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….

Web Optimiser Day opened with Dan Siroker, previously of Google and more recently of the Obama Campaign New Media Team.

Google’s Web Optimiser is a free tool that facilitates testing different combinations of content in a live environment. The goal is to deduce which combination of content best drives conversions.

Dan shared lessons he learned about Web Optimiser testing in the trenches of the election campaign, and illustrated how these could be applied to commercial Web optimisation projects.

In November 2007 Barack Obama visited Google:

On that day Barack declared himself to be a believer in evidence, science, facts and feedback. He impressed all around by fielding Eric Shmidt’s standard Google interview question on how to best sort a million 32 bit integers. He said,

“I think the bubble sort would be the wrong way to go.”

Like all good politicians, Barack didn’t actually answer the question, but he did give an impressively intelligent response (a bubble sort would solve this problem, but the sort would run in O(n^2) time making it sub optimal).

Dan was inspired to join the Obama campaign and recruited friends, family and many Computer Science PhDs, and launched an impressive new media strategy, which included numerous rounds of Web Optimiser testing. He shared some lessons he learned with us.

Lesson 1: Define Quantitative Success Metrics

In the case of the election campaign, the over-riding success would be the inauguration of Barack Obama.

The success metrics however, need to be more granular in order to be useful. For example, to measure the success of an Adwords campaign, the first relevent metric is the CPC for generating visits to the campaign site.

The subsequent ’sign up rate’ and the ‘donation per recipient measured in dollars’ complete the cycle.

Comparing campaigns based on these metrics will reveal the success (or otherwise) of a particular campaign.

Dan’s response to a question on how he fed his findings to the wider campaign team was comforting: he did not make use of KPI sheets because he knew that they would not be read.  It is a lesson in itself that the Web Analyst should go full speed ahead — I do believe in educating the wider organisation, but in order to progress, it is often necesarry to just take the reins and provide results.  Dan first proved the worth of testing and then he was given the authority to make changes to the site based on his findings.

Lesson 2: Question Assumptions

The Web Optimiser takes the guess work out of design. Decisions are based on evidence, as opposed to opinion. For example:

Having landed on the Splash Page, which of the following button text do you think would work best at encouraging visitors to engage with the site?

• Sign Up
• Learn More
• Join Us Now
• Sign Up Now

The consensus at Google was that ‘Join Us Now’ would work best, however Dans testing with the Web Optimiser revealed that the ‘Learn More’ button drove the most conversions.

Lesson 3: Divide and Conquer

Moving beyond straight forward testing, Dan then considered whether different combinations of content would work better for different segments of the audience.

For example, the audience for the campaign could be divided into 3 different groups:

• those that had not yet signed up
• those that had signed up but not donated
• those that had signed up and donated already

Combining the Web Optimiser tool, cookies and on page javascript, he tested content on these audience segments separately.  Different button text worked best for different segments of the audience and were deployed as such.

• Donate Now
• Please Donate
• Why Donate
• Donate and Get a Gift
• Contribute

Lesson 4: Don’t reinvent the wheel

Dan told us that there are many open source tools available and we should use them, instead of trying to develop in-house tools ourselves.

In particular, Open Report allowed Dan to automate ad hoc reports, which freed up his team’s time for optimisation and testing.

Lesson 5: Take Advantage of circumstance

Obama’s campaign site quickly responded to offline events that were driving visits to the site, keeping content fresh and capitalising on these visits.

For example, in the 48 hours following Sarah Palins somewhat scary speech at the Republican National Convention in September 2008, $10 million was donated to the Obama campaign within 48 hours.

The following video outlines how Dan used particularly lessons 3 and 5 in order to optimise the campaign site on voting day, by segmenting geographically as well as attitudinally.

Dan is currently developing www.carrotsticks.com, a site that helps kids learn maths; it’s worth a look.

Today is the first of two Google Analytics days at the GAAC summit, and Clodagh and I will also be attending Urchin day on Friday…. assuming we survive trampoline dodge ball tonight.

Google Analytics Authorised Consultant Summit

October 13-16, San Francisco, California

As we speak, Niamh and Clodagh are in California, Google-speaking with other GA consultants from all over the world. We’ll get an update from them on their return: in the meantime, they’re busy eating UTMX cookies. Follow all the GAACS happenings on Twitter (and then follow it some more).

Irish Internet Association workshop | Driving Self Service Online

Tuesday, October 20th, Engineers Ireland, Dublin

Due to Beatles-esque unruly crowds, Colin is giving us a repeat of his Bootcamp course, how to reduce costs by driving self service online. He’s gathered new case studies since June, so the course is new and improved.

Sign up today using the voucher code ‘iQ’ and you’ll get €50 off the workshop price.

Defuse: Design for Use

Tuesday, November 3rd, Sugar Club, Dublin

As part of Design Week, Brian will be one of the 12 speakers braving the Ignite format: 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide. The Interaction Design Association (IxDA) of Dublin are presenting this free event — there’s probably no better way to spend a Tuesday evening. Follow Defuse on Twitter.

Design week’s design challenge

November 6th-7th, Morgan Hotel and Digital Exchange, Dublin

Design Week continues with a day and night design-a-thon, and Conor and John have entered this 24 hour design challenge. Five teams armed with different design disciplines will work through the night to produce a concept for their design sponsor: a member of the public who represents a significant challenge. We’ll be covering this live on the blog, and you can stop by Digital Exchange afterwards to watch the awards ceremony (and mock our sleep deprivation).

In the pursuit for usability or the often intangible user experience, we can easily forget about one of the greatest experiences, fun. The end result is often a mundane, utilitarian design.

Just look at how these designers have altered users’ behaviour by introducing fun into their design.