October 2007
Chapter Business
Announcements:
- WUD – Fast approaching, need volunteers!
- Jobs- no one in the room hiring, a few looking
- New attendees- 8 new attendees introduced themselves
Presentation: 10 Minute Talks, Hosted by Chauncey Wilson
Session 1: Usability Testing an API by using Instant Messaging (MATLAB): Donna Cooper and Rachel Cobleigh
MathWorks personnel used instant messaging software to simulate the command-line interface of MATLAB, one of their premier products. Users received chat input from a programmer who was in the room acting as if he were the system. The goal was to usability test the application program interface (API) via the command line.
Users put in queries (4+5 =) and software presents answers to formulas: a= 4+5, response = 9
Findings: Paper prototyping was too time-consuming. Instant Messaging was the solution. Set up 2 IM clients, one for the participant, one for the computer, two different computers--participant entered something, "computer" responded with a response, could have canned text available on desktop. Overlaid the MATLAB interface with IM, mimics command line interaction, can separate participant from respondent, feedback already distinguished by color, IM transcripts are easy to save and share.
Tips:
- Be careful- routing through external networks (security), encrypt or use internal protocol
- Interruptions due to using known accounts can disrupt test
- Computer should be in separate room
- Use pre-written computer responses for quick copy and paste
- Need protocol to distinguish between "no response required" and "data entry delay"
- Should have basic Help documentation ready (with API command names)
- Name the second participant ">>" to simulate prompt
- Use Morae to record easily
- Transcripts easy to disseminate
- Users understood environment quickly
Conclusions: It exposed a major mental model disconnect between original API design and participants' expectations.
Questions:
- How long were sessions? Sessions lasted 1 hr or so.
- Did the participant know it was a person responding? Yes, engineer was in the room.
- Did participants any training? Would have liked to provide some help to get them started, because there is no visual help.
- Who were the participants? Audience was experienced MATLAB users.
Session 2: Finding Related Links from Websort Data: Michael Dutton, MIT
Problem: Redoing an IS&T website. No one clicks on related links, but everyone wants them. Websort to the rescue!
- Similarity matrix analysis
- Raw data from Websort (online card sort tool), downloaded into Excel
- Wrote a macro that moves each line to the end
- Effective way to mediate discussions with content owners and ensure reasonable matches between content and related links
Issues:
- What defines breakpoint? When does it become worthy of a related link?
- By keeping track of what they expected, and what they received, they calculated an error rate (33%) that indicates they were off from the user’s mental model.
- Used crazy egg for analysis
Session 3: User Interfaces: Design and Outsourcing: Pauric O'Callaghan, 3Com
Topic: 3Com has outsourced/offshored a significant number of employees. Raises challenges for time zones, communication, language. Makes development processes difficult. Presentation is around tips for surviving an offshored/outsourced development team.
His part: "owning the code" - take the code under his wing and have them use the code.
Understanding your audience: critical is understanding the culture of people you’re going to be talking with, appreciating who they are, can no longer sit down with them at the desk, etc. Don’t often understand UCD.
- Leadership – respective, yet authoritative, energy vs. experience
- Relationships - very hierarchical, build connections across time and distance
- In China - talk about saving time, reducing costs, ship sooner, not "good for the company"
- Very keen to learn, gain experience; it’s a double-edged sword - training someone else to do your job
- "Never tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and they will surprise you." Gen Patton
Hurdles, Methods and Tricks
- Hurdles: time zones, distance, language- Hold meetings at end of their day, prep materials to drive them through their day, wrap the cycle around. At the end of the cycle, hold our meetings at the start of our day, so they are prepared and we can check it. Distance: "other" seen as belligerent, unhelpful bunch - when deal through email, miss face to face which smooths over corners. What’s written is taken as written word, and misunderstandings. Email is terrible. Language: documentation was far too wordy, style guides too wordy.
- Methods: Documentation – translate; Email - keep simple, one, maybe two questions in an email, otherwise not getting addressed; Phone - can’t talk 1 on 1 to engineers because not documented and won’t be done.
- Tricks: Keep it simple, compliment them; make mistakes in design - keep them looking, during the design process (Requirements -> Oversight); Tools : Omni, Visio, platforms, terminology; Light weight methodology - deliverables, communicate requirements, little face to face; Iteration: regular, working presentation layer, bug reporting.
Presentation layer: mockup is the spec, reduced development time, design re-use, feature and product libraries, onoing design consistency. 1400 to 1600 employees at 3Com, now back to 5000.
Session 4: Learning Styles Overview the "Theory of Multiple Intelligences"
- Suggests people see the world in seven different and equally important ways
- What this means for design:
- We craft sites and architecture to improve conversions and messaging
- Speak in the language they understand best
- Motivate them to actions which support our agenda
- Deliver information in a manner which insures the highest retention
- Helps interpret user testing in new and enlightening ways
- Conveys instructions in a manner which reduces problems and tech support
- If we discover that linguistic learners aren’t getting it, look deeply at how info is being presented.
- If software developers are math/logic learners with second style being music, but can present content in a way that is appropriate to them. (Consider multiple intelligences when weighing the approaches to use for your audience.)
- Higher retention, higher loyalty, proved this with different sites with great success.
- Craft your site to employ the techniques of the learning style and engage them effectively.
- Design content management system around the learning styles of the individual users and message them in a style which is far more effective for them. In large sites, use the language they understand and the results can be dramatic. Can increase conversions.
- We measure learning styles with a test that takes 5-10 minutes (tops) – may be as simple as propensity to click on visual links rather than text links, don’t know yet. Always interested if people are interested in engaging in those types of research.
- As sites are more often built for automation, would like to see sites built along profiling principles.
- Not an attempt to coerce them, but a way to meet their needs in a more efficient and effective way.
- How to use on broad sites?
- Ensure that – helps you to interpret results by understanding biases for the participants - might ask "what do you remember about this site 5 min after you view the homepage?" or "what’s your mental image of this?" - helps them to contextualize. Affects the types of questions you ask.
- Self administered tests typically takes less than 15 minutes, automatically calculates results, others are available
- Contact Web marketing Resources for additional information
Questions:
- When do you administer the test? Before the test puts them in a strange mindset, so do it after the study.
- Where? Test in the environment, learning styles present the same in both environments, but profiles change depending on environment.
- Are people interested? HR orgs test this at hiring time, people are invariably interested in learning about themselves.
- In cases with small, internal sites, do audiences fit into similar learning styles? When we find that there are multiple styles, will build in multiple-conversion paths, let them self-select their path based on learning style.
Session 5: Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Strategies and Tactics: Meng Yang, UE researcher at IBM
IBM is embracing "Enterprise 2.0" = as the industrial side of Web 2.0: wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, profiles, communities. It's all about social networking, communication, strength of your weak ties (Mark Granovetter, 1973).
Challenges:
- Organization and cultural resistance
- Attention, time and priorities
- Lack of willingness to experiment and learn
Lotus Connections is their Enterprise 2.0 product: communities, blogs, dogear (social bookmarking), activities, profiles. Tips include:
- Organize around tasks, not tools
- Don’t expect that once the tools are here, people will come
- Actively foster early adopters
- Don’t expect everyone to contribute, lurkers/visitors are ok
- Adoption takes time!
- 10% of the people contribute 90% of the content
How to roll it out:
- Top down: early adopters, then evangelists, then trainers, find influencers in upper management
- Lead by example: training on WHY (value) and HOW (use cases, best practices)
- Increase the visibility (notification, newsletter, etc.)
- Bottom Up: tell a friend, emergent best practices
Types of people: Innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards.
Techniques of attraction: Enable, encourage, enable, attract, reach (pair these with audiences) (Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech products to mainstream customers (1991)
Tips:
- Identify communities, let it flow organically
- How many folks are comfortable sharing bookmarks? Been around for 2 years, supports public and private bookmarks. From log data, 95% of bookmarks are public. People can subscribe to users’ bookmarks.
- Who did the study - 10% of users - Jakob Nielsen “Participation”
Session 6: UX in a company with Multiple Development Processes: Cay Lodine, SeaChange
Cay works for One to Many.
SeaChange is actively interested in bringing users into their products, put "understanding customers expectations" in their quality statement. Cay wants to actually use that information.
- Challenges: stutter start, previous projects cut short, directive not clear
- Limited resources (new initiativs, significant new features, sustainind solutions)
- Self-directed teams
- Can't change the past - good ground work, awareness
- Budgets are always an issue (tools v. people)
- Self-directed teams – center of attention, can't work in isolation
Agile teams, waterfall teams, consulting mode team, lots of different mindsets.
Goal is not to work in isolation - be members of the team in ways that make sense to others and has process integrity for others. Took time as a group.
Sought to generalize the development process and map it to conceptual tasks rather than defined phases.
Gave examples - describe what we can do that supports their need.
Deliver UX Scoping Documents for each project:
- Make generalized process a concrete set of deliverables
Good response in engineering - active participation in 3 groups, interest in 2 groups.
Scoping is critical: It is so new, not all teams use their own process well, demonstrate success.
Questions:
- Who is the audience? For engineers, by engineers, until a few months ago no product dept, no notion of user experience, they know this is something they need to do to mature.