By Trent Mankelow

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Services currently make up 70% of New Zealand’s GDP, and this percentage is growing every year. Given how important services are to our economy, it should be easy to find examples of remarkable customer service. Instead, the front page news in Wellington is all about phone outages and train delays.

I think that the main reason we get bad service is because most organisations leave it up to business analysts, project managers or software engineers to design the customer experience. We don’t get remarkable service because organisations don’t consciously design the end-to-end experience.

This is where Service Design can help. It involves explicitly designing end-to-end customer experiences, across multiple touchpoints (the channels that customers use to interact with you) and across time. 

At a high level, Service Design is pretty simple. You start out by gathering the basic information - who are your customers? What are they trying to do? In what context? How can you help them do it? Then you create multiple concepts, which you test with users and iterate until your design gets more and more concrete. Then you implement. 

For anyone familiar with usability, this process is going to be very familiar. That’s because at a high-level, any human-centred, design-driven process will look pretty much the same.

The main difference with Service Design is the mindset and the methods. With Service Design you think holistically about the end-to-end experience, across touchpoints. Because services are intangible, you need to use a different set of tools.

For example, you might create an experience prototype, to simulate what it’s like to use a service. Steve Jobs from Apple says that one of the best pieces of advice he got about retailing was to "go rent a warehouse and build a prototype of a store, and not, you know, just design it, go build 20 of them, then discover it didn’t work." Apple designed their retail stores as if they were a product. 

You can do the same thing. It doesn’t have to be expensive - you will be surprised with what you can learn by using furniture, cardboard and paper, and asking sales staff and real customers to pretend they are in a real store. Experience prototypes are a superb way to simulate the service experience and cheaply show and test your design concepts with real customers. After all, it helped Apple to reach $1 billion in annual sales faster than any retailer in history.

In 2010 you are going to hear us talk a lot more about service design. Optimal Usability’s vision is to help transform New Zealand organisations into providers of world-class customer experiences. To do that, the focus has to be on the holistic end-to-end experience, where each touchpoint is like an instrument in a symphony. Our ambition is to help you to be the conductor of all those instruments, and to create a melodic customer experience masterpiece.

By Trent Mankelow

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We are often asked by clients for our opinion on the things they should watch out for, what the future holds, and who’s doing the really interesting stuff.
 
These kind of questions have inspired us to reflect and collect our thoughts into four inter-related articles covering:
 

1. Devices
2. Social interactions
3. Services
4. Data

 
In this final part of the series, we are looking at data.
 
The funny thing is that despite complaining about information overload since the Library of Alexandria 2,300 years ago, our appetite for information continues to grow. Thanks to the Internet we have all these great new possibilities to collect data, share it, bring it from one place to another, to remix it, label it and find it.
 
For example:
 

• Sophisticated home weather stations can be purchased for under $200. Who needs Metservice when you can collect the data yourself?
• 23andMe offers an at-home DNA test to help figure out customers’ ancestry and predisposition to 119 diseases. Even your saliva can be a form of data.
• The New York Times has described e-mail as the "the bane of some people’s professional lives" and a $650 billion drag on the economy. The trouble is that many of us are addicted to email, and it’s one area of information overload that we actively contribute to.

 
Of course, the problem is not so much the data itself as finding, filtering and understanding the data. The director of the MIT’s Center for Digital Business makes the point that "we’re rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured…the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data" (source).
 
World-class companies help customers make sense of their own data. They provide tools which give customers insight into their own behaviour.
 
For example, Mint’s goal is to give people insight into their finances. "We fundamentally believe that the reason you work so hard in life is to enjoy the financial benefits of doing that work…achieving those goals is where Mint wants to help people. The way we do this is by highlighting and focusing on the insights on current behaviour, and then promoting actions that people can take to make change a reality" (source).
 
Unfortunately very few companies have Mint’s attitude. As part of their everyday business most organisations collect data, but it do very little with it. This seems crazy to me. Even if organisations don’t help customers make sense of their own data, surely it’s worthwhile measuring, collecting, analysing and reporting customer data for their own use?
 
Of course, once companies catch on, the demand for statisticians and analysts to help make sense of the data will be huge. In a recent Wired article, Google’s chief economist shared his belief that one of the sexiest jobs in the next 10 years will be as a statistician. "What’s ubiquitous and cheap?" Varian asks. "Data." And what is scarce? The analytic ability to utilize that data.
 
 
Data isn’t going to go away. We are just going to keep collecting and publishing more and more and more information. But as Clay Shirky argues, the problem isn’t really one of information overload, it’s one of filter failure. We need to design filters that let us find our way through the abundance of information. Those filters can be in the form of Mint’s pie charts that show at a glance your financial position, while at the same time allowing you to drill down into details. Or they could be in the form of Xobni, who’s Outlook add-in which allows you to rapidly move through the piles of unsorted email.
 
So I leave you with two final questions: what is your organisation doing to help your customers understand their data? And, What is your organisation doing to help you understand your customers’ data?
 

By Trent Mankelow

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We are often asked by clients for our opinion on the things they should watch out for, what the future holds, and who’s doing the really interesting stuff.

These kind of questions have inspired us to reflect, and collect our thoughts into four inter-related articles covering:

1. Devices
2. Social interactions
3. Services
4. Data

In this third part of a four part series, we are looking at services.

I was originally going to build on the last two articles and explore how clever companies are using new devices, and the social interactions they facilitate, to deliver new types of services.

But instead, I’ve decided to focus on one aspect - the large number of services that are given away for free.

Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail, has recently written a book about this called Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Essentially, his argument is that the most effective price is no price at all.

The idea seems pretty radical, until you take a look around. Anderson quotes many examples, including Flickr, Google and Yahoo!, and New Zealand has plenty of our own. Our national betting agency, the TAB, give away Internet access for free. To launch their new house tracking service, Quotable Value gave away 220,000 reports for free (and tripled the number of people visiting their site as a result).

Unfortunately, many traditional businesses still don’t get this. In fact, some are going in the opposite direction.

News Corp, who publish many major newspapers around the world, have declared that the "era of a free-for-all in online news is over" and are going to start charging for content. For this to work, they accept that there could be a need for furious litigation to prevent stories and photographs being copied elsewhere. They will literally be taking their own customers to court. As Rupert Murdoch, the owner of News Corp, has said "We’ll be asserting our copyright at every point."

Thankfully, some publishers do get the "free" concept, like Thomson Reuters, whose President said "Blaming the new leaders or aggregators for disrupting the business of the old leaders, or saber-rattling and threatening to sue are not business strategies - they are personal therapy sessions. Go ask a music executive how well it works."

Free is getting to be normal. As consumers we are starting to expect it. But we are also starting to become resigned to the advertising that goes along with it. Advertising is a crucial part of many online business models. In fact, here in New Zealand we are getting off lightly - according to the IAB, 20% of advertising is "consumed online" but only 8% of the spend is online.

Now, this trend towards free isn’t universally applicable. People will pay if prices are low enough. For example, there were 200 million downloads in the first 102 days of the iTunes Apps Store, mostly of applications that cost a couple of dollars. Business Week predicts the app economy is worth US$1 billion today and will be $4 billion in 2012.

There have also been some criticisms of Anderson’s book. But I believe that businesses who are unwilling to accept the change to their business model, will find they quickly become irrelevant. If you are a bank: Mint.com will offer more insight to your customers than you do, and they won’t ever need to log in to online banking. If you are a sat-nav company: Google will offer sat-nav for free and your stock price will plummet.  If you are a publisher: You’ll charge for content and BBC won’t, and you’ll lose.

So what you can give away for free? As Tom Peters says - change now or risk becoming irrelevant.
 
In the next article we’ll cover Part IV: Data.
 

By Trent Mankelow 

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In this second part of a four part series, we are looking at social interactions.
 
The participatory web
The biggest difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is the change from static content to communities and relationships. Millions of words have already been written about the participatory web from Time naming ‘You’ as its person of the year back in 2006, through to Facebook breaking through the 300 million user mark just last month.

Unfortunately, the message isn’t getting through to many organisations. They say that they want a conversation with their customers, but the kind of conversation they want isn’t very real.

For a start, real conversation isn’t one-way. Blogs shouldn’t be used to push press releases into the world. They should be used to ask questions, engage customers and seek feedback like Nokia does.

Real conversation also feels like you are talking to a real person with personality, opinions, and emotions. Would your organisation write a blog post entitled "Sometimes we suck", like Flickr did?

The courage to publicly engage customers in real conversation has to be driven from the very top, and it doesn’t happen very often. You see it at online shoe retailer Zappos, where their CEO has nearly 1.5 million Twitter followers (the kind of numbers usually reserved for Lance Armstrong or CNN). Locally you see it at RaboPlus, where their General Manager is the one who’s answering all the customer queries. But these examples are pretty rare.

But, to be honest blogs aren’t really where it’s at. The simple fact is that fewer than a third of us read them (and most of those are in the younger age ranges).
 
Social interaction platforms
I think the really interesting stuff is when organisations provide a platform for social interaction.

I’m not talking about social networks so much, although their numbers continue to rise (the 169 social networking websites listed at Wikipedia include a site for knitting and crochet and there are even anti-social networks cropping up).

Providing a social interaction platform is more about helping customers connect with one another and with their own data. For example, on Delicious you can see how many other people bookmarked the same page you did, and see what else these people bookmarked.

One of the simplest ways of providing a platform is to aggregate people’s behaviour as they use your site, and then show the data back to them. Flickr uses the community to figure out how interesting a photo is, based on the number of people who view a photo, bookmark it, comment on it, and a bunch of other (proprietary) things. There are no human editors involved. The community, you and I, indirectly help to decide which of these photos are interesting. We add value to the site just by using it.

Mint takes this a step further by helping users to gather insights about themselves by comparing their finances to a group of other users in a similar life situation. How much are your paying in car insurance compared to others? What about weekly groceries? This makes the site extremely sticky - you want to keep coming back to compare yourself to your peer group.
 
Social psychology
Another trend we are seeing on the rise is the use of social psychology and game theory to persuade us, or to help us learn.

For example, when we publicly share our goals we are more likely to follow through on them. At SmartyPig they’ve taken advantage of this to create a 21st-century version of a piggy bank that allows you to set up a savings account with an automatic monthly contribution. But the trick is that you can share goals online with family and friends, who can also contribute to your account.

Nintendo’s Your Life Rhythm is a pedometer that is designed to get us off our backsides. Their trick is that the pedometer comes as an add-on to their Nintendo DS portable gaming system. Yep, walking around is now a computer game. But when you add in social aspects, and some element of competition, chances are that we will walk around more.

A more mature version of this idea is the Nike+. It uses a sensor in a running shoe to communicate with an iPod. You can track calories burned, distance, pace and time.

That’s all pretty cool. But where it goes to the next level is when you upload your data to the Nike+ website. I can challenge other Nike+ users to a race, see what kind of times other people in Wellington are running, discuss which Powersong I prefer on the forums (apparently Pump It by the Black Eyed Peas is the number one Powersong).

This is Data (it tells me that I most often run on a Wednesday), this is a Service, this is a Device (a sensor and an iPod), and it is most definitely Social Interaction.  That’s the thing with these megatrends we’ve been discussing - it’s often hard to unpick the threads on some of these things.
 
Organisations who understand how to facilitate conversations online can’t help but be more successful. How can you get your customers to participate more? With you? With each other? What can you do to help facilitate conversations? I’d love to hear your feedback.
 
In the next article we’ll cover Part III: Services.
 

By Trent Mankelow
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We are often asked by clients for our opinion on the things they should watch out for, what the future holds, and who’s doing the really interesting stuff.
These kind of questions have inspired us to reflect, and collect our thoughts into four inter-related articles covering:

1. Devices
2. Social interactions
3. Services
4. Data

In this first part of a four part series, we are taking a look at some common attributes of the latest devices. By "device" I mean a physical gadget with some kind of electronic wizardry - a cellphone, MP3 player, remote control, camera - something that someone uses for a specific practical purpose.
I want to talk about four trends relating to devices:
 

• Mobile
• Location-aware
• Touch-enabled
• Context-aware

 
Mobile
The mobile phone is the primary connection tool for most people in the world. Already there are more mobile phones than computers.
This shift has some interesting social and cultural implications. For example, the 2002 book Smart Mobs suggests we are becoming looser about time and place. "If you have a phone you can be late…the opportunity to make decisions on the spot has made young people reluctant to divide their lives into time slots."
More and more organisations are creating new ways to connect with customers on-the-go. Kiwibank, ASB, National Bank, and others have iPhone-enabled sites or apps. A bank in the States is even letting customers deposit money by taking a photo of the cheque with their phone.
All of this makes sense - we don’t want to be tethered to our PCs. We want devices that are small, lightweight and portable. That’s why by the end of 2011 there will be more smartphones than PCs.

Q: People are doing more and more things "on the go" - what does this mean for your organisation?
 
Location-aware
Location-based services have been talked about since Y2K, but it has only been recently that we are starting to see devices that know where in the world they are.
For example, you can buy shoes with a built in GPS chip. This chip acts as a location beacon to help people find you (or your sneakers) and can also monitor heart rate, speed and body temperature.
Some new cameras know where you took a photo by automatically adding location data through GPS. You’ll never forget where a photo was taken ever again (especially handy if you are touring Europe and all the gothic buildings start to look the same).
Google Latitude tracks your location using your cellphone. Before you cry ‘Big Brother’, you need to give Google permission to know your whereabouts, and explicitly decide who to share that information with. I can easily imagine situations where this would come in handy: I’m in Sydney, Australia on business and get an alert that a friend is in town and is only three blocks away. I can see that my friend is stuck in traffic and is going to be late for tennis. You get the idea.

Q: Imagine if you knew the location of every one of your customers, in real-time. What could you do with that information? What location-based services could you offer?
 
Touch-enabled
When Pew asked an expert panel about future trends late last year, one of the things they agreed on most was that touch would increase as a common technology interface.
Gesture-based interfaces are definitely becoming more mainstream, thanks in large part to Apple’s family of products. (Although you have to agree with Seinfeld that there is a lack of satisfaction in swiping the iPhone when you’re angry).
Microsoft Surface and Sphere have shown us how large, multi-touch interfaces might actually be used, but we’re unlikely to see any Minority Report-style interactions anytime soon. Humans just weren’t designed to make small gestures in front of us. (Google "gorilla arm" for more on this).
Which brings us to an important point - designing touch-based interfaces isn’t like designing for the desktop. For a start, fingers are much fatter than mouse pointers and require larger buttons. One wonders if we are going to have to suffer though years of clumsy interactions, while designers catch up.

Q: In what way can your interfaces take advantage of gestures?
 
Context-aware
Devices are becoming more and more aware of the context in which they operate. They have sensors to measure all sorts of different things: motion, pressure, light, noise and even air quality and posture.
Accelerometers are one of the more popular sensors, and allow devices to detect movement and orientation. Using accelerometers some Nokia phones allow users to reject calls by turning them upside down, and some iPods offer a "shake to shuffle" capability.
Nintendo are about to release another add-on to the Wii console called a Vitality Sensor. It’s a fancy name for a simple idea - a sensor that checks your pulse. But think about the creative ways game designers could use it, like gauging when a horror game is too horrific, or when you aren’t working out hard enough when playing WiiFit.

Q: What innovative ways can you use sensors? Could you determine engagement by the way customers lean forward in their chair? What if customers could shake your interface like they can with the iPod?
 
Individually, each of these innovations is interesting and useful, but I think the true power is when we start to see devices with all of these attributes combined.
Some organisations have tried to peek into the future and imagine what life will be like with mobile, location-aware, touch-enabled and context-ware devices. Check out these videos from Microsoft and Nokia. (Thanks to LukeW for the links).
I don’t know what the future looks like but as more and more devices get smarter and smarter and the group of people who use them grows and grows, I am convinced that we ain’t seen nothing yet.
 
In the next article we’ll cover Part II: Social interactions.
 

The overall goal of the E-government Strategy is for New Zealand to "be a world leader in using IT to realise its economic, social, environmental, and cultural goals, to the benefit of all its people."
Optimal Usability › Edit — WordPress
We certainly spend taxpayer money pursuing this goal. Last year 64% of public sector agencies expected to spend money on a new/upgraded website in 2008/09, and 53% expected to spend money on new/upgraded online services.

However, despite spending all this money New Zealand is falling behind in public sector innovation.
 
A 2008 UN report (PDF, 1.5MB) ranked New Zealand 25th in the world in terms of e-government readiness. That’s a drop from 18th place in 2005. 

Despite promises of dramatic change and innovation, the public sector today looks much as it did when the Internet started. Instead of transforming government, innovation has tended to be small-scale and gradual.
 
I believe that there are four steps to reversing this trend and creating government websites that rock.
 

Step 1. Create a citizen-centred culture
 

A. Ditch the shared accountability model
 
Currently many government departments have a shared accountability model. Someone creates content based on what their team is working on, gets it approved by the comms department and a techie tucked away in a corner somewhere publishes it to the web. 
 
Things like optimizing content for search engines, rewriting pages to make them easier to read and cross-promoting other departments are mostly lost in the busyness of day-to-day operations.
 
The trouble is that when something is owned by everybody, it is owned by nobody.
 
For example, one government department we know of doesn’t have an online strategy for their public facing websites or their four intranets. They’ve got no governance group and they’ve got hundreds of authors. The result can’t help but be mediocre.
 
B. Hire a Chief Citizen Officer
 
To create a superlative citizen experience public sector agencies need to get away from this shared accountability model and hire someone who can call the shots at the highest level. I believe that every public sector agency should have a Chief Citizen Officer (CCO), whose role it is to manage the customer experience across all the channels.
 
Hiring a CCO takes guts. But it takes this kind of commitment to run a great website. Real money and real people.

 
Step 2. Create an actionable, citizen-centric online strategy

 
A. Stop trying to design for all citizens
 
Government departments often try and design their websites to suit the needs of "all New Zealanders".
 
I understand that most public sector agencies have a vast mandate, to which they are held publicly accountable. But I believe that public sector agencies are mistaken to try and design for all citizens.
 
The trouble is that when you try to design for everyone, you design for no-one. All you get is a mediocre website.
 
One great way to stop designing for all citizens is to use personas. Personas are pretend users of a website, based on research, with details to make them "real". They are a tool that is used to help make design decisions. Suddenly you aren’t designing for everyone, you a designing for a specific someone.
 
One tip though - personas must be based on data, and there are few shortcuts. Don’t believe anyone who says they can create personas in a day.
 
B. Create a coherent, lightweight online strategy
 
Once you know what your users’ goals are, you can combine them with your own organisational goals to create an online strategy.
 
I believe that you can actually use a fairly simple process to do this. The approach we generally take is to do upfront research into users and their goals, interview stakeholders, and run workshops grounded with real-world examples of other websites. The strategy tends to come together quickly because most of the work is in the preparation.
 
Finally, don’t develop the online strategy in isolation. The role of the CCO should be to ensure that all services offered across all channels are taken into account as part of a broader cross-channel strategy.

 
Step 3. Improve findability
 

A. Create an intuitive information architecture with the help of users
 
There are currently 10,000,000 webpages spread across 900 .govt domains.
 
The number of pages are only going to grow. For example, parliament.govt.nz might add 200 documents in a single day when parliament is sitting.
 
That’s why the information architecture of public sector websites has to be carefully created and validated based on feedback from real users. The structure and labels of a website cannot be made up out of thin air.
 
B. Remove redundant content, and consolidate sites to make stuff easier to find
 
Governments in general are broken up into competing agencies and jurisdictions.
 
This causes government websites to spring up like mushrooms. Agencies care about their individual "web sites" rather than trying to understand the broader goals of their visitors. Websites should be based around key tasks, not agencies, and should ideally hide of the mechanics of government.
 
Government silos also mean that taxpayers end up paying for the same content in multiple places. I found four different websites that dealt specifically with fuel economy. I would like to calculate how much energy it takes to run all the sustainability websites!
 
In our product development business we refer to the concept of "killing puppies". Sometimes hard calls need to be made to discontinue a product. It can feel like putting down your own cute, adorable puppies. But sometimes, that’s what’s needed.
 
The UK government shutdown 425 sites when it implemented the directgov portal. 425 dead puppies. Maybe it’s time our government did the same.
 

Step 4. Follow a user-centred design process
 

A. Use ISO 13407
 
The New Zealand government spent $1.9B on ICT last year. There is an opportunity to realize immense return on investment from projects that follow a user-centred design (UCD) process simply because government operates on such a large scale.
 
ISO 13407 is probably the most well known usability standard, and documents the characteristics of UCD. It’s a simple, high-level framework with requirements that include the following:

• Project planning shall allocate time and resources for the human-centred activities. This shall include time for iteration and the incorporation of user feedback, and for evaluating whether the design solution satisfies the user requirements.
• Relevant user and stakeholder groups shall be identified and their relationship with the proposed development described in terms of key goals and constraints.
• There are four linked human-centred design activities that shall take place during the design of any interactive system
  • Understand and specify the context of use;
  • Specify the user requirements;
  • Produce design solutions;
  • Evaluate.

(From International Standards for Usability Should Be More Widely Used)

If you follow this standard you will end up with a more effective, easier to use website. Government RFPs should require vendors to comply with ISO 13407.
 

Government websites that rock

We still have a long way to go, but there are many examples of successful government websites.
 
Practice.co.nz is a risky, non-traditional website, targeted at young drivers. The user testing we did showed us that people in the target demographic loved it. (Design by Aim Proximity)

The Retirement Commission used to be three people and a part-time commissioner. They still managed to create the Sorted website that attracted over 1,000,000 visitors/year when they were that small. They succeeded because of their relentless focus on the website - it was and remains their number one channel. (Design by Sparks Interactive)

ACC recently followed ISO13407 to redesign their site, without even realising it! Their emphasis on the user experience and following a robust research programme has resulted in a 25% increase in page views. (Design by DNA)
 
 
With examples like these it’s possible to see how the Internet can transform government. I’m looking forward to the day when public sector websites become so useful and intuitive that we drop the term "e-Government" and just call it government.
 

If you’d like to hear more on this topic come along to a free breakfast on the 22nd of September in Wellington. Those who can’t make might want to check out the slides.
 

In June, three of us from the Optimal family attended the Usability Professionals’ Association conference in Portland, Oregon. We learnt a lot, including how "strategic dismemberment" relates to game usability (watch the violent video here). We thought we’d dedicate this newsletter to sharing a few gems from the conference. (Forgive us if we get a bit geeky with the terminology). Enjoy!

 
Expert Reviews

• According to the latest research, the optimal process for an expert review is to conduct evaluations in pairs using domain-specific heuristics. It’s kind of like pair programming, with the domain-specific heuristics acting as inspiration.
• Expert reviews with highly experienced practitioners are comparable to user testing in terms of the number and types of issues found. Also interesting - the method was originally designed to help beginners prevent usability errors, not help experts identify them after the fact.
• Rolf Molich only reports back his top 40 findings to clients when doing an expert review. Steve Krug has told me that he only reports back 10 issues, and tells clients to come back to him when those 10 are fixed.
• Jakob Nielsen is famous for his 10 Heuristics. Well, now his company have amassed a total 2,666 guidelines for websites, intranets and email across 9,356 pages of reports. Not so usable.

User Testing

• Users tend to report high satisfaction if they can complete a task in a user test (independent of time taken or the number errors they encounter). In other words, if you are lazy you can just count the number of times people complete a task, rather than asking them to rate their subjective post-task satisfaction.
• The latest version of Morae can use a wireless Wii remote (which costs US$40) to create markers of interesting events during a user test. Handy!
• Some companies are using Facebook to advertise for user testing participants. It allows them to narrow down by some very specific demographics, and can be quite successful.
• Phonetag.com captures voicemail and automagically transcribes it. This sounds great for longitudinal studies for only US$30/month.

Persuasion
 
One of the hot areas in usability is in the psychology of persuasion. It’s fascinating stuff. One workshop that I attended (hi Kas!) had some great points on the "Science of Compliance". Here are 5 ways you can persuade people:

• Persuade via Scarcity: People want things that are rare, hard to get or in decreasing supply. For example, we could let people know when there are "only 3 places left in our Introduction to User Testing course".
• Persuade via Authority: People who are perceived to be more credible are more persuasive. For example, we could build credibility by running training, writing whitepapers, and talking about number of clients we have.
• Persuade via Social Proof: In other words get people thinking "If lots of other people are doing it, I probably want to do it too". For example, with our recent government special we talked about the fact that we’d done 28 expert reviews for other government departments.
• Persuade via Liking: You are more persuasive to people who like you. One (non obvious?) way to get people to like you is to work on things together.
• Persuade via Reciprocity: People feel the need to pay back favours. For example if you invite people to free events that you put on, or give people free content, they feel that they owe you.

Mobile

• There are five times more phones than computers in the world.
• Interestingly though, only 2% of US mobile phones are iPhones. They are still getting a lot more press than usage.

 
One final suggestion for you to try at your work place: apparently, if you put a mirror in front of you while you work, you are more productive and make fewer mistakes. Go on, try it. We dare you!
 

By Dave O’Brien
 
Suppose you’re designing (or redesigning) the overall structure of a website. You’ve come up with a new structure - depending on the coffee, you may have come up with two or three. But are they good? Which one is best? And are they better than the old structure? Until recently, there wasn’t a quick way to find out, short of building the site and testing it after the fact.
 
We weren’t the only ones looking into how to test the organisation of websites. Some years ago, Donna Spencer pioneered a simple technique with a complicated name: Card-Based Classification Evaluation. Donna did her testing on paper, but it struck us that an online tool would make the technique much quicker and easier.
 
So we built Treejack. Its purpose was to make this "tree testing" automated and easy, while answering several key questions:

• Can users successfully find items in the site?
• Can they find those items directly, without having to backtrack?
• Can they choose between topics quickly, without having to think too much?
• Overall, which parts of the site structure work well, and which fall down?
   

Treejack - a tree-testing tool

Tree testing is a simple technique, so we made Treejack a simple, focused tool. Its sole purpose is to improve site organisation through quick, iterative testing. In a typical tree test, about 50 participants click a web link to start a Treejack session:

• Each participant is shown a website task (e.g. "Sign up for the company newsletter.")
• They see a list of the site’s top-level topics.
• They click a topic, and see the subtopics under it.
• They continue clicking down until they find the answer. They can also back up and try a different path, or give up and move on to the next task.
• After about 10 tasks, they’re done. Elapsed time: 10-15 minutes.
   

Interpreting the results

After those 50 people have tried 10 tasks each, clicking through your site structure, Treejack can show you how well the structure performed, and more importantly, show you which parts failed with users. It summarises the results into three values:
 

• Success - The % of users who found the correct answer.
• Speed - how fast users clicked through the tree. Quick choices suggest high confidence, while hesitation suggests that topics are not clear enough.
• Directness - how directly users reached an answer. Ideally, users reach their destination without having to backtrack and try a different path.

These are measured for each task, with an overall score for the whole test.
In a way, it’s like analytics for a website you haven’t built yet.

Lessons learned

We’ve run several tree tests now for large clients, and along the way, we’ve learned a few things:
 

• Test a few different alternatives. Because tree tests are quick to do, we can take several proposed structures and test them against each other. This is a quick way of resolving opinion-based debates over which is better. In a recent government project, one proposed structure showed much lower success rates than the others, so we were able to discard it without regrets or doubts.
• Test new against old. You don’t just want your new site structure to be different, you want it to be better. Tree testing is a great way to determine this. In the same government project, the original structure only had a 31% success rate. Using the same tasks, the new structure scored 67% - a solid quantitative improvement.
• Lather, rinse, repeat. Everyone talks about being agile and iterative, but schedules and budgets often quash that ideal. Tree testing, however, has proved quick enough that we’re able to do two or three revision cycles for a given tree, using each set of results to progressively tweak and improve it.
   

Summary
Tree testing has become an important part of our information architecture work with clients. And Treejack has given us the automation we were after - a quick, simple-to-use tool that generates clear results quickly.

Like user testing, tree testing shows us (and our clients) where we need to focus our efforts, and injects some user-based data into the site-design process. Its simplicity means that we can do variations and iterations until we get what we came for - a tested, effective site structure.
 

The online banking industry has revolutionized how people manage their finances. First introduced to New Zealand in 1997 by ASB, since then it’s taken off. 56% of New Zealanders now use online banking at least weekly (the highest out of the 13 countries covered in the World Internet Project).
 
Despite its popularity, online banking may have reached the saturation point in New Zealand. It’s fundamentally the same as it was in 1997, and I believe it’s time for a shake-up. So here’s what I think New Zealand banks need to do to innovate:
 
 
1. Help people manage their finances
 
Why can’t I see a simple graph of my spending when I log in to online banking? Why doesn’t the bank make an attempt to automatically categorise my expenses, so that I can see where I might be overspending?
 
Simple functionality like this can help me manage my finances as an individual, but there is also an opportunity to raise the financial literacy of New Zealanders as a whole.
 
The banks don’t even need to show much leadership; they could just facilitate conversations between their customers. For example, online tools like Mint and Wesabe have thousands of people sharing tips on how to save money on groceries or pay off the mortgage more quickly. Why do we need to rely on third parties? Why can’t the banks do this kind of thing?
 
 
2. Ensure that functionality is easy to find
 
According to Forrester, "Financial-services executives rate usability as the most important contributor to the success of a bank or brokerage site." But as more and more banking services go online - foreign exchange, term deposits, signing up for new accounts - it’s getting harder and harder to find stuff. BNZ have given up completely and have a top-level category called ‘Other Services’.
 
I believe that this issue arises because banks are very project-driven. Individual project managers are focused on delivering their project on time and within budget. Project managers are awarded by getting products to market, not on the customer experience of what they implement. Because the funding model is so project-centred, little thought is given to how the project fits into the broader context of online banking or how it contributes to a holistic customer experience.
 
 
3. Focus on analytics
 
There are 6 people at Trade Me who focus full-time on analytics - looking at how customers are using trademe.co.nz, trying to identify content holes and process bottle necks. We consult with most of New Zealand’s banks, and I don’t know of a single person whose job it is to look at how people actually use online banking - how to make the experience better.
 
 
4. Cross-sell, up-sell
 
Over time, carefully tracking how people use online banking results in powerful insights into customer needs and behaviour, product and campaign effectiveness, and even purchasing or service trends. This information can help banks to better understand, target, and service various user segments, and identify up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.
 
When carefully targeted, customers don’t perceive links to additional products or services as a sales pitch; they see them as useful links. For example, if I am constantly maxing out my credit card, and one day I see a link to increase my limit, I’m not going to get annoyed. I’m going to be pleased, and the bank is going to get more business from me.
 
 
5. Appoint a Customer Experience Officer
 
"Banks need to think of themselves as purveyors of customer experiences, and they need to master cross-channel distribution — the integration of clicks and bricks. The experience has to be superlative, whether it takes place inside a bank branch, at an ATM, on the phone, or on the Web." - Bob Steele
 
A customer doesn’t just interact with a bank online. You might deal with a branch to sort out your mortgage, get a text alert when your balance is running low, phone the call centre when you want to ask about something in a statement.
 
To create a superlative customer experience across all these interactions, there is no avoiding it - there needs to be one person who is responsible for the overall customer experience. Call centre, IVR, ATM, online banking, public site, branch - one person. We only know of one brave organisation in New Zealand who has done this.
 
 
 
After a long period of strong growth in the number of users of online banking services, the market is entering its next phase. The banks have no choice but to innovate, and the key success factor is going to be the customer experience.
 

By Ruth Brown and Philip Cockrell

Many local governments in NZ now deliver good websites with good content.  However, a recent survey highlights that just 15% of councils have formal strategies to build e-government services. Only 25% of councils provide interactive forms, and less than 10% enable automated fulfilment. 
 
Government websites are increasingly becoming the face of government for citizens and the popularity of services like online banking means that expectations are only going to grow.
 
So here are our tips on creating a useful, usable local government website. 

Create a coherent online strategy. Which transactions should be automated? What transactions should be offered on what channel? How are you going to measure? How are you going to shift people? A strategy will help you to figure out what services to offer on what channels, and helps to ensure that you meet both the users’ and the organisation’s goals.

Pick the right services to put online. Choose popular services that people use often and that would make sense to automate. Chose services that would provide significant cost savings, or where data integrity is particularly important. (Take a look at http://www.insidepolitics.org/ to check out the most popular e-government services across the globe).

Follow a user-centred design methodology. To create a compelling online experience you need to deeply understand your site visitors through user research. Ideally any new services you put online should be designed iteratively, with regular usability testing at the beginning and throughout the process.

Make sure people can find the services. Make sure people can find the services they are seeking. Recent research from Jakob Nielsen suggests that while task success has improved impressively since 2004 as a result of a greater focus on usability; bad information architecture is still causing most of the remaining user failures. 

Follow online forms best-practice. Ensure that online forms are as quick to fill out by asking only as many questions as you need.  Ensure that you prevent errors wherever possible, and that error messages constructively help users solve their problem. (Check out the Forms That Work website for more great tips).

Great usability has never been as important as it will be in 2009; as citizens expect more and more government services to be provided online. Follow these tips to make it easier for users to get the information they need, when they need it, and in a format that they understand.