So I’ll save myself the trouble of writing it again and just link to it. If you’re wondering why Lorraine hasn’t kept the blog up-to-date she now works at Royal London.

If you want to comment on the article it might be best to do so here.

What does it do?

IntuitionHQ allows you to upload images of your designs and then test them online by giving participants tasks to complete. The participant clicks the design to show where they would click to progress with each task.  It’s possible to test two designs side-by-side with an A/B test option.

It calls itself usability testing which it kind of is, but isn’t really a replacement for one-on-one usability testing. With a few improvements I can definitely see a use for it. But we’ll get to that in a bit.

An example task

I created 4 tasks, all of them with A/B options. The A design was the original design and a B design with a slight alteration I’d made. Instead of going into detail about all of them, I’ll illustrate with the first task instead.

The image below shows the product page of the John Lewis website. They have included a “Have you thought about” option that I worried would add a bit of confusion. The Add to basket button is more strongly associated with the toaster than it is the kettle. I didn’t think many people would click the wrong place but I did worry it might delay things a bit.

If you reduce unnecessary friction in a process you tend to increase conversions on sites with lots of traffic, so these details can be important. Below you can see the B option I made. As you can see the toaster isn’t on it. To be clear, I’m not trying to test which design would be most profitable. I just want to see if the results between the two differ and if so, to what extent.

The results

You can see the results of my test (hopefully this link won’t die) for yourself. The image below shows the visual representation of where people have clicked. If you select the enlarged view of a heatmap you get some numbers and percentages. This approach is a little clunky for an A/B comparison and I feel a better solution should be possible. Ideally you’d want to compare the numbers between the two designs by looking at one screen.

The task was attempted by 39 people on the original design and 41 people on the revised design. On the original design 82% of participants clicked the Add to basket button and the average time taken on the task was 15.5 seconds. Whereas on the revised design with the cross-sell removed (pictured above) 93% of participants clicked the Add to basket button and the average time taken was 12.46 seconds.

Limitations

Remote online usability testing has its limitations regardless of the software you use to carry it out . The most significant is that there will always be some participants who misunderstand the task. The more complex the task the more likely is is to be misunderstood. You can’t see them misunderstanding it so you often can’t identify them. Of course you have the benefit of cheaply using increased numbers in order to smooth out the impact of this.

In this test I wasn’t trying to find out whether people knew to click the Add to basket button. Instead I was trying to assess how much friction the cross-sell for the toaster would introduce to a fairly simple action. This is the type of thing I’d use an online solution for, very simple tasks that allow me to test a theory.

I don’t think I’ve been able to answer the research questions I had using IntuitionHQ but with a few changes this could be resolved.

In this task I wanted to know if there was a significant difference in the time taken to click the Add to basket  button because of the presence of a cross-sell option. At first glance it looks as though there is.

The average time taken on the task is 24% longer on the original design. But in order to get an accurate figure I  want to identify and remove any outliers. I also want to be able to compare the average times while both including and excluding participants who didn’t click the right button.

It’s perfectly possible that one participant can influence the average time by leaving the task open for a minute while being distracted by something external (like the phone ringing). In fact on one of the other tasks I saw evidence of this while the results were coming in.

Conclusion

I like the A/B split feature as I’ve had to hack other tests to do this in the past. But at present the timing data IntuitionHQ provides is too basic to be useful. I could hack the effects of this a bit by running several identical tests side-by-side to highlight abnormal results I suppose.

I asked the company by email if they could give me the individual times for the results but unfortunately they were unable to do so. I was told that the software excludes answers that are longer than 2 minutes. When you’re dealing in the odd second here or there 2 minutes is a hefty amount of time. That’s not good enough for me.

If it were possible to isolate only the results you were interested in and also exclude outliers this could be useful software. But without this it’s impossible to have confidence in the results. I have no doubt that some people will love it.

As it stands I can only see it being useful to see if people will click in the right place. For some people that will be enough though.

What do you think?

Do you agree with me or am I being too harsh? Perhaps you have some experience with this product you’d like to share. Leave a comment and we can get the discussion going.

In this post I’m going to have a look at the websites of a few organisations involved in delivering medals of Team GB in London 2012. I’ll briefly discuss the good and bad points of each site for newcomers to the sport.

British Cycling

British Cycling probably receives more Lottery funding than any other sports organisation in the UK. This is because they deliver the most medals at Olympic Games. So they aren’t short of funds when it comes to attracting people to the sport.  However the  website lacks discipline and organisation.

The British Cycling website seems to have fallen into the trap of trying to include as much as possible on its homepage. This is compelled further by the inclusion of gimmicky features such as the rotating ‘hero messages’ and advert type promotions. There are 2 horizontal navigation menus each with over 12 options to choose from.

Many newcomers to cycle racing will be overwhelmed by the number of options available. There is an option down the page for ‘Getting into Cycling’ but many people will have chosen their favoured discilpline from one of the menus (e.g. Road) before getting the chance to see it. Even those who do choose it will be bombarded with lots of confusing sounding options when they arrive at the following page.

Like many sports, the organisation and set up of competitive cycling is a little confusing and the site doesn’t do a very good job of trying to explain this in simple terms.

This site would be improved if they…

• simplified the structure
• prioritised the content
• rewrote key pieces of content

It’s often the things you don’t include that make a useful website rather than those you do.

British Rowing

In comparison, British Rowing seem to show a lot more discipline in the design of their homepage. The newcomer is greeted with a homepage that lacks the kind of clutter shown by British Cycling. This makes it very easy for the newcomer to find out how to get into the sport.

The primary menu is easy to spot and there are only 7 options on it. One of them is called ‘Taking part’. The resulting page provides a simple explanation that the first step is to join a club. It provides a club finder to help the user do this. Unfortunately the club finder is poorly implemented so many people will struggle to find their local club.

If British Rowing were to do a bit of usability testing of this club finder they’d find some ways to improve that would make it a lot easier for people to get involved.

British Amateur Boxing Association

The BABA is responsible for managing Team GB’s boxing squad. Its website is a little shouty in terms of the number of features begging for the visitor’s attention but it’s relatively easy for the newcomer to find out how to get started. The main menu has a nice number of options that are mostly quite easy to choose from. I would suggest they include a quick explanation that they are the BABA before offering a menu option of BABA.

Within Amateur Boxing there are a few similar sounding options but one is called Getting started in boxing. The resulting page is concise and well-written. It sticks to the basic information where other organisations might write a thesis on the subject. The page could be improved with some paragraph headings however.

The user experience takes an unfortunate plunge in the next step of the journey. There is no single way of finding your local club to join. Instead the approach differs between England, Scotland and Wales. Only England delivers a club finder. In Wales there is a phone number and the website for Scotland it sends you to is devoid of any useful information.

The website takes a shortcut in the important job of welcoming newcomers to the sport. There may well be separate organisations in each of the Team GB countries but important user journeys like this should be seized by the central body so a consistent, useful experience can be delivered.

Interestingly Northern Ireland isn’t even mentioned. Like many sports in Northern Ireland I’m assuming this is because they are managed by and All-Ireland association rather than the GB one. It’s an explanation worth giving on the GB Boxing site though even if it isn’t their responsibility.

Prioritising newcomers

Both British Rowing and BABA provide relatively simple and appealing websites which make them easier for newcomers. British Cycling is disappointingly complex. However they all fail newcomers in one way or another and this will have an impact on the take up of their sport.

Many successful websites prioritise newcomers over returning users and it makes sense to do so. If you have a pleasant first experience then you’re more likely to return. So it’s worth taking time to make sure the experience they get is a good one.

Branding guidelines can create a few debates when designing websites. In most cases, consistency with brand guidelines ensures consistency with the brand. But not always.

Picture this. After carrying out usability testing of a client’s website I’m presenting my results. I explain to those present that participants in the study couldn’t find what they were looking for because hyperlinks were difficult to notice. The deep blue colour didn’t look any different from the normal black text, so I suggest choosing a different colour “We can’t change the colour it’s against branding” is the response from one person. Really? Is being unhelpful one of the brand ideals? No, but only two text colours are permitted in the guidelines – black and dark blue.

This isn’t the first and won’t be the last design decision that’s inhibited by brand’s visual guidelines. But I’ll come back to this debate later. First let’s talk about the nature of branding.

Branding is more than a logo

These days, large organisations invest heavily in branding. When Lewis Hamilton (remember, I wrote this in 2009) arrived on the Formula 1 scene, Vodafone was quick to use him as a figurehead. This wasn’t so you’d see its logo on his kit. It was so we’d associate the brand with the person.

Branding isn’t just about recognising logos and consistent visual presentation. It’s how you feel about the product. It’s personality if you like. This part of branding is within the control of the marketers, but there’s another influence on brand perception that can be a lot more powerful. I’ll explain with an example.

Experiencing the brand

Let’s say you’re buying a car and you like the look of the new Poubelle. The adverts are funny and the design looks quirky and cool. You don’t realise it but you have an emotional bond with it.

You buy the Poubelle, but then things start going wrong after only a few  months. The car has a technical problem that means the electric windows and air conditioning don’t work. The dealers, who were very nice when you were buying the car are a little rude now that you’ve come back with problems. Moreover the customer service helpline keeps you on hold for over an hour playing the same Edith Piaf song over and over again.

You regret buying the Poubelle now. Your opinion of the brand is in freefall and only a very positive experience is likely to recover it. These experiences with brands can have a bigger impact than advertising and marketers often have little control over them.

Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department

David Packard – co-founder of Hewlett-Packard

The web is one of the few instances where the marketers can affect the actual experience that people have with the brand, rather than just the face of it.

We don’t look at websites

People don’t look at websites, they experience them. They interact with them and this relationship can affect them emotionally. On the web it’s possible for visual brand guidelines to negatively impact the brand experience.

Interfering with the experience

Let’s say my client manufactures the Poubelle and those blue hyperlinks are on its website. You’re now visiting the web pages for the Poubelle because you’re tired of listening to Edith Piaf. What do think will have the greatest impact on your feelings toward the brand: getting lost on the website or noticing that the blue hyperlinks on the website are different to the blue on your owner’s manual?

It’s a no-brainer isn’t it? Visual consistency with the brand is important but there are more important things for the business to worry about also. Every interaction we have with a brand can affect our opinion of it. But few companies measure brand experience in its entirety. Different departments tend to look after their own little area.

The people who commission a brand’s visual guidelines are rarely accountable for usability issues on the website. In large companies you can translate ‘not accountable’ to mean ‘too busy to care unless my boss tells me to’.

When guidelines inhibit the design of a website in a way that causes usability problems, they harm the brand. My advice in these instances is to stretch those guidelines. You’ll be protecting the brand by doing so.

What’s the worst that can happen? You’ll be asked to change it back. And it’s easier to seek forgiveness than permission.

When testing a site with small numbers of participants I believe you should focus on one simple question: What needs fixing?

Testing with small numbers

In most usability studies it’s possible to recruit just a handful of participants and still get useful results. This is because the aim of usability testing is to uncover the usability issues in a design. If you were to test with lots of participants, you’d find most of the issues that you were going to find within the first 5 or 6 participants who come through the door.

The cost of adding more participants increases fairly uniformly while the benefits of adding them tail off quickly. So to get the best bang for your buck, many studies use just a handful of participants.

This thinking is very well established but I don’t think it’s very well understood in the usability/UX community and I believe this lack of understanding is getting worse.

Using small numbers of participants is acceptable because we’re hunting for usability issues. When you try to extend the purpose of your test it’s not possible to rely on such a small number of participants.

Eye tracking data

Once the magic number of 5 has been arrived at (or 6 or 8 or whatever) many people seem to conveniently forget the reasoning behind using a small sample. This can often happen with eye tracking studies.  You can’t credibly quote any quantitative data from your eye tracking study with just a handful of participants.

In general, if you were to use eye tracking in a study with 50 people and then randomly split the data from those participants into 10 groups of 5, it’s likely you’d see contrasts in the data between these sets. You’d also be likely to see that no one set of data was very comparable with the total dataset. An example of this is available in PowerPoint on the Real Eyes website

If you want to draw any conclusions from eye tracking data then you’ll need to significantly increase the number of participants in the study. In nearly every usability study I’ve carried out I have concluded that eye tracking either was or would have been too much hassle to be worth including. This is not to say that I’m all down on eye tracking. I’m not, I just think it is (or at least was) over-used.

If you’re mostly interested in where people are looking on your design then carry out eye tracking with lots of participants. If you’re mostly interested in finding elements of your design that need to be fixed then carry out usability testing with a handful of participants. Eye tracking with this handful of participants can improve the experience for any observers present but it also increases the likelihood of encountering technical problems.

Testing propositions

Perhaps it’s because of the popularity for agile development, but the practice of using usability testing as a method for testing a propositions rather than designs seems to be on the increase.

Companies attempting to create the next big thing in social media are often tempted to put their design into usability testing with the key aim of finding out what people think of it. Again if we go back to the reason we’re using just a handful of participants we can see that this practice often won’t provide very accurate results. Just because 5 people hate your proposition doesn’t mean it stinks.

Many websites are popular because they target the specific needs of very niche audiences. I once met a chap whose website taught people how to fish in World of Warcraft. It would be easy enough for me to find 5 people who played this game and carry out usability testing on his site. If I were to use this study to test the proposition of the site I might find that most of them  thought it pointless. This is the opinion of just 5 people. If I were then to return to him and tell him the proposition of his site was poor how would that explain the many hundreds of thousands of unique visitors the site gets each month?

Usability testing can throw up findings regarding usefulness but opinions about it will vary even among your target audience. So usability testing isn’t a great way to establish the strength of your proposition without significantly increasing your recruitment effort

What needs fixing on this website?

When I first meet clients they often want to use testing to find the answers to numerous often complicated questions about their designs. They often focus on new features, things they think are wrong with the design or are worried don’t work. I try to convince them to approach usability testing with one question: What needs fixing? This is the one question that usability testing answers most effectively.

It’s possible to answer other very specific questions but you tend to have to sacrifice the ability to gather other findings in order to get the answer. So you go from answering the “What needs fixing?” question to answering a question that sounds a bit like this…

“When someone has this specific need in this specific circumstance, can they understand how to use the feature we’ve created to meet that need?”

Answering this question will reduce the number of unexpected things you find that you weren’t necessarily looking for. That’s not to say that usability testing can’t answer these specific questions. But unless you’re doing regular testing of your designs then it’s probably not the best use of your resources to approach testing in this way.

Testing for measurement

Usability testing can help you to assess the usability of key tasks on your website. But if the purpose of the test is to provide a measurement then 5 participants is not enough. Remember that 5 participants is a figure that has been arrived at because of the number of issues it throws up and not because of any correlation with the success rates of larger numbers.

If you want your testing to provide a “How easy is this task?” measurement then you need to increase your numbers. It also has implications for how you facilitate the session.

By explaining to my clients that we’re answering the “What needs fixing?” question I try to convince them to set aside any  ”How easy is this task?” measurement. This is because it doesn’t actually help you make any design decisions, it’s just interesting to know.

Of course not all clients can simply set this question aside, often for internally political reasons.

What d’you think?

Am I talking rubbish or do you agree? We can talk about it if you leave a comment.

A task has two sides to consider on an intranet because both sides of the task equate to internal resources being used in order to complete the task. This story is entirely fictional, but based upon the type of things that happen all the time with corporate intranets.

If you work on one yourself you may recognise some of it.

Task delivery

On one side of the task are the people who deliver it. Let’s use the example of booking meeting rooms and an invented company called DaveTec Logisitics. Large organisations like DaveTec have numerous buildings in different towns often across several countries. In DaveTec they have a team responsible for taking room bookings in all of the company’s 82 buildings worldwide. This team is made up of a manager and 8 telephone operatives who take the room booking calls.

The manager of the room booking team has been asked to make some efficiency suggestions. His brother works at StefTec and has told him that at StefTec all room booking is handled on the corporate intranet. So the manager proposes to make such a facility available in DaveTec enabling him to halve the number of telephone operatives taking calls. The manager shows the figures to his superiors and secures some budget to have his room booking facility developed.

Task users

On the other side of the task are the users, the people trying to book meeting rooms. Before the efficiency improvement these people would call a number and book a room over the phone. Now they have to log on to the new room booking facility and do it all online.

The manager got excited and called it E-book instead of something useful. So not only has he borrowed a term that means something else, but nobody knows how to find the facility on the intranet. They don’t know they are supposed to be looking for something called E-book. It’s on the homepage of the intranet but everyone ignores it and searches for ‘Meeting rooms’ instead.

A helpline is provided manned by the 4 remaining operatives but they are only allowed to talk people through E-book rather than simply take their booking. This is to help people ‘settle in’ to the new way of doing things. In the meantime the manager gets some promotional pens and mouse mats made promoting the ‘E-book brand’

Award winner

The Directors are very happy with the manager because he has reported a dramatic improvement in efficiency. Half of his operatives have been redeployed to other roles so he has reported the cost of employing them as the efficiency improvement he is responsible for. Someone from the Communications Department hears of this ‘improvement’ and writes a very well crafted application to an industry award. Before long the manager is at a posh dinner accepting an industry award for his efficiency idea.

Meanwhile…

What nobody at DaveTec ever measured was the impact E-book had on the productivity of the people that had to use it. These people outnumbered the operatives by about 10,000 to 1 and many were more expensive to employ than the operatives. Instead of being able to just pick up the phone they had to wrestle with a badly made application that it took them 30 minutes to find. When they were at the end of their tether they then picked up the phone to talk to the telephone operatives who then walked them through the process over the phone.

In time, teams within DaveTec learned workarounds. Some didn’t bother to book the rooms and just used them pretending to have booked them. In other teams the resident computer geek would be  given the task of booking rooms for everyone in the team because he had worked out how to use E-book.

Efficiency gains?

In reality there were no efficiency gains made with the introduction of E-book. It was expensive to build and needed to be promoted so that people knew how to find it. The cost of employing 4 operatives had been removed from the manager’s budget but hundreds of people across the company had picked up a tiny fraction of their job and were being paid more to do it. Nobody was measuring this, so nobody knew.

The very purpose of booking meeting rooms was being thwarted because people were too busy to deal with the hassle of using E-book. Instead dozens of people in each of the DaveTec buildings would waste time wandering around looking for a meeting room that was free and repeat the process when they were thrown out by the people who’d actually booked the room. Nobody was measuring it, so as far as DaveTec was concerned it didn’t exist.

If only…

Unfortunately this is a common approach for large organisations and their intranets. If they’d considered the other side of the task – that of the intranet users, then they might actually have created some real efficiency gains.

What d’you think?

Do you recognise this type of behaviour or am I exaggerating? Leave a comment below and let’s have a discussion. Sorry but comments like ‘nice post, thanks’ will be trashed.

Frontloading important information

There’s an advertising sign I often see when driving down the M74 in Scotland. I’ve noticed it dozens of times but I can’t tell you what company it’s promoting because I didn’t notice the company name. The copy on the advert starts something like this

Which company was awarded the best blah blah blah…

I pass the sign at about 70 miles per hour. I’m trying to concentrate on the road and look out for signs that are pertinent to my journey. So this company doesn’t have a lot of my spare attention to play around with. It needs to make its point quickly if it wants to make it at all.

Unfortunately the (as yet unknown) company behind this sign has chosen to brag about itself in the form of a question that I presume it then answers. I haven’t gotten as far as reading the entire question, never mind getting to the answer. What it should do is create a sign that says who they are, what award they won and when they won it. This way they’d communicate the same message more effectively.

Reading on the web is very similar. Your users aren’t looking for the text where you boast about yourself, they are looking for useful stuff. If you want them to know how good you are then tell them with facts and put those facts to the front of your text.

Trigger words

When you’re driving to an unfamiliar destination you can be very dependent on road signs. But you’re unlikely to read every word on every sign. Instead you’re looking out for the names of places that you’re expecting to see. When you see a place name that works for you, you’ll stop reading and won’t see the rest of the sign.

This is how people behave when they are skimming through pages for links. If they see a link with strong trigger words, they will often click it without reading anything else on the page.

People who make websites often don’t appreciate this behaviour. Instead they create pages with the impressions that users will look around the entire page and make a reasoned decision after considering all options. Very few people actually do this.

Upper-case words can be more difficult to read

When you drive on a UK motorway, the junction signage you see uses the Kinneir-Calvert system of road sign design. This system dates back to the late 50s when road signs were inconsistent and often difficult to use.

Before the system was introduced there were no standards for UK road signs to follow. So it was left to the person creating the sign to decide how it should look. Amongst other things, the sign makers often used all upper-casing when writing out place names. The place names on the road signs were sometimes difficult to read as a result.

In the Kinneir Calvert system, place names are written as they would appear in a sentence. Each word begins with an upper-case letter with the rest of the letters in lower-case. This makes signs with several place names easier to read through.

The same is true on website navigation menus. In general it’s easier to read navigation menus when all of the options are not written out in capital letters.

Be careful with metaphors

Don’t try to be clever when choosing the wording of navigation options and hyperlinks within your copy.

On one of the cycling routes I often do, there is a sign for a bistro. It’s not immediately obvious what it’s for. The most prominent words on the sign say “Fuel up here” with an arrow pointing up the road. By “fuel up” they presumably mean with coffee and cakes. I often wondered if anyone went up that road because their car was running low on fuel.

While some metaphors such as shopping baskets can aide understanding, making up your own will often cause confusion. Your links should make sense out of the context of any metaphors you’ve decided to create on your website.

Clarity comes with sacrifices

Every time you add something to a design, you reduce the visual clarity of everything else on it.  By adding content to the site you’re making it easier for people to get lost on the site. Most websites could be better improved by removing content and features rather than adding more. This is something that many people agree with but find difficult to apply to their own website.

The video below gives a rather funny (because it’s so true) depiction of how Stop signs might look if corporations were in charge of commissioning them. This is why so many websites are full of useless junk.

Some journeys are more important

One of my favourite usability metaphors is that of Red routes (I mention them quite often). Like a road network your website has lots of possible journeys. Some of them are more important to your users and your organisation than others. Dr David Travis calls these journeys Red routes and argues that keeping these journeys clear of the clutter will improve the overall effectiveness of your website. Just as red routes that you can’t park on in UK cities allow traffic to flow more freely.

What about you?

Do you have anything you’d like to share about road signs that is also true of websites? Why not share them by commenting below.

Fine wine and screw-top bottles

Picture this. You’re having friends for dinner and want to make it a little special. You want to push the boat out and create a sense of occasion. The wine you’re going to serve is available as a screw-top  bottle as well as a traditional corked one. Which bottle do you buy?

The screw-top bottle is easier to open, but sometimes the quickest and easiest option is not always the best option for the occasion. The corked bottle will provide a better experience in this context. It adds to the luxury of the experience. This idea of luxury is often wrongly implemented on the websites of luxury brands.

The website is rarely the product

Your website is part of the brand experience. But it is not the bottle of fine wine. Instead it’s more like the conversation you had with the guy in the wine store when you were choosing it.

You want that guy to be knowledgeable, informative and helpful in answering your questions. Just like a website.

Wasting time

Luxury brands often misunderstand the type of experience we’re looking for when using their websites. If you’re spending £2,000 on a handbag, it doesn’t mean you wanted to be treated to a 30-second intro to the Gucci website before you can look at products. You still want to get to the handbag section of the site without fuss.

The luxury brand experience should be just as efficient as any other online experience. However some luxury brands believe that we are more ‘bought in’ to their brand and want the website to provide us with more than just a list of bags. To an extent this is true, we do expect a little more but that doesn’t mean we want the website to waste our time.

Anything extra that the website provides should be consistent with our goals and not be wasteful rubbish that is of no use to us.

Some years ago this issue was more evident on the web with the number of elaborate Flash-based sites that existed. They each had their own unique navigation concept that took ages to work out. Such sites tended to deliver very little in the way of content so tried to make up for it with smoke and mirrors. I’m sure there are plenty still out there today. Why not post your favourite examples in the comments section of this page?

Talking nonsense

Many luxury brands think we’ll be content with reading fluff about their products. By fluff I mean the text that uses lots of big emotive words without actually telling us anything about the product.

The most vomit-inducing example I’ve found recently comes from the Cameron House Hotel. In general the page the text comes from is well designed as I’ll discuss later. This however is their opening description of a Classic Room:

After a blissful night’s sleep you dive under the monsoon shower, while your favourite song plays out from the iPod docking station. You feel it’s a cue to sing in the shower, but resist for fear of waking the stag or the grouse in the neighbouring glen. You call concierge for a newspaper and sink back on top of the bed. That’s enough hard work for today you muse, gazing across the mirror like Great Loch before lazily napping beneath a broadsheet duvet.

Thankfully for the hotel, most people won’t get as far as reading the cringe-worthy bit about waking the stag in the neighbouring glen. They’ll skip past the text after just a few words.

This is the funniest example I could find but but not the worst. You see it’s not just marketing fluff. It’s trying to provide us with substantiated facts about the rooms. Unfortunately we’re all so used to reading fluff that we’re quick to dismiss it as such.

AGA uses this copy to explain to you why you’re spending so much on a cooker:

Your brand new AGA is made in the same way today as it has always been: by pouring molten iron into moulds. It gives the castings their characteristic surface (every one is unique) and helps AGA rise above the usual mass-produced uniformity.

While most manufacturers spray paint a cooker in seconds, it still takes us three days to apply the multiple protective coats of gleaming vitreous enamel that help ensure the working life of an AGA is measured in decades, not years.

Of course, the modern AGA contains state-of-the-art technology and is subject to rigorous quality and the latest environmental standards.

Every AGA component is individually inspected and colour checked before engineers carry out the final build-up in the customer’s kitchen, ensuring installation is as quick and hassle-free as possible.

It is hardly surprising then, that while previous generations have fallen in love with Dr Gustaf Dalén’s AGA concept, it has never been more popular than it is now.

It’s a little bit long but I didn’t gag at any point when reading it. It’s telling us that the AGA is a quality piece of kit by going into detail about the manufacturing and installation procedure. It doesn’t need to create poetry to do this, it just tells us the facts.

The need for detail

If anything, we need more detail when we’re buying a luxury brand. We want to know why we’re parting with so much cash for it. It would be a bit unfair of me to criticise the page from the Cameron House Hotel site without explaining that it’s actually one of the best examples of a hotel room page that I’ve seen.

If I’m thinking about a romantic weekend at the hotel I know I can only afford a standard room. But I want to be sure I’m still getting a luxury experience. So I want to know what’s in the room and get an idea of how big and nice it is. As you can see below, this page tells me.

A large photo of the room shows me it’s easily big enough and the bed looks big and comfy. The cheesy opening description is then followed up by a list of features that come with the room. So despite skipping past the over-indulgent text, I’m still going to find the detail. I’m pretty convinced that I’d be happy with this room.

The Gleneagles Hotel

The nearest competition to the Cameron House Hotel would probably be the Gleneagles Hotel. So let’s look at the page that discusses their classic rooms. I know that the Gleneagles Hotel is very lush, but this page doesn’t convince me of it.

There’s no attempt at poetry which is nice, but the text starts of almost apologetically “Smaller, inner-facing rooms”. This is a very negative opening. I’m sure the rooms are probably bigger than any I have stayed in, but this description doesn’t convince me of this fact. I’m beginning to feel a little like I’ll be treated as economy class already.

The text that says “the finest comforts and ultimate in relaxation” tells us nothing. I’ve got a pretty good imagination, so I can promise you that my idea of the ultimate in relaxation hasn’t come with a hotel room since Roman times. These are empty words and I want detail.

The photograph shows me the rooms are nice but I can’t see the bed or get an idea of scale. Sure I can get a panoramic image of a room if I install Quicktime Player. But I can’t be bothered. I’ve seen The Cameron House Hotel page and am favouring them already. So why should I install some software just so that I can see a picture of a room?

It’s pretty obvious that this page was originally designed to have the main photograph and the short text description only. Later they realised that people might actually want to see the room and even book it. They should have redesigned the page to do this, but instead they just slapped in some links.

Any comments?

Join the discussion and leave a comment about this article. Here are some ideas:

• Show us examples of sites for luxury brands, good or bad
• If you were to make 2 improvements to this page. What would they be?
• Make a comment about designing for luxury brands

Complicated watches

A recent article in Neuromarketing discussed when complicated is good. The author argued that people sometimes want complexity. I don’t agree with the author but that’s not really important. The problem is that his argument is based upon his own misunderstanding of the word complication when used in this context.

In the article the author explains that Blancpain uses the term complications as a marketing device to illustrate that their watches are very intricate time pieces with lots of little cogs. However in the comments section of the article, somebody points out that complications is actually a term used in horology (the science of measuring time) to mean features.

The author responds, thanking the commenter and says “instead of brilliant marketing Blancpain is merely using jargon unlikely to be understood by non-horologists? Either way, I think it works for them “.

I disagree, it doesn’t work for them and it was never brilliant marketing. I think the word complication is a hindrance to the site’s users. The author’s own misunderstanding of the site has led him to write an article with a redundant argument.

Translating for your customers

Blancpain has used the term complications because this is what it calls the features of a watch. However it would be a mistake to assume the users of the site will understand it. If the author of that article misunderstood it, what chance does a passing web user have?

Baffling people with jargon is never a good idea on a website. Especially when that jargon is used on the site’s navigation menu.

Choosing your words

If Blancpain knew their key users understood such terms (high-end watch retailers for example) then using such a word would be fine. The users would know what complications meant in this context and using such a term would be consistent with the tone of  a high-end watchmaker.

However, it’s unlikely that someone who is simply looking for an expensive watch to buy for their husband/wife will understand the term. The use of the word complication will be unhelpful to these people. In fact it’ll probably obstruct many of them from choosing a watch.

So this leaves the owner of the website with a dilemma. Do they use the industry term or a simple term like features?

Like many design decisions, there are winners and losers regardless of which decision you take. Judging by the site content, it looks like the site is aimed at the end customer. But this doesn’t mean that end customers are the primary users. It may just have been a guess on the part of the web team. The primary users could be those with a better understanding of horology speak.

If in doubt, opt for simplicity

If you’ve researched your web users then you’ll know a bit about who’s using your site, what they want and what they know. In which case you’ll know the type of language you should be using. In the absence of this information, you’re basically guessing. In which case I’d recommend choosing simple words over industry speak.

People are normally unlikely to object to simple explanations as long as they aren’t patronising. Horologists won’t care a great deal that you’ve said features instead of complications on a website like this. But the word complications is an obstruction to the watch buying public.

What would you do?

In the absence of reliable research on the users of the Blancpain website, I’d use the term watch features instead of complications . Why not leave a comment explaining the approach you’d take and why?

In this post I’m going to point out an issue in the design of a yogurt pot that the designers may not have noticed. When I walk you through the problem, it may seem obvious.

Mmmm… yogurt

The product image below is a tasty yogurt-based snack called Rumbers Oat Cluster. I often buy it with my lunch when I’m in town.

The pot is quite cutely designed (if a little over-packaged). It’s made up of plain yogurt and a dried fruit, seed and nut crumble.

Before eating the snack you need to mix it all together. So you start by separating the two pots. You peel the foil lid from the pot containing the yogurt (pictured above). Then you remove the film from the pot with the crumble (pictured below) and pour the yogurt over the crumble.

After pouring the yogurt over the crumble it’s normal to mix the two together. Well that’s what I do anyway. In order to do so you need a spoon. Luckily Rumblers Oat Clusters come with a spoon. Unfortunately that spoon disappeared underneath the crumble when you turned the bowl over. And that crumble is now underneath a layer of yoghurt.

The spoon disappeared when you turned the pot over, so it’s easy to forget about it. In a step-by-step process it’s unusual to think about Step 5 until you’ve finished Step 4. Unless you can see it, you don’t really think about the spoon until it becomes relevant (See Jakob Neilsen’s Usability Heuristics – Recognition not recall).

Good designers need usability testing

If the designers of this product walked through the process of using it they might do so without problem. This is because they designed it and know more about the product than the user.

When they walk through the process, they’d just remove the spoon after removing the film from the pot. It’s unlikely that they’d forget about the spoon because it was them who decided where the spoon went. They need to test the design to find such issues.

No amount of design talent will allow you to spot all of the issues with your designs. This is why good designers understand the benefit of usability testing.

What would you do?

It’s easy to pontificate about these things from the safety of my usability blog. But in reality it may not actually be worth fixing the issue.

Why not leave a comment telling me what you’d do and why. Would you leave it as it is or could you redesign it to make it better?

Remember to consider:

• The likely financial impact of the problem (I’m still buying them)
• The cost of production (they simply drop the spoon in before adding the crumble)
• The importance of the spoon’s visibility at purchase

I’ll try to respond to each comment. You can add links in your comment to anything that supports your argument. Just paste the URL into the comment if you wish to do so.