usability ed

Usability Ed on hold

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Allison) — Thu, 30 Apr 2015 22:01:00 +0000

As I'm struggling to find the time to post to this blog as frequently as I'd like, I've decided to give it a rest for a while. I'm still reading, thinking, writing and sharing - just not here right now.
Work is pretty intense at the moment, and I blog there too. Most of my contributions are UX and usability related, albeit with a fairly strong University of Edinburgh flavour.

Neil Allison's posts for the University of Edinburgh Website Programme blog

I also tweet regularly, and very intermittently publish via LinkedIn Pulse.

Neil Allison's Twitter feed (@usabilityed)

Neil Allison's public LinkedIn profile and Pulse publishing

Thanks for your interest.

Silo-busting, scenario-driven design

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Allison) — Thu, 09 Apr 2015 23:21:00 +0000

Kim Goodwin talked to Jared Spool for the UIE.com podcast back in August 2014. It was a fantastic, inspiring chat with some great thoughts on approaching design problems in large organisations.

The podcast and transcript of the conversation is available to download.

It contains loads of great examples and clarifications about how to work towards a design starting with high level scenarios and gradually digging deeper.

Kim talks about what a persona should be here for - a reminder to the team, not an introduction to the user. She also discusses with Jared about artefacts and deliverables - how you can't pin labels such as these on particular things like a presentation or a persona. It just depends on the stage you're at in the development process and who will receive them.

Silo busting scenario driven design - Kim Goodwin talks to Jared Spool for the UIE.com podcast

U is for User

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Allison) — Thu, 09 Apr 2015 23:10:00 +0000

I was introduced to an article a week or two ago - "UX is not UI" - which prompted a bit of thinking and a look back at other related articles.

In "UX is not UI", author Eric Flowers talks about all the disciplines and techniques that contribute to the development of a user experience, and how many just consider UX to be interface design. You can see this for yourself by taking a quick look at UX job listings that contain a lot of jobs which five years ago would have been titled 'Graphic Designer' or 'Website Designer'. UX has just become the buzz word dropped into job descriptions.

UX is not UI - blog post by Erik Flowers

What UX design should be about is providing the user with a solution to a defined problem, which of course is so much more than an interface issue. And it's something that can't achieved by one person, or even a UX team within an organisation. UX needs to be team sport, led by professionals, but with active participation across the whole of the development and service teams.

Thinking about this caused me to go back to an article on Jakob Nielsen's useit.com website by Hoa Loranger - "UX without user research is not UX"

This is quite a thorough piece that considers that challenges faced by UX professionals in organisations and in particular on development projects. It's not just about improving user interfaces, which if you're lucky is often as far as you can go. It should be about bringing the user and the business closer together; informing business change to better meet user needs.

UX without research is not UX - article by Hoa Loranger for useit,com

Maturing UX in our organisations - seminar write up

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Allison) — Wed, 11 Mar 2015 22:43:00 +0000

I attended yet another excellent free breakfast briefing put on by Edinburgh consultants, User Vision. This time the topic was the UX maturity of organisations.

Many companies have embraced a user centred or customer first approach to how they do business, to some degree at least. But almost all, it has to be said still have a long way to go.

User Vision Breakfast Briefing
Image credit User Vision (http://bit.ly/1DhtO1r)

The session included some interesting models which I will be keeping in mind for future presentations of my own.

Presenter Stephen Denning talked about how businesses should be thinking about their customer/user first:

Experiences
Interactions
Touch points
Procedures
Systems

But how often is it the other way round? A system is procured that sets out procedures for predefined touch points. With these established, there's a limit to how much UX professionals can enhance user interactions and experiences.

We reflected on the simple 3 circle Venn diagram of:

Business
Technology
User

Something like this:

Image credit: GordonChoi.com

Where do our organisations give emphasis? Everyone in the room - higher ed, government and finance mainly - agreed that it was tech that was the primary driver and the typically the user came last. A simple indicator of how user focused our organisations are, even with established UX teams in some instances.

The session then went on to look in detail at a 4 quadrant UX maturity model developed by Tomer Sharon 2012. Hearing about this prompted me to dig a bit deeper, and I turned up this great article which is well worth a read:

Dealing with Difficult People, Teams, and Organizations: A UX Research Maturity Model - article by Tomer Sharon for uxmatters.com

So, all in all a really useful and interesting session, with a group of professionals across a range of sectors all encountering the same challenges. And of course, breakfast!

Thanks as ever to User Vision for a great breakfast briefing, and to presenter Stephen Denning.

UX Maturity breakfast briefing overview - User Vision website

Global Service Jam 2015 - my Edinburgh experience

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Allison) — Mon, 02 Mar 2015 23:02:00 +0000

The Global Service Jam took place on the last weekend in February, with Edinburgh consultants Nile kindly hosting a great weekend of collaborating and innovating that I was able to get involved in.

Service Design is a field I've been learning quite a bit about in the past year or so, and I was invited to participate in an annual worldwide event recently - the Global Service Jam.

Service Design and Experience consultants, Nile, hosted the Edinburgh event and it was a lot of fun, a great way to meet new people and to put our combined skills and experience into a project being undertaken simultaneously worldwide.

Host Andrew illustrating one of the fundamentals - more doing, less talking

Unfortunately due to family commitments I couldn't throw myself into the event totally - some people were involved days and evenings, Friday to Sunday - but from the full session Friday and popping in Saturday and Sunday, I got a really good feel for what was going on.

Basically, at over 100 locations worldwide, groups of people were getting together to "solve" a design problem. I say "solve" as the brief was incredibly open. It was really just an opportunity to collaborate, network, innovate and have fun. And our Edinburgh hosts Nile were incredibly generous, giving over their fantastic facilities in New Town.

Global Service Jam 2015 locations

And the projects that came out of the weekend:

So you can see, two very different outputs from the same initial concept brief. And if you explore the rest of the projects from across the world, you can see just how much creative talent was at work.

If you're wondering what this 'Service Design' lark is all about, here are a couple of starting points:

What is the value of service design? - 2 minute Vimeo video by Nile
Enabling a Career Shift from User Experience to Service Design - article by Laura Keller for uxmatters.com (despite the title, it's a good outline of what service design is, relative to UX management).

A slide from the intro presentation on the night

Edinburgh service design and experience consultants Nile's website

FAQs - not great for UX, whatever Nielsen says

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Allison) — Wed, 11 Feb 2015 21:26:00 +0000

At the end of last year, Nielsen Norman Group published an article talking up the website FAQ. I usually only post on positives and what I think is good advice, so didn't blog about this as I didn't agree. However, a couple of responses to this contentious article are well worth a read.

First off, here's the article from Nielsen Norman Group which basically says FAQs can be good if done well.

FAQs Still Deliver Great Value - article by Susan Farrell for www.useit.com

The problem for me with this article is that if you knew as much about your audiences and their goals and behaviours as its recommended you do to do a good job of FAQs, why not just get the website right in the first place? Then you wouldn't need FAQs. Because face it, they're pretty much a last resort when navigation and search have failed you.

To me, the way to approach developing a website is as advocated by Jesse James Garrett in his diagram and book, The Elements of User Experience: be clear about your objectives and your audiences goals, then develop content and functionality to meet these goals and objectives, then structure based on what you've produced, and so on. With FAQs, you're basically starting with an approach to navigation and the working backwards. Doing it all the wrong way round.

Anyway, others put it better than me. Gerry McGovern wrote a good article this week, and referenced an excellent response to the Nielsen article by Sarah Richards (former Head of Comtent Design for the UK Government Digital Service (GDS)).

FAQs are the dinosaurs of web navigation - article by Gerry McGovern

FAQs: Why we don't have them - GDS blog post by Sarah Richards

Sarah Richards' blog post response to the NNG article

Previous related posts

FAQ usability guidelines (February 2012)

Elements of User Experience (November 2009)

The fold still matters, says Nielsen

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Allison) — Mon, 02 Feb 2015 14:10:00 +0000

Jakob Nielsen's company have just released an interesting study on user attention and willingness to scroll. The bottom line: the top of the page is still critically important despite the wide range of browsing devices now in use.

He and others have been banging on about 'above the fold' for a long time now. So long that the original context of the phrase (newspapers) has probably been forgotten by many.

He's saying that visitors to a website do scroll most of the time, but the attention given to what is beyond the first viewport is significantly less than what is presented up front.

Why is this? Basically, while technology continues to move on apace, our behaviour doesn't. We're lazy, impatient and have a low attention span when it comes to interacting online.

Interesting also that the stark figures from his study are similar to those in a study done by Google on the impact of ads. There's a link to this study too.

So what do we do? Continue to follow best practice in writing for the web which has been laid out for a long time (especially in Ginny Redish's excellent book 'Letting Go of the Words')

Meaningful page title
A useful, concise summary of the contents of the page
Avoid 'false bottoms' in your design (elements that give the impression you're at the foot of the page when you're not)

The Fold Manifesto: Why the Page Fold Still Matters - article by Amy Schade for Nielsen Norman Group

Google’s recent analysis of display advertising (Think With Google)

A couple of my previous posts related to this:

Users scroll but rarely read (April 2010)

Web writing resources (August 2009) - includes free chapters of Ginny Redish's book

UX Maturity - free breakfast briefing in Edinburgh in February

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Allison) — Fri, 30 Jan 2015 20:06:00 +0000

User Vision are running another of their great, free sessions next month. This time the topic is UX maturity in the organisation.

I've attended a few of these pre-work hour long sessions in the past and they're pretty good. A seminar from a UX consultant, a chance to meet others in the city who are interested in the topic, and of course a bacon sandwich.

This upcoming session is happening in Thursday 19 February at the User Vision offices in Edinburgh city centre. Booking is required.

Maturing UX in our organisations - breakfast briefing details

What user research when?

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Allison) — Sun, 16 Nov 2014 23:13:00 +0000

Christian Rohrer's graphing of user research techniques has been around for a while; he's just written a great article about it for Jakob Nielsen's useit.com.

The graph uses a pair of axes:

Qualitative to quantitative (The why to the how many)
Attitudinal to behavioural (What people say to what people do)

On these axes, a load of user research techniques are graphed.

The article also talks about the research techniques best placed to support different phases of product development, and gives an overview of each technique.

When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods - article by Christian Rohrer on useit.com

Lou Rosenfeld, elephants and research silos

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Allison) — Sun, 16 Nov 2014 23:03:00 +0000

A lovely article in which Lou Rosenfeld tells a few stories and makes a very important point - bring together what you learn from different research techniques for maximum insight.

Lou knows his stuff, tells a good story, and references great work from lots of other experts in the field.

While he's talking mainly about well-resourced, user-focused companies who had "...a series of robust, expensive, well-staffed teams of researchers—many with doctorates—employing just about every imaginable method to study the user experience..." there's still lots to take away even if you're working on your own. The point and the principle is the same.

The article certainly got me thinking (again) about how we can make better use of the fragmented user research happening across the University. Ultimately it's all about the insight.

And elephants. What's that all about? It's that old story of the blind men around the elephant trying to work out what it is. Here, the elephant is your website or product and the blind men are your research techniques.

So the question is, "How well do we know our elephants?"

Seeing the Elephant: Defragmenting User Research - article by Lou Rosenfeld for A List Apart

Why Currys made me think about the UX of our services

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Allison) — Fri, 31 Oct 2014 18:00:00 +0000

Sitting on the bus the other day, I picked up a copy of the free newspaper - the Metro. The outermost pages were an advert for the electrical retailer, Currys. It was a really nice ad; one that I took back to the office to share with the team.

Currys have changed tack, clearly. I'm not surprised, given the challenges that bricks and mortar electrical retailers have faced in recent years, as so many purchases are now done online. They're marketing the in-person buying experience: It's not about the technology, it's about what the technology means to you.

"This is not a toaster, this is a hot breakfast in 3 minutes."

Part of the Currys advert from the Metro newspaper

It's an interesting approach. I wonder whether it will pay off.

The Currys "We Start With You" TV ad

What it certainly did for me was prompt a challenge my colleagues using their phrasing structure - "This is not a..."

I pinned the ad on the wall in our kitchen, along with some sheets containing our website service personas and blank speech bubbles. I'm interested in what the team think our Content Management System, our events, our training and support services are to our customers.

A couple of minutes' thought while the kettle boils is enabling us to share our thoughts and perceptions of what we're here for and what our customers across the University want from us.

I challenged colleagues to express our services in the form: "This is not a..."

I took this story to our last meet up of web publishers from across the University to challenge others to think like this. As with most user research activities, it's so simple but so fundamental.

Sharing our perceptions of our customers helps us all to hone a shared view of what we're doing and why. This is something that is so easily forgotten in the day-to-day hectic rush of running internal services.

Slides from the University of Edinburgh Web Publishers Community session - "This is not a..." (Log in required)

Remote testing session at User Vision

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Allison) — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 21:54:00 +0000

I went along to another excellent breakfast briefing session put on by Edinburgh UX consultants User Vision. They've made the slides available on Slideshare too.

A few things I took away from the session (apart from being pretty impressed by their ability to stage 35 tests worldwide for the British Council at short notice) were:

Laptop hugging - a cheap and cheerful way to record a participant on a mobile device usability testing session. (See: Mail Chimp UX blog post on laptop hugging) Definitely going to give this a try!
Skype translation beta demo on YouTube looks really interesting and potentially a way in future to undertake research with distance learners overseas. (See: Skype translation beta demo on You Tube)
Audio connections are fundamental - you can recover from video problems but switching to instant messaging when audio fails is very frustrating for both parties. User Vision consultants recommended Skype if choice is there because it worked well at low bandwidths and out of all options available was most likely to be familiar technology with participants overseas.
Check out the UK-based remote testing company Whatusersdo. I've always used UserTesting.com because it was recommended by Steve Krug and I've never had a scenario where UK-based participants were essential, but I'll definitely take a look if only to potentially support a UK-based business. (In fairness, I've always found usertesting.com to be a great service - have written about my experiences a few times).
Office 365 Link could be a useful tool to conduct testing with University staff as we now have Office 365 in place across much of the institution. I like doing face-to-face testing but doing stuff remotely might make it easier to reach out to specific demographics of CMS users when time is tight on our current agile project.

User Vision remote user testing briefing on Slideshare

My previous posts on remote user testing

Writing copy for interfaces - microcopy

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Allison) — Tue, 30 Sep 2014 22:27:00 +0000

Nicole Fenton tells us a couple of stories that lead to some really great points and advice on labels, help and error messages for user interfaces. This is a transcript of a presentation, and it reads like a really nice, engaging article.

Nicole's tips:

Start with questions.
Be a good tour guide.
Turn your chair.
Show you care.
Write iteratively

Interface Writing: Code for Humans - article by Nicole Fenton

Nicole co-authored a book, Nicely Said: Writing for the Web with Style and Purpose, which on the strength of this and a few other of her articles I'm definitely going to check out.

Writing for the Web with Style and Purpose - book promotional website

Gestalt principles primer for interaction design

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Allison) — Fri, 26 Sep 2014 22:08:00 +0000

If you design interfaces on any level, you need to know about Gestalt Principles. I'm sure any designer reading this will be in granny sucking eggs territory, so this one is for the project managers, the business reps and the tech developers...

I came across this stuff a few years ago and I kind of knew it all but without ever thinking about pulling it together, so having a reference point since then has been really useful. And I really like this article as it goes through these fundamental rules clearly and succinctly and picks some nice examples to illustrate.

Author of the blog post, Carolann Bonner says:

Gestalt is a term used in psychology which expresses the idea that the whole of something is more important to our understanding than the individual parts. The Gestalt principles describe the way our mind interprets visual elements.

The principles she then goes on to cover are:

Similarity
Enclosure
Continuation
Closure
Proximity
Figure-Ground

Using Gestalt Principles for Natural Interactions - article by Carolann Bonner for Thoughtbot.com

Free remote usability testing taster

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Allison) — Fri, 08 Aug 2014 20:12:00 +0000

I've been a long time subscriber to the remote usability testing tool UserTesting.com. They've recently introduced a free taster service - "Peek" - which I recommend you try out.

First impression on receiving the email was "What's the catch?" The paid service is good value, but not that cheap, so how can they be doing it for free?

But having tried the Peek service I can see why they're doing this and recommend you give it a whirl. You will probably want to pay for the full service when you have, which obviously is the point.

What happens:

You provide your email
You provide the URL of a site you want a user to try out
They recruit a participant to undertake a small number of set tasks and record a 5 minute video
You receive an email with a link to this video

It's that simple.

It's a great way to dip your toe in the water of remote usability testing and to get something to show the boss.

If you have specific things you want to learn about your site, you're going to be frustrated. You're not the target audience. I think this is for people who never get round to testing because it feels intimidating, and those yet to be convinced of its value.

Your video will be about 5 minutes long and the questions answered by the participant are standard ones set by the service. So very limited, but what do you expect for nothing?

Remember Steve Krug's advice: "Recruit loosely and grade on a curve." Recruitment is about as loose as it gets but you will learn something, and it's up to you what you do with this information.

Try Peek, the new free service from UserTesting.com

I've written a few blog posts on the topic of remote user testing, so if you want to learn more it's a good place to start.

My blog posts on remote usability testing

Navigation resources

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Allison) — Thu, 07 Aug 2014 22:14:00 +0000

Jeff Sauro pulls together a collection of articles, software and other useful stuff relating to planning website and application structure and navigation.

I've been using Optimal Sort's online card sorting tool recently and had a really good experience. Actually convinced me to do a bit more card sorting after being left jaded from data analysis hell on analogue card sorts a few years back. I'll write about my experiences in the near future.

In the meantime, some great stuff here:

20 Resources For Evaluating Website Navigation - blog post by Jeff Sauro on measuring usability.com

Simplifying user research at the UK Government Digital Service

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Allison) — Thu, 07 Aug 2014 21:40:00 +0000

Head of User Research Lisa Reichelt has written an interesting blog post about how the complexity of problems can be paralysing. She says that when "...it depends..." comes up, it's potentially over complicating things.

Of course it really does depend on things like context of use, but I take her point and agree with her. We don't do enough user research and dealing with the full complexity of a situation can stop us getting started.

As she says:

It depends is paralysing. It is a stop sign. It tells people they can’t do anything yet. That it is complicated.

Her aim is to get every team involved in development of online government services observing users on a regular basis. It's admirable and of course, essential, if they are to continue to improve the user experience.

It's a challenge because not every team has a lot of user experience expertise. It's easy to be intimidated and put off engagement with users because you're feeling you're not quite ready.

This is a situation we face at the University so this post really struck a chord.

There's nothing new here, but it's good to hear honest reflections from a high profile team. Lisa quotes an excellent article from Jared Spool in which he talks about habits of effective, user focused teams.

This is similar to what Steve Krug says: "Start earlier than makes sense" and "A morning a month, that's all we ask".
Death to it depends - blog post by Lisa Reichelt

Fast Path to a Great UX - Increased Exposure Hours - article by Jared Spool on uie.com

IA & Content Strategy - my bluffers guide to open source developers

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Allison) — Fri, 01 Aug 2014 22:45:00 +0000

I gave a presentation today at the Edinburgh Open Source Breakfast session, a monthly developers meet up. I had 40 minutes on the topic of information architecture and content strategy so even squeezing in a bluffer's guide was a bit of a tall order.

Anyway, the session was well received and the breakfast was good, so worthwhile getting out of bed extra early on a Friday morning after all...

I've posted the slides on Slideshare.

My Bluffers Guide to Information Architecture and Content Strategy - on Slideshare

Edinburgh Open Source Breakfast

What's with UX in Higher Ed? My presentation to IWMW 2014

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Allison) — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 15:59:00 +0000

Earlier this month, I presented at the UK Higher Education Web Managers Conference, IWMW. I talked about how user experience skills and techniques aren't as prevalent in higher education as they are in other sectors and why I thought this might be. The slides were quote and image heavy, so here is a transcript of what I said, interspersed with what my audience were tweeting as they listened.

What's with UX in Higher Education? (IWMW conference 2014) from Neil Allison

"Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple." - Woody Guthrie

“Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” - Thomas Edison

A couple of quotes to kick things off and to introduce myself alongside a couple of people who might be considered geniuses…

My point here though is that making something simple doesn’t happen by accident. And while some may perceive great design to be genius, in reality it’s down to hard work and perseverance. Edison is famous for the sheer number of inventions he and his company came up with, but he was very open in admitting how hard he worked, and how many ideas he had came to nothing or needed several attempts to get right.

About me & Edinburgh's University Website Programme

I’m Neil Allison. I’m the User Experience Manager at the University of Edinburgh Website Programme.

Once upon a time I was a teacher. Then I was a student recruitment and marketing officer. Then I started doing that kind of stuff online. So I progressed into website management, and from there into CMS management and supporting others with their online business, which is where I am now with the University Website Programme.

We started out as a 2 year project in 2006 to roll out the first corporate content management system. Eight years on we’re managing that CMS for about 700 users across 80+ business units who manage around 50,000 web pages. But on top of that, we also offer training, support and consultancy to the web publishing community – going beyond our CMS user group – and we’re currently developing a new CMS that will replace our current system over the next 18 months.

A common thread through everything I’ve ever done is communication and engagement. And I judge the effectiveness of what I do on how well it works for its intended purpose. For its intended audience. In its intended context. Self reflection and iterative improvement is pretty much drilled into you when you train to teach and I suppose that’s why user experience management has always seemed like such a no-brainer to me.

Usability - ISO 9241 definition: “The effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which specified users achieve specified goals in particular environments.”

How do you know how well you’re doing if you can’t express what it is you’re trying to do and apply some metrics to it so that you can objectively appraise?

Do teachers monitor the pupil experience?

So pretend you’re a secondary school teacher for a moment. You get to the end of the lesson and the kids have all gone. How are you doing? A few metrics you might use:

% who did their homework
% who brought everything they needed to class
Average noise level
Did the class enjoy themselves?
How many kids did I need to sanction?
% of required content covered
Topic test scores
End of year exam scores

Are all these metrics equally important? Do all teachers measure against these? How do these metrics align with what the headteacher is trying to achieve – for the school and for the individual pupil?

When I taught I obviously wanted my pupils to do well. But I also wanted them to enjoy the subject, so worked hard to make maths more stimulating than when I had been at school. And if I’d asked my head, they would have wholeheartedly agreed – yes, our students should enjoy their lessons. But how would they know? Did they put anything in place to measure this? Or would they let things roll along so long as the right results were being churned out and standards of behaviour were maintained?

So now have a think about your website or your application. What are your objectives and how do you measure them? Do all your colleagues and stakeholders agree?

If I asked you to name your top 3 audiences, could you do it immediately? And are you confident your colleagues and stakeholders would say the same thing? Now think about your number one audience. What are their 3 top tasks? Again, would your colleagues say the same things as you?

And how do these objectives and metrics fit in with the bigger picture? For the organisation? For the customer? It’s big, isn’t it?

Evolving my question - what is it with UX in Higher Ed?

Last year I gave a presentation at the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s Higher Ed Group conference and I called it “Marketing is Dead, Long Live UX!” Well that went quite well, so I thought it might be good to update it a bit and come along to IWMW.

But as I thought some more about what I was going to say and I talked to a few people in and out of our sector, I realised that I wanted to talk about something slightly different. So apologies if you came along today for “Marketing is dead…” because I’m calling this “What’s with UX in Higher Ed?”

(Marketing isn’t dead, by the way. It’s just changing. But that doesn’t sound so interesting when you’re proposing to conference organisers.)

What I’m wondering is why is the UX profession is seemingly booming elsewhere, but not in higher education?

There have been a small handful of UX-related jobs advertised in the higher education sector over the past few years – low to mid-level, coming from an IT-developer-designer sort of angle. Nothing like the tens or even hundreds that are coming up month after month elsewhere.

But what I was basing this on was fairly anecdotal. I monitor the jobs situation a bit, but not assiduously; it’s not like I’m looking to leave Edinburgh, after all. I thought I’d ask the community via the Jisc mailing list but before I got that far I came across a message from Dan Jackson (@beesman) at UCL in 2012.

-----Original Message-----
From: Managing institutional Web services [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dan Jackson
Sent: 06 September 2012 09:50
To:
Subject: UX & IA professionals in UK HE?

Hi all,

I'm wondering out loud how many HEI's in the UK have positions directly responsible for improving the user experience, interaction design and information architecture of their institutional web sites and web applications? A quick scan of the last 12 months' activity on this list, and a perusal of the web/digital jobs currently being advertised at jobs.ac.uk, shows the usual mix of adverts for web developers and web content editors, but nothing related to UX or IA.

This is in stark contrast to private sector companies, who are recruiting UX consultants like there's no tomorrow. If this is a true reflection of a lack of recruitment to these kinds of positions, is our sector blind to the criticality of these disciplines? Do we still put UX & interface design in the hands of developers? Or is it now common practice to outsource these activities to digital agencies? Or perhaps we expect our front-end developers to have cross-discipline skills (not always the case IMO)? Or maybe we all agree that this is vital, but are having trouble persuading & educating budget holders?

Would be very interested in any feedback - thanks!

…

Turns out I was the only person to reply to Dan on list.

Original dialogue on Higher Ed Web Managers Jisc Mailing List

I had a great chat with Dan and he shared a few other responses he’d have off-list, but there really wasn’t anything to speak of in the emails he received.

So I thought I’d try again, this time with a survey. I’m not going to go through the results of that survey here today; instead I’ve written a blog post and I’d be happy to continue the conversation after this session.

UX activity in UK Higher Ed web teams (17 July 2014)

A couple of headlines though – 60% had tried at least one UX technique in the course of a project, and just under a quarter used some in most projects.

So, what I’m thinking: Is there a problem here? Is there an opportunity? Should we care?
I’d say yes to all three questions.

User experience & usability: what are they?

Now, just to back pedal a little bit for those of you who are thinking - what is user experience stuff, anyway?

A couple of quotes I really like in explaining the value of having a UX vision for a product or service or project:

Jesse James Garrett: “A star to sail your ship by”

Jared Spool: “A flag in the sand on the horizon”

I think I prefer Jared’s as the flag can and indeed should be moved on the horizon from time to time, as new research causes you to refine your view or when your environment changes.

Jakob Nielsen’s Nielsen Norman Group produced a model I think does a good job of illustrating the relationship between usability, user experience and brand.

Nielsen Norman Group's circles model is used in the article "The difference (and relationship) between usability and user experience" by Justin Mifsud on usabilitygeek.com

And Jared Spool outlined quite a nice scenario that helps illustrate:
The difference between usability and user experience - blog post on uie.com

One of the key things I said when I presented to the Chartered Institute of Marketing last year, I shamelessly borrowed from Whitney Hess:

“Advertising is about getting the customer to love the company. UX is about getting the company to love the customer.”

Don Draper is the Antithesis of User Experience – blog post by Whitney Hess

So what about us in higher education? Do we not love our customers? Do we even see “customers”?

UX is big. Where do we fit in?

And there’s a question of scale here. At the University Website Programme at Edinburgh, we manage a content management system. This is part of our overall web publishing service to the University. How is this contributing to the student experience?

We try to put the CMS user at the centre of our work. After all, it’s the people that make the website first and foremost - not the tool. By understanding our users – their skills, their priorities, their contexts of use – we develop our service to enable them to do a better job of managing their website. A better website helps contribute to a better user experience, but I think possibly more importantly, a leaner, more focused website helps save the editors time – fewer pages to manage, more visitor self-service reducing enquiries and so on. And of course, a CMS tool that prioritises the time-poor, non-specialist and the key tasks they do most often frees up more time for their ‘real’ jobs (which often involves servicing our student customers in one way or another).

Jared Spool’s camera purchase scenario is a good one, but I don’t think you could compare it to managing the student experience. Probably more like managing a service that contributes to the student experience like, say, what we do, or the accommodation service or the library perhaps. I’ll come back to this question of scale and what we can compare our fundamental overarching services against a little later.

Jakob Nielsen suggested that usability is like cookery.

I’ve long been a subscriber to this. Before Steve Krug’s Rocket Surgery book I was borrowing all his best ideas and training colleagues. Over 400 staff at Edinburgh have learned that it’s easy to do the usability equivalent to beans on toast. And that’s fine in the main. You don’t need a UX consultant most of the time. You don’t want a gourmet chef to be making your beans on toast.

For me, the user experience is everyone’s responsibility.

Imagine if this wasn’t UX I’m talking about. Imagine it was writing. How crazy would it be if every team, every project had a person responsible for writing stuff down?

Our ultimate aim should be to ensure that UX – being interested in users’ interaction with our product, being capable of investigating UX and being capable of sharing or communicating it – is something everyone on the team can do to some extent. It shouldn’t be anything special, just a basic skill regardless of your role.

We all need motivation

But we need motivation. Remember Edison’s perserverence? So what motivates us to invest our time and attention on delivering a better UX?

What's our motivation to invest in UX-related activity?

I’m an educator, a trainer at heart. My focus over the years at Edinburgh has changed to apps, to the UX of our staff using the CMS. Why? Because investing in UX during the development process makes for less of a training overhead. It makes support easier.

And I’ve also come to realise that the better the CMS product we have, the better the job our non-specialist, time-poor website editors do in terms of maintaining the website. There’s nothing like a stint in training or support services to help you develop a degree of empathy…

What about you?

The developer – Better products sooner? Clearer requirements at the outset? Less rework? Time saved?

The marketer – Better products? An easier sell? (Others do it for you, even?!)

But what about our leaders? What’s in it for them, UX-wise?

The higher up you go, the further you get from the customers and from the front line staff who are often as frustrated with the UX as the customers. And it’s up there that decisions are made, where strategy is formulated.

UX is not a deliverable, it's not something that we sell to our organisations.

What we sell is what is enhanced by adopting UX processes. The value we bring:

Money saved
More revenue
Better customer satisfaction
The risk avoided

For senior colleagues UX isn’t about being nice to users. It has to be about revenue and reputation.

We’re not going to get far by talking about usability and personas and wireframes and experience maps. That’s for workshops at conferences such as this.

And at senior level, there’s perhaps a perception that we just need to recruit the right people. When actually it’s not so much about the people as the culture and the processes we go through in design and management.

A slight aside now. Let me tell you about a system at the University of Edinburgh. It’s called the DRPS which stands for Degree Regulations and Programmes of Study. It is the central web resource for information on courses and degree programmes. And it’s not very nice to use. For students or the staff that support them. We offer very flexible degrees, but our students often found course selection difficult and/or confusing due to the limitations of the available information.

So a couple of students studying Maths set out to make it easier and developed a system they called PATH. And it proved so popular it was taken on by their school. And it’s since been taken on by Information Services and is being scaled up to ultimately cater for all students. It’s very popular with both students and staff.

So did we just get lucky there? Did we stumble upon a couple of genius designers?

Yes we were lucky to have a couple of talented, proactive students whose motivation was to address their own need. And it has since evolved in such a way that it could be shared and scaled.

But genius?
Jakob Nielsen (amongst others) has written about the myth of the genius designer.

What we got is a product that happened to be developed by the target audience. It happens.
Jared Spool wrote about this - Actually, You Might Be Your User (an article on uie.com).

But as I said, there may be a perception out there that we just need to get the right people in. The genius designer – someone who’s done something great somewhere else. Or better yet, consultants.

I’m not saying we don’t need talented, experienced people. I’m also not saying that there isn’t a place for consultants. But for anyone, however talented, to have a real impact processes and organisational culture has to be willing to move.

Is higher ed really that different to other sectors?

I was at the UX Scotland conference a few weeks ago, and as I was talking to delegates and listening at sessions I was thinking about the question I had posed myself for this session.

I perceived that things were so much better UX-wise in other sectors. Because of all the jobs being advertised, because every time I go to events in Edinburgh there are UX people from just about every financial sector company there as well as the consultants. Even in the national and local government sectors there’s such a lot happening these days.

But what I heard and saw was that yes, organisations in other sectors are further down the line than us. They’ve got UX teams established. But they’re battling too. Despite an executive somewhere stumping up the money to establish a team they’re still finding their place in the organisation, fighting their battles in siloed cultures, taking the wins where they can get them.

So while I’m envious of what’s happening in other sectors, the big takeaway from the conference was that doing UX in big organisations is hard. And real change and big success only comes with some serious endorsement from on high.

Paul Boag was talking about just getting on and doing stuff under the radar; bringing about digital culture change at grassroots level. And I’m completely supportive of this. It’s what I’ve been doing myself for years in one way or another. The example of gov.uk building an alpha release in a matter of weeks, testing and evolving, is absolutely the way to go. But seeing that through into real change on an ongoing basis has taken support from the very top.

The higher education sector is different to other sectors. But it’s not that different.

How can UX practices flourish in higher ed?

UX flourishes in mature markets where there’s not a great deal of differentiation between competitors’ products. That’s not going to happen right across our sector, but in places where supply exceeds demand, or to differentiate from your institutional peers perhaps, a culture of UX management can really take root.

And if we think about the trend towards online distance learning I think it’s highly likely that UX will become a differentiator. A worldwide market, less familiar with who we all are, international students looking first and foremost for a UK university degree, checking forums to see what students are saying about a particular product…

Opportunities for online learning are potentially disruptive too. Think about MOOCs and professional development courses offered by a whole range of new providers in the marketplace. We only have to look at the banking sector and what has happened since in-person banking began to decline. Could you have imagined supermarkets or new start-ups entering the sector and gaining a strong foothold just 20 years ago?

Disruptive events in the sector are potentially not far away at all, and with online provision comes the opportunity for scaling up delivery and the requirement for self-service. And of course UX is so important to achieving these things. Could your institution find itself being the Blockbuster Video of the higher education sector, missing the point entirely as new entrants like Netflix leave them for dust?

Perhaps that critical mass required for senior colleagues to tune in isn’t so far away.

We’ve got the same humps to get over:

Recognise that we have customers and prioritise them as such.
Appoint people accountable for managing the user experience; joining it up across the silos.
Establish what we want from and for our customers. Share this vision throughout the organisation so everyone knows how to play their part. And incentivise great UX.
Measure and improve and measure and improve. Forever.

When UX is part of an organisation’s fabric – not treated separately – it’s core to the business. Like it is at Amazon, Apple, IKEA…

And I think perhaps IKEA is a good customer experience on which to model what we need to achieve for our students. I bought a kitchen a couple of years back from them, and not from one of a number of other providers of similar quality products that cost roughly the same. What then made IKEA different?

It was no one thing, but a whole load of big and little experiences that kept me and my family engaged. The kitchen design app that my wife found easy and engaging and played with for hours. The café breakfast and free wifi that helped drag me to the store to browse over numerous weekends. The little trolley that kept my 4 year old son entertained. And many more things besides.

Now imagine if we were all managers of the various services that go together to make the IKEA experience, like we are all managers of services that go together to make the student experience. Do you think IKEA achieve their experience by having a load of mini-businesses operating semi-autonomously and prioritising their activity according to metrics they’ve set themselves? Of course not.

So maybe we’re not really talking about UX strategy at all, really. Jeff Gothelf said:

“…there is no such thing as UX strategy. There is only product strategy.”

Read Jeff Gothelf's blog post on UX strategy

There are lots of organisational UX maturity models out there. The one I'm using today is from johnnyholland.com (See: Planning your UX Strategy, an article by Renato Feijo)

So where are you? Where is your team? Your parent organisation? Your university?

Me?

I think the University Website Programme is pretty solidly at 3.
The Programme is part of Information Services which is perhaps at 2 in small pockets, but in many areas still at 1.
And the University as a whole, you’d have to say 1.

So back to my question – what’s with UX in higher education?

Is it that UX isn’t perceived as a differentiator yet?
Possibly, but that’s changing. And in some areas that rate of change is going to be quite dramatic, quite soon I think.

Is it that the nature of the product is such that customers tolerate poorer UX?
Maybe; students aren’t likely to switch to a degree at a competitor institution but they are going to talk about you. What if your business model involves repeat trade? Why wouldn’t you want your best undergrads to stay on at postgrad level after all?

Is it because it’s just too hard?
Do we need higher education UX Woodie Guthries and Thomas Edisons to get where we need to be?
No. Joined up thinking across semi-autonomous business units is possible. Our grassroots endeavours achieve things on a unit-by-unit basis and collaboration across units happens organically when there is sufficient mutual benefit.

The growth in UX management and service design is not going to tail off. It’s not going to fade away because it’s about empowering users. And empowering users is essential to effective self service.

We need to keep on working at grassroots and weaving UX techniques into the projects we have the remit to shape.

We also need to keep on shouting about our victories however small, and the tangible benefits we bring. We also need to understand and communicate where we fit into the bigger picture. Because to achieve the real cultural change that is absolutely essential for future success, what we are going to need a bit of vision and will at a senior level (maybe not quite Edison's inspiration), and a lot of perspiration all round to see it through.

Feedback from conference attendees

28 people provided feedback on my talk. It scored 3.8 where the scale was the scale was 5 (Excellent); 4 (Very Good); 3 (Good); 2 (Poor) and 1 (Very Poor).

Comments:

"Wanted to know more! Was very good!"

"Good presentation with some useful insights and examples of a mismatch between online UX and real-life which I have returned to [my university] telling people about."

"Really enjoyed the UX presentation, just wish there had been longer!"

"Interesting and relevant to me."

"Practical and entertaining too."

"Again - a beacon for HE to sail towards; particularly in terms of content delivered to our existing students; who seem to be a rather neglected bunch (a good subject for a future talk perhaps: all our web resource seems to be thrown at prospective students)..."

"I felt the talk was more of a discussion / exploration which was in itself interesting."

Write ups

The St Andrews web team's thoughts on my session on their blog

Kevin Mears (@mearso) did a fantastic set of sketchnotes which he shared on his personal site

Thanks to @mearso for sharing his sketchnotes

UX activity in UK Higher Ed web teams

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Allison) — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 01:19:00 +0000

To help me prepare for a presentation I'm giving at this year's IWMW web managers conference I sent out a survey to web teams asking about the user experience (UX) research and design work they do, and how formally it was integrated into their role.

73 people took part, with 57 (78%) making it through to the end.

I first asked about experience of user experience techniques,and whether they had any formal responsibility for such work.

12% had no experience.

58% had tried UX techniques in the past, of which
36% apply some in most projects, with
23% having some kind of UX responsibility in their job description.

But only 3% - 2 respondents - had something about usability or UX in their job title.

A sample of the comments appended to this question:

"Although usability is part of my role, my management aren't interested in it. Historically they have sought to bury the poor results of poor usability testing. They think it makes them look bad and that it will just cause them more work."

"There's nothing in my job description about UX, but I've needed to get involved because (to date) we've had no-one else thinking about this stuff."

"My job description doesn't actually include usability and UX, but in practice that's a large part of what I'm doing."

In question 2, I asked about the techniques they had used.

Unsurprisingly, the majority had tried usability testing, but what came as a surprise to me was that personas and user journey mapping came a tied second. Both can be pretty labour intensive and (at least I've found) can be challenging to keep in the mind of the project team on an ongoing basis. While I've read good articles on why personas fail, I've never seen similar written about usability testing or prototyping which for me was unexpected at 4th.

User experience techniques used at least once by survey respondents

In question 3, I asked about the nature and naming of the team they were part of.

36% were part of a tech/IT team.
54% were part of a comms and marketing team.

Only 1 respondent said UX or similar was part of their team's name.

38% said their team had responsibility for UX activity, with 25% having a nominated person within the team responsible.

23% supported colleagues undertaking grassroots user research.

It's worth noting that there were a few respondents from the library sector, and from those involved in organisations supporting higher education.

Question 4 asked whether they had used external agencies in the past. The majority (67%) had had used an external agency at some point in the past for UX work, but only 7% regularly made use. Comments indicated that in some cases, they were referring to design and development agencies that offered UX services, rather than specialist UX consultants.

Has your university used external agencies to undertake UX-related work?

Trends in commentary (question 5) were:

Agencies where expertise of staff didn't live up to the sales pitch, or where one or two staff stood out significantly.
Money is tight, but the learning experience of watching professionals was as helpful (if not more so) than the results themselves. Learning gave confidence to do things in house.
Short term projects limit ability for agencies to get to know the sector/organisation which limits their usefulness.

In question 6 I was interested in broad descriptions of respondents' roles.

How would you describe your role?

Unsurprisingly, with such a crude range of options, about a third went on to describe other things they do. This was a very broad range of responses, from academia to team management to project management to user support.

The final question asked about role and institution. These were the most common terms in respondents' roles:

Word cloud of most common terms in job titles

So all in all, an interesting little insight which I hope colleagues across the sector find interesting too.

I realise this is a pretty light touch run through the data, so if you have any questions leave a comment and I'll try and dig a bit deeper in a subsequent post.

McGovern - how searching has changed

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Allison) — Mon, 30 Jun 2014 10:19:00 +0000

Content management specialist Gerry McGovern's latest article is a nice summary of how he sees search behaviour and how it's changed over the past few years.

He says that from what he's seen people typically prefer to navigate than to search, and to degree I'd agree with him. Perhaps he's slightly oversimplified things (we're neither one nor the other I think - we lean towards search or navigation depending on our task and our domain knowledge) but that's inevitable in the snappy little articles he shares pretty much every week.

What I liked about the article was how he highlighted the relationship between navigation and search; how good navigation - well structured and labelled - also makes for a better search experience with more meaningful results.

The example he used about the BBC intranet that used to provide a list of top searches as a navigational aid which resulted in a vicious circle was great too.

The changing nature of search behaviour - article by Gerry McGovern

Information Architecture's relationship with navigation design

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Allison) — Sun, 29 Jun 2014 22:43:00 +0000

A couple of good articles that talk about the relationship between website navigation design and information architecture (IA) and highlight what makes them distinct.

Many talk about IA when they really mean navigational design, and to a great extent I'm one of them. I've spent the past three(ish) years talking to groups around the university about how and why the website needs to change, in anticipation of us implementing a new content management system that will give me the opportunity to see change through.

I've always used the term information architecture, and while I'm covering topics such as search and taxonomy, the main focus is always on navigation design. It's challenging because I am responsible for very little content; I'm just trying to see through the best consistently presented solutions to many many university websites' content structures.

As we soon enter the critical phase of launching these many many sites in quick succession as we move them over from the current CMS to the new one, I'm about to find out if my planning and groundwork has anticipated everything the new navigational design needs to accommodate.

The Difference Between Information Architecture (IA) and Navigation - article by Jennifer Cardello for useit.com

Framing the Practice of Information Architecture - article by Nathaniel Davies for uxmatters.com

Ongoing CMS development - the NY Times

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Allison) — Sun, 29 Jun 2014 22:09:00 +0000

A really nice article from the developers of the New York Times' in-house content management system, Scoop. How they evolved it, why and how, and where they're heading next.

Of course it's always good to hear about development teams engaging with their user group; working to meet their needs, and to alleviate their problems and irritations with the system.

But what's most striking about this piece for me is the fact that they're there to stay. Their job is continuous improvement and innovation; helping the business do better business online. Not introduce some enhancements to the CMS and then go away until the next time it's identified that the website needs something.

This, for me, is what should be happening in the higher education sector. The switch to digital is of course critical for the newspaper industry so investing in this kind of thing is pretty much investing in the paper's existence. It's the same for universities though - it's just that the pace of change is slower (but accelerating!). The growth in online distance learning, and the expectation of all students to be able to do more and more for themselves online, means we need to be moving faster, being more responsive and indeed identifying opportunities and delivering improvements that our target audiences didn't even know they wanted.

Scoop: A Glimpse Into the NY Times CMS - blog post by Luke Vnenchak

Email content management checklist

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Allison) — Sat, 14 Jun 2014 21:49:00 +0000

An excellent piece from Georgy Cohen for higher ed content strategy website meetcontent.com. If you're involved in regular email communications you should check your activity against her sound advice.

We're all swamped with emails, and there's plenty of data out there showing how low the open rate on mailing list emails can be. So it's critical you get a few points right if you want to get the best out of the medium.

The funny thing is, most of this is obvious, but as we write so many emails on a day to day basis the importance of getting it right for the broadcast message can be missed.

Georgy's tips:

Set your goals, know your readers
Maintain a content calendar
Draft your content
Create your subject line
Use best practices for images
Craft your calls to action
Determine a consistent schedule
Measurement

Best Practices for Email Newsletter Content Planning - article by Georgy Cohen for meetcontent.com

UX in Higher Ed - my talk at July's IWMW

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Allison) — Fri, 13 Jun 2014 13:37:00 +0000

I love the IWMW conferences (the annual event for UK higher education web professionals). Always come away with new ideas and food for thought. Always meet good people. But I've been thinking about what I don't get from the IWMW. And it's this thought that's prompted me to speak at this year's conference being held in Newcastle in July.

I've been working in public sector (and mainly UK HE) for 15 years and attending IWMW since 2006. In that time there has been a lot of change in terms of online content and service management in the sector.

And over this period there has been a huge growth generally in awareness of online usability and latterly the competitive advantage leveraged from improved user experience. But while user experience teams are cropping up in all sorts of commercial organisations, we're not seeing it in higher education.

This brings me back to what I don't get out of IWMW. I don't get a sense of a UX community within the sector. I don't tend to meet people who do the same kind of things as me. I do meet lots of people interested in usability and user experience but not much in the way of active practitioners.

At first I thought: "Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm not moving in the right circles or I've missed the year when UX was the hot topic." But taking a look about online reassured me I'm not paranoid :)

Very little turns up on previous conference schedules around UX or usability. The last item was me in Edinburgh in 2012 doing a workshop on our experiences in user centred design. And the JISC usability mailing list is awfully quiet.

My presentation "Experiences in user centred design" from IWMW 2012
JISC usability mailing list for the UK Higher Ed community

A couple of years ago, Dan Jackson at UCL asked the usability mailing list:

"I'm wondering out loud how many HEI's in the UK have positions directly responsible for improving the user experience, interaction design and information architecture of their institutional web sites and web applications? A quick scan of the last 12 months' activity on this list, and a perusal of the web/digital jobs currently being advertised at jobs.ac.uk, shows the usual mix of adverts for web developers and web content editors, but nothing related to UX or IA. This is in stark contrast to private sector companies, who are recruiting UX consultants like there's no tomorrow..."

Chatting with Dan this week, it seems like he wasn't overwhelmed with responses to his question. Which is a shame because it's a very important question.

It's basically the question I'm asking and attempting to answer in my plenary talk.

My talk at IWMW 2014: "Marketing is dead, long live UX!"

I have my opinions, and those of a few people like Dan who think aloud from time to time.

UX survey for UK Higher Ed web managers

But what about you? What do you think?

I've set up a short survey to gather some experiences from around our sector and feed them into my talk (and probably a blog post too).

Please spare me a couple of minutes to contribute your views and perhaps outline what is happening at your institution.

Take part in my survey - the state of UX in UK higher education

I'm getting excited already about the conference as it's not so far off now. Hopefully I'll be able to prompt a bit of reflection, stir up a bit of controversy and continue the conversation with a few of you...