Design Thinking Applied To New iPad App

I came across this good, quick read on design thinking and applying it to launching a new business - in this case the iPad app Pulse from Alphonso Labs. You can read it here. In a nutshell here are the 5 steps:
1)Empathize: Research and understand the end-user - their needs, pains and usage scenarios.
2)Define: Focus on a core niche and then research that niche to define the why and how.
3)Ideate: Brainstorm sessions and innovation.
4)Create Prototype: These can be rough and even Post-It notes. But create something to narrow and code from.
5)Test: Usability test in the real world.

I would add a 6th one here which is to get Steve Jobs to present your app at the launch of iPad...which happened for Pulse. The result of good design or luck? Probably both, but you won't get lucky with bad design!

Ideas On Usability Presentations

So, this could be considered a lazy blog post - a blog post about another blog post. And, this other blog post is about other posts and presentations on usability, so this could be considered extremely lazy on my part.

However, click here for the Useful Usability blog and get links to 5 Radical Ideas From Usability Presentations. There is stuff in here for UX professionals, iPhone developers and tips on presenting research findings. All good stuff.Share it this post around and let us know what radical ideas you have for presenting usability research.

Here is a quick link to the first presentation covered:

Usability 2.0

View more presentations from Greg Bell.

User Research Technologies

Earlier this month the Austin chapter of the Usability Professionals’ Association hosted a panel on user research technologies. One of the attendees, Erin Lynn Young, posted some excellent notes about the evening here.

 

Morae, Uservue, Silverback, Clicktale, VMWare and WebEx were the main technologies covered; however, the open discussion surfaced many other technologies as well – such as TreeJack from OptimalWorkshop and Grupthink for capturing open-ended responses.

 

Morae is our tool of choice for lab-based usability testing here at Sentient. It is actually a suite of products with Recorder, Observer and Manager.

• Recorder – used to record the actual test sessions – is simple to set up, transparent during the actual session and allows for “markers” to be inserted into the recording via quick key shortcuts.
• Observer – used to stream test session live – is easy to connect to Recorder for streaming and allows an observer to insert “markers” into the recording as well.
• Manager – used on the backend for analysis – has robust editing capabilities allowing you to create a story board with analytics and video clips

When we are doing eye tracking in a study (another tool in our user experience arsenal), we use Tobii Studio. It has many of the same capabilities of Morae and adds the additional layer of eye tracking. In analysis, we can create heatmaps (an aggregate image across all participants that represents the eye gaze data of all users viewing a given page) and gaze timelines (an image indicating the path of one user’s eye gaze for the during of each page, view or visual stimulus.

 

 

What tools and technologies have you used or come across? 

Eye Tracking Web Usabilty - Jakob Nielson + Kara Pernice

So, while putting off a late night report review I came across Cennydd Bowles UK blog reviewing the new eye tracking book - Eye Tracking Web Usability. The bottom line review of the book - not a great read and not a great case for eye tracking (even though that is the express purpose of the book). I beg to respectfully disagree - my response here.

Let me know your thoughts, would love to continue the discussion.

And, one more CNN.com article featuring Sentient. Forgot about this one.

Forgot about this one - looking at e-commerce and site usability for CNN.com profile. Article covers cart, shopping path, branding, design, messaging, and SEO. It is here.

Sentient featured on CNN.com

I was just interviewed by CNN.com regarding web usability and design for a small business website make over. Always fun to do this and see the great ideas entrepreneurs come up with, and then help them bring them to market in a user-centered manner. Article is here.

Google and Eye-Tracking

A post from the Official Google Blog caught my eye last week: Eye-tracking Studies: more than meets the eye.

As Google points out, most people are not conscious of their eye movement, especially when doing something as mundane as a web search. Eye-tracking data lets you identify which elements of a webpage (or other stimulus) are viewed, and in what order. Just as importantly, you can identify elements that are not viewed - which may be the reason why task completion, ad recall or messaging breaks down.

In my opinion, eye-tracking is most powerful when it is combined with traditional think-aloud usability protocol. At Sentient, we do this with a little bit of a twist - first we start by allowing the user to complete a series of tasks without interruption from us to capture task completion and eye-tracking data without interference from trying to hold a conversation as well. Then we have the user walk us through what they were thinking and doing in a qualitative debrief.

By delving into a qualitative debrief after a user completes a task while their eyes are tracked we can learn the why behind what they did. For example:

1. Did they linger on an element because it intrigued them or confused them?
2. Why did they look at one navigation element, but then move to other navigation elements and click on them?

By adding eye-tracking to the usability arsenal, you get a rich interaction between the quantitative eye-tracking metrics and the qualitative insights derived from traditional usability methods.

Usability Survival Kit - Be prepared

We all know the scout motto: be prepared. And having grown up in Girl Scouts, I like to think that I stay prepared for whatever life might send my way. For example, when traveling to conduct usability sessions, I always drag a copy of the project folder from the server to the local drive on my laptop. I also bring hard copies of critical documents for the study.

However, during usability sessions last month, life threw me a curveball I wasn’t ready for: The power went out to the entire building. There were no lights. No microphones. No recording. My laptop had limited battery supply, and there was no internet because the routers had no power.

Luckily this happened on the first day of a two day study, and we were able to reschedule the remaining participants for the next day. We had a marathon second day, but we successfully completed our study.

Having gone through this experience, I’ve compiled a “survival kit” for usability sessions that should get you through a power outage.

1. Mobile broadband card – plug it into your computer, and you have internet access
2. Portable power supply – power your computer through the rest of the sessions
3. Digital audio recorder – hit record and capture the conversation from the session

Those three pieces of equipment should get you through usability sessions without power. Now, how you would travel with a portable power supply in addition to everything else you’re already carting around is another story.

What about you? What unexpected events have you encountered while doing research? How did you cope with them or resolve them?

The election is over - a lesson in usability?

It is the morning after the election - a historic moment in American history regardless of party or vote. Now come the pundits, the analysis and hindsight brilliance. But, one thing has been evident all along - the web and social media made a difference in this election. And, one candidate used them much more adeptly than the other, the one that won.

President-elect Barack Obama hired one of the co-founders of Facebook, Chris Hughes, to run his online strategy - not a bad move. I came across a great article comparing the two websites www.barackobama.com and www.johnmccain.com on BNET (here). Marc Mendell points out some striking differences in the article, and it is a great read just for practical design and usabiity best-of-breed parameters and how-tos.

Senator McCain gave a moving and wonderful speech last night conceding the race to Barack Obama. I woke up this morning at 5:30CST to start checking the polls and coverage (I am an election geek with an MA in Government concentrating on political behavior and survey research, so I love this stuff). What did I find at each candidate's website?

McCain's was unchanged and running through autoplay for several of his end-of-campaign ads attacking Obama - wait I have just heard from others that they saw the updated image below, apparently my browser cache was viewing an older version - NOTE - then it would make sense for any site with time sensitive matter to put in measures to keep this from happening through redirects, replacing index pages and so forth. Now, back to what was there today. There were buttons to vote, make phone calls and all sorts of stuff out of date. See it here:
Then I went to Obama's webiste and saw this:
The difference? Besides the usability dynamics pointed out in the BNET article - Obama was up to date with a "Thank You" page, a donate to the DNC as a payback to them for their help and a simple message and the most recent blog posts. The McCain site did not reinforce the great message that Senator McCain had laid out the night before and had many a CTA (call to action) that were irrelevant.

The lesson? Besides that usability matters and most likely played a major role now in the history of America - have a plan B. Both campaigns should of have had "Thank You" and concession pages built weeks ago, beta tested and deployed with hidden vanity links ready to go. Sometimes simply being prepared is the best usability tool out there.

Usability, the internet and design matter. They matter for the highest office in the land and they matter for your customers that want to purchase a t-shirt or a server.