The EchoUser Experience

Fatal error message in a terminal window

While I understand that command line interface programmers don’t feel like they need to adhere to the same rules as UI designers, I think it would be best if they reconsidered.

Under no circumstances is it necessary for an error message to tell me something was “fatal”. It evokes feelings of panic and makes me feel as though I’ve done something irreversible. In the example above I simply called “git pull” (grab the latest code from the repository) on the wrong folder.  Because that folder wasn’t tracked by git, it doesn’t do anything… it just exits.

Consider using another response, such as “Not a git repository, nothing has been pulled. Are you in the right directory?”. I don’t need to hear about what process was killed or how it died, I just want to know what happened and what I should do about it.

Thanks

Happy (belated) New Year, one and all - I do hope 2010 turns out to be a smashing success for everyone.

I figured I’d start things off with a video made by my friend and colleague Etan (@Zaqintosh).  It’s a concept for what an iPhone app designed to measure experiences (any experiences, from surfing a website to hopping on BART) could look like, and even though it’s crude, I think it gets the potential across.

Can you imagine if we were able to rate experiences on the fly, all day every day? I, for one, would love to track which ones get me up, and which bring me down.  The trick, I think, will be to get people used to rating their life experiences; Yelp’s easy because it’s tied to businesses, but it might not be obvious to people that rating a bad jog, conversation, taxi ride (due to traffic, not the cabbie) or plane ride is just as valuable as rating your local Starbucks.

In any case, without further ado, voila:

iPhone experience measurement concept - EchoUser

Dropbox and the Human Touch

A few months back I got an email from the crew at Dropbox reminding me to use their service.  If you haven’t tried it yet, Dropbox is a neat file syncing service that lets you back stuff up online as well.

Anyway, usually I hate reminders to use a service - I find them intrusive, and the repeat offenders get put on my spam list even if the service/product is actually pretty cool.

But Dropbox’s email actually made me smile:

It’s got three key attributes that make it much less annoying than other reminder emails:

1. It’s visual.

I get it, you want me to use your service. But please don’t show me a long bullet-point list of why you think you rock.  Dropbox gets this, and replaces long text with an image instead.

2. It’s funny.

The picture did actually make me chuckle.  It won’t win any best joke awards on BET and Carlin certainly wouldn’t be impressed, but in my book any laughter is better than none (and certainly better than a groan as I hit Spam). Further, it shows they have balls, which is always a good thing.

3. It’s human.

This is the most important part: the hand drawn image really lets me connect with the company.  Dropbox isn’t just a bunch of faceless programmers shoving their product down my throat - somewhere somebody actually sat down to draw this picture, and that’s a powerful thing.  So powerful that I actually pictured him or her doodling away with their tongue stuck out. Pretty cool.

Even though in the end the email didn’t get me to keep using Dropbox (I honestly don’t have a need for it), it did get me to take the time to write about it, which in the end is almost as good.

When San Francisco banned plastic bags 2 years ago, my whoops of joy could be heard across the Golden Gate in Marin.  Having grown up in the developing world I grew accustomed - sadly - to seeing plastic bags everywhere they shouldn’t be: the streets, clogging drains, polluting rivers, the ocean, even stuck on phone lines. Everywhere except in garbage cans. You can be sure that I for one wasn’t going to miss their absence at all.

So imagine my surprise when last week my local Delano’s bagger put my groceries in one of these:

That’s funny, I could have sworn that plastic bags are illegal in San Francisco. So unless I’m missing something, this shouldn’t be allowed.

On second look, the makers of the bag have done their utmost to convince everyone that this is anything but a plastic bag with the liberal use of clever marketing copy.  Phrases like “no trees were harmed in the making of this bag”, and a cute little “nutrition” box highlighting exactly how it hasn’t hurt trees are nice tries - but belie the fact that eventually this bag will no doubt end up in a dump, where it most certainly will hurt a tree.

I get what the folks behind the bag are getting at: we have so many bags in production already that it certainly makes sense to train people to reuse them, thereby preventing more bags from ending up in landfills. Indeed, these particular bags do seem more durable than their crappy white plastic counterparts, so I could definitely imagine using them for more than one grocery run - but let’s face it: I can count on one hand the number of people I know who bring eco bags to the store every time they go.  Heck, I have 3 such bags in the trunk of my car, and I still manage to forget them each and every time.

As luck would have it, these bags have an answer for our laziness, too - a message nudging us to take them to “participating stores” for recycling. Good idea in principle, until my roommate tried it: turns out our local Delano’s isn’t one of those stores.

Go figure.

A last minute glitch and I could not get international roaming activated on my cell phone. This was the first time I was going to be without a convenient access to a phone while on an international trip. I wasn’t happy…

First stop Hong Kong airport, and I was pleasantly surprised to find the complete airport WiFi enabled. I was able to use Skype on my iPhone to talk back home, check my emails and send updates to my Facebook and Twitter accounts. So far, so good…

My entire stay in San Francisco, I must admit I never missed not having cellular connection…it seemed like the entire city was WiFi enabled even though it was only in parts. Any restaurant, shop, pub I found myself in had WiFi so staying connected was a breeze. In all my years in the US and my trips there over the last 3 years, I never saw WiFi so entrenched in the ecosystem until now.

It goes without saying that WiFi enabled Internet access on mobile phones is the way of the future (Virgin America has even started offering WiFi on their domestic flights).

Suddenly, with broadband data access, 3G seemed a bit too slow, cumbersome and a hindrance to the overall user experience.

In almost all aspects of consumer consumption behaviors in India, there has been a leapfrog like trend where the Indian consumer has bypassed some of the technical/behavioral aspects of adoption due to the late entry of some technology or product. Jumping from having no phones to the cell phone, getting introduced to the Internet directly on the mobile are some classic examples.

Apart from the government run service providers, 3G in India is still some distance away. Can India leapfrog in this aspect of adoption as well? Can we jump directly from Edge to WiFi? One can argue that carriers like TTSL, Reliance and Airtel are well positioned with their already existing home based broadband service to provide blanket (to some extent) WiFi coverage in metro cities. This could earn them enhanced revenue from their broadband service and also help bypass 3G. They could focus on mid/high tier WiFi enabled mobile phones, and generate greater ARPU through a much enhanced user experience of their VAS services.

It will be worth investigating a two-tier strategy - A limited 3G rollout to cover the rural geography in India for enhanced voice/data services and WiFi rollout in metro cities for data services.

I’m running a stealth usability study for an iPhone app at the moment, and we’re on a tight 4 week RITE (Rapid Iterative Test and Evaluation) schedule.

For those not in the know, RITE is a way of condensing the usability and design prototyping process into a short time frame.  Instead of testing a dozen users in one big batch, writing a report with design recommendations, submitting the report, making some of the design changes (or not), and then starting the testing all over again, RITE lets us do the same thing in about a month. We test 4 users every week instead of 12 once a month; we make design changes on the fly instead of waiting for a report to be produced; we get all the stakeholders involved so things can happen today and tomorrow, instead of next week or next month.  In many ways, RITE is the way that usability - and design more generally - should always be done (in my opinion).

One of the problems with RITE, however (and there are a few, believe you me) is that recruiting users becomes a pressure-filled activity. Instead of having weeks to schedule participants, fill in missing slots, etc., we have days to schedule people, sometimes only one day.  For example, I scheduled 2 users yesterday for a session today - pretty nuts if you ask me.

But this entry isn’t so much about RITE, or how to test an iPhone app, or why an external USB camera doesn’t play nice with live streaming and a screencast - I’ll get to all these issues in good time. No, this time I want to focus on a particular user (who shall not be named for obvious reasons), and how persistent she was today.  If any of you live in the Bay Area you’ve probably heard that the Bay Bridge is closed, which is wreaking havoc on…well, just about everything.  And this poor user-who-shall-not-be-named made a valiant effort today to get across said closed bridge, only to spend another hour and a half trying to get into town from the East Bay.  She finally gave up when she realized that making the session would mean leaving her daughter stranded at school without a ride.

So to every user who has ever spent an inordinate amount of time getting to a session, all in the name of a better product, I salute you.

Sometimes I come across positively delightful tidbits as I trawl the web, and this one, the “coming soon” page for Hosteeo, totally got me.

Nice look and feel? Check.

Mystery? Check.

Sense of being privy to something secret? Check.

Provides me with a way of finding out that secret? Check again.

All in all, a pretty effective way of getting my email address - but more importantly, my attention. Thanks to Chris Spooner for finding this gem.

ATT logo

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…