Here’s a wonderfully dated video of David Ogilvy giving what looks like a keynote address to a Direct Response Advertising conference (by video, which must have been breathtakingly modern back in the 1960s).

Ogilvy came from a background in research, and was an early proponent of AB testing. He had a huge amount of respect for the Direct Response Advertising industry (as opposed to what he called ‘General Advertising’ – Print, TV, etc.) – mainly for the fact that they were so focused on tracking response rates, and working towards winning ad designs. To quote:

“You Direct Response people know what kind of advertising works, and what doesn’t work. You know to a dollar. The General Advertising people don’t know. [...] The chasm between Direct Response advertising and General Advertising is wide. On your side of the chasm, I see knowledge and reality. On the other side of the chasm, I see ignorance. You are the professionals. This must not go on. I predict that the practitioners of general advertising are going to start learning from your experience.”

It’s funny that, even today, the web industry is still catching up with this philosophy of metrics-based optimisation.

Does anyone know the date and origin of this video? (Found via @yandle.)

An old YouTube clip from Yes Minister (an early 1980s BBC political comedy), which shows how leading questions and tone setting can get you any results you want – if you’re willing to stoop that low.

Via Nikos Karaoulanis.

Have you ever wondered why there are many clearly defined Design Patterns for good design, and Anti-Patterns for mistakes, but in the field of UX we have no recognised terminology for evil design? And why has the SEO industry always recognised the difference between black-hat and white-hat practices?

The answer is simple really. Google has a clearly defined set of guidelines, they do a great job of monitoring for black-hat SEO practices and they heavily penalise offenders. Black-hat SEO is kept in check because it’s highly risky.

Black-hat UX is different: it’s subtle, it’s not easily monitored by software algorithms, but worst of all, as a community we’ve never tried to tackle it head on. This needs to change.

About a month ago I wrote a short post on Dark Patterns (“Dirty tricks designers use to make you do stuff”), asking for input on a talk I’m preparing for the UX Brighton conference in September. The response was pretty impressive, with almost 100 comments and loads of conversation over on Hacker News.

So, I’ve taken everyone’s suggestions and put together darkpatterns.org: a black-hat design pattern library. It’s currently in beta (i.e. unfinished), and I’d love further input. I really want this to be a community project – please free to email in suggestions, add comments, or get in touch if you want to co-curate the site with me.

Let’s stop turning a blind eye to black-hat UX. Let’s name the offenders and shame them into giving it up. As a community, it’s well within our power to do this.

I wouldn’t normally blog about job openings but this is special. Our current Creative Director, Glenn Jones, is moving into a new innovation-oriented role at Madgex, giving us the opportunity for a new hire. We’re looking for a new, talented, Creative Director. Could it be you?

Madgex is a world-leading Job Board and CV database provider, used by clients such as The Guardian, Star Tribune, The Times, Trinity Mirror Plc, Haymarket and Total Jobs Group. You may not have heard of us before, probably because we provide white label software – our clients add their own branding. However, Madgex is a force to be reckoned with, powering over 145 job boards globally and catering for roughly 2 million job seekers per week. As the Creative Director, you’d be responsible for managing the design team and overseeing all of the UI design work. We have a big focus on iterative User Experience research, which is where my role comes in – I’d be working closely with you.

Sounds interesting? Check out the job description for more details and feel free to ask me questions: harry@brignull.com.

I’ve been aware of WhatUsersDo for a while now, but I have to admit, I’ve always shied away from using it. I’ve already got a healthy and well established research programme at Madgex – do I really need to use a new web app?

Looking at it from afar, WhatUsersDo seems a bit of a strange beast. Normally I’d carry out qualitative, moderated user research (in which the researcher gets to interview the participants), or quantitative, unmoderated research (Analytics, AB Testing, Surveys, etc). WhatUsersDo is an qualitative, unmoderated tool. Since it’s qualitative, you don’t get aggregated data – so you can’t quickly come to conclusions about the entire data set; and since it’s unmoderated, you don’t get to interview the participants – so you can’t keep them on track and drill into interesting topics as needed. To me, this isn’t an ideal combination.

Another thing that put me off is the fact that with the standard WhatUsersDo offering, your participants are provided from a pre-established panel, and you know very little about them. There’s quite a few new web apps offering panel-based testing nowadays, so let me say this for the record: panels are not good unless you create and control them yourself. An experienced professional researcher will find it almost unthinkable to base any redesign, however small, on feedback from a bunch of unknown people. You should always aim to carry out research on your real target users – people who in real life would actually use your product, for whom the minutiae of your design decisions have real world implications. If you test your site on random, unknown people, at best all you get is insights as to whether a generic human is able to complete tasks without facing insurmountable usability problems.

However, now I’ve seen WhatUsersDo in action, I’ve realised that just because it’s not for me, this doesn’t mean it’s not a useful tool for other people. It’s a good value entry-level tool. If you’re new to user research, and you want a cheap and easy way to get your toe in the water, then Whatusersdo is ideal for you. On the other hand, if you’re an established researcher then you’ll probably come to the same conclusions as me. Perhaps in coming months this will change, as they do have a new “recruit your own users” feature coming out soon.

In order to give it a fair evaluation, I found a volunteer who seemed to be well suited to WhatUsersDo – Ixxy, a brighton-based web development agency run by a friend of mine. Like many small agencies, they are technically capable but they don’t have in-house User Experience researcher.

Setting up the study took about 10 minutes. We filled in one form and wrote the wording for a single task (shown below). This was incredibly easy.

Setting up the whatusersdo study

Having set up the study, all we had to do is sit-back and wait. A few days later, the test videos were waiting for us online. As you can see below, there was only one metric for each user: a satisfaction score marked out of 100.

Study results overview page

Out of the five videos we got back, a couple of them were duds. The participants either rambled on, or didn’t take the task very seriously (e.g. in a holiday booking task, one participant booked the first property she found on the first dates she chose, and didn’t blink at the price – totally unlike real world holiday booking behaviour). However, 3/5 of the videos revealed useful, actionable findings, and this was enough to made it seem worthwhile (£25 per person is, after all, very cheap).

There was one feature in particular that the tests showed to be problematic – a rather complex calendar view that users tended to get confused by. It was one of those features that was designed to the clients specification, and the developers always had reservations about it. For them, the video footage was great news, as it gave them exactly the evidence they needed to convince their client that the feature needed reworking.

The WhatUsersDo video player offers a nice tagging tool (shown below), so you can add a text notewhenever an interesting event occurs. This becomes a hyperlink and you can use it to jump to that point in the video. I expect this would be very useful for team-based analysis where you each pick a video to analyse, and then later get into a group and rapidly go through the video highlights.

Video player and tagging tool

The tagging tool doesn’t give you quite enough functionality to manage the analysis of the video observations. This isn’t a big deal – you can create your own findings log very easily using something like google docs, shown below (Template available here).

A very simple findings log template in Google Docs

Conclusions:

If you’re in the UK and you’ve never done any usability testing before, then WhatUsersDo is probably worth trying – it’s so cheap that even if it only reveals two or three usability issues, it’ll be worthwhile. What’s more, it’ll give you a taste for UX research, and that in itself is invaluable. If you’re an experienced researcher in a company that has a regular research budget, then it’s possible you’ll find it a bit low-end for your needs. It’ll be interesting to find out more about their “recruit your own users” feature when it comes out, but personally, as a verteran researcher, I’d always prefer to carry out a live interview than watch a pre-recorded video.

Disclosure: WhatUsersDo is an advertiser on this site (though I am phasing out all advertising soon) and gave us free usage of the platform for the purpose of the review.

Normally we think of bad design as consisting of laziness, mistakes, or school-boy errors. We refer to these sorts of design patterns as Antipatterns. However, there’s another kind of bad design pattern, one that’s been crafted with great attention to detail, and a solid understanding of human psychology, to trick users into do things they wouldn’t otherwise have done. This is the dark side of design, and since these kind of design patterns don’t have a name, I’m proposing we start calling them Dark Patterns.

I’m preparing a short talk on this for the UX Brighton Conference in September, and I need a bit of help coming up with some examples. Here’s a taste of what I’m talking about:

• Low cost airlines that put insurance in your basket without you asking.
• Social networking sites purposefully make it hard for you to shrink your social graph or move your content into private realms. I’m looking at you, facebook.
• Email sending systems that require you to log-in (using a long forgotten password) in order to unsubscribe. (This is actually forbidden by the revised CAN-SPAM 2008 rules, but it’s widely ignored)
• Systems that ask for your email / twitter credentials on the grounds of finding you friends, but then send messages as if they are directly from you, without your express consent.
• Supermarkets (in the real world) that prevent you from comparing products on price, by putting items in different sized bundles.

Can you think of any good, contemporary examples to go with this list? Add your suggestions in the comments below. I will, of course, credit you in my slides.

To be clear, I’m not looking for outright scams (which are clumsy and easy to identify), I’m looking for techniques used by above-board products and services that trick users into doing things.

Well, I’ve just noticed they’ve iterated the design, and guess what? It’s in line with many of your suggestions.

First let’s look at the old design:

Original times.co.uk paywall design (May 2010)

Your comments included:

• Simon Thulbourn: “Remove the giant image in favour of clearly defining what the user gets in return for their money”
• Paul Gordon: “…the registration page itself should have pricing options and free trial information”
• G Mulder: “what is this huge helicopter image trying to tell me? That SAS is gonna come and get me if I don’t sign up?”
• Johan D: “…neither the content nor the period is clear”

Now, check out the new design:

New times.co.uk paywall design (July 2010)

They seem to be iterating in the right direction, though some of your best suggestions haven’t been incorporated (clear pricing, lazy registration, teaser excerpts, etc), and bizarrely, they don’t mention the free trial until after you click through to sign-up. But let’s not forget, a UX designer’s job is never done. By keeping a close eye on their KPIs and iterating regularly, it’ll be pretty hard for them not to improve this… Right?

Danny and James have really pulled a rabbit out of a hat with the upcoming UX Brighton 2010 Conference. What a great line-up!

• Rory Sutherland: you may have seen his TED talk, Rory is Vice-Chairman of Ogilvy Group UK.
• Eric Reiss: heard of him maybe? He’s one of the most well known figures in European UX.
• Claire Rowland: an accomplished Design Researcher, Claire has spent the last couple of years building up Fjord London’s UX research offerings.
• Jeroen van Geel: Interaction Designer and founder of the hugely popular Johnny Holland magazine.
• Julian Hirst: Head of Electronic Ink in the UK (They’re UX heavyweights: think financial trading UIs and fraud surveillance visualizations.)
• James Page & Sabrina Mach: owners of Fera Labs, makers of Webnographer, the remote unmoderated quantitative user research platform, and also co-organizers of this event.
• Plus another mystery speaker: who could it be?

Early bird tickets are only £69, but you can get a further 15% off if you follow @uxbri and tweet about the event.

When you visit a top UX agency in the heart of London, what do you see when you walk in the door?

Lots of empty desks. Not because of layoffs, but because most consultants are working in labs or doing off-site consultancy projects. This means there are a lot of overheads for space and for kit that’s just sitting there, unused. When you hire a UX agency, this is one of the things you’re paying for, and it’s not money well spent.

Another problem is billing efficiency. UX research engagements can be very short – sometimes as little as two or three days (for expert reviews), usually a couple of weeks long (for face-to-face user research and analysis). The shorter the project, the bigger an issue you get with gaps between projects. In an agency, resourcing becomes a crazy Tetris game that’s almost impossible to win. Consultants end up with a lot of bench time, where they’re waiting around being paid but not bringing in any money. If you hire a UX agency, you’re having to cover this cost, and again, it’s not money well spent.

Also, agencies often try to include a research assistant and some senior consultant time into the costing. The fact is, if you get an experienced consultant, they usually don’t need support from anyone else. UX research is often well suited to “lone wolf” consultancy.

Enter the UX freelancer:

• She’s nomadic, and works on-site with clients. No overheads there.
• She has Morae and a couple of laptops. She can set up a research lab in any room in seconds, no need for an expensive facility with half-silvered mirrors.
• Having worked at an agency for a couple of years, she has all the credentials she needs.
• She’s able to charge less than half what an agency charges, and still make a very comfortable living.
• What’s more her low rate also means she’s more cost effective to hire for long engagements – which means better billing efficiency for her.

Today, clients seem to be waking up to the value of freelancers, where historically they seemed to be more risk averse, gravitating to well known agencies. Just last week I was talking to Be Kaler Blake (Director of Futureheads, a London-based UX recruitment agency), who described the market for UX freelancers as “buoyant” – an unusual word to hear in the midst of a worldwide financial crisis.

So, how do agencies feel, knowing that every time they train up a new consultant, they are paving the way for a new freelancer who may ultimately become a competitor? And what does this mean for the industry in general?

One way or another, things are changing. Charging £10,000+ for single round of usability testing used to be such an easy way to get by.

The trouble with being a User Experience specialist is the amount of wall space you need. In an ideal world, you’d set up a war room for each project, where all your materials can stay permanently stuck on the walls. Most of the time, that’s not possible – other people in your company need to use the meeting rooms too! This is where the need for portable wall space comes in. Here are some suggestions:

Foam board (aka Foamcore)

• Sheets of white cardboard with polystyrene sandwiched in the middle. Normally used by artists to mount photos, etc.
• Strengths: light, but rigid. Reusable. Check out this neat ikea-hack by Daylight (pictured above) if you need a stand for your boards.
• Weaknesses: not cheap but stationary shops may have slightly damaged items at a reduced price. (A small dent in the corner makes a mounting board useless for mounting art, but it’s still great as a portable wall surface for your needs.)

Butcher paper (aka Kraft paper)

• Huge rolls of thick paper (traditionally used by butchers to wrap meat).
• When you get kicked out of the meeting room, you roll up your paper and take it with you. It’s easy enough to unroll and stick to another wall – provided you have the space!
• Strengths: it’s damn cheap
• Weaknesses: heavy, so needs strong anchoring to the wall using tape or loads of blutack. This can ruin painted walls.

Pattern cutting paper

• It comes on a huge roll, like butcher paper, but with a dotted grid marked on it. (Recommended by Paul Thurston of Think Public)
• Strengths: Cheap, and the grid is helpful for sketching UIs
• Weaknesses: It’s heavy, like butcher paper.

3M “Self-Stick Wall Pads”

• I’ve never used these, but they are basically giant, flip-chart sized post-it notes.
• Strengths: no messing around with blutack / etc
• Weaknesses: surprisingly expensive.

So, what do you use for portable wall space? Suggestions in the comments, please!

The Frankfurt Kitchen in use (from Genius of Design, Ep.2)

What’s amazing about it is the huge amount of research and exacting attention to detail that went into the design. One of the main driving principles was efficiency, and Lihotzky conducted extensive time-and-motion studies to optimize workflows in the kitchen. She was motivated by the desire to make life easier for people.

A kitchen-usage time and motion diagram (from Genius of Design, Ep.2)

However, here’s the bit you’re going to love if you’re a UX researcher – in her zeal to make the kitchen efficient, Lihotzky completely forgot to consider real-life context and the social implications of the design. Quoting from Genius of Design Episode 2:

“10,000 of her kitchens were installed in a large-scale social housing development in Frankfurt [...] But despite all of the well laid plans, many first time users were apparently baffled by the layout. They found the inflexibility of the design frustrating, and they proved to be disappointingly undisciplined when it came to using the carefully labelled food bins. [...] When people actually went in to use the Frankfurt kitchen [...] people found them very cold”

Furthermore, the carefully designed food bins (intended for flour, rice, etc.) were easily reached by small children, making spillage very common; labels were pre-printed on the bins, meaning that owners inevitably ended up with all the wrong labels on things; and worst of all, the kitchen was so small that only one person could be in it at a time, making the kitchen user feel socially isolated from the rest of the household.

Designated storage bins in the Frankfurt Kitchen. Source: Wikipedia

Lihotzky’s ideals were born out of the Tayorism movement – which was all about making factory floor & repetitive labour activities more efficient. In that sort of workplace setting, it is possible to prescribe user behaviour (i.e. “Do this and you get paid”). Where Lihotzky went wrong was that she assumed you could prescribe user behaviour in the home. With hindsight being 20:20, it’s not surprising this idea was doomed to fail.

It’s interesting to consider that an ethnographic study would have uncovered problems with the design very quickly, while dogfooding would most likely have failed to uncover the problems. Why? Because Lihotzky and her colleagues would have been so heavily engrossed in the ideals of the design, they would have used it in a highly disciplined and rigorous way – unlike their target users (german working class families who had just emerged from the ravages of WW1). This is a lesson worth remembering – dogfooding is today a very popular method in big corporates yet it can be disastrous if there’s a big difference between the test users and the real users. Google, for example, used dogfooding in the design of Wave and Buzz, and both of them had adoption issues when launched.

If you’ve seen the off-beat norwegeian Swedish comedy Kitchen Stories, the time-and-motion diagram above might look familiar to you. That’s because Kitchen Stories took a lot of inspiration from Lihotzky’s work, as you can see below. Personally, I love the idea of writing a comedy about field research and time-and-motion studies – it’s such a geeky idea.

A still from the movie Kitchen Stories

Clicking any link in on the homepage of thetimes.co.uk triggers a lightbox.

Most of the lightbox real estate is dedicated to a photo of a military helicopter.

Put yourself in the shoes of an end-user, and consider these questions:

1. Is it obvious that there’s a free trial available? How long does it last and what content does it apply to?
2. How do you feel about being required to enter your date of birth into a registration form? And your full postal address? And being asked to enter your phone number?
3. What paid packages are available? What’s the difference between “subscription” and “membership”?
4. What tangible freebies do you get with membership?

So, here’s my question for you, dear reader: if you wanted to help improve their sign-up rates, what would you change, and why?

In the interests of getting to know my readers a bit, why not add me as a friend on Linkedin?

“You gotta be careful too, because there are a lot of these research methods, like the rapid prototyping, like the ideation, like the brainstorming methods, like the ethnography, and so on, there is actually no real evidence that it makes a difference. Apple computer is a good example. You think they do design research? No. When I was at Apple, we did a lot of design research [...] We did a lot. We worried about all these fundamental things. We did user studies. We went to people’s homes. [...] You know what Steve jobs did when he arrived? He fired all of us! And guess what resulted? Better products! Which have revolutionized the way we use machines. And he fired the usability groups as well.” – Don Norman at DRC 2010

It’s worth watching the whole video – but you can fast forward to 13m20s to see the part quoted.

Using a feed reader and can’t see the video?

eBay has always been very careful about presenting the eBay platform and its resellers as different entities. Amazon, on the other hand, really doesn’t seem to have nailed it. If I have a bad purchasing experience on eBay, I blame the seller. When it happens on Amazon, I can’t help but loose trust in Amazon itself.

The video below sums it up for me. When you hit play, you’ll see me mousing-over the different product options for a perfume. You’ll see jargony acronyms (EDT / EDP), inexplicable price differences, different measurements (fl oz vs ml), unclear photos, and missing product descriptions. Bleugh.

It is, of course, down to the seller, but the seller’s name is only mentioned only in two places as body text – effectively hidden away. It feels like Amazon itself as at fault.

Can’t make out the video? View the page on Amazon.co.uk

So – what would you do if you were Amazon? Would you carefully design your UI to clearly differentiate your brand from the third party merchant brands? Would you simply bite the bullet and start policing them harder? Or would you try to crowd-source it, and give means for the community to report poor content?

Many thanks to Phil Guilfoyle of Online Logic for noticing this and suggesting this post.

Get a toy monkey. Put it somewhere everyone can see it. The next time someone interrupts you at an inopportune time, tell them to “Go ask the monkey”.

Often, the act of clearly articulating your question is enough to enable you to answer it yourself.

Monkey says: “The answer lies within. But you might want to start by checking the intranet.” (Image Credit: Lance McCord)

What challenges do you face when working on a disruptive product?”

There are a lot of challenges – some of them are internal, some of them are external. [...] Internal Challenges that you can face are… that if you are in an existing company, with an existing product, the company is usually focused around building the revenue for that particular product. If you’re [working on] the new disruptive innovation that the company is trying to form, you are fighting for the same resources. The metrics that you are measured against are often the same. So people go “Why should we devote X number of engineers or product development specialists or scientists  - or whatever – to your disruptive innovation project when it is only making X% where as our incumbent product makes Y%, which is magnitudes more”.

And so the headcount and the attention that is devoted to your disruptive innovation, internally within a company, can just die. And externally, when you bring to market a disruptive innovation, there is a lot of challenges. Most disruptive innovations fail.

There’s plenty of challenges, typical to any new product development. But from a user experience perspective, one of the hardest ones is that you can’t predict where your disruptive innovation is going to take off.

So, the disk drive industry is the classic example that Clayton Christensen uses to illustrate this. The reason that 3.5” disk drive took off, and overtook the 5¼” ones, was not because they had more storage resolution, it’s not because they were cheaper, it’s because laptops took off at the same time – so people needed a smaller drive to fit in a laptop.

Disruptive innovation says you can’t be sure where your product will be successful, so you have to be very open. It’s going to establish itself in a niche if it meets certain needs, and then you need to grow it from there. They are the external challenges you face when building a disruptive innovation product. [...]

In your talk you mentioned that Google Wave is being used in way you never expected. Isn’t it a very big problem for User Experience professionals to design a product for a purpose that is not already known?

It’s very, very difficult. We love to talk about use-cases, personas… we love to talk about meeting certain needs in certain ways. The whole point of disruptive innovation is that you can’t know for sure. It doesn’t mean you should stop doing the research [...] but you need to not be arrogant in thinking “If we build feature X it will be used in this way and therefore it would meet needs in that way.”

→ Listen to / download the full podcast

File upload isn’t possible from Mobile Safari. My beef today isn’t with this fact – it’s with the UI design. To show the ‘choose file’ button greyed out like this is inherently confusing. To grey something out is to say that “in some circumstances, this control will be active”. On today’s iPhones, this button will never be active. Tapping the button does nothing to clarify this. Nowhere is an explanation given that “Actually, you can’t upload files from Mobile Safari. ”

I’ve got an idea of a solution in my head – but I’d love to know what you think. Suggestions in the comments please…

Many, many thanks to Aaron Young & Rebecca Gill of Bunnyfoot for carrying out all the eye tracking research featured in this presentation.