User Experience « I draw boxes

June 18, 2010

The user experience of the World Cup

Filed under: General musings,Service design,Usability,User Experience — Chris @ 11:34 am

England v Algeria gets underway in Cape Town.

As I write this I’m coming to the end of a great week in South Africa where I’ve been watching the World Cup in Cape Town. It’s occurred to me that the World Cup is so successful because it gets the basics right and is so well organised. Here I’ve decided to share a few of the aspects I think are particularly important.

The beautiful game

I’m going to start by stating the obvious: the World Cup is successful because of the success of association football – or soccer. And I believe soccer is so successful because of its simplicity – fundamentally the game has one rule (don’t use your hands) and one aim (get the ball in to the goal). This incredibly simple format makes it accessible to everyone. You don’t need a degree to understand the rules or a vast array of expensive equipment to begin. The “jumpers for goalposts” game of soccer takes place across the world – I saw no less than 5 games of soccer being played as we drove past a township outside Cape Town. It is truly the game of the people.

In my experience FIFA try to keep to this level of simplicity as much as possible – no video replays for referees, no ‘hawk-eye’ 3D replays, no different scoring system depending on how far out you shoot from (an idea I heard once originating from the States). They try and keep the games that take place in stadiums as close as possible to the games that take place in parks, and I fully agree with this.

The world cup venues are clearly shown during each match to give the viewers at home a sense of 'visiting' the host country.

Competition format

The competition format is absolutely key to the success of the tournament. The group stage ensures any team that qualifies will get a reasonable number of games (3) before going home, so any visit by travelling fans is worthwhile. The fact that 64 games are played over four weeks is unique in world football, and the clever format of the competition means that only one drawing of teams is necessary to define the matches for the entire tournament (thus making the ‘world cup wallchart’ possible). Wherever possible games are played at individual times (when no other games are taking place) to allow for maximum viewers.

Also, FIFA does not hide the fact that the World Cup does not necessarily feature the best 32 teams in the world. It prioritises the fact that it is a worldwide competition and arranges the qualification groups by continent and global region rather than by the best teams, making it truly a global tournament. This helps ensure a worldwide participation and audience even if the teams are not always the best. However, the qualification system still means that in theory any team could reach the World Cup if they play well enough. This holds true with another fundamental tenet of association football: if you’re good enough you can succeed at the highest level regardless of the size of your club or nation.

A new overhead camera for the 2010 World Cup allows for great shots for the viewers at home (shown below).

Broadcast experience

The World Cup is expected to achieve a cumulative worldwide audience of 26 billion people. This level of success is largely due to the enjoyment of the game itself, the scheduling, and the broadcast product. A new camera (highlighed in the photograph on the right) was introduced for this tournament, suspended from near-invisible wires above the pitch to achieve fantastic shots from above the players (also shown right). The camera is manouverable to virtually any point within the bowl of the stadium. Home 3D technology is also being pioneered by Sony.

View from the new overhead camera - Brazil v Ivory Coast.

The fact that the games take place across the host nation means that they can be scheduled one after another – enabling the armchair fan to take in 3 games per day during the group stages. It also means travelling fans get to see a number of venues within the host country if they want to follow their team. Significantly, the venue for each match is displayed on the advertising boards next to the centre line so the fans watching on television can clearly see where the game is being played. Without this the games could easily blend in to one experience for the television viewer. This valuable advertising space is given up by FIFA to enhance the overall user experience of the competition – the feeling of visiting a country for the viewers at home.

Related to this, I was disappointed to see the the BBC World Cup home page does not allow the user to browse matches by location – its main navigation is ‘groups & teams’ and ‘fixtures & results’. Neither of these offer the ability to browse by stadium that I can see. I appreciate that the BBC is largely targeting UK-based fans but as a fan travelling to Cape Town I was disappointed to see that I couldn’t find out which matches were being played there.

The ticket design caused problems for visiting fans because the match title was not prominently displayed.

Travelling fans

The travelling fans are the other large audience group for the World Cup, and ticketing is a major operation. Unfortunately there have been empty seats in South African stadiums and I think FIFA need to look at some kind of waiting list system to reallocate these in future. I had a number of friends who stayed at home because they could not get tickets.

The initial ticket sales take place in an online lottery. While this worked well, any online system comes with the inherent restrictions to people without internet access, credit cards or bank accounts. This was particularly a problem for African residents, and eventually FIFA opened up the ticketing to cash purchases. This is a good thing and I think they should try to expand this in future. Glastonbury festival has the same problem with ticketing, while the online lottery is fair up to a point it inherently excludes certain users and Glasto nowadays is far less diverse than it has been in the past.

Another small point relates to the design of the tickets themselves. We were told about problems where fans have presented the wrong tickets by accident and thereby invalidated their tickets for future games. This is a symptom of the fact that the name of the game is printed quite small and tickets look very similar. In the frenzied stadium checkpoint scenario it is easy for an official to invalidate (tear off) the wrong ticket. Simply making the match details printed on the ticket much larger would help fix this.

Conclusion

My first experience at a World Cup was in Germany in 2006. Since then I got the bug – and seeing how excited the entire country of South Africa has been this time makes me feel really happy about what it’s done for the country. Sepp Blatter made it his mission to bring the tournament to South Africa and I think few would criticise him.

Yes, the cynics say it can attract crime, is commercialised, benefits big buisinss and generates a lot of money for a relatively small number of people. But credit where it’s due – FIFA run the world game of soccer with a strong element of control (unified rules) and manage this event virtually flawlessly every four years. And it doesn’t happen by accident.

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May 9, 2010

My review of UX Intensive Amsterdam 2010

Filed under: Information Architecture,Interface design,User Experience — Chris @ 11:03 am

UX Intensive - Welkom Last week I got back from the UX Intensive training course run by Adaptive Path in Amsterdam. It was a four-day training course covering a variety of topics in user experience. Day one was on design strategy, day two was design research, day three was information architecture and day four was interaction design.

My knowledge of Adaptive Path started a number of years ago when I first heard about Jesse James Garrett’s famous diagram entitled The Elements of User Experience (which has since become a book). In the diagram Jesse compares informational web sites against web applications and the processes that are involved in creating both. I used to have it up on my wall (at work!) back in 2004 when I first started reading about IA. JJG founded adaptive path soon after publishing the diagram in 2000.

So this was an exciting opportunity for me – the chance to learn from the best in the business, from a company who’s founder was one of my first influences in IA and user experience.

We flew out to amsterdam on the Sunday night and had a great seafood meal at Lucius to start the trip. As someone who was vegetarian for 25 years and only recently started eating meat the meal was an amazing experience. The food was so fresh and pulling out all the winkles, cockles and snails from their shells with all sorts of tools was really fun.

Sticky note creativity The next day the course started and we were welcomed into a nice venue with a comprehensive pack containing all the printed slides for the course, as well as a notebook, stickers, post-it notes and a sharpie pen. This was a nice, professional touch. Good hygiene.

Day one started with design strategy presented by Henning Fischer, the head of Adaptive Path’s new Amsterdam office. He began by introducing the ideas of Michael Porter, a professor at Harvard Business School. He focussed particularly on the business strategy of Swedish furniture chain, Ikea. Key elements of Ikea’s business strategy that he highlighted were:

Self-selection by customers
Low manufacturing cost
Modular furniture design
Limited customer service

Henning then went on to describe the process of putting together a business strategy with the following steps: focus, definition, customer value, and scope. We also completed a variety of exercises to put together a design strategy for a fictional hotel.

Amsterdam canal Overall the day was good but I would have preferred a bit more of an interactive style (involving the audience), some background to Adaptive Path to kick-off the course, and some examples that were more up to date than flickr, blogger and nike+. On the plus side the Michael Porter work was interesting and there was a great exercise on prioritising business opportunities – a scoring system to force clients to make informed choices and tradeoffs when defining strategy.

After the day ended we stumbled across a fairground in Dam Square so had a go flinging ourselves around on a ride ridiculously high in the air! Fun times.

Day two was design research with Paula Wellings, and was all about interviewing users and finding out what they like and dislike. We did a number of exercises noting down our thoughts on post-it notes as the interviews took place, and then grouping the common themes and ideas to form concrete deliverables such as personas and user experience diagrams.

Things started to hot up on day three with Kate Rutter talking about information architecture - Kate had a real rapport with us and her energy pulled us through a genuinely intensive day. For me personally it took me back to when I first started learning about IA 4-5 years ago, with references to the polar bear book, Jesse James Garret’s original diagram, and discussions about metadata and organising information.

Delegates listen intently There was also a welcome nod to the present and the future with a quote from the recent Richard Saul Wurman keynote at the IA Summit, as well as some great slides at the back of the presentation on future trends in IA. These included the firefox operator toolbar which locates metadata within a page, an innovative classification system from wine merchant Best Cellars, and ideas around ‘fluid data’ including Moritz Stefaner’s revisit (for displaying tweets) and Tom Taylor’s Boundaries which uses user generated photo tagging to help define neighbourhoods.

On the final day we were taken on an interaction design journey by Andrew Crow. He took us through a process of first opening up ideas during the research phase and then closing them down, before moving in the the interaction design stage which also involves opening up during ideas generation (or ideation) and then finally closing down when developing a prototype.

I was surprised by the variety of outputs that are possible in interaction design. Andrew showed us not just prototypes but mental model diagrams, venn diagrams, matricies, pie charts etc. etc. I’m going to try to be a bit more creative in the way I think about diagramming my ideas.

Overall the course was a great experience and I learnt a lot. I’m going to follow up on some of the ideas in the future of IA. It also reassured me about my readings and practices over the last few years – I have been reading relevant publications and considering may of the right aspects of my work. The only thing that would have topped it off was a visit from JJG!

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March 22, 2010

The inaugural UX People

Filed under: General musings,User Experience — Chris @ 7:18 pm

Today I attended the first ever UX People event in London. The venue was the lovely King’s Place, a new entertainment and conference venue by the Grand Union canal. It was organised by Zebra People, a recruitment consultancy specialising in user experience recruitment.

King's Place conference venue I’ll whizz through the presentations and workshops, just giving a few throughts. Incidentally, this was the first event I’d ever twittered at (having recently caved in and joined twitter) and I did actually enjoy being part of the live feed of information, or conversation, that twitter enables. See the conversation about the UX People event here.

First up was Jason Mesut of The Team with some of his, erm, team. They were all talking about the importance of collaboration when doing UX work. This is a theme that’s been around the year dot (see JJG’s 9 pillars diagram) but I was particularly interested in Will Bloor’s thoughts around the journey graphic designers have come on over the past 15 years – from being in control of virtually the whole web creative process, then conceding quite a lot of their role to user experience designers & IAs, and finally getting a lot of it back with roles such as Creative Director or Creative Lead who work collaboratively. I’ve always thought that designers and information architects arguing over whether the designers just ‘colour in’ wireframes was a negative and unproductive debate.

View from King's Place Next up was Darren Evans talking about future trends in digital, for example LG’s recent unveiling of ePaper. There were a few titbits for thought here.

Then we had Robert Fein of Grand Union talking about the fact that communication underpins the work that we do – if we don’t communicate clearly then we’re wasting our time. He emphasised the value of the work we do, how to communicate this to stakeholders as well as stressing the importance of producing deliverables of the highest quality.

Finally, Jason Buck then discussed working at speed. He showed a series of techniques for producing quick and dirty (but actually very useful) outputs and also talked about the importance of under promising and over delivering – if you achieve things quickly people will respect your ability and ask for you to come back. In a way this links quite nicely with Robert’s themes of producing demonstrable value to clients.

In the afternoon I had two workshops, one from Jason Buck on storytelling and from Robert Fein on pitching UX. I found both informative and enjoyable.

Overall it was a very good day, held in a lovely venue with good networking opportunites and informative talks. I’d say over time the curation style of the event will develop and possibly themes for each event, but for now it’s a great stake in the ground. The fact that it’s not-for-profit and relatively affordable sets it apart from other events and I think will see it grow in the future.

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November 22, 2009

Working with Bunnyfoot

Filed under: General musings,Usability,User Experience — Chris @ 3:48 pm

Today I’m working with Bunnyfoot, a user experience and usability testing agency at their head office in Didcot, Oxfordshire.

It’s interesting for me to visit the company’s labs, as I’ve had quite a bit of contact with them over the years. Firstly when I was at VisitLondon.com, they did the user personas and usability testing for the site. (Personas are characters that represent the users of a web site, their goals, needs, motivations and desires). Personas also look at the entire user journey or experience outside the site and detail the role the site plays for that user. Typically 4-8 personas are created for a project and they are based on audience research including surveys, telephone interviews and face to face chats.

The personas were printed up into A2 posters and displayed around the Visit London office to remind the development team of the target audiences for the site. The personas had names such as “young backpacker” or “luxury vacationer from america” and showed information such as the interests, user needs and online goals for that audience. I really liked the work and ended up using the posters as inspiration for some persona work I did last year for Marie Curie Cancer Care. They provide a great tangible deliverable for the client and look really nice, as well as containing an important, concise summary of your user research.

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January 19, 2009

My first usability testing

Filed under: Information Architecture,Interface design,Technology,Usability,User Experience — Chris @ 9:33 am

Ever since reading Steve Krug’s Don’t make me think a few years ago, I’ve wanted to run my own usability testing sessions. Usability testing is where you sit with people who have never used a site before, (preferably not web professionals) and discuss the site with them as they try and use it. Often their comments and mouse movements are recorded so you can go back and review what they said and did.

The idea is that when you are working on a site you can become so immersed in the project it is easy to forget what normal people actually want out of the website. Business objectives (e.g. “we must sell products and gather email addresses”) and technical constraints (e.g. “we can’t build that function and we have to display the data in this way”) often get a lot of priority on a project, and it’s the job of an IA to focus on the end user.

Usability testing is where you sit with people who have never used a site before, and discuss the site with them as they try and use it

Usability testing is a key tool in doing this – and importantly it provides evidence with which to inform your judgements and back up decisions. A video of representative users saying “I don’t want to give over my email address” or “I don’t understand the data when it is presented in that way” can be a powerful persuasive tool for making changes.

Another important point is that you can test sites when they’re in the prototyping stage – i.e. they don’t have to be fully built. You can create a clickable web mockup of full colour designs, or even wireframes and still get invaluable feedback from the process.

The bottom line for me is that it just seems such a simple and easy way to vastly improve your web sites. At my previous job I wrote a proposal offering to run low budget, ‘lost-our-lease’ usability testing sessions as advocated by Krug. The idea was to do cheap, frequent testing rather than expensive agency testing (which happened about once a year).

In the end they never went for it, and continued to outsource the work. But my new employer seems to be a bit keener to do usability testing, and let me loose to test the configurator for a large car brand we’re working on. A couple of weeks ago I ran my first ever usability testing sessions, with 6 volunteers from my work spending around an hour with each of them on the site.

The bottom line for me is that it just seems such a simple and easy way to vastly improve your web sites

The product

The website I tested was a car explorer and configurator system designed to give users a visual tour of various car models (the ‘Explore’ section), before allowing them to choose and configure their own car (the ‘Configure’ section). The ‘Explore’ section was already fully functioning and live on the web, while ‘Configure’ was in prototype form. I created a clickable version of the visual designs for users to interact with in the test.

In the Explore section you can view one of four models of luxury car in 3D, navigate around it, look inside at the dashboard and interior and change the colour and wheels with real-time updates. In ‘Configure’ you can pick your options from a list and see the price and car photo update in real time.

The outcome

The aim of the exercise was to get 4-6 key recommendations for improving the product, which could then be implemented to improve the user experience. We achieved this and made recommendations to the client, including video clips and justification for the points we made. Overall it was really good to see the users interacting with the system and I’m convinced we made genunie improvements to the system. I hope we can do it again on another project.

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July 24, 2008

The user experience of a toilet on South West Trains

Filed under: General musings,Product design,User Experience — Chris @ 5:21 pm

Whitney Hess’s recent post about the user experience of a staircase reminded me that user experience design is everywhere and affects us everyday. Don Norman’s seminal work The design of everyday things analyses the design of many objects, such as telephones and doors. I came across this terrible design recently and had to share it here.

There’s not a lot you ask for when using a toilet. A reasonably quiet, clean & private space will usually do – of course with a functioning lavatory.

We’ve all used the loo – or ‘restroom’ a million times, so you’d think it was not a difficult thing for designers to get right. They’ve had enough practice over the years.

Bog standard: a normal toilet door complete with lock, coat hook and roll

The user’s goals are quite simple: relieve myself in private, quickly and cleanly. We need a cubicle with a lockable door, preferably with a coat hook. The lock should ideally be some kind of obvious knob or handle that provides visual and/or tactile feedback to confirm it is successfully locked. The user can always pull or push the door a little to confirm that the door will not open.

There are rarely instructional signs or notices in a restroom – it’s obvious from the design of the elements along with our own experiences how to achieve our goals. The Please wash your hands reminder provides a different, ‘reminder’ function and is not instructional as such.

We’ve all used the restroom a million times, so you’d think it was not a difficult thing for designers to get right

A visual indicator on the outside of the door is a nice touch – it provides reassurance for the user that they will not have others pushing on the door; and it gives anyone sizing up the cubicle considering whether to try the door a clear indicator that the door is locked. A red/green indicator is common.

The key point is that privacy is a massive issue here. There should be no possibility of an embarrassing situation involving a user literally caught with their trousers down. It is unthinkable, particularly in the workplace but everywhere.

Topographic view of a standard toilet cubicle

The standard toilet cubicle, such as the one shown here, has worked for centuries and is intuitive to use.

The toilets on South West Trains

So why, then, have the UK’s South West Trains got it so wrong? Their trains are otherwise great. They seem clean, fast, efficient and comfortable.

The toilets are an attempt to use a ‘high-tech’ system to operate the toilet. There is a large, rounded sliding door which is operated by buttons positioned on the outside and inside of the cubicle, as shown below:

The design of a toilet on South West Trains

The buttons to enter the cubicle work ok. You have a set of Open and Close buttons, which are in the same style as the ones used to open the main train doors when boarding.

So you hit open, the door slides open, and you go inside. You have to look around for the close button because it is not immediately obvious where it is – it’s positioned opposite you as you enter, quite low down. The three buttons in a row are shown here.

Once you have located the close button the door slides shut, and the Lock button flashes slowly to indicate it needs to be pressed in order to lock the door. But this is far too subtle, and not intuitve. Consequently, it is very likely that the user will assume the door is locked and proceed with their business. Once the Lock button is pressed, the light stays solidly lit, as shown in the photo.

3 buttons for operating the toilet door

The key point is this: the feedback mechanism of the light on the lock button is not sufficient to communicate to the user that the door is locked or unlocked. By trying to emulate the door mechanism for the main train doors on the toilet doors the designers have made the toilets very difficult and unintuitive to use.

The net result is that it is very likely that embarrassing situations will occur. This is not the fault of the user but the designer.

I would question the need for a Lock button at all – as a user, when are you going to want to go in to a toilet cubicle and not lock the door? The designers should just make the door lock automatically – as the user might reasonably assume it has from the flashing light on the Lock button.

This is an example of very unfortunate bad design – not quite the Chernobyl incident cited in Norman’s The design of everyday things, but nonetheless a bad design that I bet has lead to hundreds or thousands of uncomfortable situations for users.

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Update: I found Anders Ramsay’s article on New York City public toilet design. There’s also an OK/Cancel article on the usability of urinals.

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