Category Archives: User Experience

Need Purpose In Your Designs? Create An Empathy Map

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Maybe it’s the industry I’m in, or maybe it’s my age, but the past year I’ve really been searching for purpose in my work.

You see, my designs don’t help feed the poor or cure cancer (although we at IBM are trying!), so many times I stop and wonder what “Noble Purpose” my work has on my fellow humans around me.

…and then I participated in IBM Design Thinking.

…and found a way to have empathy for my users.

It’s really simple: Create an empathy map.

We identified who are user was, drew 4 quadrants on the wall and simply asked ourselves, “What is Satish saying, doing, thinking, and feeling?”

The doing and saying and even thinking was nothing new…but writing what he was feeling and adding it to a sticky on the wall…I could finally start seeing my purpose.

You see, Satish works really hard. But he feels trapped in his work because he’s always reacting to data center emergencies. Now he’s getting pressure to add new services and to be quite honest, he’s scared. He’s scared of failing, of getting it wrong, of not being valued by his boss, his team. If he only had software that could guide him, educate him, and help him deliver these solutions with ease and speed…without messing up, he would instead feel confident, valued, content, and even happy.

Wow.

In one day I learned that the work I do does have purpose…I can change a person’s outlook on life…and in turn possibly how he reacts to his kids, his wife, his friends. My designs can save him time…time he can spend playing music, playing with his pup.

No, my designs might not cure cancer (yet), but my designs can help Satish have a better life.

…and that’s a pretty noble purpose.

 

UX Review – Musical Instrument Museum – Phoenix, AZ

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How many times have you truly been surprised at a user experience? Not in the “I can’t believe they shipped this piece of junk”, but in the “I’m giddy with delight…I want to bear-hug the lead designer of this project!”?

It just happened to me at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, Arizona.

As I described in my design session “How to Craft (and Measure) a Killer User Experience”, a user experience goes far deeper than just shiny objects and fancy artwork. User Experience, at least the way I’ve come to understand it, includes six themes, or doors, the user walks through (Figure 1): Presentation, Navigation, Relevant Scenarios, Trustworthy Feedback, Initial Bring-up, and Connectivity…and they are all essential to create a killer user experience.

Killer User Experience Themes

Figure 1: Killer user experience themes

 So how was the experience at MIM? Let’s dig in…

My wife and I walk into the MIM, and pay for our tickets. Unlike the Louvre, the audio guides (earphones and device) come with the ticket. A small thing, but nice!

We walk to a nearby gallery filled to the rafters with guitars…my love language. After studying my favorite (Figure 2, a Paul Reed Smith Double Dragon), we walk up stairs to the museum.

photo 1

Figure 2 – My favorite guitar

We put our headphones on, and as we walk to the first display, we suddenly start hearing what these instruments from 19th century Africa sound like. The audio connects seamlessly and synchs so we can hear, and see on the TV how they play the instruments as well.

WONDERFUL!

I can’t tell you how delightful that was. No numbers or channels to figure out, no fancy touch-screen to palm and screw up, nothing. The mere act of moving closer to the TV automatically immerses us into the musical culture right in front of us (Figure 3).

Figure 3 - An awesome display

Figure 3 – An awesome display blending sight, sound, and history

Their attention to detail was impressive. For example, as I walked towards the display, the music faded in at a smooth, natural rate…reinforcing that this whole experience should be a leisurely stroll through the music of the world. As I walked away…or as the device switched between two nearby TV audio signals, it calmly faded, and once out, the next audio faded in. This reinforced that the designers knew experiencing the music was the top focus, rather than just making sure the technology worked. I actually expected an abrupt beginning and end, but instead I was gently waved goodbye by the display I was leaving and warmly greeted by the display I was approaching.

As a side note, it was almost erie to take my headphones off and hear complete silence..even though hundreds of people were strolling throughout the museum.

What the designers at MIM figured out is how to provide an effortless connection to experience musical instruments from around the world. I mean effortless…walking closer to a display activating the audio? With nothing for me to dial in? And not having to share audio with others or have 198 displays blaring its own audio for all to hear? Yes, effortless.

Was it perfect? Nope. But pretty darn close. There were a few times that I could not sync to the TV. 98% of the time the device worked flawlessly, but when it didn’t I did feel a bit at a loss. Since there were minimal controls on the device (start, stop, volume), the only thing I could try was to press stop and start in hopes it would re-synch. When that didn’t’ work, I’m sure I looked a little funny doing a little 2-step as I moved farther away then closer to the display in hopes it would synch up 🙂  I even found myself waving the device towards the TV and wondering if the ‘front’ of the device should be pointing directly at the TV or not.

Of course, as I write this, my wife asked, “didn’t you see the transmitter at the rim of the display that listed the order of artifacts?”

One other minor issue had to do with the “Relevant Scenarios” and “Navigation” user experience themes. Being a musician, I wanted to play these awesome instruments…like these from South Africa. (Figure 4).

Figure 4 - These were screaming for me to play them!

Figure 4 – These were screaming for me to play them!

The problem was, I wasn’t told about the “Touch-It” lounge downstairs until we found it later. It would have been awesome to have a little “Touch-It” logo next to the display label for that instrument…so I knew instantly I could either play it or something similar to it later on.

So, with these “Hintervision Killer UX” themes, let’s see how MIM did:

Presentation: A
Navigation: A-
Relevant Scenarios: A
Trustworthy Feedback: A
Initial Bring-up: A+
Connectivity: B+

Overall:  KILLER!

I realize that user experience is usually referring to software interfaces, but I think we all agree that more and more interaction with our environment does not have a detailed screen to look at. The designers at MIM should be awarded with their awesome, relevant, delightful, and in the end, killer user experience.

How about you? Have you visited the Musical Instrument Museum? What did you think?

 

Star Trek, AC/DC, And Your Killer User Experience

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I compose music (Listen here), and years ago I took a film composing workshop. The teacher was Ron Jones and if you don’t know him, you know is music from Star Trek: The Next Generation. He scored the first few seasons including the awesome season 3 finale “The Best of Both Worlds”. He said the key to being a great composer is to always ask this question:

“What’s The Main Thing?”

Meaning, at any moment in time, any measure, any beat, ask yourself:

“What is the ONE thing you want your listener to pay attention to?”

He explained that while humans think we can hear lots of different things at once, when it comes down to it, we really focus on one thing…and if a composer isn’t thinking about the “main thing”…and crafting the music to make the “main thing” stand out, then the listener might focus on something else and not really hear what the composer thinks is most essential to that moment in the song.

The “main thing” in music may surprise you. You might think it’s the melody or the lead guitar solo, but in a rock song, the “main thing” might be the rhythm guitar. In a dance song, the “main thing” might be the snare or kick drum. The “main thing” could change measure by measure from guitar riff, to snare, to vocal, and so on. For example, take the song “Back in Black” by AC/DC. (Note: for those that now categorize me into a certain genre, again, take a listen to what I write…it might surprise you)

Anyway, AC/DC’s Back in Black. That song has one of the best intros in any song. If you listen, the intro quickly moves from string mutes/high hat, to the guitar riff, then adds bass and off it goes into the vocal. But listen again. The “main thing” is actually the snare. Notice how the guitar riff stops so the snare can breathe…there’s nothing interrupting that glorious “SMACK” as the snare (and guitar) set the tone, beat, intensity of the whole song.

The “Main Thing” in Your UX may also surprise you.

While our instinct as creative designers is to want to show off all the cool graphics, colorful gauges, and awesome capabilities your product has, you need to ask yourself,

“What’s the main thing?”

Or more specifically,

“What is the ONE thing you want your user to pay attention to…to focus on?”

It may force you to dim, remove, or alter the flow of your designs so that the user is delighted with how easy your interface is to use; not because there are so many awesome capabilities to choose from, but because they instantly see what they need to focus on.

For example, in our newest PowerVC product, we have all kinds of cool capability, pretty gauges, data, and graphics giving the user much-needed information on how to manage their virtual machines. However, when users are first starting out, the “main thing” is none of that…it’s simply a “Plus” icon guiding users to add hosts, storage, and network. Nothing else should have the users’  focus.

Focus on Most Essential

I truly think we’re only tapping the surface of what this simple question could do to our user experience. I’m excited to see how much more we all can improve our products by asking this single question.

How about you?

What’s the “Main Thing” in your user experience?

Don’t Do What Users Expect

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I know. Seems stupid. “Greg, you’re an idiot”, you say. Well, hear me out.

If you’re like me, as you think through what your product needs to deliver next, the first thing you try to answer is,

“What are customers complaining about?”

…and then work to solve those exact problems. While that does help our users a bit, if we’re on our game, we step back and try to answer,

“Why are customer complaining about that?”

That usually gives us a much better solution that not only solves their immediate problem, but also may solve many related problems. We have a chance to meet or even exceed their expectations since the solution is just better.

But what if we took one more step back and asked,

“Is the way customers want to accomplish their goals really the best way?”

…along with,

“Is there a different perspective we could offer that would completely change how fast/better their goals could be accomplished?”

…and quickly finish with,

“…and how can we solve it with new technology that’s just emerging?”

If we did that, I think we could start hearing the kind of customer feedback we all really want…

…not “Neat. That helps my current need”

…not “Cool. That saves me time to accomplish my current goal”

…but we could start hearing,

“Wow. This is incredible. I didn’t even know that was possible!”

I’m starting to think that taking the extra effort to not only understand our users’ goals, but also think of how to accomplish them from a unique perspective that’s different than everyone else in the market, combined with using new, innovative technology, can truly deliver a killer user experience.

What do you think? What products have you used that don’t meet or exceed your expectations because they completely blew you away because you were in awe at how incredible the product was?

 

Killer UX Tip #37: Love Your Awesome Developers

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It’s not very often we start on a brand new product, but when it does, it gives the whole team a chance to craft a killer user experience.

While I’ve mentioned several times how I go about designing a killer user experience, but, when it comes down to it, its success truly depends on how focused our development team, executive team, and user research team are on delivering an outstanding user experience.

I am thrilled with the UX of our newest product: IBM PowerVC.

Take a peek here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFTbC6JW7YE

Why?

Because not only did we do our best work on the design, the entire team was driven to deliver the best user experience possible. Is it perfect? Nope. But based on the time we had and the resources we had available, I think it’s pretty great (and so do the customers who have previewed it…which is our ultimate goal).

The design team iterated over and over to polish, change, alter, restart, and finish a fantastic design that the development team could deliver.

The development team was relentless in its pursuit of outstanding UX. We had healthy debates about the best way a widget should behave, what tasks were most relevant to our users, even how the artwork should look. And lets face it, without awesome developers, even your best designs won’t benefit anyone.

The executive and product management team was the fuel that drove this relentless pursuit of great user experience. Even for us in the design community, it’s tempting to take the easy way in order to make a deadline, but this time there was a constant mantra “Focus on the UX” from the very top.

Take a peek, and let me know what you think.

Oh, and here’s a question to leave you with? How do you say thank you to your developers when they deliver your designs?

 

Craft A Killer UX: “Listen” To Your UX

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I’m a big fan of music.

I love to compose it, play it, listen to it, and share it.

In my years of composing, I’ve used melody, harmony, tempo, and so on to craft the best music I can. In those years I’ve learned to listen, I mean really listen, to the song as it is played to see what’s missing…or what’s extra that needs to get cut. Sometimes the song is lacking energy (fixed with adding a fast guitar rhythm track) or sometimes the song is unfocused (fixed with removing entire tracks).

The result?

A better song.

Critical listening, at least for me, is key not only in crafting the best song I can, but also in crafting the best user experience I can.

Here are a few examples of what I mean:

Hiccups
Install and configure the product yourself. Listen to the product unfold…does it flow well? Are there hiccups that force you to pause, look something up, scratch your head? Is there some step you can remove (automate) or is there guidance you should add?

Numb
Too often I get numb and don’t notice all those irritating shards in the UX that if removed would make for a much smoother experience. Listen to that nagging little voice that moans at every dumb behavior, bad icon, or poorly worded button. If you hear yourself saying, “We will need to add help to describe that”, then you need to fix that area. By listening to that voice, you may find all kinds of things to remove!

Assumptions
Listen for assumptions you make as you navigate your UX. Will your users make those same assumptions? Are there gaps in your UX that you fill with your expertise that your users will trip over?

Harmonies
Many of our product focus on a particular area of our users work. In their world, our product is only one of many they need to use to keep their business running. Listen to how customers work. Is there additional integration, sharing, awareness that your product can add? You don’t need to solve the world’s problems, but if you show you are aware of where they need to go next, users will be much happier.

Those are just a few examples…so how do you listen to your user experience?

How To Craft (And Measure) a Killer User Experience – Virtual Conference Sept 19th

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I’m always looking for ways to improve a product’s user experience. Thanks to my friends at Penton Media, I’m excited to announce I am speaking in the 11th annual iPro Developer conference, where I’ll be speaking on user experience…specifically, how to craft and measure a killer user experience!

Here’s a peek:
When you use a product with a killer user experience you just know it. But how do you create one? Even more basic, what elements make up a killer user experience? I’ve worked for years in user experience and regularly get asked that, so I will share how I describe a killer user experience, how it can be measured, and even what emotional responses are at stake. In the end, only our users can describe how they feel about a product’s user experience, and my hope is with this session you will start hearing, “Delightful”, “Awesome”, and even “Killer”.

I hope we can have a vibrant session, and follow up with some great conversations afterwards here on this site.

Check out the conference link for more details.

I look forward to the experience, and hope to see you there!

Craft a Killer UX – The Grin Metric

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“If using this software doesn’t put a big ol’ grin on your face, it’s probably not worth it” *

I love this quote. How many times have we been asked to measure user experience, when all along a simple glance at our user’s face would suffice?

Regardless of the research, design iterations, analysis, tutorials, and user testing, if a product makes the user smile…ear to ear…when using it, it’s got a killer user experience.

That grin communicates that the UX surprised them, delighted them, exceeded their I’ve-got-a-crazy-idea-to-make-my-life-a-ton-easier-but-I-doubt-this-product-is-awesome-enough-to-do-it-for-me expectations, and most of all…

…that grin communicates an instinctual delight that only comes from deep emotional impact…resulting in loyalty, trust, and, in the end, a very happy user.

What better goal is there?

* Paraphrased from an awesome article on Recording Review by Brandon Drury…read it!

Craft A Killer UX: Don’t Just Fix What’s Broken

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In a recent leadership podcast, one comment stood out:

“A great leader doesn’t just fix what’s broken”*

I love that quote and it made me wonder how it applies to user experience. Think about it…how often a user experience stalls because all design time is spent designing fixes to customer problems within the bounds of the current product rather than keeping focused on the overall user experience mission?

A seemingly common pattern in designing a great user experience is to have a grand vision…a mission statement…for a product’s user experience, work feverishly to make its first release as good as it can be, and ship it. However, as soon as the first release is out, customers request to fix pain points or add tweaks to improve what was shipped. Naturally, we want our customers happy so we focus our next releases on solving those pain points.

While reacting to customer feedback is important, how we react could make the difference from a ‘decent’ user experience to a ‘killer’ user experience.

If we are not careful, we can quickly narrow our design focus on how to solve the problem to be only within the bounds of our current product’s capabilities or infrastructure. We forget our user experience mission (or maybe just let it fade?) and as a result the user experience fades as well.

While patching a current UX may solve a customer’s current problem, I wonder if it actually reduces that customer’s overall satisfaction? If we keep accommodating repair requests, we may never have the chance to surprise and delight that customer with the killer UX envisioned in the original mission.

For me, creating a UX mission statement for each product is essential. That mission statement, along with our target personas, drive everything. When we do get customer requests, I find it useful to look at the request through the lens of that mission to see if it should be repaired directly, or if we can surprise and delight them by producing something much better that moves us closer to the overall vision.

What do you think? What other ways can we apply “Don’t just fix what’s broken” to keep improving our user experience?

* From Andy Stanley’s Leadership podcast

4 User Experience Insights I Learned From Training My Puppy

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A few months ago I got the family our first puppy. Her name? “Orchid Jane Isabella the Rut Killer”…or Orchid for short.

Like any new project, I’ve immersed myself in learning how to train her so she can be the best dog she can be. Along the way, I’ve learned a lot about our pup, my kids, myself…

…and a lot about how we should treat our users for a great user experience!

1) Positive Reinforcement Gets Better Results
I’ve tried different methods of training including one that’s strictly positive with treats/praise, and one with ‘corrections’, or leash pops, etc. In my experience, while I get pup to do what I want in both cases, I get much better results with positive reinforcement. She seems more eager to please as I guide her to do the right thing and reward her for succeeding. Besides, it seems to me that she becomes much more loyal…because she is choosing to engage with me.

A great user experience does the same. Most times users have choices between our software and a competitors. If users get positive feedback, if they’re guided to success, they become happy, engaged, eager to use the software, and they’ll enjoy the experience much more…and in the end our users will be much more loyal.

2) Take Small Steps And Start With The Basics
I am learning that in order to teach a dog a complex trick, it takes many small steps…and you can’t rush it! For example, my pup can now fetch a toy and if I say “Put Away” she walks to the toy basket and drops it in there. It’s awesome to see. However, that was not something I could teach in one step. She is eager to learn but she needs me to break down a trick into a number of basic steps that she can master…and once she masters each step I can have her perform the whole sequence. Further, if I push her too fast or start with the complex multi-step trick, she would get frustrated, abandon the training session, and just sit in a corner and chew on her bone.

A great user experience is the same: Users need to be shown the basics and feel successful! Once they get a handle of core tasks, they can be guided step-by-step through a more complex task, and eventually do the task on their own. If we don’t provide them with that guidance…and ability to do just the basics first, they’ll get frustrated and abandon our product.

3) Be 100% Consistent
To train a pup, I need to be consistent in reinforcing a behavior. If I’m 100% consistent, she learns the verbal or hand command and is very quick to understand what to do.

A great user experience is the same: If we are 100% consistent in our visual metaphors, navigation path, detailed interaction, our users are quick to understand how to get the most out of our products.

4) It’s All About Trust
It took a while for my pup to trust me. As our training proceeded, she learned I wanted the best for her, that I was here to help her succeed, and yes, that I had treats. It turns out that the more my pup trusts me, the more successful our training will be.

A great user experience is the same: As our users first start out with our product, we need to earn their trust…that we are always accurate, have their best interest in mind, and it doesn’t hurt to have some surprises (some cool capability, automation or innovative and elegant experience). The more our users trust us, the deeper into the product they’ll go and integrate it into their business.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

How about you, have you found insight into user experience from dog training or other non-technology sources?

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