Here’s another press release turned quiz from Maxymiser. Which one of the designs below do you think got the highest number of clickthroughs to an item detail page? And which one do you think got the highest number of ‘call me back’ requests?
Amendment: scroll down the bottom to participate in the poll! (All will be revealed next week)
Design A: grid layout with search controls & upsells on left
Design B: vertical layout with search controls & upsells on right
Got a webcam? Want to try a cute augmented reality demo/toy on your PC (Or Mac)? Then visit the Toyota IQ Reality site.
Although the wow factor of this demo will wear off after a few minutes, it’s worth bearing mind the potential applications of this technology. On Wikipedia there is a of current & future Augmented Reality applications, and some of them sound ground-breakingly cool. Imagine a Doctor being able to overlay real X-Ray data over a patient, so they see their broken bones. Imagine working on your car engine and wearing goggles that show you the names of all the parts and where they belong. Imagine the immediate potential for location aware services like satnav, tourist guides and friend finding. Sounds far fetched? It’s not. Some of these apps already exist!
Many thanks to John Gibbard who posted this link on the IxDA mailing list a couple of days ago.
This did the rounds last week, but if you didn’t see it, here is The Onion’s hilariously sweary usability rant about a fictitious (though familiar looking) new product from Sony.
Using a feedreader? Click through to see the clip
A nice UX ROI tidbit from Karl Sabino over on the Think blog:
Once the analytics were up and running, we could quickly see which pages occurred before and after the error page. This let us identify the user journeys where the errors were triggered. So we were able to write custom messages, things like “We’re sorry, we’ve had a problem processing your order. Your card hasn’t been charged yet. Please click checkout to try again.” We also provided a customer care number together with a code for continuing the transaction offline.
[...] Within a month the percentage of completed purchase journeys increased a modest 0.5%. Putting it in some perspective that 0.5% was worth £27,000 a month on average – or over £250,000 per year. And all this was hypothesised, diagnosed and implemented over 2 weeks, at a staff cost of approximately £8,000. That’s a great return on investment from paying attention to the detail of the customer experience.
→ Read Karl’s full article: £250,000 from better error messages
Back in the 1970s when Artificial Intelligence was in its infancy, researchers hit upon a performance problem. Their robots were designed to take in every detail of their surroundings and perform complex mathematical calculations to deduce what they could see. Is there a clear path ahead? How many degrees turn are needed to avoid an obstacle? If you saw one of these robots in action, it would move forward a meter and then become paralysed with new input, sitting still for 15 minutes at a time. If placed in a noisy, real world environment these robots would just sit there radioing information back to the mainframe, trying – and failing – to make sense of the scene. Quite literally, they’d get analysis paralysis. (Ref: Stephen Levy, Artificial Life)
One of Hans Moravec’s Robots, 1975. (photo credit: Hans Moravec)
Later on, in the 1980s and 90s, a new perspective on AI appeared, pushed forward by Rodney Brooks among others. At the core of this philosophy was the idea that you didn’t need to build a highly accurate internal representation of the world around before you can interact with it. This was inspired by nature. A cockroach, for example, doesn’t know what it’s doing when it’s moving all of its tiny legs around obstacles and away from light sources. This was a turning point in AI and robotics, because Brooks completely redefined the problem and the approach to solving it.
A Rodney Brooks robot (photo credit: Nubar Alexanian)
I often think of organisations, particularly big ones, as being robot-like in some respects. They consist of internal processes and procedures. They use research to assimilate information from the outside world. Faced with unplanned contingencies, they often react slowly or clumsily, like Moravec’s prototypes.
If your business was a robot, what kind would it be? Does your business move slowly, requiring extensive input before making any decisions? Does it always seek proof before taking an action? Or does it forge ahead, trying things and reacting to feedback from the outside world to steer and tune its approach?
Credit: George Underwood, 2006
User experience is a many faced beast.
From one perspective, it’s all about differentiation, brand image and loyalty-building. While this argument is compelling, it involves a a big gap between money in → value out. Lord Leverhume once famously said “Half my advertising money is wasted. The problem is that I don’t know which half.” Swap out advertising with UX research and you’ve hit the nail on the head. The unclear linkage between money in → value out means this perspective of UX as differentiator was popular in recent years when the economy was stronger.
The inverse but equally valid perspective defines user experience as all about efficiency, optimisation and conversion rates. If 10,000 users arrive on your site, how can you persuade the greatest number possible to engage in actions that bring them enjoyment and bring you financial gain? In this perspective, you try to create a direct linkage between money in → value out, and take a systematic approach to investigating the measurable impact of design changes. In other words, it’s all about proving the return on investment (ROI). This UX as efficiency perspective is likely to be very popular during the recession.
Lately I’ve been finding myself increasingly referring to the latter perspective. It makes perfect sense that UX specialists should put their money on the table and promise to bring improvements of conversion rates or other performance indicators.
However, measuring ROI isn’t always possible, nor is it always a good idea. If you try to prove that every tiny design decision you make will have a positive impact, then you’ll kill your business. Proof is reassuring but it slows you down. With your competitors racing you to the market, this seemingly risk-averse behaviour is actually very risky indeed. Some design decisions are too small to test and measure individually. Sometimes, you’ve gotta have faith.
I'm Harry Brignull, User Experience Lead at Madgex in Brighton. My work involves building experiences by blending User Research, Interaction Design and UCD process consultancy. In the past few years I've consulted for Nokia, British Airways, Vodafone, O2 and many others.
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