One of the most frequent tasks on many intranets is finding people within the company. Providing an effective way to search people is thus a key goal in designing intranets. This goal becomes even more important for an organization like Emirates, a leading international airline, which has over 35,000 employees with over 140 nationalities and where more people are likely to use this feature more frequently.

Our intranet provides many applications that have a people finder feature to help staff find each other. The goal in using this feature varies depending on the application and situation. For example, people may want to find a staff to book a meeting or add them to a project team. Whatever the goal, a simple text input field and a Find button are enough to provide the sought-after results. But again and again I have heard complaints about not being able to effectively find colleagues using this feature.

The effectiveness of the People Finder feature is challenged in the following ways:

1. People misspell names of staff they are searching. (e.g., ‘Vivek’ is spelled as ‘Vevek’; with over 140 different nationalities this is bound to happen.)
2. Names stored in the database are not in proper format. (e.g., ‘Vivek Deshmukh’ is stored as ‘Vivek D.’)
3. People are known by completely different names than the one stored in the database. (e.g., In some cultures women change their names after marriage.)

Figure 1: A typical example of not finding a person in staff directory

How can you design a better People Finder application than the one that so often says “Staff not found!”?

Building on users efforts

One idea is to look at what users do with the problem at hand and how they solve it, and then use their efforts to build the application. For our People Finder application we can do this by having a “Did you mean …” feature, which gives alternative name suggestions to users. These suggestions are not built by pre-defined logic but are based on the collective input of users.

In our department, when colleagues don’t find someone on a People Finder application, they try various strategies. These include:

1. trying different spellings,
2. asking another colleague for the persons correct name and spelling,
3. calling the person directly (if they have their phone number), and
4. checking previous emails to get the exact spelling.

Whatever activity they choose, they make sure that they have the right information to type in the People Finder text box. We need to make use of this effort (i.e., making an error and then fixing it) from the users to build our application. The following conceptual model is my attempt at designing such a system.

Building the application

There are five essential components to this concept:

1. Build a relation table to store incorrect entries. In other words, store search queries which produced no results.
2. Determine if the user has found the right person.
3. Build a relation between the previous incorrect entries with the last correct entry determined in step 2.
4. Check the strength of relation by observing patterns across all users.
5. Present strong patterns as a “Did you mean …” feature on the search results page.

Let’s look at each step in detail.

STEP 1: Build a relation table to store incorrect entries.

To explain the concept, let’s take the scenario in which a user Sally wants to organize a meeting with Timothy Campbell using People Finder but cannot find him because Timothy Campbell is stored as Tim C. in the application database. (See Figure 1 above.) Let us store this incorrect entry Timothy Campbell in a database table called “Relation Database Table for Sally” (See Figure 2).

Figure 2: Incorrect entry inserted in the Relation table for Sally

STEP 2: Determine if the user has found the right person.

Next, let us say Sally tries a few more names in the People Finder text box, which generate no results. We store all of these incorrect entries in the Relation table. After a few failed attempts, Sally asks her colleague how to find Timothy Campbell in the address book. She is told his name appears in the address book as Tim C. Sally types the name ‘Tim C.’ and gets a result with Tim C.’s details. Sally adds Tim C. to the meeting list. It is this action of Sally clicking the Add button that allows us to identify a correct entry for the Relation table. (See Figure 3.)

Figure 3: Sally now types Tim Campbell’s name as it appears in the database.

STEP 3: Build a relation between the previous incorrect entries with the correct entry.

We then build a relation between the previous incorrect entries with the first following correct entry (i.e., Tim C.) and add it to another table called ‘Alias’ for the staff Tim C. Think of the Alias table as a ‘People also know Tim C. as …’ list. Note that the basis for saying that there exists a relation between the incorrect entries and the correct entry is the real life observation that people do what they must to find the correct name to type in the search text box. Of course you may get mismatches but this will be taken care of in the next steps.

Figure 4: Tim C. is related with the previously typed names

Figure 5: Alias table for Tim C.

STEP 4: Check the strength of relation by observing patterns across all users.

Next we identify the most common aliases used for finding Tim C. We do this by looking at the Alias table for Tim C. Those aliases that appear frequently are strong candidates to be displayed with a “Did you mean …” feature. In our example Timothy Campbell and Tim Campbell show a good pattern across different users as aliases for Tim C., so we conclude that when people search for Tim Campbell they mean Tim C.

Figure 6: Alias table shows that lot of people type Timothy Campbell or Tim Campbell to find Tim C.

STEP 5: Present common patterns as “Did you mean …” feature on the search results page.

The last step is to present the most common pattern to the users as a “Did you mean …” feature. In our example when -users search Timothy Campbell we present them with Tim C. as a “Did you mean …” feature. We can show additional information like the department, title or a photo of Tim Campbell so that the user can confirm that it’s the person he is looking for.

Figure 7: Implementation of the “Did you mean …” feature

Making the system efficient

The secret to making our system more efficient is eliminating -irrelevant relations. Consider this question: Should you build a relation between an incorrect entry which was entered at 08.30 and the next correct entry entered at 09.20? Probably not! It is very unlikely that the user will search for the same person after a gap of 50 minutes. A time frame of 20 minutes may be more realistic.

Advice on how to go about building such a system

1. Build a business case
   Building such a system will take time and resources. You will need to present an argument to management why this is important and perhaps make a business case for the effort. Don’t forget to include key stakeholders like Human Resources while presenting the business case. Here are some key points:
   • Users will save valuable time while searching other staff.
   • Colleagues will not be disturbed – their time will be saved.
   • Companies will save on phone bills and employee time.
   • Systems become robust over time without additional work from users or a massive data cleaning effort.
2. Collaborate and co-ordinate with different IT teams who build applications
   Pepare a list of all applications that use the People Finder feature. Collaborate with the IT teams who are responsible to build these applications and work out a plan to implement the “Did you mean …” feature on the current applications. This task becomes easier if you have a centralized IT team.


3. Prioritize applications for implementation
   Our system becomes robust when many users use the system. Start implementing the feature on the “Frequently used by many” type of applications first. These applications will give maximum value in shortest amount of time.

The risks

There is a risk that few users can work together to build a strong pattern of, say, “Jerk” with Rob Stevenson, thus manipulating the system. This can be kept in check by doing two things. If your company is like ours (formal and very particular about its image) you can:

1. Keep pattern strength high especially if the suggestions to users are going to be automatic without human intervention.
2. In addition to high pattern strength you can include a manual check done by HR admin who can authorize or investigate each strong pattern. To do this you will need to provide an admin interface to HR where they can monitor and dig deeper in to strong aliases.

Going forward

Just as users learn a new system by using it, possibly by making mistakes on the way, a system can also be ”trained" to learn from the users by continuously “listening” to users inputs, while helping users along the way. Though some development effort and technical know-how is required, more intelligent people-finding features on company intranets are essential. There is a long-term payoff, and companies will be saving a great deal in terms of employee time and costs.

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As IDEA 2008 draws closer, the IA Institute is conducting a series of interviews with the speakers for the conference. As Event Coordinator for IDEA, I fill a variety of roles, including the Interviewer of IDEA Presenters (which I proudly share with Liz Danzico).

For this interview, I was fortunate to draw Bill DeRouchey’s name. If his name is not familiar to you, some of his work should be. Bill’s blog is Push. Click. Touch. and his Conversations with Everyday Objects presentation is one that is well worth your time.

RU: How did you get your start in Interaction/Information Design?

BD: Like most people working in interaction design, I arrived from a lateral discipline. I had been an information architect working strictly on web projects from 2000-2004, either within an agency or as a consultant, respectively before and after the tech collapse. Prior to that, I had experience in writing, coding, product marketing, web producing, and then all the way back to my early days doing layout of computer science textbooks. So I had many angles on "tech."

In 2004, I was hired as an IA by Ziba Design, a product design company, not an obvious match. But they had a few website projects and asked me to come aboard. I quickly began working on physical products and learned interaction design along the way. Yes, I got lucky. I still take an architecture / flow / structure / behavior / systems approach to IxD, as opposed to the visual design side of it.

RU: It sounds like you’re relatively "young" to the field, but you’re well-known and well-respected in a short amount of time.  How did you get your start as a presenter?

BD: I blame/thank Christina Wodtke for starting me as a presenter. A few months after I started at Ziba, I signed up for a Future of IA retreat in Asilomar, by Monterrey, CA. During registration, Christina asked me "what are you going to present?" Uhhh… So I pitched a talk called the IA of Things discussing my transition from digital to physical products, and the challenges of documenting physical interaction. Later after gentle prodding from Dave Malouf, I finally realized I was talking about interaction design. But that weekend seriously changed my career because I got to meet 40 incredible people, many of which I now consider friends. I discovered I enjoyed pitching weird questions and wrapping presentations around them, such as, what is the history of the button?

RU: I think a lot of us put some of the blame on Christina—and she’s a self-proclaimed talent scout. I’d say she’s on the mark!

What should the audience take away from your talk?

BD: Besides their empty coffee cups? If people took only one thing away from my talk, I’d love it if people saw that they can find UI inspiration almost anywhere and expand their design eye from pure onscreen experiences to any interface out there. Gas pumps, thermostats, crosswalk, elevators, mall signage, anything. Every one of these interfaces affects how someone thinks about technology or information, so there’s always a lesson to be discovered within them. If just five people went home and really looked at their alarm clock for the first time to figure out the design decisions that were made when building it, I’d be happy. We’re going to need a lot more product UI designers in the coming years, and they’re going to come from onscreen UI designers. The job opportunities aren’t all there yet, but the opportunity to learn always is.

RU: Who do you look to for inspiration?

It may be cliche, but my parents. My dad was always the king of the many projects, but he saw most of them through and has done some really amazing things. He started programming somewhere around 1970 on DECs and VAXs and eventually started his own company whose flagship product (UAP-LINK) transferred files across different systems, DEC to VAX, VAX to IBM, etc. A few years ahead of his time. He taught me to program in C when I was still in high school and I did some coding for his company. So my first computer experience was learning CP/M on a DEC PDP-11 and playing Adventure, thanks to him. Then about 20 years later, he built his own plane. He built an RV-10 kit, riveting pieces together for three years during the day while he coded his own instrument panel at night. It’s a gorgeous piece of work and flies perfectly. And my mom will remodel her place in her spare time. Reconfigure the kitchen, build new dressers, sew up quilts, re-mud the ceiling, whatever.
Incredible to see. So I get my Get Stuff Done inspiration from my parents.

RU: Your dad sounds pretty amazing, and it’s interesting to see what other fathers in this space are starting to do with their own kids (Matt Milan and I seem to be teaching the best of the worst IA traits to ours) and how something that used to be considered pretty nerdy/geeky is starting to be viewed a bit differently.

This is a set-up question: What’s your favorite way to communicate with people who aren’t in the same room with you?

Do I have only 140 characters to say it in? Yeah, it’d have to be Twitter. It’s been an amazing tool to stay connected with people that I’ve met at various events and friends here in town. It’s really damn hard to stay connected with all the people we know, so Twitter does a fine job at maintaining that connection by hearing about their lives.

As David Weinberger said, "intimacy is in the details."

RU: Last question, and this is a doozy: Over the course of 2008, you and I have become “friends”—at least I’d say that, and I believe you’ve said that. We most likely will not meet face-to-face until October at IDEA in Chicago, yet I’d say we have built a level of trust and respect for each other—we’ve even worked “virtually” on putting together a panel presentation for SXSW together. How do you think that happened, and who should we blame?

This fascinates me too. It’s true. We’ve never met face to face and we’ve only talked on the phone once, but we’ve had enough online interaction to build both trust and friendship. How the hell is that possible? Tracing it back is an interesting case study. On Twitter, I noticed a few friends (people I have met f2f and trust) keep talking to @russu. Okay, I’ll see what this guy is up to. Seems harmless enough, okay, follow. Then we made some connection on music, and the conversation developed from there. But is this really different at all from meeting people in the “real world”? You meet through mutual friends, connect on something simple, and then just keep talking. That’s the beauty of Twitter. People are giving you many opportunities to connect in some way. Sometimes it clicks and you make a new friend. If you never actually meet, so what? Yes, it’d be a shame, but geography should never be a barrier to connecting with other people.

 

About Bill DeRouchey

Bill has over fifteen years experience as a writer, information architect, product manager and now senior interaction designer with Ziba Design in Portland, Oregon. With Ziba, he frames and details the experience, flow, and interaction on consumer and medical products. Bill also writes about the variety and history of interaction design in everyday experiences on his blog, Push Click Touch, and is a frequent speaker at industry events. He is determined to stretch how people think about interaction design, from beyond the pure digital to any interaction between humans and the artifacts they create. Bill is on the Board of Directors of IxDA, the Interaction Design Association, and serves as Treasurer.

 

About IDEA (Information Design Experience Access)

This conference addresses issues of design for an always-on, always-connected world. Where “cyberspace” is a meaningless term because the online and offline worlds cannot be made distinct. Where physical spaces are so complex that detailed wayfinding is necessary to navigate them. Where work processes have become so involved, and so digitized, that we need new processes to manage those processes.

This conference brings together people who are addressing these challenges head on. Speakers from a variety of backgrounds will discuss designing complex information spaces in the physical and virtual worlds.

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We create software and websites to display and represent information to people. That information could be anything; a company’s product list, pictures of your vacation, or an instant message from a friend. At this moment, there’s more information available to you than at any other time in history.

All this information has a lot of positive effects, but it also creates challenges. “What information consumes is rather obvious; it consumes the attention of its recipients … a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” (Simon 1971). When attention becomes a scarce resource, it’s important to invest it wisely. Information architects and designers play a critical role in ensuring the products they design provide users’ with a return on their investment of attention.

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) has described focused attention as “psychic energy”. Like energy in the traditional sense, no work can be done without it, and through work that energy is consumed. Most of us have experienced a mental/emotional state where all of our attention (or energy) is totally focused on an activity. Csikszentmihalyi (1990) named this state “flow,” based on how participants in his studies described the experience.

In this state of consciousness, people often experience intense concentration and feelings of enjoyment, coupled with peak performance. Hours pass by in what seems like minutes. We tend to enter these states in environments with few interruptions, where our attention becomes focused by a challenge that we’re confident we can handle with our existing skills. Feedback is instantaneous, so we can always judge how close we are to accomplishing our task and reaching our goal. The importance of the task influences our level of motivation and perceptions of how difficult the task will be.

Attention and Flow

The elements associated with the flow state can be classified into the three areas; 1. Causes of Flow 2. Characteristics of Flow 3. Consequences of Flow (Novak, Hoffman and Yung, 1999).

1. Causes of Flow

• A clear goal
• Immediate feedback on the success of attempts to reach that goal
• A challenge you’re confident you have the skills to handle

2. Characteristics of Flow

• Total concentration and focused attention
• A sense of control over interactions
• Openness to new things
• Increased exploratory behavior
• Increased learning
• Positive feelings

3. Consequences of Flow

• Loss of consciousness of self
• Distortions in the perception of time
• Activity is perceived as intrinsically rewarding

As designers, we focus on the elements that precede or cause flow. Users visit sites with pre-existing goals (e.g., finding information about a product). These goals evolve over time as users complete tasks and their attention is drawn to other information. The main elements designers can control are:

• Providing immediate feedback
• Balancing the perception of challenge against users’ skills

Designing for Flow

You don’t need to take a course or learn a new software package to design for flow. In fact, you’re probably already doing it. Begin by considering the desired outcome of every interaction and then removing everything that distracts the user from accomplishing that outcome.

Start by removing distractions or impediments wherever possible. For both physical and interactive products, this means reducing or eliminating both external (i.e., environmental) and internal (i.e., pain, discomfort, anxiety) distractions that cause emotional responses like frustration or physical discomfort. Emotions demand and divert the user’s attention. Providing immediate feedback for all user actions helps to reduce user anxiety. The effective use of layout, information design, typography, interaction design and information architecture all help in balancing the perception of challenge against the user’s skill level. Information should be broken down into manageable “chunks” that don’t overwhelm users cognitive faculties.

When it comes to balancing the users’ perception of challenge, think of it this way: too much challenge with too little skill causes anxiety; and too little challenge with too much skill causes boredom.

Flow occurs at the boundary between boredom and anxiety. Think of it as a channel that runs between anxiety and boredom.(Figure 1)

Figure 1: Anxiety, Boredom and Flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990)
(captions added van Gorp, 2006)

As the challenges we face increase, we become more anxious and lose flow. Re-entering flow involves increasing our skills to match these challenges and reduce anxiety. As we increase our skill level, we become bored unless we increase the challenge to match our greater abilities.

To understand how we can reduce distractions, let’s examine the different elements of flow again to see how each can be applied to user experience. The causes of flow have the most implications for website and application design.

Causes of Flow

1. A clear goal…

The user navigates to accomplish a task, like seeking information on a particular topic or surfing for fun. This is an evolving goal, dependent on the options presented to the user and aided by logical information architecture, intuitive navigation, effective wayfinding and clear options for proceeding like information scent, breadcrumbs, meaningful labels, clear page titles, etc.

2. With immediate feedback on the success of attempts to reach that goal…

The user receives quick, sensory feedback in the form of a visual shift and/or sound from links, buttons, menus, or other navigation items.

3. Presented as a challenge that you have the skills to handle.

The opportunities for action are balanced with the user’s ability. At a basic level, this is accomplished by providing an uncluttered interface and eliminating unnecessary information to limit the user’s cognitive load. As the users’ skill increases over time, the interface can increase its complexity as well. Adaptive interface technologies allow the user to adjust the complexity of the interface to meet their enhanced skills.

Flow and Emotion

Flow tends to occur in situations with higher levels of challenge and skill. If the challenge is too easy, or user skill levels are very high, anxiety can be so low that there is little motivation to do anything. This level of activation or “arousal” in the body is the physiological (i.e., bodily) dimension of emotion. The level of arousal affects how intensely we experience a given emotion, and intense emotions demand our attention. In evolutionary terms, it’s easy to see why; the more attention your ancestors paid to predators, the more likely they were to survive and reproduce, passing their genes on to their descendants, people like you and me.

Both pleasant and unpleasant objects and experiences can increase arousal levels. Frustration and the excitement both increase arousal levels. So do large images, bright colors, and high contrast (van Gorp, 2006). For example, increasing the size of an image and moving anyone in it closer within the frame increase arousal levels.

Figure 2: Interpersonal Distance and Arousal
How does looking at the picture on the right make you feel compared to the one on the left?

The key to balancing arousal is to match the perceived challenge to the users’ skill level. Since skill levels differ from one user to the next based on their previous experiences and the type of task, interfaces should be very user-friendly but also allow more advanced users to find challenges appropriate for their skill level. These challenges can include the visual aspects as well as the content (King 2003). To put it simply, everything about a site, including content, information architecture, interaction design, and visual design can contribute to flow.

Goal-directed vs. Experiential Use

Different motivations for using a website require different designs to facilitate flow (Novak, Hoffman and Yung 1996). Novice users tend to see the Internet in a playful way, while more experienced users tend to view the Internet in a more utilitarian way (King 2003). This leads to a distinction between experiential and goal-directed use. Flow tends to occur more often during goal-directed use, because of the higher challenge involved.

Novice Users – Experiential use

• Less challenging
• More exploratory
• Entertainment-oriented

Experienced Users – tendency towards Goal-directed use

• More challenging
• Less exploratory
• Connected with tasks (e.g. research, work and shopping)

The lower level of challenge in an entertainment-oriented, experiential site means there is a lower level of anxiety connected with its use. Someone who is less anxious is more capable of using creative thought to determine how to navigate a website and overlook minor problems. Motivation here is driven by subconscious arousal triggered by interesting visual elements, bright colors or high contrast. Experiential sites can and should be more arousing visually to demand the greater attention that can lead to flow experiences.

Figure 3: Disturbia film site
An example of a visually rich, entertainment-oriented site with little or no challenge involved.

The greater challenge of completing tasks (possibly under deadlines) on a goal-directed site creates more higher arousal. Anxiety makes users less able to think creatively when problems are encountered. If a product will be used in a stressful environment, like a hospital operating room, usability becomes crucial. All relevant information needs to be close at hand and visible and feedback should be clear and immediate. A goal-directed site can and should be less visually rich so that users, already anxious at the prospect of a challenging task, are not overwhelmed.

Figure 4: Yahoo

When tasks are particularly unpleasant, we often lack the motivation necessary to complete them. In these cases, increasing the arousal level through the use of narrative can increase the user’s motivation. The Tango Tax website uses visual elements that resemble those found in movie posters and has a high contrast, cinematic feel that increases arousal. The software also introduces the classic cinematic narrative element of “us vs. them” to help increase user motivation.

Figure 5: Tango Tax website

Conclusions – Traits of Websites that Encourage Flow

How you apply these ideas depends on your target audience, as well as their internal and external use contexts. Consider the likely emotional state of your users. Are there loud noises, crowds, brightly colored objects or other distractions in the user’s environment?

Here are some basic website traits that will help to encourage flow.

• Clear navigation: Make it easy for the user to know where they are, where they can go, and where they’ve been, by including signposts such as breadcrumbs, effective page titles, and visited link indicators.
• Immediate Feedback: Make sure all navigation, such as links, buttons, and menus provide quick and effective feedback. Offer feedback for all user actions. When this isn’t possible, provide an indicator to hold the user’s attention while waiting (e.g., progress bar).
• Balance the Perception of Challenge With the User’s Skill: Since user skill levels differ, it’s up to you to balance the complexity of the visual design with the number of tasks and features people can use. Consider whether they are likely surfing experientially for fun or completing an important task. Tailor your sites to your audience’s scenario of use: more visually rich for experiential use and less so for goal-directed use.

Adaptable interfaces that allow the user to increase or decrease the perceived challenge by choosing how much detail is displayed. Simplicity helps reduce anxiety for both novices and experts, which is especially crucial in highly stressful situations. Options for information-rich displays can introduce challenge for more experienced users.

Whether you’re an information architect, interaction designer or visual designer, your work should compel users to invest their attention, and then provide them with a return on that investment.Remember, designing for flow doesn’t require a new set of tools or skills – only a different way of thinking. Finding the right balance of design and challenge can help focus attention and create flow, which results in immersive and engaging user experiences.

References

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. (1990). Flow – the Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper Perennial.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1977). Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Copyrights: Journal of E-Business (International Academy of E-Business). All rights reserved. Journal of E-Business, Vol. 1, Issue 2, December 2001.

King, Andrew B. “Chapter 2 – Flow in Web Design.” 2003. http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/2/ accessed on January 21/2007.

Fogg, B.J. (2003). Persuasive Technology – Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.

Hoffman, D.L, Novak, T (1996), “Marketing in hypermedia computer-mediated environments: conceptual foundations’”, Journal of Marketing, Vol. 60 pp. 50-68.

Norman, Donald A. (2004). Emotional Design – Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books.

Novak, T.P, Hoffman, D.L (1997), “Measuring the flow experience among Web users,” Interval Research Corporation.

Novak, T, Hoffman, D, Young, Y (1998), “Measuring the flow construct in online environments: a structural modeling approach”, Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, working paper.

Novak, T. P., Hoffman, D. L., and Yung, Y. 2000. Measuring the Customer Experience in Online Environments: A Structural Modeling Approach. Marketing Science 19, 1 (Jan. 2000), 22-42

Rettie, R., (2001), An Exploration of Flow during Internet Use, Internet Research, 11(2), 103 – 113.

Simon, H. A. (1971), “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World”, in Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, ISBN 0-8018-1135-X. pp. 40-41.

Simon, H. A. (1996), The Sciences of the Artificial (3rd ed.), Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-69191-4. pp. 143-144.

van Gorp, Trevor, J. (2006). Emotion, Arousal, Attention and Flow: Chaining Emotional States to Improve Human-Computer Interaction. University of Calgary, Faculty of Environmental Design, Master’s Degree Project.

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Games are fun, addictive, beautiful, and immersive. Websites, for the most part, are not. Take a moment and think about what video games look like, what they sound like, the way you can move on the screen, what “you” can be. Think of how you feel when you play and who you play with. Consider the launch of Halo 3 on Xbox 360, with unprecedented graphics, sound, and interactivity that Time.com called “refined to the point where it delivers only pure unadulterated gaming bliss.”

People gaming on computers and consoles are having a blast and spending big. The result: elements of the game medium are drifting into other digital experiences. Video games have become sophisticated creations that can take years to develop, weeks to play, and days to go platinum. The $12.5 billion dollar market (NPD Group 2006) continues to grow as game franchises have extended into books, graphic novels, films, merchandise, and communities of devotees. The televised Video Game Awards is in its sixth year and the influence of gaming culture is increasingly appearing in the mainstream.

World of Warcraft featured on the Jeopardy game show

Companies should create rich and immersive website experiences, drawing from some of the techniques for game design to build brand affinity and differentiate their sites.

Where did those three hours just go?

When considering whether elements of video game design could apply to a site, you might think the category of your site is your first question. At first glance, advertising sites, RIAs, and some transactional sites seem obvious candidates for engrossing their visitors in the world of the brand; enterprise solutions, not so much. As John Ferrara has demonstrated, games tackle similar tasks as web applications and the HCI considerations still apply. No category of site is therefore inappropriate for “game think.”

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Are you looking to build brand affinity?
• Do you have universal corporate messages that you would like to communicate to all visitors?
• Do you need to create strong incentives for your users to complete a certain task or contribute in a certain way?
• Do you want your informational site to be more compelling than a brochure?
• Do you have a significant set of features that might overwhelm first-time users?
• Does your brand welcome customer contributions and self-expression rather than requiring that all content and experiences be curated?
• Are you leveraging a marketing campaign that already has audio, animation, and transition styles and a narrative associated with it?
• Is social media and building an online community part of your strategy?

If you said “yes” to most of these questions, then “game think” could be applied to your site.

Successful video games get users to suspend disbelief, form a visceral connection, and invest themselves in the game world. Players can go into a zone and feel a sense of flow, described as “a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity” ¹. Imagine a website where visitors also feel and behave this way: they are engaged and focused, unaware of time, unselfconscious, and feeling rewarded. It would mean we could present brands in more complex environments and we could sustain interest in a site for longer. We could make time spent on a website more enjoyable to the visitor by touching them emotionally. Businesses could move beyond transactional interactions with visitors to mutually beneficial relationships, for long-term future rewards.

Websites don’t need to become more like video games in every way. The inherent purpose of a game is to have fun, and that is not the core motivator for most websites. Many of the most successful sites are able to incorporate fun into the experience, but the suggestion here is that the design of video games offers lessons, rather than a game’s defining attributes of fun, non-productivity, and uncertainty. Key elements of video game design are attractive to website designers because they remove some of the constraints we apply to solving design problems, and open up new opportunities for brand expression.

Such elements include:

• the reliance on discovery
• an expectedly steep learnability curve
• explicitly graded levels of difficulty
• expression of information using scenes rather than linear pages
• the entertainment value and length of time engaged in a game title

Infusing websites with some of the attributes of games does not mean that we abandon the notion of utility either. Game players have goals—to kill enemies, to find treasures, to amass wealth—just as web visitors have goals. There exists a need to make progress, to accomplish something. Successful games induce a player to take on a goal, believe in it, obsess on it, and return to the game over multiple sessions, often spanning weeks, in pursuit of achieving it. Game designers plant a kernel that rages so strongly that a player will dedicate considerable time to it. How can we, as website designers, plant such a kernel in our users?

Attributes of websites vs. video games

Websites	Video games
Hand-eye coordination: digital	Total body coordination: physical
Usable	Learnable, playful, discoverable
One level of difficulty	Multiple levels of difficulty
Social content	Social interaction
Web development	Product development
Wireframes	Storyboards
Page	Scene
2D	3D
Needs are user-centric: satisfy the user	Needs are engendered: satisfy the player
Free	Bought
2 to 15 minutes	Hours to days
Task, transaction and information	Entertainment
Sticky, at best	Addictive
Cheap to design and build	Expensive to design and build
Superficial customization and personalization	Considerable customization and personalization

So how do you play this thing?

Nine approaches can put you on the path to creating differentiated website experiences.

1. Find a balance between challenging and rewarding the user

Gut reaction: who wants to be challenged? This is an area where “game think” is not suitable for every brand, company, and user goal. Conservatively positioned banking web application used by time-poor mom: “no thanks.” Progressive youth fashion brand frequented by surfing tween: “why not?”

Call of Duty 4’s initial levels include tasks to familarize the player with weapons and actions

Another way to consider “challenge” is to recognize that games have rules and environmental constraints (e.g. materials, locations, physical spaces). Many websites and web applications also rely on rules and have other constraints that require users to interact with them in a certain way (e.g. travel booking forms, profile setup wizards, retirement benefit calculators).

Thinking about the way a game challenges a player is to think about:

• Learnability. When you start a new game, you have to try buttons, actions, commands etc. to see what can be done. By the end of a few sessions you’ve worked out pretty much everything, and the game has probably guided you through most of it. Apple made the bet that people would be able to work out how to use an iPhone without the familiarity of the interactions from other phones. Users learned the gestures quickly and it has been hailed as an incredibly usable device. As the breadth of activities that can be performed online expands, the way we navigate and interact with those sites and web applications is also going to evolve. Usability will not be the key driver; it will be a given, and learnability will play a larger role.
• Safe environments to explore and make mistakes. If you provide a way for a user to pleasantly explore and discover different things without irreversible consequences, then a website does not have to be immediately transparent in how it is used. Supporting rich undo, cancel, back, reset, and restart in appropriate ways contributes to the safety net where a user can experiment.
• Swapping between easy and advanced modes. In video games, players who can handle it opt for more advanced game situations. If they find it too hard, they swap back. Crisis over. Some websites and applications ask users to select a version (standard, professional, custom, or other more complex) before they’ve even tried it out. And then once they’ve selected the more advanced version they’re stuck with it. Let them swap.
• Progressive disclosure. Instead of overwhelming a player with all the modes of play (weapons, locations, moves etc.) from level one, the video game gradually introduces more sophistication and power. The most important options are offered initially, then more complexity is introduced as a player progresses, or specifically requests it. Tips, tutorials, and demonstrations from other game characters allow the player to learn as they go. Managing the learning curve of your website requires prioritizing features into primary, secondary and so on, knowing the technical and functional domains of your novice and expert users, and determining how many stages of disclosure are appropriate.

Usability is new to gaming; the focus has been on learnability and the visceral connection of the player with the game. Many websites aim to be intuitive. Video games show us that new paradigms can be learned.

2. Allow an ultimate fantasy experience that might actually be true to life

Fantasy experiences are not limited to creating an alter ego with a perfect body. Fantasy experiences incorporate:

• Doing something in a game that is not actually possible (e.g. breathing underwater in a lost submarine city while shooting cyborgs, in BioShock)
• Doing something in a game that is possible, just not as you (e.g. bashing out a guitar solo of “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns & Roses as Slash himself in Guitar Hero I).

Plan your dream kitchen at Ikea with your kitchen’s dimensions

For some games (e.g. Gran Turismo), representing the details of real life as closely as possible is important. Players can dream that the skills they use in the game compare in a minute way to the skills they would need in the real situation. In other games (e.g. Legend of Zelda), the sense of freedom that comes with doing the improbable is intoxicating. Who doesn’t dream of flying?

For a website, supporting both of these extremes might be worthwhile. In a shopping scenario, some users may want to see what certain apparel looks like on their exact body, while others will want to experience how a minor member of a royal family, feted with personal shoppers, is treated. Probe whether the fantasy experience that your users say they want, or your client would like to offer, is the type of thing only celebrities get up to or is not actually done on Earth. Both offer enormous opportunities for originality and usefulness.

3. Give users control of audio, colors, environment, characters

Let the user’s DNA mix with the site. In games such as Grand Theft Auto, the user can select genres of music to play in the background as well as the volume of the sound effects relative to the music. Users set preferences such as gun cross-hair positioning, colors of environmental elements (e.g. make the racing car red so it stands out more and can be recognized more quickly in the pack), and other elements. The aim here is not to make the game prettier or set arbitrary preferences but to make gameplay more efficient.

Avoid encouraging users to play around with design features that don’t make sense. For websites, the modifiable controls should encourage more effective interaction with the site. For example if, on a banking site, a customer wants to be alerted to all transactions over $100, enable them to red flag these line items in online statements. If a traveler is on a travel planning website coordinating a ski trip, let them use images of snowy landscapes to immediately visually differentiate this trip from the summer vacation that’s also in progress. If a user has the desktop email program configured so that an audible ping gets their attention, chances are they would like the same for their web-based email. Give users who value this customization the options, so they can tweak for added user-friendliness.

Design control of Second Life avatars offers unprecedented detail

Most games enable users to customize, and thus emotionally invest in, their characters. Second Life takes character creation to a level that invites the user to design anything from a facsimile of herself to something genetically impossible. Forget about shirt color, heels or sneakers, brown hair or blond—you can tweak freckle distribution, eye socket depth, lip pout, hand shape and other micro details along a continuum. Such advanced customization options enable the player to design someone unique and nuanced, and enjoy the sense of pride or accomplishment that goes with it. Once you’ve spent serious time perfecting the tip of your avatar’s nose, the bluntness of their profile and the hue of their cornea, you can bet that you’re not going to throw that work away lightly. You’re going to fall in love with your creation and show it off. What’s more, your handiwork and use of customization options impact the way other players or visitors to a social media site interact with you.

Make the character customization options on a website substantial enough, and give the options consequences, and you’ve won a degree of user loyalty. Yahoo, for example, enables visitors to create avatars that represent them as they move around the site. Users can express parts of themselves in Answers, chat, and other web applications without having to reveal their real identities. This way, visitors can avoid the proliferation of recognizable online identities and mitigate privacy concerns.

4. Wrap narratives around the action and functionality

Exactly how did Lara Craft become a tomb raider? How does this impact what “you” can do in the game? The back stories on games are well thought out narratives that drive the design of characters, scenarios, dialogue, levels and more. When new versions of games are released, the storyline develops further and players continue on the journey. Stories put everything in context.

The site reveals its functionality through a conversation, which tells the story of the firm

The narrative for a website might stem from a number of different ideas and constructs, including personas, how the site fits into the organization’s processes and business model, the company’s history, corporate values, and its brand attributes. More likely it will come from medium- to long-term communication messages already evident in offline marketing activities, especially television commercials. If the company advertises, then the company’s story is already out there.

Bjorn Borg clothing store tells “heritage” stories as video montages and invites visitor stories too

Characters, locations, and storylines can evolve online. In fact arriving at a site that doesn’t continue this story or resonate with what visitors have experienced elsewhere is jarring and disorienting. Site navigation, imagery, and messaging should tell a universal story to all visitors to the site, so that they all walk away knowing what this company stands for and what it’s about.

5. Build delightful transitions and animations

Design flourishes (or lack thereof) reveal a lot about brand and add a layer of quality that can be impressive. Games have pushed the technical and design boundaries of animation so that pretty much anything that can be imagined can be represented on the screen. The physics engines do the heavy lifting within the games themselves, but the designers have also labored over the animation and transitions for non-game screens.

All aspects of the Mercedes Benz AMG interactions—selections, deselections, transitions—have been given carefully considered behaviors

With the emergence of Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the web is rapidly catching up with gaming technology. The challenge is to actually understand what the web is now capable of and dream up the designs to exploit it. For example, navigating through a video game menu is rarely a matter of point, click, see next screen. Every interaction with the non-game screens and in-game menus is an opportunity to reinforce a brand attribute, or pad out the world the player has entered, or let the user know they’re on a certain path. Every interaction.

Blue Moon Brewery makes the most of every click

6. Use loading screens to educate the user how to use the site better

There can be a lot of dead time playing a video game: loading, graduating to a new level, “dying,” cutscenes that relay the story and so on. Games make the most of this limbo by telling players more about the game. Hints, tips, factoids, instructions, and trivia are displayed while the player patiently waits for the fun to start. “Slow mo” scenes from previous games, spectacular gameplay sequences, acted scenes contributing to continuity and online player statistics—game designers are tapping their imaginations to come up with novel ways to make these loading screens not only palatable but valuable.

If you know the page that is loading, give the user a tip on how to use it, such as in Tony Hawk Proving Ground

Online, users have the luxury of simply leaving a site if they have to spend too much time watching progress bars. Empower the user with something extra so that when the site or module finally loads they’re better prepared to use it effectively, better informed about the company, or at least amused.

7. Implement strong audio cues to provide feedback

Playing certain games with no sound is nigh impossible. You can’t hear things approaching, you’re not sure if your action was executed, you’re not sure where to go, you’re unclear about the results. Think of all the website usability tests you’ve witnessed where the participant is confused about whether their click registered with the site and whether something is happening. Further evidence of this confusion is the “only click once” message that some sites use to deter visitors from clicking again, when they think their action was not registered.

On the web, sound has been anathema. Websites that suddenly blare music at you during discreet workplace web surfing have destroyed the fun for all of us. But audio cues are common on computer operating systems and traditional applications. They’re such a simple, effective way to reinforce an action, alert you, or let you know whether something was successful or not.

Audio can add satisfaction by imitating real world sounds that we’re familiar with. The state of flow is supported because there is no need to translate the result. For example a falling two-note sound is instantly recognized as a negative result, whereas the cha-ching of a cash register is known to be a sign of money being exchanged.

On Uniqlo.com many clickable elements are indicated with an audio cue, with another sound to indicate when you have clicked and when a successful action is complete

Also, audio is another way to exercise brand muscle. Nothing quite lets a user know what your brand stands for than expressing it with a sonic branding device or giving it a literal voice. What sound would you expect to hear when visiting intel.com?

8. Play with spatial cues

Flash, Silverlight, and WPF make working with spatial cues a more interesting proposition. Many games rely on recreating three dimensions so that a player can move through terrain or other environments. In fact, game design has been likened more to architecture than film-making (which is another popular comparison) because the designers need to signal to players that they should move from location A to location B.

Using 3D space on the web is easier to visualize now that Vista, Leopard, iPhones, and iPods have reimagined how items can be stacked, ordered, shuffled, zoomed in on, and previewed. The physicality that is innate with game playing is migrating to other digital technologies, such as the web, through touchscreens and gestures.

Adidas uses backgrounds and foregrounds forcefully to denote hierarchy

Designs using the “z space” are emerging, often targeting younger audiences who might more comfortably migrate their behaviors from other media to the web.

Nike’s Jordan site features zoom controls to navigate the space

Visitors are instructed to hold down mouse keys and drag, use mouse scrolls, or use keyboard and mouse combinations to move within all three axes. Website designers can now add “depth” to the design toolbox when considering hierarchy, prominence, information design and chronology, among other things. Any element closer to the user will be more prominent.

9. Sprinkle in a few surprising serendipitous moments

Serendipitous touches are the ones that you dream up in the heat of brainstorming and figure your client is never going to go for. They’re a little bit clever, or silly, or over the top, and that’s what makes them memorable and essential. Those “extra mile” details are the ones that get a site talked about and bookmarked. They’re the things that fans savor and brand advocates “get.” For example, when your character dies in The Sims 2, the Grim Reaper appears and looks over some paperwork potentially to do with the character’s soul. Who knows? It’s totally ridiculous, and the first-time reaction is likely to be laughter, even though the player is about to start the game all over again.

The Sims 2 injects unexpected humor into what is actually an annoying situation

Flickr.com’s multilingual greetings are often cited as a lovely unexpected gesture. The designers didn’t have to do it, but they did, and it is appreciated. How many other sites welcome you and you ignore it entirely? Is this an approach recommended for every brand? Such a gesture doesn’t imply childishness: rather, it acknowledges that a human is visiting this website. There’s usually an attribute within every brand that is related to being human: this is the attribute to exploit. Think about the emotional response you’d like to get from your website visitor and find one or two ways to elicit it in a playful way.

Steadyhand’s CEO checks his phone while he waits for the user to interact with him, like a game character waiting for a player to start

Did the design stage just get longer?

Incorporating some of these ideas into the design phase of a project need not take extra time. Applying “game think” as a filter across activities you’re already doing will get you a lot of the way there.

Game designers adopt different methodologies, produce different deliverables, and follow different processes than website designers. It doesn’t make sense to take on many of these because ultimately you are creating different products. However, the fact that you’re working with the same medium—people access the internet through gaming consoles and play games on computers—should cause you to pause and consider how to make better use of the channel.

Energize a site and engage more of the user’s senses with animations, transitions, 3D, and audio. Then let the user bond with the site by having the site tell a story while incorporating their preferences, so that there is more “conversation” and less “messaging.” Encourage the user to explore and become an expert on the site through a choreographed dance of challenge, education, and reward. Finally, delight your visitors and get them hooked through unexpected, frivolous, and unique touches that your brand can own.

The payoff for using video game design elements is a memorable, distinguished, high-impact user experience that brings a brand to life, increases loyalty, and reaches out to new customers.

Your next step? Go play some video games and get inspired.

¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

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As we discussed in “part one”:http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/building-the-ux, the skills in research, information architecture, interaction design, graphic design and writing define the recognized areas of User Experience design. However, there still remains much to discuss about what makes a UX team dreamy.

Each UX Dreamteam has a finely tuned mix of skills and qualities, as varied as the environments in which they operate. Part two will address whether a person has the right ‘hard’ skills and ‘soft’ qualities like communication style, creativity and leadership ability to fit your particular organizational context. We’ll also touch on the quality of an individual’s personality that may or may not complement the others on your team.

Personality

Perhaps the most important consideration in forming your Dreamteam is mixing the personalities of your superstars. As mom used to say “It’s not just about how you look, it’s what’s inside that counts.” A candidate may look ideal on paper, but until you have them in front of you, talking and interacting, you won’t know if what is inside will be a fit. Your group spends almost as much time together as apart, they need to respect and like one another to work well together. Personality typing tests hold the promise of quantifying the immeasurable, but you would be ill advised to use them as part of the interview process. Myers Briggs, DISC and plenty of others use various axes to measure the intrinsic tendencies of a person.

As cool as it sounds, the science is just not exact enough to act as the basis of any decision. This is not to say that these tests are not illuminating in their own right – they certainly foster greater understanding and empathy among teams. Generally speaking, though, people under pressure may answer personality tests as they think they should rather than honestly.

Collaboration is a big part of design best practice and the ability to work well with teammates should be of paramount concern. Selflessness indicates that a candidate is a team player as they seek to raise not only their own reputation, but equally those with whom they work. Humility, humor and empathy are virtues particularly relevant to the creative industry and should be sought after in UX professionals. Each player on the Dreamteam accepts when they’re mistaken, keeps each other creatively entertained and feels for the users they serve.

As much as any skill or quality we have already discussed and will explore in this article, finding the right personality type you need is the classic answer: ‘it depends’. It depends on the personalities of existing Dreamteamsters, the type of work they do, and on the organization into which they must fit. There is no magic formula, but there is one thing to always avoid: toxicity. Morale and productivity can be totally undermined by a “toxic person”:http://bipolar.about.com/od/support/a/070315_toxic.htm. Having one aboard can turn your Dreamteam into a nightmare.  So, do your homework to avoid inadvertently hiring them.

Screening Tips:

Look for signs of toxicity by asking about previous work places and their interactions with teammates. Did they voluntarily leave the last job? Do they mainly talk badly about their last workplace? Remember, a toxic person is often manipulative and they may seem great on the surface, so check references. If you misjudge a new hire and you realize you have a toxic person aboard, waste no time in jettisoning them, no matter how skilled they may seem.

Creative and Analytical qualities

Most jobs in the UX Dreamteam involve a level of creativity and analysis, but it’s a rare gem who is a rock-star operator in both these modes. But visionaries and analysts are equally necessary, ensuring great ideas and the ability to organize and actualize them.

A creative person doesn’t see a glass half empty or half full, but instead asks why it should be a glass at all. An ability to think laterally, meaning" to escape from a local optimum in order to move towards a more global optimum" (“Edward de Bono”:http://www.edwdebono.com/debono/lateral.htm) – is the talent from which innovation is born. A Dreamteam accesses their creativity readily and regularly to push beyond the obvious for an appropriately innovative solution. Ensure a proportion of creative genius in your Dreamteam to increase business success and thereby the team’s reputation.

Your analytical superstars can process vast amounts of information and distill it into a concise and cohesive experience for the user. They are methodical, account for every detail, and question inconsistencies. They grow solutions by breaking a system into its component parts, then creatively reassemble it in logical order. Good analysts are passionate and detail-oriented when identifying patterns in data and behavior.

Screening Tips:

Given how ideas are often difficult to credit to the interviewee, gauge creativity from the dialogue and candor during the interview. A truly imaginative person effortlessly surprises you with a fresh, off-beat approach to old problems. Responses to tangential or seemingly random questions can help illuminate this quality. If they can link the absurd back to realistic solutions coherently and with humor, you can be sure there’s creativity within. Analytical people are interested in details. Does your candidate flinch at the idea of auditing the content of large information system? If they have they done data analysis before, did they jump into it enthusiastically? How did it go?

Practitioner vs. Managerial qualities

Managerial qualities are confused with experience in most professions, and UX is no different. Experience correlates with peer respect, but respect is not all a manager must command. Peter Merholz talks of managers needing to be either "T" shaped "Bar" shaped, referring to the profile of skills they possess. "T"-shaped people have a broad and shallow knowledge of most skills and go deep in only a few.

"Bar"-shaped people do not plunge the depths of any expertise. As “he says”:http://www.peterme.com/?p=580, they are all about the connections between disciplines, and being able to articulate the power of that integration. An "I" shape would indicate deep knowledge in just one or two areas. This profile suggests an awesome specialist practitioner (yes, there is an "I" in Dreamteam!).

Good bosses are quietly also coaches, therapists, facilitators, communicators, organizers and politicians. As leaders, they are comfortable in setting an agenda for others to fulfill while inspiring the Dreamteam to meet or beat that agenda. Your luminary leader provides ‘air cover’, also known as ‘running interference’. Making space for their reports to work by fending off interfering people or tasks, the manager ensures the Dreamteam is focused, not randomized. 

People who find less satisfaction in helping others to be effective are better placed as well-compensated senior practitioners. To presume that someone senior should be promoted into a management position is misguided. A manager’s UX skills are less important than their ability to co-ordinate a group of individuals and spot what your organization needs from them.

Screening Tips:

When seeking managerial talent, look for someone who will revel in the Dreamteam’s success, rather than their own. How have they "run interference" in the past? New managers sourced from within a team show a tendency to get the best out of others prior to their promotion. This is known as "acting up" and makes a good task to set potential managers to test their aptitude. If you’re looking for a practitioner, be sure they’re not fixated on being a manager, lest their ambitions undermine the effectiveness of your designated leader.

Strategic vs Tactical Ability

We all know guys who stand idly by, watching others do their work and wryly commenting, "You look after the details, I’m the big picture man.” Those who strategize with ‘blue sky’ ideas can raise the ire of people slaving at everyday tasks. Tactical skills are just as valuable as strategic. Each serves their purpose in envisioning and getting things done.

Conceiving an entire system and determining what both the business and users get out of it are the domains of big picture people. It is hard to imagine success without their vision to work toward. These people can be creative or analytical but find implementation a chore. They are typically well informed of industry trends and can forecast the future through them. While vision is an awesome asset, without attentive "small picture" work, it’s an apparition. Strategists think one to five years ahead and beyond and are good at depicting a vision.

Tactical people focus on day-to-day activity and on success in the one to six month timeframe. With the exception of think tanks, the organizational balance needs to skew toward small picture people in order to achieve success. Many startups and UX teams fail because of the inverse balance.

Screening Tips:

To find the detail-oriented, look for evidence of finishing products and a personal satisfaction in seeing all loose ends tied up. A strategic thinker will show evidence of helping others to see the wider context of what they’re doing, often through conceptual and architectural diagrams. Can they show you some? Also ask questions which illuminate how they’re plugged into where your organization’s industry and the wider UX field is headed.

Innies vs. Outies

In-house teams (aka "Innies") have needs different to external agencies that provide interface building/designing services or consultancy. An in-house team is working toward increasing profitability through UX. In many cases, the nature of projects does not change over time because there’s only one type of business to support. Exceptions exist, but in general those building in-house teams should discount candidates who need variety to thrive.

The in-house Dreamteam is also better suited to agile development methodologies, which rely heavily on face-to-face contact. Unless a consultant is able to work on-site for the duration of the agile project, they will not be able to fulfill some of the tenets surrounding ‘less documentation, more talking’. Aside from communicating an absent author’s intentions, documentation is a mechanism used by agencies to cover their backside if a client claims poor diligence and won’t be abandoned willingly.

Agencies don’t make much money from staff who aren’t comfortable playing the consultant role. Working under pressure, answering expertly on all subjects related and sometimes unrelated to the job requires a certain type of communication style and self-confidence. Agency staff (aka “outies”) must be broad-skilled and part salespeople to make their expertise and company’s value obvious to clients. This isn’t to say that these qualities aren’t good to have on the in-house UX Dreamteam, but they’re less critical to business success and can be compensated for in other ways.

Screening Tips:

Stack your in-house team with stars who are tactical, for their willingness to roll up their sleeves, dig-in and get enjoyment from attacking a long-term goal is what you need. Strategic thinking is also attractive, but you may want to emphasize this in your management function where vision is expected. Beware hiring those with purely "innie" experience for "outie" roles and vice versa. Outies may find innie work mundane and innies can struggle in the faster-paced, higher-pressure outie workplace. Outies need to have political and sales savvy to navigate varied organizations and present value. Confidence, plausibility and magnetism will be obvious – you’ll want to hire them before they’ve shown you their ample skills. Though be sure they have those too!

Organizational Contexts

Hiring managers generally consider organizational context subconsciously when preparing their Dreamteam, usually feeling out the candidate with gut instinct rather than concrete comparisons.  It helps to abstract the organization into something you can test applicants for compatibility with, like a “persona”;:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona for instance, then you can envision a compatible teammate for that persona. Size, work processes, project types, employees, industry and brand among other things influence the organization’s personality.

Some organizations are process-driven and others are more free-form. Process ensures that work complies with a to-do list prescribing smooth running and/or best practice. The less experienced use process like new bicycle riders use training wheels. Some people flourish within a controlled environment. Others feel hampered or oppressed by it. What are the processes used within your organization? What unique characteristics do individuals who operate within them need to be happy and successful?

A Dreamteam’s number will impact the duties each superstar performs. Small organizations can have tasks similar in number to their larger counterparts, but spread them among fewer people. This inevitably means one fulfilling multiple roles. The graphic designer might double as the interface-layer coder. The Information Architect may also be the researcher and writer. If you are in a small organization, a ‘gun’ specialist with all their UX skills primarily in only one area may not be a good fit.

Every workplace has a pace. Agile development or simply expeditious environments tend to be frenetic and mean working quickly. Some people don’t perform without time to pause, think, rework and perfect their work. Others will be frustrated if it takes a long time to get things done. They won’t always agree that crafting something perfectly, or documenting design thoroughly is time well spent. Sometimes perfection is expected, but timescales remain fixed. In this case, experience and coping well with stress is consequential. 

Screening Tips:

What kind of personality does your office have? Who would get along best with that person? Prepare to win the best fit by making a list of organizational attributes and qualities that will complement these. Agile methodologies should be coupled with experienced folk who are natural communicators; as should organizations without process to guide activities. A quiet consensus builder might suit a contentious office, etc. Use the example below to get you started – be creative and modify the attributes as you see fit.

Company Persona and Match

Here’s an example of how you might break down how a potential new team member might fit in with your organization:

Where do we go from here?

Hiring UX staff is rarely easy, but now you can take a structured approach to identifying the skills and personal qualities your team needs within your organizational context.  Like any craft, building the UX Dreamteam takes practice and the occasional mistake leads to growth as a hiring manager. Even when you think you’ve mastered it, there is still an element of luck to contend. You may be willing to compromise skills and qualities for someone who just feels right and your instincts shouldn’t be discounted. Allow them to inform your choices while thinking about the areas we’ve touched on to build the UX Dreamteam that will make your organization shine.

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Discount for Boxes and Arrows readers: Get a 10% discount by purchasing the book “directly from Rosenfeld Media”:http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/webforms/. Just use the code WFDBA.


The scene is all too familiar. You’re presenting wireframes of the registration process for a new web application when the discussion veers down a dark alley. The sky has turned the color of black ink, and you can smell sulfur in the air as one team member after another debates the alignment of form labels.

Before you can toss up a quick Hail Mary, marketing says that the opt-in for marketing solicitations has to be defaulted to yes, and you can feel your soul sucked out of your body through your nose as a simple one hour meeting turns into a 3 hour discussion over the pro’s and cons of inline validation while your stomach grumbles because you just missed lunch.

I have heard this war story many times from many interaction designers and information architects, with little variation except in the details. What we need is air cover in this battle to design better forms. Now, it’s here.

“Forms Suck!”

And so Luke Wroblewski begins his new book on web form design with a canon shot, providing just the air cover and ammunition interaction designers need; and every review, including this one, begins with a first impression.

Mine was: Boffo.

(bof·fo (bf) slang, adj.: Extremely successful; great.)

Wroblewski opens “Web Form Design” with a strategic exploration of why users interact with forms. News flash: It’s not because they enjoy it. Interaction designers need to confront the truth that a user’s goal is to get to some successful outcome on the other side of a form – as quickly and painlessly as possible. We want our iPhone, tax return, or account with Facebook. We don’t want to fill out forms.

bq. Forms suck. If you don’t believe me, try to find people who like filling them in. You may turn up an accountant who gets a rush when wrapping up a client’s tax return or perhaps a desk clerk who loves to tidy up office payroll. But for most of us, forms are just an annoyance. What we want to do is to vote, apply for a job, buy a book online, join a group, or get a rebate back from a recent purchase. Forms just stand in our way.

Wroblewski has researched everything from the basics of good form design, to labels and most-direct route, delivering his explanations, patterns and recommendations with a casual urgency that avoids preaching. This book is a useful guide for both the novice interaction designer and the battle tested UX guru, offering salient, field tested examples of the good, bad, and often times ugly forms that have proliferated the web like so many mushrooms after a good rain.

Wroblewski has also invited many seasoned professionals to contribute sidebars, including Caroline Jarrett’s no-nonsense perspective on designing great forms by advising us to “start thinking about people and relationships,” instead of just diving into labeling our forms and choosing where to put the Submit button. I especially appreciated her strategic guidelines for picking what questions should go into a form in the first place, which she aptly titles “Keep, Cut, Postpone, or Explain.”

Wroblewski is aware of how challenging most readers will find good form design. It comes as a relief, for instance, when he writes that we should think less about forms as a means of filling a database, and more as a means of creating a meaningful conversation between the user and the company.

He generally succeeds at adopting the warm tone of a confidant who can win you over with self-deprecating, you-too-can-make-dynamic-forms-every-day enthusiasm. The more subtle points of user-centered design or goal-driven design are not discussed explicitly; only the trained ear will detect them.

What’s In the Book?

“Web Form Design” is part of a wave of User Experience books from Rosenfeld Media – books focused on bringing practical, actionable and well-researched methods to actual practitioners in the field. This literature is going to have a powerful effect on our community of practice, maybe as powerful as the effect the Polar Bear book had on our grandparents’ era. This volume is broken out into three sections:

Section one: “Form Structure” begins with an overview of why form design matters and describes the principles behind good form design, followed by Form Organization, Path to Completion, and Labels (hint: your form design should start from goals). Working quickly through strategy to tactics, Wroblewski gives numerous examples – within the context of usability studies – so that you are not left wondering whether these patterns are recommended based just on his opinion.

Section two: “Form Elements,” is a useful, clearly written exploration of each of the components of form design: labels, fields, actions and messages (help, errors, success). Wroblewski attacks each one of these by defining particular problem spaces, and then shows good and bad solutions to the problems while highlighting how these solutions faired in controlled usability tests, including eye-tracking. He then finishes each chapter off with a succinct list of ‘Best Practices’ that I suggest are good enough to staple to the inside of your eyelids.

Section three” “Form Interaction,” includes chapters on everything from Inline Validation to Selection-dependent Inputs (a barn burner). Here we move from the world of designing labels, alignment, and content to designing the actual complex interactions between the system—that wants to be fed like the plant in Little Shop of Horrors –- and the world-weary user that just wants to get to the other side of the rainbow. As Wroblewski explains in his opening of chapter 9 “Inline Validation:”

Despite our best efforts to format questions clearly and provide meaningful affordances for our inputs, some of our questions will always have more than one possible answer…

Inline validation can provide several types of feedback: confirmation that an appropriate answer was given, suggestions for valid answers, and real-time updates designed to help people stay within necessary limits. These bits of feedback usually happen when people begin, continue, or stop entering answers within input fields.

To establish communication between the user and the form, provide clear, easy-to-read feedback so that the user doesn’t get the “select a username or die” travesty that we see in registration forms all over the web. You know the ones: you type in your name, choose a username, enter your email address, and your password (twice), hit the submit button…and…bad things happen. The username is already taken. Worse, the form is cleared and you have to enter all that information all over again. Wroblewski provides advice for validation (without set-in-stone rules), and a bulleted list of best practices.

The final, and perhaps most interesting chapter in the book, covers the topic of Gradual Engagement. This is particularly timely given the kudzu-like proliferation of Web 2.0 applications and services as well as social networking sites and micro-blogging sites. Instead of starting your engagement with a new company that all your friends are raving about with yet another registration form – as Wroblewski writes:

bq. “We can do better. In fact, I believe we can get people engaged with digital services in a way that tells them how they work and why they should care enough to use them.1 I also believe we can do this without explicitly making them fill out a sign-up form as a first step.”

He continues by highlighting the benefits of moving a user through the application or service – actually engaging with it, and seeing it’s benefits, while registration is either postponed, or handled behind the scenes. He explores web applications like JumpCut, where the user steps through the process of creating, uploading and editing their video—and only when they actually want to publish and share it, does the user encounter a form—at which point they have already learned the service, it’s benefits, and it’s value. This is certainly a more engaging experience than being confronted with a form and a captcha before ever realizing the value of the web application. He ends this compelling chapter by providing some advise and best practices :

bq. When you’re exploring if gradual engagement might be right for your Web service, it’s important to consider how a series of interactions can explain how potential customers can use your service and why they should care. Gradual engagement isn’t well served by simply distributing each of your sign-up form input fields onto separate Web pages.

Wroblewski showed three excellent examples of web applications that seem to very successfully utilize this new strategy for engaging new users while avoiding or at least postponing the ubiquitous registration process. This is certainly welcome news. The key is to rethink how new users become engaged with your company. Does the conversation start with a form? Gradually introducing new customers to your service and it’s benefits – letting them actually use it and learn it first seems like a better way to start the conversation.

I wish this chapter had more to it, as it covers an exciting exploration of web application design innovation. Wroblewski wrote a very compelling article in “UXmatters”:http://www.uxmatters.com/ back in 2006 titled, “The Complexity of Simplicity”:http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000151.php, which was a predecessor to this chapter of the book. After an extensive search online, this was about the only source I could find other than some blog posts referencing that article. One article on “ReadWriteWeb”:http://www.readwriteweb.com/, “Good UI Design: Make It Easy, Show Me You Care”:http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/good_ui_design_make_it_easy_show_me_you_care.php,”” did include two more examples – “FuseCal”:http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/finally_sync_any_calendar_to_any_calendar.php, a calendar syncing online application, and “Twiddla”:http://www.twiddla.com/, an online whiteboarding service.

Another spot that could have used improvement were in the last chapter. Perhaps this was either my reading of it or the way it was presented. _What’s Next_, certainly made me feel that he would be exploring his vision of the future of form design, and forms in general—which he certainly does in the section on the disappearing form, and proceeds into a very brief discussion of game-like elicitation methods (GEMS). These are welcome additions, I wish that he had gone a bit deeper into this chapter, especially about GEMS. It’s a fascinating discussion point, and we will see more examples in the coming year.

I also wanted more resources and references to studies that a form designer, information architect or interaction designer could use to bolster their design decisions. Many good designers out there know how to design good forms. The hard part is the politics and the negotiation process with stakeholders—and numbers always help.

I am reminded of a conversation I had over lunch about a month ago here in D.C. The UX professional was giving a short presentation on form design to an in-house crowd and was trying to subtly indicate the value that often times less is more in form design. He wanted to show to stakeholders that the concept that adding one, two, or four more form fields in a registration process has a cost, even if the design and development cost is minimal. I suggested that a simple info graphic that showed how, as the number of form fields increased, user signups decreased. His immediate reaction was that some stakeholders would immediately want to see metrics to back up the assertion.

I am unaware of any numbers about fall-off rates, but from my professional experience tells me less is better than confronting a first-time potential user with a long form to complete. Perhaps it would be sufficient to include a “Further Reading” section divided up into sections like Academic Research, Field Studies, and Conference Papers. The book may not the best place to put something like this—I wonder if the online companion to this book has such a thing. Either way, it would be a valuable addition.

Summary

What is likely to win the most converts, though, is the joy Wroblewski takes in designing. This impression becomes clear as you page through the book. He isn’t just an ardent evangelizer, following the rituals of going to conferences selling snake oil. He’s been there in the trenches, just like you; he’s done this a hundred, maybe a thousand times. He’s tested these ideas and provides a framework for you to use from day one. Half the battle in good form design is defending your decisions to stakeholders. This is your air cover, so call it in!

You can get Web Form Design from “Rosenfeld Media”:http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/webforms/ or “Amazon.com”:http://www.amazon.com/Web-Form-Design-Filling-Blanks/dp/B0018S232Q/boxesandarrows-20. Just keep in mind that, for the same price, Rosenfeld Media tosses in a nicely formatted digital version which you can use to quote from when you have to sell a good form design to a team that wants to bicker over form labels.

Don’t forget the discount for Boxes and Arrows readers: Get a 10% discount by purchasing the book “directly from Rosenfeld Media”:http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/webforms/. Just use the code WFDBA.

Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks
By Luke Wroblewski;forewordbyJaredSpool.
RosenfeldMedia: May,2008.
ISBN:1933820241
Buy from: Rosenfeld | Amazon

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Where would we be without rating and reputation systems these days? Take them away, and we wouldn’t know who to trust on eBay, what movies to pick on Netflix, or what books to buy on Amazon. Reputation systems (essentially a rating system for people) also help guide us through the labyrinth of individuals who make up our social web. Is he or she worthwhile to spend my time on? For pity’s sake, please don’t check out our reputation points before deciding whether to read this article.

Rating and reputation systems have become standard tools in our design toolbox. But sometimes they are not well-understood. A recent post at the IxDA forum showed confusion about how and when to use rating systems. Much of the conversation was about whether to use stars or some other iconography. These can be important questions, but they miss the central point of ratings systems: to manage risk.

So, when we think about rating and reputation systems, the first question to ask is not, “Am I using stars, bananas, or chili peppers?” but, “what risk is being managed?”

 

What Is Risk?

We desire certainty in our transactions. It’s just our nature. We want to know that the person we’re dealing with on eBay won’t cheat us. Or that Blues Brothers 2000 is a bad movie (1 star on Netflix). So risk, most simply (and broadly), arises when a transaction has a number of possible outcomes, some of which are undesirable, but the precise outcome cannot be determined in advance.

 

Where Does Risk Come From?

There are two main sources of risk that are important for rating and reputation systems: asymmetric information and uncertainty.

Asymmetric information arises when one party to a transaction can not completely determine in advance the characteristics of the other party, and this information cannot credibly be communicated. The main question here is: can I, the buyer, trust you, the seller, to honestly complete the transaction we’re going to engage in? That means: will you take my money and run? Did you describe what you’re selling accurately? And so on.

This unequal distribution of information between buyers and sellers is a characteristic of most transactions, even in transactions where fraud is not a concern. Online transactions make asymmetric information problems worse. No longer can we look the seller in the eye and make a judgment about their honesty. Nor can we physically inspect what we’re buying and get a feel of its quality. We need other ways to manage our risk generated by asymmetric information.

The other source of risk is not knowing beforehand whether we’ll like the thing we’re buying. Here honesty and quality are not the issue, but rather our own personal tastes and the nature of the thing we’re buying. Movies, books, and wine are examples of experience goods, which we need to experience before we know their true value. For example, we’re partial to red wine from Italy, but that doesn’t mean we’ll like every bottle of Italian red wine we buy.

 

Managing Risk with Design

Among the ways to manage risk, two methods will be of interest to user experience designers:

1. Signaling is where participants in a transaction communicate something meaningful about themselves.
2. Reducing information costs involves reducing the time and effort it takes participants in a transaction to get meaningful information (such as: is this a good price? is this a quality good?).

Reputation systems tend to enable signaling and are best utilized in evaluating people’s historical actions. In contrast, rating systems are a way of leveraging user feedback to reduce information costs and are best utilized in evaluating standard products or services.

 It is important to note that reputation systems are not the only way to signal (branding and media coverage are other means, among others), and rating systems are not the only means of reducing information costs (better search engines and product reviews also help, for example). But these two tools are becoming increasingly important, as they provide quick reference points that capture useful data.

As we review various aspects of rating and reputation systems, the key questions to keep in mind are:

1. Who is doing the rating?
2. What, exactly, is being rated?
3. If people are being rated, what behaviors are we trying to encourage or discourage?

 

Who is doing the Rating?

A random poll of several friends shows about half use the Amazon rating system when buying books and the other half ignore it. Why do they ignore it? Because they don’t know whether the people doing the rating are crackpots or if they have similar tastes to them.

Amazon has tried to counteract some of these issues by using features such as “Real Name” and “helpfulness” ratings of the ratings themselves (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Amazon uses real names and helpfulness to communicate honesty of the review.

This is good, but requires time to read and evaluate the ratings and reviews. It also doesn’t answer the question, how much is this person like me?

Better is Netflix’s system (Figure 2), which is explicit about finding people like you, be they acknowledged friends or matched by algorithm.

Figure 2: Netflix lets you know what people like you thought of a movie.

Both these systems implicitly recognize that validation of the rating system itself is important. Ideally users should understand three things about the other people who are doing the rating:

1. Are they honest and authentic?
2. Are they like you in a way that is meaningful?
3. Are they qualified to adequately rate the good or service in question?

The last point is important. While less meaningful for rating systems of some experience goods (we’re all movie experts, after all), it is more important for things we understand less well. For example, while we might be able to say whether a doctor is friendly or not, we may be less able to fairly evaluate a doctor’s medical skills.

 

What is being rated?

Many rating systems are binary (thumbs up, thumbs down), or scaled (5 stars, 5 chili peppers, etc.), but this uni-dimensionality is inappropriate for complicated services or products which may have many characteristics.

For example, Figure 3 depicts a rating system from the HP Activity Center and shows how not to do a rating system. Users select a project that interests them (e.g., how to make an Ireland Forever poster) and then complete it using materials they can purchase from HP (e.g., paper). A rating system is included, presumably to help you decide which project you should undertake in your valuable time.

Figure 3: The rating system on the HP Activity Center site: what not to do.

A moment’s reflection raises the following question: what is being rated? The final outcome of the project? The clarity of the instructions? How fun this project is? We honestly don’t know. Someone thoughtlessly included this rating system.

Good rating systems also don’t inappropriately “flatten” the information that they collect into a single number. Products and services can have many characteristics, and not being clear on what characteristics are being rated, or inappropriately lumping all aspects into a single rating, is misleading and makes the rating meaningless.

RateMDs, a physician rating site, uses a smiley face to tell us about how good the doctor is (Figure 4).

Figure 4: RateMDs.com rating system for doctors.

Simple? Yes. Appropriate? Perhaps not.

Better is Vitals, a physician rating site that includes information about doctors’ years of experience, any disciplinary actions they might have, their education, and a patient rating system (Figure 5).

Figure 5: The multi-dimensional rating system on Vitals.com.

While Vitals has an overall rating, more important are the components of the system. Each variable – ease of appointment, promptness, etc. – reflects a point of concern that helps to evaluate physicians.

When rating experiences, what is being rated is relatively clear. Did you enjoy the experience of consuming this good or not? Rating physical goods and products can be more complicated. An ad hoc analysis of Amazon’s rating system (Figure 6) should help explain.

Figure 6: Amazon’s rating system is not always consistent.

In this example the most helpful favorable and unfavorable reviews are highlighted. However, each review is addressing different variables. The favorable review talks about how easy it is to set up this router, while the unfavorable review talks about the lack of new features. These reviews are presented as comparable, but they are not. These raters were thinking about different characteristics of the router.

The point here is that rating systems need to be appropriate for the goods or services that are being rated. A rating system for books cannot easily be applied to a rating system for routers, since the products are so entirely different in how we experience them. What aspects we rate need to be carefully selected, and based on the characteristics of the product or service being rated.

 

What behaviors are we trying to encourage?

Any rating of people is essentially a reputation system. Despite some people’s sensitivity to being rated, reputation systems are extremely valuable. Buyers need to know whom they can trust. Sellers need to be able to communicate – or signal based on their past actions – that they are trustworthy. This is particularly true online, where it’s common to do business with someone you don’t know.

But designing a good reputation system is hard. eBay’s reputation system has had some problems, such as the practice of “defensive rating” (rate me well and I’ll rate you well; rate me bad and I’ll rate you worse). This defeats the purpose of a rating system, since it undermines the honesty of the people doing the rating, and eBay has had to address this flaw in their system. What started out as an open system now needs to permit anonymous ratings in order to save the reputation (as it were) of the reputation system.

While designing a good reputation system is hard, it’s not impossible. There are five key things to keep in mind when designing a reputation system:

 

1. List the behaviors you want to encourage and those that you want to discourage

It’s obvious what eBay wants to encourage (see Figure 7). A look at a detailed ratings page shows they want sellers to describe products accurately, communicate well (and often), ship in a reasonable time, and not charge unreasonably for shipping. (Not incidentally, you could also view these dimensions as source of risk in a transaction.)

Figure 7: eBay encourages good behavior.

 

 

2. Be transparent

Once you know the behaviors you want to encourage, you then need to be transparent about it. Your users need to know how they are being rated and on what basis. Often a reputation is distilled into a single number—say, reputation points—but it is impossible to look at a number and derive the formula that produced it. While Wikinvest (Figure 8) doesn’t show a formula (which would be ideal), they do indicate what actions you took to receive your point total.

Figure 8: Wikinvest’s reputation system

Any clarity that is added to a reputation system will make your users happy, and it will make them more likely to behave in the manner you desire.

 

3. Keep your reputation system flexible

Any scoring system is open to abuse, and chances are that any reputation system you design will be abused in imaginative ways that you can’t predict. Therefore it’s important to keep your system flexible. If people begin behaving in ways that enhance their reputation but don’t enhance the community, the reputation system needs to be adjusted.

Changing the weighting of certain behaviors is one way to adjust your system. Adding ratings (or points) for new behaviors is another. The difficulty here will be in keeping everything fair. People don’t like a shifting playing field, so tweaks are better than wholesale changes. And changes should also be communicated clearly.

 

4. Avoid negative reputations

When possible, reputation systems should also be non-negative towards the individual. While negative reputations are important to protect people, negative reputations should not always be emphasized. This is specifically true in community sites where users generate much of the content, and not much is at stake (except perhaps your prestige).

Looking at our example above (Figure 8), Wikinvest uses the term “Analyst” (a nice, non-offensive term … if you’re not in investment banking), to mean, “this person isn’t really contributing much.”

 

5. Reflect reality

Systems sometimes fail on community sites when people belong to multiple communities and their complete reputations are not contained within any one of them. While there are exceptions, allowing reputations earned elsewhere to be imported can be a smart way to bring your system in line with reality and increase the value of information that it provides.

 

Conclusion

Our discussion of rating systems and reputation systems is certainly incomplete. We do hope that we’ve given a good description of risk in online transactions, and how understanding this can help user experience designers better manage risk via the design of more robust rating and reputation systems.

In addition, we’d like to begin a repository of rating and reputation systems. If you find any that you’d like to share, feel free to submit them at http://101ratings.com/submit.php.

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MindCanvas describes itself as a remote research tool that uses Game-like Elicitation Methods (GEMs) to gather insights about customer’s thoughts and feelings. It was developed by Uzanto Consulting, a web product strategy firm. When I first learned about MindCanvas, I understood it to be an online card sorting tool. Happily, it’s much more than that.

As a veteran IA consultant, I have used MindCanvas a handful of times during the course of different projects. I have also conducted card sorting exercises without the tool. I am thrilled to have a useful—and user-friendly—tool at my disposal. One of my main reasons for selecting MindCanvas was the reputation of one of its creators, Rashmi Sinha. She is well known and respected, and I felt assured that any tool designed by a fellow IA for IAs couldn’t be all that bad. I was right.

MindCanvas provides open and closed card sorting capabilities, as well as a host of other UT tools: Divide-the-Dollar, Clicky, Sticky, Concept Test, and FreeList. Clicky and Sticky allow users to react to a wireframe or prototype by answering questions about images and content, or applying stickies (Post-it–like notes) with attributes to a visual image. FreeList and Divide-the-Dollar allow you to elicit product ideas and prioritize them by having participants list and rank the features they find most useful. All of these methods offer easy-to-use interfaces to help your research participants along.

Deciding which MindCanvas method to use is one of the more complicated parts of the tool. It’s card sorting methods are good for validating a site’s navigation or information hierarchy. You can also explore user needs and values and gather feedback on brand and positioning by using some of its more specialized UT methods. MindCanvas’ website and supporting help wiki provide information on selecting the appropriate testing method for your website or product.

Using MindCanvas

The basic process for using MindCanvas is as follows:

1. After payment, sign an agreement to obtain a login and password.
2. Decide which method (i.e. Sticky, FreeList, etc.) addresses your research needs.
3. Create potential research questions and tasks based on the MindCanvas method you have selected.
   (I’ve used OpenSortand TreeSort).
4. Upload questions to MindCanvas’ Workbench.
5. Test the research study and make changes until you are satisfied with it.
6. Send out the test site URL to your participants.
7. Monitor the study (i.e. see how many people have completed all the tasks).
8. When the study is concluded, send a report request to the MindCanvas team.
9. Receive the reports in visual form and download raw data from the MindCanvas site.
10. Embed reports into PowerPoint or Word document and review results with client.

I usually take several days to review the reports before showing them to my consulting clients. Doing so allows me to more easily explain the results. (Here’s a pointer to anyone using MindCanvas: To view the results properly make sure PowerPoint is in “Slideshow” mode).

Strengths

MindCanvas has a couple shining strengths I’d like to illuminate:

1. An engaging, easy-to-use interface for your customers or end users. It’s fairly self-explanatory and makes routine UT tasks fun.
2. Stellar data visualization tools once your study is completed.

User Interface

MindCanvas’ interface is what sets it apart from other UT software I’ve seen. Its creators took their inspiration from the world of digital gaming to develop an interface that’s engaging for the person using it, while gathering important data for researchers. Its card sorting methods employ a floating hand to deal car