connecting*the*dots

Building a successful UX team — the right mix of roles, responsibilities, method, etc. — isn’t an easy task. It really does depend on the DNA of the organization (size, politics, legacy issues, etc.) and the type of domain (application, information centric site, desktop software, etc.).

Here’s a visual outline that I tried to follow at Ameritrade — an extremely secure, authenticated trading platform, with unique opportunities for collaborative filtering, interface customization, sussinct client messaging and knowledge management (both on the unauthenticated and authenticated areas of the site).

If I had to do it all over again, here are the top three things I would’ve done differently:

Reduced the emphasis on methodology
Due to the placement of the team in the org, the legacy of design within the domain and the lack of designer input in modeling requirement documents, I pushed to implement a flexible, yet smart, IxD Goal-Directed methodology. I probably would’ve still sought to implement a similar methodology, but I wouldn’t have pushed so hard to get it.

Introduced blogging as a means for knowledge sharing
KM is such a terrible term. In essence, an outward facing blog with a solid search engine and a rich tag approach could’ve served as both a conversation point for speaking with clients and providing answers to non-client account related questions. Internally, we could’ve dropped our stiff, architected KM tool with central controls and replaced it with internal blogs for every employee.

Focused on research, behavior, information contextuality, design and presentation
Editorial is *such* a complience issue within the financial industry, collaboration with designers on interfaces was beyond difficult to manage. I probably would’ve traded that card for the client-side team, where the rubber of behavior and design explicitly hits the road of server-side code.

Live and learn ;-)

Peter Merholz has been on a philosophical bend regarding the continued development of Web 2.0 and the role of business for a few months now, and I’m pretty much in agreement with most of his assertions.

Changing a large, old school domain’s approach to interactive product development — specifically, in the Web 2.0 arena — doesn’t occur solely through the availability of smart engineers armed with APIs, feeds and Ajax alone. Unless the business has evolved its underlying approach and culture to facilitate this paradigm shift, the resulting efforts will be futile, or to quote Peter, “they’ll fuck it up.”

The powers that be must believe in and back the philosophy behind the technology.

So when it comes to business — I mean straight up, hardcore, numbers driven business — philosophy better equate with an explicit road-map to profit, otherwise we’re not talking business, we’re talking charity. More succinctly put, corporations won’t structure their annual and long-term corporate initiatives around Web 2.0 “open” principles and the investment in the underlying technology if they don’t explicitly understand how and why it will positively affect both their brand position in the market and the bottom line — both now and into the foreseeable future.

Now, I don’t hold a MBA from Wharton, so my ability to speak to the nuances of business is somewhat limited, but I did have the opportunity to spend the last three-years of my life within the walls of a conservative corporation. During my time there, it was extremely difficult to espouse any degree of change to their approach to design, development and serving their clients without raising agenda sniffing eyebrows — even when only attempting to sell the basic concept of listening to your own users when designing user experiences.

That concept alone took years to gain traction.

So while change within the Earth’s environment is as natural as a sunrise, within traditional businesses the mechanisms that foster change often signifies a threat to both the corporate strategy and the management team alike. One cannot move into traditional areas of business looking to flip long standing product development paradigms and revenue models overnight.

A recent Economist article ("Yahoo’s personality crisis") suggests that there’s a schism developing in the Yahoo! strategic and brand position, while Google is poised to sprint light years ahead. Peter’s latest post," Yahoo!: Walled Garden or Commons," tacks onto that perspective, suggesting that Yahoo!’s internal tugging between an open and closed  web philosophy, and their imminent plans to open a Hollywood office, could become a mission critical issue if not paid proper attention. The Economist even went as far as comparing present day Yahoo! to AOL from back in the days of the first web revolution.

AOL?

If we were talking about Bob Davis and Lycos, I’d have to agree, but we’re talking about Yahoo!, a company that has always been forward thinking, willing to tackle any attribute of traditional media and turn it on it’s head to make it useful on-line. With their soon-to-be-expansion into the mainstream media bastion of Hollywood, Yahoo!, for better or for worse, continues to operate as a change agent in the information age.

Simultaneous focus on open and closed aspects of the web is a solid business approach

Yahoo! has been at this web thing for more than 154 years now (posthumous math courtesy of Dick Sabot). In that time they’ve established a huge member base around the world, while designing a majority of their domain to be accessible to non-members with zero usage fees. A person can use most of Yahoo! without ever spending a dime until coming across a service with direct, fee-based competition already in the market. This holistic business model may seem passe by today’s standards, but that’s only because Yahoo! set the benchmark years ago; they were the early adopters of such an open business philosophy on the web.

This approach has provided Yahoo! with the means to both create and promote very precise revenue streams, leveraging the continuously growing reach of their membership and platform. Simultaneously, their focus on a variety of forward thinking, open tactical initiatives, such as flickr, 360, News, Music, etc. continues to move their domain forward with the best practices of the medium.

To the naked eye, this overarching strategy hints to be a metaphorical form of iterative change management, but not on the project or Yahoo! domain level, though; it’s more like change management for entering untapped external markets and media industries. In other words, Yahoo! seems to make closed moves (i.e. extending its domain by dealing with old school industries) in order to tap and evolve an established sector into a more open and web-centric format.

So does that make cents, compared to Google’s approach? Let’s see…

Google is also made-up of a brilliant group of people, creating forward-thinking user interfaces and search retrieval algorithms, but where Google’s daily operations differ from Yahoo! is their position in the market.

Their underlying funding relies almost solely on revenue established from their AdSense program and by floating company shares into a market that has provided a whopping market evaluation, based primarily on growth potential. So who really has the edge to last, riding through and continue contributing to the infrastructure of Web 2.0?

They both do.

Yahoo! has a consistent, upwardly moving market cap SMA since the bubble burst, whereas Google is on a meteoric rise post-dotcom crash. How much do you think the assertions of this chart tie directly into the two company’s strategic approaches to extending market reach? What about their commitment to open forms of Web 2.0 development? To the non-economist (that would be me) it would seem that each company has it’s own DNA to deal with and make decisions accordingly.

• Yahoo! took its bruises, but made it through the bust and learned their business lessons
• Google’s people felt the crash, but missed it all together as a company with a bottom line and shareholder’s interests to protect, so they’re more aggressive
• Yahoo! has more than a decades worth of experience, so they operate like a surgeon
• Google swings wildly at product opportunities with brilliant, broad strokes and precise algorithms to quickly iterate change

Basically, there’s room for multiple approaches to paving and extending Web 2.0.

Crafting an interactive world, one industry at a time

Take a moment to think about your life before Yahoo! took off. Ten years ago, the average American received their daily news through a newspaper and/or a TV broadcast. Due to Yahoo!’s revolutionary efforts to establish News aggregation for the public, I can barely remember the last time I read the newspaper during the week. Yahoo! forever altered that paradigm, shifting me and countless others in front of their screen for a news upload each morning.

Since Yahoo! News launched, Google raised the bar by expanding indexed sources to include international and local perspectives, while recent feed services like Rojo have cropped up, pushing the information boundaries into gourmet concept feeds.

Yahoo! set all of this in motion and continues to play a major role in how a large number of people (members or not) receive a variety of news items at their fingertips. By iterating the open, tactical aspects of their holistic user experience (i.e. feed widgets, top mailed articles, reviews of articles, etc.) while adding content (i.e. specific opinion blogs such as the HuffingtonPost.com), Yahoo! innovates by keeping one foot in the tactical realm of Web 2.0, with the other firmly planted in the strategic realm of the business philosophy.

It takes two feet to walk the walk.

As DeWitt Clinton has recognized, Web 2.0 is also about working together to reach a common goal across company lines. Forget the feeds and the tagging and the asynchronous display of data; collaboration between progressively run web firms is the biggest open paradigm shift one can imagine. Could this concept of collaboration and strategic balance be something that Yahoo! — a former Google-type firm which did experience the market correction of all market corrections in the bust of 2001 — has mandated itself to follow? Maybe it’s not schizophrenic to play both sides of the Web 2.0 fence; maybe it’s a solid business model.

With their historical record of successful brand extension — creating and/or acquiring useful, engaging experiences to change actual industries (i.e. News, Finance, Jobs, etc.) — I wouldn’t bet against Yahoo! in convincing Hollywood, through either the front or backdoor, to operate in a fashion that is more open than not.

Will the geek-to-media employee ratio be higher in the Valley than in Santa Monica? Sure. When in Rome, hire Romans, but so what? 154 years of Internet experience isn’t going to be thrown out the window because a handful of media executives are brought on-board. Will the output of this venture be as revolutionary as Yahoo! News or Finance? That’s left to be seen, but with Yahoo!’s track record, why be pessimistic?

Yahoo! espouses the tactical and philosophical pillars of Web 2.0, yet also understands business and how to engage in change. They’re no AOL.

UPDATE: AOL bought Weblogs, Inc. Let’s see how long it takes them to assert full control.

A few months back, I finally stepped out of my dead bolted existence within Ameritrade and began to digest the current state of this Web 2.0 explosion, and as soon as I did, the Semantic Web seemed so much closer to fruition than it did just a few years prior.

Much of the renewed push and entrepreneurial spirit that has driven this industry-wide rebirth seems to have been driven simply by our economic recovery from the dot-com crash. On the surface, that answer is sufficient, but something deeper is at at play. So, with my newly created free-time, I headed down a 2.0 rabbit hole to take me on a journey for clarity.

What I’ve come to realize isn’t anything particularly shocking (unless you’ve been a corporate slave for the past three years).

We’re living in tumultuous times. The air we breathe is being compromised more and more every day. Poverty around the world is increasing exponentially. Our country is knee deep in another Vietnam, another occupation, another struggle for gaining natural resources at any cost. People are becoming polarized by important and moral, personal and social issues, seemingly on a daily basis. All of this is occurring during the reign of an administration that has even the staunchest of conservatives questioning whether we, the people, are living within the midst of a dictatorial democracy, rather than a thriving Republic, built on the principles of political discourse, government checks and balances, fiscal responsibility, the separation of church and state and the power of the individual voter.

So where does this leave us as a people?

Personally speaking, I’ve decided to refocus my effort to publish my views, opinions, perspectives, experiences, etc., in an effort to make even the slightest dent in the discourse surrounding our roles as American citizens.

What motivates me? Pick your poison: the War on Terror; the Rove/Plame/Wilson scandal; the Bolton push-through appointment; the Cindy Sheehan vigil. It seems that every day a new flow of bullshit only fuels the righteous indignation I’ve come to hold regarding this administration.

Is it even possible to imagine a more visceral description of an Aristocracy at play?

For me, the complete disregard of the intelligence and voice of the American citizen begins to explain the groundswell of blogging that has occurred over the past four years, specifically the political blogs and mainstream media watchdog sites.

Sure, the potential for capital gains plays a large role in the motivation to advance technology or any other industry. The web, though, is a bit different due to it’s low cost of entry, so I believe that moral conviction plays a role in both driving the evolution of technology and the passion to leverage it to it’s fullest degree.

So what’s the connection between geo-political events, blogging and the tactical fervor of Web 2.0? (social bookmarking, tagging, open source, open content, etc.)

In a nutshell: everything.

Without a true social democracy in the real, we’ve evolved to create one on-line — where boundaries can be broken down, hierarchies can be dissolved, control can be minimized, etc.

I blog in order to get my voice out into the ether of this new social construct; I tag my blog posts to provide context and semantic relationships on numerous levels, yet with a similar purpose:

1. On the base object level to provide a succinct description of how I perceive this content from a conceptual perspective, perhaps creating a) a greater connection with the reader on a discernible level and b) connections on associative & relational levels with other objects (within my domain and elsewhere)
2. On the categorization level to establish context within a particularly defined category or across a faceted classification scheme. If I were an actual brand, this would be how I’d ensure my position was reflected within my editorial construct and navigation scheme.
3. On the retrievable object level to allow for more avenues of findability (four, well-thought descriptive tags exponentially increase the odds of object retrieval rather than none or even one, either in straight queries or in contextual presentation on the base object level)

These are tactical strategies in the information revolution.

The same principles apply to tagging even more granular object such as photographs, video and sound files, as well as the macro-level social bookmarking of URLs. The effort, I believe, is based on the desire of individual voices to be heard amidst the shelling of the mainstream media. While technically speaking, Web 2.0 is about the creation of richly defined object models and attributes — the more good data we entrench within our objects (be it content, files or URLs themselves), the better the chance for a semantic web experience — the movement behind it is much more compelling, much more philosophical in nature.

After leaving Ameritrade in April, I spent a month digesting Noam Chomsky’s Understanding Power, which introduced me to the specifics of his propaganda model thesis, which I fully digested by watching the documentary Manufacturing Consent. Recently, Dave Sifry (CEO, Technorati) posted a graph on the Technorati Blog displaying the impact that blogs are making within the once dominated realm of entrenched, funded, mainstream media.

I’m only guessing that if Chomsky has studied the progression of the web, he’s smiling up in Cambridge right about now.

The legitimization of the individual (creative and political) perspective is being sustained in the 21st century by the conviction of the blogosphere, passionate focus on the possibilities of 2.0 revenue models and domains, such as Technorati, taking a leadership position. The concept of social dialog, networking and organization and the elemental foundation of capitalism are beginning to shift in exciting ways.

Imagine a near future where:

• Individual perspectives can be made more readily sustainable through a common revenue model, reversing the big money/power structure of publication and media saturation? How would that impact the politics of our nation? Our wage labor practices?
• Algorithms and interfaces allow for rich, precise retrievals of topical queries, with just as precisely retrieved contextual objects presented within a usable format, based on better clustering techniques and taking richer and more valuable attributes into account? How would this impact the way we learn and connect to one another?
• Information domains allow topically defined objects to be rolled up into navigable concepts by users (through customization) instead of predefined categories by information architects? How could this seamlessly raise the bar for common folk in their efforts to research online? To manage information across numerous domains?
• Mainstream media articles and blog posts are presented on the same level (query or article), ensuring checks and balances of mis/disinformation, without a partisan bias? How important is it for check and balances to be rooted within the last bastion of traditional governmental checks and balances — the media?

And the great thing is that we’re not too far away from this revolutionary existence.

Blogs are beginning to bridge the social and communication gaps between nations. My peers are thinking differently when developing this medium, even in traditional business development circumstances. The tactical approach to producing, managing, sharing, finding and using information objects — defined from the bottom up — is finally getting it’s due.

Yes, these are tumultuous times, but they’re exciting as well.

Alright, I admit it. I didn’t get out (or online) much while I worked for Ameritrade. 60 hour work weeks for two straight years while building a design practice and a forward-thinking trading platform will do that to your peripheral vision. Well, I’m making up for lost time, slowing down to explore the web… big time.

• Flickr is sooo good
• My teeth are stuck in del.icio.us
• I’m blown away by the approach and possibilities of Technorati

The IA in me is smiling. No, not for the sheer joy of seeing community indexing, the IA in me is smiling because it’s becoming clear to me where the web is heading, and it’s not following a topical, structured, media-filtered path.

Take Technorati. The approach is like a Bizarro perspective of the mainstream media.

Now, Technorati isn’t dumb, ugly or inhumane as in the illustration below, but it is backwards when looking at it through the typical political/news media lens of corporate America.

I mean, the mainstream media reports news by using explicit filters to ensure that what is published or broadcasted supports the primary objectives of capitalism. In the past, I’ve ranted about the much needed expansion of the Google and Yahoo! news model to place blogs into the mix when drawing from indexed sources. Well, Technorati flipped the model entirely with an approach to sharing information that spits in the eye of mainstream media constructs, creating a communal approach to digesting information. There are no "vanilla" labels of a topical navigation, splitting the world into simplified categories and driving a pre-conceived notion of "valuable" content into the skulls of society.

Technorati leverages tagging to present contextual concepts of information back to the user based on our desires.

Run a tag search on "free speech" and you get a descriptive page of the latest blog entries, Flickr images and a contextual list of social bookmarks which include mainstream media articles (based on del.icio.us and Furl tagging). It took me a few returns to stumble upon the revolutionary aspect of this approach. I mean, three months ago, I would’ve been happy if Google News simply added a column of contextual links of blog post that corresponded to a search query. Technorati has flipped the script and placed the hierarchy crown on the head of bloggers, reducing the "real" media to a column of "see also’s."

I love it.

So where can this go? Can this approach sustain a movement towards fundamentally altering how American society is exposed to, finds and digests information? Man, "it depends" is such an understatement.

• If Technorati can reach a tipping point, similar to Google a few years back, where, say, Tony Soprano is shown "Technorating" waste management on his computer, the impact on society could be huge. People will start to look for information from other people (sans an editorial slant)
• If Technorati partners with a Google or a Yahoo! to provide user-generated content within their results pages, society will begin to experience contextual alternatives to mainstream reporting, entertainment, et al without being forced to have to go search for it through RSS and other technical means.
• If Technorati is bought by a Google or a Yahoo!, all bets are off. Only time would tell if Chomsky’s "propaganda model" proves itself to be a truism or if new media and it’s superstars are exceptions to the rule.

No matter what, it’s obvious that the web’s semantic synapses are continuing to form. This is only the beginning.

So it’s Friday night and I find myself cruising around the web after a night out and a tooth brushing away before a night in. In my travels, I landed on JJG’s blog and subsequently stumbled into his Ajax essay on the Adaptive site. I’ve got to admit something; before tonight, I’ve never read one iota about Ajax. The only real conversation I’ve had on the topic was a recent conversation with a client-side developer pal and after reading Jesse’s well defined description of the approach and the benefits. My initial reaction was pretty much, "well, duh!"

I don’t say that to offend Jesse, nor downplay the great client-side work anyone is doing right now, it’s just that I’ve been immersed in online application design for years now and have always tried to communicate these types of solutions to developers. I say "these types of solutions" lightly, as I’m primarily a designer, not a developer, so from my perspective these communication calls have been screaming to be stiched together for a while now. All said, I refuse to rake engineers over the coals. We’re here now.

Jesse spoke to the difficulties of designing online applications due to the technical workarounds which have been historically necessary to successfully support innovative interface behavior. While I agree with the level of difficulty, I disagree with the approach to design, for while practicing interaction design, I don’t model persona scenarios based on technological constraints. As David Fore of Cooper exhorts, the period of scenario modeling should be a period of making magic. That’s how innovation occurs while supporting user needs. I’d much rather engage an engineer in a position to support a brilliant solution than bland, useless features/interface behaviors. So first, come up with the right behaviors, then encourage technology to make it come to life.

Okay, that could come off as a bit pushy, unrealistic and non-tech savvy. One has to understand the constraints of the media when designing for it right? Sure. But not at the cost of potentially handcuffing a more useful experience by limiting possibilities. So how can one design for the user, while considering possibilities of Ajax?

While at Ameritrade, when the opportunity to start the UX Group came my way, I was lucky to be able to convince management to include our relatively small client-side development team in the mix. That brief organizational commitment created a huge opportunity for me to espouse innovation and collaboration across both designers and developers. I didn’t know how long the group structure would last, so I instantly switched up working from the level of context scenarios and began to approach the issue holistically.

We must have used the phrase "push the browser until it pushes back" more times in our weekly staff meetings than "war against terror" has been used in the White House over the past few years. Come hell or highwater, our (paying) client behaviors needed to be supported in our online applications, so in turn, I refused to limit us to any narrow definitions of client-side technology. Thankfully, my CSD guys (and gal) latched onto my mantra with vigor and did the heavy lifting to evolve our conversations into their domain (code), while myself and the IxD’s returned to the iteration of modeling user needs into interface behavior. Did they use the Ajax approach per se? No, but they pretty much pushed the browser until their SOP—which supported the design team’s further pursuit of forward thinking behavioral patterns—is now reflected in some of the latest Ajax app behaviors, such as Gmail. Business as usual of design and development at Ameritrade started to evolve.

Were the solutions as soundly executed across the board as the current Google attempts in leveraging the Ajax approach? I’d have to say no again, as we were performing Ajax-type workarounds on the fly. But the mere fact that the team addressed dynamic interface scenarios on a case-by-case basis, with dynamic executions on the presentation layer, led our marketing group to center their next campaign around the slogan, "Welcome to the 21st Century. Now trade like it." The ripple
effect of the progressive experience design was contained, as it only applied to the authenticated, Apex trading platform, but Barrons seemed to notice it by giving us a 4 star rating (up from 2.5 stars the previous year).

A switch to a complete Ajax approach at Ameritrade today would entail a short period of refactoring, but would make the current authenticated interface move from "singing" to "harmonizing."

As long as the IT politicians and system managers keep their paws out of coding philosophy, Ajax should mark the sweet spot of the golden age of presenting complex scenario relationships as simplified behavioral experience in the browser. Elegance in action. Personally speaking, I just never want to hear "that’s not feasible" again when proposing the design for such a dynamic solution.

Remember Belushi’s reaction to the insipid acuistic guitar love song in Animal House? Exactly.

I want a satellite radio product that meets *my* needs.

I want true convergence, not the usual business of multiple brands, releasing redundant products, creating sustainable profitability and not sustainable satisfaction.

It’s 2005 people; we deserve sustainable product offerings that meet our needs in any environmental scenario.

So what does the current portable, streaming, satellite landscape look like? Forgive the brand choices, but it seems to look something along the lines of…

Aside from the obvious competitive redundancies of the middle products, the feature overlap of any two products is pretty interesting to note:

• Portability (car, home, walking, etc.)
• Song ratings
• Random play
• Library of music to draw upon (satellite, jukebox, server, etc.)

When I see these overlapping product attributes, I also see opportunities for elegant simplicity, for product convergence, and most importantly, for happy consumers. I start to see…

Yahoo! Music plays audio files off a server, leveraging personalization settings, such as ratings of songs, artists, albums, genres, etc. What’s stopping them from striking up a deal with a Sirius or XM to create a completely personalized satellite/internet station?

A biz-dev deal here, a little bit of industrial and interface design changes there, a chunk of engineering and voila!; the physical satellite products could have input devices for rating these same music attributes. So the next time you’re on the beach, in your car, etc., you’re now continuously participating in updating your station to reflect your current passions and interests. Tie these setting into an Amazon or iTunes shopping experience and the collaborative filtering possibilities are endless.

Speaking of Apple, what about the iPod?

MP3 players bring the “tangible” nature of accessing a personal library of ripped and downloaded music. Bring this into the conversation and you now have a device that not only syncs personalization between devices via server/satellite communication, but also allows a consumer to archive a library of music/content for consumption in a more linear fashion (i.e. playing entire albums, setting up playlists, dj-ing, etc.).

Of course that also could be managed via satellite — providing the user a search and play capability — but that’s a bit more tricky regarding music rights and costs. It would also cannibalize owning CD’s and downloading music, although Napster and Rhapsody are already heading down the monthly cost for leasing music.

Once Sirius and XM start a partnership, splitting redundancies in content and sharing technology at a cost (like satellites), maybe, just maybe, we could see a sexy product, with beauty found on levels deeper than it’s original vision…

And yes, I too would rather have Apple lead the industrial design of this fantasy product than myself, but for visualization purposes (and because I’m long on Sirius, remember) I think my rendering will suffice for this conversation.

I smell a Dire Straits song in the works.

In an industry such as online brokerage, one would assume that the client would always be the center of focus. While most of the time that is the case, the focus on the bottom line in a publicly traded company demands more executive attention and decision-making, overtaking any best practice corporate mantra or initiative due to the pressures and expectations of The Street.

Therein lies the problem: Only a sustained and coordinated focus on client needs will provide properly targeted and designed product experiences for customers or clients.

Client service : Pricing

If a company provides services and products that support the goals of an individual, at a price that can be rationalized to fit the value proposition of the product, the company will find clientèle… but business isn’t that simple, as the cost of business drives most internal decisions.

Executives with P/L responsibilities tend to gravitate towards lessening the impact on spending first and foremost, rather than reinvesting within the organization. Whether the decision lands in the form of multi-tasking employee roles or approaching methodological advances with risk management adverseness, working within conservatively defined parameters lessens accountability to risk and most likely can’t be framed in a negative light.

So how can a business operate in a manner that supports clients goals, at a desirable price point, without putting the business “out of business” in the process?

Streamlined systems and processes play a major part.

Smart management plays another.

But the glue that binds these and numerous other business roles together is the simple concept of collaboration.

For the sake of simplicity, picture a company divided into four primary units: Marketing, Technology, Design and Business. In this simple, yet extremely complex fauxe business example, nothing could be accomplished with quality or speed without close collaboration.

• Marketing and Design need to share quantitative and qualitative research (respectively) to assist the Business in developing an explicit understanding of client needs. These qualified findings can then be prioritized by Business and Technology in terms of viability and feasibility (respectively)
• Business, Design and Technology must collaborate during all phases of product design in order for goal-directed and innovative experiences to become a reality at any point on the speed to market to best to market throughput timeline
• While this occurs, Marketing must be looped into all user experience design points to ensure that brand standards are met and a product marketing plan can be produced to reintroduce the client experience to the market in proper fashion

Yes, this is oversimplified.

Compliance has a large role in this process, as does Legal, Sales, etc. And while the above description sounds logical and pragmatic, imagine how many different organizational structures, methodologies, communication systems, talent, etc. could be put in place to support the concept of a Business - Marketing - Design - Technology paradigm.

Ameritrade had already become quite aware of the need for this degree of collaboration over the past few years and the current buzz of the company has jumped from touting our top operating margin in the industry to making a commitment to designing an organization around the needs of our clients, while keeping an industry leading operating margin.

Reaching that balance and keeping a competitive edge in this industry and on The Street is very tricky. Gutsy, sophisticated and experienced leadership must drive this level of corporate re-focus.

Next month: User research: The stereotype and the archetype.

I think I’ve gone beyond busy; like you can go beyond tired or beyond hungry. I’m so busy it doesn’t even feel like I’m busy anymore. I just show up at work early and stay late, 7 days a week. Yeah, I have no life. I get that all the time.

So last week our UX team became an official entity at Ameritrade. I was promoted to UX Group Manager and I’m now trying to staff up while continuing to knock out designs for our beta site release to our clients. Yep. Busy.

I don’t know what I’m allowed to talk about on here, so before I am made “not busy,” let me just say if you’re looking for an online brokerage firm, check out Ameritrade (in a few months). Our new trading platform is so dope we may be sent packing to Betty Ford once it’s released to our client-base.

And then maybe I can get busy with another, ANY other part of my life.

For the last two days, Dan, myself and the Ameritrade crew from Nebraska (that’s right, I said Nebraska) observed 10 active traders as they were walked through the prototype for the new trading platform we’re designing. We were a bit apprehensive going into it because we were adding numerous features and changing the paradigm of the trading model all together, but amazingly enough the response was enthusiastic and positive.

Of course some pretty bad design decisions in specific screens rose to the top through the interviews. By the 7th trader we were all covering our eyes and screaming at the mirror when they hit those areas. Dan and I even started a “task war,” pushing the moderator to lead the clients through each other’s shoddy screens. Yes, our professionalism deteriorated a bit, but we walked away with reams of notes and have a solid 3 weeks to crank out revisions for a second round of testing.

If all goes well (knock on wood) this product is going to be sweet when it hits the market.

I’m now booked with reviewing hours and hours of user interviews, run by Ameritrade’s client experience consultants. I asked for it, and marketing gave it to me. The info is great — hearing the God’s honest truth about your site can be quite interesting — but the format of the interviews is pretty drawn out and somewhat unfocused. Unfortunately, we never get to see what screens they are reviewing at a given time because the brilliant camera operators don’t cut to a fire-wired view of the laptop screen. Details, details…

Technical problems aside, I’m moving forward with my design process as my initial three personae for the trading platform redesign project are being rounded out as the customers open up to the interviewer. Good stuff. Now I just have to roll up the specifics into a document that focuses on the goals of the individual personae and develop a few mental models for the beginning of the redesign of the site/applications.

It’s great to finally have the opportunity to do things the right way. Kinda.

We at Datek are only a few months away (hopefully) from signing on the dotted line and merging with Ameritrade. A major result of that milestone will include a re-architecture of the two discrete sites into one new user experience; a forward-thinking trading platform. In expectation of that date, our marketing group has been doing a great job in gathering user data (video tapes of user interaction with the two existing sites, focus group feedback, etc.) and we — the user experience design team — are about to embark on the first step of the the planning process; creating the first stab of an evolving bible of Ameritrade/Datek personas.

Before I started work on designing Command Center, personas were not part of the software design process at Datek. During the initial stage of the project, I contacted a friend of mine (CCO of Onclave, Dave Reid) to borrow a persona template. After mind-melding with Dave and then internally with our marketing department, I came up with two detailed personas two reflect our active trading customer base. Sure, they’re not based on personal interviews with clients, but as stakes in the ground, the tangible reference of human personas consistantly assisted me in the design of the product and proved to be worth the effort.

The shift of our software design process, from a business centered to user centered, has grabbed huge traction over the last few months, and I feeling that the change in approach will positively affect our customers interaction with the Winter ‘03 site launch.

Come this time tomorrow, I’ll be on a flight heading to Omaha, Nebraska with Dan Saffer and Tom Alison from Datek, to meet up with the design team at Ameritrade. We’re attempting to plan the redesign of our two separate trading platforms into one, so a meet and greet is more than necessary.

Aside from football, cornfields, and frozen steaks, I know nothing about Nebraska. If anyone can point out something interesting to do in Omaha, please feel free to let me know.