A common misconception about Usability and research, is that focus groups are essentially design by committee. Focus groups are commonly used by usability practitioners to understand user needs and requirements of an interface.  While they are about obtaining a variety of users’ opinions (potentially conflicting) and feedback we would argue that the feedback is not ‘design by committee’.

Design by committee is a term generally used to describe a process in which the design is compromised by attempting to meet all needs and in effect, meeting none.  In a web context, this may mean that in an attempt to appeal to many, the homepage becomes ineffective due to a lack of clarity and/or focus.

While it is possible for the outcomes from focus group research to become design by committee, it is the skill of a trained Usability practitioner that ensures this does not happen.  A truly effective focus group asks appropriate questions which aid in understanding users and their underlying needs. Often it is about understanding user behavior, rather than asking direct questions about what people like and dislike.  For example, by asking users about the process of buying a new home it was possible for us to identify that maps were of the utmost importance and that people were motivated by attempting to emulate their own childhood neighborhoods.

When run properly, focus groups are an ideal means of eliciting user feedback to ensure that designs do meet both the user and business needs.

Card Sorting exercises are one of the methodologies that fill the standard “toolbox” of most user experience designers. Here at UsabilityOne we use them frequently. to assist with developing site IAs.The concept of using card sorts to observe how users group, arrange and label content gives amazing insight into how users view your content and what relationships they see between items.

Considering how successful a card sort can be, it logically follows that a website that can dynamically support users sorting, grouping and labeling content would successfully evolve into the perfect IA, right?

Not really.

Recently, UsabilityOne has helped with development of several sites that have offered such a feature. These sites included areas where users could upload varying types of content, from business case studies to new inventions. During the upload process, users would give each item a category, sometimes making their own category, whilst other sites had several predefined categories.

The issue that we saw across all of these sites was that users’ perceptions of where content belonged, differed. An item that the uploading user felt belonged in one category would be sought in a different category by other users. Frequently we heard users complain that content was not where they expected it to be, and that they felt they were wasting their time trawling through multiple categories.

What had been overlooked is that a successful card sorting exercise also includes a very large amount of analysis. Labeling trends are isolated, card placement across multiple categories is calculated to see which placement was the strongest, outliers are isolated. Most importantly, the data arising from a sort is used to alongside the context of known user behavior and attitudes, as well as business goals and requirements.

The recommended inclusion of a SOMETHING search tool, as well as user generated tags for each item went some way to resolving the issue. However, the question still remains; is it appropriate to have users decide where content will be placed on your site? In these days of Youtube, Flickr, Etsy and a thousand other sites that adopt this process, it may be tempting to jump on board the user generated content bandwagon. However, these successful sites have been built from the ground up to support this sort of behaviour; their very strategies are based around user generated content and dynamic, loosely defined architectures.

If you are considering allowing users to develop content for your site, it pays to sit and consider some points before leaping in. Will it matter if some content is overlooked by users? Will your users be seeking specific items of content? Are your users likely to be invested enough to properly categorise and tag content? And the bigger question, is this really the right strategy for your site, or would your users prefer a more solid, reliable architecture that has been developed and validated by people who properly understand the content?

Doors are often used as examples of good and bad design. As in, “Handles are for pulling etc.”

Last week I came across these doors and was a little confused.  Upon looking at the photo, it is clear how each door operates.  My confusion may have been a ‘user issue’ but it did defy my expectation that double doors open in the same direction.  Is it me or the doors?

Of late, there have been discussions around the office, and with some of our clients, as to why in one-on-one user testing we get users to begin each task from the homepage. Following on from the previous blog post ‘Is your homepage, your homepage?’ there are arguments that not all users arrive at the homepage, so getting them to begin from there is not representative of a real world scenario, particularly since Google and other search engines encourage users to arrive deeper into the site.

That being said, even though the majority of your users might be landing deeper in your site, it is not to say that particular content should not be easily accessible from the homepage. Often when users are browsing a site they will use the homepage as a base to access different areas of your site, continually coming back and using the homepage as a reference or starting point. So even though users may have initially arrived deeper in your site, there is a good chance that during their visit they will click through to your homepage in order to locate other content.

Generally speaking, we feel that tasks presented during user testing are largely independent from each other and we encourage users to approach each task as if they had just arrived at the site. While it may be appropriate to base the first task of a testing session on a page other than the homepage, in most cases, we recommend that subsequent tasks begin from the homepage. The homepage provides a logical reset point from which users can begin their next task and provides an opportunity to test the effectiveness of the homepage and site navigation.

When on an important client call it can be quite stressful figuring out which button to use to place the call on hold and avoid rudely hanging up on the person. No matter how many times I’ve taken calls using this phone, time and time again I get confused . So much so that I’ve had to create my own work around for the device by placing a sticky note on the phone.

One sunny day several months ago, my partner decided he just had to check out the new Mazda MX5 and towed me along to the nearest showroom. Whilst we were there, I fell in love with the CX7 but that is a story for another day as I was instead, firmly steered towards the MX5 which stood ready for a test drive.

We drove sedately enough out of the gates, but once we were on the road he put it through its paces. Suffice to say I had a death grip on the armrest by the time we slowed and turned into a residential area. As the road turned out to be a dead end, we needed to make a three-point turn to get back out onto the main road.

It was at this point that my partner realised he couldn’t put the car into the reverse gear.

“What do you mean you can’t put the car into reverse?!?” was my calm reply.

The unattainable reverse gear.

He pointed out that the sixth gear was where the reverse normally was (it was a manual car), and the indicated reverse gear was to the left of first. Only the gear stick wouldn’t move any further left than first gear. I wasn’t convinced until we had made several jerky movements forward until we were merely centimetres away from someone’s garage door.

As my partner tried to call Mazda to find out what to do with the gears, I was frantically looking through the car for a manual. Thwarted, I moved the search to the internet on my mobile. Then, we heard a car horn behind us. The owner of the garage (in a massively intimidating Hummer) wanted in. We had to explain the problem to him and he was all ready to tow us out. Finally, Mazda rang us back. It was easy, he said. “Just press down on the gear and hold whilst shifting it left”.

Just in time. The owner of the garage had had enough. I was scared to death that he would attempt to tow us out and break the bumper making us liable for the damage! We sat in embarrassed silence all the way back to Mazda.

“Well, we’re here,” I said.

“Yes. Yes we are.”

“You know it wasn’t our fault right. The label doesn’t say anything about pushing down…”

“They’re still going to laugh at us.”

Driving. Not that simple.

When a design defies established conventions, there needs to be a obvious indication of how the new design works. Clear concise labelling can be important for guiding the user in learning to use it.

Fridge control

Last night the fish in the fridge froze, so I attempted to increase the temperature .  Then I was faced with the options of ‘high cool’ or ‘low cool’.  In terms of temperature, I am familiar with warm or cold, even high or low, but not high cool or low cool. Is high cool, extra cold, or the higher end of the cold spectrum?

There are an increasing number of websites dispensing with a link to “Home” in their primary navigation in favour of the company/site logo linking to the homepage. The logic behind this approach appears to be the belief that all users understand that the logo provides a link back to a website’s homepage and to save space.

Our experience of observing user behaviour suggests that a significant number of users will fail to return to the home page when the site logo is the only means of doing so (aside from the browser “back” button of course). Using the logo as a link to the homepage is not a bad thing; we actually recommend it especially as it is optimal from an accessibility perspective. However, it should not provide the sole means of navigating back to home.

It is difficult to argue that reserving a permanent spot for “Home” in a website’s primary navigation takes up an unreasonable amount of real estate which could be used for other navigation options. After all it is only four characters and “Home” plays a crucial role in in-site navigation, with many users treating a website’s homepage as a base which they return to between tasks.

If you must write help documentation, ensure it is needed. And actually helpful.

In testing recently, we came across a user behaviour that was challenging, not so much in itself but more so for its impact on the category and how it needed to be taken into consideration during website development.

Taste.com.au Recipe

One of our Clients was in development of a website that targeted aspiring cooks. In a nutshell, they wanted to confirm that their planned website was in line with user needs, and also that they were on the right track with the specific functionality that had been developed.  We used focus groups and moderated one-on-one user testing on the project.

During the focus groups, the importance of search became very clear. As mentioned above, this in itself was hardly ground breaking. The intriguing bit however was how much search engines (and by default, Google) had become the de facto homepage for this particular category. User behaviour was to go to Google and search some aspect of cooking, and to proceed to the websites recommended in the natural search results. The use of Google was so much a part of the process that the users were nearly universally unable to name any of the websites which were dominant (by traffic counts) in the category. The users knew the sites only by the pages that they had linked to via Google, which tended to be deep within the individual sites.

The behaviour was so prevalent that it became clear that our Client would need to rethink their homepage design and information architecture. Specifically, they had designed the site so that some of the core features were only clearly visible from the homepage, and were less easily accessed via the individual pages of the site. Understanding the user behaviour in this category led us to recommend to the client that they rethink their content pages, and consider how each one was effectively the ‘homepage’ of their site for most users. They needed to reconsider how to dial up the site’s branding, and how they could introduce some of the other features of the site (which had only previously been available on the site’s homepage) to the users without getting in the way of the core purpose for the users’ visit.