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By rphillippi, July 5, 2010 5:00 am

Tom Wujec, an innovative practitioner of business visualization, presents some surprisingly deep research into the “marshmallow problem” — a simple team-building exercise that involves dry spaghetti, one yard of tape and a marshmallow. Who can build the tallest tower with these ingredients? And why does a surprising group always beat the average?

Some of the best performers for this problem are the recent graduates of kindergarten verses recent b-school graduates whom actually perform the worst. Is it becase “everything you ever learned, you learned in kindergarten moment”? No, actually most kindergartners will take the time to experiment and play. They will build prototypes to see what works and what doesn’t. Where as, business thinkers look for that one “right” solution.

In summary, the marshmallow challenge helps identify the hidden assumptions. It provides a shared experience, a common language, and common stance to build the right prototype. Design is a contact sport. It demands that we bring the best we have to the problem to move from an “uh oh” moment to a “ta da” moment.

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By rphillippi, June 13, 2010 6:00 pm

What happens when we give people responsibility to create something? Just let them take the reigns and run for 24+ hours on whatever they want? Dan Pink attempts to create that reality for you through this video done for TED. I discovered it when it was posted in Fast Company. The science proves that giving people bonuses rather than purpose actually fails to drive better performance. Richard Branson, in his book, Business Stripped Bare: Adventures of a Global Entrepreneur, also mentions how he built his various Virgin brands through the use of “purpose building”.  He gave select groups within the various Virgin brands the opportunity to take and build up a new Virgin brand. In his video, Dan Pink challenges conventional wisdom and offers a new way to motivate your employees.

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By rphillippi, May 16, 2010 6:00 pm

I’m rather far behind on the weekly UX Videos so I’ll “catch up” simply by starting my posts again. I ran across this video and am amazed by the facts. We have a fundamental shift on our hands of how we communicate with each other locally and internationally.

Similar to having a web site is required to even be seen as a legitimate business; it’s now vital to play a part in social media. Seventy eight percent of people will trust peer reviews verses the 14% that trust advertising. Some further facts of the video are as follows:

Social media is no longer a toy. It has grown into a leading tool that demands you partner with it in order to keep pace.

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By rphillippi, May 15, 2010 8:51 am

Talking to customers is what user experience professionals claim to do day in and day out. Learning the lanugage of our customers in order to talk about what we do is key to translating what we do to the general public. An 8th grader should understand it. If you were to step back, what is the experience your customers have of you? Do you know? What is it you are selling? Why are they choosing you? What is your value? These are all questions we claim to ask of our client’s users (aka customers) but do we ever ask ourselves.

I always struggle with explaining what I do. Often getting blank stares and perplexed looks when I say, “I do user experience design.”

This always leads to conversations between ourselves that go something like this, “So how do you explain what we do?” “I do x.” “Oh yeah that sounds really good. I usually say y.” “Hm, I might need to implement some of that.” However, who we are not talking to is our customers.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon says we should obsess over our customers but how many of us actually do? We talk endlessly about user experience but do we take that internally to consider the experience of our own users (aka clients)? Do we go out and talk to them? Ask them candidly, “do you understand the value of what I sell?” How confident are you that your clients can explain in plan language just what you do and what value you bring to their organization?

Spend time learning the language of your intended audience. Figure out how to translate what you do into their language. Build rapport with them through the language you utilize to explain what you do.

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By rphillippi, October 7, 2009 8:01 pm

[Link from Fast Company]

Sheer determination and persistence gets us farther than anything else. Take Colonel Sanders for example.  He talked to hundreds before he finally got someone to take him seriously and thus Kentucky Fried Chicken was born.

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By rphillippi, August 14, 2009 1:24 am

Lately I have noticed an increase in the amount of requests for “Social Media UX Designers”. This worries me. It worries me much like the Pied Piper whom led all the rats out of the village only for them to drown in the river. This is a drastic illustration of my perspective but it does illustrate a point.

Social media is about connections and sharing experiences. It will not suddenly give your business a boost without your business having a product/service your customers (ie users) fall in love with. If you as a business create a product that the users love they will run to Facebook or Twitter or any other service to let their network know about it. On the flip side, they will also say how much they hate it.

Business needs to understand this important distinction and consider their business strategy before implementing a social media tool to their toolbox. They need to ask why they think they need it and strategize that need along with exploring what users need. Combine the two with a social media strategy that fits your business and you might find you have utilized a tool to create a solution.

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By rphillippi, August 1, 2009 5:40 pm

Time to start listening again.

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By rphillippi, July 31, 2009 9:05 am

It can be said, I believe, that most of us hate automated systems. If given the option, we’d rather talk to a live human than a system. Today, it seems the automated system is taking over and the human touch is becoming a thing of the past. This is a great cost saving device for companies but could very well leave your user (ie customers) running elsewhere.

An example:

I called HSBC recently for a wire transfer between my accounts. When I reached a human, I was told I needed to use the automated system. After pressing the several numbers (1, 1, 3, 1, 2) to get to my destination, I am then given a confirmation code (#000000 for example) and a couple of fax numbers to send it to and then the system hangs up. This left me wondering what I am supposed to do with that.

I call up the help desk and ask, “What am I supposed to do with these numbers?” The conversation follows as such:

Help Desk: Go ahead and write down on a piece of paper your details, the details of the receiver, any contact details needed, and please sign it and send it in.
Me: Any piece of paper?
Help Desk: Yes
Me: Ok so not so automated then?
Help Desk: (after a laugh) No.

Not only did this leave me frustrated but it also left me wondering about the security of the system. Can anyone get my details and send my money elsewhere?

Leaving your customer frustrated and nervous about a situation will entice them to look elsewhere for the same service. This then becomes a loss in revenue for your business which can be easily fixed with a proper system.

Personally, I think I will be returning to PayPal for all my “wire transfer” needs until HSBC either:
1) Truly automates the system
2) Allows me human contact
3) Creates an automated system online

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By rphillippi, July 8, 2009 2:30 pm

I use my Twitter account mainly for work and gathering information from my friends about the latest and greatest going on in the UX community. With following 88 rather active Twitters, it’s often hard to keep up with all the articles they post so in an effort to not only summarize for myself but also pass on to anyone reading, here’s what I have seen over the last week:

Whitney Hess has posted the following:

Jess Bezos’s, the founder of Amazon.com, says, “Obsess over customers“. More importantly:

Obsess over customers: “When given the choice of obsessing over competitors or obsessing over customers, we always obsess over customers.”

Invent: “Any time we have a problem, we never accept either/or thinking. We try to figure out a solution that gets both things.”
Think long term: “It requires and allows a willingness to be misunderstood.”

It’s always Day 1: “There’s always more invention in the future. Always more customer innovation. New ways to obsess over customers.”

What I like about this video she has posted is it gets back to a point I have made about never losing touch with the customer. In all my experience with Six Sigma, Change Management, and User Experience, I think the only thing that really touches the customer is a culture of asking and consistently testing and iterating on your product line with your customers (or users). Hence why I have fallen into User Experience as a career.

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On top of this Business Week recently posted an article about the IDEA 09 Design Awards calling the article, “Designing a Better World” where they said, “Business leaders should care about design because it hits the bottom line… more than anything else, design builds a business.”

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By rphillippi, April 13, 2009 12:14 am

Is the future of digital a 4 day work week? Or will we work harder to become millionaires in 3 years? Tune in and find out.

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By rphillippi, March 29, 2009 9:01 pm

(Or how I embarrassed myself in front of a room full of people.)

I’ve been at a negotiation seminar all weekend when during the last day I went up on stage to share my 30 second escalator speech. I delivered it only to be told I was insulting my client! I said, after several edits, “Who I work with is IT Managers who has the problem of unorganized web architecture. I help them attain more clients and build loyalty.” It sounded good to me!

However, the leader of the seminar pointed out to me that it is very likely that my client is someone who created that system and consequently would be quite put out by that statement.

After some work I ended up with, “Who I work with are web based businesses who would like to work with the customers they didn’t know they had.”

Much better right? Right. The experience taught me something though. As professionals we often talk in the language of the people we work with. We need to remember when engaging our audience(s) that they may not always known or understand what it is we do. We need to always keep in mind our audience. Consider it user experience within language…

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By rphillippi, March 15, 2009 10:30 pm

I went to the SF Redux of Interaction 09 and had a great time not only getting to know some new people but also learning more about Interaction Design. Here’s some quick thoughts and notes of what I saw:

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Steve Portigal was up first to walk us through his sold out workshop called, “Well, we did all this research … now what?”

My Twitter Feeds on SP:

“Who cares about terminology. Examine, infer and apply to business or design.” I’d say apply to both. Why should they be different.

“Stay out of solution land. Try different methods”

When stuck come up with really bad ideas to encourage creativity.

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Second was Kumi Akiyoshi with “Feeling: What Makes an Engaging Product?“.  The slides from the presentation are below:

Third was Ian Swinson with “Postcard Patterns”.

Postcards = simple straight forward messaging

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Fourth was Nadya Direkova with “What’s in a game? A look at game design best practices as prime influencers of interaction design.”  The slides from the presentation are below:

Twitter:

Is google a single player or multiplayer game? How many of us get to design apps in 3d?

This is review so far. It’s all about the same from my game design class at Parsons.

Simply controls. Friend invites to play with friends. (AdverGames)

Create a reward in health. Physical Therapy… Doing # of exercises = whatever

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Kim Goodwin “each one teach one” – people are now saying I experienced good design. This is easier than that.

Twitter:

“Nothing special about the iPhone. Technology is simple. It’s design they are selling. And we’re paying a lot of money for good design.”

“Corporate Americas new found belief in design is fragile.”

A lot of good ideas end up collecting dust. “It’s someone else’s fault. We need to take responsibility.”

Sales people understand progressive commitment. Get people involved in the research and so on to understand reasoning. Pushes commitment.

Even those who are use to rational decisions can be susceptable to emotion. (Ie the Mini Cooper)

Bargaining a normal part of Change Management. “I’ll have the salad with the cake.”

Ixd = generation creation

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In summary -

Personal gripe: Another thing about less is more on presentation slides… Less information focuses the audience on you and what you are saying. Avoids info overload

At the bar afterwards: “We’re designing behaviour”

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By rphillippi, February 10, 2009 12:19 pm

While exploring the option of spending a couple weeks in Italy in a dance intensive, I visited the site of the recommended hotel: Park Hotel La Grave

In process my computer crashed and on reload Firefox reloaded all my open tabs. Then as if from no where, there was music filling the air on a constant loop. I started going through each tab scrolling up and down frantically looking for the off switch. It was no where to be found. Instead I find myself reminded of Eddie Izzard’s skit about trying to get the printer to work:

No matter where I turn. I cannot find the off switch. Finally after 10 minutes of this frustration, I find the switch at the bottom of the home page!

Don’t get me wrong, there are definite distinct advantages to using sound in the right places at the right time. Jakob Nielsen points out that sound can “enhance the user experience substantially”. He adds that testing within a game environment using the same graphics but higher and lower quality sound led users to believe that the game had better graphics when better sound was utilized. However that was a game environment not a website.

When exploring the web most users are looking for information. In this case, I was looking for the amenities, price, and any reviews on the hotel. I didn’t care whether or not the hotel had a good atmosphere. After all in a hotel you mainly sleep. You aren’t looking for a home. Thus the music only frustrated me when I couldn’t locate the module to turn it off.

If you would like to use sound to create an experience than use it wisely and place it where the user can find it. The top right or even the right rail work beautifully for this purpose. The worst thing you can do to your user is frustrate them because you will lose them as a customer. Remember you never get a second chance to make a good first impression and on the web that is even more vital.

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By rphillippi, January 13, 2009 12:30 pm

Whitney Hess recently published an article on mashable.com called 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design.

The short version that UXD is not is as follows:

Dan Saffer, founder and principal at Kicker Studio, agrees that it’s common for design to be mistaken for being solely about decoration or styling. “I’ve had clients tell me not to worry about what their strategy is,” he says, “because why would a designer care about that? UX is more than just skin deep.”

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UX is more than just skin deep. As UX designers we should be buried in the process from step one, the concept, to assist with feeling and experience around a certain product. We can mesh that with strategy and business needs and goals throughout the project lifecycle to ensure a win win for all involved. After all without an engaging product that is a feel good experience from start to finish your marketing will fall flat and your customers will slowly walk away.

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By rphillippi, January 12, 2009 3:41 pm

Jeremiah Owyang talks about, “Why you don’t need to tweet to drive traffic to your web site”. He summarizes the experiment below:

• My experiment on ‘energizing’ (word of mouth) was successful from blog to twitter, learn about my goals.
• You don’t need to be on Twitter.com as an active user to gain traffic to your site.
• Since my twitter account wasn’t involved, the number of Twitter followers doesn’t matter as much as we once thought.
• If you have compelling content, and make it easy for people to share, they will, and then it will rapidly spread through the twitter WOM network.
• While I do have a good sized blog readership, a marketer with advertising budget could easily generate eyeballs to a blog with less subscribers, and potentially get similar results.
• If you read the comments, there were several vendors that are going to offer a tweet icon at the bottom of your blog post, or wordpress plugin, so expect to see more of these.

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What’s fascinating about this post is that it confirms that if you have great content then you will get people interested in what you have to say and thus visiting your blog.

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By rphillippi, October 12, 2008 3:31 pm

I am thinking of writing a paper for the IA Summit around change management, customer service, and user experience, “Rethinking customer service through the eyes of user experience”.  In initial research I am finding I am not the only one that’s starting to think about this.  I found Brandon Schauer of Adaptive Path is also talking about it as well many who spoke at MX 2007.

I first got introduced to the idea when I was working on a project for a large broadband provider in the UK. They wanted to update and make some changes to their broadband CD.  Unlike the US, providers in the UK do not send people out to help you set up your broadband, instead you are sent all the tools and expected to sort it out for yourself.  This CD is very successful amongst it’s users so we needed to be careful about how we changed the process.  The business wanted more people to sign up for an account with the company for various business goals. The current process requires the user to watch all the 3D videos which illustrate the entire process and once they get through it all (including some software installs) they then are told they are connected. Then they can sign up for a company account.

Now I don’t know about you but if I were told I was connected I wouldn’t be bothering with a form.  I’d be off to wander the internet. Thus I suggested that the process be changed so that as someone is installing the software then they are also able to sign up for an account. However, I needed to check with tech and with the company to make sure that the infrastructure was in place to support this. The PM felt this would potentially destroy the user experience but as you can see by Jesse James Garrett’s graph below the continuous experience which allows another process to start as you are waiting for another one to finish is a better and happier user experience:

This allows the user to keep working while waiting for something else to finish.  Also, in this case, it keeps the user there at the computer, as a captive audience. If they really were not interested they could also click the “not interested” button and go get a cup of tea.

This case demonstrates how the system / user experience can affect the view of the brand and the experience a user has with said brand. In this case, users love this CD and really like the products of this company.  If we as the designers of the experience create a negative experience for the user than we can also negatively impact the business.

This is what I have been thinking about lately and the reasons for wanting to write the paper and branding my thinking about this as “Customer Experience”.

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By rphillippi, September 9, 2008 10:27 am

In this article, Oliver Reichenstein, talks about the everyday user experience and why our favorite products become our favorites. [Link]

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All things have an interface. Shaping interfaces is shaping the character of things. The brand is what transports the character of things. When looking at McDonalds, iPod, Nintendo DS it becomes quite obvious that the interface is the brand.

No Forks, no Knives, no Language Skills
16 columns submenu horizontal, I think, standing at the counter at McDonald’s. I scroll left and right and put a simple cheeseburger in my mental shopping basket. 16 columns, yet so usable. “Cheezubaagaa kudasai” I hear myself say, and glancing at the cashier display and the French fry machine interface, I hold my breath: Wow. Why did I never realize? Being a foreigner in Japan, I decide to go to McDonald’s because at McDonald’s I don’t need to deal with language. I could get much better food in a similar price range if I were ready to think, read Kanji and explain myself. But I’m not, as I’m hungry.

I’ll fill you Without any Brain Stress
McDonald’s is very easy to use, I then think, and then the McDonald’s interface looks the same all over the world. Yes, that is why it is so successful. A simple interface. I don’t need to think when entering, ordering, paying, eating at McDonald’s. McDonald’s doesn’t make me think. That’s what the McDonald’s brand promises the hungry stomach: We’re sweet and we’ll fill you without any brain stress. Continue reading “The Interface of a Cheeseburger” »

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By rphillippi, August 26, 2008 5:04 pm

While I was working in the US I was almost never pushed to consider accessibility. It just wasn’t talked about or (it seemed) even considered during the design process but then I moved over to the UK and all of a sudden I had to know it. I had to know what worked and what didn’t.

But why consider it? Bottom line if a site doesn’t work then that’s simply bad form. It is also the law both in the UK and US as well as many other countries.

About 11% of users have some sort of disability that makes it challenging to access the web. That means they are looking at it without javascript, flash, or anything else that makes the web “fancy”. In some cases that could mean they are literally listening to the web through Jaws (a browser that reads pages for you) or they could simply be looking at the text only of a site.

That 11% translates into millions of people who will not be able to access your site and if you are a company who uses calendars for picking dates such as the case of Sky Broadband in the UK when users are choosing dates for broadband connectivity then you are risking losing millions of potential customers. Or in the case of a travel site which doesn’t downgrade to a text based version then those users will not be using your site to book travel. If your site makes money on advertising then you will lose revenue because those users will simply stop using your site. Over time that translates to millions of dollars/pounds in lost revenue.

Consider accessibility.

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By rphillippi, August 22, 2008 4:23 pm

From ecommerce-guide.com, this article helps to explain why good site design and user experience is so vital to business. Written by James Maguire. [LINK]

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James Maguire is off this week, but his words of wisdom are not! Today, we’re publishing one of Maguire’s most popular series “Site Design Tips to Improve Your Sales.” Maguire’s weekly eBiz Profile will return on Monday.

The better-designed your site, the better your chances of making the sale.

Research has long shown that the leading factor in persuading shoppers to buy from an e-commerce Web site is ease of navigation — findings that were supported in a recent survey by Jupiter Research (which is also owned by the publisher of this Web site.) In other words, customers are saying “make your site easy-to-use, and you’ll earn our sale.”

If usability is the key to a better bottom line, then what specifically will improve your site’s ease of use?

For that, we turn to the preeminent figure in the field of user-friendly online design — Dr. Jakob Nielsen, whom The New York Times called “the guru of Web page usability.” He holds 73 U.S. patents, most for making the Net easier to use.

Nielsen speaks in serious professorial tones, but his advice is more than academic: Companies pay him bundles of cash to teach them how to improve their site’s sales.

First Things First
Before changing anything, Nielsen recommends that e-tailers take a simple step to examine their site’s current level of usability: Run a user test. Find one willing test shopper — not an employee — and plop them down in front of your site to get immediate, real-person feedback. Continue reading “Site Design Tips to Improve Your Sales” »