Megan Leigh McDonald

Last night I attended a French conversation group to get some practice and build some confidence in my speaking abilities. It’s interesting what came out of that for me and how that applies to my normal 9 to 5. Upon reflection afterward and during my long bike ride through the rain back home, I realized that learning another language builds some very important skills.

For example, it challenges one to think on one’s feet. There were a lot of people with different levels of knowledge. Choosing partners to talk with was somewhat challenging in that regard. On top of who looked interesting, I also wanted to choose someone who was at or around the same level as myself, but who would provide a slight challenge. For awhile I spoke to two very lovely ladies, a teacher/artist and an architect. We chatted away half the evening, talking about art and Paris.

Later in the evening, I found myself in a group with the ‘organitrice’ and some actual French people. I was a little surprised that French people would attend, but pleasantly so. At any rate, I found myself needing to strategize the way I phrased my thoughts in order to communicate clearly. Not having as many nouns and verbs in my repetoire meant that I needed to think creatively in order to describe at least the concept of what I was trying to say. I found that the more experienced speakers were more than happy to translate my attempts by reflecting back to me a better way to say it.

I have to say, I left feeling, well a little smarter and a little more practiced. If you’re at all interested in joining this group, here’s the information.

I recently attended the June meetup for the Agile UX Design Group here in SF at Pivotal Labs. It’s always really interesting to me to walk into someone else’s workplace. It’s always palpably different than every other place I’ve worked at or been to.  I have to say though it’s easy to see a shop that uses Agile or Scrum methodology. The desks are always bare, facing one another for easy access and communication. There are usually releatively few offices. What I liked best about Pivotal was its kitchen and meeting space, both really open and encouraging to what people do best in those spaces: talk.

My first time at this particular meetup, I was immediately brought into the fold of said conversation and given food. Always a good sign. Ian McFarland led us through a very thoughtful deck outlining agile processes. One thing I appreciated was his use of imagery. There were no overwhelming blocks of text. This was no document. It was a presentation. Finally, after several years of corporate decks that would make a sightseer go blind, it was nice to see such a good presentation.

A healthy diversity of people and backgrounds gave us a great discussion at the end around artifacts, processes, etc that set Agile apart. I walked out of that meeting feeling as if I had left a therapists’ office, bathed in the knowledge that outside the heavy walls of corporate design, there was still a place I could go to remember my foundations of XP, Agile and Scrum. And within the week afterwards, I was also pleasantly suprised to see the notes in my inbox. What a great group of people to find here in SF. I heart Agile UX Design Group…if you’re interested in joining us, sign up here through meetup.com.

Back in the day, I took a PhD class from an advertising exec who presented us with papers and testing results that suggested people value the concept of ‘gaming’ in their everyday experience. Certianly, Jesse Schell would agree with that premise given his dramatic and engaging speech “When games invade real life“.

Recently, a link to this cool looking interactive flash-based 3D tag cloud was passed my way and it turned out to be a great example that highlights the benefits of adding enjoyment. There was a short debate about its benefits and foibles. It was a bit glitchy when it comes to signaling relevancy by size (the relative size changes depending on user interaction instead of being set).

The thing that occurred to most of the participants in the discussion thread was that it needs to have a good foundation of meta data in the first place…which could be said of either a static or flash-based version. So, my follow on was that the real test here would be to test it for engagement and findability against its static counterpart. Now, that, I would like to see - I’m betting that given equal implementation, users will enjoy the flash-based tag cloud more.

I think it’s more than the fact that it’s fun. It’s also ’smooth’ or fluid. I couldn’t help but think of Prezi, the presentation software that allows for fluid motion and zoom controls, adding a kind of momentum and fluidity to the art of presentation. It gives the user a sense of velocity or a sense of ’speed’. If this is done correctly, it doesn’t leave the user feeling out of control. The 3D flash-based tag cloud shared this sense of speed with Prezi by giving me a feeling that I would find my results faster. Intuitively I know when I’m mousing over its topics that I won’t necessarily find what I’m looking for faster, but it felt like it would and the feeling was nice…perhaps something I don’t have an option to feel often throughout my dialy routines, certainly not in drive-time traffic!

So why, in the midst of release cycles and product requirements, do we forgo designing experiences that add these more abstract and nuanced feelings into the mix? It seems like, as UX professionals, we adhere so strictly to the fundamentals that if there’s even one minor problem, we discount it as a viable option. But, here’s the paradox: if we’ve learned anything in the past fifteen years, it’s that consumers are willing to put up with a few minor indiscretions if what they’re getting is better, more engaging or more fun than what they currently have. After all improving a user’s feeling about the product is also supposed to be at the core of what we do.

Want to learn some nice tricks to get your testing in DIY or guerilla style? Check this article on A List Apart out. http://www.alistapart.com/articles/quick-and-dirty-remote-user-testing/

Really informative with lots of juicy links to new and innovative web-ware. I especially liked the demo of Tree Jack, which is ‘like card sorting in reverse’. http://www.optimalworkshop.com/

As a professional whose main domain has always been the office, I’ve sat, stood, squatted and lain in every type of environment I can think of.  Some were my choice, others not. But each way of interacting with my computer certainly has its pros and cons.  So, I decided to put together a list of various seating positions and give a brief summary of the pros, cons and any specific adjustments that help that arrangement.

My first seating arrangement was as an assistant in a busy television sales department. Not only did I have to answer phones by chiming in a sing-songy voice (our company’s call sign was also a sexy double-entendre which the majority of the office somehow managed to miss or be bored by), but I also had to keep track of 15 sales associates and their bosses by moving some magnetic discs around a big black board which stood awkwardly behind my desk, directly in my path. My computer was on the side, so that I could rotate back and forth between greeting people and doing actual work. Did I mention it was situated right outside both of the sales managers? Fun times…there was really nothing I could do to get privacy there or avoid the pitfalls of constantly being on display.

My next position was rather quieter. I worked directly with my marketing manager, splitting her office. Rhadika was an amazing boss for me. Always sensitive, welcoming and understanding of the need for periods of quiet time, she guided me through my first real web design job, teaching and supporting. And I worked hard for her. The desk was nothing special, the room was almost always dark but that never seemed to matter to me. Always it remains a special memory for me.

Pod formation and cubicles ranked highly throughout the rest of my career. The trouble with pods is how to make them ‘your own’, a place you will be comfortable working functionally and emotionally all day long. God knows we spend enough time at work, it might as well be pleasant, especially if there are other factors which take away from the overall experience. Unfortunately, not everyone views pod customization as a worthy expense of time.

One of my jobs I sat in a very small pod in the middle of a development team. I really enjoyed the camaradarie of being able to engage in the clever comments that were passed around all day long. In fact, that’s the thing I miss the most about that job, after of course the wine and dinner evenings we all shared. The majority of the people I worked with there were European and in the midst of so much diversity, we all fit very well together.

Another job was in the old Salon.com offices (our company had taken over that spot after Salon moved on to bigger and better office space). I sat at a tiny desk with one small monitor with dust bunnies the size of, well, regular bunnies at my feet. I sat in between 2 of the sales people, since I was the only designer there. I love sales people. They are outgoing, personable and funny. I learned alot just listening to these folks.

Oh and I almost forgot that when I worked for myself, I started out in the basement of an old brownstone in a very dark corner of my bedroom, stuffed to the gill with my belongings. I stared out the bars that lined my window and searched for clients. After a successful first year, I moved upstairs to a 2 room parlor suite with a great view down the beautiful tree-lined street. I set up the back bedroom for my sleeping quarters and arranged the front room like a very bohemian office.  I created a table I could stand up to and work on as needed, but my desk was still a regular height that I could sit at. And sit I did, on a yoga ball, in order to strengthen my back. It definitely was challenging, but regular exercise is just as good, if not better.

Other positions I have had involve either laying on a couch with my laptop or sitting in a bean bag in a similar fashion. The one piece of advice I would give there is to use a lap guard. Some of them even have handy fans that run off of your USB drive.

Since moving to California, I have shared a conference room with about a half dozen other UX designers and sat in ‘pods’. If you’re wondering what pods are, you’re probably from the East Coast. I too was mystified when I first heard that term, but soon found out it involved sitting at desks that had no drawers, facing my coworkers. It made communication easier, but I have to comment that it probably also saved the company lots of money in furniture. It also meant that anything I needed had to reside in a rolling file cabinet or on my desk. I really didn’t customize my deskspace. That was the tradeoff. It wasn’t very personal. And in order to get privacy from my pod-mates, some of which would have a habit of staring into space in my direction, I’d have to use a document holder and a piece of paper just to feel like I could think privately.

A certain large northern california company took a lot of care in choosing pods that were connected, leaving enough privacy for close-in work, but also open enough to have conversations. Not that anyone did, have conversations. The other thing they encouraged, since everyone’s pods looked exactly alike and it was hard to know where you were at any given time, was decoration. There I took on a seaside theme, which I continue to this day at my present job. It does help people know where I’m at.

My current situation is a standing desk with a couple footrests and tall chair for when my feet get tired. My back is really strong right now and I find it easier to move around while switching between different tasks. I also have a bit more storage underneath my desk for bookcases and posterboards.

Give me a shout if you have any questions.

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.

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.