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Drupal.org redesign – help usability test Iteration 6 next week!

As you may have read, we’ll be doing some usability testing on the 6th iteration of the Drupal.org prototype in London next week. It seems like a great time to also kick off some crowdsourced usability testing, as we’d talked about earlier, and for any of you who’d like to get involved to do so!

(UPDATED!) Iteration six is now live here. I’d like to encourage you to take part in our Crowdsourced Usability Testing Campaign by doing a few tests yourself, wherever you are in the world, and contributing your findings back to the project.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Find some participants to take part – we want a mix of people along the spectrum of Drupal involvement from those who don’t know much to those who know lots and are super involved. Some tips for recruiting can be found here (feel free to add any other tips you have to our wiki!)
2. Take a look at the prototype and work out how you’re going to approach the interview – some interview tips and a sample script can be found here (again, feel free to add more!)
3. Work out a way to record your interview – some ideas here. Personally, I’ve found remote testing more hassle than it’s worth and much prefer to do in person interviewing. My technology of choice is a MacBook with Silverback installed for audio and video recording (you can get a 30 day trial for free). 
4. Do your interviews!
5. Share your interviews and findings! I’ve been exporting and posting some interviews on Vimeo, which is my preferred video sharing site. You can put yours wherever you like, just link to them from the comments of this post once they’re posted (and/or add them to the wiki where mine are now) – if you have some time to write up what you’ve learned as a result of the testing that would be fantastic! (If not, don’t worry, we’ll take a look through the video ourselves!)

That’s it! Not so hard at all, is it!

If you have any questions at all, post them here (no matter how silly they may sound, chances are others have exactly the same question or it’s something I forgot to cover in this post or on the wiki!) – I or someone else helpful will get back to you ASAP.

This is a great opportunity to help out with the Drupal project and a great chance to get some usability testing experience under your belt – which is a really fantastic skill to have, whatever aspect of design or development you’re most into. I really encourage you to give it a try and look forward to seeing what you come up with! I’ll be sharing my videos as soon as I can export them after usability testing sessions on Monday 3/11

If you’re able to do some testing early next week and post your feedback mid-late next week that would be fantastic. If this schedule doesn’t work for you – don’t fret – more iterations are coming hot on the heels of this one and more testing will be required and welcomed! You can get involved in the next few weeks if that suits you better.

Good luck, thank you and yay!

Drupal.org – Crowdsourcing Usability Testing – Get Involved!

Another day, another way to be involved in the Drupal.org redesign project, and this one’s a little different – but I think it’s going to be great fun!

Here’s what we’re going to do.

I’m going to be doing some remote usability testing using screen sharing and screen recording software that I’ll share back with all of you and that will help guide the ongoing design of the prototype. In particular, I’m going to be doing research with ‘outsiders’.

If you have either experience or interest in helping in this research effort, then I invite you to help test the prototype, either by doing more online remote research, or – even better – by doing some ‘in person’ research with people near you – especially people who are Drupal insiders.

We can then all post the videos of our research together with our findings and recommendations in a central location, building an amazing resource to document the progress of the prototype and what has guided the decision making as it is designed.

We’ll be asking people to help out with testing for each iteration as it is released, so if you’re too busy (or nervous) now, then never fear, opportunities abound. In fact, there’s no reason why this should stop just because the redesign team are off the case.

This is a little more complicated than our original crowdsourcing effort (wireframing), so I’ve quickly thrown together the skeleton of a wiki where we can pull together a toolkit of need to know information for this project – technology to use, how to interview, how to analyse results, that kind of thing. If you have expertise in this area, please feel free to pitch in a few recommendations.

You can find the Crowd Sourcing Research Wiki here. (Be warned, it’s pretty ugly, but I’m too excited about this to spend time making it look pretty – anyone who wants to do so is more than welcome).

So, consider yourself invited. If you’d like to be involved in helping test the prototype then please get involved. If you’ve wanted to try your hand at usability testing but have never had the opportunity, here it is. Exciting, huh?

Heathrow Terminal 5 – Another rant about respecting conventions

This seems to be my theme at the moment. Respect conventions.

Respecting conventions doesn’t mean that you have to slavishly follow them, that would be boring and unnecessary, BUT if you *are* going to break with convention then make sure it is very well sign posted, otherwise people will make mistakes.

I give you terminal 5 at Heathrow. 

Firstly a quick question – how long before an international flight do you need to get to the airport? 

The vast majority of people would say that the conservative answer is 2 hours but they don’t usually give it quite that long. 

Another quick question – how long before a flight to a European destination do you need to get to Heathrow? 

Again, most people will give you an answer around the 1 hour mark.

Now… you may already know this, but if you want to fly from London Heathrow Terminal 5 to Istanbul in Turkey (as I did the other day – yes the weather is beautiful, thank you!) they want you to get there not one, not two, but THREE hours before your flight.

We arrived an hour before our flight the other day and were severely reprimanded and had to be given ‘permission’ to proceed from the check in desk to try to get our flight. Fortunately (for us) the entire security software system crashed and massive queues meant that most flights (including ours) were delayed and we made our flight with plenty of time to spare.

So, given that getting to the airport 3 hours before the flight is apparently a big deal for BA, and given that T5 is relatively new, and given that in all my years of international flights, I’ve never been expected to be anywhere any earlier than 2 hours before the flight, you might expect that BA would make a big song and dance about this 3 hour requirement.

You’d be wrong.

They *do* make a big song and dance about the fact that we were leaving from T5 and that T5 is a new terminal. I definitely knew that because they advised me at almost every interaction I had with them regarding this flight (and these days there are quite a few touchpoints between purchasing the ticket and boarding the flight). But what did they tell me about time?

This is an excerpt from the email they sent me one week before the flight, specifically to help me to prepare for my upcoming flight:

IMPORTANT: For flights departing from Terminal 5, you must pass through ticket presentation and security at least 35 minutes before the flight departs. For other important information about passport, visa and UK domestic flight security checks, please visit ba.com/t5information.

So, honestly. Do they *really* expect me to turn up 3 hours early when this is the information they give me.

Perhaps they do, but I can tell you that a good portion of the passengers for the Istanbul flight were stuck in the security queue with us, having arrived much later than 3 hours before. And I doubt that it was because they were being naughty travelers, or that they liked the adrenaline rush of almost missing a flight. They just assumed, as we did, that turning up an hour before a flight from London to somewhere in Europe was the right thing to do, because that’s what we’ve done many times before.

This is what we do as humans. We make assumptions based on past experience and if we think we *know* how something works we don’t bother investigating it in detail, because we could spend our time and energy investigating things we think are new and interesting.

If people are making assumptions about your product, service or interface design and you’re *not* following the conventional approach, make sure whatever you’re doing differently is very clearly signposted. And then signposted again. Otherwise mistakes will happen.

And a customer who is making a mistake is very rarely a happy customer.

(disclaimer – yes, yes. I know that technical Istanbul is both European and Asian, doesn’t really make a difference to the discussion tho’)

Thoughtless design is going to cost me money… (or, why you shouldn’t ignore conventions)

Here is a new phone we got the other day. It’s our landline phone. Pretty cute huh? It’s called the Aqua by BT. Don’t buy it. I paid about £100 for a set of these phones. They are going to cost me a lot more than that in no time.

Here’s the thing. How do you end a call on a slide phone (which is what these are)? Simple – you close the slide, right? Well – yes, on every other slide phone that I’ve ever encountered, but not on this phone. Closing the slide does nothing… except closing the slide. So, when I went to make a call last night I discovered that, in fact, a call was still in progress. A call to a mobile phone, that had been connected for 8 hours. Ouch. I am *dreading* seeing this months phone bill because this isn’t the first time we’ve made this mistake. Although, this is probably the worst example.

We keep making this mistake because the slide-to-end-call convention is such a strong part of our model of how a slide phone works. We will keep making this mistake – despite the fact that we will be punished, seriously, by our telco.

As cute as these phones are, they’re going to be returned very soon because the experience of using them is so broken.

Moral to the story – if you’re designing something that has existing conventions associated with it – ignore them at your peril. Otherwise you’ll end up designing something that sucks as badly as this phone. And we don’t want that, do we.

End of rant.

‘I can’t work this!’ – iPhone’s cameo in Sex In The City Movie

Yes, I’ve seen the Sex In the City Movie, I’ll admit it. Either the rest of the UX community hasn’t seen it yet or we’re all just ignoring the fabulous user experience moment that Carrie has with the iPhone. For those who haven’t seen it, she is handed the iPhone (not hers) at a time when she urgently needs to make a phone call. She looks at it briefly, pronounces ‘I can’t work this’ and asks for a proper phone.

Unsurprisingly, Gizmodo reported it this way: ‘Confirmed: Carrie Bradshaw is too stupid to work a iPhone‘. Very helpful.

Personally, this was my favourite part of the whole movie (which says more about the movie than it does this particular moment). I loved the fierceness of her reaction to the unfamiliar interface.

It reminded me again that those of us who are ‘into’ interface design are really a fairly small group and how important it is for us to remember that the vast majority of people who encounter our interfaces do so on the way to achieving a task – sometimes one that is urgent and very important to them.

The people who encounter our interfaces in that kind of moment are not going to find them interesting, but an obstacle. And that they won’t take the time to ‘explore’ and ‘enjoy’ and ‘learn’ our amazing interface design.

It would be easy to say that SJP’s encounter with the iPhone showed that it lacked ‘usability’, but in fact it is probably more instructive as to the importance of evaluating usability over a longer term than just a one hour session in a usability lab. As I’ve said in the past, if something like the iPod, and no doubt the iPhone had been ‘usability tested’ using the traditional methods, they no doubt would have ‘failed’ and the world would be poorer for it.

All these things I had to think about because the movie was so disappointing… (speaking of bad UX).

Dialog Boxes: Making simple things simple…

How much thought do you give to writing the text on dialog boxes when you’re designing?

It’s fairly common for these to be written by the developers as they’re being coded, from what I’ve seen. They certainly deserve a whole lot more attention than they generally receive.

Here’s a prime example.

Notice the text that has been bolded. It’s asking me a question ‘do you want to allow the new version to access the same keychain items (such as passwords) as the previous version?’.

Is it just me, or are the obvious answers to this question either Yes, or No. Yet this dialog box presents me with the options ‘Don’t Change’ or ‘Change All’. To which my immediate response is… Change What?! I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Let’s ignore the fact that, hypothetically, I have pretty much no idea of what a keychain item might be, the next line of text reassuringly tells me that whatever option I end up guessing at is permanent and affects all keychain items used by Adium.

OK. So here’s what I know… whatever choice I make here is pretty important and not able to be undone… and yet I know little about what the question is and pretty much nothing about what the options represent.

Not a pretty situation considering I was just installing an update to my IM application.

Potentially enough for me to bail and go install another application instead? Maybe.

It’s in the details people.

[Note: Yes, I've heard that Adium is the best IM client for Mac. I'm sticking with it for the time being.]

[Another quick note: how much do I *hate* the way that Mac software uses that little triangle on it's side to represent 'if you click here, a whole stack of functionality that you *really* need but have no idea where it is, will be revealed. Who thought *that* was a good idea? It has caused me grief over the past couple of weeks... even *after* I learned its meaning. End of moaning.]

Is anything more aggravating than an indecipherable captcha?

Of course there is… but seriously… how hard do you want to make it for me to engage with your service and give you my money?

Very silly.

why bother calling if you call so late?

Don’t get me wrong… it’s not that I don’t want to work with you. I’d love nothing more to help make sure that your design is great and people love to use your product.

It’s just…  by the time you get to the part in your project plan that says ‘Usability Testing’, there’s not much I can do. You’ve left things too late.

Sure, I know. That’s when you do the usability testing, isn’t it? In that mad rush when you’re trying to get everything coded up and launched. I know, because it usually means that we don’t get much time to do the testing, and it’s usually not with the finished product.

And, you know… that probably would be ok, if we’d have done some testing earlier on in the piece.

OK, so you might not call it testing. You might call it research. Or you might just call it putting some ideas in front of people who might be using your product in the future and seeing what they think.

No, we don’t need your finished product before we can test. Not at all. We’ve tested with scraps of paper in the past and discovered we were heading down the wrong path altogether. We’ve learned a LOT about how our design should work even with some ugly wireframes.

And the great thing is that scraps of paper and wireframes cost nothing… compared to the amount you’ve invested in getting to the ‘Usability Testing’ line item on the project plan.

Compared to the amount you’ll probably have to spend if you want to implement any of the things we’ll probably learn if we do that testing now.

Of course… between you and I…. we know that’s probably not going to happen anyway, is it. There’s no time for changes. There’s a launch date fast approaching, and hardly enough time to finish the work you have already.

We’re just ticking a box here, aren’t we. With the best of intentions.

It’s a shame tho’. We could have been a good team.

We could have got to a kick butt design, one that we *knew* would work. We could have stopped all this coding and re-coding. We could have had good strong answers to questions that the business was asking. We could have taken so much of the guesswork out of it.

We could have been launching this thing with out the sneaking suspicion we’d be back at the drawing board (literally) in the very near future.

But I’ll tell you what I’ve found, and you tell me that you don’t have time to do anything about it.

And hopefully, next time, we can work together from the beginning.

I think that would be a much better idea.

Vodafone UK redesign – clean and simple on the surface, but it ain’t necessarily so.

Vodafone were certainly well over due for a redesign of their website, and so I was pleasantly surprised when I went to look up some contact details and found that redesigned they had…. and what a nice change. Compared to previous design (you can see more or less what it was like here), this design is calm and controlled and much less frantic. The old design used to make me feel stressed even before I started trying to negotiate it. My starting point with this new design is much more positive.

How have they achieved this? Dramatically cutting down the complexity and busyness of the old design and taking a much simpler and more cleanly structured approach. The clear division of the personal and business section certainly helps this, but even within the sections, significant work has been done with the information architecture to achieve this apparent simplicity.

But does the new design work better?

The thing that *really* aggravated me on the old website was the web interface for buying new ‘Pay As You Go’ credit, or Topping Up. I could find the functionality very quickly, but ended up caught in an endless cycle of error messages that never resulted in a sale.

So, I tried to perform this task on the new website and I found:

1. it was much harder to find where I was supposed to go to ‘top up’. Perhaps this is low down on the Vodafone priority list (although I’d be surprised at this… a whole lot of Vodafone customers PAYG customers). The information scent around this functionality is much weaker than on the previous website. I assume, although I’m not entirely certain, that I would find it somewhere in the ‘Manage Your Account Online‘ section…. I tried this after I tried Shop and My Vodafone without success.
2. it looks to me as though this design just re-skins the horrid software that I’ve battled with in the past to ‘top up’ my PAYG account (it certainly has the same look about it). I gave up when I struggled with the log in. Given that there is virtually no information provided as to what exactly I can ‘manage’ in this section, there is little incentive go through the registration process and maintain patience with the system.

So, from this quick evaluation, it seems to me that although the Vodafone redesign is, in some respects, an improvement on the previous site, particularly with regards to visual appeal, there are still plenty of opportunities for Vodafone to deliver a much more impressive customer experience online… perhaps focussing a little less on the flashy animations (yes, they’re still there, just on the lower level pages now), and more on supporting user tasks.

A step in the right direction though. I wonder if this design is now going to be implemented globally?

Technorati Tags: vodafone

A Sale Un-Made (snatching defeat from the jaws of victory at three.co.uk)

It’s been a a while since I’ve gotten all excited about a mobile phone. Since I’ve been in the UK I’ve been getting by with a rather old Razr (awful, awful interface design) and a pre-pay account from Vodafone (don’t even get me started on how impossible it is to do an online top up). When I heard about the Three X-Series, the idea of a fixed price to take the internet with me absolutely everywhere, and with Skype and Messenger and all the good stuff already pre-installed… it was too much for me to resist.

Aaahh. The familiar tingle of gadget lust. I do love it.

So a couple of weeks ago I gave Three my email address so they could email me when the service was on sale, and this morning they sent me an email saying I could buy one of their X-Series phones… and off I went, with haste, to their online store. Hoorah!

Ahh. But not so fast. This was by no means a simple experience… and it’s not over yet. How can buying stuff online still be so difficult? Shouldn’t we be good at this by now?

Well, we are… and we aren’t.

Choosing my handset and package was made comparatively simple due to the fact that there was only one handset available, and four reasonably well explained ‘packages’. Then, onto the shopping cart. Here’s where we hit the first snag.

Just as I was about to hit the green button and go through to the checkout I noticed that they were telling me the ‘Total Monthly Rental’ was about double what I’d been told throughout the sales process. Insert red flag waving wildly. Trigger desire to abandon the purchase process. But no… I neither hit the phones nor abandoned at this point, instead I thought I might try their ‘live chat’ service and see if they could help me out.

Does anyone else use these live chat services? I think they’re great, but then you go to a whole other aspect of interaction design that can’t be programmed quite so easily… real human beings. Service can be variable. I got lucky and chatted to Glen, who was reasonably speeding in helping me out and assured me that they’d only charge me the amount indicated throughout the sales process and not the either inaccurate or misleading amount shown in the Trolley.

Ok. I decided to take Glen at his word and moved onto the form.

At this stage I’m thinking that so far the process is going ok. I would rather not have been confused by the trolley page, but I was also quite inspired by how appropriate and helpful a live chat feature is in the online buying environment. I used to always think this was a bit of an annoying gimmick, but in this instance it was genuinely helpful.

And so, to the form. It was a pretty clean and simple form, and I really liked the Help section in the RHS column which updated with contextual help depending on what field I was completing. Neat, helpful, very nice.

Now I’m feeling impressed with Three. They’ve thought about this. They care about my experience of their website, of the purchase process. This is good.

And then I hit the next page…. they wanted my address.

No problem. I give them my current address.

But I’ve only been here months, not 3 years, so they ask for another address… and that’s where the trouble really kicks in. There’s no way I can give them a non-UK address. Their form requires a UK postcode. This is not good.

I fire up the live chat again. It’s Glen, again. I ask him for help.

He confirms that they can’t take my address online. He gives me a phone number. Apparently they *can* take my address details if I call them. Or go into a store.

And that’s when I abandon.

And I wonder why on earth it was designed that way. Perhaps there’s a good reason. Might have been nice if they could tell me that.

Did I call the call centre to buy my phone?

Nope.

I’m going to go into town tomorrow and see if I can go get one from a store. (Given the stores in the vicinity of where I’ll be, Three are going to end up having to pay a commission for this sale now, as I won’t be going direct to them).

I really like ordering online because it’s convenient, and I don’t have to deal with people. And then, a day or so later, a little present arrives! It’s kind of like magic.

I’m not sure why, but ordering stuff on the phone does nothing for me. The only time I like to use the phone to buy stuff is when I’m getting Indian food delivered. Strangely… when I buy something online, I’m prepared to wait a day or so for my purchases to arrive. When I’m ordering on the phone, the same wait seems unacceptable.

Is this just a crazy weird quirk of mine or do other people get this too?

For me, if I have to go deal with a sales person, I’d rather do it in the flesh, and get the bonus of being able to have a play with the handset before I buy it, and the instant gratification of being able to take my phone home with me straight away.

So, that’s what I’m off to do tomorrow.

But…. before we completely signoff from the Three.co.uk Store, a few minutes after I’d abandoned my quest to purchase, I received this email:

I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen one of these kind of emails before, but I think it’s a great idea. It makes Three look smart, and it also creates the impression that they care whether I sign up with them or not.

I think they’re missing a great opportunity to get some golden feedback here though. They really should be asking *why* I didn’t end up making the purchase. I certainly would have told them my reason, and that would be a great way for them to better deal with this experience (and I’m sure I’m not the only person who has been affected by it!), and it would give me an opportunity to vent. (That’s something that’s really missing from the online buying experience… look at the length of the blog post I’ve had to write to make up for it!)

So, in summary. Tried to buy a phone from Three online. Couldn’t. But don’t think I’m suggesting that means the Three online experience is dreadfully broken. It’s definitely not. In fact, they’re doing a whole bunch of stuff I really like. My experience is probably a bit of an edgecase example, and it’s a shame they’re not handling it better.

This experience has really made me think, though, about how two way communication can be powerful in this type of transaction. Both me being able to talk to Glen at points where I may otherwise have bailed, and also the missing opportunity for me to tell Three *why* I bailed.

It goes to show how easy it is for even a well designed experience to have flaws that impact confidence and trust and that can turn an easy sale into a sale un-made.