This is a reprint from an article in UX Magazine by Cyd Harrell. It raises some excellent questions about what I like to think of a the inertia of doing things the same old way. I have experienced a lot of frustration as a user because of the lack of attention to functionality and user needs.

 

This is settled law, right?

When designing a shopping experience for anything remotely complex, present the user with general information first, then help them dive into the details.

Well, something has been niggling at me over the last few months as Bolt | Peters has observed peopleshopping for furniture, laptops, enterprise software, audio equipment, clothes, cars, business course content, restaurant reservations… and probably a few other categories we’ve forgotten. Tons of users tell us they want to find general product information first when shopping, but when pressed on what that key general information is, none of it is actually general—not for one user among the hundreds we’ve spoken to. Instead, early-stage shoppers—those still assembling the 3-10 options of a consideration set—need specifics first, and specifics are often very hard to come by.

General information is that top paragraph people skip over and scroll by when looking for the specific details, which are usually placed at the bottom of the page. It’s often called an “overview,” and it’s usually found at the top of a product page, occupying prime screen real estate next to the main “hero” photo. Some of the words our research participants have used to describe it are “fluff,” “marketing,” and “bullshit.” Our clients usually call it “copy” or “description.” Another common location for it is on the default tab of a set of options below a summary graphic.

Take a look at these product pages for surfboards:

^{Channel Islands Surfboards}

This page starts with information about the company, then a paragraph of text that includes dimensions, descriptions like “performance hybrid design,” and brand names like “Double Helix technology.”

There’s no link to further specs at all. This is certain to be a frustrating page for any user who hasn’t researched the board thoroughly elsewhere.

Imagine instead if the page provided a single sentence of description, something along the lines of “Limited edition performance board, purchases benefit AIDS elimination in Africa,” followed by a clean, bulleted presentation of the dimensions, weight, materials, colors, appropriate wave conditions, the designer’s name, and how much of each sale goes to the charity. Then, under a separate heading (or even behind a link), the history of the company and some of the story of this special board could appear. This structure would support the user’s natural information-gathering flow.

Many product pages have similar problems and would be improved by equally simple changes.

^{Surf Industries}

This one, too, dedicates a lot of space to telling the history of the design, and provides anchor links (in the blue nav bar at the top) to the dimensions and to download a PDF with detailed specs. It’s definitely better to have those available, but the extra scrolling and linking make it hard for a shopper.

Interestingly, there is a better page on this site, in the online store:

^{Surf Industries}

This page presents specs at the top and description at the bottom in a reversal of the usual order. Details are scarce, though.

^SurfTech.com

This similar one, while not necessarily an example of elegant visual design, provides a short, descriptive paragraph next to a few key specs. This is an excellent start, but it’s not clear where to find further details.

These issues exist across all product categories. For example, this page is for the latest version of Photoshop:

^Adobe.com

It takes two clicks into the very quiet right-rail navigation to get to system specs and detailed information.

Or this one, for a dishwasher. Notice how scrolling past the paragraph of descriptive copy rewards the user with a long list of feature names, but it’s still one more click (for each feature!) to find out what it actually does. If a potential customer is trying to decide whether to include this model in the set of options they’ll share with their spouse, it’s a tedious process to get to that initial decision.

^{Whirlpool.com}

Consideration Sets Explained

Consideration set is a term for situations in which a shopper isn’t sure exactly what he wants to buy—which hiking boots, which sci-fi novel, which cubicle system, which digital camera, which mid-size SUV. Undecided shoppers typically put together a shortlist of options that satisfy their most critical requirements before getting into detailed comparisons. It usually isn’t worth the effort to do serious research on hundreds or even tens of products, so shoppers need to come up with a reasonable number of ideas to look into more deeply. The number of items in a consideration set varies depending on the product and shopper, but most of the time it’s 3-10 possibilities.

This concept isn’t terribly controversial as far as I know, but developing a consideration set isn’t discussed much in shopping or search studies. And it should be, because the kind of information shoppers need to make decisions about whether something belongs in their consideration sets is not the type of information that’s presented on most online product information pages. General information won’t do the trick although, again, users will tell researchers that “general” is what they need. This is a classic user lie, because users aren’t consciously aware of this need in the abstract.

Here’s the tricky bit: if a researcher conducts a qualitative session with someone who’s not actually shopping at that moment (someone who doesn’t have a native task), they’re very likely to get positive feedback about the general information. “Oh this is great—an overview!” This is the user lie, and is really where Time-Aware Research earns it stripes. Bolt | Peters has seen plenty of instances in which time-related considerations have a big impact on user feedback. Someone evaluating tax preparation software will have less patience for reading general information two days before his taxes are due, and an IT manager trying to spend out the department budget before the fiscal year ends will want to skip straight to the details. Sometimes the last thing a person needs is a general overview.

Don’t Listen to the Lies. Give ‘Em Specifics.

What are users really looking for in early phases of the shopping process?

A couple of critical, deal-breaking details.

Every user is different, but many of these critical details are extremely specific, and users often don’t find this information on product landing pages—they have to dig into specs.

• Does this car have a third row and does it come in a stick shift?
• Is this piece of software going to be compatible with two others and is it in my approximate budget range?
• Can I use generic memory cards for this camera?
• Can I get this chair in a special height and does it offer a fabric upholstery option?
• Does this dress have the right “vibe” I’m looking for?

Okay, that last one’s a bit of a red herring. In cases like fashion, the need for immediate detail is very well served by images. But in products that can’t be as easily represented by a photograph, the challenge is much harder.

Take, for example, two shoppers who are looking at the same camera model with very different needs in mind. Natasha wants a digital camera with a huge storage capacity and a sturdy exterior because she’s going on a long backcountry trip; Marco wants a camera capable of extra-high resolution and lens switching because he’s shooting for print. Unless they are new to photography, they have a pretty good idea of what they’re looking for and they know the major brands by reputation, at least a little.

So while both may be interested in the same model, when it comes down to it, the last thing Natasha and Marco want when they hit the product page is a brochure about the manufacturer or marketing language about what makes it a good camera. One user wants to know about the body specs, and the other wants to know about the resolution. And until they find that information, everything else is “fluff,” “BS,” or “in the way.”

Those words may sound harsh, but they came directly from the mouths of a few of the hundreds of users we’ve watched scroll irritatedly past carefully designed overviews and photo layouts. Most of the time, users have to scroll way down to the bottom of the page to find the details they care about. In some cases, they have to click into a second page. In the worst case, they have to download a PDF. Actually, in the very worst case (most commonly seen in enterprise software) they can’t get this detail without contacting a rep and formally entering the sales cycle. They often still find what they’re looking for and if they’re highly motivated they’ll put up with the hassle, but they don’t understand why it has to be so hard.

I’ll underline that point: if users are highly motivated they’ll put up with the hassle, but users are typically not highly invested in a particular product or brand before the consideration set has been assembled. Natasha and Marco are much more hassle-sensitive right now than in later decision stages. They’re correspondingly more likely to abandon research on a product (and thus leave it out of their set and their eventual purchase decision) if it requires extra effort to find key specifics. Designers of product pages could greatly enhance the user experience and conversion rates by incorporating as many details as possible into the main body of project pages, and providing easy access to more.

But Don’t Completely Ditch the General!

Somewhat counterintuitively, Bolt | Peters research has found that users are more receptive to brand and marketing information for items that are already part of the consideration set. Once they’ve done their check and verified that the desk chair comes in red and has a seat-tilt adjustment, it’s useful to know about the company’s philosophy, especially if they’re now going to need to convince someone else about the purchase. In fact, those elements may be critical to the final decision, but they don’t help companies that don’t make it into the consideration set in the first place.

So what to do? Don’t take strong images off product pages, but do flip the traditional model on its head a bit. Give more focus at the top of the page to specs, and less to descriptive copy. Above all, make easy access to the nitty-gritty details a top priority, and don’t assume that any detail is too specialized to need that easy access. If it’s part of the product, it’s probably important to some shoppers. At the end of the day, if users leave a site having quickly found the details they’re looking for—even if the result is that they now know the company doesn’t have what they’re looking for—the company gains credibility. And if the company does have what they’re looking for, they’ll know it and will add that company’s product to their consideration sets, which is, after all, the only way to get them eventually to convert.

This is repost of an article by Whitney Hess, one of the pioneers of the UX movement

When I tell people that I am a user experience designer, I usually get a blank stare. I try to follow it up quickly by saying that I make stuff easy and pleasurable to use. That’s the repeatable one-liner, but it’s a gross oversimplification and isn’t doing me any favors.

The term “user experience” or UX has been getting a lot of play, but many businesses are confused about what it actually is and how crucial it is to their success.

I asked some of the most influential and widely respected practitioners in UX what they consider to be the biggest misperceptions of what we do. The result is a top 10 list to debunk the myths. Read it, learn it, live it.

User experience design is NOT…

1. …user interface design

It’s not uncommon to confuse “user experience” with “user interface” — after all it’s a big part of what users interact with while experiencing digital products and services. But the UI is just one piece of the puzzle.

“Interface is a component of user experience, but there’s much more,” says Peter Merholz, founding partner and president of Adaptive Path. Christian Crumlish, curator of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library, explains that design “isn’t about cosmetics, pixel-pushing, and button placement. It’s holistic and it’s everyone’s concern, not just the realm of ‘artistic’ types.”

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.”

2. …a step in the process

It is the process. In order to create a great experience for your users, not just design something that we’d like to use, we need to keep listening and iterating. It doesn’t have to be a rigid process, but it does need to exist.

“User experience design isn’t a checkbox,” says Liz Danzico, an independent user experience consultant and chairperson of the new MFA in Interaction Design program at the School of Visual Arts. “You don’t do it and then move on. It needs to be integrated into everything you do.”

Dan Brown, co-founder and principal at EightShapes notes, “Most [clients] expect experience design to be a discrete activity, solving all their problems with a single functional specification or a single research study. It must be an ongoing effort, a process of continually learning about users, responding to their behaviors, and evolving the product or service.”

3. …about technology

User experience isn’t even about technology, says Mario Bourque, manager of information architecture and content management at Trapeze Group. “It’s about how we live. It’s about everything we do; it surrounds us.”

Like a painter uses paint to communicate concepts and emotions, user experience designers use technology to help people accomplish their goals. But the primary objective is to help people, not to make great technology.

“User experience design is not limited to the confines of the computer. It doesn’t even need a screen,” argues Bill DeRouchey, director of interaction design at Ziba Design. “User experience is any interaction with any product, any artifact, any system.”

Really, a user experience designer could help to improve a person’s experience with just about anything — a doorknob, a faucet, a shopping cart. We just don’t typically refer to the people using those things as “users,” but they are.

4. …just about usability

“People often think that [UX design] is a way to make products that suck into products that don’t suck by dedicating resources to the product’s design,” says Chris Fahey, founding partner and principal of Behavior. Making stuff easy and intuitive is far from our only goal. In order to get people to change their behavior, we need to create stuff they want to use, too.

David Malouf, professor of interaction design at Savannah College of Art & Design, explains that “while usability is important, its focus on efficiency and effectiveness seems to blur the other important factors in UX, which include learnability and visceral and behavioral emotional responses to the products and services we use.” Not everything has to be dead simple if it can be easily learned, and it’s critical that the thing be appealing or people might never interact with it in the first place.

“Usability is not a synecdoche for UX,” asserts Will Evans, principal user experience architect at Semantic Foundry. He points to Peter Morville’s UX honeycomb, which in addition to usable, recognizes useful, desirable, accessible, credible, findable, and ultimately valuable as the essential facets of user experience.

5. …just about the user

Russ Unger, experience design strategist, likes to say that the biggest misconception of UX design is the “U.” “There are a set of business objectives that are needing to be met—and we’re designing to that, as well,” he explains. “We just can’t always do what is best for the users. We have to try to make sure that we are presenting an overall experience that can meet as many goals and needs as possible for the business and the users.”

As user experience designers we have to find the sweet spot between the user’s needs and the business goals, and furthermore ensure that the design is on brand.

6. …expensive

Every project requires a custom-tailored approach based on the business’s available resources, capabilities, timeline, and budget, and a whole slew of real-world constraints. But that doesn’t always mean that it needs to be costly or take forever.

Steve Baty, principal and user experience strategist at Meld Consulting, combats the fallacy that UX design adds too much time to a project. “Sometimes a fully-fledged, formal UCD process may not be the best thing to try first time,” he says. “It’s extremely important – and totally possible no matter where you’re working or when you arrive on a project – to make small improvements to both the project and the product by introducing some user experience design techniques.”

“People cling to things like personas, user research, drawing comics, etc.,” notes Saffer. “In reality the best designers have a toolbox of options, picking and choosing methods for each project what makes sense for that particular project.”

7. …easy

Just because we know how to conduct some cool and useful activities and you know your business really well doesn’t mean that this whole process is a breeze. And cutting corners on some important steps is a recipe for disaster.

Saffer maintains that a misconception “as common among designers as it is among clients, is that there is one secret method that will solve all their design problems.”

A trap that a lot of companies fall into is in thinking that they are their own end users. Erin Malone, principal atTangible UX, finds that both product managers and programmers believe they will create the experience as they build it. “UX designers are caught in the middle trying to speak the business language and the developer language to justify why we need to do our jobs and why it’s important to success.”

If you make assumptions about the people you expect to use your product or service — who they are, how they behave, what makes them tick — you’ll probably always be wrong. But take the time to get to know them, and hire the appropriate person to facilitate the process, and you can ensure you’ll get it right.

8. …the role of one person or department

User experience designers are liaisons, not subject matter experts, doctors or any type of magical beings. We don’t have a set of best practices that we can robotically implement, nor do we have all of the answers. Our greatest skill is that we know how to listen. While we can help evangelize the most effective process within your organization, it’s ultimately up to all members of the business to make it a success.

“User experience isn’t just the responsibility of a department or a person,” says Livia Labate, principal of information architecture and user experience at Comcast Interactive Media. “That compartmentalist view of UX is evidence that it is not part of the organizational culture and hints to teams not having a common goal or vision for the experience they should deliver collectively.”

Malone highlights the fact that there are many different breeds of practitioners that fall within the user experience umbrella. “We, as an industry, have not done a good job of separating out specialties and roles with enough unique language so that clients and businesses get that they need to hire (on staff or consultant) different types of people at different points in a project lifecycle.”

9. …a single discipline

The truth is that we’re all still very new at this. Louis Rosenfeld, publisher at Rosenfeld Media, publishing books on user experience design, and co-author of the seminal 2002 book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web argues that user experience may not yet even be a discipline. “It may not even be a community just yet,” he asserts. “At best, it’s a common awareness, a thread that ties together people from different disciplines who care about good design, and who realize that today’s increasingly complex design challenges require the synthesis of different varieties of design expertise.”

We have proliferation of nebulous titles: information architect, user experience architect, interaction designer, usability engineer, design analyst, and on and on. And they don’t mean the same thing to every person or company.

Different people specialize in different parts of the process. Some UX practitioners focus on a specific technique, like Indi Young and mental models, or a single challenge, like Luke Wroblewski and web forms, or a focused activity, like Steve Krug and usability testing. Just like you wouldn’t go to a cardiologist to heal your broken foot, don’t expect any professional in the realm of user experience to accomplish everything you need.

10. …a choice

For those of you who think you don’t really need a user experience designer, keep this in mind: “Nobody wants to believe that what they are offering is of poor-quality or deficient,” says Kaleem Khan, an independent UX consultant, “because nobody sets out to achieve a bad design as a goal. It’s always a risk. Bad designs and bad experiences happen.”

Jared Spool, founding principal and CEO at User Interface Engineering (UIE), the world’s largest usability research firm, has done extensive investigation on the qualities of the satisfied and successful product teams. Simply put, the most common flaw he has found is that companies think “good experience design is an add-on, not a base requirement.”

Josh Porter, formerly of UIE and now principal at Bokardo Design, echoes Spool when he says, “The biggest misconception is that [companies] have a choice to invest in their user’s experience. To survive, they don’t.”

There are plenty of amazing practitioners who can help right in your local area. Check your local chapter of theInformation Architecture Institute (IAI), the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), or the Usability Professionals Association (UPA), or just find someone on LinkedIn.

Looking forward

2009 is going to be a year of scaling back, but let it also be a call for pragmatism. It’s time to adopt more streamlined, smart, progressive and effective practices. We’ve reached a level of technological maturity where functional just isn’t good enough.

It’s how we engage people and the respect and value we provide to them that will separate the wheat from the chaff. Which side will you be on?

Found this press release today.

 

Google Penguin Update Will Affect Many SEO Companies, Marketing Expert Fiona Lewis Believes

PR Web

Sydney, Australia (PRWEB) September 05, 2012

It is true that many (and major) SEO companies have grown complacent during the last years and that they have been optimizing for search engines in ways that are not very Googthodox.

However, this month a new announcement came from Google and the phrase which is now terrifying the World Wide Web is ‘you don’t want the next Penguin update’, uttered by Matt Cutts, Google specialist in SEO issues.

While nobody knows what he really means, Fiona Lewis and many other internet marketing experts are already wondering about the future of SEO companies who have been cheating their ways into good rankings.

The update has already received several nicknames such as ‘Googageddon’ or ‘carnage’, but the latter seems to resonate the most with people. When asked about her opinion on this denomination, Ms Lewis answered, “It will be carnage for many companies and business owners. I feel sorry especially for the businesses that pay good money to slack SEO companies who didn’t see this coming.”

According to Ms Lewis, SEO companies have about three months to get things straight with their practices before their clients will start noticing problems. Fiona Lewis puts the blame on the SEOers who have been lazily crawling their clients’ websites to the top: “The worst part is that they have been doing bad practise for so long and were lazy, and business owners trust the SEO companies are doing the right thing.”

What seems to be the end of many SEO companies, will be, however, a good thing for those using Google as their search engine. It is predicted that Google will show random or unexpected results which will not affect the everyday user, but it will affect a website’s ranking.

In a nutshell, while internet users will not suffer from this update, it is the SEO companies and their clients who will have to deal with the consequences.

Where does ROI fit in?

Advertising has always been a big boys’ game. The big boys, Chef Boy-ar-dee, for example, have big money and buy big media. TV spots, full page magazine ads in the ladies’ journals… and now search engine placement. The idea was that if you lodge a brand name into a consumer’s mind then you will see an increase in sales. For years it seemed to work… a big company would use a major advertising agency to expensively craft a campaign, they would launch it and then sit back and wait to see if it was worth it. They could wait months, or even years, for the data, but by that time they would have moved on to slay the next dragon. If the agency is pressed about ROI, they will form focus groups and very expensively pan through the data. Smaller companies would do less expensive version of the same: regional or local TV commercials, newspapers instead of magazines… and as far as ROI, it was anyone’s guess. If you could afford it, you took the risk.

But with online advertising, the whole game changed. Here, at last, was the ability not only to target specific markets but also to see exactly what they did when they received the promotion. Did they open the ad? Did they act on it? What browser did they use? What time of day? All these questions could now be answered, the data collected in a detail that was unimaginable until just a very few years ago. Add to this the latest in social media marketing with its ability to track customers’ emotional responses to brands, loyalty to marketing campaigns, real-world behavior relating to said campaigns and you have a data gold mine.

if you know what to do with it. As any CIA analyst will tell you, acquitting intelligence is only a part of the equation;  often, it’s the easy part. Ideally, the data will tell you if you’re on the right track with your marketing activities and serve as a tool to guide your efforts. Ideally, it will help you to avoid pursuing efforts with markets that aren’t giving sufficient return for the investment. Advertising has always been and will always be expensive, and budgets are tighter than ever. Just setting up Google analytics isn’t enough; the data needs not only to be gathered, but also measured and applied. In my next entry I will address some specific ways that you can set up your analytics to work in conjunction with your other marketing efforts, as well as the top things you need to look for  in determining how you’re doing.

Remember, analytics exist to answer marketing questions about the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, the value of advertising and marketing investment and… most importantly… how your customers react.