Why people fail to see things we think are obvious
by Lee on July 18, 2011
We’ve all seen it at some point. We design an interface that includes a message of some kind. Maybe an error message, or something generally informative, and then we do some usability testing and people just don’t see it. So you make it bigger. You give it a background colour, then a brighter background colour. Still, a lot of people just don’t see it… Why?
Well in some cases it might be because people don’t expect to see it. Or to put it another way, while the message may have high sensory perspicuity (it’s big, bright and right in their field of vision), it may have low cognitive perspicuity (your eyes see it, but your brain doesn’t recognise that it’s something it needs to respond to).
There was an interesting analysis on this area conducted by Sussex University in 2002 about accidents involving police cars. Specifically it looked at why people crash into police cars when they’re stationery, in situations where they should be pretty obvious and impossible to miss. For example situations where a police car was parked on the hard shoulder of a motorway or dual carriageway, or blocking the scene of an accident.
Essentially it suggests that while police cars, with their flashing lights and bright colours, have very high sensory perspicuity, they are often used in situations where people either don’t expect to find hazards, or else are parked in-line with the moving traffic, in which case other road users fail to see that they’re stationary. So in various ways they might exhibit low cognitive perspicuity.
So what does this mean from a user experience perspective? Well, specifically in terms of interaction design it means that making something bigger and brighter doesn’t necessarily always help. It depends on the context and content of the page. If I want to present an alert to users of a site that something needs to be done, then I need to ensure the rest of the page doesn’t suggest something else.
Take this page from Thomas Cook. I’ve run a search and they’ve actually failed to find any perfect matches, so they’ve cross-sold me something different. There’s a message there, but from usability testing I’ve conducted in similar situations myself I’ve found this kind of messaging is very frequently missed.
Although the message itself could be clearer, the real problem is that from a customer perspective, you’ve run a search and been given some results. You expected to see results, and you have them, so your attention is immediately given to reviewing the results themselves.
There are many different ways you can handle this, but I just wanted to highlight this as a way of thinking about design problems and to help avoid those “just make it bigger” discussions.
Getting buy-in for personas
by Lee on July 7, 2011
I ran a workshop for a client a few days ago, where I had to discuss personas and design ideas with a range of stakeholders from the company. The majority of people in the room where from a non-UX or design-related background, and ranged from directors to marketers. I tried a couple of games to get them thinking from the perspective of the personas, and thought some elements of it might work for others.
Their familiarity with personas ranged from limited to non-existent, so I wanted to find a way not only to explain what personas were, but also to get a direct feel for the value themselves. Firstly I gave a short presentation on the research we’d conducted to underpin the personas and how we analysed the data to derive the personas, and the reasoning behind the particular layout and structure we’d used.
Games to bring personas to life
After that was the fun part. I’ve given presentations like this before and seen how the personas themselves get ignored in any subsequent discussions, and even when handed out simply don’t get read. So for this event I decided to do something different.
I split the audience into 3 groups (to match the number of personas we had) then asked each group to focus on one specific persona. I then handed each person a sheet with the headings “gains” and “pains”, and asked them to consider – based on current circumstances for that client – what the “pain” points were for that persona when using their services, and what would be the most valuable “gains” for that persona if we changed the status quo. This game (the “pain – gain map”) was lifted directly from the Go Gamestorming website, and I highly recommend the accompanying book.
Even those who were dubious initially couldn’t help but think of the personas as real people, because they became immersed in the reality of the problems. I have to say that, given the audience I wasn’t sure this method would work, but it really got them thinking of the personas as a tool for understanding problems and solutions.
Persona timelines
I followed this up with a different game based (very) loosely on another game from the same website, the “History map”. I varied it by creating a timeline that fitted the potential range of time and range of activities over which a customer might interact with the client’s service.
On this timeline I then asked each group – again representing a specific persona – to add post-its to the timeline to indicate how they might interact with their service, when, and using what channels. I also asked them to add the potential pain points of the current service to the different points on the timeline. Again, this worked well and helped everyone to see how different customers interact in very different ways.
Collaborative design
All of this led to the final design activity. Groups had to write up a list of potential design concepts – in purely textual form – and on a sheet had to relate each concept to a particular persona and explain why it might benefit the customer and the business. These ideas were then all passed to the next table, who had to sketch their favourite three ideas.
I’ve tried collaborative sketching sessions before, but the key difference in this session was the thorough grounding in the personas that came first. Without that people just sketch ideas in their heads that seem interesting to them. With the earlier games, the sketching was immediately focused on how the problems would affect the personas.
It was one of the most successful sessions of it’s kind that I’ve facilitated, so I hope some of these ideas might be of some use to others. I’m under no illusions that this is ground-breaking or new, and I know Jared Spool in particular has promoted role-playing with personas for example, but I thought it was worth sharing all the same.
I’d love to hear what works for you too, or where you’ve hit any brick walls…
lightningUX III: The good, the bad and the ugly
by Lee on June 14, 2011
Last week saw the third in the lightningUX series of events. I hoped to write something up more quickly afterwards, but it was an exhausting week and client projects were keeping me busy in addition to the event.
It was hosted by LBi in their Brick Lane offices, which was a great venue. Apart from having a separate bar area (with beer kindly provided by Flow Interactive and Foolproof) that made it more relaxing both before and after the event, the room for the presentations was much larger than we’d had previously, and there was a massive projector screen, so everyone got a clear view.
First up was Sophie Freiermuth on “How not to get started in mobile UX”. She talked us through a recent project and described some of the mistakes made and lessons learned. For example, starting with a design that was focused on a standard desktop browser without consideration for mobile up front, not considering the range of different mobile OS’s, potential viewport sizes and the pitfalls of gestural interfaces.
Continuing the mobile theme was Alex Baxevanis from Webcredible with “How I single-handedly designed, built and launched an iPhone app and lived to tell the tale”. He certainly had the longest presentation title! His presentation gave us some great insight into what it’s like to just take an idea and run with it in your own spare time. I must admit it’s something I’d find daunting, but Alex managed it and had some interesting lessons to impart.
First was don’t re-invent the wheel, but pay attention to the details. There are examples of code and guides everywhere for designing iPhone apps, much like anything else, but the details are what sets an individual product apart. Then he talked us through how this affected his app.
Our third presentation was quite a change of tack after the first two. In “Adapting techniques to culture”, Sedef Gavaz described some of the difficulties she encountered in conducting research in China.
She told us about how culture in China made it difficult to run what in the UK might be fairly standard research activities such as usability testing, and emphasised the importance of a shared language when conducting research. Not just the basics, but ensuring you can communicate effectively and with enough subtlety for the research in hand.
Davide Casali & Riccardo Cambiassi then dived into the age old story of project politics, and how personal debates can sidetrack a project. The essence of their presentation was that communication is key, and when issues arise they need to be dealt with professionally and dispassionately. The longer these issues fester the more personal and intractable they can become.
Through all of the lightningUX events so far I’ve worked hard to get slightly left-field perspectives on what are seen as traditional UX practices, and I’m happy to say this event was no different. We had Alison Thomson of SomehowRelated come along to tell us about her experiences of designing outpatient services in the NHS, which was great and really refreshing. It was a research and design project that could be seen as in the service design mould, but as Alison prefaced her discussion with the quote “I hate service design” (not entirely seriously I don’t think) I’ll refrain from calling it that.
One of the really interesting aspects of her presentation, and in the same mould as Mary Cook from Uscreates at lightningUX II, was the way Alison conducted her research. It was user research, yet conducted in a completely different way than you might see in a typical UX project. Big Brother style chairs for participants to discuss their doctors for example. Really interesting stuff.
Jason Mesut gave us a five minute rendition of his UXLX presentation on recruiting for UX. This was highly entertaining but also hugely informative. There were several areas in this that resonated with me, not least of which being candidates turning up to interview claiming they couldn’t show any previous work. Not good enough.
David Whittle finished off the event with a great narrative of a project he was involved in a few years ago. It was an interesting tale about how there can be disconnects between client and agency, and how it’s all too easy to lose control of a project over time. This one won’t be on Slideshare unfortunately, so it just goes to show it pays to turn up to the event!
One thing I’ve been a little surprised, and I have to say a little disappointed about, is the lack of people coming forward to speak. In some cases I have people in mind for particular events, but it’s great when people drop me an email or a message on Twitter because they want to share their ideas. This is a platform for people in our industry to communicate in a friendly and informal way, and there are no barriers to entry.
A common misconception is that people think they have “nothing to say”, or that their subject is too complex or esoteric for the 5-minute format, but neither of these is usually an issue. We all have stories and ideas to share, and the smallest insight can easily fill a five minute slot. Similarly, the audience is made up of peers, so it’s a great place to discuss a narrow idea in some depth.
All in all though, this was a great evening, and I’m already planning the next one. Apart from David’s, I’ll try to get all of the presentations online in the next few days, so keep checking back. And of course if you have any ideas, do drop me a line…!
“Research thing” meetup
by Lee on May 26, 2011
Last night was the first of a new regular meetup for UX researchers in London, covering diary studies. Kindly organised by Jeff Van Campen and hosted by Fortune Cookie, it went really well. It’s great that with all of the other meetups that focus on aspects of design, we now have one that balances that by looking at research too!
There were three speakers (including me), and between the three of us we covered the theory and early practice underpinning the method, alternative approaches such as digital diaries, and also a case study. The first part was discussed by Boon Chew (“Diary studies – a primer”), then I reviewed the pros and cons of paper and digital approaches (“Hi-fi or lo-fi”). Finally, Beth Duddy talked through a really interesting case study on using Posterous for a diary.
I think we all agreed that it’s surprising this method isn’t used more in industry, particularly given the many different ways you can now implement a diary. Hopefully this event will go some way to encouraging it’s use.
There was a really good fishbowl Q & A session at the end, and a few interesting themes came up. There was some good discussion initially on when it would be appropriate to use the method. When specifically would you use it? Are there situations where you wouldn’t see a diary as appropriate?
My response to these questions was that I tended to use diaries primarily when I wanted some qualitative research but the behaviour I wanted to observe happened intermittently, or was difficult to observe directly for whatever reason. So for example I’m planning a diary study now of how people think about and plan holidays. This is an activity that happens across digital and non-digital channels, in different locations, at different times, with different people. In practical terms this is impossible to observe directly, and interviews cause problems because participants need to recall thoughts and behaviour from weeks or months prior to the interview. The opposite to this is that if the behaviour I’m interested in is directly observable, then I’d usually do that first. From that I might be able to assess whether a diary study would add further value.
It was all really good discussion, and there were clearly people in the audience who had as much if not more experience of running diary studies than the speakers. There were also some great contributions in the form of sketchnotes by at least a couple of the attendees. If there’s anything else from the event I’ve missed, do leave me a comment and I’ll update the post.
Here’s my presentation from the evening, make sure to check the slide notes! I tend not to put much in the slides themselves…
Diary studies: Alternative approaches
Will Myddelton provided some great sketchnotes on Boon’s presentation, mine, and Beth’s. Eva-Lotta Lamm also drew this great set.
I’ll add Beth’s presentation here too as soon as it become available.
I’d love to hear about others thoughts diary studies and different ways they’ve been used…
lightningUX II
by Lee on April 7, 2011
I recently organised and hosted a second lightningUX event, at City University. The event went reasonably well, and the speakers were excellent. I even cheekily added myself to the speakers list, which I didn’t on the first occasion and don’t plan to again in the near future.
There were a number of things that could have been done better. I didn’t make it clear enough when tickets would be available, and I also failed to ensure there was specified time for Q&A at the end, which cheated both attendees and presenters of the opportunity to expand on their presentations. I intend to rectify both of these things for the next event, should there be one.
The style of the room, and the fact that drinks only arrived shortly before the event started also contributed to a much more formal feel than had been the case at SapientNitro, so that’s something to think about for next time too.
Overall though I’m reasonably happy with how it went, given that I organised the event on my own. Maybe this is the main lesson I need to accept, which is that in order to get the best out of the format I need to enlist some help. Then I think the other issues will be much easier to resolve.
In the meantime I hope to continue receiving feedback on the event. It can only help to hear what people enjoyed and what they didn’t. At the end of the day it’s an event I organise to meet a demand from peers in the industry, and if it doesn’t meet a need I’ll stop doing it. I’ll also look into getting all of the slides online as soon as possible, and I’m working on the video too.
For now though, thanks to everyone involved for what I thought was a great night.