UX meets Blog consumption

When it comes extracting information from consulting-type blog posts, I follow the same theory as Steve Krug when trying to find usability problems on websites. This is a bit of stretch but it makes sense to me (surprise!). For example, say we are trying to figure out how to fix a toilet and Bob Vila has a blog on fixing toilets but to read it will have to shell out a dollar. Do I feel that this information is worth a dollar? Sure, but is it worth me taking out my wallet, entering my information, authorizing the payment and burn a few minutes of my life? Um, no. What I’ll do, is do a Google search for fixing toilets, read three or four of the free articles and extract the major points from all of them. The idea is that while one blog may miss a point, if the point is important enough or significant enough, another blog will bring it up. Reading other points of view on the same subject doesn’t hurt either.

Laziness and Anti-Social Media

So off the toilet, and back to my point. Recently, a very well known and respected blogger, Dennis Howlett (you can follow him on Twitter: @dahowlett) started providing some premium content for a small fee. His explanation for doing so can be found here. While I respect his work, I simply cannot be bothered to pay to read his insights for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, I’m lazy. (OK, I’m not lazy in general, but my wallet is pretty far from my desk). Secondly, and more importantly in my eyes, is that it’s a blog. As a blog, it is part of the social media eco-system. You can create discussions with blogs and interact with readers with a click of a publish-button. Making people pay to engage with you seems pretty darn anti-social if you ask me – especially for a blog, which really, is often just a vehicle to boost one’s reputation in an industry (*cough*). Simply put, I feel that if someone decides to post actionable advice on his own blog, he has opted to work for free.

So while I wish Mr. Howlett all the luck in the world, unfortunately, the next time I run into a prompt telling me I need to pay to view some content – you can be sure that I’ll be Google-ing shortly afterwards and reading another three brilliant posts written by similarly qualified writers – for free.

P.S. Bob Vila does have an article about fixing toilets. Pssst, and it’s for free.

Remember to always step back to see the bigger picture.

So, I’ll cut to the chase. Usability? Often, it’s useless.

All that designing for usability does is make websites easier to use (duh!). But how crucial is usability to the well-being of a website? I contend that it’s not that important. Yes, usability is a marketing issue. It is indeed a touch point that should be tended to and nurtured to improve ROI. But the way I see it, usability can only make a well thought-out site better, and a poorly thought-out site more bearable.

What usability will never do is automatically work out how to satisfy users in a way that is inline with your business goals. Furthermore, usability will never promote your most important business services. So while many usability experts will insist that usability has to be kept in mind throughout the design process, I would suggest that we all take yet another step back. Before we lay a single pen to paper, or any mouse to pixel, we must do several essential things:

• Know what the user wants.
• Know what we want the website to do.
• Figure out how to make it accomplish these goals.

The Norman Door: Redux

If you’ve ever read Donald Norman’s, The Design of Everyday Things, you’re familiar with the “Norman Door”. Essentially Norman examines exactly what makes a well designed door, i.e., the affordances and visual cues that help you figure out how it works. While this is a great illustration of what makes a well-designed door, I feel Norman misses out on a key issue: A well-designed door is rendered useless if it leads no where of interest for the user.

I’m quite convinced that even if a site breaks every usability guideline in The Book, twice - the site will ultimately succeed by reaching its business goals as long as the site implies that the desired information or application exists on the site, i.e., it has a strong scent of information (obviously within reason). This is where knowing what your users’ wants plays a role. Even if you have non-standard navigation behaviour, and poor legibility, as long as the user is convinced you know what he or she wants, and that you have it somewhere on your site that can be eventually reached, I guarantee you’ll be surprised as to how much time he or she will invest to find what they want from your site (E- and F-patterns be damned!). And as long as these desires are inline with what your goals are for your site, bob’s your uncle.

So should we relegate usability to the backburner?

Of course not, nor should we ignore accessibility, find-ability or web standards. But know that these are simply tools in our web designer/developer/architect/producer/ninja toolbelts to make a solid website amazing. As web workers we need to be attentive to strategy, have a big-picture view, and raise our concerns as they occur. We need to constantly ask ourselves,”Is my work adding customer-value?”, “Will my work help the bottom-line?” If not, we should re-evaluate whether we’re working in the right direction. Are we obsessing over silly details? Are we improving usability for usability sake? Before we add bells and whistles, and optimize for ease of use, we need to get the basics right. We need to give the customer whatever they want that is part of our offering and is beneficial for both parties.

So with all this said, I present to you:

My Useless Usability Litmus-test:

Your usability work is pointless if it falls in any of the following categories.

• You’re performing card-sorts to figure out what direction to go.
• You’re obsessing over affordances for homepage real-estate that is dedicated to non-business goals.
• You’ve followed all the usability guidelines “to the T” but have never had a detailed talk with marketing.
• You are not able to list any specific business goals that your work accomplishes.

Essentially, we all have to work together. Become integrated and communicate with each other. Time is precious and money is short – so why waste either on anything that doesn’t get us where we need to go: more conversions.

What are your thoughts? Is usability getting too much of the limelight? Have you ever missed the forest for the trees?

We all love it when brands make us feel special, but how forgiving are we when they get it wrong?

Large strides have been already made in terms of personalization through customized content. Visit Amazon.com for example (my site is on page 24 of that book by the way). If you’ve been there before and sign in, Amazon welcomes you by name, and suggests items that it thinks you’d be interested in. In the case of a hotel, go to a hotel enough times and they’ll remember little details like the fact you enjoy an extra pillow, or what your favorite daily is and provide both of them for you before you enter your room. However, let’s look at this in a different way.

Are the potential gains of creating a positive, customized user-experience worth the risk of getting it wrong from time to time?

It has been said that no two people are alike, but if we generalize enough, we can segment audiences and markets. That’s what all of marketing intelligence is about after all. Web analysts extract behaviours and wants (and hopefully demands) from the volumes of visitor data and all the other internal records at their disposal to serve as the basis of customization systems whose purposes are to make customers feel welcomed and valued. But despite everyone’s best efforts, mistakes do happen.

Consider this, Walmart, a few years ago, “recommended a film about Martin Luther King Jr. to potential buyers of a “Planet of the Apes” DVD” (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10730202/). Damage control must of been in high gear that day and probably left a permanent bad taste in a few customers’ mouths. Whether or not Walmart actually lost customers over this incident is unclear. However one thing is for sure, there was bad press and it wouldn’t be far fetched to assume that even bigger hiccups than this could occur in the future.

Are there times when adapting content for users is dangerous?

Let’s put PR and hurt feelings aside for a moment. There are some cases where identifying personality-types and leveraging this knowledge could be potentially dangerous. For example, take users that can be categorized as substance-abusers or compulsive gamblers. Feeding into their tendencies, though profitable, could be detrimental to their well-beings. In fact, if adaptive systems advance even further, it might be necessary to set guidelines on how they are used to protect vulnerable consumers. And what if governments were to impose their influence on these adaptive systems? Could this be a tool for online propaganda or censorship? Could web logs incriminate users or make them political targets? To deal with these scenarios, it may be necessary for these systems to develop morals.

Customized user-experience: It’s the new black.

Despite any moral implications, customized user-experiences are here to stay, and in fact, they will become more prevalent in the years to come. Consider some other adaptive technologies in the pipeline:

• In 2003, IBM developed a way to customize the grocery shopping experience by helping shoppers know of specials in certain isles, etc via a small terminal attached to shopping carts. It’s only a matter of time until they work out all the angles on this one and introduce it to more grocery chains.
• MIT is working on websites that adapt. These adapting sites change their content and layout for unknown users in order to better suit their preferences. It is predicted that  this technology, when implemented on a site, could increase sales up to 20%. MIT plans to launch their first full version of this technology in the near future in Japan.

If you can’t fight ‘em, join ‘em.

It’s not about whether this will happen, it’s about when it will happen. The web industry has remain vigilant, constantly determine the new metrics, and have the strength of character to remain ethical despite the temptation of possible easy gains. Discussions at the early stage will help steer new technologies and prepare us for the future.

What do you think of customized user-experience? Should we embrace it, or discourage it?