Oz-IA, one of my favourite Australian conferences, has announced a call for proposals.
And they’ve made it super-easy - it is a call for expressions of interest, rather than full, detailed proposals. But the hitch is that they need to be in soon (25 July). So if you have an idea for a talk about IA, or of interest to IA folks, please submit. And if you would like me to look over your idea, let me know!!!!
I don’t know if this is such a good idea, but I’ve been watching Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen nightmares, re-reading the Cluetrain Manifesto and helping a client write a set of guidelines for social media .
And I just realised what each has in common…
Voice
Ramsay, when you remove the f*** word, talks always about authenticity and simple, true food.
A big chunk of the cluetrain, and the part that I connected with when I first read it, is about communicating with a true, authentic voice.
And the core of social media is about being real, being yourself and communicating with people as a person not as a corporation.
In every case, the authenticity, realness and honesty is most important, and will always be so.
Someone asked me recently how many items were ‘too many’ to have in a navigation bar on a website. Of course, there is no definitive answer to this (and please don’t ever believe it if someone tells you 7+/-2: the research behind that is completely irrelevant). I don’t think I’ve seen reliable research on this, and if I did I think I’d be suspicious of it anyway as the complexity of the issue isn’t about number, but about complexity of concept.
So I spent some time thinking about what the underlying principles would be if you had to think this through for a decision (I always like thinking from basic principles out, not just relying on simple answers).
One of the main principles is Hicks Law. This describes the time it takes for a reader to make a decision when provided with a number of choices. It basically says that the more choices, the more time (obviously) but it is a logarithmic relationship, not a linear one. So that’s one part of it.
Another important part is the concept of basic-level categories. There is a level of a hierarchical classification that is called ‘basic’ that is more cognitively real than other levels. People think at the basic level. A simple example is this: Mammal - dog - dalmatian. We usually think about ‘dogs’, not mammals or dalmatians.
In practice, I’ve seen people cope with long lists when:
The opposite to a long list of course is a shorter one. This will usually mean breaking down the long list hierarchically, or group some of the items together (e.g Products & Services). The challenge with this is doing it in a way that still makes sense to the reader - as the level of abstraction increases, it is harder for people to determine what might be in a more abstract category.
The other challenge is that, even if you do make a really good long list that is full of great terms and works well for readers, everyone else will challenge you because there is a perception that long lists are bad (even users will say ‘oh, that’s a long list’ before they jump in and use it really easily). If I were about to do implement a long list I’d set up a mini-usability test that compares a couple of options - long lists, grouped items, more hierarchy). I developed a quick usability testing method years ago that I still use that would be good for showing whether the list works or not.
What do you think? How do you figure out how long to make your navigation lists? And how do you convince other people that a long list is OK?
Here’s my presentation from Web Directions User Experience, titled ‘Getting content right’.
The description for it was:
“We all know that great content is a core part of the website user experience. So why is it so hard to find content that isn’t dull, lifeless and uninteresting - blah, blah, blah?
Web content can be vibrant, interesting and fun. It can draw you in, fill your head and make you learn without having to think. And it’s not really hard to write. Three simple tricks can turn poor content into a great experience - remember that readers care more about themselves than you; write in real words with authentic voice; play show and tell.
This presentation will discuss these principles, with plenty of funny and not-so-funny examples. You’ll go away with practical steps to make your writing kick-ass. And you won’t even have to think.”
I think it went well. Good questions at the end, and a number of people commented that the tips actually were things they could do (which was the aim).
(Lots of car references in there too…)
Yet another workshop announcement…
On 7&8 August, I will be teaching a 2-day master class on information architecture and collaborative design, run via Ark Group. The thing that is slightly different about this workshop compared to my IA workshop is that, duh, it includes a lot of collaborative design.
I’m adding more material on user research, design games, usability testing and designing in teams - I don’t usually get to teach these in a one-day workshop. And 2 days allows more hands-on, practical stuff than one, and that is always good.
So if you know someone who may be interested, and can get to Sydney, please pass on the details: Information architecture and collaborative design workshop.
In my last post, one of the things I most criticised Peugeot for was providing navigation based on a series of numbers, and making me decipher the numbering system before I could start to learn about their cars.
This numbering system (or strange names) problem exists throughout the car industry. It is just one of the things that a consumer needs to learn before starting to navigate the car world. It has been around for a long time, is fairly embedded, and there are plenty of people who know the system. Just not everyone.
The thing that we can do, as user experience designers, is to make sure things work on both levels - to provide ease of access to those who know the system, and help people who don’t know the system to learn it quickly - to lower the barrier to entry.
So given I’ve been spending too much time on car websites recently, I thought it would be worth looking at some examples of how some brands are managing this.
First, here’s the some bad examples.
Peugeot’s model range page is based on numbers and provides no further information:
Alfa Romeo doesn’t have a ‘models’ landing page so the only entry is through the navigation in the middle of the page. A simple addition would be to add the model name to the scrolling banner image - at least I could then watch the image and get an idea:
Citroen are the same - no ‘model’ landing page, so all entry is through the number-based navigation at the top of the page:
Renault and Volkswagen both show names and thumbnails at a glance. Nicely done and easy to understand.
Audi have a go at it, but the thumnails are a bit small to tell the cars apart (I do like that they show starting price here - that’s handy too):
BMW tries as well, but the images are too busy to see detail of the car:
This is the most common approach with other manufacturers doing it with varying levels of usefulness
Fiat has a ‘Model range’ widget on the home page that lets you scroll through the range, so you can visually connect the picture to the name:
Saab have thumbnails of the models on the home page, with good detail on hover (and consistent navigation options for each):
Holden too have a ‘more details on hover’, interestingly attached to flyout navigation (I did nearly miss this though):
Just goes to show, it is possible to do better…
And now I should get back to work and stop thinking about cars (though ping me if you love/hate your recent-model Peugeot, Alfa or Fiat).
… any car other than a Peugeot.
The back story …
I’ve recently started to think about buying a new car. I don’t mind my current one (it’s a Nissan X-trail) but it is a bit bigger than I need and sort of just not me. I’ve been thinking about buying a Peugeot for well over a year - they’re terribly green (very low fuel use, low emissions, and supposedly would run on biofuel if it ever turns up) terribly sexy and quite well-priced. Every time one goes by me I notice it and think about buying one. I hadn’t even considered buying anything else.
Until I visited their website.
I’m a girl - you probably know that. For me buying a car is a bit of a scary idea - every car purchase I’ve previously been involved in had a boy part to it. That shouldn’t be so scary, but there are still great big blocks of the consumer world where girls are treated differently (wine stores and wineries are the other, but I’ll whine about that later).
And I’m sort of organised, which is why I’m a decent information architect. You’d hardly expect me to do something so important without research. And I’m a web chick so the website was the natural place to start.
When I approached the website, I had three goals in mind - to find out about the new model that I had seen advertised, figure out which model was good for me, and learn enough to sound sensible when I went to the dealer. Sounds like a decent, straightforward research task.
Not much help there - a big picture and a bunch of numbers.
Another big picture and a bunch of numbers. This number problem is consistent in the whole car industry - you have to decipher the numbering system before doing anything.
No image this time, but still the numbers.
So I just dug around for a while (like, an hour) to figure out the numbering system and to vaguely figure out what I might want. I narrowed it down to a 207 (small hatchback), 307 (medium hatchback) and 308 (new, medium hatchback) with 5 doors and diesel. My main criteria are a hatch so I can drop the seats and put stuff in the back, low fuel use and low emissions.
Guess what I might want to do next? I might want to compare the specs for these three narrowed-down options side-by-side. Compare dimensions, options, fuel use, emissions and price. I’d sort of like a neat table that lets me scan and compare each.
Let’s give that a go - the ‘Build your own car’ so doesn’t build a car, but does let me filter into all the possible cars and display results.
After choosing 5-door hatch, diesel, it told me there were three models and 8 versions, so I thought that was enough. Here are the results:
I can choose each of these, but not compare. My only choice now is to open up each ‘family site’ and dig through it. No side-by-side comparison. Nothing but sending me into three different organisational silos (oh, and the links don’t work anyway, so I can’t go anywhere; and what the * does ‘visual no contractual’ mean).
You know what makes this all worse. I could just cope with having to dig into three different ‘family sites’. If they were consistently done, I could find the specifications part for each and flick between browser tabs. But no, each family site is structured differently.
Different visual approach, different navigation options, different styles of content. I still can’t compare. I’d be better driving to the dealer, getting brochures and putting them side-by-side on my kitchen table. And what’s the point of having a website?
You know, I only tolerated this because I really, really, really wanted to buy a Peugeot. But every minute and every further moment frustration decreased my love.
I started by being totally convinced a Peugeot was the car for me. I finished by making a stop this morning at the Alfa dealer.
And just as a last image, do you think they talking about the car, or bandwidth:
As I mentioned recently, I am changing my name back to Donna Spencer.
Last time I changed my name was pre-internet and it wasn’t terribly hard. But now I have identity spread out all over the web, and am wondering just how easy it will be to change my name, and how important name is to identity.
I anticipate one thing will work in my favour. In the main, my name isn’t necessarily tied directly to my username. My main usernames are maadmob, maadonna & donnam. I don’t need to change them at all, but it certainly would be interesting to know what would happen if someone did need to do that.
So I’m keeping a running post of progress as I go - both to highlight the identity issues and good/bad examples of user experience.
First stop (for no other reason than convenience) was Facebook. On my account page was a clear option to change my name (image below taken after I had done it), followed by a big warning about the types of names they won’t accept, and that all name changes are checked.
I was wondering what would happen with Wordpress. Ideally I’d be able to change an author’s name, have old posts under the old name, and new posts under the new. After all, the author doesn’t change, just the name.
Turned out I can change the nickname, but not the name. So I think I’ll probably set up a new author with a new name, rather than risk uncertainty of just changing a nickname.
This was dead easy & only needed a minor edit in one field:
More to come…
Today’s big, exciting announcement is …
I’ll be speaking at this year’s User Interface 13 Conference, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’m teaching a full day workshop called Information Architecture Essentials: Best Practices for Organizing Your Site’s Content. I’ll also be doing a 90-minute presentation, but haven’t yet figured out what it will be.
I’m excited about this for two reasons. I look at this conference every year and want to go every time - it has a consistently strong line-up of both topics and speakers. And I get to present my favourite workshop - one that I have done enough that I know people *always* enjoy and learn from.
More details to come, and a discount code for you to use!
This is just a little post to let you all know I’m changing my name. I’m returning to my maiden name, which was Spencer.
So if you all of a sudden see comments, posts and general noise from Donna Spencer, it’s still me.
I had an IA Summit epiphany today…
When I looked at the program this year, I was a bit disappointed that some of my favourite and noisiest IA folks weren’t speaking. It felt a bit odd to see a program with loads of names I didn’t know (back story - I’ve been on the organising committee and closely involved in the previous 4 summits). It didn’t bother me, and would never stop me from attending, but did feel a bit strange.
But then I was hanging out in the hallways in a break today and spotted lots of people with ’speaker’ ribbons that I didn’t know. And I felt something I thought was interesting. I felt glad that there were loads of new-to-summit folks who had gotten their stuff through a tough review process; and glad that there was a venue for the same folks to communicate their ideas to peers.
It really felt quite strange, and reminded me of why summit is my favourite conference, by far, for the year.
I’m very excited to announce that I’m teaching a new workshop with Russ Weakley. It’s called “Website user experience & CSS workshop: Designing for usability, building for the future“. It will be run in Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, in late March and April.
I’m teaching the day on user experience, and Russ is teaching on CSS, which is lucky for you as I’m pretty good at ux and Russ is awesomely good at teaching CSS.
I’m really looking forward to it - I’ve wanted to go to one of Russ’ tutorials for a couple of years. And I love teaching user experience design for the web - I’ve spent a lot of time doing it, and a lot of time thinking about what I’ve learned and how to best share it.
I hope to see you, or your colleagues, there. Please pass details on to anyone you think may benefit.
A hands-on workshop with user experience expert, Donna Maurer, and CSS
expert, Russ Weakley.
Over two full days you will build detailed websites layouts from the ground up - starting with page layout, navigation and form design; and ending with clean markup and elegant styling using XHTML/CSS.
On day one you will plan and design a website - focusing on the user experience: designing the navigation, page layout and forms.
You will:
For each step, Donna will outline the fundamentals and show examples from small and large website projects. But most of the time will be hands-on -you work on your own project, ask questions and discuss with the group.
On day two you will build your website from the ground up - starting with structural markup, adding accessible markup and then styling your layout using CSS.
You will learn:
Canberra - Monday 31 March and Tuesday 1 April
Melbourne - Thursday 3 April and Friday 4 April
Sydney - Monday 28 April and Tuesday 29 April
Brisbane - Thursday 1 May and Friday 2 May
More information and registration here: http://maxdesign.com.au/workshop2008/
In the last few weeks I’ve been in different situations that all reminded me of a key principle in any persuasive communication - no matter whether it be writing, designing, pitching or delivering a report. It is a principle that is absolutely key, and all so easy to forget…
The situations I found myself in were something like this:
On reflection on the similarities between these situations, I realised the problem - in each situation the writer/interviewee talked about themselves and how great they were, instead of talking about the person they were talking to. And I remembered something that I already knew:
Nothing is about you. Everything is about the reader/listener.
I think it was Kathy Sierra who really nailed this a few years ago (and who I would like to thank for her many ideas and insights). She put it so eloquently:
This is the key to every single piece of communication. No-one cares about you, but they do care about what you can do for them.
Remember it, embed it, do everything you can to make other people shine; and good things will come your way automatically.
I was given a wonderful, if slightly geeky, christmas gift this year - a year’s hosting with a new provider. Of course, a new host meant work - I had to move my website and weblog to the new host.
I was happy to rebuild my website from scratch as it needed it anyway, and chose to use wordpress as I knew it could do what I wanted to do. But when thinking about moving my blog, the decision was much harder.
I’ve been blogging since 2002, and have used movable type for the whole time, upgrading regularly and remaining up to date with how it works. I’ve also used it for other projects - the biggest one being the IA Summit website. So I had a level of commitment that meant that it was my natural choice.
In rebuilding my blog, I had only two requirements:
That’s not too big an ask is it? With those two simple requirements, I decided to stick with movabletype, thinking the second criteria was a done deal and the first should be OK given I had upgraded many times without breaking links.
In a funny co-incidence, the morning of the grand rebuild I had an email from the MT folks saying there was a new version. Cool - I wouldn’t have to upgrade within a few days.
So I downloaded the install files and uploaded them to my host. Time-consuming, but relatively easy.
Then things started to go pear-shaped…
I’ve installed wordpress a few times in the last few years and think the ‘5-minute install’ is a pretty grand thing. I knew MT had a few more steps and wasn’t worried about it taking a bit longer. I followed the install wizard, which I thought odd given I’d always just updated the config file. Wizards should be less geeky than their direct-edit counterparts but this one so wasn’t:
But I took a deep breath, calmed down (something very hard for me) and continued. I finally got it installed (after an hour of working through the ‘wizard’).
Given my number one criteria was not to break links, and given I had been using MT since 2002 (with urls like 000123.html) my first job was to change the URL path to numeric (I know these don’t make great URLs, but really didn’t want to redirect). I dug around the interface for ages looking for the piece that let me customise the URL. I couldn’t find it. So I went to the official help and the support site. I couldn’t find it. After another hour of digging around, the camel’s back broke. I’d completely had enough.
From a simple, useful, usable blogging tool in 2002 MT had become a bloated, useless, unusable tool in 2008. I could no longer use it.
I deleted the MT files from my server (another hour) and changed to Wordpress. In 15 minutes I had installed, configured and imported my content. I resigned myself to the fact that I’d have to build a redirect file, which ended up taking much less time than the stuffing around with MT.
I won’t be going back to MT any time soon. Perhaps never. The ridiculous amount of complexity and lack of flexibility just proved too hard. They’ve completely lost me. I’m now a wordpress girl through and through. And happy being so.
A couple of weeks ago I reworked the business part of my website - I had to move it to a new host and remove some content (and it really needed some polish). So I decided not only to think about re-doing the website, but to re-think what I’m doing with my business.
One of the things I needed to sort out was the types of service I offer - I want to focus narrowly enough in my area of expertise to attract clients who I suit, without looking like so much of a specialist that good people pass over me. So of course I decided to focus on design training, IA and interaction design - these are my core offering, they are what I’m good at, and what I want to be doing right now.
So I had a page on my old website about usability testing (I’m finally getting to the point of the story). I automatically brought it over and added it to my list of services. I did it because I thought it was just something that a business like mine should offer.
But when I came to write the content, and convince you why you should hire me to help you with usability testing, things started to unravel. In writing it, I realised that I actually didn’t want to offer a usability testing service.
I thought about that some and realised why I don’t want to do standalone usability testing:
So lots of people are going to be upset with me about that, so I will acknowledge that there are some caveats:
So I now don’t offer a standalone usability testing service - and don’t feel the loss at all. But I will teach others and will test on my own projects…and I’m comfortable with that.
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