90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

I’ve always liked this story about Betty Crocker and how General Mills took such care in designing the experience of making a cake. They’d been espousing speed and ease in the kitchen since 1931 with products like Bisquick, but this story originates from a cake mix they launched in 1952, almost 2 decades later.

To quote from Finding Betty Crocker by Susan Marks:

“At this time, the company was still refining their approach to marketing. While they sought to promote a quick and easy product that still retained a “fresh, ‘home-made’” quality, ‘the market was slow to mature’ (p. 168). The company called upon the market research of Dr. Burleigh Gardner and Dr. Ernet Dichter, both business psychologists:

‘The problem, according to psychologists, was eggs. Dichter, in particular, believed that powdered eggs, often used in cake mixes, should be left out, so women could add a few fresh eggs into the batter, giving them a sense of creative contribution.’

As a result, General Mills (who own Betty Crocker) altered their product, abandoning the powdered egg in their mixes. The requirement to add eggs at home was marketed as a benefit, conferring the quality of ‘home-made’ authenticity upon the box cake mix. (Whether using fresh eggs instead of powdered eggs actually enhanced taste was beside the point.)”

I like this story because it nicely sums up the progression in thinking from ‘just designing for ease and speed’ (old-school usability) to ‘designing an entire experience’ (new-school experience design).

Old-school Usability espouses the idea that user activities are onerous tasks that they want to get out of the way as soon as possible. While this is true in some cases, usability is now widely understood to be more of a hygiene factor – something that can cause dissatisfaction if missing, but its presence cannot take you beyond lack of dissatisfaction.

Image credit: Jonny Baker

By now you’re probably thinking “Yeah, I get it already – usability is just one of the components of good design”. So let’s move on to my second point. In the Betty Crocker example, the psychologists realized the customer wanted to play the role of a successful home-maker and cook. We could even go so far to argue that their customers may have felt societal pressures to perform this role well. The egg, therefore, becomes more than an ingredient, and more than just an extra pleasurable step. It becomes a prop, enabling the customer to play a social role. Goffman’s theory of Dramaturgy explains this to some extent. It’s worth reading about if you don’t have much background in Social Psychology or Sociology.

Now, I’m not saying that knowing a bit of sociology is going to make you into a great designer. However, it does give you a nice underpinning perspective for when you carry out field research.

I have to admit I only tried Pidoco° very briefly at UX Brighton last week, but I was impressed with what I saw. They’ve integrated an Axure-style prototyping tool with a remote, moderated usability testing tool, and the price is very competitive: only $45/month for the entry-level package. For the same service using Protoshare (which only does prototyping) and Uservue (which only does remote moderated testing), you’d be paying almost $200/month in total: almost 3x the price!

Here’s a quick walkthrough the product:

Above you can see the wireframing/prototyping tool. It’s pretty much as you’d expect if you’ve ever used Axure, Protoshare or any of the other similar tools out there at the moment (there were at least 32 last time I checked).

When you view your prototype, you can view it with either a low-fi (hand sketched) or hi-fi skin. Above you can see the low-fi skin. All of the form fields are interactive.

And here’s the hi-fi skin.

You invite participants by sending them an email containing a unique URL. When they click through, they are taken to the page shown above. Pidoco° has a built in VOIP tool (much like Skype), or you can fall back on good old-fashionned telephones. Then you simply run the usability test over the web, much like you would in a face-to-face session. While you are interviewing them, the session is streamed to your web browser. Obviously it’s not going to feel as intimate and easy as a face-to-face test, but it’s far cheaper, particularly when you are testing people spread over large geographic distances.

This is the participant’s screen during a test. The narrow grey bar along the top is inserted over the prototype. The entire session is recorded in the same way as any other screen recording tool (e.g. jing, camtasia, etc), and it includes the VOIP audio. The footage is saved online for you, within your (secure) Pidoco° account area.

Bargain hunters among you may be thinking “I could do all of that using free tools instead of Pidoco!” – This is completely true. You could, for example, use yuuguu for the screensharing (free), hotgloo (still in free beta) for the prototyping and camstudio (free) for the screen recording. However, if you cobble together your own assortment of tools, you wont get the tightly integrated workflow process that Pidoco° offers. For example, on Pidoco°, moving from prototyping to a user test only requires one click. Plus, you can edit a live prototype during a user test, which is trivially easy. It’s these little details that promise to make Pidoco° different to the masses of other prototyping tools on the market today.

Disclosure: I received no incentive for this review (not even a cup of coffee). However, Pidoco° was one of the sponsors of UX Brighton Remote 360, an event I helped organize. UX Brighton is a free event, and sponsorship covers the cost of venue hire and refreshments for the attendees.

“The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have
plenty of messenger boys.” – Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer, British Post Office, 1878

“This telephone has too many shortcomings to be considered as a means of communication. The device is of inherently no value to us.” – Western Union internal memo, 1876

“Getting a new idea adopted, even when it has obvious advantages, is often very difficult.” – Rogers, 1962

Adoption of technology by end users is key to its success – even the most brilliant innovation is worth nothing if it doesn’t get used. Many technologies suffer from delays in achieving adoption. For example, voicemail was reported to have taken roughly 10 years to achieve widespread adoption [1], while the fax machine took roughly 50 years [2]. This shows that it is not just quality or usefulness that determines successful adoption: there are other factors at work.

Back in the late 1800s, the telephone met considerable resistance – people just didn’t get it. Bell actually tried to sell the patent to Western Union and to the British Post Office, but neither were in the slightest bit interested. The chief engineer at the British Post Office famously replied that they didn’t need it because “We have plenty of messenger boys.” [3]. This shortsightedness was the best thing that could have happened to Bell – today, the patent is regarded by some as one of the most profitable patents ever created [4].

Once Bell decided to start a telecoms business, the tricky business of adoption had to be dealt with. Bell knew that the benefits of the telephone were undeniable once experienced in the real world, or once you saw others like you experiencing it (aka observational learning). So, Bell Co. put telephones in hotel rooms for calling the front desk, in offices as a replacement to intercoms, and near lunch counters in diners and lunch rooms – “…that way, it reasoned, people who didn’t know how to use them would be likely to see people who did know how and in this way learn about the phone system.” [5]

By positioning telephones by lunch counters, Bell Co. are likely to have considered the public availability of the telephone usage, the highly concentrated flow of people past the telephone as they queued to buy their food, and the stage-like nature of this arrangement. They also indirectly chose a time for the interaction – lunch break, when many people have time to kill. Pretty clever when you think about it. Plus, the idea of replacing office intercoms with telephones was inspired. Intercoms were already used widely – by swapping in a telephone, this familiarized people with phones, using a known, comfortable context. Intercom-style usage is very limited (single point to single point, with no network), but it served well as a “foot in the door” to capture the attention of potential users.

What does all this mean for you – the designers of tomorrow’s products? Well, one thing’s for sure. Designing your product is only half the battle. If your product really is as disruptive as you think it is, you have to design a strategy for adoption.

References:
[1] Fancik, E., Rudman, S. E., Cooper, D., & Levine, S. (1991). Putting innovation to work: adoption strategies for multimedia communication systems Commun. ACM 34 (12), 52-63.
[2] O’Brien, L. (1989). Will the fax boom go bust? Telephony, 217(14), 38-46.
[3] Cosier, G., & Hughes, P. M. (2001). The Problem with Disruption. BT Technology, 19(4), 9.
[4] The Telephone Patent Follies on telecomhistory.org
[5] Brown, J. S., & Duguid, P. (2000). The Social Life of Information. Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School; New York : McGraw-Hill.
Image credit: Early Bell telephone and terminal panel, 1877. The Science Museum

The Bell Co. telephone adoption story can be found in The Social Life of Information by John Seely-Brown and Paul Duguid. Many thanks to Aaron Cheang who reminded me of this story while we were chatting about Google Wave.

This is going to be something special. Abtests.com is created by Bokardo, Performable, and KISSmetrics. In their words: “Our goal is simple: to help people test their web sites/applications and share that knowledge with others, making everyone smarter in the process.”

The site uses a well considered and concise format for the articles, making it really easy to read. I think it’s still in Beta, but it looks almost ready to me. Follow @abtests to find out more.

Using a feedreader and can’t see the video?

This post is all about the importance setting accurate expectations. One of my friends, Ofer Deshe, often uses this clip when running UX training workshops. What a great way of summing it up!

If you lead your consumers to expect one thing but then give them a poorer substitute, they will be disappointed – angry even (but hopefully not machine-gun angry like Michael Douglas in Falling Down). Honesty is the best option. If your credit card application process takes 15 minutes to complete, then just tell them. Don’t say it takes 5. Lets look at a real world example. Geni.com is often cited as providing a great sign-up experience, but the example below example shows it in a different light.

Above you can see a screengrab from a recent geni.com email campaign. “Discover new relatives with Geni hot matches” – sounds pretty cool. Let’s see what happens when you click through.

After you’ve taken the trouble to log-in, you end up on this page. This is pretty tantalising – it’s possible that within a few seconds you’ll see entire new branches of your family tree, perhaps even new lines of ancestry. You’d be foolish not proceed by clicking on one of the “similar profile” links.

What’s this? Most of the information here seems redundant – but hang on, it’s mentioning words like “Pro”, “Special Offer” and “Try for free”. That doesn’t sound good. Let’s see what happens when we click “Try Geni Pro”

A collective scream of frustration “Argh! A credit card form! And it wants almost $100!”. Users are likely to feel manipulated and annoyed. The key point here is that users would have reacted differently if they were presented this information upfront – the problem lies in the order of presentation. With the right sales pitch, it could have come across as a great deal.