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).
How to better incorporate customer feedback into your engineering driven product.
Limina is often faced with products that have been in the market for years with little to no professional user centered and UI design methodology applied. It’s typically apparent in the interface before delving into the history of development through issues including but, not limited to the following examples:
inconsistent UI patterning
obtuse, or in many cases, non-existent workflows where users are either left to their own devices to develop their own approach to the system or spend time in manuals or training
random color and graphic treatments with little or no usage rationale
core features and functions hidden in right click menus with no alternative access
extensive use of dialogs and workspace changes to complete primary tasks
random and inconsistent screen layout
chop-shop iconography, cut and pasted from other applications
Most of these issues can be attributed to an engineering driven culture where usability has not been a core part of the methodology. Sure, the code is clean, the feature works, QA and Unit Tests have passed with flying colors… but is it usable or useful from an end to end experience?
A typical engineering approach to incorporating customer feedback
As a stop-gap to implementing user centered design practices, we’ve heard: “We’re meeting with our customers regularly to hear what they need and we keep them happy by feeding these requirements directly to the engineers to implement.”
First of all, we applaud you for going directly to the users with your product and taking back their requests into the design… but this is a slippery slope.
Although you may know your users and even have some working for you, how well are you capturing their needs? Are you asking the right questions? Are your users able to articulate what they need? You may have voluminous user feedback, support call logs, or error log reports on file, but have you put the user data into a framework that generates an actionable set of UI enhancements?
Equally important; when you have captured their feedback, how do you use it? Without a clear definition or roadmap for incorporating the user feedback, your product is at risk of losing competitive ground. When a company has to spend additional revenue in extensive training sessions, help documentation, call centers and product revisions, the margin of return on investment can take a massive beating.
Here are some activities to help you to incorporate user feedback into your agile development practice:
1) Give the feedback some context – What were users doing or attempting to do when they encountered the issue, and what are their roles? Usability specialists conduct a set of contextual inquiries to interview and observe users as they are performing various tasks in the context of their workplace to determine both system and non-system based activities, documents, and tools that are used to complete their tasks.
2) Quantify and qualify the user data – Where do you see common issues reaching a critical mass? Which are the exceptions and how do you prioritize them? What issues constitute a completely new set of features and possibly a new product?
3) Organize it – Once you have synthesized and prioritized the issues, determine their relationship not only to the system, but also to each other. Which comments are related and which ones are specific to a given task or feature?
The result is a set of researched usability issues that can be organized into enhancements prioritized by issue, prevalence, technical complexity, business, and user benefit.
Such a framework should be employed when embarking on a product definition or enhancement process. It allows parties from marketing, product management, and engineering to uncover the root of software design issues that challenge usability, and ultimately to gain a deeper understanding of their users. Product managers and engineers who gather and process user feedback assist their company by developing the right products and tools for their customers.
Skipping this step leads to an iterative path of organically distorting the original design of the system and frankin-hacking patches and appendages to the product to the point where rebuilding from scratch is easier than overhauling the UI when your users start running to your competitors.
There are a great many development teams using agile methods, SCRUMing it out, getting the features out the door to see what sticks. In many ways, this is a helpful model to beat the first-to-market and innovation clocks, but if the net result is revisiting the feature again and again or playing “pass the trouble ticket” from developer to developer as the feature enhancement is punted to the next iterations for months… something isn’t working.
We are all for engineering driven product teams. In most cases, massive leaps in technical innovation are paved by developer teams and individuals unhindered by business and user requirements. But we’re talking about products in the market that have ROI, user adoption, marketability, competitiveness and other business considerations to name a few.
There’s something to be said for dealing with the cost up-front; for taking the time to build a sustainable product whether in its initial incarnation or when producing the next generation of its kind, because the hidden cost of maintenance, marketing and training can work against you in the long run.
Give us your thoughts and share your experiences with us and our readers!
Years ago, various UX gurus touted the coming of the ubiquitous computer– every device would have a computer built in and they would all talk to one another. Mark Weiser coined the term while at Xerox PARC in 1988 and Alan Kay of Apple called this the “Third Paradigm”. It began with mainframe computers (one compute -> many people), followed by the personal computer (one person -> one computer), bringing us to ubiquitous computing (one person -> many computers). Ubiquitous computing can be considered the opposite of virtual reality, rather than surrounding the person within a computer-generated environment, ubiquitous computing surrounds the individual with computers (in between, lies augmented reality). In other words, computers are made to live in our world and not the other way around. Donald Norman updated the term in 1999 and used the term invisible computer and information appliance to refer to the coming revolution of devices that that would have embedded computer chips and effortlessly communicate with one another.
To some degree that has happened, even if you disregard the multiple computers that most people own (desktop, laptop, netbook) even the simple electronic devices that surround us have considerable computing power. According to futurists, my toaster should be talking with my refrigerator to know what kind of bread I have and how I like it toasted or to notify my online grocer that I only had two slices left (some of the early predictions were pretty bizarre and stretched the definition of “usefulness”). But why did their prediction fail to materialize and we’re all living in remedial houses rather than the smarthouse we were promised? Even though my appliances are much smarter than the ones my parents had there is little chatter between my toaster, coffeemaker, or any other smart appliances in my household. Most of the things I own don’t really need to communicate with one another, nor do they have much to say to Net. In fact, most of devices don’t have much to say about anything. My refrigerator still doesn’t know when I’m almost out of orange juice, though, given Tropicana’s new packaging I wish it could tell me what kind I just bought and why it was not the one I wanted. Is ubiquitous computing just one more failed prediction like fifth generation computing (expert systems) or has ubiquitous computing shifting to something else?
Apple takes an interesting two-pronged approach to ubiquitous computing, instead of everything communicating with everything else, the iPhone says – “talk to me, and I’ll talk to those that need to know” and asks “no need for multiple devices, just give me a simple focused task and I can do that.” The latter approach is familiar to everyone who has ever downloaded an app from the iTunes Store, while the former is somewhat new and is made possible by the introduction of OS 3.0 and APIs that allow for easy communication with other devices. The application approach is akin to a universal Turing machine, and the API model is more like a universal interface. It’s not quite two-pronged, rather applications are developed that allow devices to integrate seamlessly with iPhone – I consider it a different enough model as to warrant it’s unique status. For example, Johnson & Johnson made a bit of splash at the Apple developer conference with their demo of LifeScan a tool that integrates a glucose monitor with the iPhone and provides a range of features from simple visualizations of historical data to food tracking to uploading data to your healthcare provider.
Whether or not one believes the hype surrounding LifeScan (is it vaporware or will it see production?), it’s easy to imagine a range of medical devices (or any category of devices) all communicating through the iPhone, all using the iPhone’s screen and its Samsung S5PC100 processor – one person, one user interface with many devices.
I’m not sure if Apple is going to be the one that finally surrounds us with computers or smart devices, but I think their model puts us in more control than the previous one of smart appliances “deciding” for us – when to order OJ, how to toast my bread, etc. My toaster can simply communicate with my iPhone, and I can set how the bread is toasted (silly ideas never really die, they just move around the ether). I think the future is looking less like Terminator Salvation and maybe more like Star Trek [Note: It is very hard to find good science fiction movies or shows that paint a bright picture].
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