iPhone tapping single letters sets off a little animation of the tapped letter flying into the corner. Since there is no consequence to doing this, it becomes something to do as you look for new words.
De-re-selecting – some people use their mouse to repeatedly select and deselect text in web browsers as they read pages online. This is absolutely crazy making for onlookers, but really satisfying for the user.

Hey! That’s what I do
It’s that last one that I found really interesting because I am guilty of this. Whenever I’m reading text on the screen, I always use my mouse to select and deselect text as I read it. And yes, people who might be sitting with me at the time, find it REALLY annoying…but I love doing it.

Designing free interactions
Chris says “I suggest that designers begin to include one free interaction in their designs to enable the channeling of energy and simple expression.” I think it’s a great idea and I’d like to add an extra thought to it.

Include support for existing free interaction conventions in your designs
I recently started using Google Reader (I defected from Bloglines). It’s a great RSS aggregator but it has one disappointing flaw: it doesn’t support the de-re-selecting that I’m so fond of. You see, in Google Reader, when I try to select the text as I read, the screen “jumps” – the heading of the blog post I am reading jumps to the top of the reading pane. And then I feel confused: “Huh? What happened just now? Something moved? Why did it move?” I’m not used to my playful little “twitch” of selecting text as I read having any impact whatsoever upon the interface. So I feel a little annoyed. I don’t want to change something that I love doing so much just because I’m now using Google Reader. I want them to change Google Reader instead ;)

Here’s a little video which shows my interaction with Google Reader:

Google Reader Doesn't Support My Twitch from Suze Ingram on Vimeo.

Context is Bad?: Comms Versus UX Teams

2009-02-24T22:30:00.005+11:00

Sometimes communications and user experience folk don’t see eye-to-eye. Here’s a tale about mismatched philosophies...

Working together
Last year, I was happily and productively collaborating with a communications team as part of a website redesign project. We all got along well and it seemed like we were all on the same page.

Adding some context
The existing homepage showed a list of 3 or 4 news headlines. Each headline was short and snappy and was linked to the full article (e.g. “Protect your glory box” linked through to a news article about sexual health).

I recommended that an abstract and a publish date be added for each news item. This would give users more context for each news item and help them decide if they wanted to click through to the full article. Nothing too controversial or revolutionary there.

Context is bad (huh?)
The comms team saw it much differently:

“Abstracts can actually decrease effectiveness of news on websites. The “that's all I need to know” attitude rules where people believe they discern enough information from the abstract and will not go any further.

There has been a 50 per cent increase in readership in the past two years through use of clever imagery and headlines that have intrigued readers and allowed discovery of information that may never have been discovered had an abstract been included.”

Well knock me down and call me Ethel! I couldn’t believe what they had said. Abstracts would decrease the effectiveness of news? Huh?

Different definitions of success
After I picked myself up off the floor, I realised that it was a difference in philosophies between the comms team and the UX team which explained everything.

The comms team believed that to be successful, news articles needed to be read in full. I disagreed. By including an abstract, additional context can be provided for those very snappy headlines. For example, the headline “Protect your glory box” has much more meaning when an abstract such as “Five ways to avoid sexually transmitted diseases” is added. By providing an abstract which gives context to a news headline, users might be more inclined to click through – even those users who were initially confused by the cryptic headline. And heck, readership might then increase by 100%! Also, by providing an abstract, there is a greater chance of users understanding the information that is available to them if they want it. And that’s got to be a success, right?

Share the love
What experiences (positive or negative) have you had with communication teams? Let us know about it in the comments area below.

Tabs for Navigation are OK (There, I said it!)

2009-02-04T20:36:00.006+11:00

Using tabs for navigation is a bit controversial for some interaction designers. Quite a few people I have worked with over the years despise (yep, that's right, despise) the use of tabs for navigation. Mr. Nielsen has said "placing a horizontal set of tabs across the top of the screen...is a bad design and an abuse of the tab metaphor...Tabs are supposed to be used for rapid switching between alternative views of the same information object." Not mincing his words there.

History of tabs as navigation
It all started with Amazon back in 1998. Luke W has tracked the "colourful" (literally) history of Amazon's tabs. Amazon went through loads of tab variations and stuck with its tabs until 2007 (Amazon has used a left-hand side navigation since then). Even though Amazon has abandoned tabs, tab navigation had already taken on a life of its own. Others sites had started using the tab metaphor for their main navigation. And here's the thing - I think that so many sites started using tabs for navigation that the original metaphor morphed. No longer did a tab mean "alternative views of the same information object". It now meant "main navigation". And that's OK. Just because this doesn't fit with the traditional, physical world metaphor for a tab doesn't mean that it's a bad thing.

When to use tabs for navigation
Yahoo's pattern library contains a great page on navigation tabs. They suggest using tabs for navigation when:

There are 3 - 10 category titles.
The category titles are relatively short and predictable.
The number of categories is not likely to change often.
The entire width of the page is needed for content. An alternative approach is to use a left bar navigation
The categories belong to a single site.
You need to represent the highest level navigation options on a site.
You need to indicate the user's current location in the set of available options.
You need to change the entire page and not a sub-section of content within the page.
You need a way to control the highest level of navigation.

Ironically, if Amazon had considered these points, they probably would never have used tabs as navigation in the first place!

Not everyone agrees with me
Here's a final word from Mr. Nielsen:

"I maintain that tabs would be better used for switching between alternative (but related) views than for navigating to unrelated locations. But unfortunately, users will soon lose any understanding they may have had of tabs as a special design element if more and more sites keep abusing tabs. I still think that less than 50% of sites use tabs in the (erroneous) meaning of navigating to the main sections of the site. Thus, I still think that the correct use of tabs is preferred and I recommend using different techniques to visualize the main areas of the site. But this may be a losing battle and I may have to revise this recommendation in a year or so if more and more sites adopt a misguided use of tabs."

Change is difficult for some.

10 Intranet Best Practices (and more...)

2008-12-21T09:57:00.000+11:00

I'm really pleased that a report I wrote recently has been added to the eGovernement Resource Centre. The eGov Resource Centre was a finalist in the e-Democracy Awards 2008. The resource centre "is the foremost repository for everything eGovernment in the world. The site attracts more than 20,000 visitors each month and provides a weekly newsletter and RSS news feeds to its readership".

10 Intranet Best Practices (and more in the report)
Here's 10 of the best practices outlined in the report (there's another 13 identified in the report):

One unified intranet is preferable to several intranet sites.
It should be easy for users to access the intranet when they are not at their regular computer.
Generally it is best to avoid users having to log-in to an intranet (except when security or personalisation are important).
Intranets should be structured in a user-friendly way to help users find information quickly and easily.
Intranet personalisation should be considered with caution.
Similarly, intranet customisation should be approached with caution.
Forms on an intranet should be located in one, central place and extensively cross-linked with related intranet content. Users should be able to find forms by searching and by browsing by topic or function.
News and events are often popular intranet content. The intranet should list news on its homepage.
The employee directory is very often the most popular intranet feature. This is not necessarily true for organisations which provide an employee directory search within another system such as MS Outlook or Lotus Notes.
An effective intranet search is essential to an intranet. There is a strong relationship between intranet search effectiveness and content quality.

All best practices outlined in the report are supported by reputable references - it makes it easier to support your case by saying "this is what Gerry McGovern recommends"!

Free Download
You can download the full report for free! That's right, it'll cost you nada! Thanks to the Victorian government of Australia.
Download the full report (MS Word 0.2Mb).

Persona Template (Microsoft Word version)

2008-12-16T22:09:00.008+11:00

This persona template is in a narrative style (I also have another persona template that is more succinct). This persona template is great when you want the persona to read like a story.

Here's a preview of the template:

You can download this template for free. Yay! All I ask is that you Pay With a Tweet:

If you download the template, let me know what you think. I would love to know what you use it for or how you intend to use it. Please leave a comment below...it's quick and easy - your comment will appear immediately and there is no capture image thingy to annoy you.

Thanks
Big thanks to @brucemorrison, @gnuchris and @noonycool who helped me out today via Twitter when I was trying to work out the best way to share this MS Word file online. Thanks guys :)

An Obituary for The 3-Click Rule

2008-12-09T17:12:00.016+11:00

A Short History
Essentially, the 3-click rule requires everything within a website to be accessible within three clicks of the homepage. Everyone, even your friend's nanna, reckons the 3-click rule is the best rule of thumb for designing great websites. During any meeting with business and user stakeholders, you are likely to hear them endorse the 3-click rule at least twice.

A long overdue obituary
The 3-click rule lived a long and infamous life. The rule’s birth date is tellingly unclear. However, it is almost certain the rule was born during the first website era of grey backgrounds, serif fonts and tables with default borders.

A valued member of society
The 3-click rule enjoyed immense popularity during the mid 1990s. Designers and smug people proffered the rule in hopes of sounding all smart like and in-the-know during first dates with their future spouses. Wide endorsement of the rule hit its peak in the late 90s – with the esteemed Jeffery Zeldman joining the chorus in his book titled “Taking Your Talent to the Web”.

The formative years
The rule was most pertinent when creating little websites for the local dog wash business which only had enough dollars for 10 web-pages (note, these were the days when web pages was still hyphenated).

Things started to go a bit wrong
At this time no one seemed to mind that the 3-click rule had fundamental issues. The major problem was scalability. In really large websites the rule didn’t scale up much past 100 pages. If a website has several hundred or more pages, this meant a really top-heavy global nav structure, mind-bogglingly long lists of links on each page, and other crazy clutter-prone mechanisms to link all those pages together. Users had to scan stupid amounts of information at once, and got frustrated with it all damned quick!

Birth of a new era
But everything changed when Chi and Pirolli at Xerox birthed the theory of Information Scent. The theory of information scent superseded the three click rule. Information scent describes how people hunt through the available pathways when they’re looking for information on a website. Sites with really strong info scents are really good at leading users to the content they want to find. Sites with faint or weak information scents mean that users spend much longer evaluating the options they have and increases the chances that they will select the wrong option.

Summary
Creating a strong information scent involves giving users just enough context and information at each pathway decision point. This makes it easier for them to choose the best pathway to lead them to the information they want. As long as users are confident they’re heading in the right direction, then they’re not likely to abandon a site if it takes more than 3 clicks to get where they’re going.

R.I.P 3-click rule (and not a minute too soon).

Please share your memories of the 3-click rule or leave your notes of condolences as comments below...

4 Strategies for Improving Search Functionality and Results

2008-12-04T10:09:00.007+11:00

1. Create quality content
An effective search requires quality content:

Content should marked-up (HTML coded) semantically.
a controlled vocabulary should be created (a list of standardised terms used to describe topics). This will help to ensure that topics are consistently tagged in metadata. For example, content may be tagged with “teachers” in one area of the system while “tutors” is used in another area of the system.
Additional meta data should be considered. Additional tags that identify the target audience group, a sector, or the content type can provide more description for content and therefore help users to find exactly what they require.
Many search products support ontologies. An ontology is a list of concepts linked by the ways they relate to one another. This helps a search engine grasp the content’s meaning and can significantly improve the quality of the results.

2. Index useful data
A search index is a catalogue of the locations of every word in every document. It is important that only useful data is indexed.

Unnecessary page content should be ignored. A page often contains primary navigation text links which allow the user to move to other parts of the system from that page. However these navigation items should not be indexed by the search engine because they do not relate specifically to that page. Including navigation content in search indexes is one of the most common reasons why searches return strange results.
Plan to index .pdf, .doc, .xls, .ppt content. Search users will reasonably expect a search to return all of the system’s relevant documents – including the aforementioned document types. Many search products are unable to index these document types. As an alternative, these document types can be converted into HTML. This can be a big job, so priority should be given to the most commonly accessed documents.

3. Support the user’s query
There are a number of strategies that may be implemented which help support the query entered by the user:

Users should not have to learn which search syntax a search engine supports. The search engine should accept all common syntax conventions, for example, “and”, “or”, “not” and exact string (using quotes around a query).
Support “word stemming” (automatically adding different endings to the query entered. For example, ‘walk’ would also find ‘walks’, ‘walked’ and ‘walking’).
Implement search engine synonyms so that when a user enters a term, it is looked up in the synonym list and any equivalent words are also included in the search terms. In this way, the desired information can be found even if the search terms do not exactly match the content of the pages. Search logs provide an excellent starting point for developing a synonym list.
Implement “fuzzy logic” elements such as supporting common spelling errors and providing a “did you mean” function.

4. Build a user-centred search results template.
The search results page should be designed to help users find what they require as quickly as possible:

Display a text excerpt from the page that contains the terms from the user’s query instead of the meta data description field (the description may vary greatly from the user’s entered query).
Bold the terms in the excerpt that match terms in the user’s original query.
Minimise the details provided for each result. Search results pages can often provide too much information to the user. For example, size in bytes, links to other similar matches, and relevance expressed as a percentage. These details are not required on the search results page.
Consider providing search 'best bets'. Establishing a separate database of ‘key’ pages for a given subject is done to enable ‘best bets’. When a user submits search terms, these are looked-up in this database and any matching entries are listed at the very beginning of the results page. For example, on an insurance website, the "get a quote" page can be presented as a best bet in response to any query which includes ‘insurance’, ‘application form’, ‘quote’, ‘price’ etc. But beware, implementing and maintaining a best bests database can become unweidly and cumbersome.

A couple of excellent articles for further reading:
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/strategies-for
http://www.finance.gov.au/e-government/better-practice-and-collaboration/better-practice-checklists/search.html

Have you used any of these strategies to help improve search? Please let me know about it. Leave a comment below. Your comment will appear immediately plus there is no weird captcha image thingy to annoy you. So it's really quick and easy to leave a comment...go on....

The dust settles after the UBank / "My Future Bank" incident

2008-12-02T08:45:00.000+11:00

The Backstory
In October 2008, there were a string of incidents and comments around UBank's myfuturebank.com.au (run by NAB). For about a week or so, the blogosphere was positively pulsing with bloggers posting and others commenting about what was going on over there. Cheryl Gledhill's post (which she has since taken down) started it all and it spread like wild fire.

The fallout
It was like a car crash taking place over a whole week. The story was feeding on itself. Cheryl blogged it, then Kate Curruthers, Gerry McCusker, Stephen Collins and Laurel Papworth blogged some more about it, and so did many others. Them-there-be-fightin'-words were used: "train wreck", "crapped in their own nest", "friggin' mess" and "dishonest and not-very clever" were used to describe the incident. Comments were flying everywhere. Then others picked it up too, like wotnews, IT news and The Finanser in the UK. The fallout was everywhere. And I enjoyed reading every bit of it. It felt like scandalous school yard gossip spread by the cool girls in year 10. Oh the drama, drama, drama!

Hang on. What just happened?
But after the dust settled I started to think about what had really happened. What lasting effect is the brouhaha around a social networking "experiment" that screwed up royally going to have? Not only did the experiment fail, but the surrounding scrutiny was so deafening that it took on a life of its own. The message seemed to be "if you get into the groundswell, you had better do it right, otherwise you'll get crucified - not only by your target audience, but also by bloggers who are watching you like a hawk". Sheesh! The pressure! If you were a CEO, VP, or head-honcho decision maker in a big organisation, would this give you any confidence to approve your organisation's first foray into social networking?

The possibilities, benefits and power of social networking
I really hope the "shitstorm" (great quote from Cheryl Gledhill) surrounding the myfuturebank.com.au story won't stop Australian businesses from embracing social networking as an integral part of their business. Surely our messages and efforts should encourage and help nurture the burgeoning social media industry and shout loudest about the possibilities, benefits and power of social networking for organisations.

Promote the successes
So, what now? Let's sing the praises of those who are getting it right! Let's start a case studies collection of big businesses in Australia that are successfully engaging within the groundswell. Who's with me?

Australian Politicians and Governments on Twitter

2008-11-28T16:13:00.015+11:00

Australian politicians and government departments have cottoned on to Twitter. When departments and politicians (and others) dip their big toe into social networks, they are often oblivious to the implicit “ground rules” that exist inside the big, wide world of social networks.

Government departments and politicians need to prepare a plan and strategy before they engage in social networks. I have noticed that the two biggest challenges faced by organisations entering into social networks are:

Not being prepared for the negative comments and conversations that will, inevitably, arise.
Of course positive comments will arise, but these are easier to handle. Organisiations should plan their strategies for responding to "negative" comments and conversations.

Not understanding that social networking is a two-way channel.
Many organisations engage in social networks by "shouting" out communications, but not listening and responding to the community’s comments and reactions.

A couple of recent examples highlight the risks surrounding these two issues: NAB's My Future Bank experiment and BigPond's entrance onto Twitter.

Here's a quick round up and analysis of some Australian politicians and government organisations in Twitter:

Malcolm Turnbull (Leader of Australia’s Liberal Party)
@TurnbullMalcolm
Joined twitter 13 October 2008.
Early on, Turnbull didn't follow any of his followers. This was a mistake which was quickly rectified and he now follows his followers. Turnbull now also responds to @TurnbullMalcolm tweets, so they are starting to get it right. @TurnbullMalcolm tweets approximately 3 - 4 tweets a day.

KevinRudd (Australia’s Prime Minister)
@KevinRuddPM
Joined twitter 11 November 2008.
Orginally used an auto-follow to follow his followers and was criticised for being robotic. @KevinRuddPM began by only tweeting about what the PM was doing. However, @KevinRuddPM recently started engaging more and reponding to @KevinRuddPM tweets. @KevinRuddPM is overt about the fact that it is not the PM actually tweeting - tweets are signed off with "#KevinPM Team". Tweets approximately once a day.

The Greens Party (Australian political party)
@GreensMPs
Joined twitter 13 August 2008.
@GreensMPs tweet links to their website. Huge volume of tweets which border on spamming frequency (19 tweets on 25th November 2008). @GreensMPs rarely responds to questions or comments from other twitterers. I'm a supporter of the Greens Party and would really like to see this twitter account blossom into a successful two-way communication channel.

Mosman Council (A municiple council in Sydney, Australia)
@mosmancouncil
Joined twitter 18 August 2008
A great example of grass roots, authentic twittering. @mosmancouncil tweets about what is happening within the council area. Regularly responds to @mosmancouncil comments or questions. I was impressed with @mosmancouncil openess and full disclosure when they tweeted "we're following people who have mentioned 'mosman' - if you're not comfortable with that, let us know... otherwise your feedback appreciated". Tweets approximately once a day.

I don't know of any state or federal Australian government departments currently active in Twitter. Please let me know if you do.

(Hey! You reached the end - you read the whole post! Rock on! Why don't you leave me a quick comment with some feedback. Go on, leave a comment - it doesn't take long, I promise. Your comment will appear immediately - there is no moderation of comments. Plus - there's no Captcha image thingy to annoy you. So I've made it super easy for you to leave a comment. Go on, do it. Say "Hi" at the very least :)

Is gender important for a website redesign?

2008-11-25T17:16:00.003+11:00

“Are you male or female?”
I recently wrote an online survey to gather quantitative data about a website’s users. The survey was reviewed by some colleagues with a marketing background. They thought a gender question should be included in the survey (i.e. “Are you male or female?”) so we could understand what proportion of the website’s users are male or female.

Gender isn’t relevant to IA and IxD (but might be for some visual designs)
I said that gender isn’t relevant to the goals of the project we were working on (redesign a government department’s website to make it more user-centred). I don’t think knowing what proportion of a website’s users are male or female impacts the redesign of its information architecture and interaction design. I can see how gender might be relevant for some visual designs. For example, you would expect a site for Barbie to have a visual design which appeals to little girls. But the website we were redesigning is for a large government department.

Gender-less
Designing a website around supposed differences between males and females and the way they perceive information and interact with a website would be odd. Men and women’s mental models of information and interaction design can’t be that different, can they? I could not think of a single instance where the gender of the user would impact an information architecture or interaction design. If your website’s target audience includes both sexes, then your information architecture or interaction design must make sense to both men and women. Even if your website is targeted primarily to males or females, I don’t think their gender is a pertinent factor when creating an information architecture and interaction design. There are other much more important factors to take into account (are the website users confident with technology? What sort of terminology makes sense to them? What are they expecting from the site?).

Talk to me…
Do you think the user’s gender has an impact on a website’s information architecture or interaction design? Have you ever designed a website primarily targeted to just men or just women? Did you consider the opposite gender during the design process? Leave a comment below with your thoughts.

Poor User Experience at Virgin Blue Website

2008-11-23T20:50:00.004+11:00

I did a silly thing. A couple of days ago I booked a flight on Virgin Blue to Adelaide. I booked it in a rush. I booked it for the wrong date. Doh! My partner realised this afternoon then rang and told me. So I jumped onto www.virginblue.com.au and navigated my way to the Manage Bookings page. It looks like this (I've cropped out the top part of the page).

"looks simple enough", I thought. But I was wrong. Here's why:

Reservation # - OK, this is pretty straightforward, although the designers are assuming that I know # means "number". By the way, this isn't consistent with what's displayed in Virgin Blue's online check-in interface:
"Passenger first name" and "Passenger last name"- Seems straight forward enough, but it isn't. The booking I was changing has TWO passengers - myself and my partner. Which name should I enter? After contemplating this for a few moments, I assumed I should enter the passenger name which appeared first in the original booking. But I couldn't remember if I entered my own name or my partner's name first in the original booking. Argh!

So I gave up and moved over to the second set of input fields:

Reservation #: - Hmmm same issue as above
Departure date: Ouch! Sore point - this is the whole reason I needed to change my booking (I got the departure date wrong in the original booking). Deep breath, move on Suze. So I needed to choose the original departure date using these dropdown lists. The fields aren't aligned and have no default values, so it's difficult to anticipate what I need do with them. Again, these dropdown lists aren't consistent with other parts of the www.virginblue.com.au interface. For example, check out Virgin's flight booking interface:
This interaction design is much better. Dropdown fields are nicely aligned and the default values are intelligent (they are based on today's date). Plus, there is a very handy date-picker icon to the right (which I always use, by the way - I find it much easier to use a date-picker than remembering a date). Now, why couldn't the Manage Bookings interface use the same interaction design?

Back to trying to change my flight...
Contact E-mail: Doh! I can't remember which of my many email addresses I used to book this flight. I know that's silly of me, but I bet I'm not the only one! And by the way, who spells email as E-mail? Picky I know, but by this time I was annoyed and cranky.

I tried and tried various combinations of things in the fields available without any luck. After a quite a few attempts, I received a message saying I had tried too many times and I would have to wait 30 minutes before trying again. ARGH! ARGH! ARGH! ARGH! I. JUST. WANT. TO. CHANGE. MY. FLIGHT.

I ended up calling the Virgin Blue call centre, waiting in a queue for 15 minutes then the operator finally telling me that she was able to log-in to my booking. Grrrr. Finally, I logged-in and changed my flight.

While I did end up achieving my goal, it was not a positive experience. It wasn't even a neutral experience. It was negative. It made me feel stupid and made me think that Virgin Blue is a stupid organisation that doesn't care about it's customers. Designing an online experience that is positive for customers is not a luxury. It's a necessity. Each time a customer has a bad experience with your organisation, it effects how they feel about you. You need to oberserve your customers, analyse their tasks and design an interface which supports their needs.

Oh and by the way, while writing this post I noticed something else. To check-in for a flight I need only to enter my reservation number (or membership number - I have a choice) and select my departure city. Why, for Pete's sake then, do I need to enter all this other guff when I want to change my booking online. What was I saying about stupidity....

(Yay! You reached the end - you read the whole post! Rock on! Why don't you leave me a quick comment with some feedback. Go on, leave a comment - it doesn't take long, I promise. Your comment will appear immediately - there is no moderation of comments. Plus - there's no Captcha image thingy to annoy you. So I've made it super easy for you to leave a comment. Go on, do it. Say "Hi" at the very least :)

Screenshot of New Promote and Remove Functionality on Google

2008-11-21T11:28:00.006+11:00

I was searching just a couple of minutes ago, and noticed some new functionality on Google's search results page. Very Digg. Very cool. Screenshot below:

Am having a play around with it now. What do you think??

You say personalisation, I say customisation, let’s call the whole thing off

2008-11-16T15:54:00.021+11:00

Does personalisation happen in the back end, or in the front end? Or is that customisation? The answer depends on who you speak to. In the user experience, information architecture and interaction design worlds, definitions of the two terms aren't universal.

So what is personalisation?
Some define personalisation as the ability for the system to show content to an end-user based on who they are. Others call this customisation.

What about customisation?
Some define customisation as the ability for an end-user to manipulate and choose what or how things are displayed in an interface. Others call this very same thing personalisation.

Well that’s confusing!
I know, tell me about it! So I went to the big wigs to try to get some consensus.

Who says what?
I did a quick tally to see which camp the big wigs fall into: is personalisation controlled in the back or front end? Here’s the results

Who says personalisation is controlled in the back end?	Who says personalisation is controlled in the front end?
Gerry McGovern Jakob Nielsen Peter Merholtz Lou Rosenfeld Christina Wodtke	Donald Norman Steve Krug Jef Raskin Luke Wroblewski

There is no consensus!
That’s right. Even the big wigs of UX, IA and IxD can’t agree on personalisation. I also found a helpful CHI Web discussionfrom way back that illustrates the same issue.

So what now?
I suggest you choose which camp you agree with. Does personalisation happen in the back end and customisation the front end? Or vice versa? Either way you have a bunch of luminaries who already agree with you. Just make sure you always, ALWAYS include your definition when referring to either personalisation or customisation.

P.S. I’m in the “personalisation = back end and customisation = front end” camp.

Wherefore art thou Executive Summary?

2008-11-11T12:24:00.003+11:00

I'm writing a rather large report this week. So I'll definitely be including an executive summary. I've had some spirited debates recently about where an executive summary should be in a document. Should it be immediately after the title page, before the table of contents? Or should it be after the table of contents?

I'd like to hear your ideas.

Should an executive summary be BEFORE the table of contents or AFTER the table of contents in a document?

Leave your "vote" below as a comment.

8 Tips for Getting Started on Twitter

2008-11-04T18:16:00.000+11:00

1. Start tweeting straight away
After signing up you need to start tweeting. This helps people who visit your profile page to see your tweets and then decide if they are interested in following you or not.

2. What should I tweet about?
You should tweet about things that interest you and things that would interest others. Tweeting only about the things you are doing day-to-day isn't compelling reading for others. Tweeting links to interesting articles you have read online is a great way to share information with your Twitter network. Using something like Tweet Burner or Tiny URL is handy because it cuts down the characters you need to devote to a URL in your tweet.

3. Start following
You need to start following people so that they know you are on Twitter. When you follow someone, Twitter sends them an email. They can then follow you in return. This is a very common way to start building your Twitter network.
Once you are following a bunch of people you can start to use their tweets. Often their tweets will contain an @username (this means their tweet is a reply to someone). If you click on that @username you will see the person's Twitter profile. You can then have a read of their tweets and decide if you want to follow them.

4. Twitter search
Do a twitter search for things you are interested in. For examle, I'm about to buy a Canon EOS 450D camera. So recently I did a Twitter search for "EOS 450D" to find people who are talking about this camera. I followed some and started a dialogue with them about the pros and cons of the camera.

5. Browse through Twitter Packs
Twitter Packs is a great wiki that lists Twitterers by topic and by location. For example, there is a Twitter pack (i.e. list) of people who are school teachers, small business owners, and user experience designers (that's me!). There's bound to be something that interests you.

6. Google search
Lots of people have written blogs about interesting people to follow on Twitter. So do a google search for Twitter + (keywords you are interested in). For example: try a search for twitter + web design.

7. Send a direct message when someone follows you
Before long, people will start to follow you. I recommend sending a welcome message to your new followers. Visit their profile page and click on their "message" link in their right hand column. This allows you to send a direct message to just that person.

8. Use third party Twitter tools
Once you get started on Twitter, there's a bunch of third party Twitter tools that you can use to enhance your experience, such as Tweet Later, Friend or Follow, and Qwitter. I'll be posting about these and others next week. In the meantime, tell me if you are already using any Twitter third party tools in the comments below.

"How many focus groups should we run?"

2008-11-03T19:56:00.001+11:00

I am asked this question a lot. Often, my clients think the more focus groups we run the better. I don't agree with this (and ultimately this saves them time and money).

Focus groups are usually one of the activities I conduct during the user research phase of any project I work on. I use focus groups, contextual enquiries, usability tests, collaborative design and sometimes card sorting as part of the user-centred design process.

Insights and trends
The purpose of the focus groups I run is nearly always the same: I want to gain insights and identify trends in the needs and goals of the target audience for the product I'm working with (usually an application, website or intranet).

2 - 3 focus groups is ideal
In my experience, conducting 2 - 3 focus groups per user segment is ideal. After the third focus group with a particular user segment, the number of new insights gained and trends identified starts to taper off. That means your return on investment (ROI) drops off really quickly. By focus group number 4 or 5 you are learning less and less new insights and trends. By focus group number 6 there are no additional insights or trends.

Timeline and budget constraints
Most of the projects I work on have a limited budget and timeline, and yours probably do too. Therefore, conducting 2 - 3 focus groups per user segment makes sense. This limits stress on budgets and timelines and still captures the insights and trends you are looking for.

Obviously the number of focus groups you should run always depends on the specifics of your particular situation. However, this rule of thumb is a good starting point.

Have you run focus groups recently? How many did you run? How did you decide how many to run?

Major Issue With An Intranet User Group

2008-10-30T20:48:00.000+11:00

I'm currently working on a large intranet redesign project. I'm in the middle of the user research phase.

This intranet serves 15,000 staff. One-third of this workforce are a somewhat unique user group. These 5,000 people work in small and widely distributed accommodation facilities across the state in teams of 5 - 6. Their work involves caring for disabled tenants. They use a computer 1 or 2 times a fortnight and use the current intranet rarely, if at all. Most of this workforce are casual workers with limited IT skills (for example, I observed one worker become confused when trying to work out how to close a MS Word document). There is one computer per team and the computer and network performance is slower than normal.

The organisation wants these people to use the intranet for forms, policies, procedures and other administrative tasks. The organisation has good intentions to design an inclusive intranet that meets the needs of these 5,000 workers and the remaining workforce.

But I'm starting to wonder about the reality of these intentions. We can design an intranet to support their tasks, but will they use it? We know this group of users has low IT literacy, low computer usage and limited time to complete administrative tasks. There seems to be so many barriers standing in the way of their using the intranet. Will an intranet designed to support their tasks be enough to draw them into using the intranet?

Have you ever come up against something like this? Where you've discovered major barriers which indicate your target users won't use the product you are designing? What did you do about it? What advice can you offer to me in my situation?

My Top 5 Focus Group Questions

2008-10-29T19:58:00.001+11:00

I run lots of focus groups (and other user research activities) as part of my job as a user experience consultant.

Over the years I've learned a lot about running focus groups. Here are my top 5 questions that I always seem to use during focus groups:

"How could we summarise the point you have just made"
Sometimes during a group discussion a participant makes an important but long-winded or convoluted point. This is sometimes because the participant is formulating their ideas on the fly. It can be really hard to distil what they have said down to the important bits. In this case, I always ask "how could we summarise the point you have just made". I find this works really well. Sounds simple but it really works to get the participant to rephrase what they have said.

"Why?"
My nieces and nephews all went through the "why?" stage when they were about 3 or 4 years old. Every question I asked them, they would reply with "why?". If I answered their "why?" question, they would ask me "why?" again. "Why?", "Why?", "Why?", "Why?", "Why?" it would go on.
In a focus group, I'm always the curious facilitator. I'm always asking participants "why?"...even when it might make me look a bit silly. Sometimes I might phrase the question as "this might sound like a silly question to you, but, why do you need to do that".

"I understand. Thanks [name]"
OK, so not a question, but still a phrase that I use very often in focus groups. I find it really important to avoid endorsing any particular comment. I never say something like "good point, Sarah" or "excellent idea, John". These kinds of comments from a facilitator can discourage rather than encourage the conversation (participants start to wonder if there is a right or wrong answer for the focus group questions).
Instead, I usually follow-up comments with "I understand, thanks Julie" or "sure, I hear what you are saying".

"How would you describe this to your friend's grandmother?"
Occasionally in a focus group I find it difficult to understand a participant's comments. This usually happens if the conversation goes into "subject matter expert" territory, where participants talk in a jargon that makes sense to them and those around them, but not to me. In this situation I will ask "if you had to describe this to your friend's grandmother, how would you do that". By the way, I would never ask "describe this to YOUR grandmother" because that would be assuming the participant knows their grandmother or that their grandmother is alive and well. That could make for an awkward situation.

"Can you give me an example..."
Sometimes participants make wide, open or general statements. These don't help me very much. So I'll always ask them to provide an example to illustrate their comments. I avoid seeming confrontational in this question by using a curious tone and facial expression.

What questions do you typically ask in focus groups or other types of meetings?

Groundswell in Australia

2008-10-26T20:24:00.002+11:00

I'm reading "Groundswell" by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff at the moment. Their Social Technographic Profile is really great and very, very interesting. They break down online behaviours into 6 groups:

Creators - write blog posts, publish web pages, upload video/audio/music they have created.
Critics - post ratings/reviews of products or services, write comments on blogs, contribute to online forums and wikis.
Collectors - use RSS readers, "vote" for websites, add "tags".
Joiners - maintain profile(s) on social networking sites, and visit social networking sites.
Spectators - read blogs, listen to podcasts, watch videos from others, read forums and customer ratings and reviews.
Inactives - are not involved in any of the above.

They have put together a nifty interative tool to help you see these behaviours broken down by country, age and gender.

Australians are big "Creators"
I had a play around with this last night and looked at behaviours by country. Interestingly, Australia has a lower number than the US in all behaviours except "Creators" - which is the most active and engaged of all behaviours. For every 100 adults in Australia who are "online", 26 of them are Creators, while in the US this number is 21 (and in the UK it is just 15). I am wracking my brain to try to understand why this is. Australians are generally thought of as early adopters of online technologies compared to other countries, but I don't think this explains it. How would you explain this? Any ideas?

Here's the data that I looked at:

	Australia	South Korea	US	UK
Creators	26%	51%	21%	15%
Critics	35%	51%	37%	20%
Collectors	16%	24%	19%	5%
Joiners	45%	51%	35%	28%
Spectators	63%	79%	69%	49%
Inactives	24%	7%	12%	42%

Data from Forrester Research Technographics^® surveys, 2008

How to Write Intranet Business Goals

2008-10-26T08:29:00.000+11:00

Over the last week I've written a couple of posts about intranet business goals:

Intranet Business Goals Workshops has some ideas about how to run workshops to gather intranet business goals from business stakeholders.

Mind Mapping and Intranet Business Goals shows you how I gather my thoughts and notes after stakeholder workshops to then begin writing the business goals.

Ready to write your intranet business goals?

So once you’ve conducted workshops or interviews with business stakeholders and analysed the outcomes, you are then ready to start writing intranet business goals.

Writing intranet business goals

When writing intranet business goals, I tend to try to answer the following questions for each one:

What?	Errr, this is kind of self explanatory. You need to state what the goal is. For example: “ACME aims to improve staff member’s awareness of the organisation’s activities”
Current situation?	Try to explain what the current situation is in relation to the goal. If you can, include an example to illustrate the point. For example: “At present, it is very difficult for staff to realise if others at ACME are working on related projects or programs. For example, it is very difficult to find out what work ACME is doing around “chronic disease” or “youth support”.
Impacts of current situation?	Explain how the current situation impacts the organisation. For example: “A lack of awareness about ACME’s activities can lead to duplication in work. This lack of awareness can also exacerbate a “silo effect” in an organisation. Also, a lack of awareness about ACME’s activities can inhibit a staff member’s sense of belonging and contribution to the organisation’s plan and “bigger picture”.
What is the organisation doing to address the current situation?	Explain if the organisation has any projects, strategies or procedures in place to help address the current situation. For example: “In 2008, a project was initiated within ACME to help foster better staff awareness of the organisation’s activities. The project will be mapping potential “touch points” for project across a number of areas within the organisation.” Also, several cross-departmental communities of practice have been established to help share knowledge and information within ACME.”
Role of the intranet?	Here’s where you bring the intranet in. Explain how the intranet can be used as a tool to help the organisation achieve it’s goal. For example: “The future ACME intranet can be a key tool for helping to increase staff member’s awareness of the organisation’s activities. For example, Keyword searching can help staff find internal information about a topic related to their work. Publishing news articles to help highlight ACME’s activities. Providing enhanced information about roles and responsibilities to help staff find who’s responsible for what within ACME.”

Putting all together
So once you put all the above together, you get something like this:

Improve staff member’s awareness of the organisation’s activities

ACME aims to improve staff member’s awareness of the organisation’s activities.

At present, it is very difficult for staff to realise if others at ACME are working on related projects or programs. For example, it is very difficult to find out what work ACME is doing around “chronic disease” or “youth support”.

A lack of awareness about ACME’s activities can lead to duplication in work. This lack of awareness can also exacerbate a “silo effect” in an organisation. Also, a lack of awareness about the ACME’s activities can inhibit a staff member’s sense of belonging and contribution to the organisation’s plan and the “bigger picture”.

In 2008, a project was initiated within ACME to help foster better staff awareness of the organisation’s activities. The project will be mapping potential “touch points” for projects across a number of areas within the organisation.” Also, several cross-departmental communities of practice have been established to help share knowledge and information within ACME.

The future ACME intranet can be a key tool for helping to increase staff member’s awareness of the organisation’s activities. For example,

Keyword searching can help staff find internal information about a topic related to their work.
Publishing news articles to help highlight ACME’s activities.
Providing enhanced information about roles and responsibilities to help staff find who’s responsible for what within ACME.”

How many business goals for an intranet

I usually identify between 6 and 12 business goals for an intranet.

Last words

If you are just about to start identifying business goals for your intranet, well done. This is a vital first step when redesigning or over-hauling an intranet. I hope this little “how to” guide helps. If it does, I’d love to hear about it. Email me on susan.ingram1 at gmail.com.

Intranet Business Goals Workshops

2008-10-20T21:42:00.000+11:00

The essential first step to creating a successful intranet is to define business goals.

What are business goals?

Business goals state what an organisation is hoping to achieve from an intranet. Often people want to jump straight to designing a site, but if the needs of the organisation have not been defined first, this usually leads to failure. Importantly, business goals must be outcome focused, rather than technology focused. This avoids the implementation of the latest “cool” technology or buzzword without clearly knowing how it is going to help.

Why define intranet business goals?

Without a clear vision of the business goals, it is impossible to track the success of an intranet or ensure that benefits are maximised. Clearly defined goals will help to keep priorities in focus during the design and implementation stages of a project. Without the direction articulated in business goals, an organisation can waste time and resources building an intranet that fails to provide benefits.

Business goals are usually identified by talking to people around your organisation. I typically run interviews and workshops with business stakeholders (like HR managers, CIOs, line managers, Comms managers etc) to help me identify business goals.

Driving me crazy

When I conduct these interviews and workshops, someone nearly always says “the intranet should have a blog” or “the intranet should be a wiki” or something to that effect. And, just between you and me, this drives me crazy!

Goals, objectives and problems…not technology

You’ve probably heard IT people talk about “the what, not the how”. When business stakeholders start mentioning wikis, blogs, or other web 2.0 tools, they are actually talking about a solution (“the how”) not what they need the intranet to do for them.

Focus, people. Focus

Recently I tried a new way to help keep business stakeholders focused on their goals, not their ideas of what the solution might be. It worked pretty well, so I thought I’d share it here with you. This idea came from reading Iain Barker’s post on Microsoft’s Product Reaction Cards.

Step-by-step process

I started by printing some generic business goal statements on cards (I've included the list below). I got these from my previous experience and a couple of google searches.
During the workshops, I gave a set of the cards to each participant. I then asked them to choose 5 – 10 of the cards that they felt represented what they (or their business area) is trying to achieve.
It took about 10 minutes for participants to make their choices
We then talked about each of the cards they chose. Specifically I asked:
“What benefits do you think are related to the card” and
“Can you give any real-life examples related to the card?”

Generic business goals

Here's a list of generic business goals that I printed onto cards and used during stakeholder workshops.

Support cultural changes
Communicate organisational messages consistently
Establish a united culture
Decrease paperwork
Encourage feedback
Learn from past activities
Enhance staff collaboration
Increase informed decision making
Timely distribution of news
Succeed in business improvements
Improve access to information
Improve staff "sense of belonging"
Improve trust and reliance on information
Increase efficiency
Increase staff satisfaction
Promote the organisation’s integrity and credibility
Provide a reference tool for staff
Increase information self-service
Provide a fun environment
Deliver relevant and up-to-date information
Raise awareness of the organisation’s activities
Reduce the "silo effect"
Reduce information distribution costs
Reduce information overload (e.g. e-mails)
Support business processes
Support change management
Improve relations between central and regional offices
Support knowledge sharing
Support new staff induction
Encourage staff networking

Result!

The activity worked really well. I’m pretty sure only one person mentioned blogs, so that’s success in my book.

Final word

I wouldn’t use this activity as a quantitative research technique. That is, I wouldn’t count how many times a particular card was chosen throughout all workshops. The activity is best for focusing people’s discussion on goals, objectives and current problems. It’s the discussions around the cards that provides the insights I’m looking for.
If you use this technique, I’d love to know how it works for you. Similarly, if you want some more information on how you could use the technique, please contact me.

Mind Mapping and Intranet Business Goals

2008-10-18T17:14:00.000+11:00

I love using mind maps to help me organise findings and notes taken during interviews and workshops.

Lots of interviews and workshops

For the last month or so, I've been conducting interviews and workshops to help identify future business goals for the intranet I'm working with at the moment.
I've talked to about 70 people from various areas of the business. And I've taken a bunch of notes. I mean, reams and reams of notes.

Mind maps

So I decided to consolidate my notes into a set of mind maps. For each workshop I conducted, I created a mind map to summarise my notes. I organised the mind map by theme or topic, for example, "collaboration" or "increase awareness of organisation's activities".

My mind maps

Below are some scans of my mind maps. I used a pink marker to highlight the topic and themes, and a green marker to highlight specific examples. These specific examples were really great to help me illustrate the intranet business goals that I wrote.

Mind map #1

Mind map #2

Mind map #3

I ended up with about 10 mind maps. From these, I looked for common themes and similarities between them. Then I was able to start writing the business goals. I highly recommend this process when you need to analyse, consolidate or summarise masses of information. It worked really, really well for me and it's a process that I'll go through from now on.

Next week, I’ll post a blog with some hints and tips for writing good intranet business goals. So keep an eye for that.

My sock drawer has a task based navigation

2008-10-16T21:50:00.000+11:00

My professional life as a user experience designer is slowly leaking its way into my private life.

I realized this a few weeks ago. I was up at 6.30am fumbling through my drawers, shelves and wardrobe grabbing all the clothes I would need to go for a jog. Sports socks, undies, sports bra, leggings, t-shirt and hoodie – and I was getting frustrated and cranky. You see, all of my socks were in one drawer. My undies in another. My bras and thermals in yet another. My jogging t-shirts and leggings were in the bottom drawer and my runners were on the other side of the room at the bottom of my wardrobe.

If this experience was replicated on a website where I was trying to buy a new thingymebob (you know what that is, right?), it would be the equivalent of visiting a products section to find the product I wanted. Then having to go to an FAQ section to find the shipping and delivery details followed by the contact us page to find an email address to ask a question about the thingymebob. And finally to my web email to send my question.

C-R-A-Z-Y!

I lamented: why can’t everything that I need to go jogging (or buy a thingymebob) be all together? So I’ve re-organised my drawers…I’ve now got a task-based jogging drawer. Now all my jogging t-shirts, leggings, socks, bras, and undies (yep, I’ve got dedicated “jogging” undies) are all together in the one drawer. Now when I get up at 6.30am it’s much easier to fumble through and get my gear on.

About Suze Ingram

2008-10-01T19:35:00.017+10:00

I'm an independent user experience consultant from Sydney, Australia. I am a passionate about user-centred design.

I use my skills in interaction design, user-centred design, visual communication and information architecture to create great user experiences.

I am contactable via:

suze.ingram [at] gmail.com

@suzeingram

www.linkedin.com/in/suzeingram

I also run servicedesignhub.com.au and I really try to find spare time for yoga, photography and illustration.