The delights of feta cheese
I gotta share the delight of feta cheese with you…
[Edit: - STOOOPPP! Before you read any further I don't want to mislead anyone. I have to say the product mentioned in this article is not feta cheese - it is Mediterranean style semi-hard cow's milk cheese - so not the same thing at all, not even from the same animal - so there you go: where you see the word feta cheese - please mentally substitute with Mediterranean style semi-hard cow's milk cheese! Apologies for the interruption - read on!]
Whoooa! This is a website about user interface and user experience! This madman is talking about feta cheese!!
Stay with me – it’s on topic – honestly. And I’ll give you a bonus recipe.
User experience isn’t just about software and websites, and mobile apps – it’s there in everything that is designed to be used, whether it’s a car, an ATM, a chair or a button – whatever.
Thinking back to the Kano Model in a previous post, when you use a product or service, you can have some basic expectations which should be met, and you can have some excitement generators that elevate the experience beyond just being satisfying.
So it’s nice to find occasionally, some excitement generators where you’d least expect to find them. It carries the element of surprise which is key to engaging the user and keeping their attention as well as lingering longer in the memory when the moment has long gone.
And here’s a tub of feta cheese doing just that – to the point I just have to share.
Sometimes, when you buy feta cheese, it’s in a block and you have to cut open the slimy packaging and cut the cheese into cubes to go with your pasta or your salad. Then you have to store what’s left somehow. Well I tried out Aria Foods’ Apetina feta cheese in a new kind of container yesterday. It just looks like a normal tub, except inside is a strainer that lets you lift the strainer clear of the solution it’s stored in, tip out what you need and pop it back in without losing any of the solution in the process. Fan-flippin’-tastic! Well done Aria Foods. My wife and I marveled at the simplicity, usefulness and unexpected delightfulness of this idea.
Feta cheese packaging with built-in strainer (We already used half, btw)
And if you’re looking for a recipe to use it with. Cook some spaghetti (al dente), roast some good cherry tomatoes in olive oil until soft and oozing goodness (use half each of chilli infused and basil infused oils), mix with the spaghetti, add the diced feta cheese and serve. Top with grated Parmesan and enjoy with a glass of your favourite Chianti. One of my favourite dishes!
Lightning talk at Cambridge Usability Group, UXLondon Redux 2012
Thanks to organizers and other speakers, and to everyone who came to this evening’s UXLondon Redux event.
Below are my raw notes from my talk on Kano and the 90%, a brief talk on the recurring theme of customer experience which I found most inspiring at this years UXLondon event earlier this month. Big thanks to those who inspired me for this talk – Leisa Riechelt (@leisa), Jared Spool (@jmspool), and Leif Roy(@optimalNZ). Without their input, I would have had no output.
Below the notes is a prezi slideshow (which is only a slightly embellished version of my slides at the event).
UXLondon was an amazing event with lots of high quality speakers, loads of inspiration and there was probably hundreds of takeaways, but I’m going to cover just 3 that really inspired me the most.
The first big takeaway was that UX is growing up, not just as a field in its own right but in its relationship with related fields that have been around for longer.
One of the indicators of this was the recurring theme of Customer Experience (CX). Leisa Riechelt spoke about the relationship between UX and CX, and the importance of strategy for the business as a whole towards providing a great customer experience.
Obviously as a UX practitioner we use strategies and methodologies in our research, design, and provision of content, but if we take a step back and look at the bigger picture, we’re really looking at having an overall business strategy, albeit one where the user is at the core not the highest paid person’s opinion (HIPPO).
This overall structure includes CX which has long had the user’s needs at heart but with a stronger connection to business level roles and goals rather than at the design and development level (or deliverables level) which is traditionally where UX comes in. So strategic UX looks at getting the UX profile raised within the organisation – being inclusive of everyone from the top down, and from an early stage.
Another speaker at UXLondon, Leif Roy, flew over from New Zealand to give a 15 minute talk on how his team at Optimal Usability approached the design of a new type of economy class seating for Air New Zealand. Now what they were doing was not just looking at the needs of the passengers during the flight – they were taking this step back and looking at the bigger picture – the whole customer experience. They were designing an experience, with anticipation, interaction, engagement, and subsequent memories. They were designing for the whole customer journey. In her talk Leisa Riechelt was advocating the use of user journey maps that let you view and design for this whole customer experience. She also said: UX is not CX, UX needs CX.
The most inspiring point for me came when Jared Spool spoke about how four factors are coming together in UX at the same time in order to create this perfect storm that UX is in the middle of. Now he was talking about mobile and its market maturity was one of these four factors, but really what he was talking about is applicable to UX as a whole.
One of these four factors was the Kano Model, which isn’t exactly new – it was created by Noriaki Kano in the 80′s (1980′s). The Kano Model is a two dimensional graph – there’s an x-axis and a y-axis, and they cross in the middle. On the x-axis is the investment of the organisation. Investment can be time, effort, research, whatever. Essentially it boils down to cost but cost is a negative word so we’ll call it ‘willingness to invest’.
On the y-axis is the user or customer response to using the product or service that the organisation produces. It ranges from frustration at the bottom to delight at the top
In the middle, where the axes cross is this area we call satisfaction. It’s a neutral term.
There’s 3 main lines on this model. The simplest is a straight line from bottom left to top right, which is simply ‘performance’. The more willingness there is to invest, the better the response we get back from the user – you get back what you put in.
Then there’s two interesting curves here. The curve at bottom right describes the user’s basic expectations. Some basic expectations don’t take so much investment – lets face it, if you can’t even meet the most basic of expectations, you don’t have a product. But to meet all the basic expectations actually takes quite a bit of effort. The key element of this curve is that it never rises above the x-axis. Even if you meet all the basic expectations, you can’t do more than just ‘satisfy’ the user.
Now if we’re serious about providing a good user experience, then we want to do more than just satisfy the user – we want to ‘delight’ the user.
It turns out we don’t have to work too hard in order to come up with some nice features that get the user above the satisfied state. This other curve at top left rises from the satisfaction level up towards delight, as the organisation is more willing to invest. These are added value features – the elements that make your product or service unique, easy and pleasurable to use – the things that delight us. We’ll call those excitement generators.
There’s no use, by the way, of having these excitement generators without also meeting the basic expectations. The one is built on top of the other.
The interesting thing about the Kano model is that there is an invisible dimension. Over time, these excitement generators start to become taken for granted, in fact they move down to become basic expectations, and new excitement generators have to be brought in, so the playing field is always changing. But that’s ok because technology is always changing and when technology changes, people’s behaviour changes, and some of these basic expectations aren’t really needed any more so there’s this beautiful balancing act going on across the chart. It turns out the Kano model is really good at predicting the future of things we’re building.
So coming back to Leif Roy and Air New Zealand: their big excitement generator was this economy class seating such that could turn into lay flat surfaces that you could lie down on and sleep during long haul flights. Lay flat seats on economy class – whoever heard of that! Cattle class is the realm of prolonged and painful experiences. Hipmunk give their flight plans a rating – they call it an Agony Rating, and here’s Air New Zealand promoting this wonderful experience. It’s more than just about customer satisfaction; it’s about a great customer experience.
And as UX practitioners, it’s our role to be part of producing this customer experience. UX is not CX, but UX needs CX, but CX needs UX too. Multiple skills are required in order to work in this grown up field of UX, like copywriting, content strategy, information architecture, design process management, user research practices. And we need to understand the technologies involved; marketing, analytics, business knowledge, ROI, social networks, story-telling and lots more. This is all stuff that makes up a business and this is what lies behind building a great customer experience.
Jared Spool went on to mention Sturgeons Law, or as it’s more correctly named, Sturgeons Revelation. Theodore Sturgeon was at a science fiction event when the question was asked ‘Why is 90% of science fiction crap?’ Sturgeon thought about this and posited that science fiction wasn’t special and that actually 90% of everything is crap.
Thinking about it, that’s pretty much right on the money. 90% of everything IS crap. If you look at our Kano model, many products and services fail to meet all the basic expectations and certainly do little to delight us. And the people behind them probably aren’t willing to invest.
The result is that this 90% of everything that is crap falls into this bottom left quadrant.
But we have a choice when designing and creating our user experience. We can choose to be in this 90% of crap, or we can choose to be in this 10% that is good – and perhaps even strive to be in the 1% that is brilliance.
We have a CHOICE – YOU have a choice.
Content strategy strategy for multiple devices
Yep – strategy strategy – that was intentional! Let me explain:
I was reading CXPartners‘ blog article about Reading and responsive design. The article cites statistics which show that the degree to which content is consumed is related to the size of the screen on the device it is displayed.
It’s hard to determine how much of a particular screen’s content is consumed, so this research was based on the number of page views. There are many factors which affect the way content is consumed on portable devices, but this article got me thinking:
This problem of delivering content for muliple devices is such a relevant topic in today’s marketplace where desktop usage is slowing and tablet/mobile usage is exploding. The question of responsive text vs. truncated text came up at UX Stack Exchange recently, and I invited Karen McGrane to come and discuss the pros and cons of truncated content vs responsive content.
Truncated text is typically not a content strategy for several reasons. On both desktop and mobile, you have to engage the user in order get them to read more. But, on mobile you have to engage the user more quickly, and this can come at the cost of overviewing the content to a sufficient enough extent that user can identify *parts* of the content that are of interest.
This then requires a whole different strategy when designing for multiple devices in that the structure of the content needs to be analysed and organized not just in context of the rest of the content but in context of its whole journey from copywriter to reader. Combine this with the differing user behaviour constraints that mobile provides, and it becomes next to impossible to actually provide the *same* content for all devices because it’s much more complex than simply making the teaser/intro shorter. So we’re taking the topic of content strategy to this meta level – a kind of content-strategy strategy.
Karen McGrane writes in her answer to the question linked above, that truncation can be a strategy but only if you can be confident that the first sentence provides enough context and value to inform the user.
As Karen essentially goes on to say, the implication is that if truncation is not actually the correct strategy, then comes the question of whether the CMS can even support the provision of content for multiple devices; the different fields and metadata that are required and the delivery of ‘progressively enhanced’ text (vs. the download of all content to all devices).
Not only does the CMS need to support this alternative on-demand content delivery strategy, but the copywriters themselves need to understand the varied audience and devices on which their content may be served, so that they can specify how the content is to be shortened; chunked; selectively delivered; or in some case completely rewritten to remove the ‘fluff’. Thus the copywriter is distracted from the job they are meant (or want) to be doing.
The problem I see, however, is that it’s a process that is extremely hard to automate. Content analysis is too diverse, it’s in the realm of artificial intelligence. And if it is automated, it becomes too formulaic. It’s rare that one single person is responsible for the actual content structure – the ability to actually manage, correlate and organize the various aspects: content from different sources; content by different people; content about a multitude of topics; and content incorporating a variety of different media is beyond most organisations. It simply won’t happen in any but the smallest or most dedicated org where a content curator (or team of curators) can manage the process, in which case the additional obfuscation of an extra layer between content creator and content delivery is going to cause complications. It will become too expensive and prone to antagonism from copywriters who see their content effectively censored for different devices via a process in which they have little control.
I’d love to be proved wrong but I suspect the cost/benefit ratio will be so low that in nearly all cases we will simply continue to see truncated content (albeit with the core message up front) rather than curated content tailored for different devices.
The upside of all this though, is that as I started off mentioning, mobile is exploding, the ‘Mobile First’ approach is gathering support, and that gradually the question will perhaps not just become ‘how do we make desktop-targeted content suitable for mobile?’ but also ‘how do we ensure that mobile-targeted content is also suitable for desktop?’
I think there would be an interesting response from a proportion of users who once they realise that content for smartphones is different to the content on tablets or on desktop may feel that they have a dumbed down version. It would be important to always provide a mechanism to read the full article as might be delivered for the desktop reader. Once you start providing a great experience on mobile, users may actually prefer the ability to more easily browse content overviews and starting demanding that the same experience be available for desktop. This means it’s not just down to the CMS to be able to deliver a version of the content depending on a media query, but also different versions on demand and according to user preferences. Who knows, the strategy of introducing the provision of content targeted for mobile may end up being the only useful content delivery structure!
I’d love to hear from anyone who has more information on this topic.
User Experience, Customer Experience, The Kano Model and the 90%
Tonight I will be giving a lightning talk at the Red Gate offices for the UXLondon Redux Event. I’ll be speaking on the relationship between User Experience, Customer Experience, The Kano Model and Sturgeon’s Law: topics and relationships that inspired me during the event, and that I’d like to share. I’ll add the notes and slides of my talk here afterwards.
I’ll also be speaking at the Mobile East conference on 29 June – talking about ‘Mobile Last’ – Considering the mobile experience when it’s too late for ‘Mobile First’. Mobile First is a great action to bear in mind when creating a new website or product, but for many who have already invested in the desktop browser, this advice comes too late. This talk covers some of the considerations to take into account when transitioning to mobile, including the difference between types of user and their behaviour; the constraints and opportunities that mobile provides; and strategies for mobile content delivery, organisation, layout, and navigation.
UX London 2012 – day 1
So here I am at UX London 2012. Is it any good? Yehuh! Apart form the lack of wifi at the venue which has not gone unmentioned by a single person here. It should exist – it’s just broken, and will probably be fixed the day after we leave.
To be honest – maybe it wasn’t a bad thing to have people paying attention rather than tweeting every damn word. For those interested – the twitter tag for this event is just (oh jeez – I’m borrowing someone’s MacBook Air – where’s the hash on this thing. Alt-3 in the UK – thank you!) #UXLondon
Today was the first and only day of actual talks, the next two consisting of workshops. So far we had Bill Buxton, Anders Ramsay, Luke Wroblewski, Kristina Halvorson, Jared Spool, Bill Derouchey, Jon Kolko and a couple of others giving amazing, engaging and inspiring talks that have left me on a real high buzz. I’m hoping that I can compartmentalise all this input in my sleep, because honestly, there’s so much I found interesting (no – fascinating/engaging/inspiring) that I don’t think I want to try and distill notes – because I can almost guarantee nearly everything that was said today might be useful at some point in the future – if not the second I get back to work.
Fortunately others have done some of that notetaking already – like Luke Wroblewski who has published his notes on his website:
Harry Brignull: From Print to iPad
Jon Kolko: Social Entrepreneurship
Bill Derouchey: Design with an Opinion
Jared Spool: Mobile & UX A Perfect Storm
Anders Ramsay: Agile UX Rugby
Kristina Halvorson: Content Strategy Roadmap
Bill Buxton: Long Nose of Innovation
Luke Wroblewski’s own talk was much along the lines of the chapter on organising mobile content from his book Mobile First – stressing the importance of considering content first and navigation second.
In the bar after the first day, most of the speakers were there – I found myself talking to Luke Wroblewski (oh yeah – name drop – I’m gonna say that again: I was chatting to Luke Wroblewski in the bar…) briefly about the pros and cons of various Q/A forums for UX topics – i.e. like UX.SE and Quora. I’d like to have explored this more but he had to disappear to the UX book club event that was in the same venue.
I had a chat with Stephen Anderson about… well stuff – but also his workshop tomorrow – the quest for emotional engagement and information visualisation which I’m incredibly excited about as I’ve always been a proponent of pictures and visualisation for conveying ideas, designs, and just about anything to other people.
If the next two days are as inspiring as today I’m going to leave here very happy to recommend this event to others who may be unsure whether it’s worth considering next year.
Is content really ‘king’?
Content is king…so goes the widespread meme popularised by Bill Gates’ essay of the same name
Is this true? Well often it is, but not always. Sometimes it is not all about the content, because the content simply does not hold the intrinsic value.
Perhaps it might be reworded as communication is king. Because, if a website cannot communicate its message, there is no point in it being there at all. In order to communicate, there is an important prerequisite – people have to come and read it – which usually means it needs to be a good resource.
Let’s say you visit a beautifully designed website and take away the pretty layout, the colours, the attractive images and logos, and strip it down to bear bones elements that are simply communicating the messages.
A lot of the time, you’d be left with a fairly minimal set of messages, and the marketing department would probably be horrified at the low number of really useful messages left sitting there on the screen, a bit lonely looking. Yep – it’s the designers worst nightmare!
You might be taking away a lot of the aesthetics – but that’s all it is. It’s like looking at the core content of a pure CSS-styled website. For some, removing this skin over the top of the content will bring the website down to a more approachable level. There’s no pretending to be something it’s not, there’s no subliminal messaging – no feeling of being persuaded to do something. Just bare bones and plain English.
By doing this, you’ve removed a number of social, visual, cognitive, expectational and ethnographic barriers – a good thing. Ok, not pretty, but good going!
Now, if you are a marketing person, you’ll quickly realize you can increase the density of useful messages on the screen and get a corresponding increase in effectiveness of the website – i.e. greater communication per unit area.
Result: There’s any number of marketeers who make ugly websites, but even marketeers can see there are limits in effectiveness of communication with increasing density of information, so simple mark-up and small amounts of whitespace still get used to highlight and separate messages. This prevents a ugly working website from becoming an ugly non-working website.
Let’s be fair; marketeers aren’t stupid. They can see when a change to their website starts getting less visitors or making less money – they’ll be watching it like a hawk. In actuality, your ugly (but working) website is probably very finely tuned!
Wikipedia is not a pretty site, but it’s functional, it communicates well, and it’s been designed within a tight specification because it’s what works for the people who use it. So is functionality king then?
Wikipedia, Craigs List, The Drudge Report – they all are highly functional, highly communicative, and indispensable resources for many people. They don’t need aesthetics – if they did, they wouldn’t do their job so well.
So when it comes down to it, perhaps the holy grail of web design really is achieved when there is special and exclusive meeting of the three wise kings: content, communication and functionality. Thus perpetuating another popular saying “all good things come in threes”.
Squeezing the most out of browser tabs
The big five browsers
I love my browser. Google is my best friend. My Google-Fu is important to maintain, so for me, being able to browse the web efficiently is a real productivity issue.
But, one thing I’m not very good at is keeping a check on the number of tabs open in my browser. I keep my browser open constantly as I use it very frequently every day. I’ll start with one or two tabs and then I’ll open another, and then a bit later I’ll come back and refer to them and probably open some more. And this will keep going on all day – maybe for several days. Predictably, the rate that I close tabs is slower than the rate that I open tabs. Consequently, the number of open tabs increases and increases and the tab headers themselves get smaller and smaller until I can no longer see what I’ve got open and in an exasperated moment, I’ll close the whole browser down and start again.
My browsing behaviour is probably best described by the word trawl. I don’t use the same set of sites consistently enough that I feel that Firefox’s Tab Groups are advantageous to use.
Right now, I use Chrome. It’s lovely, but is it best for me? Things have got worse for me since checking the option to automatically open links from Google Search Results in a new tab – I end up with way too many tabs because I’ll branch off down a trail of pages, and inevitably, the original search result tab remains open unnecessarily.
I think that particular option is going to be switched off again, but I got to thinking – how do the various browsers help me or hinder me with regards to tab management? I decided to find out and was surprised by some of the things I found out on the way.
I loaded up 17 identical tabs in each of the five major browsers all running on Windows 7:
- Microsoft Internet Explorer 9.0
- Mozilla Firefox 6.0
- Google Chrome 14.0
- Apple Safari 5.1
- Opera 11.51
Firstly I took a look at how the tabs are presented initially at my maximum screen width of 1920 pixels. Then I looked at their ease of use as the tab density starts rising, by reducing the width of the browser down from 1920 (HD) to a tiny 360 pixels to simulate having many more tabs. Finally I looked at other ways to use or access the tab pages in each browser that might make my life easier.
Tab Candy -> Panorama -> Tab Groups -> Tab Sugar. Why are linear tabs still not dead?
There’s been more than just a nod recently towards browsers becoming essentially the desktop, and the content being the interface.
It’s a year now since Aza Raskin spoke on his blog about a new way of interacting with browser tabs called Tab Candy (see the video). He then later made an announcement that it was in FireFox 4 and as Aza said it is known as FireFox Panorama (see announcement video), although the browser itself seems to call them Tab Groups (more functional than funky naming, but there you go).
What is Tab Candy or Panorama?
From the FireFox features page: ”Organize your Tabs with Panorama: Too many tabs? Reclaim your browser from tab clutter! Panorama lets you drag and drop your tabs into manageable groups that you can organize, name and arrange in a fun and visual way. To get started with Panorama, simply select the Tab Groups icon when you customize your Navigation Toolbar or right click any tab to Move to Group.”
So this is like a desktop style spatial hierarchical organisation of the areas where you want to spend time doing tasks, whether it’s reading, browsing, purchasing, events, whatever. Group them together – chunk them and manage them.
Did this mean that tabs were destined to no longer be constrained to the single linear dimension that we have been so used to and taken for granted? Time has still yet to tell – we’ve seem some third party extensions for Chrome with TabSense and Tab Sugar (discontinued at last check), but nothing ‘official’ as yet. And yet, this line of ideation has some much to offer the user in terms of organising content and engaging with it in a way that suits the user. Why the delays, we wonder?
A different angle on navigation menus.
Seme Nedis new website (June 2011)
When we saw that Seme Nedis had redesigned their website, we took a peek to see what they’d done – and were horrified by the orientation of their main product navigation menu. It’s a sure-fire quick-bake recipe for aching necks, that’s for sure!
It’s not hard to improve on readability, using no more space that already used, and without requiring that awkward tilting of the head.
I only hope for the sake of their staff and customers that they take this on board for a less painful neckst design iteration.
Less painful...
[Not to mention the fact (ok, so we're mentioning it) that the top left logo doesn't link 'home', but if we start analysing the whole site we're going to be here for a while...]
Is Google an instant success (again)?
Google have introduced Google Instant and now Google Instant Pages (in Chrome). The basic fact is that user input (ie typing) is slow. In terms of how fast the computer and the data transfer rate over the internet, then typing is comparatively veeeerrrry sssslllooooowwww. So there is a period of time while the user is typing that the computer is just sitting there waiting for the next letter – and the next – and the next. So why not fill in the gap doing something useful.
That’s just what Google Instant Pages does. It looks at what you typed already, what you’ve looked at in the past, what the top likely results are so far, and goes off and starts loading the web page right away.
Google Instant has being doing something similar for search results changing real time as you type, but now it loads the web page for the most likely result straight away, if the most likely result isn’t a web page you get the search results as normal.
It doesn’t matter if it’s not the right one (you haven’t wasted any time remember) – you can keep typing as normal until the resulting web page starts to look more likely to contain what you were searching for, or you get the standard search results instead.
Yep – it’s distracting at first as things seem to be changing under your feet a bit, but give it a bit of time to get used to it and you’ll find yourself saving time because Google already loaded the webpage whilst you were typing, so you don’t even have to finish. Touting the saved amount of time as 11 hours per second, the claim seems to be greater productivity for the (online) human race.
The problem with the previous version of Google Instant, where the search results appeared as you were typing was that it was difficult to process both what you were typing and what was appearing on screen – especially for those who can’t touch type and are always looking at the keyboard. Now with the likelihood of the whole webpage loading ‘instantly’, the ability to visually process the appearance of the (larger) actual webpage is improved thanks to images, headlines, layout and many other subtle characteristics rather than a collection of visually similar textual search results.
This could be a great step forward in make search efficient. That’s great for Google, and great for those browsers that copy the mechanism or take advantage of Google’s planned open source – (at least for Google Instant).
The problem is there’s an awful lot of websites out there that provide internal search tools that are suddenly going to seem very slow in comparison.
So while Google might say the web is going to seem faster, then actually once you’ve used Google Instant and Instant Pages, then in comparison – until everyone is using the same technology, the web is only going to be perceived as slower.
