Robert Hoekman’s books are inline with Steve Krug’sDon’t Make Me Think. They are quick reads that take a simplistic, straightforward, and humorous approach to explaining usability principles.
Designing the Obvious focuses on Robert’s 7 qualities of great web-based software. Explaining how to use each quality to perform ‘Interface Surgery’, as well as changes to the overall usability process, and principles such as kaizen and poka-yoke, the book is great for anyone tasked with creating a pleasant user experience.
Designing the Moment takes a micro-look at different phases of a user experience from searching to sign off and how to make improvements every step of the way. By focusing on each ‘moment’ of the user experience, Robert puts many standard elements of a web experience under inspection and makes some great recommendations.
If you’re looking to give some time to a ‘professional’ book, consider giving one or both of these a shot.
As a new visitor to the Engauge Digital Blog, I decided to start by reading the existing posts in an effort to avoid duplicate discussions. With numerous articles and limited time, my experience consisted of multiple visits where I would read a few articles before having to leave to focus my attention elsewhere. I began each return visit by asking, “Where did I leave off?” The answer would be found after scanning several posts and pages requiring a growing amount of time and effort. I don’t spend much time on blogs, but I have had similar frustrations and thought I would post to see if my experience is common.
THE QUESTION: Has anyone seen a blog that easily allows users to indicate what posts have been read, easily locate unread posts, and search within the posted content?
Indicating where the user is and where they have been in a web experience is a basic best practice, but in my experience it’s commonly void within blogs. The fact that users do not have to select every post prior to viewing does make the typical visited link identification difficult. However the presence of a “Read” check box with every post, an “Unread” filter or category option, and a search field could help answer “Where did I leave off?”
My final task at Engauge was to look back on my 8-week summer internship and reflect through a blog (I know, big shocker, blogging is so rare for this company ). Though I learned A LOT this summer, I decided to create a top 5 list that describes my time spent interning in the Behavioral Research Department (aka, the BRD).
1. What are you doing on Facebook? I’m working! Always choose an internship where Facebook research is encouraged.
2. When the BRD wants to celebrate, they’re going to do it right. They decorated my cube with Clemson tiger prints! (Go Tigers!)
3. Social Networks and Virtual Worlds: stop trying to avoid them and just give in. (Read my blog if you need any justification )
4. If you learn how to use a video camera, you will be tasked with fun “Researcher on the Street” assignments. But don’t bring the camera to the Marta station or the Marta police will come after you. Trust me!
5. Interning in the BRD will give you multiple personalities.
On a slightly more serious note, after completing this internship, I am now even more thankful that I have a major in Psychology and a minor in Business Administration. I now know that I want to pursue a career in Behavioral Research. What company wouldn’t want a team of psychologists? We’ll pick the consumers’ brains, study their habits, and we can even analyze our own data!
I would like to thank everyone on the BR team. Y’all helped me learn so much more this summer than I could ever imagine learning in a class. Preparing documents + Creating surveys + conducting user experience testing = an amazing learning experience. Thanks for helping release my inner geek.
I happened across a seemingly ordinary slashdot.orgarticle talking about a conceptual Mozilla browser, codenamed Aurora. While this browser is a long way from reality and does build on some older concepts, I am noticing a pattern in how we are building our applications. I find it intriguing, novel, and fun… but I’m unsure about the problems to be exposed in this new paradigm.
Visual Organization and an Embrace of the Scroll Wheel
The first interesting piece of this demo is the use of more visual techniques in grouping and/or relating information. We’ve seen this technique in everything from Tag Clouds to the graphical flipping between iPhone music and Vista applications. Instead of simple text based categorization/reference of objects, everything is moving to graphical thumbnails of objects that can be scanned pictorially instead lexically. Tag Clouds are still a primarily lexical representation but they did bring in the notion of using size, color and transparency to emphasize strength and relevance. Pictorial representations typically use the same notions of size and transparency to convey the same information. What I am most excited and forlorn about is the relatively new introduction of depth into these efforts to help us relate complicated and disparate information. Demonstrated in spectacular ways by Microsoft’s Photosynth or even Google Maps and Earth, applications are developing with the notion of relevance and frame of context by a depth characteristic. Our two dimensional world of yesterday is quickly becoming and antiquated notion in lieu of a new third dimension to store and relate even more data.
Will this new way of thinking leave me cluttered in another dimension?
Kinetic Gestures and Wrist Weights for Exercise
The second big shift is coming from the advent of Wii and iPhone among others. Everything is becoming so much more energetically interactive as we make our Human Computer Interaction (HCI) devices momentum and gyro aware. We can shake our devices, sling them, and elicit different behavior based on the speed and direction of our actions. HP has release it’s new line of “TouchSmart” PC’s that offers scrolling ability and speed based on the swipe of your hand and the speed of your swipe. The above video as well as the others on Mozilla Labs demonstrate this new capability in all facets of Browser design.
Are we moving towards forced exercise in all of our computer interactions as we speedily try to navigate and pull detail information to the forefront of our screens? Maybe they should start making our Wiimotes and Gyro-Mice in 2lb, 5lb, and 10lb sizes.
In a recent alert on Jakob Nielsen’s site, the “guru of usability” helps us understand the really important website analytics and how to interpret them better. He then helps us understand the ways in which to improve our analytics, particularly the dreaded Bounce Rate.
The bounce rate of a site is measured by calculating those who enter through any page and leave from the same page versus those who enter through any page and click-through to another page.
Recent research has shown that an increasing number of people are entering sites not though the home page, but through some deeper, interior page. This can be due to the increase of social bookmark sites like Digg and Del.icio.us, which points the web user to particular content. As a result, the bounce rate of most sites is going up.
To better understand one’s own bounce rate and how to reduce it, Nielsen recommends understanding the bounce rates of particular visitors. Alas, not all bounce rates are equal, just as not all visitors are equal.
There are basically 4 categories of visitors:
1. Those entering from the likes of Digg. These are the least important to you because they are a fickle bunch and will have unusually high bounce rates.
2. Those who enter from direct links from other websites. These visitors are in essence receiving a recommendation from some other site. People who follow these recommendations may not have been looking for your site or product directly. They have some degree of interest, but if the usability of the site is poor or does not match their expectation, the bounce rate will be high.
3. Those entering from search engine traffic (whether it be SEO or paid links) will have a specific interest in your brand and your product. They are actively searching and wanting to engage with your company. Nielsen state, “If they leave immediately, there is something wrong with your landing pages.” Check your usability, your copywriting, and don’t forget to modify keywords.
4. Loyal users are those that return repeatedly to your site. This is your core consumer audience. If they return repeatedly, they may only be checking for new content on the site. Upon finding it, they will engage longer with your site than many other visitors. As long as they keep coming back, it’s okay if this user has a low page count.
All in all, Nielsen recommends shifting your attention from the “unique visitor” as the gold standard for a site’s success. Because the majority of unique visitors will be of the #1 and #2 variety above. Instead, count loyal customers and convert them with new content, new products, new special offers just for them. And try your best to convert the unique visitor into a repeat visitor.
Make sure the site doesn’t have confusing navaigation and is light on the copywriting. Insure that there is a clear path for the visitor to follow and provide them with next steps. Don’t force them to guess where the special product or offer is, expose it.
I shop at Gap, Old Navy and Banana Republic (clearance items). 95% of my wardrobe is stamped with one of these three tags. Having said that, I had never shopped online for the clothing because it just never suited me for some reason - maybe because I hated the idea of paying for shipping. (The irony now is that shipping may cost less than the gasoline I’d use to get to a retail location!)
Recently, I tried ordering jeans recently at Gap online only to find that they were out of stock. Along with an apology, I got what they call an “Options Card” that can be used across all the brands. Then, I got an email announcing that they had free shipping and a single shopping cart for all four of their brands - Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic and Piperlime.
So I click through and find this clean, simple site navigation that gives me easy access across all of their online stores. I cruised through the Gap store and found nothing. Click the next tab and I was in Old Navy. Click the next tab and I was in Banana Republic. No mall cruising, no shopping bags. ONE shopping cart, ONE checkout with my Options Card and FREE shipping.
Long story short - I could handle this kind of shopping again in the future; it works for me and it’s convenient.
And for those of you too young to remember, the title of this post was a reference to an old Gap jingle that continues to reside in the recesses of my brain. If you remember it, now it’s stuck in your head, too. Talk about sticky branding.
Online worlds have attracted big business. Marketing and advertising inside virtual worlds has taken on new and innovative strategies, as more and more companies are establishing an interactive presence “in world.” The Engauge Digital Behavioral Research Department loves to conduct research in a range of worlds - so I thought it would be a fun idea to explore Webkinz.
If you aren’t already familiar, Webkinz is an online world created by Ganz for kids ages 5-13. Webkinz has an estimated 530,733 in world visitors everyday. In terms of US visitors, Webkinz has seen tremendous traffic and growth in comparison to other virtual worlds.
Ask any child you know if they have heard of Webkinz and you will most likely get an earful about their specific Webkinz avatar: born from a real-life stuffed animal that translates into a digital avatar with its own personality and hobbies. The avatars – whose stuffed counterparts are purchased in stores by parents – have the ability to chat, make friends, get jobs, build homes, and play games with others, all in the comfort of a supervised and secure environment that caters to parental concerns. And of course the in-store purchasing power is not limited to only stuffed animals – parents and their children can dress their stuffed avatars in clothes or give them Ganz brand lip balm, and all have digital codes to convert the real life products into interactive versions for their pet. Webkinz and Webkinz related products are well sought after gifts for children.
So in researching this whole Webkinz world as opportunity space for our clients, I naturally have my own avatar – a friendly, opportunistic, sunglass wearing chicken. He’s got his own place, complete with a bed, couch and a couple of cacti and it turns out that he apparently really wants a toy cell phone. He’s got several friends and even has a job where he earns his Kinzcash (Webkinz currency) to buy things like smoking hot sunglasses or furniture for his room.
It appears that with so many visitors to this online world, that Webkinz and the Webkinz generation will be the future of other online worlds. It will be interesting to see how the world grows and evolves as the “Webkinz generation” grows into adults. Will this generation transform the way we look at virtual worlds in the future?
Back in the 1980’s my beloved colleagues and mentors at Indiana University got me involved in a little project that is still going strong and finding a lot of value: The IU Technology Services “Standard Terms List” (insider nod: The use of “STL” is an acceptable acronym variation).
It was during those formative years before the web, that IU’s University Computing Services Publications Group was charged with reporting on and enticing students toward usage of the fledgling realm of personal computing. We were a young department of five persons responsible for writing technical documents, marketing pieces, instructional manuals, and newsletters on every aspect of campus-wide computing.
There was a lot of exciting writing and reporting to be done during those early years, and we quickly learned to enlist experts from across the campus to help us create a buzz.
Consistency and audience tone was key. So how could we make certain our guest writers and lecturers were speaking the same voice when even The Chicago Manual of Stylewasn’t ready to offer advise on best practices for such an emerging and quickly expanding area of terminology?
Enter the Standard Terms List. As “keepers of the word,” the Ms. Thistlebottoms and I would refer to this running index as a way to illustrate proper text usage. The original document started with less than 50 key terms and their preferred (and un-preferred) usages. Eventually this index grew into a tool of 1000+ items that is used daily by writers, editors, campus Web managers and support teams across eight campuses.
Taking the success of this document on the road, I’ve found its format a welcome and differentiating deliverable for many large clients including Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, Emory University, and SunTrust Bank.
In addition to providing support to my clients’ marketing and editorial teams, this document format proves a valuable tool for:
QA Teams
SEO/SEM Tools
Taxonomies
Metadata
and, of course, Knowledge Management and data warehouse teams.
As many Engaugers are aware, here in the Behavioral Research Department we have been up to our ears in research work lately. Early mornings, late evenings, lots of coffee, approaching deadlines, and no end of billable hours in sight. All this Discovery has sort of forced our Behavioral Research Manager, Josh, to have to crack the whip to the BR ladies. In fact, the amount of research to be done had reached the point where the team had even discussed working over the holiday weekend (working on Monday?!?!).
Not surprisingly, this idea was met with despair and objection as we all watched our fantasies of beaches, road trips, and barbecues vanish. So today, when Josh announced to the BR Team that we had successfully completed all of the tasks, projects and assignments in time for our client deadlines, the Behavioral Research team let our hair down. Josh told us that we could have our extra day over the weekend, and instructed us not to even think about online behavioral research over the holiday. We have always appreciated and celebrated Josh’s methods for project allocation and his mad skills for facilitating task completion by deadlines, but today we girls got to celebrate a three-day weekend. Okay, so we did more than celebrate … it turns out that behavioral researchers know how to get down (Sayonara Josh!).
To check us out as we celebrate, click on the image below:
I was checking out Geek Sugar last night and came across an interesting video posting about the iPhone. The point of the post was that the iPhone interface is so simple that anyone can easily figure out how to use it — even a two year old toddler.
In searching YouTube, I came across quite a few videos (see a couple below). The interesting part is that there are no videos of any baby boomers using it. Hmm … I guess that it’s not that interesting to see a 44-year-old using their iPhone. Heheh.
At Spunlogic, we have a lot of great experience and unique ideas to share. From work with clients to new approaches and trends, in this award winning blog you'll find Spunlogic experts sharing their opinions and ideas on all aspects of interactive marketing.
). Though I learned A LOT this summer, I decided to create a top 5 list that describes my time spent interning in the Behavioral Research Department (aka, the BRD).
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