Monday, August 27, 2018

God is on our side, but we can help him. (Rolf Molich)

One thing I always liked about doing usability is the knowledge that we are fighting the good fight. In our own small way, we are actually helping to make the world a better place. 

I mean, it’s not like we’re curing cancer here, but we are doing our own little part. If we make some poor user’s life a little bit easier, we are part of the solution – and maybe can even sleep a tiny bit better that night.

It’s not that there aren’t challenges in this space though.

For one thing, the battle isn’t over when you’ve run a test, or created a report, or delivered that report. Resistance is just human nature, whether the result of pride, stubbornness, or just plain laziness. You have to do a little selling, if not some follow-up and then even more selling. Hey, if that great suggestion of yours is actually going to help anybody, it’s gonna have to be implemented, right?

There is also a challenge that is fairly new to our work. It used to be that usability and UX were primarily about making a user’s tasks easier to do. These days, though, there seems to be a real emphasis on selling things – get ‘em in the funnel, get ‘em to click the call to action, get ‘em signed up, take their money …

Now, a more streamlined process is what users often want themselves. I’m really surprised, though, how often that’s not the case. Often, they want a little bit more information on something before they sign up. They might click on Apply Now just to see what the process is like. Quite often, they’ll even want to call to get their questions answered. 

Personally, I know I’ve often been the victim of buyer’s remorse on the Internet. I tend to be an impatient, slapdash kind of buyer to begin with. As a result, my garage is now full of stuff that wasn’t quite what I thought it would be. 

There is, however, often an additional result, something which is often not talked about. In addition to the cluttered garage, I’m also often left with a bad taste in my mouth, especially around the brand of the company whose website I was on or whose product I bought. So, congrats, guys. You got the sale. Unfortunately, though, you also lost the customer. Honestly, short-term thinking like that drives me crazy sometimes.

In general, I think it’s great to offer a streamlined process for those who want one. At the same time, though, we also need to provide the details that another set of potential personas need, want, and expect. Just include that information in a link, or on another page, or in some fashion that doesn’t necessarily slow down those first users. Heck, you might even make even more sales that way!


Buy before midnight tonight!  Not sold in stores!



 Also from Rolf:

Tuesday, August 21, 2018

While hard data informs the intellect, it is soft data that builds wisdom. (Henry Mintzberg)

Sometimes I feel like a Freudian analyst in a Big Pharma world. Bear with me on this metaphor …

We are so awash in hard data these days – just like we are awash in psychotropic drugs. Now, while both of them are actually pretty good at treating symptoms, we’re not always sure how they did so or how we got ourselves into a situation where something needed to be fixed in the first place. There’s definitely some why missing in both cases.

As an old-fashioned usability engineer, though, I place great value on the why. If nothing else, I figure that, if we know why something didn’t work, we have a much better chance of not doing that again on the next project. 

And sometimes that why really needs to sink in too. I know, for example, with writers, it usually takes more than a few tests for them to finally realize that people really just don’t want to read their stuff. Once they “get it,” though, they can then incorporate some ways to make their copy more attractive – slimming it down; supporting scanning and skimming by using lists, bolding keywords, chunking, using more headers … 

Would we ever have figured that out, however, just from combing through web analytics? I doubt it. Similarly, it’s nice that an SSRI is helping you sleep and feeling better, but it’s not going to be much good and getting at the issues you have with your mother. 

That last bit brings up a very important point. Most therapists these days try to combine the two methods – prescribe a drug to handle the symptoms, then work on the issues so that the symptoms don’t come back when the drug is eventually taken away.

So it is in UX. Use your data to identify problems (a poor conversion rate, say). Then, use good, old-fashioned usability testing to see where those problems come from (e.g., too many steps). Finally, use data again to see if the solutions you came up with (fewer steps) actually addressed the problem (a better conversion rate).


Henry Mintzberg is a biz school prof at McGill

Monday, August 13, 2018

It is difficult to see the picture when you are inside the frame. (Wendell Castle)

It’s really hard to believe I’m fighting this battle again. 

One of the principles of Design Thinking, though, seems to involve designers testing their own stuff. They are encouraged to do this in full-on guerilla mode – grabbing people in coffee shops and thrusting screen shots in front of them.

Now, I will admit that their heart is at least in the right place. They are getting some feedback. It's also good for the designers to interact with their actual users. And, finally, I’m all for informal methods.

This is not, however, usability testing. First, testing cannot be done just by anyone. There are some real skills involved, skills that need to be seen, learned, practiced, and critiqued. It is very easy to bias your user, to ask the wrong questions, to intervene at the wrong point, to generally muck things up. Heck, I’ve seen my share of “professional” usability engineers who couldn’t get it right.

I’m also a firm believer that it takes a certain kind of personality as well. I’ve mentored a lot of folks over the years who have expressed an interest in becoming a usability engineer. Some people were total naturals. Others (often because they were too extroverted, or impatient, or unfocused) struggled and struggled.

Second, humans are simply not very good at objectivity. There are dozens of proven cognitive biases that show this – the IKEA effect, confirmation bias, the backfire effect, belief persistence, denial … And based on the resistance I sometimes get from mere observers, I can’t imagine that having those folks leading the tests instead of me could possibly do anything other than make things worse. 

One of the stories I like to tell in this regard involves a favorite designer of mine who was asked to play the “computer” (i.e., shuffle the papers) in a test of a paper prototype. His body language was comical. At one point, he actually spun around in his chair when the user, who had been struggling mightily with a task, finally got it right. A brilliant designer who has since gone on to a very successful career, I might add. I wouldn’t ask him to test his own stuff though. Heck, it would probably never occur to him to do so anyway. 

Tell you what … Give the usability engineers the tests and we’ll let you guys do some of the upfront research. It’s a lot harder to muck that up, plus it can really help you get to know and build empathy with your user. Just stay away from your designs though. And don’t be afraid to ask us for advice.


I have to give this guy credit, as Wendell Castle was actually a designer himself (and of art furniture, no less)

Tuesday, August 7, 2018

No one ever listened himself out of a job. (Calvin Coolidge)

Boy, people sure do love to talk. For a usability engineer, though, that’s a great thing. If they didn’t do that, the think-aloud method would have never seen the light of day, and I’d have probably had a career doing something else entirely.

I probably don’t need to tell you all that however. In the lab, listening is our main duty. Not only do we need to listen though. We also need to listen in the right way. 

You’ve probably heard of active listening before. It’s really just a set of behaviors we can use to make sure that listening isn’t just simply a matter of waiting for our turn to speak. It includes things like demonstrating attention, monitoring body language, paraphrasing, asking open-ended questions, probing, and watching for emotional impact. And that’s a great start. 

Some other things we can do include simply shutting up. (I’ve often said the best tests are the ones where I don’t say “boo.”) And when we do intervene, we need to be brief and completely unbiased. Our real job is simply to keep the user talking. Three particularly valuable tricks (which I learned from Judy Ramey, at the University of Washington) include:

  • Simple saying “uh-huh”
  • Echoing what the user just said (“You like that feature …”)
  • Repeating the user’s incomplete verbalization (“You think that …”

What usability engineers sometimes forget, unfortunately, is that they can apply those same skills outside the lab as well. And, when I say that, I’m not just referring to on-site testing or field studies either.

We can definitely use those same skills when we interact with the people we work for and with. An obvious spot to do so would be a stakeholder interview. It can also, though, come in handy in meetings, phone conversations, hallway drive-bys, and in pretty much any interaction we might have.

In fact, at this point in my career, I’ve become so good at it that I have colleagues jokingly accuse me of pulling “jedi mind tricks” on them. And, who knows? Maybe they’re right.




Our 30th president was after all
also known as “Silent Cal”