24 Nov 2009 1008H

New thoughts on shopping carts and the e-commerce experience

Today observed my wife shopping online and cussing out the webpage at checkout. You see, she is one of the many people — not a majority of users certainly, but definitely a persona to be designed for — out there who I observed at Sears, MyGofer, Hallmark, Borders, Wilton, so on — who use the shopping cart as a kind of basket: they put things in as a kind of temporary holding area for later decision making. Later, right before checkout, as they review the cart, they remove the items that they don’t immediately want. Now if I were running the e-commerce strategy, this group of customers is not one I would ignore. They have already increased your lift, so, what you want is to push them to convert, perhaps by incentivising them to do so via special combination offers, such as Amazon has been offering for some time: Buy this item A and this item B together for $XX.XX and so on. Another thing I would do is probably to allow users to do a visual comparison in the cart, without taking the users back to the detail pages for those items. I might use a kind of special view of the cart to do this or preview in place. Now, originally I had deplored the use of the cart for anything more than a confirmation page directly proceeding to the checkout flow funnel, but, I have come to realize that the cart represents this opportunity, untapped, to press the advantage. Perhaps it is there that I would position the offer to buy both for a special price, or buy all the items at a special discount for same type items.

Permanent link to New thoughts on shopping carts and the e-commerce experience

Filed under Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Strategy, User Experience

Respond »

19 Nov 2009 0748H

Experiential design in video games

Great article in the New York Times about the search for a great differentiating experience in video game design: Can DIY Supplant the First Person Shooter?

Permanent link to Experiential design in video games

Filed under Interaction Design, Technology, User Experience

Respond »

30 Oct 2009 1003H

30 second review in iTunes

Whoever designed this bit of interaction is worth their weight in gold. The feature — new to iTunes 9? — lets you reverse 30 seconds, an extremely helpful feature for audiobooks particularly. May have been one of these things you learn only by observing users.

Permanent link to 30 second review in iTunes

Filed under Interaction Design, Technology, User Experience

Respond »

28 Oct 2009 1429H

On great user interfaces

Great UI work can’t be done after the fact. Great UI can’t be a patch to things. It can only happen as a result of deep understanding of user needs and user testing. Once the product is rolled out, it’ll take a revolution to change what’s in place.

Permanent link to On great user interfaces

Filed under Interaction Design, Product Design, Usability, User Experience

Respond »

01 Sep 2009 1616H

So, what have you been up to?

Sit down, kiddies . . . listen to your ol’ Uncle Gene tell you a story. A little over a year ago, I stopped freelancing at Sears Online Services, where I’d been working for a beta service that Sears was looking at growing called MyGofer.com. We — meaning a team of about three IAs and a lead — were able to pull off a number of online shopping innovations which actually translated to the direct commerce site before tough economic times resulted in their circling the wagons. Quite surprisingly saw some assets archived that I and Ben Watson cut back in 2000 while working for Viant, don’t know what kinda holiday they were keeping that for!

Shortly thereafter interviewed with a bunch of different places: Amazon, which has a grueling interview process, and would have been quite exciting, except it seemed they weren’t interested so much in a user experience person as they were in someone who was more a designer who had UX chops; Critical Mass, which seemed very ad agency and interactive marketing driven, not much for usability and user experience practice; passed the stringent hiring process at TandemSeven, only to find no job waiting for me at the end due to the economic climate; talked to Fry, which seemed much like Brulant; talked to Acquity Group, which has great people, but the job was clearly not a good match for either of us. There were a lot of conversations that led nowhere. A lot of resumes submitted electronically, a lot of hustling. Finally got some work at Manifest Digital, which was alright, actually, took care of a bunch of us after a gig fell through after starting, and paid pretty well for a few months. Around October or so, I was very surprised to be approached by a recruiter for Siemens in the deep northwest suburbs, and started talking to them, and was faced with a pretty technical interview, but, clearly passed and was hired in short order. And since then it’s been a pretty interesting time.

It is at once disorientingly different and similar in strange ways. Because I am no longer working in e-commerce but in healthcare, on medical devices, the goals are of course quite different. We’re not developing methodologies either to pressure people into buying more or how to make it easier to find or buy things, aka, increasing lift and flow. We are however still helping users to achieve tasks and goals through interactions with an application. What we’re doing here is definitively traditional applications development, which doesn’t have web conventions, or the kinds of behaviors built into it that we’ve learned from the tens of millions of user behavior observations over the last 10 or more years. But then too, so many people have cast their lot onto the web that often times the desktop application development side has been overlooked as a result. I may take a course at Cooper Interaction Design in the near future, and there is a conference for improving the usability design of medical devices in Virginia later this month.

Mostly my disappearance from correspondence with you, my beloved readers, is due to me becoming familiar with this new work and the processes that we must undergo to ensure that the product gets launched in a safe and timely fashion. Our in-house process is fairly heavyweight, with oversight from peers and management and also compliance with international engineering and safety design standards, and the documentation process is also quite heavyweight as well. There have been things I haven’t had to design for before, such as whether or not an audible signal meets a sufficient level of loudness in decibels, or, a setup with two monitors. The team I work with has a mix of hardware and software competencies, people who came from other parts of the company from overseas, and there are clinical experts on staff. There are challenges working with an international team located at our headquarters in Forchheim, in Bavaria, Germany as well as in Bangalore in the state of Karnataka in India, the greatest of these is getting in the same time zone so we can get on the same page. Even though the common corporate language is English, I often find that a good interaction design diagram in the form of the particular kind of wireframes we learned to make at Sears Online Services (by way of Orbitz and so on) might makes things more helpful. But this requires that people be taught how to read them, and even when we used these diagrams at Sears, I didn’t think that the offshore team understood this stuff all that clearly. We’ll have to try a few approaches. I did show my German counterparts how we do this work here, and I don’t think they use the same methodology as I saw a few powerpoint presentations that demonstrate interaction. But none of these challenges is insurmountable, although, it does require quite a bit of time.

There have been plenty of site visits in the last year to meet with doctors, nurses, applications support and trainers. There are regulatory bars within this industry against gifts or tokens even for usability testing. Observing users is the same as usual, tasks, discount usability, so on, which is complicated by the kind of users we deal with. Perhaps the most disconcerting thing has been those moments when a patient is wheeled into the laboratory for an emergency procedure, or seeing an already very ill patient during a procedure, and usually the intervention must take place then or surgery for bypass must be scheduled immediately. It is at that moment that you realize that the kind of work that you are doing is important, far more important than almost anything else you have ever done in your life, because you are crafting tools that will enable someone to make decisions about someone else’s life. If that person was related to you, or was you yourself, wouldn’t you want that tool to be as precise and as easy to use as possible? And so, for all my complaining, I actually find myself quite deeply engaged in the work that I feel I should have been doing all these years.

Permanent link to So, what have you been up to?

Filed under Interaction Design, Product Design, Technology, User Experience, Work

Respond »

07 Jul 2009 0847H

Na hören Sie mal

Jemand muss die Interaktion zwischen dem Benutzern und dem System angeben. Sonst macht man nur Grafikdesign.

Permanent link to Na hören Sie mal

Filed under Interaction Design, Product Design, Work

Respond »

28 Apr 2009 1844H

Doing no harm

Interestingly — I may have said this on another blog — “do no harm” appears nowhere in the Hippocratic Oath. It is believed that the words stem from the Epidemics of Hippocrates:

“The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future - must mediate these things, and have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm.”

I am learning all manner of things about our users. See, in my past work, if something went badly, the user didn’t get their purchase. But now, when things go badly, someone could die. That’s the difference between a good and bad user experience here.

Permanent link to Doing no harm

Filed under User Experience

Respond »

19 Apr 2009 0724H

from “Beijing Modern”

‘‘Too often contemporary Chinese art is rooted in Western traditions,’’ he says. ‘‘Even my education was Western.’’ (Shao’s parents, acclaimed painters, began giving him painting lessons when he was 3.) ‘‘True contemporary Chinese art must evolve from Chinese traditions,’’ he says. ‘‘It must have a Chinese soul.’’

Link

Permanent link to from “Beijing Modern”

Filed under Design

Respond »

04 Mar 2009 2254H

Wow, what a difference a few months makes. . .

Long story short, work and non-work are conspiring to take time away from the blog and quite a few other things I used to do to while away the lonely hours alone. The big thing is that I recently took a trip to Germany to visit the HQ and learn about their UX practices, and all this on top of what I am doing here with the Axiom Sensis recording solution for cath labs. I’ll try and collect my thoughts about the experiences I’m having but in the meantime, hang in there. Hope you all are well and we’ll talk soon.

Permanent link to Wow, what a difference a few months makes. . .

Filed under User Experience

Respond »

10 Feb 2009 2159H

1 million Xbox users running the Netflix service

That’s a lot of users. I know our family’s done our fair share of contributing to those minutes. It works pretty darn good, except, you can’t pick your movies in XBox Dashboard, you have to go to Netflix and put them in queue, which is half-assed, being a political decision to not cannibalize from Microsoft’s own video service on XBox. The quality is very good, all things considering, and the application seems to take into account highly dynamic network conditions. The other problem is that Netflix almost doesn’t want you to use their view-on-demand service: their IA on there is such that you really have to dig for movies to see what is available to view immediately and what is not, perhaps they are equally afraid of cannibalizing their own lucrative DVD rental service. I mean, God forbid you should want to make it easy to rent movies. So despite these two roadblocks which would have scuppered any other fledgling service, the whole enterprise is surprisingly popular. I expect it won’t be too long before that old commercial comes true, the one where you can order any movie ever made and have it instantaneously available wherever, whenever.

Permanent link to 1 million Xbox users running the Netflix service

Filed under Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Strategy, Technology, User Experience

Respond »

« Older entries Newer Entries »