If we build it, they will complain. (John Morris)

Ah yes, transfer users. If you’ve never heard that phrase before, it’s really just a fancy way of identifying users who are moving from one system to another. Upgrading your iPhone? You’re a transfer user. Reacting to that redesign of Facebook? You’re a transfer user. Trying to adjust to that new software program at work that replaced the one you’d been using for 10 years? You’re a transfer user.

And one thing we know about transfer users is that they will squawk. They could be moving from steam-powered mainframes to gestural AI systems that read your brainwaves, and you can be as sure as the dawn that your users will protest, grumble, whine, bleat, carp, cavil, grouse.

Face it, it’s just human nature. People just don’t like change. Now, there are a whole bunch of fancy psychological ideas to support this concept – status quo bias, loss aversion, the endowment effect – but it’s just the way people are.

Think of the all the old idioms that describe just this situation. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Old habits die hard. The leopard can’t change his spots. And my particular favorite, Don’t move my cheese! Believe me, I’ve seen a lot of cheese-moving over the years.

How to get around the problem? Jared Spool is a big proponent of incremental change. I can highly recommend his article The Death of the Major Relaunch. 

Having worked on many major corporate rollouts over the years, I can also recommend putting together a serious communication plan. Tell your users what’s happening, when’s it going to happen, and why it’s going to be happen. Tell them these things in several different ways. Tell them these things multiple times.

A final idea is simply to wait. Humans are wonderfully adaptable creatures. That evil abomination that had users storming the corporate gates with torches and pitchforks might well have turned into something that they now can’t live without. Just give it time.

And that’s what I generally tell any team I’m on who is ready to jump off the roof after their relaunch generated less than 100% glowing feedback. Take two weeks or a month or so and look at your feedback again. It’ll probably be just fine. If it’s not, though, that’s when you really need to worry.

Affordances are the baby to skeuomorphism's bathwater. (Dan Wineman)

So, before I do anything else, let me define a couple of terms. First, there’s the ghastly “skeuomorphism.” According to Google, it’s simply an “element of a graphical user interface that mimics a physical object.” They offer examples from note-taking apps, such as “yellow legal pads, squared paper, ring binders, etc." 

Skeuomorphs were at one time very popular parts of UIs. In fact, they were rather central in helping early users move from a world they were familiar with (e.g., the office) to one they were not.

Obviously, they can be overdone. Mimicking rich Corinthian leather for an online address book is a great example of a skeuomorphic design element that really doesn’t add anything, and that probably just gets in the way and looks a little cheesy as well. 

Other examples, however, include rather valuable elements, such as radio buttons, buttons with beveled edges, and tabs. Yes, these things mimic the physical environment. But they also help the user an awful lot. That beveled edge? It says, “Click me.” The radio buttons? They say, “Click one of me.” Tabs? They say, “click me for information on the topic listed.”

In this regard, these elements act, not just as skeuomorphs, but as “affordances” as well. And what, pray tell, are those? According to Don Norman, who first applied the term to software, affordances are “the perceived and actual properties of the thing that determine just how the thing could possibly be used.” Knobs on doors are made for turning. Light switches are made for flicking on or flicking off. Buttons are for pushing. They don’t need instructions. They’re not going to be misused.

So, where’s the problem? You can get rid of the wood grain and still make your buttons look clickable, can’t you? I mean, seriously, can’t you?

Well, according to the proponents of “flat design” (another term), you cannot. They’ve taken the horrors of faux leather and wood grain and mixed them in with the useful things, like buttons that look like buttons, field that look like fields, and tabs that look like tabs. And, unfortunately, those proponents are people with names like Microsoft, and Google, and Apple. Sigh … Hopefully, the pendulum will swing back again one of these days.

So, which light switch would you prefer to use?

The users of your product are experts in what they do and how they do it. (Whitney Quesenbury)

Google isn’t exactly helping me here, but I recall a story about a bunch of philosophers sitting around debating how many teeth hen have. Of course, all of them had great arguments about what that number might be, but none of them actually went outside and checked a chicken.

I’m struck sometimes how much some of my meetings over the years have resembled that conclave of philosophers. In general, the syllogism goes something like this:

1. I’m a user
2. I have teeth
3. All users have teeth

Honestly, sometimes I feel that usability engineers are the only ones who want to go find a chicken and pry open its mouth. Yup, we tend to be the empiricists in this matter.

Now, a lot of this comes from simply doing usability tests. It’s amazing what you can learn about - not only the particular subject matter of the test, but all sorts of things about your system, your users, and people and technology in general. Do that a hundred times a year over so many years and, yup, you do get to know those chickens pretty well.

An even more effective method, though, is through field studies. Now, you may know these as “ethnographic studies” or “contextual inquiry,” but all they really involve is simply watching people doing their thing in their own environment. I’m definitely not a purist when it comes to these things, so I typically have no problem just making them a glorified interview. However you do it, you’re sure to get a lot out of it. And no matter who runs 'em.

Oh, by the way … Hens? They don’t have any teeth. Believe me – I just looked.

(not Whitney, by the way)

Supposing is good, but finding out is better. (Samuel Clemens)

My life is full of conjecture. Now, some of it is often quite intelligent, and very well informed. That said, it is still someone’s opinion.

How can we get things out of the realm of conjecture? Well, one sure way is to rely solely on the numbers. And that’s where web analytics comes in.

One thing that web analytics sometimes misses, though, is the story behind the numbers. Yes, the users do seem to be dropping like flies on page 3 of the signup process. Why there though? What is happening on that page that makes them want to bail? What’s the story behind that?

Interestingly, there are plenty of companies and teams out there who, though they might be totally numbers-based up to this point, have no problem whatsoever abandoning that approach and conjecturing to their hearts’ content as to what those numbers might mean. And that kind of conjecture is typically no more informed or insightful than straight conjecture without any numbers. In other words, if you don’t watch it, there’s a good chance you’ll get pet peeves, “focus groups of one,” HIPPOs (highest paid person’s opinion), and anecdotes – instead of insightful, informed opinion.

Now, there are also groups out there who supplement their analytics with survey data. They might, for example, mine the survey data to find anything that might point to possible problems on that page 3.

And you can get even closer by providing a “give feedback” link on that page or by throwing in an intercept survey. The latter simply asks the user why they’re bailing. If it’s not pitched like pleading, you should get some pretty decent  feedback from it.

Another method, on the other hand, is to do some usability testing. A usability test always gets at the why. Just go ahead and put your users in the same position as those who were giving you your original analytics, ask them to think aloud, and see what you get. I highly recommend it.

Mark Twain doing some early man-machine studies

Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. (Albert Einstein)

So, what happens when you make it “simpler”? It’s a little counter-intuitive, but you can actually make things more complex. Let me explain …

In general, usability engineers worry about the opposite. The systems and sites we test and evaluate are often the product of design by committee, corporate turf wars, and designing for the exception. They’re typically bloated, speak in another language than the user’s, and are clear and obvious only in the mind of some engineer or developer. 

A team that has started to design this complexity out of their solutions is a team that is in on its way to greatness. Sometimes, however, you actually can go too far. 

For some reason, I often find this to be the case with teams that are heavy on the graphic design side. These folks are often concerned with clutter and detail, striving instead for a clean, crisp interface that meets their aesthetic values. And this makes sense. Just ask yourself … Who is the better artist – Henri Matisse or Hieronymous Bosch? Now, whose interface would you prefer to use?

Graphic designers usually pare down their interfaces by reducing detail. Sometimes, though, that detail serves a real purpose. So, what a graphic designer might see as unnecessary frou-frou really might actually be genuinely meaningful to a user. In fact, that frou-frou might actually be a valuable affordance.

Take the Metro, or flat, school of UI design (please!). Before flat design came along, a button on a screen looked like a button on a physical device. It looked like it had three dimensions. It practically begged you to push it. In flat design, though, all that detail is gone. A button is now just a rectangle with some words in it. As such, there’s nothing that really says, “push me.” Heck, it might just as well say, “here is a field with some information in it,” or “type in me,” or “here’s a box with a word in it for some reason.”

In a review meeting, one of the many eCommerce  directors I’ve worked with over the years once said that something “was so simple it was hard.” Though that does sound a little like something that Yogi Berra might have said, I think she may even have had the drop on Einstein when it comes to getting this important idea across.

 

Can you guess who is who?

Einstein also said:

• "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."
• "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."
• "If I had one hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about the solution."

A word is worth a thousand pictures. (Bruce Tognazzini)

I’m assuming he was referring to icons in this case. And the thing that icons have going against them – at least when compared to the average picture – is their almost total lack of detail. Compare, for example, the Sistine Chapel ceiling with the hamburger icon (you know, that thing with three lines in the upper right corner of a lot of your apps). Heck, compare a printer icon with the hamburger icon.

I’ve noticed a real turn in the wrong direction relative to icons lately. To me, they seem to be getting more and more streamlined, causing users to have a harder and harder time interpreting them. They kind of remind me of acronyms in that way. Now, acronyms are an elegant, time-tested way to express a lot of meaning in a very small space. Unless, of course, you don’t know what they mean. And, then, acronyms become totally uninterpretable.

Now, I’m sure this move to icons is due primarily to how our screens have gotten smaller and smaller over time. That said, I am starting to wonder if this whole thing hasn’t taken on a life of its own.

In addition to giving us less space to play with, another thing the move to smaller screens has encouraged is a real reliance on graphic design. I attribute this in turn to the incredible success of Apple, who – of course – owes a lot of their success to their graphic design. Indeed, UI design in this day and age has often struck me as the era of the graphic designer.

One thing I’ve noticed about graphic designers over the years is that they really don’t like words. Now, I’m not all that fond of them either. In fact, I constantly remind the writers I work with that people don’t like to read. I sometimes, think, though, that graphic designers would be more than happy if there weren’t any words on their UIs. 

How else to explain what seem to be an almost visceral reaction against labels on their part? As an example … My company very early on adopted the hamburger icon – long before it had that much currency. Unsurprisingly, users struggled with it. My humble suggestion was to add a label. Boy, did that go over well.

So, here’s the thing with words and pictures ... We need both. If you’ve got an organization that favors one over the other, it’s like driving a two-horse cart with only one of the horses doing the work. Tends to make you run in circles. If nothing else, it sure ain’t very efficient.

Tog, with trademark suspenders

What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things. (Margaret Mead)

I think the perfect example of this is when, at the end of a test, I ask the user how things went. Invariably, they’ll say it went “pretty good.” And they’ll say this no matter whether they aced it, flunked every task I gave them, or – as most commonly happens – fell somewhere in the middle.

I’ll typically also have observers who will hone in on that particular part of the test, citing it as evidence that the users “liked it,” the test went well, and nothing really needs to be changed. This usually only happens for brand-new observers however. I’ve invoked this particular quote so often that I’m pretty sure that anyone who’s sat in on more than a few of my tests has already committed it to memory.

I do also explain, though, that what’s going on has a lot to do with social niceties and – to a lesser degree – the limitations of human memory. I then try to focus them on what actually happened, reiterating that usability tests are task-based.

I also make the point that a task-based test is a real reflection of how people actually use websites. So, yes, Mr. Art Director, when the user says that they liked the colors? They’re really just being nice (or are not sure what else to say).

I’ve also used Dr. Mead’s quote when I need to emphasize the limitations of surveys – including self-reporting, self-selection, and retrospection. And, though I run focus groups myself, I also use the quote to make sure that my team realizes what focus groups are – and are not – good for. Finally, I also use it to make a plug for ethnography, a field that owes a lot to Margaret Mead.

Unfortunately, I cannot use that quote when it comes to web analytics. In fact, I once had a senior exec take a shot at usability testing by firing that quote right back at me. After all, web analytics really are what people do.

After fumbling around a good bit, I was able to make the point that this is one time where the “say” part of the equation is pretty darn important. In a usability test, what the user says while he completes his task lets us know what’s going on in his brain – he’s looking for x when we call it y, he’s looking at the top of the page when we put the button at the bottom, he thinks he’s finished but there’s one more step he needs to take. And analytics might not tell you any of that. And that's why this particular quote is still one of the best ones in my armory.

Unfortunately, this book has nothing to do with usability