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."
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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.
 

By Richard Kerr and Trent Mankelow

Recently I used an airline’s touch-screen kiosk to check-in, and made the mistake of touching the No button on the ‘dangerous goods’ screen. I’d anticipated that the question would be worded something like ‘Are you carrying any dangerous goods?’, like it would be if I was physically checking in. Unfortunately it wasn’t worded that way, and pressing No kicked me out of the system. An airline representative, who had been hovering nearby, moved in and cancelled the process. He then took us through the whole process again, this time doing every step for me. How embarrassing.
 
This got me thinking. Shouldn’t a successful self-service kiosk interaction be one where I can do it myself?
 
This is an important question as more and more services are being migrated to kiosks. BNZ has departure fee kiosks, Dymocks has introduced a BookFinder kiosk, PAK’nSAVE have a SHOP’nGO kiosk as part of its self-scanning experience. Back in 2005 the Photo Kiosk was even named the Person of the Year by the PhotoImaging Manufacturers & Distributors Association.
 
 
How to create a great kiosk
 
The first step in designing any kiosk is to establish its purpose. This involves understanding who the audience is and what their goals are. Then you should work out the common tasks they’ll want to perform. (It’s interesting to note that research suggests that kiosks work best when they focus on just a single transaction.)
 
Next, you should adopt a user-centred, iterative design process.
 
This involves testing your kiosk designs with representative users performing representative tasks using the kiosk or a prototype. For example, if the kiosk is for supermarket shoppers, you might test with the actual people who do the family shopping. In fact you would ideally conduct the tests in the environment that the kiosk will be ultimately be located - in the supermarket itself.
 
 
Kiosk usability tips
 
As part of designing a kiosk, you’ll want to take into account the large body of research that exists. The following guidelines can help to produce a great kiosk experience:
 
•    Optimise for ease of learning over efficiency of use. For most kiosk interfaces it is important to presume no prior knowledge of the system by the user. The appearance of the interface should convey that it is basic or at least straight forward and simple to use.
 
•    Design for single touches rather than common web/desktop interactions. Multi-step point and click gestures that are appropriate for mouse and keyboard interactions may confuse kiosk users. Ideally eliminate interactions that involve dragging, double-clicking, scrolling or scroll bars. For example, pull-down menus that necessitate a press, drag and release can be difficult to execute using a touch-screen.

•    Don’t display the mouse cursor when the customer touches the screen. Any evidence about the operating system driving the experience can break the user’s mental model about how they are interacting with the kiosk. It may confuse users about which actions might be possible, and it looks unprofessional.

•    Don’t use black as a background colour, as it promotes reflections and accentuates finger prints. Instead, use halftones or textured backgrounds.

•    Attract customers to the kiosk. Ensure that there is a prominent ‘Touch to start’ button, and include a short looping introduction to familiarise users with the system, explain how it operates, and alert users to what they can achieve using it.

•    Ensure that there are clear visual cues that elements have been selected. For example, make buttons ‘depress’ when touched to indicate when they have been ‘pushed’. Other ways of indicating this are colour or shade changes, a ‘negative’ of the button or even sound.

•    Gives customers a sense of control. Display a busy indicator if a process will last longer than a few seconds. Offer clues about where the user is in the system, and how far they have to go to complete the process.

•    Design the system so that the user can complete the process as quickly as possible. This will increase the chance that the user will stay to complete the process and will decrease the chance of physical fatigue.

•    Carefully consider how questions are phrased when leading the user through the process. In particular, if the kiosk is replicating a task already performed in the real world discover the exact wording of how the question is asked. For example, if users are used to answering a question in the affirmative, consider making sure the related question on the kiosk is also asked in the affirmative. 

•    Track how the kiosk is being used. It can be very useful to track how often a kiosk is used and when it is used, the amount of users per day, the average time spent at the kiosk, the average completion time for tasks, and the last screen visited before leaving.
 
A great kiosk provides a better experience than the one customer can currently receive over the counter. That’s the promise of airline check-in kiosks - they shouldn’t just make the experience quicker, they should make it better.

Good self-service kiosks reduce costs for the business, but great ones also deliver a rewarding and engaging customer-experience. It’s good for the business and the customer. 

Interested in ensuring your new kiosk is as easy to use and intuitive as possible? We have done kiosk and touch-screen work for leading organisations such as Air New Zealand, Navman, Westpac and others. Let us know if you’d like to know more about our services, by emailing Trent.
 

Self-service is a simple concept: use technology to get people to help themselves. Its promises are twofold:

1.    Getting customers to help themselves saves organisations a lot of money. For example, the single most expensive transaction for a bank is the face-to-face transaction that occurs when a customer speaks to a teller (apparently tellers spend 39% of their time waiting for customers to sort themselves out at the counter). It might cost $35 for a customer to interact with a teller, or $0.75 to do the same transaction online-a potential saving of 98% on just one transaction.

2.    Self-service gives people the choice of how they want to interact with the organisation. Self-service can provide not just convenience but a sense of power and control.

Self-service works when there are benefits to the customer and the business. But it typically costs a lot of money to implement self-service technology, and if you are not careful, it can backfire. The key to ensuring that self-service is successful is to have a coherent strategy. Here are a few tips:

1. Create a quality experience

One objection to self-service is that while it saves companies money, it does not always save their customers time. As more and more tasks are unloaded on to customers, and they are forced to use poorly designed systems they may be put off for good. The key is to truly understand user goals. What information do they need? Why are they calling? Organisations need to think of themselves as purveyors of customer experiences, and they need to master cross-channel distribution. The experience has to be superlative, whether it takes place inside a retail store, on the phone, or on the web.

2. Focus on transactions that already exist

The key is to automate a task that already needs to be done, not to invent a task and then provide a computer to do it. Automate the routine tasks, and let exceptions be handled by people.

3. Bite off less than you can chew

Don’t try and create the ultimate experience first up. The Air New Zealand kiosks don’t allow customers to change flights or purchase an upgrade. Give customers a chance to learn the system, and to develop confidence in a new technology, before adding layers of complexity.

4. Create a robust measurement framework

The adage "you can’t manage what you can’t measure" is especially applicable to self-service applications. If you track how people are using your systems you can not only identify problems, but also better understand, target and service various user segments. You should track information about the automated transactions and use that data to improve future transactions.

5. Have a strategy regarding how to move people to different channels

One way to encourage people to use your self-service technologies, is to not give them a choice. A couple of years ago Telecom New Zealand released its Freedom plans, where customers could nominate a mobile phone and call it as much as they like from their home phone for $10. You could only sign up using self-service, either via an automated phone system or online. The New Zealand Companies Office has also taken this position. From 1 July 2008 it will become mandatory to file certain documents online.

You can penalise customers. Air New Zealand offer discounts to customers who book online. Buy your tickets the old-fashioned way and you must pay more. Organisations who do this are, in effect, introducing penalty charges to persuade customers to use self-service systems. Some customers might resent this. Self-service works best when customers decide to use a well designed system of their own volition; it infuriates most when they are forced to use a bad system.

You can create incentives for people. You can make it a better, higher quality experience (once you’ve received your balance via text message, why would you want to wait on hold?)

Finally, you should educate people on the best channel for their transaction. This is a no brainer really - you must make your customers aware of self-service tools before they can expect adoption. I rang my bank the other day to apply for a credit card for my wife. They told me I could do it online - great, that means that I can do it when it’s convenient to me, rather than having to talk to a person on the phone.

6. Accept that not everyone will self-serve

While self-service technologies offer convenience, they don’t offer personal service. No matter what, some people are going to want to wait in line and talk to a customer services representative. So there may need to be a balance between self-service and conventional forms of service.

Self-service is all around us, and in some ways has also become so pervasive that we forget what it was like to not serve ourselves. A generation ago, consumers expected a teller to help them with financial transactions, an attendant to pump the gas, and a clerk to ring up the groceries. These days convenience has become the mantra of today’s consumers and more and more people are going to prefer to serve themselves.

This month our Australian Managing Director Susan Wolfe returns to our newsletter to describe her recent difficulties in getting good customer service

There couldn’t be a more exciting time to be in our field. Never has there been such a discrepancy between what people expect as a customer and what they actually experience.

In the past few months, I’ve had more than my share of reasons to notice this. In the process of launching a new business, I’ve had to establish new telephone and broadband services, acquire a new internet domain and get email up and running, open a bank account, get a credit card, set up a post office box, take out business insurance, and start paying bills.

This is core business for the respective organisations delivering these services. In 2008, these transactions should run like clockwork. But they don’t.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, went right.

It all started with the telecommunications. I did my homework and knew exactly which company should have been the easiest to deal with; given the location of the new office and the services already used by others in the building.

I had expected that setting up a new business service with this company would be simple, after all, they have an entire branch devoted to supporting business customers. Therefore, I called the dedicated business number hoping to have the telephone and internet service up and running by the following week.

Consequently, I wasn’t really prepared for the initial 1 hour, 54 minute conversation, involving a customer service rep (CSR) who insisted on selling me a package that sounded suspiciously like home phone and internet service, which was not what I wanted.  She also asked if I wanted my business to have the same phone number as my holiday house (which is 90 kilometres away from the office), and as she didn’t know how to use the system, she repeatedly had to put me on hold in order to go and get help. She quoted me a price, a tentative new phone number and a reference number, and explained that all would be confirmed in the email that I would receive shortly.

Needless to say, the conversation didn’t inspire confidence that my phone service and broadband would be up and running anytime soon. Sure enough, the promised email never arrived and my suspicions were confirmed.

So, another conversation, over an hour long, was required two days later. Firstly, we had to undo everything the first CSR had done, and then start all over again. Fortunately, I happened to encounter someone who truly wanted to help. Unfortunately, the systems and processes she relied on to help me repeatedly let her down. It started with one system for requesting someone to come out to install the line, and then continued when a new line couldn’t be installed without re-wiring the whole building (and having me responsible for a minor public works project to tear up the street to lay new cables!) Numerous phone calls, input into various systems and a lot of finger pointing then ensued between divisions within the company and external organisations which provide cabling.

When it was finally agreed that the only solution was for someone to generously give up one of their lesser used lines, there were delays of several days while the line was transferred, numbers changed and capabilities added so that I could also send/receive faxes.  A new telephone-company handset was also issued, for which I was given a reference number to use when I picked up the phone at a local office. And in true form, it took not one, but two trips to that office before I walked out with a phone, because the reference number I had been given wasn’t compatible with the system that the office uses for issuing the phone.

As a customer, I shouldn’t have to know about the details of how this all worked, but by this stage I felt I deserved a Ph.D. in phone service provisioning!

After the saga of the phone line, it was with much trepidation that I approached the next job, getting broadband set up. However, apart from initially sending the modem to the wrong address, setting it up was surprisingly easy. To give this company their due, it was actually a very straightforward, ‘out-of-the-box’ experience, and one they should be proud of.  I was pleasantly surprised as I would have expected this to be a bit more complicated than getting a new phone - particularly since it relied on me doing all the work, once I had the equipment.

Unfortunately, however, the story doesn’t end there.  The three plus weeks involved in the phone/broadband setup was nothing compared to what I’ve been through, trying to get email working properly. The details are unimportant, but suffice to say that it’s now just shy of three months since that initial conversation to set up the service - and it’s still not working. I shouldn’t have to be on a first name basis with several of the CSRs, but I am. The last straw came recently when I was told that they couldn’t help me use Outlook, and my only solution was a new computer. My computer isn’t old, nor is my operating system, and I’m using their technology! I know this isn’t the kind of customer experience that I want or deserve.

Not an isolated event.

One might think that I just made the wrong decision with the company that I chose to use for telephone and broadband services, but the problem is pervasive. When I discovered that the closest post office had no available PO boxes, I inquired about opening a ‘locked bag’ service instead. The downside of this is that I could only pick up my mail during business hours and must wait in line to do so. The advantage, however, is that it is in walking distance of the office - convenient and a good excuse for exercise. Certainly a viable solution, except that the process of setting up a simple locked bag takes a month, as ’someone out of state has to enter it into the computer’! Yes, I’m driving to another post office to pick up our mail now.

To save me unnecessary trips. I’ve chosen to pay extra for them to email me when mail arrives. That’s money well spent for a good customer experience, except for the occasional false alarm when they send me an email even though the bag is empty. The manager explained that it’s easier to do a visual inspection than rely on the scanners to identify which people should receive notification, so they occasionally get it wrong.

It took countless visits and several weeks to open the business bank account - and this is at a bank where I am an established customer. I wasn’t given the information that I needed to begin transacting online. Furthermore, one of the two business credit cards issued now appears mixed amongst my personal banking portfolio, not the business accounts and the other one doesn’t appear anywhere. And let’s not talk about how internet banking didn’t work when I made my first rent payment from the new account. So much for impressing my new landlord that we’ll be reliable tenants!

Taking out business insurance wasn’t much easier. One of the two policies involved being sent a premium based on incorrect information entered by the CSR regarding the amount of coverage required (despite two phone calls about this very topic). The other policy was issued correctly, but when it came time to pay, the invoice included incorrect information about how to transmit payment.

What’s going on?

There are several causes of these failures to deliver. CSRs are trying to deal with complicated systems which don’t support them as direct users, let alone the customer as an indirect user. The systems (and, therefore, the CSRs) don’t speak the customers’ language. In my attempts to get the phone and email working, I’ve had countless conversations where I have had to give CSRs various numbers and codes that have no bearing on either my phone number or customer number - the only two numbers that I should really have to know. Jargon is pervasive.

Systems are designed in a vacuum, without considering the overall business process in which they have to fit. Furthermore, transactions are arbitrarily divided across these systems, such that it’s impossible for one person to resolve a problem (’Sorry, I’d love to help you, but I don’t have access to that system’). The processes are simply not in sync with users’ expectations or needs, and they often do little to support the business’ needs either.

Training for the CSRs on the systems is woefully inadequate, and usually at the expense of the customer. My first failed attempt at getting the phone set up while talking with a "specialist business service person" was evidence of that.

The list goes on and on - and I haven’t even made it to the whole notion of abysmal correspondence with the customer and customer self-service via the internet. However, if an organisation can’t get their internal systems right, they don’t have a chance of getting customer self-service working well.

Customers expect and demand more.

These products and services are available anywhere and everywhere, so the only real differentiator is the customer experience. Sadly, there’s a lot of rhetoric around good customer experience, but unfortunately not often a lot of delivery on the promise. As a consumer, I have choices and can easily research alternatives to every single organisation that I’ve dealt with in setting up this business. The companies make it fairly easy to switch as well, and I am highly motivated to do so. I shouldn’t have to invest this much time or effort in these simple transactions. I’m certainly not alone in thinking that I’d rather patronise companies that deliver on their promise, and do so accurately, quickly and seamlessly.

That’s where customer experience design comes in - recognising that the optimal customer experience can only be designed through a holistic approach that understands and balances the needs of the business with those of the customers. But in order to do this, one has to first understand what those needs and expectations really are, and then explicitly design systems to support them.

The final irony of this long, sad tale is that all of these experiences described have happened while setting up a company called Optimal Experience! We clearly have our work cut out for us. That’s why there’s no more exciting time than now to be in our field.

In the second of In this month’s Thought Leader article we hear from Susan Wolfe, a pioneer in the Australian usability industry. She has spent 25 years evangelising the value of usability and user-centred design, and has extensive experience making it work in the real world. She has built and managed a number of highly successful teams, and has collaborated with a vast array of commercial, large corporate and government clients across industries and around the globe to introduce and reap the rewards of user-centred design practices.

So, you’ve decided your organisation needs a User Experience (UX) team.  It seems straight forward enough - there are lots of projects going on that would benefit from some attention to UX, and you’ve already identified a few staff who you could help deliver UX-related services.

While the need for a UX team might be obvious to you, setting up and running such a team is not as simple as you might think, and how to make it successful is anything but obvious.  There are a lot of considerations, such as:

• Figuring out where to start in the organisation
• Deciding where in the organisation your UX team should live
• Determining the best structure for your team
• Determining what services to offer
• Hiring the right people (whether that’s training people from within or going externally)
• Training the new team
• Maintaining your team and ensuring their ongoing skill development

These are just some of the many decisions that you will face.

But before you tackle this list, you need to recognise that there are lots of potential pitfalls to avoid.  Some of the more common ones include:

• Assuming that everyone in the organisation values a good user experience as much as you do
• ‘Stepping on the toes’ of other groups and not being sensitive to their priorities
• Introducing a new methodology on top of an existing methodology
• Transforming internal staff into user experience specialists without training
• Bringing in a consulting company without knowledge transfer

The list goes on and on.  Sadly, ‘build it and they will come’ simply doesn’t apply to UX teams!

However, this doesn’t mean that all UX teams are doomed to failure. It’s simply a matter of doing your homework - and approaching the development of a UX team as you would other business propositions.

One way to begin is to consider your organisation’s real business goals, which are generally tied to profit. Most activities can be related back to profit; such as how to earn more, cut costs, improve stock value, and expand market share. Your homework involves understanding and articulating exactly how UX activities can have an impact on profit, using real numbers from your organisation, not stats taken out of a book on Return on Investment. This is a good starting point.

However, understanding these business goals is not enough to ensure success. You also need to understand the organisational barriers and opportunities to introducing usability, user-centred design and broader UX activities, as well as the cultural myths and values held within your organisation. By understanding these, your team will better understand how to work within the context of organisation, and also with others on your team.

Barriers and opportunities

A barrier has the potential to prevent or undermine the adoption of your UX design activities. Think of it as an existing or planned circumstance that may get in the way of your ability to carry out UX activities. Some of these could include:

• Inadequate communication between developers and users
• Clients not understanding usability or UX and therefore not wanting to pay for it
• Different groups within your organisation "owning" the user experience
• Not enough skills in usability and UX design
• Most of the projects are too small to incorporate explicit UX design
• Overloading the UX specialist(s) with too many projects to support>
• Having projects which are located across the organisation and are hard for the specialists to reach
• The departments within your organisation consider themselves unique from each other, making standardisation feel difficult to sell

An opportunity, on the other hand, offers a vehicle for pushing UX design initiatives through, Think of it as an existing or planned initiative which may be leveraged to help carry out UX activities, such as:

• New systems development or redevelopment
• A well accepted systems development methodology
• A training department that is targeting cost reduction
• A quality assurance initiative that is well received
• A new business process re-engineering activity
• A management team that supports continuous improvement
• An impending reorganisation
• A senior manager who is willing to "champion" UX
• A set of clear and widely accepted corporate objectives
• Existing staff who can become UX specialists

Myths and values

Myths and values are not actual circumstances, but perceptions that can form potential barriers. A myth is a belief about usability and UX held by stakeholders, such as:

• Usability is subjective and can’t be measured or engineered
• Users don’t need better interfaces, just better training
• Standards and guidelines will take the creativity out of design
• As long as designers are familiar with interface guidelines and principles, they will design the right UX
• UX design shouldn’t be considered until the detailed design phase of a software project
• UX specialists aren’t technical enough to understand the requirements of systems development
• Users cannot affect or impact user interface design

Furthermore, a value is a belief that defines the culture of your organisation. These can either be helpful or unhelpful, and may include such things as:

• Developers are rewarded for "rescuing" a failing project
• Clever code solutions are applauded
• Innovation is highly valued
• Staff who don’t "rock the boat" are safe in their jobs
• Risk is dangerous

It is not until you understand your organisation at this level that you can start to craft a UX team that will really work. Though you are unlikely to immediately dispel a myth or change your organisation’s values, it is essential to recognise what they are so you can determine how best to introduce and foster a user-centred culture and a UX team. In future articles, we will show you how to effectively use this information to identify your allies and target your approach.

On my way to Australia last week I read a great article in the Harvard Business Review entitled "Defeating Feature Fatigue." The article discussed a complex user interface for driving a BMW that, with over 700 features, required a "cheat sheet" for anyone who didn’t normally drive the car.

On the same overseas trip I had two experiences that reminded me careless design makes even easy things hard to use.

The first incident was at Auckland Airport, when I opened the door of a toilet that I thought was vacant. Imagine my surprise when an elderly foreign lady greeted me enthusiastically. She seemed relieved to have been rescued. You see, to open the door you couldn’t just operate a manual latch and pull the door. Instead you were required to press a button on a side wall some distance away, then pull the door. The woman had obviously figured out that she had to do something with the button, but who knows how long she had been standing there waiting for the door to automatically open.

Opening a door ought to be a simple operation. Instead, the airport authorities had installed a part-automatic, part-manual solution that was so unintuitive that it required instructions. The button was surrounded by verbose, ambiguous signage indicating what it was for, which was further reinforced by recorded instructions piped over a crackly speaker in a strong kiwi accent. All of which is useless for non-English speakers.

The second incident was at Sydney airport. A confused older gentleman, standing at the basins with lathered hands, was looking around. It was apparent that he couldn’t operate the tap. Once again there was a large sign above each of the basins indicating that the taps would automatically turn on when hands were placed underneath.

The need for signage to operate such simple devices is a classic indication of a usability problem. One of my favourite examples of this is the Evian "Nomad" water bottle that requires opening instructions. However, the bigger issue in my opinion is the complete disregard for foreign travellers. The main reason the gentleman couldn’t operate the tap was because he obviously couldn’t understand the sign. Surely non-English speakers must make up a significant number of those using the bathroom in international airports?

As a recent Slate article [1] discussing auto-flush toilets mentioned, you should never replace a technology with an inferior technology. We’ve taken a simple technology and made it so unintuitive that we now need written instructions to understand how to operate it. There are enough complicated interfaces in the world as it is, without having to be toilet trained all over again.

[1] http://www.slate.com/id/2137256/nav/tap1/

- Trent

After six hours of Christmas shopping on Saturday, I couldn’t help but notice how little attention retailers seem to pay to the customers’ in store experience. Finding a DVD was the worst, mainly because I couldn’t tell how the movies were categorised in any store I visited. But then I started wondering.  With all this rampant commercialisation, is it a good idea that things are easier to buy? Can usability and market research be used for evil instead of good?

For example, supermarket design is evil. Most supermarkets make it deliberately hard to get to commonly purchased items. They ensure that milk and bread are at the furthest corner from the store entrance. This means customers must travel the length of the store to find them, hopefully making more impulse purchases on the way. Essentially, they are being enticed into buying items which usually yield a higher profit than the staple products.

Here’s the thing. We all know that knowledge is power. So when retailers understand human behaviour, and use this knowledge to influence customers for their own ends, it is easy to abuse that power.

In 1937 a New York ad agency executive urged his colleagues to inject "a little fear in advertising…fear in women of being frumps, fear in men of being duds." There is no denying that in a society flooded with mass advertising we can’t really hope to avoid this influence. Everyone knows that marketers are out to get us, and we struggle to escape their snares.

I’m not suggesting that we don’t study and understand how people behave. The key is to use this knowledge responsibly, in a way that respects the consumers’ best interests.

For example, usability takes into account users’ goals, as well as the business goals. If my goal is to buy a present for my father, and a store helps me to achieve that goal, then that’s perfect. That’s why those little tickets that say ‘Good for Him’ can be very useful signposts. That’s what I want.

As Gerald Zaltman writes in How Customers Think, using knowledge about unconscious processes to better understand and satisfy customers is good. It’s only when this information is used to influence them involuntarily that it’s evil.

[I recommend looking at Inconspicuous Consumption: Lessons for Web Design from Mall and Retail Design for a fascinating 3-part series on applying real life shopping experiences back to the web.]

- Trent

The project is about to go into launch.  Weeks, months, if not years, of planning, designing, development and testing has gone into it.  Project managers, business analysts, developers, designers, testers and contractors have all been putting blood sweat and tears to make sure things go smoothly.  Of course, it’s seldom that everything is perfect – there is some smoke and mirrors (but only a few!).  But it’s version 1.0.  Version 1.0 always has problems we know about – we’ll fix them in version 2.0.

Then it happens.  Someone finds a problem because she had her friend use it when she was showing off her work – and he couldn’t for the life of him figure out how to work it.  He didn’t even notice the fancy new functions that took the team spent a lot of time arguing over.  Worse still, he is using one of the basic functions for something completely different to what the project team had intended.  There is a slight moment of panic.  Perhaps he’s an exception.  How could he not know how to work it?  It seems blindingly obvious.  A few more ‘corridor tests’ reveal the same worrying problem – no one seems to know to use it properly!

Just to be safe, the project manager gets someone to do some usability testing.  That should fix it.  They will come up with some ‘quick fixes’ and everything will now be fine.

Most readers on this newsletter will be familiar with similar stories, or have experienced it themselves.  While this narrative is somewhat dramatized, it’s not uncommon.  Say hello to the usability band aid.

In real life, band aids are messy.  They are seldom big enough to cover the wound.  It’s sticky, and it hurts to take it off.  They can increase the risk of infection and can even slow healing.   Unfortunately, the usability band aid is very similar to its real life counterpart.

Fortunately, it is possible to prevent the need for a band-aid altogether.  We’ve been fortunate enough to work with some clients who employ usability not as a messy band-aid near the end of the project, but more like vitamin supplements.  Vitamin styled usability is not only a good preventative; it can also serve as a powerful competitive advantage.

Good usability demonstrates respect for users.  It shows that customers’ needs have been considered from the start rather than added on as an afterthought.  While this simple truth is nothing new, it is surprising how seldom we see it exercised with websites, intranets, software and the plethora of consumer electronic devices.

Just like real vitamins, proactive usability needs to be taken in daily doses and takes commitment.  But that doesn’t make it hard.  Besides, consider the benefits.  In the end, the products that standout all share common design traits, including good usability that has been planned for.  Google, iPod, Nokia mobiles, Tivo, Amazon, Flickr - all products that are easy to use and enjoyable.

What about what you’re working on now?  How can you start taking usability vitamin supplements?

It’s all about consistency.  Or is it? When it comes to communications, organisations are concerned about delivering a consistent branded experience.  However, sometimes it is easy to lose sight of the purpose of communication itself.

Here’s an example - yesterday I changed telephone accounts.  I must say it was a good experience on the phone.  Despite being on hold for 20 minutes, the person on the other end was friendly, chatty but also professional.  It was as pleasant as you could expect with such a mundane task - until she started reading from the company script.  All of a sudden it was as if somone had replaced the person talking to me with a corporate machine.  Admittedly, it was the part about the legal stuff where it is important to get it right.  It could be argued though that such obvious reading from a script on this topic only makes it worse.

Up until that point, I was having a conversation with a person, who I was aware represented a large company.  After that point, I was only aware of the large company.  A pity.

Technology wastes our lives. How much time is spent waiting for computers to boot? How much time standing in front of fax machines wondering if anything was actually sent? How much time trying to get through to an operator when you’ve called a toll free number?

Apparently we get mad at all this time wastage - a 2,600 person international study found that consumers damage or destroy about 10 percent of all high-tech gadgets. Reported acts of rage included punching, hammering, incinerating, shooting, driving over and microwaving these devices that are supposed to help improve our lives.

My impression is that it’s getting worse. Firstly, the tendency for devices to have more and more features makes it harder for us to figure out how things are supposed to work (is it a cellphone? a camera? a razor?). And secondly, we are getting increasingly impatient as our lives get busier and busier. We have lower tolerance levels and less time to waste on understanding technology. We’re spending more and more time on the web, and on the web we’re used to being in control. Page taking too long to load? Click away. Not finding the information you need? Go to Google.

Essentially, the web is making us impatient with anything we can’t skim. This includes being on hold, which is why customers love self service. It’s a well known phenomenon in customer support that people would rather find the answers themselves on your web site than have answers delivered to them by picking up the phone and calling your call centre. It’s because the customers are in control of their own time.

These customer goals marry up perfectly with the business goals, because rather than paying for an employee to reset a password or change an address the customers do it themselves. Organisations can get away with fewer frontline and call centre staff.

Of course, it’s not just technology that wastes our time. Oftentimes it’s people who use technology poorly who waste our time. Michael Dertouzos suggests that "prolific email authors should think of each message they send as an instrument that reduces the recipient’s life by 2 to 3 minutes." Good idea, especially since a UK survey found that some of the UK’s biggest companies spend an average of 10,000 pounds per person per year paying employees to read and write unnecessary emails.

Many usability issues are related to respect. Designers need to have more respect for the user’s mental and physical effort. Technology needs to have more respect for our time. It’s the ultimate limited resource. We only have 24 hours a day, so it should be treated as a precious, precious thing.

- Trent