Establishing Qualitative Criteria for IA and UX in One Fell Swoop: How to Conduct a Card Sort with Storytelling

Slides from a presentation we did at the Boston Mini UPA conference in June 2010. "Card Sorts with Storytelling" is how we describe the type of research we started doing with site users for MIT Medical in 2008. We combined methods – a card sort, careful questioning and task completion – into a protocol to get information to inform site map, feature and overall IA decision-making, which was stuck due to lack of team consensus. The sessions were successful, and the results were extremely helpful in helping the team focus on making the site as useful as possible for the MIT community.

We refined and repeated the format on several higher-ed projects with similar success. This practice is not intended to replace more rigorous testing, but rather to quickly provide a project team and visual designers with user information when there otherwise would be none.

Establishing Qualitative Criteria for IA and UX in One Fell Swoop -- How to Conduct a Card Sort with Storytelling

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User experience design overview for Tufts' School of Medicine web health communication class

Slides from my talk at Lisa Gualtieri's class at Tufts University SOM. Created for health communication students to give them an overview of design activities and the process of designing sites and apps.

User experience design overview for Tufts' School of Medicine web health communication class

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Making "Support" helpful - some tips for Twitter

We all run into problems now and then using technology – heck, I'm a pretty tech-savvy person myself, and even I sometimes have to contact tech support. And when I do, there is nothing I find more infuriating and representative of poor customer support practices and user experience than hiding vital support information.

Consider a recent example of this: we're having problems getting our tweets to load on the Nimble Partners home page. I've worked tech support myself, so I know that the first step is to try to reproduce the bug and isolate the problem. Since nothing about our code had changed, and nothing about seaofclouds' script had changed either, I suspected the problem was with our Twitter stream. This was easily tested by successfully loading another public Twitter stream onto our home page.

So, now I knew that @nimblepartners was the most likely source of error. Next thing to do: check Twitter's support documentation and Google for potential explanations. I couldn't find anything, so finally I realized I'd have to file a support ticket. Twitter's support website allows you to log in and check the status of your current tickets, but there's one critically important thing it doesn't easily let you do: file a ticket.

That's right: you can spend all day looking through the otherwise well-designed ticket review pages, but if there's an obvious link to file a ticket, I never found one. After many frustrating minutes, I finally gave up and Googled for how to file a ticket, which eventually got me the right link – on an externally hosted site totally separate from Twitter's Support site. (Update: days later, I discovered that FAQs about account abuse and a small selection of other issues have links to the ticket form – but there's no consistent placement for or treatment of a link area.)

I understand why companies want to drive customers to online documentation: it's vastly cheaper than having a human provide assistance, and most of the time, a good FAQ will solve most of the problems. But there's no reason to hide or bury vital contact information – all this does is annoy your user base, and for a company like Twitter that seems to pride itself on interface simplicity and a friendly, inviting user experience, this kind of hide-and-seek game is antithetical to the way they're trying to present themselves.

One possible solution: make the link available on support FAQ pages as part of a consistently placed and worded "did this answer help you?" area at the end of each question. This hides the link from the casual emailer who rarely bothers to click into or read the support questions, but still makes it available for people who genuinely need assistance. Ultimately, it's counterproductive to annoy customers by implying you don't want to talk to them – an ironic result for a company whose basic mission is to promote communication.

A Tip for Visual and Information Design from the Movies

About this time of year I participate in the AIGA's student portfolio review. Graduating designers pay for the "privilege" of showing their work to as many volunteer professionals as possible within a set time limit. As a reviewer, the heat is on to grasp a student's capabilities in a nanosecond and impart some wisdom that will magically help them transform their portfolio into a thing of power and beauty that will make jaded design hiring managers weep with awe.

These brave and determined kids have paid through the nose for college, paid quite a bit of beer money to be critiqued, and fairly enough, have high expectations of the event. The work varies. In a room of about 16, there are a few standouts. For one or maybe two, it is hard to believe that they had formal design education. Last year I was faced with a portfolio that the student should have been able to use to get a refund from his college, or at least a free extra year. College doesn't work that way, unfortunately, and I had to figure out something constructive to say, fast.

The student used his own illustrations as backgrounds to several CD packages and action movie posters. The illustrations were graffiti-like and the type was big and bold. Overall, the work was a visual explosion, not in a cool way. I started talking about movies – about how in action movies there's a star and a best supporting actor or two. Visual design is like that. You can think of what you are designing as a movie with a cast. To tell the story, there may be a headlining star above everyone else – they are the most important thing. In a comedy or period piece there may be an ensemble cast and the setting may play a key role. In a buddy film there are two stars who are usually very different, and it's the chemistry between them that makes the movie interesting. When you think about your poster or site or whatever as having a cast, and you identify elements of the design in terms of a cast of characters with "roles," it forces you to think about hierarchy and the relationship between elements, which is a good thing. When a film has a lot of big stars, the script has to be written to use them wisely, where they have the most impact.

My student nodded like I was speaking a language that he understood, which made me feel relieved. I have no idea how he's fared, but I used the movie analogy yesterday to help get myself unstuck on a website design. It has helped me, and I really hope it has helped him.

Guest post on designing web-based communities for professionals

We are pleased to contribute a post about design to Leader Networks' blog, Building Online Communities for Business. We've worked with Vanessa on a few projects, and it is always a pleasure. Vanessa's interest in and knowledge of communities of practice pre-dates the web. She's translated her expertise on the topic from the offline world to the online world, well, expertly.

Our LN post is geared towards an executive audience and is based on what we've learned from several projects: a partner site for MIT's Center for Transportation and Logistics, an invitation-only community for executives in the wireless industry, password-protected sites for business managers and technical clients of ATG software, and an internal community for ATG employees all over the world.

Check it out here: http://blog.leadernetworks.com/2010/03/designing-web-based-communities-for.html

User scenarios beyond the web

User scenarios have been widely adopted by web designers as a useful tool for helping ensure sites provide what visitors need and expect. Less well-known is that they are also a great tool for ensuring offline communications do the same.

Recently I was in Sears. They have created central checkout kiosks at my local store (Cambridge, MA) which is a step forward, because previously, it was impossible to find a cash register and a salesperson at the same time. Now there's a large checkout hub at the exit/entrance to the connecting mall. When I entered the store I came from downstairs – not from the mall. I did not pass a kiosk. I shopped and could not find where to pay. I looked for signs, and found this (pardon the fuzzy, surreptitiously shot image).

The sign points to a wall. There's no pay kiosk on either side of the wall.

This could be blamed on a number of things, but for the sake of this post I'm going to pin it on a lack of user scenarios when the store was planning the pay kiosks. If, when someone in Sears corporate offices was thinking about or planning the kiosks, the context of shoppers making purchases came up, hopefully they would have realized that finding where to pay is just one part of a flow that ends with paying – that paying is a part of a larger scenario.

A few years ago, we worked with the marketing team at Sloan Executive Education. They run programs that are attended by professionals from all over the world. Aware that there was a flow of information, and that it needed to be consistent to ensure that expectations were met, we mapped out scenarios related to how potential participants found out about the programs, registered, made travel plans and arrived at the program. After listing all the recipient types and situations, we could evaluate the communications and see where information needed to be changed, added or made more consistent.

There are hybrid online/offline situations that call for scenarios as well. Hospitals can have complex and inconsistent technical setups that send healthcare workers back and forth between paper and electronic files. Working with a client who provides software to streamline hospital discharge, we needed to design a fax form that would literally connect paper and digital correspondence. Care facilities received faxes from hospitals to let them know there was a potential patient for them. Included in the fax was a unique code that, when entered on a website, would provide the patient details and acceptance information. We used scenarios that captured the full flow of contact – online and offline. Because we looked beyond the web interactions we were able to design a complete system that worked, not just a form or site that only addressed part of the situation.

Higher education: the destination site is not dead

The pace and rate of technological change is dizzying. We are seeing and hearing many organizations become disoriented. In higher education as with any organization, when there are funds there is a tendency to want the latest and coolest. The possibilities available - cheap and fast streaming video, presentation design "skins" that change on the fly, the ability to aggregate and display content from a wide variety of sources - are tempting.

Critical thinking must be present in the higher education site redesign process. Like the dessert table at a great buffet, it is easy to over do it, and forget about providing the nutrients your body (like your site visitors) need.

Bottom line - if you are a site for a department at a college or university, your site visitors need facts. They need to know what the department is. They need to know how they might engage with you and for what. They need to know who is in charge of what and who to contact for what. They need to know how your department or organization may be connected to others or the university as a whole. Prospective and current students and their parents get a huge amount of their information from the internet. They are relying on your institution or department's site for the details they need. There are many, many sites that provide inspiration on every topic imaginable. Chances are, if you have a current or potential student on your site, or even a donor, they have been to those sites and are already inspired. They are on your site to move forward and take action - to go beyond inspiration and act.

Organizations must ask themselves - are they in the media business? If not, how cool and inspiring is your cutting edge site going to be in a few months when the content needs updating? How impressive will it be when news feeds pull in content that isn't what your audience is looking for or have already seen somewhere else?

Higher education sites are destinations. Ideally, they do both - inspire the visitor by reassuring them that they are in the right place for their interests (video could really help here), and help them engage. This takes more facts than flash, more veggies than dessert, smelling salts and a heavy dose of restraint (also known as user research).