What a ‘Mobile’ User Experience is not …

We often talk about how usability can make or break system adoption. And claim that we understand that it’s the experience that a system delivers which is the driving force behind whether the benefits it promises to deliver are actually realized.

But what exactly does that mean?

It’s not a checklist of things and the landscape is changing as quickly as we find the next thing. Inspiration in solving the big question can come from a variety of sources and often, the best ideas come as much from reviewing poor examples, as they do from great ones …

At the weekend we were in a store – a well known one where 95% of the stock isn’t on the shop floor and you get to ‘borrow’ a miniature pen and order your item with a slip of paper.

So we’re looking for a Christmas Tree, as you do on Dec 15th. Clearly we’re in a hurry and struggling as we’re both flicking frantically through laminated bits of catalogue, looking every inch the needle-in-haystack hunters.

Along comes a sales assistant who asks “Can I help you find what you’re looking for?”

And in his hand is ……. drum roll please …….. an iPad!

“First day I’ve used this,” he says happily proud of his bit of kit, “best not drop it.”

And on his iPad he has ………….. the internet open, on the webpage for the store.

So he types into the search box ‘Christmas tree’ and sure enough off it goes in search of Christmas trees … time passes … clearly he’s using the same 3G connection we could have on our iPhones and the store evidently doesn’t have dedicated connection.

Eventually the site comes back to say that yes, they do indeed sell Christmas Trees – he shows us a few on the iPad and we pick one.  He then ‘orders’ one to see if there are any in stock in the UK (after much fiddling around with quantities and choosing between home delivery or in-store purchase).

Eventually, once his iPad has some connection and he’s established that they have one in the UK, he then picks up a miniature pen and writes the code of the tree on a slip of paper.

“You’ll need this to check if there’s one in stock here” he pro-claims.

As he then battles to try and rest his precious shiny iPad on the only space (a laminated, unstable catalogue) so he can write down the code, my husband has found the tree in a catalogue and is already using the customer stock check thingy with the big buttons.

“There are 7 in stock – ones on the shop floor,” my husband announces.

And sure enough – there in the corner of the shop –  under a sign that read ‘Christmas Trees’ boxed up and ready to go – was a 6ft tall spruce specimen which had been waiting patiently for us all along while the sales guy was trying to catch up – still obliviously punching the numbers into a customer stock checker, whilst trying to hang on to his iPad and miniature pen.

So what lessons do we have here?

When we talk about a mobile offering we’re not talking about our users just doing the same things they do now but on a fancy piece of kit. We’re not talking about something which takes longer to do than pen and paper. We’re not talking about something that isn’t designed in every inch and detail to meet the process it’s adopted into. We’re not talking about something that forces you to complete seemingly unnecessary tasks in order to do what you want to, and we’re certainly not looking for you to still have to carry around slips of paper and miniature pens to fill in the gaps that mobile can’t quite fill.

The Sales assistant didn’t need an iPad connected to a website – he needed a bit of kit linked live to the stockroom of the store he was in, which was specifically designed so that he could beat the customer system.

One which had a homepage constantly updating itself to say what was happening with the stock levels of this years best Xmas sellers (in that area), or what was happening with the stock of the items sold most that day (in that store and the nearest ones) or offering a multitude of alternatives for the things which were out of stock.

One which at the touch of an optimally sized button could text a customer the stock codes they need or a QR-Code image which they could use to buy it later or even better they could just complete the order for them and text them their order number … etc etc etc.

He needed something intuitive to use and which knew the tasks he was likely to try and perform and subsequently live up to his role as an, ‘Assistant’. Not some flimsy half hearted attempt at being ‘mobile’ and flashy.

Or failing that he could have used some sense –we don’t always need to rely on technology, often we just need to look at what is right in front of us all along.

iOS7 a look at color schemes

Speaks for itself really.

Hope this helps others in the experience of creating great iOS7 design, why Apple couldnt just do this for us of course Im not entirely sure … maybe they missed the designers out of their ‘users’ matrix?

Original image taken from iOS Human Interface Guidelines

Why, oh, why bother with User Experience …

Originally posted as part of the staff blog series for Digital Spark Ltd

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To start then, in brief. I’m Stacey Rogers, I joined Digital Spark around 3 months ago as Head of Interaction and I joined because something about the culture of the company struck a chord. The fact that it would be perfectly acceptable to arrive to my first interview by bike, and not hiding behind a suit and set of heels, was somewhat of a relief!

I’m going to briefly talk about “why”.

So, to start then, why the introduction? Well a) its brief because I’m only allowed 400 words, because you might not have a lot of time to read this. B) Knowing my name mean you have a point of reference for future “yeah, I read in that blog by Stacey Rogers”. And lastly, c) hopefully giving you some idea of my interview outfit gives a brief insight into us. Its not that we’re unprofessional – absolutely far from it, its just certain things don’t matter, and when people feel relaxed and can be entirely natural they connect with their purpose, as we do.

So I now have c.200 words to tell you a story!

My role at Digital Spark, as I see it, is to be the “Why Bird”. I want to know ‘the B all and end all’ of why something has been asked for in our products or why we have chosen to add it.

So… to set the scene, I’m in the clinic of an collaborating clinical team … absorbing, as we do… because it helps us to understand. I’m going through a paper form with a group of clinicians to understand how useful (or not) it is to them. We talk through each of the fields – some self-explanatory, others not so much and discuss two questions in depth: ‘Marital Status’ and the ‘Occupation’ question.

On the surface – to the layman, these might seem fairly simple. But these two questions opened quite a debate.

The marital status question. I put a tick next to it – as if to say ‘yes, needed’ – when one clinician explains that he rarely asks this question, preferring just look for a wedding ring. Another doctor isn’t sure and so I ask the inevitable “Why is it important?” question to clear this up. “Well its in case someone needs an operation”, they say, “who’s going to look after them? We need to know if someone is at home.”

So, whether someone is married or not or divorced or separated (these are the options next to the box) is completely irrelevant – this is simply the ‘what’ of the situation. The critical ‘why’ turns out to be: ‘Does this person have a support network around them or are they on their own?’

This is where my role comes in – as on our version of said paper form it won’t prompt users to ask a patients’ “Marital Status”, it’ll cut to the chase and ask them if they have anyone to look after them if they have an operation! (Maybe not in those words – but why not, if that’s actually the question you need the answer to).

At Digital Spark the User Experience is so, so important, and we’re not talking just about how pretty a screen is, UX is how this product makes someone’s working life easier or helps them to be efficient or standardises practice in the interests of patient safety.  It also provides people with information and values which they can do something about or  which they’re asked for 3 times a week, or helps them keep informed by providing the answers to the questions they’ll need at some point in time.

So. I ask ‘Why?’ a lot. And if people can’t come up with an answer, well then that’s where the fun starts. And what was the response to the ‘Occupation’ question, I hear you ask? Well, I’m well out of words, so maybe I’ll have to come back to that one later …

In the meantime, here’s more on the power of ‘Why’ in the brilliant TED talk from Simon Sinek. I may have watched this more than once:

 

An extraordinary user experience this was not – bin battles

This is what I arrived home to yesterday ::

My driveway. My bin. My heart hurts. Sob.

Not that interesting?

Wrong – very. I could write an essay on how interesting this is – but for fear of losing followers before I have any, Ill keep it brief.

Here is a perfect example of an exceptionally shockingly bad experience.

The ‘job’ is to empty the bins, but actually that’s not the job.

As a user – I may fill my bin with my crap and other people may see their role is to clear it away but it’s not. Their role is to clear it away in utter ‘silence’. To clear it away as if by magic, to indeed be the fairy who comes along and gives me back an empty bin to one again fill.

But instead I cam back to a bin parked in the middle of my driveway, which resulted in me parking in the street as I was in a hurry to get into my house. My parking in the street effectively blocking the road for the bin van to get through when it was trying to escape my estate later. Once home I then had some bits and pieces of work to do which I couldn’t quite concentrate on as the ‘beeeep-beeep—bloody-beeeeep’ of the bin van reversing and the horrendous clattering of it shifting all of 10 metres a time up the streets in the surrounds of the estate and the noise of the rubbish pouring from the bins continued to bellow on for at least an hour. At least it wasn’t at their usual un-godly hour of 7am on a Saturday I suppose.

Clearly the bin men/women of my area have not quite grasped the concept of an extraordinary experience. Is it too much to ask that you appreciate the impact your task has on the rest of my world? Why? Why? Why? Would you leave my bin in the middle of my (and my neighbours for that matter) driveway!

Get some respect man – wasn’t it Martin Luther King who said

“If it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music … Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.”

And while you’re on – turn your sodding reverse alert beeper off when you’re rolling along the road at 5mph – you’re not going fast enough for me to require any warning – I could walk quicker!!

There’s always a woman named Margret

The problem – who are your users and what do they do?

The solution – Margret is a clerk, she has 2 kids and a husband named John. She is 42.

This is not the solution, nor is it is useful to us as we handcraft the next best thing and lead the way in innovation and quite frankly be brilliant in what we do. Nope, Margret is not the answer. And neither are her children Emily (11) and Jack (14, an aspiring footballer) and her dog Badger (7, a sheepdog cross) and the family cat Tom (named after some hot Doctor in the TV show Casualty, much to John’s disgust (a point he has laboured over for the length of time he’s been her ‘better half’, i.e. the past 20 years)).

And neither is the fact that ‘Margret must review files’ of any use to us either. What’s she reviewing them for? Typos or the fact that certain criteria may mean they could be eligible for a $1million pay out?

So if this is of no use to us, then what is and how can we ensure that what we craft truly is user-centric or whatever else cliches or spin we might want put put on good olde fashioned, understanding the customers needs or ‘personas’.

So lets assume that designing for Margret the clerk isn’t going to cut it, what is then.

Well how about actually we do design for Margret, but we just take a different look at Margret’s world.

Ok. She’s a clerk, so she’s fairly computer literate, will complete simple tasks, and a lot of them. Typing won’t be an overhwelming problem for her, so make the comment boxes as big as you like, however its likely that much of her job will be based on things which have been set up for her to simply ‘complete’, she’s not about to start to design her own reports, forms and datasets, but if you give her a few criteria she’ll be able to run one.

Our user is in a crowded office with fairly old equipment – not the latest tech and has a lot of work to do in a day – some of which is often slowed down by the limitations of her technology. She has a computer at home, the family PC, which is far more up to date than that which she uses at work, however iPhones and anything beyond your basic mobile device is left to the kids. She is not spending her life on the likes of Facebook and Twitter of an evening or thinking about work – once home she is out of ‘office mode’.

So why then does Margret need our system?

Her day is too busy – or feels it, so she needs it to help her to be more efficient and to make sure she can get out of the office and be on the road as soon as possible to be completely frank. The kids, the dog and the husband are all waiting for her.

She needs our system because the one she uses now takes so long that it often falls over just before loading her a report, her boss does not appreciate this and she’s often left feeling stressed due to these inadequacies yet helpless to do anything about it. She needs our system because there isn’t enough room in the office for all the paper files she often ends up having to deal with. She needs our system because she takes pride in what she does, however there are so many manual tasks for her to complete at the minute she is barely able to deliver the basics let alone add any value without having to work additional hours, which her family situation simply doesn’t allow for. She needs our system because she feels she is falling behind with technology as she’s so used to working with an old system and feels entirely out of touch with some of the things her children talk about and are able to do with the PC they have at home. She needs our system as her kids will be off to Uni in a few years time and by that point she doesn’t want to be going backwards and instead may be looking to take on more demanding tasks. However she feels trapped at the minute by the mountains of paper pushing at the misconception that she’s more than happy working on the mundane because these days its all she gets chance to do.

She does not need our system to only run on 21″ mega monitors or a laptop. Neither does it need to allow her to ‘share’ her every interaction with the world and be accessible from home. She does not need it to ‘time her out’ if she’s in the middle of setting up a report and indeed she’s likely to dip in and out of the system often throughout the day, so the sign in process should be seamless. She does not need it to follow the latest interaction patterns necessarily but would appreciate simple instructions on use. And whilst we’re on there she appreciates the odd bit of feedback and would prefer to have the confidence that she’s not about to break something – so a few prompts of ‘are you sure’ now and again wouldn’t go a miss …

And we’ve not even mentioned one task which Margret has to do.

So whats the point then? Well the point isn’t that so called ‘BS Personas’ are useless, moreover that they are only useful if you consider then next dimension or the impact of the fluff.

Want to find out more about ‘BS personas’ ? More here in a talk by Jill Christ (lynda.com) and Stephanie Carter (boltpeters) which they delivered at SXSW Interactive 2012:

Slides

Audio