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.

Why, oh, why bother with User Experience …

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

————-

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!!