Thanks to Ruairi for editing, Ciaran for filming, Elizabeth for help scripting and Cory, Finan, Aislinn, Rosarie and Conor for starring.

Any iQ how tos you’d like to see? Let us know.

Irish artist Gary Farrelly has imagined a Dublin city-wide subway system and he’s put it on paper for the cover of this week’s Le Cool online magazine.

What’s so interesting about this subway map is that it has a point of view. It’s a lot like Richard Saul Wurman’s famous Tokyo subway map, which depicts the stations by where subway riders want to go, rather than as a comprehensive map:

Compare this with the actual Tokyo subway map:

When you use a map it’s so you can get to your destination, not so you can memorize an entire area.

Here are some of my favourite parts of Farrelly’s map:

Shark attack town

Just a stone’s throw from Malahide.

Blackrock is a supermarket

That’s a fair enough representation of Blackrock. Although, I’d call it Joe Burger.

Friendly neighbours

Booze to Go right next to Boytown. Perfect.

This could be a great project if we all took part. There are some places in Dublin with a universal association, but many with associations wonderfully individual.

A year later . . .

Photo by c.u.p.k.e.y.k

For the anniversary, and to celebrate World Usability Day 2009, we thought we’d take a look at what we found and what has changed. Oh, and we’re also opening our own studio and throwing a little party.

Check out our latest feature: World Usability Day | A Year in the Life.

After each team received their design challenge, route and sponsor, Julia Cassim from the Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre gave the teams a refresher on universal — or inclusive design as she prefers to call it — as well as some advice for the challenge.

Inclusive Design in a nutshell

Inclusive design, Julia explained is not about being boring, creating special gadgets or lacking insight. She then moved onto the good stuff — the competition.

The design challenge

The teams will have different routes around the city and they’ll have to design the best route to get from point A to point B. The teams will have to think about:

• Obstructions
• Navigation Patterns
• Resting Places
• Contrast between design features and also signage
• Other sensory means people may use to get around (ie. touch)
• Wayfinding

“If you’ve not found a design direction by 7 o’clock tonight you’re in trouble.”

Julia encouraged everyone to build multiple scenarios but to make it snappy.

But she wasn’t short on inspiration: Julia shared the winning pitch from a recent 48 hour (!) inclusive design challenge in Seoul that the Helen Hamlyn Centre ran in October. Pitch Perfect outshone the other entries; it was a karaoke experience inspired by a team’s hearing impaired design sponsor.

The teams are starting the challenge over food, and will be heading into the city with their design sponsors after lunch. Stay tuned for the winner. My bets are on team iQ.

But what about forms that users must fill out even if they don’t want to? Where design and content don’t matter? How does that form spiral out of control?

In the case of the US’s Electronic System for Travel Authorisation, it spirals and spirals until it may as well not be in English anymore.

Photo by Matt Coleman

ESTA: Useless but Mandatory

Most of you have probably filled out this form, because you must to travel to the US. This apparently gives the government some sense of control, even though they aren’t very good at keeping track of illegal immigrants.

If you must get to the end of a form, then you will, no matter how annoying the form is. Just how annoying? Question A:

“Do you have a communicable disease; physical or mental disorder; or are you a drug abuser or addict?”

Poor leper. He’s dying for some sun and sand in Miami, but oops — now he can’t go. He was going to wear a turtleneck through customs, but this form forces him to admit his leprosy and foils his travel plans.

Check out the list of the hottest communicable diseases.

Question B:

Have you ever been arrested or convicted for an offense or crime involving moral turpitude or a violation related to a controlled substance; or have been arrested or convicted for two or more offenses for which the aggregate sentence to confinement was five years or more; or have been a controlled substance trafficker; or are you seeking entry to engage in criminal or immoral activities?

Technically, working on a Sunday constitutes moral turpitude (according to the Bible), so what is the travelling workaholic to do? He wasn’t arrested for it, but still, should he click yes? He certainly doesn’t want to something morally unconscionable in front of the US government.

Question C (the best of the lot)

Have you ever been or are you now involved in espionage or sabotage; or in terrorist activities; or genocide; or between 1933 and 1945 were you involved, in any way, in persecutions with Nazi Germany or its allies?

Waterboarding isn’t a problem, but terrorists always fold under e-forms. And thank god for this form, keeping out those darn Nazi children, now decrepit.

If you ever feel bad about your online form, just travel to the US, you’ll feel much better by comparison.

Onto the good stuff: Web Analytics

I flew the flag for Web Analytics at the Dublin Web Summit,  by encouraging on-site analytics. I also pushed for Web Analytics to inform online marketing and traffic acquisition, in a talk structured around the excellent Web Analytics Business Process from Web Analytics Demystified.

A quick example

A site gets 1000 visits a week but only makes a sale in 10 of these visits, giving them a conversion rate of 1%.

Unfortunately this company cannot pay the wages on 10 sales per week. What they really need to make is 20 sales.

Without making any changes to the site, they would need to increase the number of visits to their site to 2000. Thats hard. Or expensive. Or both.

The solutions

On-site optimisation: an attempt to makes an extra 10 sales in the 1000 visits. In other words , they need to reduce the number of visits in which they didn’t make a sale from 990 to 980. How hard can that be?

Design informed by analytics

How I would increase conversions (or decrease the visits where there are no conversions):

Remove any unnecessary fields from your forms. One troublesome field can decimate your conversion rate.

Minimise the distractions on the checkout screens.  If someone is checking out, you shouldn’t distract them with ads for other products. In fact, I would even strip out much of the navigation from these screens.

Add relevant information to the checkout screens. Customer testimonials (saying how wonderful you are), prominent no fuss returns policy, and great big buttons all work to get people from start to finish.

Even if you are not in a position to make any functional changes to your site, you could say some nice things to your users, hold their hand a little bit and drive them towards conversion.

Optimise your conversions

This is called conversion funnel optimisation.  You can measure how successful you are at decreasing the abandonment rate from your funnels by doing just two things:

1. Set up the address of your receipt page as a goal in Google Analytics
2. Add the addresses of your conversion screens as funnel steps.

Then check out the ‘Funnel Visualisation’ report in the ‘Goals’ section of GA.

Check out my slides from the Dublin Web Summit (pdf).

Photo by Ben Arent

Last night’s Defuse Dublin (part of Design Week) was a resounding success. My objectivity is compromised (iQ was one of the sponsors), but you’ll just have to trust me: it was a fantastic production.

The Defuse Dublin scene

Dublin’s IxDA team know how to put on a good show: an ’80s soundtrack, free Bombay Sapphire (another sponsor), and the Sugar Club. But the crowd didn’t forget what they were there for. When the host stepped up at the start of the night and said “testing” into the microphone, someone shouted “User Testing!” There was an appropriately high nerd ratio: perfect for designers.

A mini design challenge

We were all handed cards and pens at the start of the evening and told to think of a bad design that really annoyed us and sketch the solution. At the break in the show, they projected some of the entries, which inadvertently revealed a major problem in Dublin. A good 25% of the sketches had to do with public transportation. And indeed, that was the winning design sketch, from our own Peter McKenna (his idea: one ticket for all the Dublin transport systems). When offered a choice between a bottle of Bombay Sapphire and Windows 7 as his prize, he went for the gin without hesitation.

The speakers

Let’s get to the good bit. The format for the night — 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide — brought out the best in (almost) everyone. The brevity of the presentations meant that the speakers, all presenting on design, something endlessly broad, remained concrete and specific. Here were some of the best in my humble opinion.

Fiachra Ó Marcaigh talked about the mostly bad, a smidgen of good, Dublin street design, like the seamless transition on O’Connell street from pedestrian walkway to heavily trafficked street, leading to death and injury. Somehow, he made this very funny.

Simon Roberts spent his 5 minutes making fun of Nordic Walking Poles, his point being the importance of stories in our relationship to products. He made the night’s second reference to Segways, proving that many designs fail because we don’t need them.

Simon Denehy, from Perch gave a fascinating talk about designing chairs and desks for primary school students. He found a way to improve students’ posture and therefore health through his design and proved that design iterations for furniture is much harder than ones for websites.

Des Traynor gave a hilarious talk about how design influences our behaviour, usually in ways that aren’t usable; and that we should be designing beyond that. His examples? Crowded bars and meandering supermarket aisles.

Our own Brian Donohue gave another hilarious talk about the Catch 22 of Design: we redesign things that already work fine, but we rely on standard designs that don’t work at all, like elevator buttons.

You can check out the speakers on YouTube. And check out the rest of the Design Week events. Hopefully they’ll be as good as this one.

How to use our studio

You can book the iQ Studio for usability tests, focus groups, or market research.

The fancy stuff

Our studio is decked out with the latest equipment

• a 3 metre one-way soundproof viewing mirror
• DV-quality recording facilities
• a ceiling mounted camera with tilt, pan and zoom you can control from the viewing room

Check out the studio in action:

The important part: the part-y

We’ll be hosting a free launch party at iQ headquarters with short film/video screenings, wine tasting (or BYOB), music and other fun activities. Plus, Powerpoint Karaoke may be making an appearance.

The details:

World Usability Day and iQ Studio Launch
Thursday November 12
6pm - 8pm
iQ Content
2nd Floor Clarendon House
34-37 Clarendon St (opposite Saba)

RSVP to cory.joseph@iqcontent.com if you’d like to attend.

Hal gained popularity with Web Analysts globally when he outlined in a New York Times article that “the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians”.

Searching for insights in the economy

Hal’s presentation called “Predicting the Current Time” covered the insights Google found from their Search and Trends tools, insights related to economic recovery.

Hal said you can take any economic index and build a forecasting model, based on these values:

• the series in the last months (to account for current trends)
• the series in the same month last year (to account for seasonal variations)
• add in the trends in relevant Google search terms

Google’s research shows that in the past, the number of new unemployment claims peaks at the end of a recession.  This is true in American history: almost every American recession has had a peak in initial unemployment claims immediately prior to the end of the recession. 

The amount paid out in benefits peaks several months later.  In the past this number peaked 4 to 6 months after the height of initial unemployment claims, but in more recent recessions this number has peaked 18 months later.  This is a lagging indicator.

In America, the number of initial unemployment claims appears to have peaked already, and it is likely that their recession concluded over the Summer; however, unemployment will not peak for some months.

A search in Google Insights for ’social welfare’, restricted to Ireland, gives the following graph:

Google Insights 'Social Welfare'

This directly reflects the unemployment rates in Ireland, as measured by the CSO:

Unemployment Rates Ireland

The numbers on the graph reflect the number of searches for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches on Google over time. They don’t represent absolute search volume numbers, because the data is normalized and presented on a scale from 0-100.

Is Google showing us the light at the end of the tunnel?

Avinash chose not to take this opportunity to promote his new book, instead he set out with the dual purposes of venting and inspiring, as was requested of him via the GAAC forum.

New metrics

The key message I took from this session was that our traditional metrics (visitors, visits, pageviews etc.) give us a very limited view of the impact of our web content. This is because content is often redistributed across platforms, on-site, via RSS, tweets and retweets.

Avinash encouraged us to develop a new mental model to reflect this.  The reach and velocity of metrics are the future of Web Analytics.

Measuring Twitter

Some expensive analytics tools claim to measure twitter by providing:

• the number of followers a tweeter has, and
• the number of tweets they post

One may have many followers and may post regularly, but any measurement of the reach of a tweeter is not complete unless you consider the prevalence of retweets.  Extensive retweeting indicates that followers are highly engaged, and spreads a message beyond the direct followers.

Marketing is changing dramatically. Avinash suggests this is because the channels of influence are changing.  The amplification of any message sent out is more relevant than the number of followers to whom a message is originally directed.  Avinash suggests a suitable metric to measure your success on twitter is

“the number of retweets per thousand followers.”

Measuring a blog

For a blog, the number of subscribers, rather than the number of visits, is a better measure of success: subscriptions are the ultimate in permission marketing.  Once a visitor subscribes we have permission to push our messages out to them at will. 

• The number of comments per blog post, plus
• the standard deviation of the number of comments

equals a measure of how much conversation the blog is generating, which is a far more effective metric than visits — that just measures how loud we are shouting, not how effective our message is.

The excitement continues

As if Avinash didn’t cause enough excitement, there was Kobe beef and Fois Gras for lunch, and trampoline dodge ball and bounce rate jokes in the evening –I really shouldn’t find them so funny….