The tool’s failure was not just a technical problem: It was an interaction design problem.

Interaction design is an often overlooked aspect of “experience design” – making the quality of a person’s entire experience the project goal.

Ad agencies are good at the emotion end of experience design; engineers are good at the functional end. But marketers (and even technology companies) struggle mightily with making it come together – the interaction design.

We’ve put up with it from the technology world for decades. Think of all the frustrating experiences you have with your DVR, your smartphone, your computer. All designed by people whose livelihoods depend on getting it right.

If they can’t get it right, what chance do we marketers have?

The good news is that it is fairly well-understood how to get it right. There is the stuff that we know from experience, that expertise can help you avoid. And there is the stuff that can only be fixed with process.

It’s the process part that gets skipped most often.

Consider the Republican get-out-the-vote tools that performed so poorly on election day. Its problems were identified in a rant by a frustrated Romney volunteer:

• Critical information was emailed in a 60-page PDF. PDFs are a relic of the print era and are meant for printing. They are not meant for digital consumption. (Indeed, the author ran into trouble because his printer did not work right.) Most low-cost printers that people have in their homes are adequate for printing a page or two at a time; printing 60 pages was asking for trouble.
  This is well known among experienced interaction designers.
• The checklist the tool provided was missing a crucial item: the pollwatcher certificate. It included two entries reminding people to take a chair. Proofreading is proofreading, but a usability walk-through would likely have exposed the problem.
• Three contact avenues were provided: a help line, a legal line and an email address. The author got no response from any. Again, a well-designed usability evaluation would have exposed this problem.
• The tool was billed as an “app”, which caused people to look for it in the big app stores run by Apple and Google. It was not a standalone app, though, but a mobile-optimized Web site that operated like an app. The naming created confusion. Language and labeling choices are critical to success with interaction.
• The Web site was at a secure address, so you needed to enter https:// in the address line, not the much more common http:// . This can be accommodated by a very simple technical trick on the server side, but that was not in place. While a person with a technical mindset would not regard this as a mistake – or worse, would attribute it to “user error”, a usability professional would identify it as a problem that must be addressed.

As you can see from this mix, it’s a bunch of different kinds of problems: proofreading, labeling, hardware, technical.

Interaction designers can help. They are not just concerned with the shape of a button on a Web form; they are concerned with creating an experience that is easy and intuitive in real-world conditions.

That’s understanding the way people use platforms (the PDF issue), ensuring comprehensiveness (the bad checklist), emphasizing the forgiveness of the system (the inadequate support), and knowing the way people actually act as opposed to the way they “should” (instantly assuming that “app” means a Web store product, not entering the necessary ‘s’ in the URL).

A lot of these problems can be avoided by having the right expertise and experience on the team. But that’s not nearly enough.

Interaction designers have known for decades that one tactic far outperforms any other: prototyping and iteration.

There is nothing more effective than watching someone trying to do what your tools are supposed to enable them to do. Good interaction designers get you a big head start, but there is no substitute – and there is science behind this – for watching ordinary people trying to use something that someone else has designed.

This isn’t a beta test. Beta testers are evaluating against a plan. They know, or are told, how something works. They are trying to find programming mistakes. (For a long analysis about how the Democrats tested their own systems, see “When the Nerds Go Marching In” in the Atlantic.)

Usability testing identifies design mistakes.

This is, and always has been, a tough sell. It’s only with the ascension of Apple that ease of use has been understood as a differentiator.

In the advertising world, we spend weeks looking at and refining a digital comp that is flashed up on a big screen. But we are reluctant to spend any time and money prototyping and evaluating our digital designs.

We largely assume that our designs work. In the winner-take-all-world of politics, that assumption can be deadly. Here’s that Romney volunteer on the consequences:

“So, the end result was that 30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help. Like driving people to the polls, phone-banking, walking door-to-door, etc. We lost by fairly small margins in Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Colorado. If this had worked could it have closed the gap? I sure hope not for my sanity’s sake.”

What’s happening with your digital experiences? Do you even know?

We offered it at a surprise time in the middle of the day.

The coupons were gone in 30 seconds.

Sometimes it’s hard to digest the meaning of numbers. Our client has hundreds of thousands of fans, and we understood that.

But jamming our fingers into the dike last week, we felt what that meant.

Via Mashable, a great infographic on the amazing numbers in social media.

• More than half of Americans over 12 years old have at least one social media profile
• Four out of ten Americans on social media platforms identified as frequent users follow a brand, service or product
• 70 percent of the 149 million Americans on Facebook log in daily
• 38 million American adults say their purchase decisions are influenced in various ways by social media

That’s a lot of readers, and it’s generating the beginning of real money: nearly $1.2 million at the $59.95 annual subscription rate.

I was fortunate enough to hear Conde Nast’s Scott Dadich at AIGA Maine’s Abstract conference describe the thinking behind the interface his group developed for the magazine.

It was very simple; swipe across to go from story to story, swipe up and down to read through a story. It works great for the New Yorker, where the words do the work.

The iPad (and tablets generally) were hailed as the answer for traditional media trying to navigate the digital age profitably. Rupert Murdoch saw the potential immediately, and invested a lot in The Daily.

The Daily, however, was a lot of sizzle but not a lot of steak. Technology is alluring, and the people behind The Daily focused on that at the expense of developing a clear voice and a coherent presentation.

It may take a while for the reality to catch up to the hype, but tablets are fantastic media for magazines and newspapers, and the New Yorker is showing that it can work.

They were playing to our instincts and paranoia.

Hundreds of millions of people were holding what we now call a “feature phone.” Those phones could get on the Web (sort of), fetch email (kind of) and sign you up for text messages from brands (that the customer had to pay for).

Our “instinct” was the same one that led us crashing into digital advertising before anyone knew what they were doing there: You go where the eyeballs are.

The “paranoia” was that something was happening here, but we couldn’t figure out what it was: We might be missing out on a huge opportunity for our clients.

Fortunately, our CEO, John Coleman, uttered something after one of these presentations that I was willing to bet was true: ” ‘Mobile marketing’ means the iPhone.”

Substitute “smartphone” for the iPhone (then a Category of One) and we can easily see we are deep in a mobile marketing revolution.

And while we were thinking back then of the phone as a decent platform for digital advertising (even the iPhone did not yet support apps), the opportunities to reach your customer have exploded now that everyone has a pocket-sized computer with them at all times.

So here’s some conventional wisdom about how to market with mobile phones, and where I think a lot of the focus should be for certain kinds of brands:

• Option 1 is to create more engaging interactive advertising “experiences.” This is the “advertiser as filmmaker” idea, inventing something that on its own is so entertaining and fun that people give up their time to experience it, and then share it with others. The odds of success on this are very, very long.  (Just think of the audience testing and vetting that Hollywood goes through each year, and the number of blockbusters produced through that process.) This is always an expensive gamble, but the payoffs can be huge if the creation goes viral.
• Option 2 is to build branded tools that help customers. We loved a hiking/journaling app we pitched an outdoor equipment company a few years back: Buy our hiking boots and get an app that used GPS and Internet connectivity to find, track and share great hikes throughout the country or world. Problem: the app has to be truly useful, and complementary to your product. Then you have to beat an established player to the app market with it (we were literally days ahead of significant product announcements like that). When that happens, it can be magic. And with all those developers looking to unleash their talents, there is a market for sponsorship that could help everyone.
• Option 3, and my current favorite, is to use the smartphone to get closer to the point of purchase. This is an opportunity we are aggressively pursuing with some consumer packaged goods clients. Research is showing what our instincts are telling us: just as no one buys so much as an electric can opener any more without checking the Internet (searching on a desktop computer prior to a planned shopping trip), people are now using their smartphones in the aisles of big-box retailers or chain pharmacies to figure out which of six seemingly identical cold medicines to buy. This can put every marketer right at the point of purchase for the cost of a shelf tag with a QR code and some Web development.

That last one – getting closer to the point of purchase – is one of our current fronts: How can we make it painless for someone who sees products on a shelf to understand our value proposition. The thing that differentiates us from the colorful box to the right?

And how do we do it in a way that is credible, and opens the consumer up to the idea of maintaining a relationship with us?

The technologies change – rapidly – but in the end it always comes down to speaking to the customer at the right time, with the right message, about ways we can make his or her life better.

And mobile hasn’t changed that.

That stuff is important, but as important for us (though generally far less interesting for our clients) is contextual navigation.

“Contextual navigation” is the selection of links to related pages on a page. An example: On a site selling women’s shoes, you might include a link to matching handbags.

We have two objectives: The first is helping the customer find what they are looking for. The second objective is to sell more stuff!

The thing is, it is important to be hyper-relevant with those links. A specific shoe should have a link to a specific handbag. This turns out to be non-trivial.

Pure eCommerce sites have understood the value of this for a long time. Amazon’s collaborative filtering (“People who bought this were also interested in this …”) and the recent Netflix $1 million contest to improve suggestions are good examples.

YouTube is desperately trying to keep people on its site (to generate more advertising impressions, click-throughs and revenue) by improving its contextual navigation. YouTube technicians call this process “discovery”:

That’s the art of suggesting videos that users may want to watch based on what they have watched before, or on what others with similar tastes have enjoyed….Recently, for instance, the group began tackling what it calls topic exhaustion. No matter how much users may like to watch, say, Shaquille O’Neal highlights, they will inevitably reach a point when they will have had enough.So while YouTube used to suggest more of the same topic to users who watched a particular video, it has gently begun to nudge them toward related topics.

The Shaquille O’Neal video may prompt suggestions for Kobe Bryant highlights, N.B.A. clips or even topics further afield, like sports stars who appear in films.

“If we guess wrong, you could leave us sooner,” said Jamie Davidson, a 25-year-old associate product manager on Mr. Walk’s team. “But if we guess correctly, we may get you to watch another 10 videos. This is very hard.”

(Read it all: YouTube’s Quest to Suggest More, So Users Search Less – NYTimes.com.)

We don’t have the data or the computing power at our disposal when we are creating an information architecture for a large site. We do it the old-fashioned way: We try to understand what the visitors want to accomplish when they visit a site, and make it as easy as possible for them to do so.

That results in a hierarchical navigation structure (the main sections of the site) and a slew of contextual navigation elements (the collection of links on a particular page that our task analysis suggests will help people achieve their goals).

Thus a person may just want a pair of shoes. Another may want an outfit. And a third may decide she wants an outfit when she thought she wanted a pair of shoes.

It’s painstaking and unsexy work, but we’ve seen how effective it can be. In an example a few years ago with a large hospital group, improving the contextual navigation resulted in visitors looking at two to three times more pages than they did when the site relied on the primary navigation alone.

(We also exposed a lot of those links — another important part of the story. And another difficult sell.)

We never knew what to call the outcome of this process. I used to say we could create more “awareness” through effective contextual navigation.

We may not have Google’s computing resources on our side, but I think we’ll steal the terminology: “We want to improve discovery on your site.”

Paging through a newspaper allows you to come across things you weren’t necessarily looking for. Some of that experience seems to be lost online, even with hyperlinks, contextual navigation and other techniques.

That’s why I’m still a fan of the “Times Skimmer.” It’s a layout of new stories that presents about a dozen stories and headlines, and the ability to quickly evaluate them and move to another set.

Check it out: Times Skimmer by The New York Times.

Here’s a list of 30 attempts at that that can serve as inspiration:

The navigation might be the single most important aspect of a web design’s usability. Without a navigation, you would be stuck on the home page for a very long time. I believe a navigation or menu must be easy to use, but this doesn’t mean it has to be boring.

See the list at: 30 Website Navigations that Make You Wanna Click It | Web Design Ledger.