Megan Leigh McDonald

Even when working under the ‘Waterfall’ methodology, I always make it a point to keep a ‘task board’ at my desk or nearby. It’s something I borrowed from Scrum but it works so well for my own personal workload.  Usually it’s just a bunch of index cards and maybe a stark black and white printout of headings for one of three or four columns…not started, currently working on and finished. But about 8 months ago, I got fancy and created my own task headings/cards in Illustrator.

Since a lot of people who have seen the cards have asked for copies of the files, I decided to post the template here. It’s got a loose color-code schema (I could easily see the red for ‘to-do’ instead of ‘done’) and there are separate headings as well as a handful of usefully named cards. And if you’re an Illustrator afficianado then you can edit them and use them as you wish.

• - Task Board Headings
• - Task Cards 1
• - Task Cards 2

Have fun! Work is hard, but the details should always be fun…Mouseover

I’ve been thinking a lot over the past year about what makes designing for customer service different than designing for conversion or other business needs. Clearly, most of the goals around customer service efforts relate to cost savings in terms of reducing contacts, handle time or user churn (repeat user contacts). In this area, businesses are more transparent about making changes that impact the bottom line,  like putting up ‘challenge’ pages or road blocks for the user to discourage them from making a contact. This is a simple way to do it, but not a really good user experience. What’s best for both the business and the user is to strike a balance or find an innovative way to accomplish both goals.

The  cornerstone of reducing contacts, in my opinion, is to know which contacts are avoidable and which are not. With the list of avoidable contacts, one can measure the number of those contacts to the Call Center against time. Key Performance Indicators can take the daily or weekly temperature of a system and allow the business to respond to changes quickly and efficiently.  They can also reflect the marked progress of user experience efforts over a longer time. For customer service initiatives, those numbers should show a decrease in contacts, which inversely relates to an increase in savings and revenue.

The Call Center and its agents are a great resource for more understanding of what kinds of problems user are having that relate to those top avoidable call drivers.  They can provide some insight and background. Developers can provide rules or if/then statements from the code that help further define the problems and solutions. And Product Management can work with a designer to delve more deeply into the data and user behavior to discover areas of opportunity.

A three pronged approach to providing a better experience for the user that also helps them avoid a contact in most situations would be to contextualize help within the flows where a user needs help, to personalize their information so that the right information bubbles up to the user and to provide a wealth of searchable and/or browseable self-help information in an easily navigable format.

Contextualization gives the user the information he/she needs at the right time. An example of this is when a user is entering key account information in a sign-up form. If a user enters a field incorrectly, help text that appears inline at that moment or upon ’save’ at the very least is more helpful than providing a link to an FAQ that describes the error and its causes. Page-level help is most useful when a user is completing a specific task. Another example, as the flow level this time, would be if a user is paying for a service or good and stepping through multiple pages of a form. There are a lot of things that could waylay that process or prevent a conversion. Being able to conditionally display help text depending on the particular problem the user is experiencing is very helpful in giving the user what he/she needs to proceed and convert to a final sale.

Personalization allows the company to bubble up the best information for the user to take actions on his/her account. It also functions as a way to increase brand recognition and familiarity. It could be as little as including a welcome message with the user’s name. It could be as much as providing a ‘feed’ of what all of their friends or contacts within a network are doing right now. It could also be alert statuses for payments made or received in the past 30 days.

Self-help is a last key in providing the kind of information users want and in a way that they want. A large database of centralized help information with its various elements can be used in a variety of ways by providing straight FAQs, popups on other site pages, shortened versions for help text or contextual aid. The self help FAQs should be both searchable and browseable by a secondary or tertiary navigation menu, allowing the user to engage in primal actions like hunting, searching, browsing or finding. This would also allow the business, with proper data calls in place, to get a snapshot of what users’ paths are. This data could alert designers and product managers about ’sad paths’ or problems the users are having. It could help them solve problems. The data can also reveal behaviors that lead to new products and features.

All these things combined could potentially increase engagement on the site itself and reduce contacts to the live agents. Saving money would seem to be a key to increasing profits, so why wouldn’t we look at ways to increase the efficiency of any cost center? I’m sure there are a few reasons why this area often gets overlooked or avoided, like tax breaks due to losses or lack of resources. These reasons are not always compelling, especially when compared to the potential benefits. As the saying goes, ’sometimes the best offense is a good defense’.

As a veteran web designer, I’ve created many a form in my day, but recently really took stock of what I’ve learned over the years.  I wanted to describe a set of standards I think sum up what a user should see when signing up for an account, changing important personal account information, or other form related task. After digging around for some advice and looking to previous projects, my standards for forms evolved into something a user would consider quick and easy. The overall impact of both visual and interaction elements, fired me up enough to break the elements down.

Form Modes

A form is comprised not just of editable input fields or drop-downs, but also of modes, states or ‘cases’.  A form could be a form a user fills out for the first time to add a piece of personal account information. Or a form could be used to edit previously saved information. And lastly, it could be used to review and confirm recently edited or added information. These three states should be recognizably different from one another.

Input Mode

Adding data for the first time can be a painstaking process but there are ways to make it easier and quicker on the user. By stacking the labels and field forms, the user can tab through the fields, inputting the data one at a time. Calling out optional fields with a slightly different color signals to the user that all fields except those are required. Concise pieces of help text underneath the fields or as hover tool-tip links next to the label give critical help information to the user.

Review Mode

Getting a user through a confirmation page with the accurate information and into the conversion stream is the most important aspect of review mode. Clearly showing the previously edited or entered information as well as a way to change the information, to proceed or to cancel are very important. Using a left to right structure for the labels and form fields helps the user scan the information and discern if it’s correct or not. A ‘change’ or ‘edit’ link next to the information allows the user to either edit on another page or to expand an inline editing box. Once the changes are approved, the user can save or confirm and advance through the flow.

Edit Mode

A user’s primary need is to filter through the form fields and edit specific ones. In order to do that a left-right pattern enables the user to quickly scan the field names and find the fields that need to be edited. Help tips or tool-tip links as well as ‘optional’ field descriptions can be aligned with the label.

Error Cases

Errors need to be presented in an easy and quick way to signal the user when to revise information in an input or edit mode view of a form. With input mode, an icon as well as text can mark the specific field(s) that need attention. Using red text alone isn’t the best standard to include visually impaired users. For example, a color blind user will completely miss a field label that is red. Unless there is another way to signal to the user that there is an error, that user will more than likely get confused as to why they did not advance through the flow.

Conversion

When a user doesn’t advance through a flow, we lose ‘conversion’. This business term, at face value, suggests lost revenue or lost engagement with the product. As a User Experience Designer working for a business, I am charged with all kinds of goals like saving money on contacts, improving sales on sign-up forms, etc. But in the larger picture, my primary objective is to make the experience better for the user. In theory and more often than not, in practice, this works for the business as well. If ‘form follows function’,  then a well designed form or flow will allow the user to advance and complete it quickly and easily.

Is there such a thing as too much change? That seems like such a taboo thing to say out loud. I don’t want to be seen as someone mired in the past or unable to move forward through a dynamic and fast-paced work environment. As I look back on the many clients I’ve had over the years, I see countless professionals and offices with diverse processes. And I see this diversity of what is considered ‘process’ and ‘change’ as one of the many great mysteries of life itself.

I believe ‘process’ is the way we handle change in business and that it’s dictated by several natural laws:

1. The Law of Entropy: The amount of energy it takes to change is inversely proportionate to the lack of change that preceded it. This plays into our everyday experiences at work when people become complacent, don’t rely on data to drive decisions or foster an atmosphere of ‘group-think’. There can be a lot of change that seems to happen as most of the group follows very easily with the strongest personality. But this may not be vetted to be the best change or change that matches the company’s goals. It takes vast amounts of firm hand-holding to turn this kind of environment around. It seems to me, that there is a tendency for a large staff turnover when this happens.

2. The Law of Inertia: The amount of resistance is directly related to the amount of momentum needed to change. Somewhat related to Entropy, Inertia is more about the consistent action necessary to gain speed. If you know your goal and you move toward it, only to be constantly derailed by resistance, one never builds up enough speed to efficiently reach the destination. And, of course, the danger of getting thrown off course only grows with each setback.

3. The Law of Matter: This has more to do with the conservation of energy and its transference from one form to another. If you think of a business process like this, we have a whole lot of kinetic energy at the beginning part of our process and need to take the thoughts whirring around in the brains of a bunch of professionals and transfer it into a product that at the end of the day, transforms into dollars spent by consumers. There are plenty of things we can spend our energy on, but if we don’t realize that execution is a process of taking one form of energy and translating it into another, we may never get past the beginning stage.

There is a point when we think far too much and act not enough. This goes even for the people whose roles are at the very beginning of a process, for those are the people who set the pace and get the ball rolling for the rest of us. As a UI Designer, I get my energy from Product people whose ideas, creativity and understanding of data mixes with mine to produce something wholly different — wire-frames and mock-ups that visualize a different reality for our users. And so on and so forth throughout the rest of the PDLC.

I think process and change are the same things. I think because we’re a business comprised of people in the natural world that we need to look at ourselves in relation to that. What we do each day is molded by these abstract and often hidden concepts. Taken from physics but somehow very relevant, we are always part inertia, part resistance to entropy and part efficient transfer of energy whether we’re walking down the street or sitting in a board room.

Corporations are difficult entities to run. There are a lot of people to manage and a lot of personality conflicts that get in the way of productivity and plain old ‘morale’. I have a theory, though, that to effect change in any organization, we don’t need self help gurus or corporate therapists to come in and fix our dysfunctions. Instead of seeing a therapist, we need to each become a therapist.

Anyone who has ever been to a therapist knows that it feels like stepping in a pile of doggy poo. You’re sitting there on that couch because you’ve either got a problem to ‘fix’ or someone has strongly encouraged (i.e., blackmailed) you to go. Whatever the reason, that therapist is an ‘authority’ based merely on the fact that he/she ‘knows’ how to fix you and you’ve got doggy poo on your shoe. In a word, it’s a little humiliating. It’s not like going to a regular doctor who fixes physical ailments and at the worst makes you feel guilty about not flossing or having high cholesterol.

And there is usually no physician at work that could help anyways. No one is going to analyze the facts and give you a prescription to follow to get better results from your cross-functional team. And the last time I checked, there is no magic pill for getting people to cooperate, collaborate or even listen to anyone’s voice but their own. If there were, I would be distributing it in the form of brownies every Monday morning.

Situations in constant stalemate may drive you to a therapist, but seeing a therapist is no picnic. It’s an exercise in which you expect him/her to tell you what your problem is and he/she doesn’t. A therapist will refuse to tell you the direct answer, and, instead, proceed to drive you mad by guiding you to see it for yourself. I feel like if my therapist knows what’s wrong with me, why can’t he just tell me? Why is he keeping it a secret? This could sometimes, be how we feel about each other at work too.

But therapists are there to help you solve your problems, not to solve your problems. And, that a-ha moment IS enlightening. It builds an appreciation for how well I can hide from my own self when I don’t want to accept my flaws or those of the people around me. I always recommend it even if you have to make up a problem to fix because you just learn so much. And, the last time I checked, there was no liberal arts requirement for ‘emotional IQ’.

At work, I tend to speak my mind directly, but also try to grease the wheels and persuade when there is a disagreement - until it backfires. And then I’m left in the terrible position of feeling depleted, misunderstood and in some cases a bit resentful when something I strongly believe in is dismissed. Then of course, I risk being viewed as a petulant child if I express that, which is pretty far from the truth.

This all leads me to what I’ve been pondering: how to tell the story better? Specifically, I am starting to see that telling the story is merely simplistic persuasion. Maybe I can take a lesson from the discipline of therapy. When there is churn, I could try guiding people to the right answer, to see for themselves what needs to be done.

A good cognitive therapist has a unique vantage point, as well as tons of education that put them in the position to see the big picture from the first session to the last. And, in a very similar way, I feel as a User Experience Designer, I advise business stakeholders on how to solve their problems. Most of us use our gut instincts, but some of us also use statistics and user research to back up our advice. But we’ve all been there, in a room full of passionate people all trying to meet various business goals and no one agreeing on how and all of our efforts falling by the wayside.

At no time in my life have I seen so clearly how telling people something is so ineffective. I myself relate well to people telling me information. I absorb it, I look at ways to use it, I pick a point in the big picture and throw down a flag where that information is most usefully applied. But I have to remember that the way I think may be more unique than I own up to. So when a person is a unique thinker, the story is harder to tell, because people who hear it don’t really hear it the way the storyteller thinks it. Why else would five people see a piece of abstract art entirely differently?

As Designers, our colleagues have different perspectives and levels of experience that we have to take into account as well as respect. So I take a lesson from psychologists. I look at their methods and consider ways that I can prompt people to come to their own conclusion. I want them to have the a-ha moments that they can ‘own’ - it’s more exciting and productive for the business if they are empowered like that.

I can ask them sincere questions even if I already think I know the answer myself. I can ask them what they think the impact of a change would make. By doing that, I put myself in what I fondly call the ‘downward dog’ position because I’m essentially talking ‘up’ to them instead of down…I’m coming from a different place that allows me to speak to them respectfully.

I can deflect inconsiderate behavior by refraining from engaging in argumentation. I can ask someone why they are getting upset or look at them inquiringly. I could express concern.

I can also stop myself from caving by just remaining quiet a little longer before responding. I can rephrase or take it ‘offline’. I can stop myself from automatically being agreeable.

Working on bonding is potent. By taking the focus off of the ‘other’ in arguments, animosity dissipates. There is no ‘me’ and no opposite of me…there is only a ‘we’. That is a powerful word, if used wisely.

Understanding that the relationship is about me leading my counterparts to see what I see or vice versa, focuses my interactions. Then, any way that I can accomplish this goal is good and anything that gets in the way is something to be dropped. I hope this doesn’t come off as overly analytical or cold. I wish that I could say all communications were organic and natural, but they’re not especially in large, diverse groups and corporations. However, I do think the more I practice these skills, the more natural they will feel.

“Dear Diary…Today I made introverts the world over nervous when I stopped by their desk to chat, irritated some fact-driven people by saying ‘I just know it’, smothered my little sister and made someone cry by being honest; but then I apologized and almost cried myself because I hate the idea of hurting anyones’ feelings.”

This is the life of an ENFJ, which is what I am, according to Myers-Brigg. I am big-eyed, full of wonder and find inspiration in idealistic people, things and events. The good thing about being an ENFJ is that I’m also the one who introduces people at parties and work functions. I’m confident and comforting and often correct in my intuitive assessment of people and situations. My feelings show in my face and flood over a crowd of people, often influencing them in a subtle way, making parties more fun and bad times better. I grease the wheels and give people a necessary piece of humanity that often isn’t part of our everyday experience. And I use my judgment, a double-edged sword to distinguish between right and wrong, healthy and unhealthy, good and bad and all the grey in between.

Yes my enthusiasm sometimes is unwanted. Yes my confidence appears arrogant at times. Yes I could stand to think more and collect facts. Yes I could stand to consider someone’s feelings before I joke about something personal. And you bet I should probably tone down my emotions or ‘passion’.

A really smart and very skeptical person I know half-jokingly compares Myers-Brigg to an astrology sign. What do you expect an INTF to say…? (Only teasing.) Score or not, though, I value people who are stronger thinkers than me. And I need to be reminded of the value of thinking in my life, so I’m glad that I have people around, who give me reason to pause. Too often, I get a ‘bright idea’ and I’m off and running without thinking it through or collecting enough facts.

So the question that my friend’s comment begs, though, is do these labels stick? I validated my score twice and it remains the same. One thing I do know is that it’s consistent. And it did aptly describe my life experiences. Even if that’s just looking at the past through a reparative lens, it gives me a starting place to make sense of where I fit into the whole scheme of things and people in this world. The point of going through an exercise like taking the Myers-Brigg test is to recognize that each of us are similar but vary in some significant ways.

No matter who we are, it can be difficult at times to accept that others don’t always see the world or a joke or a business requirement the same way. It is challenging and I know I’m not alone in struggling to tell my story in a way that the listener will ‘get it’. I make mistakes, sometimes everyday. But it is the reality and it is the only way to access other people, their support or opinions.

What it takes is being able to recognize the way another person sees or hears a conversation, and momentarily step outside the self to explain one’s story or reasoning in a way that is accessible to the other person. Just telling is not enough. Showing is often not enough. But involving one’s self with an other is very powerful.

So whether this score cements my life experience or not, I find it useful and validating in many ways and I continue to mull it over as I struggle with my inner self and how it fits into my outer world choices.

To start off, just want to explain why I haven’t been writing for the past few months. After relocating for a new job up in San Jose at PayPal (yay), I am starting to really feel at home and making some time to devote to my writing again. So on with the show…

Dreaming of Solving Problems
The other morning I struggled to wake up while listening to NPR (yes, I know…doesn’t exactly get the blood pumping but I like it).  I laid there like a quietly vibrating half set brick, my mind sliding in and out of consciousness. I remember work being part of the dream scenarios. In the midst of this I had a very sober thought about some of the problems I was trying to solve in my projects — that actually I define my own life as the problems that I choose to solve.

Indeed, man in general can define our own history in terms of the problems we chose to solve at given times. For instance, early man took on the problems of how to process the raw foods they hunted or gathered into more easily consumed forms, i. e. how to make fire.  The sixties were ‘How do I get/give more love?’ The seventies were ‘How do I get more sex?’ And the eighties were ‘How do I get more time?’ The nineties seems to have been ‘How do I get more happiness?’ The 2000s are not over yet but so far seem to be asking the question ‘How do I get more balance?’

Each decade really can be compressed and defined by one question. I am considering illustrating this idea on a time-line to put it into more of a cultural evolutionary perspective.

 So what does this have to do with Usability and User Experience? 

Everyday at work I advocate and take on a somewhat nurturing and protective role of ‘my/our’ users. I do think of them as real people that I might know, like cousins or friends of my parents in the small town that our family comes from. They all have stories and needs. Every day, I think of them when I must dig deeper as I struggle to understand the product and the vast technology behind it in a highly diverse cultural environment.

What I do is not just work. I choose to solve problems that affect people’s financial and small business problems. I seek to be of service in facilitating between users and business needs. It’s a crucial role in our ever-changing tech industry today and I’m certainly not the only one, so I have no worries that I’m Atlas about to be crushed by a lofty goal. And I think as much as I can own the problems I choose to solve, the larger entity that I work for also chooses to solve problems for users and makes it possible for me to advocate as I do for better experiences on our sites.

I reflect on people I admire like Mother Teresa, Gandhi, Sylvia Earle, Rachel Carson and other great people or entities who affected a lot of change. Those people and  organizations chose to take on a problem that probably seemed so large and unconquerable that most people simply gave in and understandably ‘let go’. I’m quite fascinated by people who despite the odds, struggled, focused and made progress against highly complex sets of circumstances. And I’m also fascinated by companies who do the same. I am left questioning whether the business of solving problems online is philosophically any different than anyone else solving a social problem.  It’s all a form of ‘User Experience’…called the ‘human experience’.

Today I learned something from my Product Manager. He had the look of a ‘bearer of bad news’ but he gave me the medicine anyways. I have heard in the past that ClickMap is not always reliable and noticed even that the data didn’t always match the next page reports I pulled.

But today, I understood at a new level of how this tool, as great as it seems to a designer, is sometimes wildly innaccurate. As you might have read on this blog before, I love this tool mainly because of its visual appeal and in some cases, when the link leads to a popup or a page that doesn’t have omniture tracking code, it can be really helpful.

However, when using templates, one must beware. It’s probably also a factor of not being coded correctly or with great care, but templates can give some very misleading numbers that represent the total clicks of all the links in a defined module. The module, such as a sidebar or navigation menu, might have more than one link but the flag will appear on only one of the links, leading one to misinterpret the data. Sigh. Well I hope that Omniture really looks at ways to improve the implementation of code for this tool or the tool itself because the visualization of clicks on live site pages seems like a really great idea.

So I feel as if I’ve just landed in my new job and I’m in a large waterfall of information. This is my first exposure to such a large set of cross-functional team members and, frankly, it’s a steep learning curve in terms of the process. I’ve often been in environments that were highly structured with XP, Agile or Scrum. I’ve really enjoyed those in the past and love co-location with my team and the efficiency of communication that those methodologies bring with them.

I’m beginning to see, as I read up on everything non-XP/Agile that basically all other ‘methodologies’ were sort of retroactively lumped together and placed under the label ‘waterfall’. This involves a large amount of information, not unlike the water from the snow caps of Yosemite, rushing downstream at so many ‘knots per minute’ only to be tumbled over and over at junctures called ‘handoffs’ from one support org to another. These ‘handoffs’ truly are like the mad rush of a waterfall as all that information gets dumped from one level to another on its trajectory toward the city water taps.

In some ways, it’s a giddy experience as it strains all my skills and challenges me to be a better designer and a better professional. My understanding and use of data was already strong but continues to grow daily after each meeting I have with my product brothern. My communications skills are also expanding as I review with my cross-functional teams across vast distances from India to London. I’m also honing my speaking skills by giving Design Reviews in front of all the executives of my org. My documentation skills are also becoming more detail oriented, which is an area I’ve needed work on since kindergarten. Yes, I do appreciate Mrs. Montalvo for pointing out that I draw outside the lines, but was the ‘frowny’ face really necessary?

At any rate, my ‘giddy’ experience is enriching and just the kind of challenge I wanted at this point in my career. I am absorbing it all as fast as I can, making mistakes and learning from them.  I can see, after this, whenever it’s at an end, that I’ll be so much stronger and confident in the realm of my ’soft skills’.  I can’t wait to see what happens tomorrow.

I’m leaving so many of my friends here at Reunion. This is a small team but I’ve bonded so much with them, that the hardest part about leaving now is leaving them. I’ve learned a great deal from watching my boss, P. You can tell he really cares about his people. He takes great pains to gather all the requirements so that we can do our jobs that much more efficiently and clearly.  I’m sure he’s got loads of politics to deal with, but he rarely shows that.  And he’s always getting the team to go out for coffee/tea and have quick breaks that ‘keep things real’.

I’ll miss the rest of the team like sisters and brothers, big holes in my heart for awhile until I adjust to my new job and location. But most of all, I’ll miss A’s big smiles and warm heart and good talks. I’ve learned so much from her about people and how to adjust to California’s culture. She’s the best.

But I’m not losing a bunch of colleagues or friends. I’ll still be able to IM them or call them and there will be visits eventually. And who knows…the world is small, maybe we’ll even work together again some day.  But in the meantime, this new job is a great step forward. I’ll be gaining a whole new set of colleagues and friends. I’m excited. I guess this is what people mean when they use the word ‘bitter-sweet’.