Michael Beasley

I have had some busy times around here. The most recent Michigan Usability Professionals’ Association meeting was just last week, and I was one of the panelists, talking about what makes for a great UX practitioner. I was honored and surprised that someone thought I had the answer!

It was a great panel session, though. It felt like it was over too soon, and I love opportunities to have to put my thoughts into words. Explaining things is always an opportunity for greater understanding.

I’m going “heads down” this week to do some deep thinking on my professional volunteering obligations, and we’ve got another great event coming up at the end of March. What I’ve really been slacking off on is figuring out if I’m going to try to be a contributer to this year’s Internet User Experience conference… I feel very close, but it’s one thing to have an idea and another thing to take the time to put those thoughts into words. But if I do, the reward will be great as far as increased understanding goes.

It’s hard to believe, but even today there are still a lot of sites out there that are hard to use.

I find myself falling into the trap of thinking that designing a standard, informational website is a “solved” problem. You put a main navigation on the site, fill it with labels that capture the things that you can offer people, add in an “About Us” and a “Contact Us” section, and you’re good. Don’t use hard-to-read color combinations. Don’t bury important information. Get to the point. Or, to put it in a really boring and worn-out way, usability professionals aren’t going to find this “low-hanging fruit” anymore.

That just isn’t the case, from small mom-and-pop businesses to huge national brands.

Although I spend a lot of my time thinking about incremental improvements to sites, there are unfortunately still plenty of chances to make bold leaps in site performance. These are the situations that often allow usability professionals to put on the business analyst “hat” (which is pretty much the same as the “business therapist hat”). Sites that are confusing down to their core are probably the product of people that aren’t sure of the purpose of their site… at least, putting those goals into specific and explicit terms.

A down side of these situations is that you may end up coming back with recommendations for improving the site that amount to “scrap this site and make a new one.” How do you make tactical improvements to a site that’s got foundational problems?

I don’t have a good answer for that, because I think every situation is different. It comes down to managing expectations and negotiation, though. Redesign may be out of scope for a project, but it doesn’t meOKan that you can’t raise the issue. And what can you focus on in the meantime to improve the site that is currently there?

In addition to may day job as a usability professional in the world of Internet marketing, I also moonlight as an officer in the Michigan chapter of the Usability Professionals’ Association (and the soon-to-be-revived CHI chapter). Last week, we had the first MI UPA meeting of the year: an outstanding panel on Usability and Agile.

Agile wasn’t born with a clear place to fit user-centered design, but integrating usability seems to come down to a couple of strategies:

• Adding a planning stage to the beginning of the project to figure out what the team is going to build
• The usability person/people work on planning the UI for the next iteration while reviewing the previous iteration

Flexibility is also key, although I would suggest that any usability professional that wishes to stick to rigid structures is living in some kind of fantasy land.

My joking complaint about the meeting is that the panelists disagreed with each other too much. Perhaps that’s why I should never be invited to join a panel – I’d want to cause a disagreement just to make things more interesting. However, the audience was very engaged, despite the alignment of the panelists.

In usability, little things can make a big difference. A weird label, an extra field for users to fill out, a certain color – all sorts of factors can affect user behavior.

My background is in conducting usability tests and designing software user interfaces (typically, I wouldn’t do both of these things for the same product). At the time, I knew intellectually that even subtle decisions about the interface could have a great effect on task completion rates and times.

Working on websites and keeping an eye on analytics, I see the connection between design choices and task completion a lot more clearly. Take the example of deciding whether or not to remove a field from a Contact Us form. Try taking it out and wait for a couple of weeks, then go back and compare the completion rate before your made the change to after you made the change. Maybe it went from a 2.1% completion rate to a 2.2% completion rate. That’s a small movement, but depending on how many people go to the form, it could be a dozen or a few hundred extra completions.

The differences could be even more subtle – changing a color, moving an image, cutting down the text, even changing a label. Come up with a theory and go test it (perhaps using some A/B testing).

After thinking over this matter, I’m left with the feeling that usability testing is a blunt tool in comparison to the precision of analytics. I guess in some ways it is, but there is information you get out of usability testing that you just can’t from looking at analytics data. The thing to keep in mind is the cost effectiveness of being able to run many small, precise experiments, using analytics to find answers. Or perhaps even to raise questions that you want to answer with a usability test.

Coming to the marketing world as a usability professional has been an interesting change. Usability has historically dealt with ensuring that users can accomplish tasks easily, to put it simply. It has been concerned with making tasks more efficient or easier to learn.

That’s not the point of a marketing website. That’s just the cost of showing up.

Obviously, there are e-commerce and lead-generating sites that are hard to use, sites where you can’t figure out what they’re selling or how to buy it. Sites where you can’t take the desired action – “convert.”  That’s a whole other post. I’ll go out on a limb, though, and say this without any data to back it up: It’s not that hard to convert on most marketing websites, whether that’s filling out a contact form or buying a widget. Those sites may not be pretty and they may be annoying, but it is still possible to buy something.

What can a usability professional do for a marketing website? How do we improve task performance when the task is to read about a product? How can we improve efficiency in the contact process when there’s a great big, bright “Contact Us” button prominently displayed on every page?

Living in marketing world, I now deal with persuasion and affect. Was a site persuasive? Did users find the information that they need to make a purchasing decision?

I’m not sure. This means change – I know that. Can you round up 5 usability testing participants, put them in front of the website, and then ask them if they were convinced to buy a widget? Those people would have no actual motivation to buy a widget. Maybe you’d get useful data and maybe you wouldn’t.

As a usability professional, I’ve got to start doing more to capture data about what people are doing “in the wild” – what real users do in real situations with the site. This means more analytics, more remote usability testing, and learning new methods for data collection. In future posts, I’m going to explore these topics further.