The EchoUser Experience

Good beginnings.

I’ve been following WalMart’s sustainability plans for awhile now, and I have to admit I was initially impressed. One of the world’s biggest companies actually making strides in sustainability and forcing its suppliers to come to heel?  The ripples of the Sustainable Product Index, I was sure, would spread far.

That was until I read more about their plan. It’s pretty simple really, and involves three steps:

1. Ask suppliers 15 simple questions about their supply chain and production practices.

2. Create a Sustainability consortium of universities, companies, NGOs and government to “develop a global database of information on the lifecycle of products…from raw materials to disposal.”

Ok, so far so good.  And finally:

3. To (and here I quote) “translate the information stored in the database into a simple tool that informs consumers about the sustainability of products.”

Right. Because consumers are inherently dumb, and the complicated supply chain information needs to be “translated” before we get to have access to it.

While I’m sure that the information is complicated, and that most people buying Kraft mac ‘n cheese, jelly donuts and frozen dinners don’t give a flying crap about supply chains, leaving the end user out of the equation until the very end is a huge mistake. WalMart may have made strides on its way to taking over American industry, but it committed the cardinal sin of standards creation: only including the end user, you know, the actual people who will use the standard on a daily basis, at the end of the process.

It’s not about the labeling, stupid.

I imagine WalMart’s thinking has gone something like this:

“We have about a million moving parts to coordinate with the Index, so we’ll tackle our suppliers first because they’re more complicated. Then we’ll make things seem more legitimate with a warm-and-fuzzy Consortium (I actually like this move, FYI). And finally, we’ll slap some pretty labeling system on everything so Gina from Shattunket, Georgia can choose the toilet paper that speaks to her conscience just as well as it does her bottom.”

But this is all backwards. Creating an index to be used by regular people isn’t just about making it legible or usable (although that’s definitely important and should be thought about up front anyway), it’s about making it relevant.

And the only way to do that is to include the end user - you, me, everyone - right smack at the beginning the whole process. Word.

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

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.

Much of our work results in our clients having to make changes to an existing product or service.  It’s kind of the point of usability and design: unless everyone loves your product, careful research and testing will be sure to raise a few things that could be changed. Whether it’s the color of an icon or the entire product concept, design leaves no stone unturned.

One of the common refrains we hear from clients is this:

“But how will users know what we’ve changed??!”

(implication: they will hate it…)

We have lots of answers to that question, but here’s an example of my favorite (and perhaps the simplest) answer:

The lesson, it would seem, is to just tell them.

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?

A big part of the guiding philosophy for how I work revolves around the concept of “fun”.  Sure, creativity, passion, drive and actually delivering are all part of a job well done, but if I don’t feel I have the license to have fun, good ole fashioned feel-like-I’m-a-5-year-old-again fun, then my overall motivation suffers quite a bit.

I imagine the same is true for our end users.  Fair enough, they signed up for a 2 hour usability test, but who says they can’t have fun in the process? And what of our clients - I know that it’s often a very serious affair for them, with jobs in the balance, nay, lives on the line (or it would seem, anyway), but why can’t they get to play as well? “Putting the user first” is all very well as the governing maxim of User Experience, but if it means at the expense of my team and my clients - well, I’ll have none of it.

Fun, I think, should be for everyone.

Design 101

Experience design, I thought, was a staple of the design community.  Phone design, airplane design, coffee shop design, car design, everything design - I just assumed that designers made sure to actually conduct basic user research and usability testing before investing hundreds of millions into a product potentially nobody will buy.

As it turns out, Ford is a little late to the party.

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