22. How the How the How the business
How the customer How the analyst
project leader programmer consultant
explained it designed it
understood it wrote it described it
How the project What operations How the customer How it was What the customer
was documented installed was billed supported really wanted
57. Call Centre Terminal Redesign
Case Study
• Challenges:
– Difficult to navigate
– Difficult to find things
– Operator has to remember too many things
– Easy to make mistakes
– Customers are not forgiving
– Steep learning curve
– Long training times
– Stressful environment for the operators
– High staff turnover
58. Call Centre Terminal Redesign
Case Study
• Redesign methodology
– Stakeholder interviews
– Contextual inquiry
– Design sessions with stakeholders
– High-level wireframes
• Daily hallway testing
– Detailed wireframes
• Weekly hallway testing
– Usability testing
59. Call Centre Terminal Redesign
Case Study
• Outcomes (so far)
– More streamlined navigation
– Less mental load on the operator to find and
remember things
– Balance between
• learnability (for novice users)
• efficiency (for expert users)
• Expected future outcomes
– Reduced training times
– Reduced staff turnover
– Less stress for the operators
– Faster transactions for the customers
65. Next-gen mobile banking solution for a major bank
Case Study
• Challenges:
– Disintegrated mobile banking components
– Information structure not logical
– Lack of funds for an app for every platform
– Lack of a common vision
– Difficulty in getting buy-in from board
66. Next-gen mobile banking solution for a major bank
Case Study
• Redesign methodology
– Stakeholder interviews
– Focus group with end-users
– Design sessions with stakeholders
– High-level wireframes
67. Next-gen mobile banking solution for a major bank
Case Study
• Outcomes
– Integrated approach to mobile banking
– Logical information architecture and improved
findability
– Platform-agnostic mobile site
– Shared vision of the expected system
87. Eyetracking
Tobii T60, T120, T60XL Tobii TX300 Tobii X60 and X120 Tobii Glasses Tobii X1 Light
Used to test images on a Used to test images on a Used to test large images Used to test in real life Portable light weight
computer screen. screen, at high speed e.g. shelf layouts. situations e.g. shopping. eye tracker, which snaps
(300Hz). laptops and kiosks.
Visit http://www.tobii.com/en/eye-tracking-research/global/products/ for more information
92. Recap
• Bad vs good UX
• (Very) brief intro to UX
• Benefits of UX
• User-centred design methodology
• Case studies
• Skills required
• Tools
• Trends
93. Say hello!
James Breeze Nirish Shakya
Chief Experience Officer User Experience Consultant
jbreeze@objectivedigital.com nshakya@objectivedigital.com
0410 410 494 0431 170 608
@NirishShakya @NirishShakya
301/15 Lime Street
King Street Wharf
www.ObjectiveDigital.com Sydney NSW 2000
Editor's Notes
Have you had a similar experience with the computer lately? Keep your hands raised if you’ve felt like punching the computer screen or smashing your phone! Yep, it’s all too common! Ladies and gentleman, my name is Nirish. And I’m Dan. And we’re people who try to make sure you don’t have to punch your screen or smash your phone. They call us user experience consultants.
I’m sure you’ve seen the unusable tea-pot on Don Norman famous book ‘The Design of Everyday Things’.
And too often, we come across these doors which we’re not sure whether we’re meant to push or pull.
And then there are website menus that try to confuse you random icons.
Don’t we all love these??
Don’t we all love these??
Don’t we all love these??
And some are just so bad that they’re good…to make fun of! We’ve all seen this infamous homepage of a computer store. To my surprise, they recently revamped their website…
And made it even more confusing!.... GO TO SYDNEY WATER SITE!
On the other hand, they are some satisfying user experiences as well. For example, the new Chrome browser lets you do a google search straight from the URL textbox without having to go to the google page.
Some make it really clear what you can do on the page.
Others make the experience a bit more memorable.
This is true with any product, not just software products. You buy a glass a beer, not for the beer itself, but for the experience it gives you. This is especially valid in software because the customer cannot touch or feel the product. They can only experience it.
UX is important because we all have a customer.
User experience is made up of a variety of relevant fields. While Usability is still the most prominent (and provides a good framework for what we do) it is important that other factors are taken into consideration. It doesn’t matter if it works if the marketing team has told them something different. The video might be great, but most of your users are still on dial-up. These are the issues that we try to uncover.
Accessibility: Will colour blind people be able to use the colour coded map? Content: the right information at the right time? IA: general public users vs large corporate clients. Are their needs different? Functionality: does the site or application deliver the tools to fulfil a user’s needs? Platform: What is the experience like on a mobile phone on a crowded bus. User interface: Does the site using conventions?
I did my undergrad in IT.
And for a lot of our programming subjects, we had to draw these entity-relationship diagrams to show the relationship between different entities involved with the system. But the closest we ever came to meeting the user was this box called ‘Driver’.
Or stick figures.
I don’t remember actually meeting this elusive user that kept appearing in all our diagrams. After 3 and half years of hard work, I graduated I got a job as a programmer. But I found that a lot of the projects I worked on looked a bit like…
…the famous tree swing cartoon. [END]We used to develop these really cool industrial navigation and job dispatch applications for technician vans and security cars. We knew they were used by drivers but we didn’t know whether it was used by
Elderly drivers who had difficulty with their visions or
People who hated technology. We didn’t know.
We only thought in code. It was all about getting the requirements coded and shipped.
After years of hard work, we came up with this. But we started receiving a lot of complaints from people who found the application difficult to use. Are you kidding me? It’s easy! So we did what every engineer knows how to do.
We wrote a user manual with all the detailed instructions and pretty screenshots. But the there was one problem – no one read the user manual.
Life was imitating these Dilbert cartoons. If it couldn’t be solved by user manuals or tech support, just pretend nothing happened. After all, ignorance is bliss, isn’t it?
Not anymore. Have you heard the Google Ngram viewer? Using this, you can visualise the rise and fall of keyword across 5 million books and 500 years. As you can see, the keyword ‘user experience’ is trending up.
Whereas, the keyword ‘software engineering’ is trending down. But that doesn’t mean that software engineering is any less popular than it used to. It just means that people’s expectation of a satisfying user experience is going up. Now, technology has become something that’s taken for granted. It’s like 60 years ago, owning a TV was the coolest thing in the world. Now, owning a TV is like owning a pair of undies. Everyone’s expected to have at least one. Now people want something more than just the fastest hardware or the most-efficient algorithm.
So why is UX getting so popular? Well, obviously it has some benefits.
UX guru, Jared Spool, talks about the $300 million button. A big e-commerce company approached him to find out why customers were dropping out in the middle of the checkout process. Spool conducted some usability testing on the site. And found that the site was making the user …
..register before they could make the purchase. He found that a lot of people did not want to register.
How many times have you seen these shopping sites which force you to register for an account when all you wanna do is pay for the thing and get the hell outta there? And if you look at the fields you need to fill in to register, it’s actually information you have to put in anyways when you checkout. So why make it look like it’s an additional step in the process when the customer is already in a rush.
Hence, now we’re starting to see more and more e-commerce sites that allow customers to checkout without registering for an account. Some others let you register while you checkout.
Now who here doesn’t want that? If we can save our customers or users time, that’s good for their business, which in turn in good for ours. But unfortunately, you see a lot of sites out there that love to play a game of cat and mouse and send you on a treasure hunt around the site.
This visualisation here is called a gazeplot and it shows the flow of my gaze on the page. As you can see, I had to scan the entire length of the page to find the online-check in function that was meant to be the most important function on the page.
This is another culprit when it comes to lost productivity. On the older version of the Transport Infoline website, when you click on the address boxes to type your own address,
The instructional text stays there and you have to delete the text yourself. Now, I timed myself deleting all that text from those 4 textboxes.
And it took me 19 seconds in total. Not let’s say the Transport Infoline gets around 1000 visitors in a day searching for public transport routes. That’s 190000 seconds, which is 13 hours per day which totals to 197 days of productivity lost in a year which the NSW government owes us!
Good user experience makes our customers happier and when they’re happy, they want to use our products more and more.
Do you remember these super-fancy smartphones running on Windows Mobile? They were so fancy, they even came with a magic wand! But unfortunately, for them and for a lot of other phones, this happened. In terms of the technical specs, they didn’t have much between them. In fact, I would say a lot of the other phones had better hardware and processing power. But people just felt good using these phones. Whether you were a techie or a grandma, you could just pick up one of these phones and enjoy using them. Now I’m not a marketing guy and I’m not here to talk about all the marketing that goes into Apple products, but there’s no denying that they offer a much superior user experience than other comparable products out there and that’s the main reason now you see most people on the Cityrail trains playing with their iPhones and no one with a Windows Mobile phone.
THE UCD or user centered design processInvolves research, concepts and testing with users.It can be an ongoing process which has touch points with users throughout the life cycle of the project.
Who is your user?
Who is your “User”? What is their environment like? What do they know about the system?
Is it a novice user who just wants to enjoy some of their personal music collection on the way to work and wants the simplest device to use?
Or is a full-blown expert or a professional who needs more power and is prepared to learn the complexities that comes with the power?
After you figured out why you’re designing or redesigning something, next step to understand in what context your users will be using the system.
As the famous saying goes, ‘If we try to be everything to everyone, then we become nothing.’ So we need to understand how our systems are going to be used by what kind of people.
Context—The user’s actual workplace. Watches users do their own work tasks and discusses any artefactsStep-by-stepre-tellings of specific past events when they are relevant to the project focus.Confirmyour interpretations and insights with the user during the interview. The user may expand or correct the researcher’s understanding.
Context—The user’s actual workplace. Watches users do their own work tasks and discusses any artefactsStep-by-stepre-tellings of specific past events when they are relevant to the project focus.Confirmyour interpretations and insights with the user during the interview. The user may expand or correct the researcher’s understanding.
Descriptive profiles of users, summarising their needs and motivations. They help to force a focus on user needs by putting a ‘human face’ end users.Make 1 per user type.
Use what you know from other researchProduce scenariosPredict issues arising
Who is your user?
Who is your user?
Explore ideas and iterate on conceptsQuickly and easily Don’t createdetailed mockups, just ideasConceive and predict the consequences of certain design arguments
Whether you have a bunch of paper prototypes, or HTML prototype or a full-blown website. Better early than late and better late than never.
Ask someone to do something on your product. You can grab someone at their desk or meet them at a coffee shop. As long as you have a comfortable space and the stimulusA lot of people will do it as a favour. Or you can just buy them coffee.Avoid designers & engineers
Ask someone to do something on your product. You can grab someone at their desk or meet them at a coffee shop. As long as you have a comfortable space and the stimulusA lot of people will do it as a favour. Or you can just buy them coffee.Avoid designers & engineers
Ask them to do a task. E.g. download a video / buy a pair of shoes. Watch and ask them open-ended questions ‘What are you looking for?’ or ‘What’s behind that button?’. 5-6 people generates 70-80% usability issues.
Evaluate a product by testing it on target users.Measuring a product's capacity to perform it’s intended purposeUse 6-8 people (per cell) to uncover the majority of issues.Start with context of use, then initial reactions, a set of tasks and closing thoughts.Ideally you have a lab & recording software, and participants are incentivised for their time.
If you follow an agile methodology, such as Scrum, you can do this kind of hallway testing towards at end of the sprint. Test in the morning, report in the afternoon. The returns you will get from that 1 day of testing will be several times the investment.
Make your ideas come to life – easily and cheaplyAn early sample modelA prototype is designed to test and trial a new design
