Overview:
If you’ve ever watched an eye tracking enhanced usability study, you know how much influence visual perception and user feedback have on usability.  While in progress, eye tracking visualizations can be extremely entertaining, like watching search and destroy video games, but the visualizations also provide meaningful clues that help to unlock the mystery of why pages succeed and fail in usability.

Despite the best copy writing and most well intended navigational systems on the web… one of the most startling facts of web usage is… people don’t read. Sure, they see words and scan for key words and main points, but they don’t read in the traditional literary sense. Both focused web users on a mission to accomplish a task and casual web surfers, those just browsing freely, are not on a mission to read. Their purpose is more tactical and akin to hunting and gathering than reading.

Our reliance on visual and audio senses for survival and focused execution of tasks in the physical world, are equally important for successful orientation, navigation and consumption on the web.

In the majority of eye tracking usability sessions, you will note that the eye moves in a seemingly chaotic yet highly systematic way. Typically starting at the top left, the user will quickly scan across and down stopping a large and distinct blocks of color, chunky text and other visual punctuations. The same scan is repeated a number of times incrementally slowing and resting on the initial set of visual markers with some variance in sequence and jumps to neighboring content. Actual reading in a literal sense does not happen in the first three to five seconds.

You have roughly three seconds to accomplish the following:

• orient the user
• provide key visual markers
• enhance aesthetic experience
• avoid competing with high priority content and actions

It seems like a relatively simple set of tasks, but in three seconds it’s a relatively challenging task. The relative complexity and levels of difficulty vary depending on the site and content objectives. Fortunately, there are proven methods for optimizing the design for scanning and discovery.

1. be conservative. No matter how tempting, minimize the use of color and attractive design elements unless they directly align with a visual system to support content enhancement, clarity, and information of navigational visual cues.
2. be systematic. Patterns of use are driven by patterns in design. Establish punctuating visual treatments for key information, functions and features. Determine content and feature importance both from marketing, business, and functional aspects as well as from the users’ perspective. Once a clear priority is mapped, apply the appropriate visual emphasis the establish visual weighting and emphasis. You can use placement, size, proportion,spacing, color and graphic treatment to establish you visual hierarchy.
3. be consistent. Users rely on repetition to establish a mental map of your organizational system.
4. keep it simple. Users won’t be impressed with how much information you can get above the fold or on the page or in you navigation. Users are more apt to reward sites with clear, simple, and clean designs with repeat visits if they can consistently find what they’re looking for. Simplicity is the art of eliminating clutter while providing valuable content and contextually relevant visual markers for navigation and related features and functions.
5. have fun. Don’t be so serious… users will stay longer and take time to orient themselves if you can avoid chasing them off your site in boredom. Use informal and playful copy as appropriate, but remember the priority is not to distract, but to avoid banality.

Happy designing! Feel free to share examples of your work or other designs that achieve zen visual design.

-Jon Fukuda

We get a ton of hits on our Agile Approach page so I thought I’d take an opportunity to give some more background on our methods and share some of our experiences.  The Limina Team comes from a traditional Waterfall or Rational Unified Process software development background.  Our consulting history and practice methodology is an adaptation of best practices developed in-house by user experience professionals and collaborators who’s expertise run the full spectrum of user interface; research, analysis, strategy, management, interaction modeling, information architecture, design and development.  As a result, we have developed a suite of services that can be applied throughout the full span of the product development lifecycle.

As a practice, our methodology has been flexible enough to add value to every client engagement in our portfolio.  As our team engaged on increasingly more frequent Agile/SCRUM driven teams, a trend which began for us in 2006, we needed to make some adaptations to keep pace with rapid iterations.  The following is a rough breakdown of the adaptations we made by “activity”.

We tool a look at the activities and deliverables we execute in a more verbose and lengthy cycle and dissected each phase to  determine which tasks and deliverables dovetail with the Project, Incremental Release and Sprint cycles of an agile project life cycle. Each level invariably incorporates tasks and deliverables from the traditional Analysis, Definition, Design, Development phases.  Here’s what we came up with:

Product Cycle: Assuming 6-9 months.

Intense Observation and Analysis activity in the all important “Phase Zero” a period of three to six weeks.  In the absence of the waterfall lead time, this is the cycle where UX research seeks to identify the following in rank order:

• Task / Activity Model
• User Role Model
• Business Stakeholder Goals
• User Goals
• Competitive Analysis

Release planning: “Iteration Zero”.

While rough concepts are being established to determine technical frameworks and baseline use cases, the UX team takes 2 weeks to elaborate on the primary storyboards to cover feature definitions in the first iteration.

The At this phase, requirement gaps have been identified, rudimentary user typologies have been identified, development road map has been established based on technical complexity, feasibility, business benefit and user benefit.  Relevant personas for the user stories and features are drafted, usage scenarios are  drilled down, the draft interaction model is established and the associated process flows and wire frames are generated.  This iterative cycle is a lather, rinse,and repeat.

Ideally after 2 weeks iteration zero kicks off user stories, wire frames and mockups and will be available for itteration one development work.

While UX team is cranking out user stories and related assets for iteration two, custom asset creation and spot UI reviews run in parallel in support of iteration one.

This  completes the lather, rinse, repeat cycle.

Meanwhile, persona assets, user stories and related assets are aggregated up for incremental release review.  Any usability or user experience hurdles are triaged and assessed for re-insertion into the iteration plan.  Instructive text, user help documentation are written and evaluated for release.

Benefits and Lessons Learned

As a seasoned UX practitioner, I know the value of getting the requirements right before writing a line of code and my initial reaction to agile development was harsh to say the least.  It’s just a temporary jolt.  Once you get in the swing of rapid iteration and continuous design, you barely miss lengthy requirements gathering and documentation.  The clear benefit is low upfront project spend and near term return on investment.  In traditional models, upfront costs on analysis, strategy, definition and design don’t immediately translate to rapid deployment.  And the upfront cost is significantly higher to account for  end to end specification prior to development.

In an agile team, the analysis, strategy and definition are more light weight and design an development run in parallel.  If high yielding business benefits are addressed in the early release, you will be seeing a return on the investment   earlier than you would have if you staggered the design and development in waterfall fashion.

One major lesson learned for Agile UX in practice:  It is absolutely critical to get one or two iterations ahead of the development team. One slip, and you lose any runway for giving yourself the time  necessary to construct successful solution to meet the needs of your users.

Happy Sprinting UXers

-Jon Fukuda

A nice percentage of our web traffic comes to us, believe it or not, from Google images. As we started to analyze the traffic we found that our Agile Usability Model was one of our main attractions.

Agile Usability is clearly blowing up and becoming a much more efficient model for addressing continuous design and development, so it’s no surprise that this page in particular has piqued some interest. We had not, however, anticipated that our concept was something someone would lift almost to the letter.

A small IT and Development Outsourcing company, BMBO, decided that they liked the visual concept enough to take roughly 90% of the design and visual concepts intact, while altering (minimally) the content.

Joost van de Wijgerd, Founder and Advisor to BMBO, has yet to respond to our email which acknowledges the uncanny resemblance. There’s no telling if they’ll attribute the design (which you may note they ironically watermarked as their own) to Limina, but in the mean time… we’re flattered.

Recently, intranets and enterprise systems are being met with s host of new “social web” requirements. How are these new requirements bleeding into the corporate culture? How successfully are these requirements being integrated? What are the challenges, what are the risks and how do you define success?

Our study looks at internal company networks and how they are or are not employing social media as a means of increasing or aiding communication, collaboration, process management and productivity. Our initial responses are giving us a better idea of the importance of social media on the company intranet as well as where issues currently exist that might be preventing companies from making use of the technology.  We’re confident this will be a valuable report.

Our responses are coming from hundreds and potentially thousands of people at all levels of their organizations. We expect that this approach will give us a more accurate representation of the current conditions.

Survey participants will receive a pre-release version of the report when the results are compiled.  Take the survey!

The survey should only take a few minutes to complete. For all questions, there is a “n/a” (not applicable) answer if the question does not apply to you or your company.

About Limina

Our user experience research and design consultancy specializes in user research and complex information design which includes multi‐layered workflows and complex visualizations. We improve user effectiveness, make products easier to learn, operate, and more meaningful in their function.

If you have questions regarding this report and our research program, please contact Mimi Knowels (mknowles at limina-ao dot com).