User experience is like a delicious cake.  (And I love cake!)   Just as a cake requires a variety of quality ingredients, user experience requires the “good stuff” from many disciplines, ranging from cognitive psychology to communication to information architecture to visual design.  And just as a master pastry chef knows how to combine these ingredients in the right way, user experience experts know how to combine the best and most pertinent aspects of these disciplines, “baking” them into a satisfying experience.

An important, yet sometimes forgotten, ingredient in user experience is effective words.  It sounds so basic—precisely why it’s so important.  Like flour in a cake, words are almost always a part of user experience.  Below are a few principles and simple examples to make a website or interface wordalicious:

Concision – Pick the right words, not more words.
Users don’t typically read; instead, they scan.  Therefore, it’s critical to make the most of the words in an interface by selecting them carefully.   For example, the headlines on news  websites, such as cnn.com, convey the crux of each story in very few words. 

Clarity – Say what you mean.
Again because users scan, it’s important to pick words that are clear to the targeted users.  Generally, simpler words are better than more complex ones. Even if the targeted users are well-educated, they will recognize simpler words more quickly than complex ones.  For example, e-commerce websites say “shop” or “buy” rather than “procure.”

Tone and Brand – More than words.
Just as graphics and colors give a website a certain look and feel that conveys a company’s brand, words convey a company’s brand through tone. One way words create tone is through their connotation—their implied, subjective meanings beyond the dictionary meanings.  It’s important to pick words and phrases with connotations that resonate with users and are consistent with a company’s brand attributes.  For example, Virgin Mobile creates a fun, informal tone through wording, even in its log in instructions.

My wife was perusing Art.com the other day looking to fill the walls of my 9-month old baby’s room.  As I was looking over her shoulder, I couldn’t help but notice how well certain aspects of their interface were designed from a usability perspective.  But then I thought…is it that the page is “usable” or is it “persuasive”?

It’s both really.  But the thing that caught my eye the most was how simple the visual layer was and how it created a perception of usability.  Are there only a few items on the page that make it simple?  NO.  And that is the beauty of it.  In a recent blog post, I talked about the Misconception of Clutter and this site does a great job of illustrating my point.  There are actually a lot of items on each page.  But Art.com has done a great job of stripping away fancy creative elements that don’t serve a purpose and uses the power of visual design to create not just a simple, usable page; but one that subtly persuades users to follow a path towards making a purchase.

They use lots of white and very light grey tones as the base color for the site.  What this does is allow the color they use for their primary calls to action to really pop.  It really makes the eye focus on the primary action, which is Add To Cart.  There is something about that shiny orange button that creates a gravitational pull towards clicking it.  Something about it brings me back to the old dot-com days where anything that looked interesting, made me want to click it just to see what would happen. But the reason why the button brings attention to itself is not just the shiny gradient color, but the absence of color around it.

My point with all of this is that I think the role of the creative designer is often underutilized when it comes to website design.  Everyone wants the site to look good and be consistent with the brand, but the creative designer plays a much more important role in User Experience design.  How information and interaction elements are presented visually are critical in helping the user clearly understand them, as well as persuade them into taking the action we want them to take.  Designers aren’t there just to make things look pretty…although if it’s pretty enough, it might make me want to click it.

Alright, so the nursery rhyme goes slightly differently. Regardless, I couldn’t resist talking more to the Agile process; since another big dogs has realized the benefit. Adobe (of all folk) has announced the success of using an iterative process in the development of CS3.

Clearly, no one process will rule all. But I still reassert that I like the idea of incremental process.

Do a little…
review…
improve…
repeat…

Most modern processes have such a concept, whether TQM, Six Sigma (DMAIC), BPI, or Lean. I couldn’t imagine going into product development anymore that would last 2 months or more without an iterative based approach. It is too easy to misinterpret, miscalculate, and misunderstand client needs and intentions.

Part of the story also speaks to “Bugalaunch” - the death march to release depriving team members of precious sleep, social lives and undoubtedly personal health. Too often it is the unceremonious end to a project to be rewarded with Bug Hell; which I think exists somewhere around the 222nd layer of the abyss.

This made me realize that it makes the job of motivating developers very difficult, since they never really get a clean, clear reward of a product delivered well and gracefully. I mean, in a traditional Waterfall approach, the chances of something going bad and erasing months of hard work is high. Why not allow for incremental “showing off?” The Agile method allows developers to demonstrate the exceptional work they do gradually. If the project does go awry (for whatever reason), the customer would now be aware of all the good work that happened before a major hurdle is reached. They will therefore be more sympathetic, appreciative and understanding of the hard work it then takes to right the project and overcome the hurdle.

Of course, my developers should beware, because I do like the 20 bug rule too.

I’m a picky eater. Always have been. It was a major miracle for my mother to get me to even taste a green vegetable (unless, of course, it was smothered in cheese). In fact, I only considered corn and potatoes as valid, edible veggies. God forbid she try to pawn brussel sprouts (the vegetable of the devil) or rutabaga on me. Though I eventually got over my aversion to nutrition (NOT brussel sprouts), I still maintain some of my eating oddities.

Among them is my sheer disdain for ‘Stuff in Stuff’. I’ve only found one other person who understands this concept, as it has its nuances. In fact, I’m not sure I can fully explain, but here goes: Chocolate chips in cookies, casseroles, chicken cordon bleu, or stuffed shells do NOT constitute Stuff in Stuff. However, nuts in brownies (or any dessert), celery in potato salad (or egg salad or macaroni salad or ANYTHING for that matter), and anything in Jello, DOES. See the difference?? Most don’t. Stuff that ‘belongs’ in other stuff, that blends and melds with other stuff, is NOT Stuff in Stuff. As a whole, it creates the Stuff. Stuff that doesn’t match or can be ‘picked out’ (ok, so salads are an exception, but that’s a dish where EVERYTHING is separate) is Stuff in Stuff.

If you ever see me with a little pile of something at the side of my plate , you’ll know - THAT was Stuff in Stuff. And I don’t like it. Nor do I like anything in life that doesn’t belong with the other stuff that surrounds it. I like things to be consistent, contextual and meaningful. If it doesn’t belong - if it doesn’t create one concept -  then don’t put it in there! It’s Stuff in Stuff.

Of course, I can translate this easily to website content. For instance, if you have a page on your company’s mission, then don’t include information on your history and your board of directors. Too many times I’ve seen that page. It’s almost as if people throw stuff in other stuff simply because they have it and don’t have any place else to put it.

So next time you have that half-a-bag of leftover walnuts, PLEASE resist the urge to put them in your brownies. Save the world from Stuff in Stuff. Unless, of course, you LIKE nuts in brownies. But then you’re just weird.

I’ll try to handle this as tactfully as possible …

Out of the blue one day, a friend of mine declared – with index finger extended – “isn’t it amazing how your finger fits perfectly in your nose?”.  Uh, well, sure.  Not that I’ve ever tried it, of course =).  Finger-in-nose activities aside, he’s right.  I had never thought about that before.  This divine design is no accident.  It’s only until you break your finger and it swells up or you have a splint on it that you notice how perfectly it was *designed* in the first place.

The same holds true for web or interaction design – or any design for that matter.  We walk through doors every day, but we don’t realize how well most doors are designed until we pull on a door that should be pushed, because it had a handle on it (which affords pulling).  As user experience architects, our designs probably won’t ever earn outward praise from users, because ‘good’ simply means it works as it should – seamlessly and to the users’ expectations.  There’s also never one *right way* to design something.  It’s only when something doesn’t work (or something breaks) that design gets noticed.

So, the next time you pull on that push door, or you can’t figure out which way to go at the airport then stop and think about why the design is broken, and what could be done to make it better.

I’m speechless.

I honestly don’t know where to begin. I’m afraid I might get carpal tunnel syndrome from typing up all the usability issues on this website.

http://www.levi.com.sg/copper/index.html

Enjoy.  Comments are more than welcome.  I’d love to start a dialogue about this.

P.S. No offense is meant to the Levi’s brand or the team who built it, but a lively discussion on the blend between creativity and usability is certainly warranted.

The other night, my wife was inquiring about making an appointment somewhere and went online to find a location. I’m being vague about what type of appointment this is because I don’t want to call out the specific website that she encountered, because it had an incredibly horrid usability error. And when I say horrid, I mean it was so bad that it actually prevented a conversion from occurring. Was it a technical error? One would think so, but the error message it gave made it seem intentional.

I took a slice of a screen shot so you could see the error first hand. Check it out…

“Please check spelling of your last name” ????

What? Are you serious? Now this isn’t a login page where it’s possible she was entering an incorrect user name. This is the page you get to after clicking through from a PAID search ad on Google. Above the form it provides an offer and says “Register Now for a Free Consultation”. Clearly the purpose of this website and form is to convert visitors into customers. If this was a technical error, wouldn’t it have said something different like, “Please make sure all fields are completed”? Plus, how are they to know if we had spelled our last name incorrectly or not? Our last name could be Kashingtoniktoriley. Would that be spelled wrong? Oh, okay. Maybe they don’t think we spelled it wrong. So what do they want us to “check the spelling” for? It’s not like we are even using illegal characters. Even if we were, the error message doesn’t say that. It just asks us to “check” it.

Okay, rant over. But this is just a really funny case where had someone checked the site, not to optimize the usability, but at least make sure it was simply usable, the business could be cashing in on many more conversions.

Last week the top internet retailers in the country convened at eTail 2007 to learn what their peers are doing, listen to vendor’s pitches of new products and services, and to commiserate about the state of their industry. In my post from the conference last week I had commented on the recent lack of innovation in online shopping. Over the last three years merchants have moved progressively towards what has become a fairly homogenous online user experience that caters to the same mode of browsing and transacting as each other’s websites. Imitation may be a form of flattery, but if form follows function, then in the case of online shopping, banality follows form.

Online shopping has in reality been reduced to online transacting. Seek this one thing, find that one thing, maybe compare prices, then check out. 1 + 1 = 1.1 = something less than the whole. The building of desire? The premise that shopping should be engaging? Maybe at next year’s eTail. Or the year after that. Or never. Maybe it’s time to accept the fact that this is the business of ONLINE shopping, and not online SHOPPING. Maybe it’s about the medium and not the act?

That’s what it seems like today. The onerous burdens of the internet retailer to streamline technology and operations, to market the site in search engines, to keep their heads above the latest calendar-driven buying surge have driven innovation to the back of the “to-do queue”. Innovation - isn’t that the job of the next technology vendor? A slightly faster search tool, a multivariate test platform, a 0.05% improvement guaranteed or your money back technology elixir. All fine and well. But what if the industry could look out further than this month’s results? What if they could rise above the day to day grind? What is missing? I say at a high level it’s a sense of fun.

Fun? Yes, Fun! Not laugh out loud entertainment, at least not for most types of products. But how about at least a sense of discovery, of desire, of something a level above the pablum of the competition? If there are three basic pillars of online retailing, they would be operational efficiency, marketing efficiency, and conversions. A few retailers have achieved an operational advantage over their competitors via technology, fulfillment processes, and scale. Some have achieved an advantage of driving qualified traffic to their websites through search engines and affiliates. But who has led in conversions? Ask most industry experts and they will point to conversion ratios in order to rate the winners. Click to Product to Cart to Checkout. Mission accomplished in their book. They will pepper that user with some email campaigns, a discount here and there and wait for them to come back. Maybe they will type in the URL this time and save the retailer $1.50 charge from Google.

But what if shoppers came to your site because they really wanted to? What if they experienced something unique, engaging, even dare we say it: fun? There are several ways to express this concept in different terms. What if shopping online was more social, more collaborative, more educational, more engaging? What if ONLINE shopping became online SHOPPING. Or what if someone threw caution, and e.e. cummings, to the wind and capitalized both words, “ONLINE SHOPPING”, and created something worth seeing, doing, and doing again?

I think something is coming to help make online shopping fun. It just isn’t coming from retailers. It’s coming from outsiders like social networks where products can be promoted by buyers’ peers. Its coming from magazine publishers who are going to attack with a vengence. They will not bog themselves down with operational concerns, they will not seek to compete in the traditional online marketing channels as internet retailers, they already have traffic, and they will build more through word of mouth and the nework affect. The good ones will get stronger and more powerful at a very quick pace. These sites will not hold inventory, they will not plow money into google keywords, they will send their qualified, engaged traffic to the online shopping sites, for a fee. Their margins will be in the mid double digits rather than the high single digits of transactional websites.

So when People Magazine realizes that their InStyle website should not look like this but should look like this then users will flock to the site. The magazine will be useful online. It’s already engaging to users offline. Conde Nast is beginning to get it and they have a bevy of content to expand this vision. Scripps gets it and has a powerful stable of multimedia content plays to bring to bear.

These are the companies that help build desire, that help create buzz, that engage their customers through their multiple channels of content. While online retailers are homogenizing their shopping experiences the here-to-fore dormant giants that help build desire, and the new age social networks that have created communities that spread desire are preparing to close in and take the high ground. The high ground of traffic and lead generation. And retail shops will pay, a lot, for that traffic and for those leads, and thereby label themselves as low margin impediments to purchases rather than the high ground of creating desire and providing true value.

It might take a couple of years for this to play out. But I see this as something that will play out. And major retailers with a sense of initiative (and budgets) have a tight window to decide on whether they will invest in content, features and partnerships to bring the “fun” back to shopping. Or resign themselves to being transaction vehicles with an ongoing operational focus.

In the last decade or so, CSS has taken the boring world of markup and turned it into a more colorful world to write in. Before CSS, the “oh so popular” font tag was a regular occurrence. Today, we can create web sites without font tags, or other types of formatting tags, that were needlessly being used. This is all possible thanks to CSS.

We can do all our formatting internally—defining margins, padding, font color, font size or even bolded text. So what could be the next step in the world of markup languages? Let’s start with an example. Say I was HTML, while CSS was my clothing, hair style and - dare I say - piercings. What would my personality and my behavior be like? For those web designers out there, imagine creating an id or class and assigning a particular behavior or personality to it that is an element, not just a style. When assigning an id to a span or div tag, it would look a certain way and behave in a certain way. What would that be like? How would that work?

Let’s go back to my example from before, a web designer who is creating me (remember I am the HTML code), has just finished creating my mouth and even used CSS to add gold teeth to it. Now the designer is thinking “this looks pretty good, now what does the mouth do? Does it move? When I put food in it what does it look like when it chews?” Because these questions cannot be answered with HTML or CSS, the designer is stuck. He could go to the developer and ask him how this would work, but the developer is more concerned with how the food is being digested rather then what it does when it chews. The designer now needs to find a way to add the behavior to his new creation.

By using JavaScript in combination with CSS the designer can now add the necessary functionality to his site and have it look good in the process. Some other designers will tend to use Flash to solve this problem. While Flash is the obvious choice for sites that are 100% Flash driven, it’s becoming less of a practice to use Flash for working on just a small and simple component of the site. The advantage to adding “behavior” to a site using JavaScript is that it allows the site to be more organic, with the remainder of the site and all its components.

Again, let’s go back to my example, where I am the HTML. If the designer were to add Flash to my mouth in order to add “behavior,” this would be the same as taking my mouth and making it robotic instead of flesh and bone. And that would just look weird. I either need to be completely robotic (Flash) or completely flesh and bone. And because JavaScript has the ability to manipulate HTML and CSS, this would provide a more “organic” feel to a web site.