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.
 

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!
 

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.
 

$200,000,000 was spent on online advertising in New Zealand in 2008. But what percentage of those thousands of ads were effective? How many were ignored, or, worse still, annoyed the very consumers they were supposed to persuade?
 
In our work, we have found that following a few basic rules of thumb can produce effective ads without frustrating users.
 
Support the user’s goal. For example, if a user is reading a music review and sees a link to purchase the album online, chances are they will appreciate it.  It’s not always possible to target ads this specifically, but at least try to make the ad relevant to most of the audience.
 
Give the user control. Any ad that removes control from the user will annoy them. Don’t create ads that pop up, won’t close, are constantly animated, or trick users into clicking on them.
 
Reduce clutter. A survey of over 4,000 web users (PDF, 1.38MB) showed that over one-third will immediately abandon a site that appears cluttered.  The survey also showed that 51% of users had a less favourable opinion of the advertiser’s product when it appeared on a cluttered site.
 
Consider using textual ads. We conducted user testing that compared a news site before and after a redesign. Participants unanimously agreed that the number of ads on the redesigned site had decreased.  The new site had in fact increased both the number of ads and the amount of screen real estate dedicated to ads.  The only difference was that many more ads on the new site were text based.
 
Don’t put ads near important site links. Eye-tracking studies prove that people will avoid looking directly at some ads.  In a round of testing we recently completed, a site had important links near an advertisement.  Users assumed they were just part of the ad and didn’t notice them.
 
Don’t use pop-ups.  Most users close pop-ups within a few of seconds or ignore them completely.  We see this again and again.  Jakob Nielsen found that more than half of participants in a study of 18,808 users reported that pop-ups affected their opinion of the advertiser very negatively.
 
If you must animate, animate only once then stop.
 
Be honest. Make it clear to the user that the ad is in fact an ad, what it’s advertising, and what will happen if they click on the ad.
 
Replicate your site look and feel in the ad. Studies have shown that ads that blend with a site’s design are more likely to be looked at than ads that are in contrast.
 

Many people now accept that they will encounter advertising on sites. Following these few simple rules of thumb will ensure the maximum success for advertisers without frustrating users. 

We are running our first Breakfast Briefing event in Wellington on Wednesday on the results of reviewing over 50 research papers on online advertising. Let us know if you’d like to come, by emailing Kimberley.

 World Usability Day mobilises usability professionals in over 40 countries to raise awareness of usability through a series of public events. The theme for 2008 was transportation, with a focus on how we access and use transportation, and the role that transport systems, processes, and infrastructure play in shaping our society and culture. This year, Optimal consultants contributed to events in Auckland, Wellington and Sydney.

Auckland: First into the air

On the 13th of November Optimal Usability’s Auckland office held its first World Usability Day celebrations with a breakfast event held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel.

With the promise of Optimal’s famous ‘usability gift’ and a full cooked breakfast on the menu, the turnout to this year’s event was fantastic. Shailesh Manga introduced this year’s theme and, having got the ball rolling with poor usability examples from the transport industry, turned to a discussion of aspects of Air New Zealand’s self service.

Ed Sims from the Air New Zealand executive team then provided a fascinating glimpse into the heart of a large and complex organisation that not only takes notice of, but also takes action on the feedback received from both customers and employees alike. Ed reminded us to be mindful of usability factors when designing products and the interview proved to be the highlight of the event.

Next on the agenda was Sam Ng talking about Optimal Usability’s latest usability assessment tool - ChalkMark.

By taking a simple image and turning it into a clickable online task completion activity, ChalkMark can provide feedback from real users within hours, allowing time between design iterations to be significantly decreased. Best of all, design decisions can be based on an understanding the needs of the end users, ensuring they receive an optimal experience. Those working on the product can also finally feel confident of their direction during development and sure of success after completion. Thanks Sam!

All in all this year’s World Usability Day event was a resounding success and it was certainly great to have Ed Sims take part in the celebrations.

Wellington: Car nagging and card tagging

In Wellington, we had a different flavour. Trent Mankelow from Optimal Usability in Wellington and Gerry Gaffney from Information Design in Melbourne spoke with about 65 people who braved the 7am start be the first of the 170 events from around the world. (Well, first equal with Auckland).

We started out discussing the latest innovations in vehicle infotainment systems. These are systems that integrate the control of multiple devices in a single interface, and help control things such as the air-conditioning and stereo system. The latest versions of these devices (such as Ford and Microsoft’s Sync - watch the video) are voice activated, and will speak back commands to the driver. The most recent UX magazine, of which Gerry was the editor, had a number of interesting facts about the voices used in these systems. It seems that sexism and ageism are alive and well in the vehicle infotainment industry. For example: 

• BMW in Germany have just changed their voice system from a female voice to a male because male drivers got angry at being told what to do by a woman.
• Male voices typically get more attention and respect than female voices, from both males and female drivers.
• Older drivers apparently respond better to younger voices. One theory is that older drivers think of younger people as having better vision, and are more likely to see things that the driver may have missed.
• A perky voice can be irritating to a driver who is upset, but inspire better driving among happy drivers. For those who were upset, a calm, even slightly depressed-sounding voice actually improved their driving by 40%. 

We then talked about Hong Kong’s famed Octopus card, and our local equivalent, the brand new Snapper card. Passengers hold their Snapper card over a reader when they board the bus in Wellington and again as they get off. The reader on the bus uses GPS technology to deduct the appropriate fare. Audience members had a lot to say about the user experience when using the Snapper. Many found it difficult to check their balance and expensive to recharge, while others found they frequently forgot to "tag off" when leaving the bus, which meant they were charged the maximum fare.

In all, it was a fun morning with great views over the harbour capital.

Sydney: What would it take to get you out of your car?

In Sydney a day-long programme of speakers from different backgrounds tackled the transport theme. Between sessions, the attendees viewed and voted for the entries to a competition for transport-related insights and ideas.

This was the fourth time World Usability Day had been celebrated in Sydney, and included interesting speakers, plenty of volunteers and of course, good food! This year we used a seminar format, instead of the Open Day style of previous years. The organising group from the Sydney UPA chapter did a terrific job, thanks to months of careful preparation. Susan Wolfe, as past-president of the Sydney UPA chapter and one of the event organisers, did a great job of being MC for the day. The sessions were well-attended and a great rapport between the speakers and the audience developed over the course of the day.

While the first sessions looked at transport issues from a usability perspective, as the day progressed the range of speakers’ viewpoints broadened and we moved from the intimate (making personal transport choices) to the synoptic (considering human factors in bus and bicycle transport system planning). It was fascinating to see how some of the core concepts of usability and user-centred design have spread beyond IT into the design of transport networks and other systems, and how even some familiar technologies - such as eye tracking - are being applied to research into topics such as driver awareness of cyclists.

After the last session, judging of the design and photo exhibition became a contest between two entries that both analysed and redesigned the mess of unreadable and almost incomprehensible signage used in Australia to indicate kerbside parking restrictions. Both showed keen observation and insight, but the ultimate People’s Choice winner used a clock-face design to simplify different restrictions and time zones into an outstandingly simple display.

Finally, after a rich and rewarding day, the sense of professional community carried on into the evening at a nearby open-air bar. This was the best Sydney WUD ever, and with many new faces becoming involved the event promises to get better yet.

Back in 2004 we were doing a card sorting project for a banking client, and really needed to be able to slice-and-dice the data in ways that existing tools didn’t support. We didn’t find anything that could do what we wanted, so we ended up building our own Flash-based card sorting tool over a weekend.

Three hectic years later, we finally ended up releasing a public beta of our card sorting tool to the world. It had gone through a lot more testing and revisions by that stage, and several thousand participants had completed card sorts for our clients. We thought it was pretty useful but we weren’t sure if anyone else would think so.

Given that we’ve had the tool out in the wild for nearly 18 months we thought it would be fun to some analysis into who was using Optimal Sort, and what they were doing. (We first talked about this stuff at OZ-IA 2008, and you can get the presentation online).

So, our first fact is that information architects are very multinational. The 2,552 Optimal Sort customers come from 121 countries, including some unusual locations like Mozambique, Ghana, Bolivia, Serbia, the Bahamas, Georgia, Malta and the Cayman Islands. (As a general rule, Asian countries are vastly under-represented in our customers, possibly because our tool doesn’t support non-English languages.)

People using Optimal Sort tend to work for an internal team (45% of users), which is typically small in size (48% work in a team of less than 5 people).

The companies that they work for though, are massive. Our customers come from organisations that have an average (!) of 5,169 staff.

All those information architects have definitely been busy. Since we went live with the public version of Optimal Sort, 3,875 different card sort studies have been run. A staggering 117,932 people have completed a card sort.

What’s interesting is to see that 65% of the card sorts are what we called open sorts. (Open sorts are when you let participants choose their own category names, whereas in a closed card sort you force people to drop the cards into pre-defined categories.)

The reason there are more open sorts than closed sorts is that closed card sorts aren’t very useful. They are one way of validating a proposed information architecture, but there are much smarter, more robust ways of doing this. (Stay tuned for an announcement very soon of an exciting new tool to give you much more confidence that you have the structures and labels right.)

What is probably the clearest statistic of all is that information architecture as a field is growing in prominence and it’s growing fast.  According to the IA institute annual report there were 750 members in 2007. In 2008 there were 1,500 members. Its membership doubled in 12 short months. Doubled.

It’s a great time to be in the field, and we owe a depth of gratitude to all the pioneers who have used Optimal Sort and helped us to learn what it takes to make a useful card sorting tool. Thank you all!

Last week I attended the annual Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) conference in Baltimore, Maryland. I’ve attended a few conferences over the last few years and have noticed a few trends coming through.
 
Firstly, usability is in hot demand. There is no doubt about it, this field is booming. Usability makes more sense than ever, thanks to the:  
•    Success of consumer products and services like the iPod and Netflix
•    Growth of self-service (and its ability to decrease the cost to serve each customer)
•    Improved ability to track the benefits of usability thanks to more pervasive, robust measurement systems
However, we still need to do a better job of selling ourselves. We need to be known for more than just usability - we must get involved right at the beginning of the design lifecycle. Understanding users is vitally important in product development and customer experience strategy, and we need to get better at understanding how organisations work, and the flow-on effects of what we do.
 
As a result of usability being a hot button, skilled usability practitioners are in high demand. In a June 4 report entitled User Experience Salaries Are on the Rise, Kerry Bodine from Forrester says "While demand for UX work is up, capacity is not. Universities continue to pump out new crops of practitioners from their design and human-computer interaction programs, but this influx still can’t keep up with the US’s surging appetite for UX work. This imbalance will continue to create enormous headaches for hiring managers: For the past several years, every agency exec we’ve talked to has reported that hiring and retention is a top priority."
 
You see this every year at UPA, as the job board gets quickly filled up with dozens and dozens of jobs. Jakob Nielsen thinks that we’ll need 500,000 usability professionals over the next 20 years, and that we currently have about 50,000. That’s a big gap.
 
We are also seeing a trend of usability practitioners becoming more and more specialised. Susan Dray commented in a UPA panel discussion entitled ‘The Future of User Experience: Niche or Not?’ that this is only natural. "Showing value means selling ourselves - so we must differentiate ourselves from other functions, people, and disciplines". In particular, I’ve seen three areas of specialisation:
 
1.    New technologies
Usability is moving beyond the web, and organisations are really starting to care about the cross-channel experience. At Optimal Usability we are seeing more and more of this as we look at things like the retail store experience, kiosks and automated phone systems.
 
2.    New geographical markets
We also see usability becoming a global concern. Big companies want to know how customers behave in different countries, so there are more and more multi-country studies. This is mirrored by the growth of usability companies all over the world (although, interestingly, Asia continues to be grossly underserved).
 
3.    Information architecture
If I had to pick one area to watch in web usability, it would be information architecture (IA). There is more and more content on websites, so it’s getting harder to find stuff. At Optimal Usability, we are banking on this trend continuing. We have a new IA tool that allows us to validate a site’s structure (that we’ve code named Tree Hugger), and over 60,000 people have completed card sorts with our tool, Optimal Sort.
 
 
I find conferences a great way to re-energise, re-focus and re-connect. It’s only by stepping out of the day-to-day that these industry trends become obvious. One thing is for sure, we are working in a very exciting industry at a very exciting time.
 
 
P.S. If you enjoyed this, you may find the State of the UX Community article an interesting read as well.