Have you ever wondered what is necessary to make sure that an iPod can be used intuitively even by new users or that a phone does not break when you accidently sit on it? Every great product is not just the result of a great designer but also of great user and product testing experts.

YouTube, Microsoft, Nokia and Apple are four companies that are well known for their innovative products and the focus they put on the user. Yet little is actually known about what these companies do to really ensure that their customers have a remarkable customer experience.

I would like to share with you some practices that companies apply when they are aiming to design and test new products that I have collected in the last months. 

YouTube: Why do users watch videos online?

YouTube/Google is not sharing much corporate information, but in a recent blog post they have shared some insights into their user testing process. YouTube has identified two distinct groups of users, one who just wants to watch movies and one who wants to connect with other people online. Here are mockups of what these different user groups expect from YouTube:

 

 

The design for each user group is different as they summarized in their blog post:

So what exactly is user research like at YouTube? Sometimes it means letting users design their ideal experience. For example, last year we used a method called FIDO (first utilized by Fidelity Investments) where we cut out different elements of various video sites, stuck them on magnets, and had users arrange their ideal organization of the elements (see below for an example). Other times we use a more standard research method called a usability study, which entails seeing whether a user can or can’t complete certain standard site tasks in a usability lab.

One of the most important findings has to do with the difference between the large group of users who are on YouTube simply to watch videos and a smaller, but very important, group of more engaged users — often uploaders. The latter group will, unsurprisingly, care about details like how to make communication with their audience easier and more effective, how to grow their audience, and even how to make money on YouTube. The former, on the other hand, want as simple of an interface as possible: "Just let me watch the video, please!"

Read the full article.

 

Microsoft: Inventing a new game of play for Halo 3

The designers of Bungie Studios, the company that is developing Halo 3 for Microsoft, are facing a tough challenge. They need to create an experience that is challenging enough to thrill the 15 million existing hardcore fans of Halo— yet appealing enough to lure in millions of new players. In their quest to make the video game a success the company is able to gather a lot of data that can be used to derive conclusion about the actual game play.

The lab also records video footage of every testing session and hyperlinks these clips to the individual progress reports. If the design team wonders why players are having trouble in a particular area, they can just pull up a few test games to see what’s going wrong.

 

Take what happened last March: A report noted an unusual number of "suicides" among players piloting the alien Wraith tank in an upper level. After watching dozens of archived test games, Griesemer spotted the problem. The players were firing the tank’s gun when its turret was pointed toward the ground, attempting to wipe out nearby attackers. But the explosion ended up also killing (and frustrating) the player.

To prevent this, Griesemer reprogrammed the tank so that the turret couldn’t be lowered beyond a certain point. The Wraith suicides stopped.

Read more about this in Wired Magazin or download a presentation from about tracking player behavior in computer games by Ramon Romero at the Game Developer’s Conference. (Direct link to presentation, 14 MB)

 

Apple: Why you can’t innovate like Apple

Ask somebody to name an innovative company and you will most likely hear Apple. One reason why there is so much mystic around Apple is that the company doesn’t talk about the process of developing radical new products.

Sometimes though, some individuals set out and try to collect all information that is available and put together a coherent picture that explains how things play together. Alain Breillatt has done this for Apple and summarized what he could find about Apple’s development process. Alain has written up an article presenting his perspective of Apples design philosophy. One of them is the 10 to 3 to 1 principle:

10 to 3 to 1. Take the pixel-perfect approach and pile on top of it the requirement that Apple designers expect to design 10 different mockups of any new feature under consideration. And these are not just crappy mockups; they all represent different, but really good, implementations that are faithful to the product specifications.

Then, by using specified criteria, they narrow these 10 ideas down to three options, which the team spends months further developing…until they finally narrow down to the one final concept that truly represents their best work for production.

This approach is intended to offer enormous latitude for creativity that breaks past restrictions. But it also means they inherently plan to throw away 90% of the work they do. I don’t know many organizations for which this would be an acceptable ratio. Your CFO would probably declare, “All I see is money going down the drain.” This is a major reason why I say you can’t innovate like Apple.

You can find the full article here.

 

Nokia: Breaking phones on purpose

How can you ensure that mobile phones are not breaking when customers use them? By breaking them early in the development process and ensuring that you are using designs that ensure that they withstand the daily wear out.

The idea is to simulate years’ worth of real-life product use in just a few days — individual tests last anywhere from a few hours to three weeks or longer — by pressing buttons, sliding sliders, actuating hinges, heating, cooling, wetting, drying, dropping, whacking, shaking, rubbing, bending, and generally defacing the phones in every way imaginable.

Once a phone finally breaks, they look for obvious reasons — cracked plastic, broken springs, and the like — but if that initial analysis fails, they’ve got a well-equipped lab on site complete with a scanning electron microscope and CT scanner for taking microscopic looks at failed components in both two and three dimensions; from here, they can find broken connections on chips, incorrectly-fabricated materials, and the occasional ant eye magnified a couple thousand times (it’s posted on the wall in the lab, and yes, it’s scary).

I have embedded two videos, this one from the Nokia Test Center in Southwood, UK

 

This one is produced by Engadget and shows their development facility in San Diego:

 

Microsoft: The Story of the Ribbon

This has already been posted here on the Customer Experience Labs but I still think that this is a valuable case study that shows how a product  was iteratively developed and how continuous user testing beginning in early stages is done.

The Story of the Ribbon is a presentation by Jensen Harris from 2008. He tells 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.

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

Posted in user experience | Permalink | 2 Comments »

The Google Chrome team has published an amazing video where people on the street have been asked if they know what a browser is. Only 8% percent of the people they asked where able to give the right answer to this question and the other 82% of answers shed light on the understanding of consumers about Internet. Here is the video, see for yourself.

Are users stupid?

The first reaction that one might get is that you should invest in educating people what a browser is (a piece software to navigate on the World Wide Web) and what options they have available (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome and others). But maybe a better approach is to ask “Why don’t they know what a browser is?”.

Most users just don’t care

The reason why people don’t know what a browser is, is that they just don’t care about the browser. And why should they? People care about Facebook, Google and Yahoo but how to get to these websites doesn’t matter. And if you are not one of those that are heavily using some browser plug-ins you probably don’t see any differences in using different browsers.

Browsers are a commodity and a better browser is not enough

The key to understand the dynamics in this market is to understand that the available browsers are basically interchangeable because they are only marginal different. Of course there are differences in speed and compatibility but only power users who spend several hours working online can tell a difference – the majority of internet user can’t tell the difference.

The key to success is in creating a differentiated internet experiences

So if user don’t care about the how to get to Facebook and Google, how can you create a remarkable browser that people care about? The key is in re-inventing what it is that a browser does. Focusing on surfing the internet is not enough anymore. Opera is taking a step into this direction with Opera Unite which offers a wide range of additional services and functionalities to the traditional browser concept. It is too early to tell, if the Opera way of differentiation will be relevant to users, but the core idea is the right one – reinventing the browser.

How can we reinvent the browser?

I think it is still unbelievable that we are seeing such a strong growth of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter yet there seems to be no integration into existing browser. Instead there is a range of companies that are developing desktop applications that integrate into these services and provide a differentiated social networking experience.

It is time that these services get stronger integrated into existing web browsers and instead of bribing users to download the new Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft should work on a tighter integration of social networking and deliver a different experience of surfing the internet. Now they have a real use to justify their investment in Facebook.

The question is as well, whether we really need to reinvent the browser or if it will become obsolete? What if social networking clients like TweetDeck and Seesmic will see continuous growth in the future and will become the main entrance point for users when they access social networks? You think that is a crazy idea? Remember, only 8 percent know what a browser is.

How do you see the future of the browser and the future of people accessing the Internet? Share your thoughts and opinions in the comments.

Posted in innovation, user experience | Permalink | 5 Comments »

Recently I have been traveling quite a lot, mostly to locations where I haven’t been before. Since I use a BlackBerry Curve with GPS and Google Maps Mobile (GMM) as my main mobile phone, I thought that my mobile companion can definitely help me answer a lot of questions while on the road. I was wrong.

Let’s recap a few situations:

I was in the city center of Brussels and wondering where I could find something to eat. Unfortunately most of the shops were already closed and I didn’t want to go to a restaurant. So I started Google Maps, searched for “McDonalds” and “Subways” and basically the results where mediocre: I found out where the McDonalds Headquarter is in Belgium (some 20 km outside Brussels), I guess there might be a Subway’s restaurant but it was out of walking distance and I was not willing to study public transportation – so at the end I asked around for the next train station and found a small shop there.

Similar situations happened in Milan and Istanbul – even in Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley, I was trying to use Google Maps Mobile to help me find a dedicated Puma Store. When I finally arrived at the mall it was merely a little Puma shop with a few of the most common shoes – not exactly what I have been looking for (I was looking for the Puma Black Label series of shoes….but that’s a different story).

Overall my impression was that there is a huge potential for Google Maps Mobile and location based services when you are traveling or in locations that you don’t know that well. The only problem: Google Maps Mobile is simply not ready for primetime yet.

I have summarized the areas for improvement in the list and I am the first to upgrade when Google implements a few of these requests:

1. Include a pedestrian mode
   Not everyone is using GPS in a car – I guess that most users of Google Maps Mobile use it for navigation outside their car when they are walking or cycling. If you need GPS navigation regularly in a car I suppose most people would buy a dedicated GPS car navigation system. I want to have the ability to switch to a “pedestrian mode” where the routing is based on each “walkable” street, not just on “drivable” streets as in a car mode. Help me find the shortest way in a city, and not the way next to the main roads.
2. Include support for the most common human activities
   We humans tend to follow the same patterns and we usually perform quite similar activities to reach certain outcomes. There are different situations when we are looking for restaurants, a small shop, a big supermarket, a fast food restaurant, a coffee shop or a toilet. I could imagine a menu with options that resemble common activities and include Eat, Drink, Sleep, Shop, See/Discover. The submenu for Eat would be “Fast Food”, “Average Restaurant”, “Exclusive Restaurant” – and Google Maps provides suggestions based on my current location.
3. A location based search for actual products and services
   When I was in Milan, I was not searching for a restaurant itself, I was searching for typical, traditional Italian pasta; same in California, I was looking for a shop that sells the Puma Black Label series of shoes and wouldn’t mind if I can find them in a store that is not a Puma store. So besides supporting certain activities that most humans perform regularly, location based search should also help me find the location of certain products – whether it is helping me find a certain pair of shoes or a restaurant that sells a certain kind of pasta. While the quality of the search results depends largely on the amount of data that is integrated, the first step might be to integrate Google Product Search into Google Maps.
4. Turn Google Maps Mobile into a travel companion
   Since the biggest use of Google Maps Mobile can be expected from people who are traveling (business and personal) Google Maps Mobile should be able to store all the relevant information for my trip (hotels, meeting points, maybe even appointment schedules – combined with Google Calendar) and be my travel companion that has all information available for me. I prepare it in advance (maybe by mailing it to a dedicated email address) and when I am on the road, I just push next, next, next.
5. Solve the language problem
   When I was in Brussels, I tried to search for the Flemish Parliament, the venue for a workshop that I planned to attend. Unfortunately Google Maps couldn’t help me because the Flemish Parliament can only be found with the correct Dutch term which is “Vlaams Parlement” – unfortunately I haven’t included that word in my Dutch vocabulary before. Even the search for “trainstation, St. Gallen, Switzerland” (my current residence) doesn’t return the expected results, only the search “Bahnhof, St. Gallen, Schweiz” returns the correct address. I understand that it is impossible to incorporate a complete dictionary but at least the most common search terms and locations should be multi-language capable.
6. Include public transportation
   If you are not familiar with the public transportation system in a city you have two choices: (1) spend a lot of time trying to figure out what could be the right mode of transportation or (2) spend a lot of money on taxis. Google Maps Mobile should help me find the right choice of public transportation – not just from one station to the other but from my place of departure to the place of arrival.
7. Integrate, Integrate, Integrate
   The quality of Google Maps Mobile (as well as Google Maps) depends fundamentally on the amount of integrated data. A search for restaurants can only generate useful results, when a sufficient number of restaurants are stored in the database. Otherwise it is still better to “open your eyes and look around”. While most McDonalds restaurants can be found through Google Maps in Switzerland, the data was still missing in Belgium.

These improvements – if adequately implemented – could render tremendously useful application for everyone who is traveling regularly. The integration of Google Maps into the iPhone, BlackBerry and other mobile phones creates a huge user base that could tap into these services. Yet as long as the quality and utility from Google Maps Mobile is still not better than that of “looking and asking around” we won’t see large adoption.

Does this only apply to Google Maps? Not necessarily – the company that is able to provide this functionality combined with a sufficiently large user base will become the leader for location based services.

The picture that is shown with this post is currently uncredited because I couldn’t track back the source. If you know the source of this picture, please drop me an email.

Posted in mobile, user experience | Permalink | 3 Comments »

Whenever you are working in a large team towards a common goal it is difficult to ensure that all team members are moving in the right direction. Defining a vision (I personally prefer the term "intent") helps a team to stay on track by guiding and supporting the decision making process.

Google’s User Experience Principles are one of these tools that help design teams stay on track and they reflect how most of us expect to experience Google’s services.

The Google User Experience team aims to create designs that are useful, fast, simple, engaging, innovative, universal, profitable, beautiful, trustworthy, and personable. Achieving a harmonious balance of these ten principles is a constant challenge. A product that gets the balance right is "Googley" – and will satisfy and delight people all over the world.

The ten principles that drive design decisions and contribute to a "Google User Experience" are:

1. Focus on people – their lives, their work, their dreams.
2. Every millisecond counts.
3. Simplicity is powerful.
4. Engage beginners and attract experts.
5. Dare to innovate.
6. Design for the world.
7. Plan for today’s and tomorrow’s business.
8. Delight the eye without distracting the mind.
9. Be worthy of people’s trust.
10. Add a human touch.

While are the first glance these principles still seem very high level, my impression is that they are valuable because the primary objective of these principles is not to design new user experiences but to facilitate decision making – decisions between different design and implementation alternatives.

But here is what I don’t understand:

Why Google would post them on their website?  Are these guidelines just an "explanation" and "justification" of "Google’s User Experience"?

Do they help to educate user what a "Googley" user experience is and influence their expectations of Google’s products?

How does it affect you when you read "Every millisecond counts" but the performance of your Google Reader is slow? Will it make you think that "at least they tried" and positively impact your user experience?

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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.

Posted in user experience | Permalink | 1 Comment »