Charting User Waters: How Maps and Flows Help with Usability




Dr. Brian Still

This is a guest post by

Dr. Brian Still, Director

 Usability Research Lab

 Texas Tech University. 

Doing effective discovery, or understanding just who is using your product and what they need to be successful, is always challenging. Ultimately, going into the field where they live and work is an irreplaceable method because of the realism it offers and the depth of data it returns about what they are actually doing.


However, if you just go out into the field without a clear purpose and expect to see something happen that you’ll know is significant while it happens isn’t, most of the time, going to lead to a positive outcome.

There’s just too much to see, and so very often we report back with too much data to make sense of. This, unfortunately, can lead to picking off only the most obvious observations and incorporating them into task development or even product design.

We need better focus when we’re out in the field, which is to say that we need to know why we’re going out there, and what we’re trying to find out. That doesn’t mean we want users to confirm to us what we think is right, but it does mean that if we don’t have a game plan for the observations we carry out in the field, we’re just going to see a forest, not trees.

I’m teaching a user-centered design course right now. It’s different from user evaluation because we want to make something for the users. We still need them to evaluate what we make so we can insure that we’ve built in the affordances and requirements necessary for them to do well with what we’ve designed.

But we have to make a lot of decisions early on and, in fact, we want to make a lot of decisions early on because we have something we want to produce, and we have goals, design ideas, etc. that we want to see carried through. Because of this, when we do interact with users, we have to spend a lot of energy on understanding who they are and what we want from them as part of our overall design process.

That places, therefore, a lot of emphasis for us on discovering, even before site visits in the field, critical things related to users:

·         Who are they, what do they use right now, what’s their experience, what can they handle?

·         What do competitors do, or previous products we’ve made, that works to satisfy user needs?

·         What limitations do we have in time, money, materials (web site, mobile both?) that will impact the design and use?

There are a number of methods we can employ, metrics, other data resources we can gather, that will help us answer much of this. But if we want to go into the field and watch users use our new product and then use that as feedback to improve the design, eventually transitioning into full-blown user testing, we need to try different approaches to gather knowledge about users that will tell us more clearly what goals they need and what features are required to allow them to achieve those goals.

Often we’ll brainstorm, we’ll even do card sorting, affinity diagramming, but those tend to help us as designers organize our thoughts and goals. We can do cognitive walkthrough, interviews, and surveys, but all those imply that we know who to interview or survey. What if we’re still not sure? What if we need a little more clarity about our population but lack the data and focus necessary to go into the field right away and know who to watch and what to watch for?
I want you to consider, beyond surveys and interviews, a couple of other approaches that might serve as useful stepping stones to building a better sense of key user characteristics and use requirements.

User Flow

Let’s say you can describe your user with a few defining characteristics: Bob is 14-18, attends a Catholic high school, has used St. Mary’s products before, has an affinity for electronic devices, and enough experience with information on mobile devices to know his way around the interfaces found there. That’s great, but how does Bob go about using information on the mobile interface, for example, information related to Catholic education? You’ve got enough maybe to recruit people like Bob, but you don’t have at this point enough knowledge to look for particular things as you visit Bob on-site, or you construct tasks for him to do when you test.

A User Flow chart can help with this. Pick a process, such as Bob wants to edit his profile in the application. Now the first thing you do, illustrated below, is have Bob start where he would naturally start. Understand, this isn’t where he has to start but where you expect Bob would want to start, which already helps you start to think about how the user will flow through. If your application is intuitive, it will allow Bob to flow as he expects to flow through it.

From Bob’s start you then create squares for every other page Bob would expect to encounter along the way to achieving his goal. Whenever Bob has to make a decision, surround that with a triangle.  If multiple pages are available for Bob to choose from, put those into the flow, and also indicate where, if any, files have to be accessed.

This flow can get complicated, but understand that if a complicated flow is required, you’re most likely designing an interface that will have problems. But once the flow is down, and you can create as many as you want to allow Bob to complete his goals for using the application, you then have a better sense of what Bob is doing so that when you go into the field, you’ll have the focus necessary to look for the bottlenecks, problem spots, or navigational pathways that you noted when you created your user flows.

A sample user flow:

User Journey Map

There is a great online article, http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2011/09/the-value-of-customer-journey-maps-a-ux-designers-personal-journey.php, that effectively illustrates how to perform a user journey map. Duplicating here would just be overkill. But in a nutshell, the user or customer journey map is a visual depiction of what a user needs and what steps they take to fulfill those needs as they interact with your product. Simply, you create a visual that allows for you to display, together, what the customer is trying to do, what steps they want to take to do it, and what emotions or thoughts they experience as they carry out these steps.

Now what I like about this mapping is that once you create a map, you can continue to revise and/or add to it as you gain more data about users, and it serves as a nice reference tool for prepping folks for doing site visits, or explaining how, ultimately, your testing of products, as well as your design of them, resulted in creating an experience that was successful in allowing people to take the journey they wanted. Or if not, what needs to be done to help them do that. And, as the article notes, it is a tool that resonates understandably across an organization. You can remind stakeholders of what Bob wants to do, why, and what he thinks/feels as he does it, or cannot do it. This helps compel support for product design changes, helps recruitment of Bob for testing, and, of course, helps refine at the earliest possible stages of discovery your goals for determining who Bob is and what he does. This, in the process, naturally leads to less murkiness when doing field analysis, or when creating/evaluating products.

 

Remembering Who We Are: The Man I Met at LA Congress

We are often, in this blog, looking at what we are doing, our application of the knowledge and skills inherent in practicing user-centered design. Rightly so, for that was the purpose of the blog. But, today, I want to step back and look at something which is the guiding force for whatever we do and that is,  who we are.

 A story from LA Congress

 

The booth was emptying as the attendees made their way to their next session. As a couple folks checked out at the registers, I watched as a gentleman entered the booth from the other side and walked across the carpet. He walked with a cane as he slowly but purposefully made his way over to the table where I stood. He wasn't looking for information. He didn't want to buy a product. He wanted to tell me about a man and a story about the beginnings. The press' beginnings.

 

As he began talking about the press, I asked him if he wanted a chair. "No, I'm fine," he said as he stood with his cane and held onto to the table as we talked. I was as eager to make him more comfortable as he was eager to tell me about this man and about his time at SMU. He told me about his memories of Brother Alphonsus Pluth.

 

He told me about how he remembered the beginnings of the press, how it began in the basement of St Mary's Hall on the campus of St Mary's University of MN.

 

He told me about Brother Alphonsus and how he would play his cello at night.

His memory was clear and vibrant and as he spoke of these memories, he had a brightness in his eyes.

 

I've heard Saint Mary’s Press’ story many times. I've heard the facts and the events in the order in which they unfolded.

But this man shared about these events as only someone who lived them could, and introduced me (again) to a man I've never met but whose legacy lives on in both its importance and its practice.

When I think about LA Congress 2013, I know that I was excited to see our customers’ delighted reception to the Catholic Children's Bible as well as the reception people had to all of our new products and our digital texts.

But upon further reflection, I've realized that the brief conversation I had with this man also carried with it a profound meaning and an important reminder. A reminder about who we are, where we come from and why we exist as an organization. A reminder about our humble yet persistent beginnings. Most important, it provided me a glimpse into the life of the man whose legacy lives on in the work we each do every day.

This conversation reminded me to always remember the man and to never forget the vision. That- what we do- must always stay grounded in who we are.

For this, I am grateful.

 

 

The Power of Paying Attention: Looking at the Value of User-Centered Design- 2 years later

I’ve been thinking about the last two years and our journey into the work of usability and into the practice of user-centered design.

Two years. It’s a good time to step back and say, what have we gleaned?  Has it been worth it?  What is the purpose behind all of it?  Does it still hold value for us?

Our goal as an organization is to be customer-centric in our product development: to understand our customers, understand their needs and to partner with them in the development of solution providing product.

Is user-centered design simply an exercise in practicing certain methods or is it an exercise in presence and the power of paying attention?

Practicing these methods just for the sake of practicing these methods misses the point.

However, if these methods allow us to move forward in understanding our customers and their needs more effectively, if they assist us in bringing customers into the product development process in a way that is strategic and intentional, then they have continued value for us as an organization.

It’s critical that we ask these questions and that we take an honest look at what the answers mean. 

Two years later, ask yourself:

• Do you know more about the lives of our customers than you did two years ago?
• Do you know more about who our customers are? Where they work?
• Do you know more about what products they use & how those products work for them?
• Do you know more about how they go about planning a lesson and where they go to find resources?
• Has spending time with the customer informed or confirmed your understanding of the customers’ pain points? Or what a product needed to be to provide a solution?
• Has spending time with the customer informed or confirmed what is working or not working in a product, be it the words, the design, the title, the marketing or the selling?
• Has usability testing of a product led you to make changes to the words, the design, the title, the marketing or the selling of a particular product?
• Has user feedback identified or unearthed any confusion in their use of a product?
• Has spending time with the customer informed or confirmed how the material needed to be organized?
• Has spending time with the customer informed or confirmed what navigational clues the customer is expecting to see?

I went through each of these questions myself and would be willing to venture that anyone who has gone on site visits or done usability testing probably has more insight than they realize about the above questions. 

Why do I say that?  Because what we’ve been doing over the last two years is, very simply, paying attention.

User-centered Design offers us a rich set of tools for effectively paying attention to our customers which leads us on a path of continuous improvement and innovation.

It teaches us how to effectively be present and observe our customers, listen to them, interview them, and how to effectively partner with them in the creation of product.

Paying Attention.

It seems like a simple thing.

But to pay attention well, effectively and continuously takes time. It takes work. In some ways it’s like a parent who is continuously paying attention to their children throughout their child’s life. That attention sometimes takes different forms, but it’s always there.  So too, our attention to our customers takes different forms.

Sometimes we pay attention through surveys, sometimes through spending time with them at their place of work. Sometimes we spend time with them and attend to their needs when they contact US via customer care. Sometimes we attend to their needs in person as the sales team does during their visits. Sometimes we pay attention through e-mail and sometimes we ask them to sit beside us and help us look at a product in new ways through usability testing.

But we are always paying attention. That is what it means to be user-centered.

That’s what it means to be Saint Mary’s Press.

UX Quiz Cards: Take the UX Challenge

The Product Development and Innovation team recently had a conversation around all of the different ways learning happens.
 
We identified that one way people learn is through playing games or by taking specific knowledge and skills and using them in a more fun or interactive way. 

Based on an activity we tried during our meeting, Connie Jensen helped us to create our very own set of UX Quiz Cards. (Thank you Connie!)

Stationed outside of Jason's office by the Saint Mary's Press UX Tracks (more on that next week) you can find the Saint Mary's Press UX Quiz Cards.

 

The Saint Mary's Press UX Quiz Cards

 

The goal of the UX quiz cards is to help us:

1. recall and reinforce the skills and knowledge that we are building around UX and want to continue using going forward.
2. remind us that we do this work together and draw on one anothers' perspective to ensure we see the whole UX picture.

The Saint Mary's Press UX Quiz Cards

Example of a UX Quiz Card

 To Play 

• Individually

1. Take a card and see if you can answer it. If you are not able, invite a colleague to share their knowledge about this aspect of UX.

• In a Group (perfect for meeting openers)

1. Take a card and see if you can answer it.
2. Once you've answered,follow it up with the question:  what else do we know about this aspect of UX

            
             *By the way---there are fun cards in there as well, so be ready.

What a UX year!

Happy New UX Year to you all!  Wow, the staff at Saint Mary's Press has had a busy year. 

As an organization, we've committed to implementing the principles of user-centered design in the creation of new products or the improvement of our existing product line.

To that end, over the last 12 months, Saint Mary's Press staff spent:

• 287 hours observing, interviewing and learning from our customers in their native environments
• 575 hours usability testing products for our customers and the markets we serve.

This spring we are releasing a number of products that have benefited from the insights we've gleaned from site visits as well as the work of usability testing.

We have learned many things this year including but not limited to:

• the necessity of the product
• the need for additional content within the product
• the need for different labeling in website headings
• the location where customers expected to find information
• specific information customers expected to find
• how colors affected a product's readability
• how design elements could assist the user in navigation

In the coming weeks, I will be interviewing some people who were part of the teams that gathered the insights (from our site visits and usability testing) and decided how to build or improve products based on what was learned.

Until then, here's a short quote from Br. Michael French who visited Saint Mary's Press back in November.  He affirmed that

 

“To interpret the culture— you have to be present to it.” 

I wanted to thank each of you and congratulate all of you on staff for taking the time (and making it possible for folks to take the time) to listen and to be present, so that no matter what we create, it is done in collaboration and in partnership with those whose work we support.
 

It's World Usability Day

November 8, 2012 is World Usability Day. 

 

World Usability Day was begun in 2005 by what is now known as the UXPA (User Experience Professional Association).

 

"Held annually on the second Thursday in November, World Usability Day promotes the values of usability, usability engineering, user-centered design, universal usability, and every user's responsibility to ask for things that work better. The day adopts a different theme each year. Organisations, groups or individuals are encouraged to hold events to mark the day, optionally according to that year's theme." (Wikipedia)

 

As stated on WorldUsabilityDay.org, usability is "about "Making Life Easy" and user friendly. Technology today is too hard to use. A cell phone should be as easy to access as a doorknob. In order to humanize a world that uses technology as an infrastructure for education, healthcare, transportation, government, communication, entertainment, work and other areas, we must develop these technologies in a way that serves people first."

 

As an organization committed to its' customers and to making their life easier, its imperative that we pay attention to this aspect of usability and make room for it to be an intrinsic aspect of our products. By utilizing usability in our approach to product development and design, we are ensuring that these products-no matter the medium of delivery- are developed and designed in a way that keeps our customers at the center of the process.

 

This video from WorldUsabilityDay.org offers a great explanation and background on the importance of usability.  

  

 

from WorldUsabilityDay.org

To learn more about what's happening around the world for World Usability Day, please check out the World Usability Day Homepage

Is UX work really saving us time?

Every product has a starting point. When we develop a product disconnected from a clear understanding of it's ultimate user, the product success will either be compromised or worse, end in frustration for the user. 

When a product fails to meet our customers' needs and we have to redo the product (for one reason or another) the cost of our time and resources is very clear. In fact, at that point, the costs are quantifiable. We can look at the product and say, "We had to spend this much time and money rewriting, redesigning, recopyediting, reprinting etc....."

However, when we develop a product utilizing user-centered design principles,we are often not as aware of how the time taken on the front end of development results with time savings for our customers as well as ourselves once the product is on the shelf. 

I recently came across a unique exploration into the connection between UX work and time. Andrew Mayfield, CEO of Optimal Workshop, digs deeper into this topic of how UX (user-experience) work and time-saving are connected in his interactive infographic called "You're saving time". 

Click the image below to open up Andrew's infographic:

 

Image by Andrew Mayfield, CEO, Optimal Workshop

Used with Permission