Identify or Die: Do You Know What This Symbol Means?

Take a close look at the icon above. If you saw it on your car's dashboard, would you know what it means?

You better: Your life may depend on it.

According to cars.com, one out of three drivers surveyed did not understand this difficult-to-decipher warning light. Which means that more than a third of drivers on the road today are in danger of creating a major accident if this symbol suddenly lights up.

The article says the icon is supposed to be "idiot proof," but as we've learned in thousands of usability tests, there is no such thing when it comes to symbols. The real "idiots" here (Hey, if they are going to call us idiots, then I'll throw it right back at them) are the designers and developers who don't label their icons. Everyone who sees a symbol for the first time has their own image of what it represents.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a word will prevent a thousand pictures - and in this case, save your life.

No, I won't tell you what the symbol means (Take a guess below first), but you can read the original article and explanation here.

Company forums, personal information and the World of Warcraft

Those of you who have forums on your Web site understand that spammers and trolls can be a real nuisance. Perhaps you can relate to the trouble Activision Blizzard has with dealing with the multitude of undesirable posts on their official World of Warcraft forums.

On July 6th, Activision Blizzard, Inc. unveiled a controversial plan to help regulate the forums: Anyone posting on forums would have their real name displayed. The philosophy is that with real names associated with each posting, personal accountability will come into play and subscribers will be more civil. There was immediate backlash from WOW subscribers and users concerned about this proposed policy change. Personal privacy advocates were particularly concerned about publicly displaying real names in connection with Warcraft. Posters also worried about the possibility of cyberstalking and out-of-game harassment.

In an attempt to show how "harmless" the proposed change would be, a forum moderator posted his real name in the Blizzard Forum discussion on this topic.
Within minutes, community members posted all matter of personal information on him. Using only Google searches and his real name, they found and posted such info as his:

• Cell phone number
  
• Twitter and Facebook accounts
  
• Personal photos
• Mailing address
  
• Maps to his house.

The community used this opportunity to illustrate how much information can be easily gathered, and how it could be dangerous when your real name is displayed in the forums.


There are simpler ways to combat undesirable posters than by publicly displaying personally identifying information. In her post, forum moderator Nethaera provides the basic methods used in forums to ensure that useful information will be seen and found by users:

• Having the community rate posts (the Slashdot commenting model)
• Highlighting posts based on rating (YouTube's "highest rated comment" model)
  
• Improving forum search
  
  YouTube has successfully adopted most of these methods to improve the comments on their videos (highest rated comments, voting up/voting down and automatically hiding spam/comments with a low rating).

The lesson is that spammers and trolls will make it on to your company forums, as they find their way onto EVERY board. The undesirable posters can manage to defeat almost any automated security precautions you can set up. The presence of an active group of forum moderators (employees of your company or a trusted enthusiast of your brand) goes a long way to creating an active, safe community. Even though forum trolls and spammers are a nuisance on forums, you do not need to take the drastic measures of posting your customer's personal information to combat them.

-by Kyle Kulakowski

Stock photography vs. reverse image searches

For companies with respected online brands using stock photography can be a terrible disservice to all Web site visitors and your online reputation. In user tests at Interface Guru, we have found the more tech-savvy users (like engineers and programmers) are particularly intolerant of stock photography and will think less of a brand if they see it used on a Web site.

Stock photography recognition is no longer a skill limited only to the more fluent Web users. There are now tools called reverse image search engines available to all users. With these specific search engines, users can instantly discover the source of an image on a Web site as well as find other Web sites using a particular image.

Caption: A sample Tin Eye search found 77 uses of this image

Here is a quick breakdown of the more popular reverse image search engines:
1) TinEye (http://www.tineye.com/) - Exact match of an image uploaded or image URL linked by the user. Arguably the most popular of the reverse image searches, it even provides plugins for Firefox and Chrome browsers. With a simple right-click on an image, users can check to see if your graphics are used elsewhere on the Web.
2) Byo (http://labs.ideeinc.com/) - Searches for images based on similar colors.
3) Gazopa (http://www.gazopa.com/) - This engine will search based on color and shape similarity.
4) RevIMG (http://www.revimg.net/) - This reverse image search is focused more on art and architecture. It looks for the exact image (just like TinEye), but users must specify the artistic category that applies to the image before they can conduct the search.
5) Google's Similar Image Search (http://similar-images.googlelabs.com/) - While less robust than specific reverse image search images, this functionality is now built right into Google Image search returns.

Caption: Another sample search from Tin Eye

Chris Barton, photography blogger, has an entry where he uses a reverse image search to find all instances of sites using a particular employee stock photograph: http://fairtradephotographer.blogspot.com/2010/03/microstock-why-would-reputable-company.html

In a follow-up entry Chris provides a risk assessment breakdown of all your available options for providing images on your Web site:
http://fairtradephotographer.blogspot.com/2010/04/microstock-how-to-avoid-poisonous.html
He rates stock photography as the highest risk to your organization and creating your own images as the lowest risk.

At Interface Guru, we agree that using stock photography is a risk - you do not know what other Web sites have purchased the image and are using it on their site. Your images on your Web site should be as unique as your company; create your own graphics and images on your Web site and tailor them to match your content.

- by Kyle Kulakowski

Good food, great Web experience

Recently I ordered Domino's Pizza for the first time in years and discovered that the new sauce isn't their only innovation. Their new Web site includes the Domino's Tracker, an application that gives you the real-time status of your order (the Tracker activates after an order is placed, so I'm including a screencap from a recent order). A glowing status bar tells you exactly where your pizza is from the moment you place the order, to when Terrence puts it in the oven, to when Dmitri the delivery driver is en route to your house. It's a great example of online customer service.
One of the drawbacks to delivery service is the open-ended nature of the delivery time. A quoted delivery time of 45 minutes could mean anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes before that pie hits my counter. As the timer ticks down I often end up perched on the edge of my couch, eagerly jumping up each time the outside gate creaks only to be disappointed by my neighbor's face. As a customer, I love the transparency offered by this app. No more guessing about if I have time to take a shower or run to the bank.

That simple addition to their Web site made for such a great brand experience that, a week later, I ordered another pie just so I could get screen caps of the Tracker in action. Now my only question is how long will it take other brands to do something similar?

Babysitting the interface: The myth of self-service

As we prepared for another road trip and the attendant joy of air travel in America in 2010, I was musing about the common sight of a human being helping passengers use the so-called "self-service" kiosk. It was in that frame of mind that I went to Facebook; I had to laugh when I saw this screen with the instruction: DO NOT CLICK THE "Go to Application" BUTTON ON LEFT!

Human intervention with software, Web pages, and kiosks is a regular occurrence across corporate America. You see it first-hand at airport counters, supermarkets, a co-worker's desk. We see it inside call centers and controlled environments. How much does this cost business, education, and nonprofits every day?

Well into the year 2010, we are still seeing an utter failure to budget - or even account for - the design of information structure, meaning: Where will this digital media experience begin and end? How does the user know where he is in the morass of content? How do you know whether you've seen and experienced all the content? How does he get to related content? Did anyone design or plan this experience? What are the opportunity costs related to this basic failure of planning?

In 2000, seven years into the commercial Web, a failure to plan and structure digital media interaction was understandable. Skeptics were still expecting (or hoping) that the Web would die. In 2010, the failure to plan and structure digital media is unforgivable.

If your digital media project lacks a budget item for information design (information architecture, task sequence design, user interface design), it is destined to under-perform and disappoint. Web sites and applications, software applications, kiosks, intranets, instrumentation interfaces - any digital implementation must include planning and architecture beyond simple functionality and appearance.

The Self-Service and Kiosk Association begins to address the usability issue in a blog post by Stephen Kendig, but the industry is just beginning to scratch the surface. If we use the Web as an object lesson, bad information design proliferates more quickly than good design. We will be living in a dystopian reality if the same problem propagates across self-service in a world that seems determined to eliminate human-powered customer service. The current economic woes will only exacerbate the problem.

If we're going to eliminate the human from the equation at all the transaction points of daily life, the digital interface must be bulletproof. Else we are destined for the worst of both worlds - unhappy customers, unhappy workers. Babysitting an interface is no one's career goal.

User Experience: What's Your Fail?

I've been excited to see that user experience (UX) has been a big topic and in demand at SXSW Interactive this year. We've built Interface Guru around user experience design principles over the last 10 years, and frankly it sometimes feels like we're alone in the jungle.

The first session track ever devoted entirely to user experience design at the conference was held on Saturday, and its opening workshop ("The Ten Commandments of User Experience") packed a large ballroom and left a line of people standing outside. It had tough competition, too: the keynote address was going on at the same time.

Judging from the Twitter feed for the session (at #uxsxsw - thank you to presenters Nick Finck and Raina Van Cleave for hacking the 18-character official hashtag and shortening it), many participants were disappointed in the introductory nature of some of the sessions.

Comments:

"(Has) the UX community stopped thinking about new ways of doing things or am I at the wrong conference? Mostly old news so far."

"The last UX session of the day is the first where I've seen people actually walk out to move to another session."

"I agree with your twitter stream. #uxsxsw has been underwhelming - what about what's next?"

I have to admit I shared the sentiment - until I took a closer look at the program. Specifically, the ubiquitous pocket schedule everyone relies on to keep track of what's going on at SXSW.

If you look closely at the events on the schedule, each session has a small circle, square, or diamond next to it - indicating the session is either beginning, intermediate, or advanced. The two sessions people complained the most about had circles next to them, indicating they were basic introductions to the subject matter.



I only discovered this because I happened to open my pocket guide to the front for the first time during the conference, and stumbled across the key to the symbols, which only appears on the first page.

It's a classic fail: Assuming your users are going to look at your information in a linear fashion and understand that icons have meaning, without labels to guide them.

I've conducted an informal survey since, asking my fellow conference attendees (especially those who complain about a lack of relevance or depth in sessions) if they knew that the symbols in the schedule meant something. I've yet to find someone who noticed this helpful bit of information.

Once they realized the importance of the iconography, people I've spoken to have said they would have been able to use this information to narrow their selection of sessions to something more relevant, creating a more positive user experience.

Think about all the thousands and millions of dollars it takes to put the hard stuff together for one of the biggest conferences in the country: assembling panels, printing conference materials, advertising - the list goes on and on. Only to have many of your customers' satisfaction with your product come down to a few inexpensive labels and icons on a piece of paper.

What's YOUR fail?

Error message of the day from Tweaker Speakers Grandmax

I loved my Tweaker Speakers until one inexplicably died. So I go to Grandmax for tech support. After clicking the support link, here's the error message:

"We're sorry, we're temporarily undergoing maintenance!
[Saeven|CRM cannot operate with register_globals set to 'On'. Set this to 'Off' using php.ini or a .htaccess directive, and restart your webserver thereafter.]

If you would like to contact us in the interim, please do so at admin_at_toqen_dot_com"

Grrrrr.

Surviving SXSW Interactive

In four years of attending South by Southwest Interactive, I've learned one thing above all else: If you don't arrive with a plan, you're screwed.

Whether it's how you're going to get from your hotel to the convention center (if you're not already downtown, it's a nightmare), to how you're going to eat (A hotel circle with almost no restaurants. Really?), to which after-session parties to network at, it isn't a conference as much as it is a tactical military operation.

And that's not even factoring in the conference itself.

My long-time friend and Internet colleague Ward Andrews drove this point home Tuesday on the phone, as we were conferring on strategy.

"Do you know what sessions you're attending?"

I've tried to schedule. Really, I have. I can't get past the first session, which starts today at 2 p.m. There are 19 sessions going on concurrently, eight of which I want to attend. These eight aren't sessions I'm kind of interested in - they're all "must-sees."

If I go to any one of these eight, I'll miss easily the most popular session every year: "How to Rawk SXSW." Fittingly enough, it's a session devoted entirely to surviving South by Southwest. In fact, going on at the same time is a session addressing "SXSW SARS" - the name given to exhaustion that brings on sickness from trying to do too much in this pure chaos.

It's a great test bed for using technology to make life easier because it mimics the information overload we experience in our everyday lives ... to an extreme. Kind of like putting cars through the roughest conditions to ensure their safety (maybe this isn't the best example right now).

Ward turned me on to the latest weapon in managing the chaos: It's a mobile site called SitBy.Us (www.sitby.us) created by Weightshift (www.weightshift.com). Not only does it have the complete SXSW schedule and descriptions in an optimized layout for all mobile devices, but it also allows you to create a personalized schedule.

The kicker: Log in with your Twitter account and you can see what sessions your Twitter friends are attending. Once you show up for the session, you can let your friends know where you are sitting by selecting your location on a map of the room. How cool is that? The app also will tweet your session with a link to the description.

Ward, my brother Greg, and I are brewing a plan to use this app and Twitter to mount a guerrilla attack on providing simultaneous coverage of the conference. Stay tuned!

There's no replacement for a good research plan

Yes, you should test your Web properties, especially the transactional ones (e-commerce, subscriptions, digital libraries); we routinely recommend usability testing combined with other techniques such as multivariate testing or A/B testing. Anchor Wave's Anthony Rivera (@ant1832) asked us about The Ultimate Comparison of Multivariate Testing, originally tweeted by always-on-top-of-it Smashing Mag - which solution do we recommend? Good question, since startup costs range from free (Google Website Optimizer) to $33,000+ (Accenture). Where to begin?

Here's the short answer: We recommend selecting the best fit for your company. (You need to decide whether you need both multivariate and A/B testing; check out Avinash Kaushik's simple explanation of the difference. Or check out the handy glossary from Web Analytics Blog.) Essentially, multivariate testing swaps out components of a Web page, while A/B testing swaps out two (or more) versions of a Web page. Both are valuable and merit consideration.

Basic criteria to consider when choosing a solution:
- Scale: How extensive is your digital product?
- Flexibility: Can you modify your test targets?
- Self-service: Do you need or want hand-holding?
- Return on investment: If your digital product is a major source of revenue, shouldn't you invest in testing it with something more than a free solution?

There are two basic fallacies to avoid in considering multivariate testing or A/B testing:

The first fallacy is the idea that testing one page is enough. User experience consists of multiple steps (or screen views) through a Web site, Web application, or kiosk. Whether you select multivariate or A/B testing, the tool you choose must account for task sequences - the steps that users take through your digital product.

This is not to say that one page can't make a huge difference. Our usability testing shows that common, simple missteps - such as an interface change at a critical transaction point - will discourage users from completing a purchase. But the larger point is that measurement must be designed to span the entire process - especially because conventional metrics may fall off the map when the user proceeds to a different URL.

The second fallacy is the idea that ANY product replaces a considered research plan. In our practice, we rarely encounter well-planned research, where the organization routinely measures success against defined goals. (A notable exception: Playboy, where measurement is a regular activity conducted by research professionals.) As with usability testing results, well-planned research is most valuable when shared within the organization. The purpose of conducting research, after all, is to inform your business activities.

If you have not established a research plan - even at a back-of-the-napkin level, with definition of user profiles at a minimum - it's probably too soon to engage in multivariate or A/B testing. Because you really don't know what you need yet.

Are you an enterprise, a medium-sized business, or a small business? Your research initiatives should map to the size of the business. The enterprise MUST invest in professional research (and if it does not, it will eventually fail or under-perform, which amounts to the same thing). The small business can take advantage of free or almost-free tools. The medium-sized business can find solutions somewhere in the middle. Regardless of budget, a basic research plan must be in place before solutions are selected. It's a basic part of your Web strategy.

Social media and culture fit: You can't fake it

While listening to my colleague Mike Schmidt's podcast on "social marketing," (a good primer for newbies, featuring Jerry Harkins of MacTutorTucson.com) I considered my setup experience with Google Buzz this morning, and my Mayorship of the Hotel Congress on Foursquare, and the status updates I posted to Facebook and LinkedIn on the way. Another day in the roiling surf of social media. Which service gets your allegiance and time?

As with all digital media, it depends on your users and your business. Some truisms are helpful; we know that bands prosper on MySpace, and charitable causes flourish on Facebook. But in our view, the key to social media is culture. Are you willing to be what Schmidt calls a "good social media citizen"? Are you willing to help people solve problems even when the dollar is not immediately attached? Or are you only willing to invest time in exchange for dollars?

The greatest challenge for conventionally structured organizations is to become those "good social media citizens" when lack of transparency and buyer-beware have been the standard marching orders - until the emperor-has-no-clothes power of the Web came along.

The selection of social media most valuable to your business is a tactic. The strategy: Support a corporate culture whose values are revealed by social media. Successful strategic values include collaboration, humility, helpfulness, expertise, hard work. Going the extra mile. You can't fake these values in social media. At least, not for long.

You should never ignore a technology because you don't know what it is. In our practice, we frequently encounter Web teams that don't use the very technologies about which they are expected to make decisions. "You have to try it to understand it," says Schmidt, the principal of Anchor Wave, and there we agree wholeheartedly. Kudos to managers who understand they may have to rock the boat by introducing - dare we say it - meritocracy. Who are willing to experiment. Who understand that workers must demonstrate interest AND capability. In some organizations, where seniority and longevity rule, this is a tough battle. But it must be fought, and it must be won.

Those who hold back until someone else figures it out (a philosophy proudly stated to me by the principal of a New York "digital design agency" a couple of years ago) are simply walking into the theatre in the middle of the metaphorical movie. You'll never catch up with the story, much less the subtleties. How can you make good decisions about digital media that way? The answer is, you can't.

But where do we find the time to filter out the valuable social media endeavors from the less productive ones? Find that time - because as co-podcaster Jerry Harkins points out, people filter out conventional marketing messages without even realizing the are doing so. People are likelier to trust peers over authority - a finding Interface Guru first realized during a usability test for Clickability in San Francisco in 2001 - and your conventional marketing message may be pointless in 2010. Harkins directs listeners to The Purple Goldfish Project - a great resource on how businesses (and people) can - literally - blow people away with a gesture of respect and service. When you see the examples, you realize the winning companies' strategies are less about what they spend, and more about the core values they hold dear. What can you learn about your own brand that's worth sharing with the world via social media?

You can't have a robber-baron culture and a collaborative social media strategy. One of the two will lose.

So, how were your e-sales this year? E-com usability

So, how were your e-sales this year? E-com usability may be easier to discuss in recent hindsight, after the dust has settled and the wishful thinking has stopped. How well did you do? What sort of ROI (return on investment) are you seeing?

E-commerce success can be measured in many ways; gross sales numbers are just a start. A more critical number in our view: Abandonment rates. How many people abandoned a shopping cart? Do you know exactly when and where it was abandoned? Most importantly - Do you know why someone abandoned a transaction?

The UK firm userfocus recently discussed "Nine tests for a usable checkout" which certainly merit a look. It's great to see another firm reiterate what we've been observing - and telling our clients - for years. "Ask the minimum number of questions. Use consistent and standard form controls. Place error messages next to the entries that need correcting." Truly commonsensical advice.

While the Nine Tests checklist is a great contribution, we still need to understand our users on a more specific level. The Amazon one-click book shopper is not the Playboy online club member, who is not the engineer joining IEEE online. Mental models, and the reasons for our purchases, play a role. The Amazon book shopper has learned to trust one-click ordering and needs little else. The Playboy user may like the added thrill of the chase that results from "teaser" screens. The engineer at IEEE will grumble if date entry fields don't enforce formats (he's an engineer!).

User experience is about seeing the world through the user's eyes, even if briefly. The personal interaction that comes from user involvement - be it as advisor to the design team, or simply as usability test subject - is irreplaceable. Feel-good aside, sincere understanding of - and concern for - your user is the key to successful business online.

You can and should know how many transactions were abandoned; that's tactical. Understanding that user and designing to his needs is strategic.

Coda: I was about to join an association I really admire last week. They lost me at unenforced date format for my date of birth. Why did they lose me? Because I know they're smarter than that.