Tag: userresearch

As reported by IW:

The “repetitive now” user is someone checking for the same piece of information over and over again, like checking the same stock quotes or weather. Google uses cookies to help cater to mobile users who check and recheck the same data points.

The “bored now” are users who have time on their hands. People on trains or waiting in airports or sitting in cafes. Mobile users in this behavior group look a lot more like casual Web surfers, but mobile phones don’t offer the robust user input of a desktop, so the applications have to be tailored.

The “urgent now” is a request to find something specific fast, like the location of a bakery or directions to the airport. Since a lot of these questions are location-aware, Google tries to build location into the mobile versions of these queries.

This definitely makes sense. In short: remember what people keep coming back for, constrain to location if they need something right away, and tailor to the medium.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to best address users from other cultures, and as she spends a few months working in India, some of my good friend Ali’s posts have been particularly thought-provoking.

Fantasy versus emotional marketing: The core of U.S. marketing – whether for a product or a mission – is trying to make something more emotional to “tug at the heart strings” and make you act (or buy)… But in India, some argue that people are consistently surrounded by emotion (or reality) such that escape is more attractive. One person told me that you only need to look at the movie industry to see this: Slumdog Millionaire was not as acclaimed in India as it was in the U.S., for example, as compared to the dramatic, dancing, singing Bollywood style of film.

It’s easy to think that users will all more or less act like Americans, but when your product is used in a different cultural context, is it still doing its job as well?

The case also highlights the distinction between understanding and listening to customers. “Adrià’s idea is that if you listen to customers, what they tell you they want will be based on something they already know,” Norton observes. “If I like a good steak, you can serve that to me, and I’ll enjoy it. But it will never be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. To create those experiences, you almost can’t listen to the customer.”

Don’t take this the wrong way — Adrià most certainly pays a lot of attention to his customers. It’s at the core of what he does. But what he doesn’t do is listen to their input, he instead works to understand their needs and desires, and creates his own experience to satiate them.

You can listen to customer feedback all you want, and it might give you an okay product. It’s when you understand your customers and forge your own pathway based on that understanding that can lead to something really special.

From CXPartners:

We can offer three design tips to ensure content below the fold is seen.

Less is more – don’t be tempted to cram everything above the fold. Good use of whitespace and imagery encourages exploration.

Stark, horizontal lines discourage scrolling - this doesn’t mean stop using horizontal full width elements. Have a small amount of content just visible, poking up above the fold to encourage scrolling.

Avoid the use of in-page scroll bars - the browser scrollbar is an indicator of the amount of content on the page. iFrames and other elements with scroll bars in the page can break this convention and may lead to content not being seen.

Tom Watson on the value of taking outlier cases into account:

Now these things on their own are valuable, but the collateral benefits are why you should do them. If you were designing a car, worrying about extra leg room might make you rethink the entire console. Making a design polished isn’t achieved by making it work for your mom or the average user. You end up with something average.

Jim Ray posits that the new AIR-based New York Times Reader app is destined for failure because it seems too much like a newspaper for its own good.

The premise is that the Times Reader mimics a newspaper because that’s what they’ve heard customers want in their research:

But those are technical problems, the real sin of Times Reader is that it’s attempting to give readers what they say they want instead of what they actually need. Henry Ford is said to have quipped that if he asked his customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse. The Times has said that they’ve listened to readers and have delivered a newspaper-like reading experience on their computers, but it isn’t what they need to be building. Face it, if any New York Times’ reader could tell the Times what they needed, instead of what they wanted, they’d be running the company.

Classic case of misusing user research

Douglas Bowman, one of the godfathers of web design, on his decision to leave Google after three years:

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such miniscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

As is now coming up over and over again, data and user research should be one tool to inform design decisions, but should not be the sole factor or measure of design success.

Quoth TheAge from Australia:

Ninety-four per cent of the nearly 800,000 Facebook users who have voted in a poll on the site said they do not like the changes rolled out in the past two weeks.

Let’s see what these folks are saying in a few weeks. For all that’s wrong with Facebook, and there are certainly more than a handful, I’m glad they have the stones to know when to listen to the masses, and when to pursue their product vision.

Andrew Chen has a great post about a common thread for me, the misuse of user research:

Ultimately, quantitative metrics are just another piece of data that can be used to guide decision-making for product design - you have to combine this with all the other bits of information to get it right.

Just like there’s no single risk-assessment equation in finance, there’s no single driving factor toward successful interface design. While user testing and research is an important factor in any significant design project, conclusions that are principally based on user research are incomplete and underdeveloped.

On the web, the little things can make a big difference. Jared Spool helped a major e-commerce site (anyone know which?) evaluate their checkout process, and found that one button was standing in the way of — get this— $300 million dollars per year of revenue.

The challenge is being able to find those same issues when you’re a site that can’t spend money and hire someone like Jared Spool for weeks or months.

FeedbackArmy is an interesting little product, using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to quickly and inexpensively get some usability or product feedback for any site. For $7, you get ten responses from reviewers in a matter of minutes.

It’s probably not the world’s most valuable feedback, but if you need something in a pinch and for almost zero budget, it definitely looks like a worthwhile option.

IDEO is working with BUG Labs on a fairly quick exploration of a redesign for their popular hardware prototyping tool. It’s always cool to get to see the work IDEO does.

The most interesting thing about this is that they’re blogging about their deliverables publicly as the process is underway. I’ve been hoping to land a project that would benefit from this kind of public exposure, getting feedback from real users throughout the course of the process.

I think that feedback could very successfully augment or replace many aspects of a big user research process, with a potential to do so with a much smaller budget and time commitment.