"A Bad Website is like a Grumpy Salesperson."

Jakob Nielsen says in his quote (featured on the site last week) which is also the title of this post that "A Bad Website is like a Grumpy Salesperson".  

Interesting.

We would all probably agree that the actual words of the quote probably speak more to the type of experience we DO NOT want people to have when they interact with anything Saint Mary's Press. So, you may wonder why the quote is on the site and why I went so far as to write a whole post on it? 

Sharing a couple positive interactions with colleagues may help to illustrate how I came to understand the truth of this quote. 

As you know the 24/7 customer service phone travels with a few different people. One day, many weeks ago, I e-mailed Joanie (our customer care manager) asking if she could take the 24/7 customer service phone for me one weekend when I had to attend a class. She was under no obligation to take it and I could have understood her not wanting to take it--she's already on call on lot. But-

She e-mailed back, “I’d be delighted to.”

Not long after that, I had another experience where I asked Rosa a question. 

She also replied, “I’d be delighted to…”.  

Wow!  What an unexpected response. My interactions with Joanie and Rosa have always been good, but this particular response surprised me (especially in the midst of attending to other e-mails that day). The response was surprising and unexpected.  And nice. Both times, the response made me stop and think, "Really?".

Although I knew our customer care team uses this phrase on the phone with customers I wondered if maybe this was a new part of the brand experience they were adding to e-mail.  Their response made the interaction seem even easier.

Not long after these two experiences, I ran across the quote about the grumpy salesperson and immediately thought, "If bad websites are like grumpy salespeople, then good websites must be like Joanie and Rosa --delighted to help people.  

I considered again my response to that interaction, the surprise and unexpectedness, the sense of "ease" just because they were delighted to help me.  Upon reflection, I realized that this experience of surprise at their delight in assisting me- is similar to that feeling of surprise when a website is really easy to use or intuitive...it's like the system itself is saying, "I'm delighted to help you".  So I turned Jakob Nielsen's quote around:

"A Good Website is like a Salesperson Who is Delighted to Help you" 

So I wondered further, "Are all of our websites like a salesperson who is delighted to help people? 

"What if all of our websites and products, processes and services conveyed through their ease of use that they were delighted to help people?  How would the site or book or service look? How different would the customer's satisfaction level be?

It's something to think about…

*Note: my thanks to Joanie and Rosa for giving me permission to share these accounts.

3 Yards: The Power of Incremental Innovation

In a recent post,  Paul Casper talked about iteration and what that looks like.  He said:

"To get 10 yards in 4 downs, you only need to average 2.5. Sustain the drive for the long haul. Small incremental changes add up to big changes. Continual improvement is essential."

This idea of incremental innovation, of moving 2.5 or 3 yards at a time is quite interesting and it is a piece from our class in Texas that initially challenged me-in a good way. It challenged me because I was sitting in class thinking, "If I know there are 20 things wrong with this product,why wouldn't I want to change them all?"

Often times, we equate success with the big end goal, in terms of getting a touchdown, or hitting a home run.  We want our product to be a huge win right out of the gate, even if the product is being released as revision. Who doesn't? The concept of moving only three yards is a challenging one because we want to fix everything. All or nothing right? We want to fix it so its working perfectly.

Remember the phrase from Voltaire that John shared --when was it--a year ago?

Don't let the perfect become the enemy of the good.

What is hard to fathom sometimes is that we don't have to change 20 things --or everything that could be changed--on a product to make that product more usable for our customers.  Sometimes, it's a matter of making what we would consider "small" incremental changes- that can make the most difference --and have the most far reaching effect on a customer's experience of a website or a book or a service. Three yards, three yards......

What does "3 yards" look like? The specific "3 yards" we move each time is going to be dependant on who our customers are and what they are trying to do, i.e. what the key tasks are that our customers are trying to complete and what's keeping them from quickly and easily completing those tasks. Do we know what those tasks are?  (If not, some discovery work might be in order.)

Example 1: In a book where navigation is a key task and yet seems to be posing a challenge for young kids, it might mean adding colored tabs to the side of the book or coloring the index section a different color to make it possible for them to see "IMMEDIATELY" where they need to go.

Example 2: On a website that customers go to specifically to find certain types of information--strengthening the search functionality or the way the content is tagged on the site could significantly increase a customer's satisfaction of a website experience.

When we are clear on what tasks our customers are trying to complete, we can then choose which pieces to fix based on that task.

Three yards is a challenge, but it's a challenge I would issue to all of us.  What does 3 yards mean for this project we are working on? What can we fix NOW to make this a better experience for our customers--to make it more usable NOW? This is one of the things I always appreciated about Paul Casper. For those of us working regularly with the online learning environment, he was like that driver who would re-align us when our conversation would start veering us off the 3 yard road toward fixing the 20 things.  He would say, "We know we can't fix everything right now, what is the next 3 yards? Let's get to the next 3 yards."

What do you think is the best/most creative/most effective way to illustrate or convey 3 yards?

Take the "3 yard" Challenge

Come up with your approach to conveying "3 yards" by December 1. (For off site employees, just submit a photo of your "3 yards" to hsutton@smp.org and your model will be part of the challenge.)

A visiting guest will determine the top 3 winners. The winner of the top model of conveying "3 yards" will receive a gift card to the local restaurant of their choice.

The Difference Between Market Research and Usability Research

Have you ever had that experience where you go someplace thinking you know something, only to come back realizing you were kind of clueless?  Well, I had that experience when I (and two colleagues) went to Texas in February to attend the Certified User Experience Professional Class .

The professor starting by saying, "Let's begin talking about usability by talking about what it's not."  Even though I thought I had a good hunch of what it was, my mind went completely blank.  I listened as Niall (one of my new favorite people called coders whose responsibilities pretty much eluded me before this course--and, let's be honest, often still does) rattled off about 7 different things that usability wasn't (while I started checking my binder cover to make sure I was even in the right room). It was during that first discussion when I learned  one of the many world changing pieces of wisdom I was going to come to delight in--

 Usability research is not the same as market research.  

1. Traditional marketing research methods often gleans some information ABOUT the customer and often comes through what the customer tells us.
2. Usability research, on the other hand is aimed at uncovering how something is USED, the behavior and motivations of the customer and gleans this by looking at a holistic view of the customers experience (so not just what the customer tells us, but also by watching what they do).  It's almost like a "360 view" of the customers experience.

As we've begun doing site visits, we're learning about the different tasks that are part of the teachers and students process of using our materials. This research is aimed at usability---trying to understand how they are trying to use our resources.

The research project John talked about in our meeting this morning was about market research where we are asking the customer about different types of information such as what product they use, a particular decision they made ---BUT HERE's THE KEY---not necessarily about how they are trying to use a resource. 

While we could have asked that question, here is where we would need to determine, based on what we are trying to learn, what methods do we need to look at employing---market research methods or usability methods?

So, now, as project teams or any team begins to talk about learning from the customer, our starting point can be a little different based on what we've learned.  We can ask, "Are we trying to learn information ABOUT the customer or insight into BEHAVIOR and what the customer is trying to accomplish?".  Both usability research methods and traditional marketing methods are valid and give us ways to discover great information.

The key is understanding what kind of information we are after. 


For more information, check out this link for a fabulous contrast between market research and usability research: 
 http://ripul.blogspot.com/2008/06/market-research-vs-usability-testing.html

Do-Discover-Iterate: Wisdom and Insight from Professor Paul Casper

The idea for this post began almost 2 months ago as Paul Casper was preparing to begin his new vocation as a teacher. As someone who has enjoyed collaborating with him and learning from him as we've navigated the usability and user-centered design front,  I asked him, "What are your parting words to us Paul on usability?" 

Read Paul's 5 pieces of wisdom and insight here: http://pcasper.com/2011/10/21/do-discover-iterate/

The Site Visit Scheduling Saga

Over the last month, requests for site visit scheduling hit an all-time high.  (For those of you that are newer, site visits are one of the methods of customer discovery we began using this year to understand what our customers are trying to accomplish and what we need to create to help them meet those objectives. When we visit a customer in their own environment, we refer to this as a site visit.)

In addition to the requests for site visits, came also the need for project teams to stay up to date on which customers were being called when and what visits were actually confirmed.  It became clear really fast that we needed a tool.
 
So Connie, Linda, Sara and I got together and started with the standard UCD (User Centered Design) question:

What are our (internal) customers trying to do? OR

 What are the specific tasks they need to complete?

KEY TASKS team members needed to be able to complete: 

1. Check to see if there are any visits coming up
2. Check to see who else was going on a particular site visit and if there was availability
3. Check to see the focus of the site visits
4. Check the status of communication with sites being contacted for visits
5. Check to see how recently a particular site was contacted or visited in relation to any project
6. Sales Team also needed to be able to see what communication was happening with sites in their territory

 

KEY REQUIREMENTS the tool must meet to ensure team members can carry out their tasks:

1.    It needed to be easily accessed by EVERYONE on project teams

2.    It needed to be easily updated by ANY project team member

3.    It needed to be easily sorted however the user wishes to see the data (by project, data, site name, diocese)

4.    Must be able to see the Diocese that each site belongs to 

Now, with the above tasks and requirements we created the first iteration of the SITE VISIT SCHEDULER TOOL (an internal spreadsheet) where project teams and employees can go to see what is happening with site visits.

Keep in mind, in user-centered design, we DO—DISCOVER—ITERATE.  So, we created the tool, we’ll discover how it works and we’ll move on to the next iteration.

So, try those tasks (from above) & check the status of those visits!

(Check your e-mail for the tool link.)

Let's Be Honest: What's the ROI on UCD?

In whatever we do,  there a moments when we ask some really critical questions

So I thought I would pose one to us…..

What is the ROI of User-Centered Design?  

ROI is a good question to look at not just corporately, which John, Steve and the managers lead us in doing, but also how our individual work intersects with the user and how that can affect the much bigger picture of what we do.

I came across this video from Human Factors International that provides great food for thought, no matter what project you may be working on or what function's lense you may be viewing this through.  While the language they use is specific to software, this concept of ROI applies to software, hardware, print books, digital books, etc...so keep that in mind as you review.

p.s. At the end of the video, they tell you how you can get a free poster of what you just saw created on the screen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O94kYyzqvTc

Surprised By Discovery

One of my favorite books of all time is C.S. Lewis' Surprised by Joy. I read it for a paper in college but its storyline has stayed with me. I think the part of the story that has stayed with me is that Lewis--as the title suggests --was surprised by the joy.

Surprise is one of those emotions that always reminds me that I am human, that life is a mystery, and that no matter how much I try to understand something or might think I have a handle on it, there is always something more to discover and to understand.

I've just recently (as of 8 months ago) become a regular practitioner of user-centered design principles. I've probably used these principles now in the development of about 15 projects, but I am still surprised by discovery. I'm still surprised by the insight I glean through some of these simple processes; insights, which, are often those moments of "Why didn't we think of that?" or "Yikes! That seems like it would be common sense!"

But these moments have also reinforced for me the value of observing or shadowing customers, the importance of taking the time to sit with them as they walk through specific tasks so that I understand the process they are going through and the information they need in order to carry out each task.

Case Study: Giving Customers Access to the Online Learning Environment
I was sitting in my colleague, Candy's office one day in June as she and I continued our work connected with the creation of an administration site for our customer care & sales teams. This new site would be the interface that our teams would use to control customer access to our online learning environment.

Those of us working on the project had asked a number of the "users" about the tasks they would have to complete with the system we were creating for them. Now, we wanted to OBSERVE these customers in the process of trying to carry out those tasks.  Our purpose, at this stage, was to identify any additional tasks that might be involved or other specific requirements that might be needed in the design of the system that hadn’t yet been identified.

So, I asked Candy to walk me through an actual order with one of her customers and we talked about what she was doing, what information she was using, and what else she was expecting to see.

What stunned me is that immediately it became apparent that, in order to carry out the tasks she would be completing in the system, the interface would need to accommodate two additional pieces of information, two pieces of information that hadn't yet been discovered in the previous 5 people we had walked through processes with. It turned out she needed further identifying information of the book based on how her customers ordered-because her customers were a little bit different than other customers we served.

The first piece of information we were missing was some sort of "E" designation for each particular product so that (when she printed the document and matched it with the invoice) it would clearly show her customers that they were in fact purchasing an electronic version.

Item Number 1141       became       Item Number E1141

The second piece of information needed was the ISBN because her customers purchase by this number instead of the shorter item number as is the case with many of our customers.

I was so elated by this discovery I said to her, "Isn't this amazing" with excitement comparable to a kid on Christmas morning. Because she knows me, she smiled and responded, "Yeah, Heather, that's----great".

The extraordinary lesson in this example was realizing AGAIN that having a customer explain a path and observing them walking the path often yields different results.

I remember a few months ago I was chatting with a friend who plans the music at our church. She was explaining that she thought she had worked out all the music for the mass (who would lead particular songs, what instruments would play etc.) until, in rehearsal, when she actually tried to forge a path through it--she realized there were still pieces she needed to address. I kid you not--she even used those words "forging a path through it.....”.

What surprised me about that conversation was that she and I have never spoken about the work I am currently doing. I have never used that terminology around her, but out of the blue, she used that language. All I could think was---unbelievable ----this applies to music as well.

But, the truth is, this type of experience--of recalling steps one way and then seeing the steps differently while carrying out the same process--happens everywhere, everyday.  A great corporate example that I came across recently is from the company Argos. Argos sells "general merchandise for the home throughout the UK and the Republic of Ireland"  (http://www.argos.com/).

Listen as the design manager shares what they discovered when they enter into the discovery process with their customers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG1VChFbIBs