16 Jul 2008 0814H

Design Can Change; Interaction Design Supporting Sustainability

Maybe you all have seen this site, Design Can Change, from SmashLab in Vancouver, but I just tripped over it the other day. It’s a good read, and I think we’re all looking at ways to make changes as we can in the work we do.

A new society will require all kinds of people, as Steve Louie once told me, and I think this means we don’t leave environmental care to a handful of steward activists but really take it upon all of ourselves to make a change. For instance, recently these two young guys down at Bloomington’s informatics department won an award for interaction design in support of sustainability. To be honest, “sustainable interaction design” (PDF, 482.7KB) sounded wacky to me at first, but, the more I think about it, there are all these little things we can start building into our designs, in the interest of libertarian paternalism, to encourage sustainability.

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Filed under Design, Environment, Interaction Design, Product Design, Strategy, Visual Communications

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15 Jul 2008 1049H

Randy Pausch lecture

This is a fantastic talk, the condition of the lecturer notwithstanding, which incidentally has really great relevance for user experience:

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08 Jul 2008 0735H

Using old sites for benchmarking

In attending a UIE webinar two weeks ago I think it was (on designing to accommodate information foraging), it became apparent to all of us in the room that the site examples were about 10 years old, dotcom era relics already relegated to the historical dustbin of the Internet Archive. Was the information relevant? Of course it was: the older sites tend to have a higher number of apparent design problems and so are quite easy pickins. Besides, you don’t necessarily want to give your work away as I occasionally do on the site by using a contemporary, live example. So raid that Archive!

In other news, I’m a little late on this reviewing of Montauk Sofa, but, rather busy here at the Empire of Lampert, and also, getting married in a few weeks. Forgive me.

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12 Jun 2008 0706H

But what happens if you DO happen to be the user?

The famous UX tenet is, “we are not the users.” Let’s not take that so literally. The spirit of that statement, for all the fundamentalists out there, is to avoid making judgments about whole groups of people’s behaviors solely on personal proclivities alone.

Now, if you happen to fall into the neighborhood of people that form a persona, that still doesn’t give you the right to say, “I like blue, and I shop this way, so everyone else shops this way, so everything should be blue, and we’ll design it so that it accommodates my individual prefs, since I am, after all, this persona.”

Um no. We can use our experiences as a springboard sure, but, a far more rigorous practice is to assume nothing and remove one’s self from the pool of data so that we can truly have a representative idea of what user behaviors are like in the aggregate.

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09 Jun 2008 0850H

Destroy the Web 2.0 Look and Feel

By way of my colleague Mark. Wholeheartedly agree.

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04 Jun 2008 2214H

Do you make things? Real things?

So I get this email from this guy today. I usually don’t help out grad students generally. As a former academic I try not to get involved now. But the ghost of Victor Papanek won’t let me ignore this one. He said once, “There are professions that are more harmful than industrial design, but only a few.”

Again, I happen to agree. Packaging. Disposable goods. Built-in obsolescence instead of modular designs that can be replaced and recycled. We’re choking to death on our own trash. We send our people back and forth on business trips on planes and in hotels and cars. We burn megawatts on our computers and data connections. The endless prototyping. Our carbon footprint grows ever broader. We not only consume, but we produce. Designers have become an integral part of the problem. Surely we can do better as a civilization, as a species. But then too if we are problem solvers as we claim to be, was it an accident that we went to the moon, or can see into the edge of time? This too was design. If we have created the problem, we can uncreate it.

If you read this blog, you likely also believe that design will save the world. You can be start being part of the solution. I’m going to quote the guy’s email now:

“This research stems from the impression that there has been a lot of academic research telling designers what they should be doing with regards to the environment during their work, but much less research that explores the reality of product design to understand the perspectives of those actually doing it. This work aims to be neutral (we are not necessarily promoting environmentalism in design) and completely anonymous (no participant or their organization will be identified in published work).

“I am seeking feedback from anybody associated with commercial product design, whether designers, product managers, executives, or academics. I would appreciate your help in publicizing the following survey:

Environmentalism in Product Design - http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=GX2eBbTIjDNKVSo09T3bBQ_3d_3d

“Participants will be entered to win a 100$ gift certificate to Amazon.com.

“The project tries to get a snapshot of the current use of environmental tools in product design. What tools are designers using? At what stage of the design process are these tools being used? Is the purpose to reduce material use? Toxicity? Energy consumption during product use? None of the above? What are the business drivers and barriers for environmentalism in product design?

“For more information visit http://www.ginkgoproject.com/“

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04 Jun 2008 0633H

UX dojo-storm-redux: Montauksofa.com

New splash screen

Back in ‘06 we looked at Montauk Sofa site, but it’s been redesigned since then. The Montauk Sofa brand, which is ostensibly an luxury furniture brand, was being represented by a simply bad website. It seems, given the fairly high position of this site’s review on the Google search results, that someone finally listened. We’re gonna take a look over the next week at the parts that changed.

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02 Jun 2008 0624H

UX-dojo-storming PotteryBarn.com

Oh. Looks like W-S brands’ UX & Dev teams down at the north end of Van Ness have been hard at work lately. Let’s look the numbers:

We are all trying to get this right. Yes yes. Oftentimes we make decisions to get us down the road towards where we are trying to go even if they seem like detours away from the customer-centered path. It’s easy to criticize if you’re not working in that environment: I understand all that. And anyone who has worked in online retail for any amount of time should know that too. So with that disclosure, purely in the interest of competitive spirit, let’s look at what they’ve done across their brands, since they too, like the Gap, share code across the different web properties:

Ginormous hero image

Ginormous hero image. What’s so special about this image that it has to take up 2/3rds the height of the screen (which is still accommodating 800 x 600, by the way) and flush left, not centered at that? Trying to get a piece of the Crate & Barrel pie, eh? They need to get in line with everyone else. Sometimes I’m not even sure if the pie’s already been et, as they say in certain parts of this country.

Hidden affordances on mouseover

Ah. As you can see here, they have hidden links within the hero image that present themselves on mouseover. But there are no affordances (little hints that things, like door or faucet handles, can be acted upon and how to act upon them) on the hero image and no expectation that the mouseover would show that the user can take action on the target. Perhaps that is why the designer or their stakeholders decided to make the image 2/3rds of the height of the screen. You know — subtly hint something could be done here. Ha. Let’s click.

The Collections page

This would seem to be a detail page on first glance. But actually it is a kind of detail page that is a bit wonky since it is both master and detail, subcat and product page. There are actually different kinds of pillows that are on this page. I learned that by scrolling down the page by the way cos I was looking for an add to cart button and a quantity field. Instead all I see are swatches, which we could use further down the page when you are trying to make the comparison, and there’s the shopping info, which isn’t helping me right now either. Where is the compare function anyway?

Pop-up window with the collection

So this is helpful, but the image that gets fired up when I hit the button to view the swatches (and view shipping info should be worded so as to maintain consistency for action buttons) doesn’t entirely fit inside the darn window and you have to scroll to see the detail. It’s nice they have different contexts, sure, but couldn’t this be more appropriate to the context?

Oooh pretty colors

We march on, inexorably, to the colors. Again, I am thinking that these could be more contextual.

Shipping Info.

As could the shipping info. You all did see the PayPal ComScore survey that said people really get turned off at checkout by high shipping costs, right? On eBay, a common seller tactic is to lowball the price but then stick it to you on the shipping. People really pay attention to the shipping costs, which really can only go up as the days of cheap gas are officially over. More so than taxes. But you could move this information elsewhere to be more contextual.

Selecting items.

Advancing down the page, we come to the product details. Here’s where the problems really begin. We saw at the top that the price for the pillows is $25. This is fine for just one — the 18″ pillow — but for the 12″x15″s it’s used to show $25 for each color, unless not available. So this appears to be a code issue where because of the way the page is coded, the iterator pattern is used to write $25 as the price for each color unless it’s not available, in which case no price, but “no longer available.”

There’s a number of lost opportunities here, not the least of which is that here is where you want to show the colors. Is it really necessary to show $25.00 for each pillow? And maybe the only reason why I would show No Longer Available would be to use it as an opportunity to check other PB stores in my area to see if they have any, or email me when this comes back into stock, or some way to get the user to convert.

Here\'s where the colors could\'ve come in helpful

By the way, those bright swatches we saw waaaaay up top? We could really use them here. Did I mention the color swatches already? Avoids bouncing back and forth to the top. Kind of mini-pogosticking.

Selecting Shipping Options

Here’s something interesting. If you select You for the Shipping Options, all the other shipping options change in turn. So there is no ship these pillows here and then ship those pillows there.

Shipping to Yourself

So what happens if we ship these to Other?

Taking the user to the Shipping Page

I’ve been taken to what looks to be a page in the Checkout path to give my Ship To information. Unexpected. Seems odd and out of place here, since it still seems that I’m in the Rugs, Pillows & Windows Page. Wouldn’t this be best in the Shipping Info page for the Checkout instead of interrupting my shopping experience?

What happens when I click Add to Cart?

The cart as lightbox

Actually all the items get added to cart with one add to cart button push (unexpected, but okay) if you have set quantities for each item on the collection page, and add to cart then fires off a lightbox, which is modal (no real reason for it) instead of pogosticking you to the first page in the checkout path.

A good thing working here is that the cart indeed, when fired off, does not have to be pinned top right. Only the affordance for the cart — meaning the cart icon, the word “cart”, the checkout button — needs to be at top right where people expect to find it. Here it is not exactly clear, hidden in plain sight as it is as a kind of link which will take you to the checkout path. But the action of adding to cart is correct, and it shows what has just been added and allows the user to close the thing to acknowledge the action, which, I don’t think is necessary here — it should acknowledge the action and then go away.

Paraphrasing Krug, this stuff is hard to get right. People always make these assumptions that the people behind websites are just crazy, simply irrational, they don’t know what they’re doing. But in reality often times people do have rationales about doing things, even if they don’t wind up doing things right for the consumer online. Maybe someone with more authority leaned on them or made a unilateral call without any data. Maybe it was IT related and the effort to change a process or data was ridiculously expensive. Everyday we deal with highly political environments where we are trying to deal with multiple inputs, from merchants, from business unit owners, from the IT side: this is what it is to work in large corporate settings with lots of people. The important thing is that as a discipline, businesses are starting to understand that their profitability online is inextricably linked to the quality of their user experiences. Now having said all that, because business leaders are still trying to grasp this concept, progress is measured oftentimes by baby steps, and not by the quantum leap that Gap Inc took with its user experience back in ‘05, which even that likely required months of planning in advance.

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Filed under Information Architecture, Information Design, Interaction Design, Usability, User Experience, Web, Work

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27 May 2008 1702H

Borders.com launches!

And we’re live! Congrats at last to the Brulant team under Adam Cohen who stuck it out in Ann Arbor for the past year and change, the Deloitte guys, and the Borders e-commerce team under Kevin Ertell. All in all, pretty miraculous building up an entirely new business operation wing more or less from scratch. Hard to believe it’s been over a year since I first stepped foot into the corporate offices in Ann Arbor. I personally am going to celebrate by trying to buy books on the very systems that I worked as a user experience architect on, and of course, trying out the various flows which we had fleshed out over hours of reqs sessions.

Edit: Hmm. (Forgot how expensive Borders can be.) I also forgot we designed a flow in there for Ship to Store. Free shipping, 3-8 days! I can wait. Works good. There are some weird interactions with the site remembering me though. Did I sign in during the beta period? Must have. Thought we designed a flow in there so that when you continued as guest, you would be given a chance to save info to your account after checkout. Oh well. R6 perhaps. . . . Did we knock out gifting? Need to review the screen grabs.

The epilogue: Ordered on a Tuesday. Received ship notice Thursday. Said it would arrive by the Tuesday after. No phone call, no email. So was I to assume that one just calls the store? I could have handled that better. Instead I drifted over on Friday. The young lady working the counter seemed unfamiliar with the procedure but produced a ship-to-store binder which I signed duly, without needing to produce info, but I did anyway. And then I had my books. Done done-done done DONE. Couldn’t I use this system to send books to myself  or someone else at a Borders location somewhere else? But of course.

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27 May 2008 0650H

UX Dojo-storming

As a young martial artist, hard to believe, almost 20 years ago, I was told of an old, now deprecated practice called dojo arashi, dojo storming, where by one school would go to another school, usually unannounced, to, uh, test their skills. So in going through the metrics for this site some of the greatest interest is on articles when I’ve gone through and taken a site apart, for FTD and Montauk Sofa, we’re going to do more of these “UX dojo storms” in the future. I have one I’m lining up now, be done before the end of the week. Maybe I’ll try and get someone to guest storm too.

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