ChaosScenario

The Rebirth of the 30-Second Spot

If you had 30 seconds to say anything you wanted to a prospect, what would you say?

While you're thinking about it, keep in mind that they're using this time to selectively size you up. You're saying something about "value," and "features," and all they hear is "blah blah blah" as they decide whether that tie you're wearing is suitable for the occasion, and if it's for sale. 

30 Seconds and Your Home Page

This is sort of like the process one goes through when visiting a home page for the very first time. According to this interview with Jakob Nielsen, they stay there for about 30 seconds, and they don't want to listen to your elevator pitch -- or any other kind of pitch.

They want to know where they can find the answer to their question or the place they need to go in order to fulfill the purpose of their visit.

But first, you have to quickly assure them that they CAN find what they came here for and that your company DOES make the process of finding it fairly easy.

Give them something to scan

You have to understand that, in most cases, they are not interested in hanging on every word you say. They have a busy life, and if they can't find an answer to their question easily here (or if they aren't reasonably assured that they can find one here), they will reformulate their search in Google before they give you the time of day.

What is scanable?

• Headline - All <H> tags. (e.g., <H1>, <H2>, <H3>, etc.)  Says "This is what the content underneath here is about. I can also help you form i a mental model of the hierarchy of information.
• Form field - Says "Interact with me. There's something to do here." The context surrounding the form field or fields communicate its purpose.
• Button - Says, "Not only am I clickable, but I'm also almost sure to be universally important."
• Pictures - Pictures, icons and any visual aid can say a number of things. They're important because they can be used to establish a tone and personality of the site, provide an understanding of what the site is about, and they can give the eye a break when scanning or reading a page.
• Bullets - Say "Here's a high-level overview of what you can expect here, relative to the context surrounding the bullets."
• Boldface - Says "Here's something worth reading."

Also, don't dismiss the value of a good Web tagline at the top of every page on your site.

These are specific tactics that, when used properly, may aid in homepage usability. However, it's important to note that, as with anything, when used improperly, they can decrease homepage usability.

If you remember that the tactics you use cannot replace the user research and business priorities of the site, you should be okay. - Cam Beck

Apologies to Joseph Jaffe. :)

When to improve usability by destroying it

Fitts' Law says that the bigger something is, the easier it is to point to it, and the closer it is, the faster you can point to it. This has enormous implications for designing any interactive product, including websites.

(This Wikipedia article defines Fitts' Law in more abstract, science-like terms, but if you remember the above, I think you'll be okay.)

How can you advantageously use this principle to destroy usability? When does that, in so doing, actually improve the user experience?

Let's take a look at a couple of fictitious examples.

This has enormous implications for design, but only when you reflect that design is more than "look and feel." It is operations. It is interactions. And yes, it is relationships -- and the models we use to manage them. - Cam Beck

Apple's Difficulties With Convergence

To those who watched the evolution of the iPod to the the iPod photo to the iPod video to the iPhone, it may not be surprising that one would sync and manage the iPhone, its apps, videos, songs, and photos through iTunes, the application that started as a way to purchase and manage music. However, this interaction is by no means intuitive to those who didn't care to follow this evolution. As a convergence device, the iPhone still needs some work.

Bruce Tognazzini, principal with the Nielsen Norman Group, recently critiqued the current Apple design aesthetic for both Macintosh computers and  some of their peripheral devices (like the iPhone and iPod) at his blog, Ask Tog.

He makes some interesting points, and Apple would be wise to take heed from their former employee and the founder of the Apple Human Interface Group.

Apple's apparent design strategy is definitely in vogue right now: Strip down interfaces to their bare essentials. The problem is that, though this may aid beginning users,it can frustrate advanced or power users.

(Conversations I've had with developers, though anecdotal, support this judgment)

The kind of trap Apple has fallen into can be particularly destructive. It's important for designers, when approaching new revisions, to reexplore who your various user populations are and what their unique needs are. Apple's singular focus on new users, correct at a distant time, is now threatening the very existence of external developers, as well as limiting positive word-of-mouth about Apple products, critical to future sales.

It is possible to increase the satisfaction of advanced users, Tog says, without impugning on the satisfaction of beginners. Hopefully they'll get it worked out soon. - Cam Beck

P.S. I saw this on Usability Notes by Chris Baker and hoped you would find it as funny as I did.

The Ostrich Approach to Interface Design

I saw this Dilbert comic over the weekend. I looked it up today to print it out and hang at my desk and noticed that dilbert.com actually allows people to embed the image in their websites.

I was so impressed by this venture into distributable content when others seem to be looking for ways to lock down their content or charge for it, I thought I'd share it here.

Way to go, Dilbert! - Cam Beck

Insights: The Case for Use Cases

Website design to some people is a little like a secret, magic box. You tell someone what you want and then presto-change-o, out pops a website, champagne falls from the heavens, and you win all sorts of awards and are gratified by the applause of your peers and colleagues. It never works that way.

It actually takes a lot of foresight and planning to build a website that meets the strategic needs of an organization. At the risk of oversimplifying, doing this requires understanding:

• what the organization's needs are (and hopefully what they should be),
• what their audience's goals are,
• figuring out where the two meet,
• how to make sure the audience knows about it, and
• how to ensure an easy, mutually satisfying transaction

This week, in my second-ever Click Here blog post, I wrote about one of the methods used to plan a website that accomplishes these goals.

If you're on the agency side, hopefully it will give you some ammunition for explaining to clients the time and effort it will take. If you're on the client side, this may give you a little peek into the magic box.

They say a magician should never reveal his secrets, but happily, as this article will clearly show, there's no magic to what I do. - Cam Beck

Related Blog Posts:

• Only The Fools Brand Lightly
• Can't I Just Get Ads and a Website?

Five in the Morning

A little while back, Steve Woodruff tapped me for continuing his excellent "5 in the Morning" series, which allows bloggers to highlight articles you might have missed. Below is my contribution.

1. How to approach a problem by Inspire UX
2. Is the beautifully simple Macintosh OSX interface the panacea of interface design? Not according to Bruce Tognazzini of NN/g.
3. Anyone who has ever bought a bleeding-edge device and had difficulty trying to use it can surely appreciate this piece from the Onion via 90 percent of everything (language advisory).
4. Business Intelligence is rated a #1 technology priority for CIOs, and #5 business priority (Perhaps this second number should be moved up).
5. Steve Roesler advises us to look at presentations the same way Oglivy looked at advertising. Long live the big idea.

Thanks, Steve, for allowing me to participate!

Subscribe: ChaosScenario / Steve Woodruff's StickyFigure blog
Follow on Twitter: Cam Beck / Steve Woodruff

Why Function Requires Imagination

"Good design is design that not only achieves a desired effect, but shapes our expectation of what the experience can be.” - Astrida Valigorsky via InspireUX

 
- Cam Beck

Round rock by postmoderngirl
Racing car by Ian Muttoo
Doughnut by uncleboatshoes

How to reach your audience without getting in their way

With all the criticism that Facebook received for appreciably changing their terms of service, it's interesting to note the positive way they responded that probably prevented any mass exodus.

Full disclosure: I have to mention that I completely empathize with their predicament. While their membership is growing by leaps and bounds across the world, they've had difficulty implementing an effective means to monetize that takes advantage of their unique data mining methods.

The market is fickle. People don't care that they're getting this awesome platform without any membership fees. When Facebook tried to monetize and launched one of its first initiatives, Beacon, the public revolted. Their 2008 ad revenue, in spite of the vast numbers of people using the platform, is less than that of MySpace.

By the time I got word that Facebook revised their terms of service, people had already started revolting.

Facebook then did two good things well. The first was in direct response to the outcry and threat of lawsuit from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), and the groundwork from the other was laid long before this was even a blip on the EPICs radar.

1. They recanted the policy and solicited feedback from the audience
2. They communicated directly with the members without the normal lawyer-speak.

(To show how fickle the marketplace really is (and what an itchy trigger finger people have),the executive director of the EPIC, Marc Rotenberg, withheld filing the his complaint with the FCC but promised to keep it in his back pocket.)

As for the other issue, here is the message Facebook sent out to all its members at the top of their member home page:

Notice the "Close" call to action in the upper right hand corner?

If the users don't really care about what's going on behind the scenes, they can just close out the message, and it won't return. I imagine Facebook can use this method to communicate any message they need to communicate to their audience about their service.

They kept it short and to the point, and it speaks directly to the people who were raising the fuss in the first place. In 4 short sentences, the Facebook team was able to explain

• Why they're sending the message.
• What they're going to do about it.
• How to get more information.
• Instructions on how to participate in the conversation.

That's all well and good. But here's the question:

If Facebook can communicate issues before the fact in a manner that provides an easy way to ignore it, if the users wish, can't they just have let their users know, in the same way, that their terms of service were going to change, and have solicited feedback before they pushed it live?

It seems getting feedback from the community before they blow up might be the best way to avoid these sorts of situations in the future.

And in the meantime, they might want to keep Marc Rotenberg's number on speed dial. Especially in a space where privacy is a huge concern, bringing in a privacy advocate (even if he does represent only the most privacy-conscious) for advice just seems smart. - Cam Beck

How to destroy a good brand

Inspired by this post by Lewis Green.

Ambivalence is the price of innovation

At a recent professional gathering, our speaker disparaged the "best practices" argument because, as professionals, we should advise to aim for something better than what everyone else is doing. "Best practices" is the entry fee. Innovation is the goal. I understand her point, but there are instances (particularly amidst the group of interface and application designers and developers she was speaking to), when "best practices" do indeed have an important role in building a company's brand.

When a Best Practice Isn't Enough

(Excerpted from an email to Cece Solomon-Lee)
In the late 19th century, Alexander Graham Bell offered to sell his telephone patent to Western Union for $100,000. They refused, believing the telephone to be a novelty — a kids toy — and focused on more "practical" pursuits such as multiplexing telegraph lines. Two  years later, they would have paid $25 million for Bell’s patent.

At the time, Western Union — and everyone else for that matter — knew so completely that the infrastructure did not support everyone having a telephone line run to their home, that they could not imagine the potential for Bell's device.

Buying into such unproven technology was not a "best practice," and as a result, they missed out on a huge opportunity -- perhaps THE opportunity of the century.

When a Best Practice Is a Best Practice

Graphical user interfaces built for the public — in websites or applications — present a challenge not unlike Western Union's, because of the need for differentiation, each one has unique properties.

Since normally the user is seeking the content he hopes to get on your site and because he visits a lot of sites, he doesn't want to learn a brand new interface each time. That would take too long to be useful.

The challenge, then, is to give each user something that is familiar without being ordinary. That is where "best practices" prove their utility and how good interface designers earn their money.

Many times decision-makers at companies charged with shepherding the website redesign process favor glitz and pizazz in the interface in order to differentiate themselves from their competitors. However, their efforts would often be better spent developing either a useful, usable utility or unique and useful content within an interface that makes the content easy to access, transport, and share. - Cam Beck