We were happy to be recognized as the fastest-growing user experience research firm for the second year in a row by Inc. magazine.  Clients often ask the reason for our growth.  We see three primary reasons.  Based on our research of the industry’s needs and our follow-up surveys with clients, we’ve seen that clients value a research company that is:

• Responsive. Our research shows that next to “quality of research” (which is expected as a given) clients most value a research firm’s responsiveness.   Responsiveness to us means answering clients’ questions quickly, providing timely project updates, being flexible in the face of changing needs, moving quickly when development deadlines are tight and really just caring about a client’s goals as much as they do.

• A trusted advisor.  We’re not beholden to a specific research method or technology which means we can truly allow the client’s business needs drive our planning and recommendations.  Many companies in our industry sell specific point solutions, for example just ethnography or just usability or just satisfaction monitoring.  While there is definitely a market need for these solutions, we think it’s tougher for a single-solution company to become a true trusted advisor.

• Strong on execution.  Our tagline is Excellence in User Experience Research.  To us, the excellence refers to our execution.  We attract and hire researchers who are strong project managers.  Clients don’t need to worry about their research projects since they know we have every detail is covered.  They know when it’s time to present the results to their boss and their boss’ boss that they have the data and insights to back them up.

When clients see that we’re responsive, a trusted advisor and strong on execution, they refer us to others in their company and to other companies.  Clients that leave one company will often call us when they land at their next job.  We can take on this increased demand for our services because we’ve spent years building a strong internal infrastructure of systems and best practices that allow us to scale while delivering high quality work.  We find this to be fascinating work and we love working with clients that are developing unique and cutting-edge products.  We continue to make investments today so that we are prepared to deliver at an even higher level in 2011.

Read the article here, or take in the view of AnswerLab being feature on the home page with the likes of Google and Zappos.

Now off to work on the creative user experience research!

The main theme of the interview is internal evangelizing of user experience. Check out what AnswerLab has to say about that in our free report: Lessons from User Experience Leaders: Justifying UX Research to Business Stakeholders.

This post will outline a few of the best practices that we have synthesized from our early research. AnswerLab has also published a full report that tackles the question: How can content owners and digital marketers successfully create a digital content strategy across mobile platforms? See our website for more information about iPad user experience research.  

1. Don’t neglect information-seeking paradigms

Users have been conditioned by years of web-browsing to expect certain navigation elements. For example: Participants in our test were frustrated when they could not find a way to go Back or return to Home.

Confused, some of these participants used the iPad’s own Home button, thereby inadvertently exiting the app completely. This disrupted the flow  and took the users out of the immersive experience of the app, making them less likely to return again.

Users struggled to find their way back to the app home screen in Pinball HD for iPad.

Many participants also felt disappointed to learn they could not search content in the New York Times Editor’s Choice or NPR apps. They said that the inability to search diminished the utility of the app to the point that they would use the website instead of the app going forward.

The takeaway? Provide a simple, discoverable way to go Back or get to the app’s Home screen easily. And if your app contains a lot of content, make sure your users have their preferred method of wading through – search.

2. Navigation elements need to be easily discoverable

In addition to mimicking the basic website paradigm, the navigation elements in your app need to be easily discoverable. Despite the fact that some of the applications we tested had Back or Home buttons, some participants were not able to find them.

In the USA Today app, none of the participants realized that they needed to tap the USA Today logo to navigate to different news sections. Building a great app with rich content needs to be accompanied by a sound navigational structure that allows users to access the breadth and depth of your app without getting confused or frustrated.

Users failed to discover that tapping the USA Today logo would reveal navigation by section.

Other applications that we tested – like ESPN’s Score Center XL, Epicurious, and Wikipanion – had navigation elements that were only obvious when the iPad was in landscape mode. Participants that were already in landscape mode noticed these elements, but those that were using the iPad in portrait mode did not discover that they could turn the iPad 90° to uncover these features.

In landscape mode within the Epicurious Recipes & Shopping List app, users would have been able to sort by recipe categories and favorite recipes.

To ensure that your users discover all of your navigation elements – and don’t get lost in your app – make the most basic elements obvious and provide visual cues for elements that are more advanced or hidden.

3. Swipes are more fun than clicks

The touchscreen tablet platform opens the door to novel ways of interacting with content. Leverage touch gestures like swipes and flicks where appropriate, and where users most expect them. For example, users expect to be able to pinch or spread to zoom content – a convention learned from touchscreen mobile phones – and most participants in our testing understood and were delighted by the action of swiping to the next page in apps like the New York Times Editor’s Choice or Time Magazine.

Apple’s iBook application lets users swipe to turn the page in iBooks.

Again, ensure these sometimes unexpected ways of interacting with your content are discoverable by providing indications or visual cues to your users.

4. Keep an eye out for emerging standards

The iPad has only been available for a few months, so the platform is new and rapidly evolving. As more users adopt the iPad or other touchscreen tablet devices, standards for navigation and interaction will emerge that have yet to be established. Users will become more familiar with these standard interactions over time, but certain functionality may take a while to catch on or, certainly, to become ubiquitous.

In the meantime, make sure your app is simple to use. If you are pushing the envelope to institute your own set of standards, make sure they are discoverable and intuitive. Most importantly, test them amongst your users. Keep an eye out as standards emerge and be prepared to incorporate new best practices as they are defined.

Our latest report will help content owners and digital marketers create a winning digital content strategy across mobile platforms. Go here for more information about the iPad user experience research.

http://www.suzuki50years.com/

At AnswerLab, we’ve heard from a number of our clients that they’d like to understand users’ expectations across platforms to help inform their design strategy. Should we design mobile apps or mobile optimized websites? Which mobile platform should we design for? What do users expect when they interact with our content on the iPad?

We conduct a ton of mobile user experience research at AnswerLab and now that the iPad has entered the picture, interest is gaining momentum. When I read about Suzuki’s latest creation, I immediately grabbed the AnswerLab shared iPad and brought up the site.

My first impression… It looks fantastic on the iPad.

The designers obviously put energy into creating a site that fits well on the iPad’s screen. And Suzuki fully embraced the iPad/iPhone touch interface, allowing one to traverse the site via a simple swipe to change pages. As an iPhone owner, I’m used to performing this action in iPhone apps and the extension of this gesture to the web page is gratifying — albeit a bit unfamiliar.

While writing this blog post, I discovered Apple’s list of iPad ready websites and I’m sure there are others. I intend to check many of them out to see how well they’ve embraced the iPad’s unique format.

Whenever there is an iPhone optimized website, I’ll opt for it when browsing on my iPhone. Given that the iPad’s screen is much larger than my iPhone, only time will tell if I will prefer an iPad optimized website or the standard version of a website.

As your company decides which platform to embrace and whether to create an app or a mobile optimized site, consider your target audience and especially what experience you are bringing to the table. Suzuki may not have a huge iPad audience at this time but by creating an iPad optimized site, they are taking a risk and learning what works, and what doesn’t. At AnswerLab, we conduct research for industry-leaders to minimize their risk. When the platform is new and your audience is relatively small, risks like the one Suzuki is taking with this site may be somewhat trivial. However, prototype testing, conducting research, and fully understanding your users needs becomes paramount as the platform matures and users’ expectations become clear.

Recently, AnswerLab conducted testing to understand mobile consumers’ behaviors when purchasing apps and interacting with mobile devices including the iPad. Look for more information based on our findings in the near future.

In the mobile space, location-based awareness is a hot topic and one that is becoming more prevalent. At AnswerLab, we’ve conducted numerous mobile studies. A key to conducting mobile studies as well as delivering actionable results lies in first-hand experience. With that in mind, I thought I’d share some of my own experiences with location aware apps on the iPhone.

There are a few apps on my iPhone that are aware of my location on Planet Earth and connect that information to whatever it is I’m doing with my phone. For instance, when I arrive somewhere such as a restaurant or a park, I check-in with foursquare. When I leave for a bike ride, I start up RunKeeper, and it tracks my ride in real time. And for those times that I find myself seeking good food, I start up Yelp and use the Monocle feature to augment reality; information overlaid on the camera app to present location data while looking around at the world.

I can use my iPhone just fine without Location Services turned on. However, when I enable this setting, apps, such as the ones I mentioned, become far more interesting.

Foursquare, for example, has done a fantastic job of building an entire app around the premise of one’s location. Let’s say I’m at work and decide to grab lunch at The Sentinel, a popular eatery in downtown San Francisco. While standing in the inevitable line, I pull out my iPhone, fire up foursquare, and ‘check-in.’ Upon checking in, my foursquare friends become aware of my presence. As well, if I check-in more than any other foursquare user at a particular venue, then I am deemed the Mayor of that location. While it may seem a bit silly to become the virtual Mayor of a place, it does provide incentive to check-in. Now that my foursquare friends know that I’ve checked in at The Sentinel, they might decide to drop by and eat lunch with me if they are in the neighborhood. Or, if I’ve stolen the title of Mayor from someone, they might be determined to procure the title back for themselves. And finally, House of Shields, a bar next door to The Sentinel, pays for ads on foursquare. So, when I check in at The Sentinel, an ad pops up that says I can get a free drink at House of Shields if I simply show them that I checked in on foursquare.

RunKeeper, a wildly popular iPhone fitness app, uses location awareness to track my bike rides and walks. By tracking this information, I am able to visit the RunKeeper website, log in, and view a history of my activities. I can see a map of where I’ve gone, the time it took, and other valuable data. I can also share this data with others or keep it private. I won’t get into privacy issues concerning location data in this blog post but the two are heavily intertwined and thus a future post on the topic is imminent.

Yelp, the wildly popular online site for reviews, has taken the concept of location awareness a step further and included what it calls Monocle mode. Let’s say I am out and about in downtown San Francisco and I’m starting to get hungry. I load up Yelp on my iPhone, Choose Monocle, and point my iPhone’s camera at the surrounding area. If there is a venue in Yelps database that I am pointing the camera at, a small box will appear containing the name of the venue, the number of reviews it has received, the number of star ratings, and a link. If I click on the link, it takes me to the Yelp page where I can read more, call the venue, and more.

This is just a taste of what location aware apps are capable of doing. When designing your mobile app, consider opportunities to deliver a richer experience by incorporating this extra level of interaction. In other words, how can your app benefit the user by adding location awareness?

As I mentioned, with location awareness comes privacy issues. When incorporating location aware features into your app, keep in mind how this may affect users privacy as well as their overall experience. In this post, I focused on the features of location awareness rather than the privacy concerns it raises. Look for another post in the near future in which I’ll discuss some of the privacy concerns we’ve learned from users as we’ve conducted mobile studies at AnswerLab.

Game success could be defined simply by player counts and revenue.  However, games with long-term success in mind are creating new development challenges, adding additional metrics of success to ensure continuous engagement and strategic expansion.  These success metrics are becoming increasingly important as competitors enter the space.   Success within these metrics shows how game design differs in some very important ways from application design.  For example:

• Challenges are key drivers of game engagement, yet detrimental within applications
• Sequential discovery of features and capabilities heightens engagement in gaming, which is not the typical effect in commercial applications
• Motivation for engagement is driven more from elicited emotions than perceived utility

Some success metrics apply across game and application design:

• Objectives & rules to complete the objectives must be easily understood
• Key elements to complete the objectives must be discoverable, usable, and comprehendible
• Contextual help and concise messaging is key
• Showcasing progress & highlighting success furthers engagement

These are critical factors for driving adoption and engagement of a game.  For game designers who can make use of these factors, and tailor them to the motivations of their target players, they will ensure successful experiences with their games.  But what motivates users to become players?  Through studies focused around gaming, AnswerLab researchers have grouped player motivations into BAGS.

Badgers: Collectors of feedback largely reflecting behavior outside of the game’s primary objective

Achievers: Those who showcase skill/expertise level at the game’s primary objective

Game Itself: Players who are primarily interested in the story, challenges and/or dynamics of the game

Social: Those who are drawn by the opportunity to interact and communicate with other players

Each of these motivational factors varies in intensity among different players, and there is a world of factors within the game itself that impacts engagement.  Understanding the most motivational factors of target players, while analyzing key metrics throughout game development, is a powerful approach to assessing and improving the player experience. Game designers and developers that keep in mind these essential building blocks will be well on their way to ensuring business success of fun & games.

1) We “Grew Up” on the Web together: While fledgling websites were finding their way in the early days of the web, Asian consumers were finding their way to the only sites available, which were decidedly American. Site creativity outpaced the technology available to have multiple, customized sites for a long time, and overseas users became conditioned to the singular designs. As the technology, and sites themselves matured, users hungry for content delighted in language accommodation. Study evidence uncovered similar tastes in layout based on this conditioned expectation of how sites should look and behave.

2) Personification is key to unlocking feelings: It is acknowledged that some cultures make a habit of not verbalizing feelings. While this may be perfectly acceptable in a social setting, it does make research difficult. To ask international testers for their feelings about a website can often garner you a lot of blank stares. However, asking these same testers to describe the site as if it were a person, whether it would be hip or stodgy, sharp or dull witted, friendly or grim, will bring out the rich set of observations into how users perceive the site. This is the useful data that can be coupled with stateside testers’ feelings to create useful design recommendations.

3) Behavior drives preferences: Although demographics play an important part in how users perceive features and options, it is very often behavior that can lead to surprising final choices. In fact, nationality/culture is perhaps one of the most important demographics and yet in this study we did not find significant differences across regions. When study goals focus on the impact of change to existing users, these types of findings are likely to crop up. For example, if you were testing a music application, and Bruce Springsteen was a test subject, would it be more important that he was a rock star, or that he was 50+ years old?

While wildly different explanations can yield the exact same result, it is key to understand these differences to ensure the layers of design do not conflict with these expectations. While both sets of testers in our study expect to see weather modules high on the right side of the page, it is important to understand that US testers have often self selected weather to be in that location, while the Taiwanese test group understands weather as “news” and expects news to be in the upper right portion of the page. Modularizing weather may not be suitable for a site in Taiwan, as they expect news to change, whereas US testers show that news is expected to be separated from weather.

There are interesting and important cultural nuances and underpinnings to study findings, but showing user preference for the same concept shouldn’t be an overwhelming surprise. Digging deeper into the thought process will uncover long held preconceptions, feelings and similar behaviors. These are some key reasons to conduct user experience testing when taking your website overseas.

Companies primarily undertake re-branding efforts to  affect users’ brand perception. However, the most successful efforts are those where the entire experience – not just the wrapping – is enhanced or improved to the benefit of the end customer.  Often, how a customer interacts with a product or service and the company that supplies it – including the actions taken by the company if anything goes wrong —are more influential on loyalty and repurchase metrics than the product itself.  In an era of commoditized products and services where the barriers to switching are low, companies whose re-branding efforts only polish the surface – but don’t improve the user experience – run the risk of losing.

Other companies have been successful in changing both their name and their user experience. Take, for example, the case of Voicestream Wireless, the oft-forgotten brand name of a wireless carrier that was just the 8th largest in the US in 2001. Today, after an acquisition and a re-branding overhaul, the same company is the 4th largest carrier in the US, has celebrity spokespeople (Catherine Zeta Jones!), a slick logo, ultra-cool handsets, and – more importantly – is tied for the best-rated customer care amongst wireless carriers by JD Power. Yes, I am talking about T-Mobile.

But back to Comcast. On the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, Comcast currently has a substantially lower rating than competing cable and satellite TV providers like DirecTV and Cox Communications. A wholesale improvement of the entire user experience – from shopping to sign-up to everday usage to customer service – will make Xfinity successful.  Without the support of real experiential improvements, the new Xfinity name will simply be another cable brand offering below-par customer experiences. Our most successful user experience projects include implementing and measuring not just improvements to surface design features and look and feel, but to functionality, content and customer interactions.  When viewed holistically, companies can tie these improvements back to specific business outcomes, and measure success along the path.  In some ways, Comcast is lucky in that they do not have to make grand assumptions about which material changes are priorities for their customers.  The details are readily available on which improvements will help make a success of the Xfinity products.  Not only do they have their own customer service data, but there is a wealth of information in specialized user sites, social media and the blogosphere for them to tap into.  Active online forums like those on DSLreports.com actually contain useful information on which to base user centric improvements.  When embarking on a user experience improvement plan, monitoring social media can provide some great concepts to test, and some great ad-hoc measurements along the way. Formal user experience research can help quantitatively benchmark these improvements over time.

A great product and great user experience make a great brand – not vice versa.  Staying customer-focused will help companies like Comcast concentrate on the entire experience to maintain the brand promise.  Remember when Starbucks changed the coffee machines to have a lower profile allowing better engagement with the barrista?  Did this have anything to do with how the coffee tasted? No, but it had everything to do with the intimate experience of going to the coffee shop.

Let’s hope Xfinity is better than Comcastic.

The dedication to design sets Apple apart, and the tools from the iPod to the iPhone have fundamentally changed the way regular users interact with technology. The iPad is essentially a larger, and more capable iPhone. With more real-estate, and a well known OS this could be the tool for personal computing. In a world where everything gets smaller and faster, the iPad’s large format may provide the perfect platform for user capabilities. We are looking forward to our first iPad studies.