User driven content and search

The 1-9-90 principle makes you understand who you have to build for: The super user.

Check out the presentation on LinkedIn: “Ideas on how to find a movie to watch“.

Thanks to Harald, Johannes and Tone for feedback and valuable input.

I decided to use a website that lots of people use – or at least; a kind of page that people could relate to. So I redesigned Netflix’s search result in an hour – using the Phi spiral.
I made the first design, showing the result of a search for the actor Kevin Spacey.

This is the design:

When user testing the design at FiveSecondTest.com the 15 first test results showed me that the design was spot on. Of course, it would be more credible with a lot more tests, but seeing a clear trend in the first ten results often points out how the next 150 results would look like.

This is the result of the first and second clicks:

As the results show: My colleague’s theory is spot on.

But … when we look closer at the result we see that people are clicking at the face of Kevin Spacey. It that because the people we tested knew that we where looking for him, and that our mind then automatically looks for his eyes?

I made another search result. This time for the search query “horror movies”.

This is the design:

And this is the result:

As we see, the spiral still works – but not as distinct as test number one. But the power of human eyes draws our attention, I guess. So using images as the search results can give us challenges.

Still. Espen Klem’s myth: Confirmed!

Knowing one’s roots is important, and it feels good to point out where I stand as a practitioner of user experience design. After ploughing through years of bookmarks and downloaded PDFs – with subsequent strict self-censoring – I came up with this list of 12 extra important sources of inspiration. The selection is wide and eclectic – something pre-Internet, something from yesterday, something obvious, and perhaps even a surprise. I learn something by integrating this knowledge into my own design process, and I hope you find something you like as well. Enjoy!

Principles of Traditional Animation Applied to 3D Computer Animation [PDF] by John Lasseter (1987)

Good animation = good interaction design! John Lasseter, the grand old man of Pixar and Disney, explains the principles of communication through movement.

The Myth of Metaphor [PDF] by Alan Cooper (1995)

Use conventions, not metaphors! Good conventions are easily learnt and remembered forever – metaphors just limit our thinking to old habits and frames of mind.

The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less [PDF] by Barry Schwartz (2004)

Few, but good alternatives are best! Read the whole book, which explains why low expectations are the key to happiness.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness [PDF] by Thaler & Sunstein (2008)

As designers we have an obligation to help people choose wisely. Not because people are stupid, but because we all would rather not think for ourselves.

How To Kill Creativity [PDF] by Teresa M. Amabile (1998)

Purpose, mastery and control (and pleasure) are fragile qualities that flourish with care, and wither if neglected.

The Analysis-Synthesis Bridge Model by Dubberly, Evenson og Robinson (2008)

An analytical and straightforward presentation of the creative process, which also puts the need for design documentation into context.

Design Thinking by Tim Brown (2008)

User-centered design – said with other words. Design is not just about practical knowledge, but also important personality traits – such as curiosity, empathy and “formidlingsglede”.

Bringing Holistic Awareness to Your Design by Joseph Selbie (2009)

Cross-disciplinary collaboration permeates everything we do with user experience design. Nobody can find all the answers on their own!

5 Decision Styles. What is Yours? by Jared Spool (2009)

There’s not just one true good design process. We all take shortcuts – and it’s important that we know about the consequences of doing so.

What Goes Into a Well-Done Critique by Jared Spool (2008)

Giving and receiving critique is perhaps the most difficult – and also the most important – thing we can do to help each other become better user experience designers.

Guiding Principles for UX Designers by Whitney Hess (2010)

Design is a creative decision-making process, where principles are more important than your particular choice of user research methods.

The Fall and Rise of User Experience by Cennydd Bowles (2011)

What does it really mean to design great user experiences, and are really anything more than self-centered beta junkies with turtle-neck sweaters and Apple logos on our breakfast cereal?

Other sources of inspiration:

• So you wanna be a user experience designer — Step 1: Resources
• Essential Interaction Design Essays and Articles

Yesterday I went to the store to buy oregano and pizza seasoning mix, amongst other things. Usually I use two or three hours in front of the seasoning shelves to find what I am looking for (at least). But yesterday I found what I was searching for in two or three seconds.

Why? Because the designer of the seasoning labels was smart enough to think about how I search for the right product, instead of just making something beautiful.

This is what the shelves looked like:

All the seasoning labels were marked with a letter: the first letter in the name of the seasoning. And luckily for me the store employees had put them in an alphabetical order, so I in matter of seconds found what I was looking for.

Happy from experiencing a user-friendly design solution in my everyday life, I headed out to my Toyota Avensis with my groceries. And there, in the driver seat, trying to change my CD to the next song, I concluded that not all designers think about the users need:

What button do you press to change to the next song?

Make your search solution easier to use for your users! Try to understand how they think, and what their challenges are …

First of all: How do we define the term logical design? By logical design we mean graphic design with the user in focus: Design inspired by interaction design that takes the seriously principals of usability seriously – both on screen and paper.

If we say that design is “art”, we can define logical design as “crafts”. Attractive things that at the same time has a purpose, and that is like it is for a reason.

Logical design on a CD leaflet means the design that instantly tells the audience what kind of music they can expect when pressing play. Logical design on a website makes it a no-brainer for the customer to click the right places (thereby enhancing the call-to-action), what is clickable and so on. Logical design on a brand identity is the design that to the greatest extent possible enhances the brand values, without extra confusing visual elements.

But the challenge appears when our customers asks for web design with “an edge” or “a website different to all other websites”. Because with web design in particular, we have our customs and principals:

• Links in blue, underlined text
• The logo at the top left corner
• Obvious clickable submit-buttons
• The main text in black on a white background
• Clear labeling of what site you’re on
• Headline on every site
• and so on …

By now you’re probably expecting me to come up with a solution of how to combine attractive design with logical design. But again I turn again my own headline: Logical design and exciting design are not opposites. Logical design, done the right way, results in happy users and happy customers, because they both can take a look at the design, and say: “Yeah, that’s just the way it should be!”

Logical design is about making good design, without breaking too many of the rules that we know work – just to appear “innovative” and different.

Take a look at a beautiful design made more logical

Examples of websites we consider both pretty and logical to us as users:

The Norwegian site of the mobile operator Telenor.

The websites of the Norwegian Travel Operator Ving

The online Annual Report of Statoil.

These days I’m working on a project here at Comperio. A project in which I need to know how the companies we compare ourselves with presents them self visually. I decided to try something new: to let the mathematics explore the artistic feelings.

Some of the ads I quoted statistics from. Click for large version.

Our main target audience is corporate Bob (45), which is either CIO or CMO in a large company. He lives in London but works several days a month in New York. For Bob it’s important to be a modern man. He has high demands and is hard to impress. He is daily exposed to marketing that attempts to get him to change his mind about a brand, to buy a new watch or to decide to choose a technical solution over another for the business he works in.

I went out and bought two magazines and two newspapers that I reckon Bob reads on the plane to New York:

• The Economist (Issue April 2nd-8th 2011)
• The Wall Street Journal Europe (Issue April 5th 2011)
• The Financial Times Europe (Issue April 5th 2011)
• GQ Magazine (Issue March 2011)

These magazines and newspapers contains, by my theory, visual communication that affect our target audience (Bob) and communication that compete with Comperio message.

I went through these four publications, and noted statistics from 114 of the 150 ads I found. 36 of them were disqualified, either because the ad was from a too unknown sender, or because the ad clearly was not “spent time on”, or did not seem to be a part of a larger brand identity. Ads for the magazine/newspaper itself, and job listings are not included.

In addition, it may be necessary to mention that I let the ads from GQ Magazine only count for 20% compared to the three other publications. This is both because I think Bob consider GQ Magazine less “important”, but also because the GQ has five times as many ads per issue compared to the other publications. If the GQ ads had counted a hundred percent, the result would have been somewhat different, but not much.

So, let’s take a look at the statistics …

Logo color: Is the logo in plain black, a color + black and white, or has it several colors?

Logo version: Is it a dark logo on a light background, or vice versa?

Logo design: Has the logo 3D effects / gradients, or is it “flat”?

Logo background: What’s behind the logo? White background, black background, a picture or a colored background?

Registered logo? Has the logo a ™ or ® symbol?

Font usage: What type of font is most dominant in the ad?

Color usage: What color dominates the ad?

Dramatisation: How is the message of the ad dramatized? With a large picture of happy / cool people, a picture of a mobile phone, only typography … ?

OK. And how is this useful?

To get back to where I started: Can we understand the trends based on these statistics? Yes, I think so. I think we can understand todays trends, how large international companies present their message and brand to appear as credible as possible.

However, what the figures doesn’t show is (1) the future trends, (2) the design that has the greatest credibility or (3) which of the options in the statistics that provide the greatest willingness to purchase among users.

What we concluded, and how we used the statistics … will stay our secret. But I’ll admit that we learned something new.

It really is not surprising that a lot of new portal initiatives therefor start with what the companies have and are familiar with: the content and internal systems. In the early stages of a project we are often faced with the different department’s clear opinions about how their products and services should be presented to the customers, what information they want to publish and how they want to manage the customers and partners. If IT is involved we are also given a lot of guidelines about how the system should work.

These are obviously valuable premises for a successful new solution. One important aspect is, however, missing; the users!
The users tend to be a whole less interested in internal organization, product packaging, and the company’s need to inform the world.

So how do we incorporate the users’ interests into the solution? Well, we invite them in and listen hard to what they have to tell us. We engage them into the analysis and design process, and verify our solution concepts to see if we got it right.

When designing information access solutions for the future it pays off to keep an eye on the basics. Some things never go out of fashion.

Remember the old saying: “The customer is always right”? A good start is to ask what’s right.

Have a good day!

Jørn