The EchoUser Experience

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I love it when companies ask for customer feedback.  I’m that idiot that responds with an exuberant “YES!” whenever someone says “Would you like to fill out a survey/answer some questions/provide some feedback on your experience today?”.  Not surprising, really, given that studying and understanding experiences is my day to day. Besides, I consider it good karma - since we test a lot of users for our project work, it’s only fair that we return the favor!

Anyway, moving on.

I decided to give AT&T customer service a call the other day because my voicemails aren’t showing up on my iPhone.  I’m the only one of my friends with this problem, and after trying all sorts of quick fixes, as well as simply waiting (for AT&T to magically work - not a good idea, in the end), I broke down and called in.

There’s no need to go into the details of the call, though I will say that I got through to a person almost immediately (which is always nice), and even though “Marilyn” couldn’t fix my problem, she was very bubbly and earnest throughout the process.  It was more the end of the call that got me all riled up:

Marilyn: “Would you like to answer a quick survey about your experience today?”

Me: “Sure!” (note my excitement)

Marilyn: “Would you say I succeeded in trying to answer your questions today?”

Me: ::: silence as I tried to figure out the correct response :::

“Sure?”

Puh-lease.  My first thought was, “well, duh, why else would I call the customer support line other than to get you to try to help me?!”  The next thought that came to mind was the poor sod deep in the bowels of AT&T who will get all the “data” from this “survey question” and have to come up with a pretty chart to explain it to his higher ups. “But sir, we succeeded in trying, doesn’t that count for something?”

Not really, no. This example illustrates exactly why surveys are tough to get right: it’s all too easy to ask biased, misleading, or confusing questions - and sometimes, as with the AT&T case, all three at once!

A recent post by the folks at Nielsen from their AlertBox service titled “Fresh vs. Familiar: How Aggressively to Redesign” talks about how users tend to prefer incremental UI changes (i.e. familiarity) to something novel and unique.

The theory goes that a more aggressive redesign will force a user to relearn and re-familiarize herself with a new visual layout and navigation, thereby reducing the overall usability of the UI in question.  I think that in principle this makes sense - assuming we still live in the 1990s!

I can’t believe how traditional usability seems to design for the lowest common denominator user, assuming that any little change, anything that will make a user have to - god forbid - actually modify their behavior (gasp!) is a bad thing.  I call this the “1990s approach” to usability, because back in the 90s it made sense to design for novice users: the interwebs was barely hitting the road (and not yet the mainstream), and web designers the world over were just starting to figure out how to design websites and UIs that didn’t confuse people with conflicting colors, black backgrounds, and hideous layouts.

But we’re in the 21st century, people.

This means that for the first time in UI design’s short history we are able to create designs that delight while also serving a broader functional purpose, rather than worry too much about making something purely functional and usable. Sure, there’s a place for functional design that hits all the right usability buttons, but I get frustrated when I see the usability profession, my profession, getting pigeonholed as stodgy and uptight.

A friend of mine who used to work at Apple, someone who I thought understood that usability involves both function and (sometimes beautiful) form, drove it home for me: “Usability? That’s boring, there’s no creativity or design innovation in that. You guys just make sure things are usable.”

This isn’t because he doesn’t understand usability, and more serves to illustrate that usability overall has a slightly stale rap - one that I aim to change.

Who’s with me?

Measure me this

Over the past few years, the buzz on the street in the development space (read: international development), has been all about impact.  What is it? How does it affect our bottom line? Is it related to success - and if so, how? Who’s involved? How to improve it? But most importantly:

How to measure it…?

Quite a few people have been thinking about this for awhile now, and first among them is Sasha Dichter from Acumen Fund.  His thoughts on the matter merely reflect a broader movement within philanthropy that is focusing on what it means to create a sustainable development space that is responsive to changes on the ground.  Of course, before measurement comes definition, and what a bugbear that has proved to be!  Sara Olsen at the SVT Group has spent years trying to answer this question, and while she has been generally successful in some ways, it seems that a cookie cutter solution will be hard to come by.

Read more…

Since the launch of the MotoCliq yesterday, my Facebook and Twitter have been flooded with hurrahs and comments about this cool new device. Seven years in Motorola gave me enough friends there and some of them were heavily involved in making this Motorola dream a reality. Great work guys!

The iPhone kick-started it all and now Motorola has joined the social networking bandwagon (many others have but very few deliver the experience worth mentioning) with it’s first Android phone. They have gone a step ahead (as should be expected) and created a great experience around integration of the various social networking sites in a very cool looking ‘Homepage Dashboard’. Sanjay Jha in his talk at Mobilize 09 said that ‘one-to-one’ communication is a thing of the past. Now, it’s all about ‘one-to-many’ and the MotoCliq is true to this tenet.

This is all good but what happens if ‘Facebook’ or ‘Twitter’ are not ‘THE’ social networking sites anymore. The probability of that happening is low at least till the launch of Motocliq but same time next year and the story might be very different.

If changes in the human behavior at the high tier segment has forced companies to respond with the now social networking solutions, can they not extrapolate this behavior to the many many more low/mid tier user groups, provide customized social networking solutions, encourage this networking behavior and drive ARPU.

How do mobile phone companies respond to 2 basic questions?

• How do we keep pace with the ever-changing landscape of social networking sites
• How do we scale it so that such services are made available to the rest of the 80-90% low to mid tier cell phone users worldwide

Living in India the second question intrigues me more. For sometime now I have been thinking about a flexible mobile social networking platform that can be customized for different and specific user groups at the low and mid tier user categories.

Consider these user groups:

• Auto rickshaw/Taxi drivers across a city like Mumbai
• Truck drivers across India
• The millions of maids employed in every middle-class family of India
• The millions of farmers across various states in India

Now a few facts about the above user groups:

• They all have cell phones
• They do not possess an internet connection
• The cell phone is their main channel of communication and entertainment
• Their awareness levels of things around is very minimal and hence are an exploited lot
• They come from very specific user groups and normally communicate within their own group/community

With the above facts, a dashboard like networking application can improve the quality and extent of communication and also make them more aware, entertained and connected. It could eventually provide them with a better life.

I hope the mobile industry is already working on such solutions but I suspect the focus is very heavily bent on making the iPhone competitor. There is an opportunity waiting to be tapped. Any takers!

One of the biggest gripes among usability professionals is that their client/boss waits until the end of a product or service’s development life cycle to start worrying about user experience.  This is like slapping a nice paint job on a jalopy, or building an entire stack of Jenga before checking to see if the table has a wobbly leg - in the long run it’ll bite you in the rear and all come crashing down (literally).

This is all very well when applied to a tangible product, a visible service, but what happens when it’s applied to something a little more fuzzy, say, like team building?

A friend was recently describing his attempts at building his team within a larger organization.  His goal, he explained, was to build out his team so he could then more effectively tackle larger organizational problems beyond his unit.  By hiring product managers, designers, marketers and the like, he was desperately hoping to buy himself the space - organizational and mental/emotional - to think about how to engage in larger scale change management.

To me, this seems like a dangerous game.  Sure, building out your team might buy you more time as you delegate to others, but with delegation comes responsibility, which itself takes time.  Indeed, much more time than we all initially think.  Furthermore, a bigger team makes for a bigger target within the organization, so there is the potential that any gains will be lost in the bigger organizational chess game.

My advice? Start with the connective tissue, the core usability and user experience. Don’t build out a team when the core is rotten, and risk creating a silo whose walls will need to be broken down anyway.  Start with the human-t0-human interactions that define the basis of the organization, no matter what size it becomes.  And don’t stop until you feel it in your gut.  Think you have it down? Tear it all down and start again, and again, and again.  Conversely, don’t drag it out for months - set the ball rolling and maintain momentum into the future.

Call it office “culture”, a philosophy, or whatever; slap guidelines into a pamphlet if you like, or conduct executive seminars during lunchtime; whatever it is, make sure you deal with the baseline usability and connective tissue first, and that you’re not just putting lipstick on a pig.

Last night I had an interesting discussion with Aaron on the topic of ‘Usability Magnitude Estimation’ where we discussed the various capabilities of this very scientific and powerful tool that elicits a user’s perception of a product. Mick and Aaron have successfully applied this methodology on various software applications, devices and even the BART public transit system in the Bay Area.

Coming from Motorola and having seen the challenges of the mobile device industry from close quarters, I’m writing down my perspective on applying UME to the building of an effective portfolio.

To give some background on UME: Usability Magnitude Estimation is a methodology used by us to measure the value of the user’s perception of expected and actual user experience. This is a powerful tool that can be effectively used to improve many product capabilities and hence company portfolios.

A telecom service provider portfolio mainly consists of products (cell phones) and services. Let us consider the products aspect of the portfolio and apply UME:

A portfolio is mainly divided based on segmentation and price point. A cell phone has physical and digital attributes that contribute to the overall experience delivered. (physical color, finish, keypad usability, density, one handed opening for clams, digital power up/down screen, individual applications, tasks within individual applications, especially high ARPU tasks, graphical elements etc.)

Read more…

Lately I’ve been struck by seams.  Seams everywhere: sometimes in the right places, sometimes definitely in the wrong places, but almost always noticeable.  It’s been a while since I went through an experience where I didn’t notice the seams.

Seth points out that seams are important, and I think he’s right.  But like most things, you only really notice them when they don’t work, or are broken.

“Where’s the damn mute button on the remote?”

“Which of these icons does what I want?”

“How to I turns on the wipers for this car?”

Each of these isn’t a deal breaker in and of itself (unless not being able to turn the wipers on/down ends in a crash), but in the long run, like Chinese water torture, they add up. Drip, drip, drip, drip…

The Bolt || Peters crew point out that one of web site UX’s 10 biggest faux pas is to unnecessarily block access to content, creating a huge seam. I remember hitting a similar seam while trying to read a Globe and Mail article way back when, and was appalled at both A. the seam and B. the audacity of G&M’s assumption that in today’s world of free! free! free! I would consider paying anything to read the article - let alone a whopping 5 dollars!