Archive for the 'Usability' Category
September 8, 2008
Finding the Biggest Bang for Your Usability Buck
Most people acknowledge that usability is a critical factor in the success of a page, application or entire web site. Poor usability will drive away users and limit the results you can achieve.
However, how can you best determine where to start with your usability efforts? Here is an easy way to triage your opportunities and identify those with the best chance for high impact.
Identify which processes or transactions on your site are repeated the most frequently and ideally result in the greatest value for the web site publisher.
You want high frequency so that you are targeting the most (or most active) users of your site.
You want a cumulatively high value of all those actions in order to focus on those that create the most value for your organization.
A process that happens a million times a month and is worth, on average, 10 cents to the publisher is cumulatively worth $100,000. A minor usability improvement to that process which adds a penny or two to the average value has a big impact. You get the idea.
The best usability improvements are not necessarily the most brilliant or unique; they are those that generate the most value. A high value usability improvement could be a simple as adjusting a confusing label.
What are the highest volume and highest cumulative value processes on your site? Focus on making incremental usability improvements there in order to be a usability superstar.
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August 16, 2008
Disolving Usability Problems
A lot of usability work focuses on solving interface problems, making it easier for users to achieve a certain outcome or complete a task. This can involve user observations, iterative design changes, traffic analysis and other tools in pursuit of improvement. It is often not cheap in terms of time and effort, let alone when outside help is brought in.
A solved usability problem is one where both the user and the publisher get precisely what they want from the interaction. The user has an efficient and pleasant experience and the publisher gets the user to complete a desired task. All is well in the world.
A resolved usability problem is one in which a reasonable compromise is reached that is good enough but requires that either the user or publisher (or both in some cases) give up something. For example, the user experience might still have some rough spots but the value of the transaction doesn’t warrant further investment or outside factors impose it.
However, something a lot of people fail to consider is if the interface in question can be completely eliminated instead of ‘fixed’. Instead of solving the problem, can you dissolve the need for this interface completely? Sometimes making a few changes to the larger system of which the interface is a single element can completely eliminate the need for the interface.
This isn’t an option all the time, obviously, but the only way to know is to consider the larger context of the problem at hand. Simply focusing on individual interfaces is inadequate.
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April 15, 2008
Extrinsic and Intrinsic Value
Every web site embodies both extrinsic and intrinsic value to its visitors.
Extrinsic value is the value of achieving a particular goal or outcome. It might include buying something, finding information or connecting to a colleague.
Intrinsic value is the value given by the experience of achieving the extrinsic goal.
One implication? Among extrinsically equal options for a desired outcome, that with the highest intrinsic value will be chosen more often. This is where usability goes from a nice-to-have feature to a crucial competitive advantage.
Another implication? People will jump through painful hoops if the extrinsic value of the goal is high enough and not available elsewhere. However, if you’ve read Innovators Dilemma, you know that such a high extrinsic value is very hard to maintain over time. Paying attention to intrinsic value protects your overall value while you have the luxury of a big lead.
A final implication? Intrinsic value isn’t worth a hill of beans if your site has no extrinsic value to begin with.
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January 7, 2008
Why Business Intelligence is Often Stupid
Business intelligence (or BI) has been all the rage for the last couple of years. It is a central topic in ASAE’s Tech conference later this month, with many sessions focused on how to extract data from your systems and present them in shiny dashboard interfaces. There is a problem though:
Many business intelligence tools are plain stupid.
All the dials, speedometers, bar graphs, and status icons in the world won’t help you if you do not first ground your efforts in what data you need to make sound decision in pursuit of your business outcomes. A lot of vendors and consultants out there gloss over these critical issues in pursuit of the BI sale.
Take dashboards, for example. The concept is that a single screen will give you all the data you need to make quick decisions, just like you can with a car dashboard. The problem is, most businesses and organizations don’t have to make a decision in a split second like you do when driving an automobile. Auto dashboards are optimized to give the driver critical feedback in a glance lasting less than a second.
When is the last time you had to make a decision of major import to the organization from your desk in less than a second? It just doesn’t happen.
Yet, a lot of business intelligence dashboard tools look just like the dashboard of a car. It is a literal interpretation that ruins a somewhat valuable idea.
So, what to do?
You have to start with the objectives you are trying to achieve. What process are you putting into place to achieve an objective? What are the measurable steps within that process? What data sources do you need to tap into to generate those measures? How will you use that data to make decisions?
Once you have answered all those questions you should be able to identify what measures you should monitor and how often. If one or more of them matter on a daily basis, a dashboard interface might make a lot of sense for presentation of the data. If not, a simple report will probably meet your needs and save you the time, effort and expense of developing a dashboard you don’t need.
That is being intelligent about your business data.
By the way, I will be presenting a session with Wes Trochlil at the ASAE Technology Conference titled: “Getting Intelligent About Business Intelligence: Finding the Value Behind the Hype.” If you only go to one BI session, I suggest you make it ours.
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December 19, 2007
DRM is Hazardous to Your Revenue
I answered a question yesterday about tools for applying digital rights management (DRM) to electronic products such as PDFs and digital video files.
The short answer is that you do not need to act like an big media executive in how you offer digital products. Applying DRM to your electronic publication products is counter productive in most cases. I offer a few more thoughts on this in the short slide presentation below.
As an aside: I’ve been having fun with slideshare.net this past week, as you may have noticed. The key to using this as a medium for sharing your ideas is to design for it. Slides from my presentations are optimized to support my talk. Slides on slideshare need to stand on their own.
Update: This set of slides is currently featured on the Slideshare.net home page. Nobody can resist a good DRM smackdown.
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October 2, 2007
Effective Ecommerce with a Login
The screencast I created of the effortless ecommerce process for Coda prompted several questions about how to best incorporate a login to the online sales process. I’m going to address that issue via a normal blog post rather than a video.
Every additional step in an online process usually costs you people who don’t want to go through that extra bit of effort. Depending upon the situation, the abandonment rate can be quite high for each step. Exceptions are when the goal of the process has a very high perceived value by the customer.
The Coda example does not use a login. They have no need for it. All they care about is selling an individual product to you. However, some organizations offer discounts to certain classes of customers (members, rewards program, etc.) and they need some way to identify them in the process. They may also wish to capture data about the individual purchasing a product for later analysis.
Here is the deal: you can incorporate a login to the ecommerce process if it provides sufficient apparent value to the customer to go through the extra steps required. Here are some potential reasons a customer would perceive value in logging in:
- Repeat customers can save time not having to re-enter their data and billing information.
- Certain classes of customer receive a significant discount or savings if they identify themselves to you by logging in.
- They want the product enough to jump through the login hoop. (This is obviously not a good reason for a login, however.)
Look at your process for selling online. Is there any value to your customers to login for each sale? If not, you are going to hurt yourself by placing a login between your customer’s money and your bank account.
What should you do if you have both customers who can benefit from a login and those who won’t? Provide the option to login but do not require it. A number of sites offer this where you can login to retrieve shipping and billing data or go to a simple form for entering it. Providing the option allows your customers to self-select the process that is most appropriate for them.
Your database administrators may be pushing you to implement a login to reduce the occurrence of duplicate records in the database. You must analyze this requirement for the actual value to your organization. Is forcing data maintenance onto your customers the most profitable tactic to take? It very rarely is from a online sales perspective.
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September 27, 2007
The Amazon Bar
Amazon continues to set the bar for ecommerce efficiency and overall experience. I have been telling clients and audiences this for some years but I had an experience this week that shows they are still on top.
I bought three books from Amazon yesterday, which get free 2 day shipping from my Amazon Prime membership. They showed up today. I could immediately access status reports on the orders and even change or cancel them before the products had shipped (although that didn’t take long!). Great experience, exceeding my expectations all the way around.
I also bought two small bags from REI for organizing all the gear that goes with my laptop and other electronic doodads. I selected regular ground shipping since I don’t need these in a hurry. My e-mail from REI confirming the order says I can access the status of my orders after 48 hours have passed. I have no idea when they might arrive. It was such a let down from my experience with Amazon.
The lesson, my friends, is to go through your own ecommerce process, including fulfillment. How do you measure up? Do your customers know exactly what status their order is in, when it ships and when it will arrive? I guarantee you are being compared to the Amazon experience by many of your online customers.
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September 6, 2007
WYSIWYG Web Editors
All modern content management systems provide a Word-style editor that lets non-technical staff edit and add content to web sites. It is a key part of enabling line staff around the organization to produce and manage their own content.
What you may not have realized is that you have several options avaiable for adding WYSIWYG editors (what you see is what you get) to your own web applications. Sometimes they are as easy to install as adding a few lines of code to a web page.
Here are a few free and commercial solutions for providing an easy to use text editor in your own web applications:
Tiny MCE
This editor works across numerous platforms and is available under an open source license. It is written in javascript and is used widely in many applications. It has many configuration options available and can be tweaked to support a defined set of styles.
Ektron eWebEditPro
A widely used commercial editor from Ektron. It is also highly configurable and allows you tie down functionality to just what you want editors to have access too. It is not cross platform and only works on Windows-based browsers. (Their suggestion for Mac clients is a bit of a joke.)
openWYSIWYG
Another open source content editor written in Javascript.
FCKeditor
And one more open source, Javascript-based, editor.
Given all the options available, it is unreasonable not to provide a rich editor for your applications that should support user formatting of content.
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August 20, 2007
Getting Out of The Way
I made a short screencast on Friday showing how Panic does a great job with the shopping cart for their products. In We Have Always Done It That Way, I write about getting out of the way when someone is ready to invest in your product or service:
When a member has made the decision to invest more money in the association by purchasing a product or paying dues online, get out of their way and make it as easy as possible for them to complete the transaction.
Panic does a great job of this with their site. They collect the bare minimum of information for completing the transaction. They don’t even ask for you to subscribe to a newsletter! Watch the video below to see a demo with my commentary.
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