Jensen Harris recently gave a talk at MiX08 titled “The Story of the Ribbon”. He told the story of the development of the new Microsoft Office 2007 user interface. There are great insights on how Microsoft solved the challenge of “menu clutter”, various methods to collect user insights and how to setup an iterative prototyping process to create a product that radically improves the users experience when working with a word processor or excel sheet.

The story of the development of the new Office UI starts with identifying the real problem with Office suits. While conventional wisdom might suggest that Office is already “Good Enough”, when asking real people how they felt about it they came up with different stories. People felt that Office is powerful, but they don’t know how to use it anymore. Jenson makes a good point:

The goal was to give back the user the feeling of mastery and to find a way so that working with Microsoft Office makes fun again. Harris stresses that interface design is one part art and one part science and he presents his insights on art and science of interface design.

Instead of generating wild ideas through brainstorming sessions, the UI team focused on two main activities: gathering user insights and building a “culture of iteration” through prototypes.

Here are some slides that give more insight how user insights were collected.

The method of planning to iterate as well as some prototypes for the UI are shown below.

So has Microsoft been successful with creating an Office Suite that gives users a feeling of mastery and which is fun to use? Here are the results of an survey of users of all skill levels after 2 months of use.

Nearly 90% of users agree that the software makes it easier to create professional looking documents and about 85% percent of user agree that the software is more fun to use.

The key lessons from his talk are:

• You can turn using a “boring” product into fun and enjoyable experience
• The key to success is not about brainstorming but about gathering user insights and iterative prototyping
• Even a mature company can create radical products by setting the focus right: on the user

You can watch the talk online or download it. Powerpoint slides are available too. Highly recommended.

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Creating questionnaires is an art in itself; an even higher art is creating questionnaires about customer satisfaction. A recent experience with a satisfaction survey during a train ride reminds me that it is important to understand customer satisfaction in order to be able to create a questionnaire about customer satisfaction.

The questionnaire included questions regarding my satisfaction with the cabin, services and food on the train. The biggest challenge is to understand that customers are not just satisfied or dissatisfied. Your customers can also feel indifferent about your products and services.

It is essential to understand that satisfaction or dissatisfaction is the result of a confirmation or disconfirmation of the expected brand performance with the actual brand performance.

Following this logic, customers evaluate an encounter with a product or service and if the perceived brand performance matches the expected brand performance, the customers have neutral feelings (The Zone of Indifference). If the actual brand performance is less than the expected, customers feel dissatisfied. Only if the perceived performance of that experience is better than expected, customers will feel satisfied.

Asking a customer how he feels about the encounter when he has neutral feelings should allow him to answer that he feels indifferent. Companies have to realize that customers don’t feel satisfied just because their customers experienced everything as expected!

The challenge with surveying customer satisfaction is to ask about the elements that cause satisfaction not about satisfaction itself. It is impossible to conclude that your customers are satisfied when they are asked if they are satisfied with a product or service. If customers say they are satisfied, are they really satisfied (meaning that their expectations where exceeded) or are they just indifferent but feel that since their expectations have been met, that they should be satisfied? During my travel on the train I have experienced nothing extraordinary, just a normal journey and basically I felt indifferent.

Customer don’t know if they should feel satisfied when everything was just as expected or if they are also “allowed” to feel indifferent.

 

So instead of asking “Are you satisfied with our products/services?” and rating the satisfaction with a service on a scale, one should actually ask:

“Have we been able to fulfill your expectations?”

“Have we been able to exceed your expectations/surprise you with our products or services?”

The goal is to have customer’s that don’t feel indifferent about your services, but customers that care and are satisfied. This requires that the delivered experience exceeds their expectations which is a difficult task, but the only possible way to ensure that you have loyal customers who care.

The only way for a business to survive, is to have customers who care.

Posted in customer satisfaction | Permalink | 1 Comment »

Information about IDEO is rare and even though this presentation is already from 2005 it is still highly interesting and provides a good overview of IDEO’s design practice.

Making a valuable contribution to many types of business is the story of IDEO. The application of their expertise is moving from the more traditional product design to the recent application of design thinking to service and customer experiences for everything from hospitals to the GUI on cell phones.

The design process, the people and the culture of IDEO are world-renown for their ability to combine intellectual prowess with intuitive, human-centred design which generates marketleading results. As the applications of IDEO’s design expertise become more diverse, Tim sees IDEO’s design process being used as a navigational tool for discovering the right problem, more than simply designing the right solution.

Tim presentation focused how IDEO harnesses the talents of both their staff and their customers to gain the insights that they harvest into tangible outcomes for business.

Download the presentation here.

via [intuire]

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User centered design is receiving increasing attention in recent years. Various methods and tools are used within organizations to improve the understanding of user and task requirements, support the iteration of design and evaluation. Identifying the most important and most used user centered design methods was the goal of the study “The State of User Centered Design Practice”.

In this study the authors surveyed more than 100 experienced practitioners of UCD with at least three years of experience and who considered UCD as their primary job. The following table shows the key results of the survey (Ranging from 1 to 5, from the most important to the least important method):

The following links provide more information about the individual user centered design practices, collected from various sources.

Field Studies: The Best Tool to Discover User Needs (by User Interface Engineering)

The most valuable asset of a successful design team is the information they have about their users. When teams have the right information, the job of designing a powerful, intuitive, easy-to-use interface becomes tremendously easier. When they don’t, every little design decision becomes a struggle. Field studies get the team immersed in the environment of their users and allow them to observe critical details for which there is no other way of discovering.

Requirements Analysis – Characteristics of Good Requirements (by The University of Queensland)

Requirements analysis is a tool that can be used to ensure that designers capture all the whole-of-life needs of the product or system from the perspectives of all the stakeholders - the acquirer, the operator, the user, the maintainer and those who refurbish or dispose of the it at the end of it life. At the end of the process, the designers are left with a document listing the system requirements for a product design. From this document they can base much of their subsequent work.

Iterative User Interface Design (by Jacob Nielsen)

Redesigning user interfaces on the basis of user testing can substantially improve usability. In four case studies, the median improvement in overall usability was 165% from the first to the last iteration, and the median improvement per iteration was 38%. Iterating through at least three versions of the interface is recommended, since some usability measures often decrease in some versions if the usability engineering process has focused on improving other parameters.

Usability Evaluation (by Jean Scholtz, National Institute of Standards and Technology)

User-centered evaluations are accomplished by identifying representative users, representative tasks, and
developing a procedure for capturing the problems that users have in trying to apply a particular software
product in accomplishing these tasks. During the design/testing/development cycle of software
development, two types of user evaluations are carried out.

Task analysis methods (by UsabilityNet.org)

Task analysis analyses what a user is required to do in terms of actions and/or cognitive processes to achieve a task. A detailed task analysis can be conducted to understand the current system and the information flows within it. These information flows are important to the maintenance of the existing system and must be incorporated or substituted in any new system. Task analysis makes it possible to design and allocate tasks appropriately within the new system. The functions to be included within the system and the user interface can then be accurately specified.

Using Focus Groups for Evaluation (by The University of Arizona)

Focus groups were originally called “focused interviews” or “group depth interviews”. The technique was developed after World War II to evaluate audience response to radio programs (Stewart & Shamdasani, 1990). Since then social scientists and program evaluators have found focus groups to be useful in understanding how or why people hold certain beliefs about a topic or program of interest.

A focus group could be defined as a group of interacting individuals having some common interest or characteristics, brought together by a moderator, who uses the group and its interaction as a way to gain information about a specific or focused issue.

Heuristic Evaluation (by Usability Body of Knowledge)

A usability evaluation method in which one or more reviewers, preferably experts, compare a software, documentation, or hardware product to a list of design principles (commonly referred to as heuristics) and list where the product does not follow those principles.

Interviews (by UsabilityNet.org)

The interview is a method for discovering facts and opinions held by potential users of the system being designed. It is usually done by one interviewer speaking to one informant at a time. Reports of interviews have to be carefully analyzed and targeted to ensure they make their impact. Otherwise the effort is wasted.

Using Prototypes (by SAP Design Guild)

Prototypes can help to evaluate design alternatives at any stage of the development process. Here three approaches are introduced: storyboards, paper prototyping, and HTML prototyping. A listing of pros and cons is given for the prototyping approaches in order to facilitate the decision of which is best for your requirements.

User survey for design (by UsabilityNet.org)

User surveys are a means of finding out how the software or web site is likely to be used by a specific set of users, and who these users are likely to be. The answers user surveys provide must be relevant to the issues that are important to the design team. User surveys are traditionally carried out by post, but increasingly, the Internet is used for this purpose.

Expert reviews (by Cognitis)

Expert reviews are an opportunity for the design team to obtain the perspectives of designers who have been outside the development process. There is probably no single more cost-effective way to improve the quality of a product.

Perform Card Sorting (by Usability.gov)

Card sorting is a way to involve users in grouping information for a Web site. Participants in a card sorting session are asked to organize the content from your Web site in a way that makes sense to them. Participants review items from your Web site and then group these items into categories. Participants may even help you label these groups.

What is a Participatory Design workshop? (by Information & Design)

A Participatory Design (PD) workshop is one in which developers, business representatives and users work together to design a solution. PD workshops give users a voice in the design process, thus increasing the probability of a usable design.

Posted in methods, user centered | Permalink | 2 Comments »

The April issue of UXmatters magazine is out and Dirk Knemeyer has written an article titled “Defining Experience: Clarity Amidst the Jargon“.

The word experience has gained significant traction over the past 15 years. Beginning with the mainstreaming of the term user experience in the software industry and, later, extended to the work of marketing professionals who began thinking about marketing as being experiential, the idea of experience as a focused professional area of endeavor is alive, well, and growing rapidly. However, the more our space grows, the more confused and chaotic is our collective understanding of the meaning of these terms. To try to help clarify this murkiness, I want to share my definitional model for the fields of experience and provide guidelines for the use of various terms.

This is an important step forward towards better definitions of the various terms in the field of designing experiences. After reading the article you will realize that one term is missing: customer experience. Since my blog is titled “The Customer Experience Labs” I feel obliged to add a definition for this term.

Customer Experience refers to all touchpoints people have from the moment they are aware of a need until they have fulfilled the need or reached a certain goal. While Brand Experience offers an “inside-out” perspective with a scope that is defined through the organization’s boundaries, Customer Experience takes an “outside-in” perspective and recognizes that there are more actors (organizations) involved when a customer is striving to reach a certain outcome.

One example:

Imagine you are planing your next flight and you will realize that there are more than a few different actors involved. You might have booked your ticket on a travel website like Expedia (Actor #1). You will have to arrive by train, bus or taxi (Actor #2). After arriving at the airport you have to find your check-in counter, check-in and kill time in one of the restaurants, bars or shops at the airport (Actor #3). When boarding the plane you have the first interaction with the airline (Actor #4) and after landing you interact with the destination airport (Actor #5) and public transportation to reach your destination (Actor #6).

All these interactions with different actors influence the Customer Experience. Organizations that adopt the customer’s point of view and look beyond the current organizational boundaries are able to create truly remarkable experiences. All these independent organizations can optimize their Brand Experience, but only by understanding the overall context in which customers are interacting them, an organization can become an “synchronized” actor in the system and remarkable Customer Experiences can be created.

Is it different from User Experience? Yes, since it is not just one specific design but all the experiences that a user (or customer) has in order to fulfill a need.

Is it different from Brand Experience? Yes, since it is and “outside-in” perspective from the customer’s point of view.

Posted in customer experience, experience design | Permalink | 1 Comment »