Ever have that moment when you’re in the middle of some inane conversation and the thought flashes – this could be a Dilbert strip! Well rejoice, for the newly launched Dilbert website offers you the chance to make just that happen. Oh the opportunities that this new world offers. Write your own ending, write the dialogue for an entire strip or start the strip and pass it along to friends to add their dialogue.

For a comic strip, this is pretty huge. Enabling user generated content or feedback to filter into a brand is something that companies struggle with on a daily basis. The fear, and reasonably so, is that if you give people the chance to talk about your brand they’ll say mean things.

Dilbert’s creators understand that people are already saying, and doing, much of what this new website offers and have made the decision to become a part of that conversation.  Good for them.  I wish more companies embraced this type of user feedback because an essential part of a product or service lifecycle is hearing what customers want and making the offering better. I know, it takes time and a lot of convincing to even get an audience to start the conversation, but it’s not going away anytime soon.

So what do users think about this 2.0 version of the Dilbert site? They think it sucks. Yep, that’s right, after all that hard work to add more features they want the old site back. Why? Loss of functionality and compatibility. Apparently the old site made it easier to view daily strips and find old ones.  Site creators have apparently been monitoring this feedback and added a blog post saying that they’re looking to make some changes in the next few weeks. User feedback rocks!

I find it fascinating that there’s so little information available out there on the value of taxonomy as a founding principle in Web design strategy.

Taxonomy - the study of the general principles of scientific classification - has been around for hundreds of years. In Web work, it’s generally the organization of contexts into logical groupings and hierarchies.

It’s those groupings that, in turn, help IAs determine navigation structures, metadata, even the very nomenclatures that are the foundation of Web usability best practices.

If you’ve ever been approached to help a client correct a truly horrific Web site, you’ve no doubt found that some (possibly much) of their pain points can be traced back to a poorly designed – or altogether missing – taxonomy.

Maybe it’s that those of us who build Web strategies have just come to see taxonomy as a “given” within the Information Architect’s toolset — something IAs employ but needn’t share with the rest of the creative team or [forbid!] the client.

Maybe people think taxonomy is just an issue for larger, content rich KM sites.

Maybe I’m not finding a lot out there because whoever is writing tomes on taxonomy best practices just isn’t remembering to add metadata to their articles.

Ok. That was a cheap shot. But where IS the supporting data in Taxonomy’s defense? I’m disappointed by just how little taxonomy information is out there on the Web. Do a search on your own and you’ll see examples for “Taxonomy best-practices” and rationales are few and far between.

As a creative body, IAs all too often struggle with clients who “just want to see the comps.” Client’s don’t realize how much of their bottom line rides on the contextual storylines inherent in the usability of the site.

The process of taxonomy creation is really much easier and effective than the name might imply. Yet, I’m amazed at how few IAs are given [or is it take?] the time to apply it. And I’ve [almost] never seen nor heard of a client demand a content outline as a deliverable.

I recall a previous colleague who was asked to design wireframes as the initial deliverable for a large eCommerce client. He produced very innovative wires complete with auxiliary navigations, functional buttons, web 2.0 components… the whole nine yards. The client was delighted with the results. After all, they were the pre-cursors to some beautiful graphics.

The site, however, was completely useless. By not first establishing a contextual format for the linear plots and subplots of the user experience, the navigation “buckets” we’re little more than a sloppy hodgepodge of disparate functions and features. The site’s organization lacked cohesion and the end users simply couldn’t build a mental storyline around its intended purpose.

That’s why, whether creating a new site or performing an audit on an existing one, I find reviewing the site’s taxonomics an invaluable starting point.

I begin with a literary outline based on the site’s overarching goals. Sound too old school for today’s hyper-connected world? You’d be amazed at how much mileage you can get by FIRST establishing the value of those straight pathways. It helps the client visualize those important “subplots” that will eventually become the site’s use cases. It also points out where there are potential holes or disparages in the client’s existing content sets and expectations. It also grounds them in reality that these areas of the site will need to be created AND maintained by someone in order to be successful.

More important, we’re helping rationalize and strengthen their business requirements – an important pre-visual practice before going to the expense of designing (and redesigning) wireframes or comps.

After all, isn’t the role of a good taxonomy advisor to SAVE the client some money?

VW celebrates its anniversary in style.

It may be a Dutch website, but they have the same great taste in music (less the awkward skew towards the still popular Journey, Asia and Air Supply). The microsite showcases 5 generations of VWs alongside the music of their era. The gaming portion of the site quizzes the user to pick which VW and era belongs with the song and the results are an engaging advergame that delivers some great music and memories.

So what were my findings?

1. VW sure has changed from the 5os, and still has yet to bring back the Karmann Ghia.
2. Quiz shows and advergames mix very well.
3. I have an odd skew towards 50s and 80s music.

Take the quiz and see how VW has changed over 60 years. Just click on “speel het spel” and enjoy the music. (It takes a while to load, please be patient!)

Whoever said scrolling for content was bad? Maybe our entire User Experience Department…

So why can’t scrolling be part of the experience, part of the concept… well it can be and Orange does a great job with the dreaded “page down” action.

Orange, a mobile provider out of the UK, recently launched the microsite around the concept of unlimited mobile usage. It’s a clever play on unlimited and scrolling lets the user interact with various flash experiences and conveys the feeling of a single page that never ends. The micro-experiences give quick interaction points and continuously drive the user deeper down the page to an abyss of rainbows, birds, bunnies and monkeys.

All said and done, it is a smart site and if it does not crash your browser, I hope you enjoy the lengthy experience.

Are you confused by the hundreds of printers that fax, copy, print, talk, beep and jam? I know I am.

Enter Epson’s new website that simplifies your decision process while giving you a few “chuckles” along the way. There are some great aspects to this site that make it viral and also sales focused. Epson understands that the viewer/user might not be the purchaser and also might not be ready to buy the product this instant. So, they have given the user some tools to share their findings with others and even themselves for future Epson purchase decisions. See below in the “Wish” page and a great example of a “Dear Me” reminder email.

So with an understanding of the user and the buying cycle, we might say that Epson has built an amusing site that guides us through a normally frustrating process. Well, before we jump to high praises, I would like to talk about some other key points that I would have wanted out of this decision engine:

1.) If they are talking about the quality of prints, show me the quality. I would have loved to have seen side by side examples of the same image to weigh the print resolution.

2.) If I am given options to compare the product, give me the ability to select from other manufacturers. The site is fun, but it will not stop me from going to a better comparison site like cnet to get unbiased reviews and user generated comments.

3.) As we all know UGC (user generated content) is a great feature to add validity to your products, why wasn’t a dialog started with consumers on the site that already owned these products?

All in all, Epson and their agencies have built a very creative way to choose “your” peripheral device, but they have left out some key features that could really make it more than an engaging microsite and make it a great tool.

Many user experience professionals shy away from marketing.  In many ways, who can blame them?  We’ve observed customers ignore banner ads, watched pop-up ads annoy and confuse customers, and read rants by usability pioneers about the evil that ads wield on web design.  We have seen attempts at applying a traditional “broadcast” model of marketing fail in interactive mediums.

But good marketing is more than ads—a whole lot more. Several concepts in marketing jive quite well with user experience.

Integrated Marketing Communications

Relationship Marketing

Customer Relationship Management

The Good: The Communication Experience Is the Marketing
By emphasizing consistency, customization, and credibility, these concepts echo a few characteristics of what I’ve described as customer-centered communication.  

These concepts additionally

• Lead us to view a customer’s interaction with a brand holistically instead of isolated in certain channels.
• Challenge us to effectively apply customer data such as demographics and buying history to improve communications.
• Encourage us to think about building long-term relationships with customers.

The Potentially Bad: User Experience Opportunities
The potentially bad side of these concepts is, of course, their execution. (Remember those banner ads.)  Here are a few ways user experience professionals can help avoid the bad.

Don’t Interrupt Me: Placement and Content 
Because user experience professionals understand how and why customers actually use the channels, we know when and where marketing communication is most appropriate.  We also can inform its content.

Example: A well-placed, relevant, and undisruptive BP banner ad on CNN.com that engaged even a skeptic like me. It shares a similar topic with the article, visually stands out on the simple page, and expands instead of taking the user away from the page.

Don’t Just Tell Me—Show Me
Telling is reporting that you hiked 25 miles on the Appalachian Trail last weekend.  Showing is describing the weather, the scenery, the sounds, the animals you encountered, the soreness in your muscles.  Telling makes you aware of what happened. Showing engages you in the experience. I think showing is critical to making brand attributes clear and to developing trusting, long-term relationships with customers.  User experience professionals can help brands “show” in interactive mediums.

Example: Betty Crocker has been demonstrating brand attributes such as practical, friendly cooking expertise since the 1920s through recipes, cooking tips, cooking shows, promotions for discounted cookware, and more. (Below is a 1951 print ad with tips and a recipe.) These efforts continue successfully today on the Betty Crocker website and its RSS feeds.

Help Me Help Myself: Applying Customer Data
User experience professionals can make the most of customer data across customer self-service channels and applications such as store kiosks, web applications, automated phone systems, and more. We know how to leverage that data to make self-service customized and therefore more valuable and easier to use. 

Quiet the Noise: Optimizing for Specific Channels
Of course, we can make marketing communications highly usable and accessible in specific channels.

Not to be Captain Obvious, but men and women really do shop differently.

The other day, I was listening to ‘the Herd’ on 680 the Fan and Colin Cowherd (the Herd) was going off about airport security and luggage and how he thought it would be SUCH a great idea to have a website where you could buy your clothes online before you left and pick them up on the other side of security when you arrived. Apparently, men have a uniform – khaki pants, blue button-down shirts and loafers. They can just pick out their size and VOILA! Instant outfit. This may work for men, but….

I’ve had several conversations with my husband about this. I can buy him any piece of clothing – pants, dress shirts, shoes, boxers, etc. simply because I know his size. Ah, “would ‘twere that it were” for women. He won’t go NEAR buying women’s clothing. Each type of clothing, each brand, each store has different interpretations of what a size ‘8’ is. Some even under-size to make women feel skinnier. Am I going to buy jeans that SAY they’re size 4 when they’re not really size 4? – heck yeah!

More importantly, men just think differently about shopping. Don’t believe me? It’s well documented…

From misscellania.com

Women go on an expedition. I needed jeans; it took me 6 weeks. Too low at the hips, too tight, too loose in the waist, those can’t be 8’s – they’re too small, too short, too long, TOO AGGRAVATING. To add to my pain, I refuse to shop in department stores – too many choices.

Back to this airport shopping site idea. For men, I can see this working. For women, not so much. I’m wondering if etailers do/should/can market differently to men and women. Should the structure of the ‘women’s’ section of a site be different than the men’s… is it ever? Is it smarter to package outfits (like Rooms-To-Go or Garanimals) for men but provide accessories and upsells for women? I haven’t seen any sites that sell differently to men than women…then again, I don’t shop for clothing online, either. Maybe (cave)men do.

As more and more companies adopt a user-focused approach, those who are new to the field often interchange terms that sound alike, but are really different. One might argue that it’s just a matter of semantics, but when talking with a user-experience professional, semantics can mean a great deal.

Here’s a quick guide to make sure you are using the right terminology:

Usability
Often times people will say we are working on a “usability project”. This could mean a wide variety of things. Is it a usability test? Is it a website re-design focusing on improved usability? Is it a review of an existing site to identify usability issues? “Usability” has become a catch-all phrase, but it simply refers to how “usable” a function, feature, or entire website is.

User Experience
Now the user “experience” of a website or product is a much more holistic view of things. It’s much more than how easy something is to operate. When you “experience” something you are taking in multiple stimuli, all of which impact the initial and final impression of a user.

This honeycomb diagram probably explains it best. Originally developed by Peter Morville of Semantic Studios, it provides an overview of the different facets of a user-experience.

Useful - Ensuring the solutions and features help users achieve their objectives.

Usable - How intuitive the interaction is based on proven theories and design principles (and validated through testing).

Desirable - The website’s balance between efficiency and aesthetics - how well the site utilizes the power of perception, image, identity, branding, and other elements.

Findable - Designing navigation, content, and page layouts so users can easily find what they need and be confident that they’re on the right path.

Accessible - Ensuring that everyone (including those with disabilities) can access the features without problems.

Credible - Designing elements that will influence whether users trust and believe what the site tells them.

Valuable - Ensuring that what we are creating delivers value to the user.

When you examine the many facets involved in creating a good user-experience, you can easily see that it’s not just about usability. So, if you decide to launch into a re-design because you are trying to fix “usability problems”, take a step back for a holistic view of things. There may be other areas that, if you focus on them, can result in not just improved usability, but a dramatically better user-experience.

Back in June, NBC’s dotcomedy.com launched The Lunch Break Show, a new diversion for those of us that eat at our desk to save time during the day. Arby’s was the sole sponsor and the site is plastered with Arby’s branding and links to their TV commercials. Although it seems to have hit the news release channels back in June, I only recently stumbled across it and found it interesting enough to share the links and some thoughts for any of you who might have missed it the first time around.

The Concept:
The top of the original press release states quite obviously where the idea came from: “According to a recent survey by Kelton Research, nearly 60 percent of office workers in the U.S. spend their lunch breaks at their desks looking for distractions.”

So, it seems that NBC and Arby’s decided to go after this target market by throwing together a 30-minute collection of short segments taken from the previous day’s comedy shows on NBC and inviting office workers to ‘tune in’ between 12:00pm and 2:00 pm to watch the show while eating lunch at their desk.

The Experience:
Open http://www.thelunchbreakshow.com/ in a browser outside the time of 12:00pm - 2:00pm and you will see a page that explains quickly what the show is about and a form to register for email alerts each day before the show begins that only requires a Zip Code and an Email. There is also a countdown to the next show.

Open http://www.thelunchbreakshow.com/ in a browser between 12:00pm - 2:00pm and you will see the video which loops through the 30 minute segment repeatedly, along with a funny little PANIC button.

Thoughts:
I love the idea, it got me interested enough to try it out, but I had some problems with the experience.

Design - I enjoyed the website design and loved the funny little Panic button that pops-up a screen with numbers and lines all over it to make it look like you are doing something important.

Email Reminder - The email comes at 9:30am for me, and there is no way that is going to help me remember the show at lunch. It is buried in my email by that time, and I have to consciously think about the show and go and dig up the email to find the link. (If I haven’t bookmarked or tagged it already)

The Video – The video has some great spots in it each day, and I can always find something to chuckle at. However, you can’t pause it, rewind it, or skip ahead. Here comes the rub. I get what they are trying to do. However, I find it hard to believe that the same people who are clicking around online for entertainment at lunch can’t pause and rewind TV at home with some sort of DVR. I found it very frustrating. A colleague came up to me and asked a question during the show, and I missed something I wanted to hear, and couldn’t pause it or rewind it and I wasn’t about to wait another 30 minutes to catch that segment again.

So to wrap things up, I enjoyed the website and the video, but ultimately got turned off by the lack of ability to interact with the video. I wonder what their drop-off statistics look like because it feels as if they missed the mark a bit on how their demographic would want to interact with the site once they actually got there.

Links:

• To give credit where credit is due, I stumbled across it here at MediaPost in an article that gives a few facts about the campaign.
• The original press release
• Lunch Break Show FAQ

Last night, Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path spoke inspiringly to a group of user experience professionals, CHI-Atlanta, about “Experience Strategies.”  Not any ordinary presentation. It reminded me why I care so deeply about user experience and rekindled my vision for it to be not just good but innovative—for it to not just compete but leapfrog competition.  I’m sharing a few high points here and will share more in another post.

Take an Experience-Based Approach
Peter talked extensively about what this means, especially for products–applications, websites, devices, etc.  It’s easy to get mired in technology and features without truly understanding the problem we’re trying to solve and envisioning the experience we’re trying to design.  In the words of Steve Jobs:

When you start looking at a problem and see a simple solution you don’t understand the problem. You keep looking and see how complicated it really is and you are halfway there. The really great person will keep going to find the key underlying principle and create a beautiful, elegant solution that works.

The stage of looking at the problem is one of the most critical and often the most overlooked.  Looking at the problem takes research with real customers/users, understanding the competitive landscape, understanding the brand’s system of customer touchpoints (channels, etc.), and more.  Reflecting thoughtfully on all these considerations helps us find that key underlying principle.  And all this takes time.  (I’m reminded of the CHI 2006 keynote address given by Scott Cook, co-founder of Intuit, where he discussed the culture of innovation.  He views every touchpoint with customers as an opportunity for innovation.)  One of the most compelling examples Peter mentioned was the Nintendo Wii.  Rather than staying in the same features and graphics game as PS3 and XBox, Wii changed the game by introducing physicality—and has outsold the competition in huge numbers ever since.

Employ Experience Strategy
So how do we apply an experience-based approach?  Largely by articulating an experiential goal and sticking to it. Peter also noted it tends to be where business value and experience opportunities align.  This doesn’t have to be expressed in reams of documentation.  It can be a few paragraphs or a few words.  Its purpose is to remind everyone what the end experience should be.  Peter artfully described many examples, but I am simply noting a few here:

• Kodak camera (in 1884): You press the button, we do the rest.
• Flickr: Articulated on their About page. 
• Google Calendar: Shown on the AdaptivePath blog.

Think Systems—And Leverage Them
Perhaps my favorite part of the presentation, Peter described how a customer experiences not just a product but a system.  The system is comprised of the brand/company’s processes, or channels (web, paper, IVR / call center, store, etc.), or more.  The product is just an interface to access the system.  For example, the iPod itself doesn’t have much functionality.  It’s the iPod device (to access the media) and iTunes software (to manage and buy the media) together that make the system, albeit a system Apple tightly controls.  A more complicated but still tightly controlled system is Target’s prescription bottle and communication system.

More complicated still are the multiple channels of a financial services company he encountered when designing its website.  The danger there, Peter warned, is treating the channels as silos, not as a system.  This partitioned view results in a fractured experience for the customer. It burdens the customer to figure out the system, rather than burdening the system to help the customer.  I cannot stress how important this point is for large companies and big brands, especially those offering services.  Designing the experience for a single website or application is good.  Designing the experience across channels is what leapfrogs competition.