Low-fidelity Branding: November 2011

20 November 2011

113: Designer vs Programmer

Designer vs Programmer

1) Abstract / Concrete

2) Concept / Detail

3) Future / Present

4) Originality / Conventionality

5) Imagination / Factual

18 November 2011

112: UX is not an assassin cleaner

UX satisfaction testing's annual project cost of $1,200 can save development teams 10 times or much more if used properly. It is the speed and accessibility that is most important.

Cheap/hacker results are better (even preferred) to what teams are presently being dished up --slow to no results. Meaningless philosophical drivel arrives too late to do any good. The team has secretly already moved on.

There is a resistance to using UX satisfaction testing in team development because programmer's attitude is it slows down the process. (Oh no! Not UX again! Rain on my parade.) In reality, user satisfaction testing doubles the real-world efficiency. Agile cannot be productive without rapid feedback. That is proven --but no one is doing anything because they don't know how to solve the problem.

I suspect one reason Agile fails to use UX is because they don't have a decent tool yet. When they do, they will finally operate closed-loop. It's a convenience issue. It has to be painless. What is presently available just doesn't fit their workflow. It hurts to use it. It's like starting a fire by friction --not near as much fun as a match and gas.

My goal/mission is to break down the resistance to good UX "inline". Right now it's done "offline". UX "afterwards" for damage control, repair, and cleanup. UX is brought in like an assassin "cleaner" after a project's gone wrong. Strategic UX is about avoiding failure in the first place.

Agile UX (rapid prototyping) must be more strategic than in the past --embedded into the actual development process like lean manufacturing checkpoints and quality control. It builds quality into the product as it's built --not in final inspection. It has to be part of the team process and expectation. The cry of "We can't live without it" is insistence value in marketing. I want insistence value.

Agile teams pay lip service to UX but are not doing it because it is "hard and frustrating" when applied. It requires too much thinking and then the results are fuzzy. They'd rather be coding. We can be just as fuzzy --but FASTER.

We are eliminating obstruction, fluff, and friction for concurrent UX testing.

They don't really want a volume of data. They want quick judgments to guide the next iteration (2 weeks). It's all about efficiency. That is something programmers can relate to --that is the need.

17 November 2011

111: Speed UX

There are two speed metrics: 1) based on actual pageweight -- you have offloaded some weight (sharing with Picassa); and 2) perceived load time (page rendering or recognition). As long as you are "perceived" as under 2 seconds you are fine.

Google owns Picassa. They are using good technology to speed up the image "delivery". You benefit from their expertise and wonderfulness. This is a good example of benefiting from cloud services.

I classify speed as "obstruction" when it is bad. It's weight is twice any other factor. You have zero UX after 9 seconds. It doesn't matter how beautiful or desirable the content is. People will not tolerate a slow load. You've ruined the experience. Like kissing with bad breath, it's memorable for the wrong reason. The first-impression is ruined. Obviously, instant loads of under 1 seconds are the best. Speed is then transparent.

Now try your tablet speed on a commute or remote location --not near a home wireless router. :) A real test of mobile user environment.

The 2-second threshold is not an "Internet" created parameter. It has been proven for decades a threshold of human tolerance for presentations. In other words, it's more classic (hardwired) than fad (habit). People ARE becoming more impatient and intolerant but only when the 2-seconds is violated. Their annoyance is more pronounced after 2 second waits. Up until then everything was fine.

Like McDonald's has shown American's will wait 5 minutes for food. Then they get more and more agitated with the wait and will even leave or make threats. That is for food. It's different for pages.

www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html

If you liked this tutorial, please raise your hand. :)

110: Interview with Joe Harris

Can development teams do rapid user satisfaction testing themselves?
This would be called a focus group or simply emailing survey questions. You know how good those are and how long they take to assemble. They tell you what you want to hear. Teams sometimes try to do testing themselves by using in-house staff (hardly unbiased) but with interviews or paper and pencil or email --not electronic automation. It is more expensive to analyze --not to gather data. You end up with a pile of reports and video on your desk to try an intuit and sift what it means. They don't need complexity. Overkill creates delays.

Simple and fast is better.
There are "survey and questionnaire" subcontractors --but the turnaround is slow because it doesn't indicate what to do next. You still have to have a brain. The problem is the project is stalled or may be turned in the wrong direction while waiting. Paralysis by analysis. Nor do traditional methods necessarily produce a baseline for comparisons on subsequent iterations (two week sprints). The user experience is bad with questionnaires (no seamless ecosystem). I take "online tests" to evaluate competitor weaknesses. Our "voting ecosystem" is fast and painless by comparison for the tester and instant results to view by the design team.

How much are you really saving companies after you charge your fee?
They literally can double their output or half the cost, etc. It's efficiency we sell. How much is that worth? Our potential fee is $50 per iteration (every 2 weeks) per project ($100 per month). That is peanuts compared to the potential gain. If it's a big million dollar project (not uncommon), they will save a half million dollars. If it takes a year, that means we only charged them $1,200. It is disposable reporting. We are not talking speculation about profit or sales. We are talking budgetary improvement. "X" is alloted. They save 1/2 of that.

Disposable feedback doubles project efficiency. << Is this a new positioning statement?

Imagine building a product where you NEVER asked the customer what they thought about features until you spent 2 years and $250,000 dollars. Is that smart? No! But that is how websites are usually built. Then it's all demolition, maintenance, and repair work after that. Very ineffective. If the customer/user is involved in tweaking and reviewing the design, they save 50% of the development cost. The shelf-life of a website is 3 years. It's almost time to start again!

The best analog comparison is lean manufacturing which also requires lots of in-process feedback for good quality throughout the process --not just at the end. You build in the quality, not rebuild in the quality.

In your ROI calculations, are you also including the cash flow from sales generated from the time you have saved them.
Nope. Too fuzzy. Just budget and project improvement. No direct or potential sales income is calculated.

If they are 50% faster to market, they have the 50% time saved to sell their product.
That is true. But usually they already started pre-selling the product. That is the marketing guys have. Not the programmers.

Or am I off base?
Your questions are very valid. I'm not sure I've answered them well. I'm thinking about what you have asked. Some is immeasurable. Like asking "What is the benefit from wearing lipstick?" How much is self-esteem worth or a really good kiss?

Sometimes there is a psychological benefit from just knowing you are doing it right or installing more lights in production areas for good morale.

15 November 2011

109: MBTI UX INFP

http://uxmovement.com/thinking/myers-briggs-personality-types-of-designers/

I am INFP (dominant) or INFJ (subordinate). I can role play ENFP (teacher) with high taxation on my energy levels. I'm well suited for the UX work.

I've been immersing in UX and in particular "Rapid User Satisfaction Feedback" which is essential for "agile" web development (team projects).

Agile project management improves web project ROI by 50% to 200%. This is measurable time and money. How it is measured I'll share some time. But "good agile" is contingent on "inline" and "concurrent" user feedback which presently is very clunky and time consuming (such as interviews, surveys, and questionnaires).

I've developed new cloud-utility feedback methods to match UX and Agile collaboration using tablet and mobile devices (painlessness). Essentially a low-entry best practice standard. My past attention (obsession) with web speed is paying off for mobile and tablet pages which must be between 20 and 25K pageweights. Old is new again!

14 November 2011

108: UX world-domination

I have yet to see a satisfaction survey site that made me want to get out my wallet or give it a try. They are usually charging by the month or by the test or by the project. And the offer is just extremely boring. None of them make me go "cool! gimmee!" Most have barriers to entry "like writing a survey" or setting up credit card accounts, trial periods, etc. Those are all intimidating, frustrating, and burdensome. Bad UX.

Skype has an interesting strategy. Their service is free. You can upgrade to professional quality services. You don't have to have a credit card to get in. Only 6% of their customers are "paid subscribers" the other 94% are all leaches. Yet, those 6% provide 100% of their profits. Essentially, $100 per year per paid user.

Microsoft bought Skype for $8.6 Billion. The annual revenue is not quite $1 billion. How much is profit I don't know. It took only 8 years to get to that point. Phenomenal.

Skype eliminated their competition with a preemptive first strike at market dominance. They weren't the first online telephony company but they were the first to go FREE.

It is called the “free plus paid services” business model. It all depends on how compelling of a value proposition Skype makes for users to upgrade.

About 35% of Skype’s users are businesses (probably small businesses). And not all of those are paid. This is also important because business users are more likely to pay for advanced features, rather than sucking up the free version only.

The question is what compelling value proposition will entice free users to convert to paying users. Answer: Remove all barriers to use then upgrade.

We aren't selling to consumers --we are selling to programmers, project managers, and marketing managers (development teams). Business people with profit motives. But first they need to toy with it.

The point is Skype used "free" to go viral. The cost of acquiring customers was small compared to the usual sign-up conventional phone services. What they bought with "free" was cheap marketing. Without it, they never would have gotten out of the gates.

My gut says we have to give something away to make it big. Something compelling like unlimited tests and access to the dashboard --but lock up the "details section". The real pros will want the whole enchilada. Those who came just to play could careless but as long as our overhead is minimal it's okay. We have to encourage playing. We have unlimited bandwidth. We have limited data storage but can make it time-limited (expiration of access). The dashboard is relevant (juicy) but not as much as the "details". It is a good and pretty indicator (qualitative assessment). It has value but not everything.

Let them sample all they want of the nutrition-less but still charge $50 per project to taste the main course. We sell the add-on from the dashboard. We give them repeat but expiring access to the results.

I think this is required for fast "world-domination".

107: Agile-wannabees

Agile is good but too tightly focused.
"Team development" is really the positioning. Agile is a team project management method but most teams fail at Agile or just pay it lip service. It is an ideal. It is hot but in the real world only a small portion are disciplined and motivated enough to make it really work.

We have services for agile and agile-wannabees.
Agile is still a keyword for SEO but it's too esoteric for marketing managers to comprehend. Marketing guys are on the team. In fact, they sign the checks. We need to appeal to agile programmers but marketing managers are the ones who put the guns to their heads and want evidence and proof.

We are doing industrial committee selling.
I've been doing that forever and ever. It's my forte. Agile programmers sit on the committee. They have the luxury of being the influencer but not necessarily the buyer. The programmer is the guide who takes the marketing guy to our website and says, "See. We need ScreenZest."

Go viral via programmers.
We need programmers endorsements but they aren't the authorizer or purchaser. Buying our service is not a one-person decision with a credit card. The committee has to be all onboard and unanimous to using our process.

Positioning
The fundamental difference here is we don't sell "user satisfaction feedback". That's what "it is" (the tangible) but not what they want "to buy" necessarily (the intangible). We sell development teams faster communications about agile satisfaction. Well. That's closer anyway.

03 November 2011

01 November 2011

102: Jacob Nielsen Anti-UX?

I've read Jacob Nielsen's stuff and watched video interviews with him, etc. I agree with much of his philosophy and he is intelligent but he is so militantly anti-design (prejudiced?) that I --like other User Experience (UX) pros-- find him an obnoxious snob. He's been preaching usability for decades now.

I've seen UX slide shows where they poke fun at Nielsen as an undiscerning nerd. I'm sorry to say it's pretty funny. He makes lots of money since he appeals to left-brain web programmers and developers --and not right-brain designers.

Here are the flaws in his opinions:

1) Nielsen is a usability expert. He focuses on Spartan decoration to the extreme and sees that method as a panacea. UX views usability as a component in a bigger picture. I say that even as I presently focus on a piece of usability which is "user satisfaction". Which came first?

2. Nielsen sees only one flaw: bad usability. I see there are three hurdles to good user satisfaction and they are not equally weighted. He doesn't recognize their value nor does he "weight" them. Here they are:

a) OBSTRUCTION -BIG
First: Obstruction like speed, accessibility, and brokenness. If a viewer won't wait for the page load (scarcity of attention) or can't "see", they will bail on the site. So it doesn't matter how beautiful a site is or how good the content. Speed is the first deal killer. Two seconds maximum wait is tolerated. So Nielson says, "Eliminate decoration." Wait. Not so fast. Read on.

b) DECORATION -MEDIUM
Second: If the viewer can get past obstruction, the next hurdle is the site aesthetic. Lab research shows people pass judgment (first-impression) on a site in less than 50 milliseconds. The biggest influence is the use of color combinations and type (aka theme). It bypasses all cognitive mental process. It's visceral. This causes a halo bias. Everything is judged after that to reinforce the first impression. Other research shows that even though people SAY they are most influenced by usability and content that isn't true. They are most influenced by a "pretty screen" for credibility (credibility = trustworthiness + expertise + leadership). Nielsen's solution is to eliminate all decoration and even provide full-measure screen text. Uh. Proven bad for credibility. Self-defeating "logical" behavior.

c) FRICTION -LOW
Lastly, the final hurdle is "friction" which includes all of the things that make us feel we are in the right or wrong place (cuing). These include content relevance, readability, navigation, expectations, etc. These are the details that can frustrate us if they aren't obvious or transparent. But they happen AFTER obstruction and decoration judgments. They are frequently subconscious irritation or pleasure.

My goal is SATISFACTION (like hotel hospitality for the web). It is impossible to eliminate all these hurdles completely but they can be optimized to improve website success. First impressions can be voted on and then ranked. (It isn't necessary to overkill to zero when 0.40 will do the trick.) The goal is improved efficiency. In other words, how quickly can the barriers be reduced with the least amount of time and money.

I don't really WANT "plain-Jane" sites. I feel there are decorative elements that can be leveraged and balanced with speed and still give "branding". That requires compromise.

Extreme light page weights (20K to 25K) have suddenly become important again with tablet and smartphone web browsers. The "old" I've been fanatic about is "new" again. I don't look so dumb to programmers now. This makes me feel happy. :) But decoration should not be discarded completely.

So if you say Nielsen reminds you about "me" and my thinking it is happily a compliment --and sadly an insult. I thought I'd set the record straight on the idea differences be they only subtle nuance.