November 2009

There were 3 posts published in November 2009.

Do you have a relative with dementia? Please help with a website usability study (London)

I’m working on a website usability project for a charity that provides services to anyone affected by dementia. This project will help to ensure that we are delivering support and information services in the best possible way.

We will need an hour of your time on Monday 23 November in Central London. There will be other studies conducted throughout 2010, so please let us know if you’re interested but not available on this date.

If you’d like to participate or to find out more, please complete this form and we will contact you with more information. London travel expenses will be reimbursed.

If you know someone who might be interested in participating, please pass them this information.

Thanks very much for your help with this.

Customer Vs User Experience

Since it came up in discussion at the recent London UX Bookclub where we were discussing Selling Usability: User Experience Infiltration Tactics by John S. Rhodes, I have been thinking about whether it would be useful to start calling myself a Customer Experience Consultant rather than a User Experience Consultant.

In the book, the author advocates using the term ‘customer’ rather than ‘user’ because your business colleagues will both understand & value a ‘customer’ more than a ‘user’. This is not really the reason that I would consider the change, though. It’s actually more about me and the kind of work I do.

The main reason that I would consider changing to a Customer Experience Consultant is because I’ve found that more and more the scope of ‘experience’ that I need to access and can have an impact on goes well beyond the website. Despite the fact that I have much more expertise in engagement with customers in digitally interactive environments, more and more the holistic experience that the customer has with the business I am designing for is relevant and important in the strategy, recommendations and ultimately design work that we do.

By defining myself as a ‘User Experience Consultant’ I am effectively signaling that my scope, interest and usefulness starts and ends at the digital border (however fuzzy that border may be becoming these days). I don’t think this does anyone any favours.

I’m also on the record as not being a huge fan of the term ‘user’, because there are so many more descriptive and humane alternatives. It would be a nice fringe benefit for me to get the word ‘user’ out of my job title.

Of course, there are downsides to this. ‘Customer’ is also a fairly limiting term, it implies consumer focus, it doesn’t allow for differentiation between the person who is ‘buying’ the product/service and the ultimate end user (who can sometimes be very different people!), and it is often too generic and not descriptive enough for companies we engage with, where ‘customers’ are called ‘members’, or ‘readers’, or ‘subscribers’ for example. (Were I working inhouse I could tailor my title to suit, but as a freelancer this is more challenging!).

Another downside of this change is that it creates yet another definition for us (the IA/UX/IxD and however else we already define ourselves) to argue over, it is another title for clients to learn, and it doesn’t give any clues around ‘usability’ which is still something that a lot of clients look for when they are really looking for user experience (but don’t yet know it exists).

I’m not really one for labouring over definitions of what we do, and I don’t think I’m going to go out and change my business cards tomorrow, but it’s something I’ll be mulling over for a while I think. My gut feel is that there is something important here, but also a bunch of problems. I’d be very interested to get your thoughts on this as well, included suggested alternatives.

Translations:
 You can now read this post in Belorussian (thanks to Fatcow for the translation).

Make it measurable: set clear goals & success criteria for your projects

Over the past few weeks I’ve been wrapping up and kicking off a bunch of projects. It is during both of these phases that I am reminded how incredibly valuable it is for me, as a UX practitioner, to proactively encourage my clients to clearly define the goal for their project and to create success criteria – ways that we can tell whether or not the project has been successful.

Be specific

In my experience it is very often left up to me to make sure that the project goals are as clear as they need to be. Many clients come into projects wanting ‘to improve the usability of our website/application/etc’, in my experience that is most often too vague a project goal as to be useful.

The kind of project goals that are really useful go more like this:

We’re getting lots of traffic to the site but not many are joining/buying/contributing/coming back. We want to fix this.

We’re getting lots of calls from people who have visited our website but still don’t know what we do. We want to fix this.

People are coming to our site and doing X but we really want them to start doing Y, we want to find out why this is happening and what we need to do to address it.

As soon as you start defining more specific project goals you can immediately see the way that success criteria start to become immediately apparent.

Measuring success criteria

Some success criteria are immediately apparent and easy to measure, for example return visitors, increased membership, activity or sales. Ideally you want to put some numbers around what you’d consider would define this project as ‘successful’, but even just identifying the metrics that you will use to judge the success of the project is a good start.

Some success criteria are less easy to ‘measure’ but don’t let that discourage you. Often for these kinds of criteria I’ll use a round of research to determine whether or not we’ve been successful – those things that are difficult to quantify are often quite easy to examine using qualitative research. I find myself more and more using a last round of research to ‘check off’ the less quantifiable success criteria for projects.

What’s in it for me?

Failure is a built-in risk of success criteria, but don’t let that put you off. Failing knowledgeably is actually an incredibly useful learning experience for practitioner and client alike (and yes, I speak from experience). I would argue that by defining clear goals and success criteria you are going to do nothing but increase your chances of success in a project.

Clearly defined project goals allow you to make all kinds of good decisions on a project and it can impact everything from design decisions through to who you recruit to participate in design. Just the other day a project I’m working on managed to avoid wasting a number of research sessions on ‘people we felt we had to include’ because we were able to really clearly define why, for the purposes of achieving the goals for this project, they were not our target audience. Without the clear goal we would never have been able to come to this decision.

Clearly defined and measurable success criteria similarly guide you through decision making throughout the project, but they also continue to be useful well after a project has wrapped up. Of course, we use them to judge the success of the project, but we can also use them to communicate this success to others in the organisation and beyond. Clearly defined and measured success criteria give us something tangible to talk about and take much of the ‘touchy feely’ fuzziness out of User Experience and that makes it much easier for more people to understand and appreciate the value of the work we have done.

Would love to hear your thoughts & experiences.