connecting*the*dots

Lovely map, eh?

The darker colors indicate a higher degree of happiness in one’s life, while the lighter colors indicate that life for certain folk isn’t what they had expected or want moving forward.

You and I would probably take these indicators as interesting fodder while we head off to purchase another video game.

What would EthanZ do?

Ethan breaks down the (un)happiness of the world (on the shoulders of the original researcher, Adrian White from the University of Leicester) by analyzing the clustering of the actual data points. From that analysis, he comes up with a few interesting deductions of his own.

Brilliant read.

Ethan, please remain a geek with a bunch of free time on your hands.

First off, thanks to the good folks at Adaptive Path for granting me an invite to review the *alpha* version of their first web service, Measure Map. Onto the review…

Usefulness: Interaction Design

Knowing the Adaptive team, I’m sure they did their homework in modeling design personae and context  scenarios to drive their interface, function and behavioral requirements, yet being that this version of Measure Map is an alpha release, it would be a little unfair of me to review the usefulness of the service as if it were completely mature. That being said, here’s my review as a potential design persona, representing an archetypal mix of blogger, designer, marketer and technologist.

Dashboard

Bubbled up to the surface of the service is a default presentation of:

• Number of visitors who have been to my blog today
• Number of links which been used from other sites to navigate to my blog today
• Number of comments left on my blog today
• Number of posts visited today
• Popular posts for today (with an RSS feed for placement on my blog)
• A dedicated messaging area for presenting upcoming features

While the interface satisfies my immediate need for analyzing recent activity when logging into the service—stitching together the decentralized activity of people across the web into a centralized interface for simple digestion—it fails to give me a quick view of who is accessing the blog and where they are traveling within.

My TypePad stats tool may not be chock full of the features found here, but onLoad it does provide me with a display that communicates a narrative of actors and movement. A potential solution would be to display a sliced view of these stats in the lower half of the interface when clicking on an umbrella icon of the large icons at the top of the screen. That would be a smart use of Ajax.

Primary Sections

If Visitors equates with unique visitors, then I’m pretty geeked already. That qualitative recognition is hard to produce, but it seems as though this is what Adaptive has provided, as on they present a percentage statistic of the number of daily visitors who are return users.

The dynamic graph of visitor traffic is extremely useful for a default quick glance of today’s traffic, or by simply pulling on a widget handle, exposing traffic over n period of time. AP also provides a sweet linear navigation devise, which dynamically shifts the traffic view over two week intervals.

Links are broken up into two categories: incoming (including search terms) and outgoing. Incoming links are standard tracks across all services, while outgoing links nicely differentiates from my basic TypePad stat tool. Outgoing links help me understand the movement of my audience, yet for some reason AP decided against displaying movement through internal links. Understanding where people are coming from and what captures their interest to leave my blog is great, but I need to understand how people are moving throughout my own domain.

Typepad produces this stat and I’ve found it very useful. Session interfaces with a cross section of explicit unique entrances, movement and exits might be too much for the free version of this service, but displaying internal links without the stitching would be very useful.

The dynamic graph operates with the same efficiency and usefulness as the previous section.

The Comments interface displays comments left today, with a link to a page displaying comments, and post that "got comments." I don’t understand what the second stat refers to, as my total number of  comments have been tracked and the number here only reflects the test comment I left today.

That being said, the drill-down visitor comment page is a nice quick view of comment activity across my blog. I can only imagine how useful it would be to an owner of a high traffic blog, such as Daily Kos or AMERICAblog.

The dynamic graph operates with the same efficiency and usefulness as the previous sections.

The Posts interface follows the same UI construct of each of the previously mentioned areas. It displays the complete number of posts on the blog, with the number visited today and how the top 10 posts are drawing today (very neat).

The dynamic graph operates with the same efficiency and usefulness as the previous sections.

Secondary Sections

The Browsers page displays stats with browser logos within relatively scaled graphs. Very easy to read and digest. It would be nice to see platforms and resolution stats as well, though.

Stats for the Country of visitor origin are displayed within context a clean world map, with zoom capabilities and rollover country tool tips (a nice feature for a geography refresher, as well as helping bridge global blogging)

The Times that visitors arrived is clearly rendered within a dynamically generated graph, which displays the number of visitors per hour

The usefulness of the overall service is very high, especially for an alpha release. The behavioral and functional foundation is clean, consistent and ready for smart iteration.

Usability:
UI Design | Visual Design | Language| Presentation Layer

The user interface immediately struck me as one with a high degree of clarity, reduced down to a elegant and well structured design. Only primary and secondary colors are used with sprinkled, subtle visual clues, such as the Link area and RSS feeds tying together through the use of orange as a signifier of "connection" or "linking."

Explanatory and functional copy across the service is bold, clearly written and presented with the proper degree of contrast to ensure readability. The Visitor area copy and functionality is a little vague, as it leads me to believe that the number of visitors reflects unique visitors, which would be a great service to provide. I’d only ask AP to reinforce this with more direct copy in the interface if this is actually the case.

Visual displays of quantitative information (previous examples) throughout the service are extremely simple and powerful, both graphically and in terms of pertinent information. The dynamic presentation of graphs and data views doesn’t suffer from latency issues, and the experience is elegant enough to support the future addition of Ajax presentation features when needed. Adaptive did a great job in building this service from the ground up, as each design decision seems extremely well thought out.

How Did Measure Map Measure Up?

Overall, the presentation of Measure Map is a joy of an experience to view, read, manipulate and explore. Bloggers are going to be able to digest this experience with very few usability difficulties. I fall in the advanced camp, so some of my needs aren’t fully supported, but as an alpha release, man, this thing is looking like a home run.

Congrats, Adaptive!

Related reviews:

Flickr & QOOP
Google Reader
Flock
Yahoo! News w/ blog search
A9 Yellow Pages (.ppt | 5.2mb)

UPDATE: Check out some of the other early reviews across the web

… what would we call this incarnation other than 2.0?

About 10 minutes ago, I was in the midst of creating a post about Web 2.0 and how its principles can be viewed from both a macro and micro perspective when I paused briefly to research a few of the features within flickr to help illustrate my point. Lo and behold, I immediately trip right over a classic example.

This particular post was created via the "Blog this photo" feature in flickr, which interfaces with TypePad (my blogging tool), enabling me to easily share data and information while in the context of my current mental model: exploring photographs.

Web 2.0 Yellow Pages Case Study
Originally uploaded by spcoon.

I was reviewing my “Creating Humane Experiences” presentation image on flickr, and I switched right to blogging the image itself. How dope is that?

Before you shout out “super dope!” check out the feature for yourself and try to imagine which missing interface requirements would’ve make this feature even more “2.0″ dope. I’ve got one, modeled after the persona of a seasoned blogger (me):

How about a TypePad API which allows flickr to display my TypePad list of categories (tags) within its branded interface, providing me with the ability to tag my flickr generated post with one or many of my universe of tags and the ability to create new tags and add them to my current tag universe?

The decision to implement such a feature would be an even more concise example of domains working together to satisfy user goals and tasks. Interaction design 101, yet modeled across multiple domains and stakeholders. Without this tag feature, I had to jump over to TypePad to assign the tags separately, which greatly reduced the usefulness of the flickr blog feature for me, the potential, archetypal blogger.

If these domains were both open source, and if I weren’t so technically challenged, I guess I’d be able to whip up some code to make this feature a reality. Yet as much as I buy into that philosophy, that shouldn’t impede flickr from doing their due diligence in putting out the most useful and usable product, first and foremost. Yes, I know, flickr is in quintessential beta mode (another 2.0 principle) and will probably iterate to include the communication of tag libraries across both domains, but this example of a partially useful feature is why user research is so important when modeling the scenarios for useful experiences. Agile development and interaction design can live hand in hand.

Another example of cross-domain, data sharing needs can be found within Yahoo! 360. Most bloggers like having their own branded domain, so why not follow flickr’s footsteps in accessing any number of blog tools topost in the user’s own domain? Similarly, why not allow a member to access their blog feed from 360’s "Make your own blog page," instead of having to use the "Share feeds" area on the main 360 page to present their blog?

As a blogger, I appreciate RSS, but don’t make me retrofit my "blog" into a ill-labeled feed box in my own Yahoo!  360 environment, leaving the blog area unused. That says to me, "use our blog service or screw off." While Yahoo!, the behemoth corporation, has their finger on the pulse of the web, this particular approach is not very 2.0.

As for the viral aspect of Web 2.0, if you follow the top image to flickr and click the link within the description area, you’ll fall ever deeper into the rabbit hole of the Web 2.0 conversation. flickr provided the features for tagging personal photographs and creating HTML laden image descriptions; users extended that context scenario by leveraging the existing interface to accomplish other goals—in my case, the unabashed promotion of a user experience presentation.

Enjoy!

The longer we drag forward within a partisan run government, the more the Republican Party proves to be vile and full of power mongers.

This particular administration spins faster than a dreidel on Hanukkah and smears more often than a left-hander writing in a rainstorm, but if one can remain objective when studying their tactics, one cannot discount the fact that they’re a well oiled machine, running their party with business-like effectiveness. They’re so organized, they remind me of a hive of worker bees, humming to the whim of the queen, existing only for the future of the hive and a taste of the honey they produce.

This is how they roll — deep and in-tune.

So how do the Democrats stack up?

Bill Bradley recently wrote an opinion of the state-of-the-party in the New York Times, describing political organization in explicit detail; how the Elephants have created a thirty-year strong infrastructure — with defined roles, responsibilities and financing — to further their agenda, while the Jackasses get lost in the tactical arguments of the moment and eat their own in a fight to reach an elected seat. More specifically, the Republican Party has mastered the pyramid organizational structure. They’ve created a template for a replaceable leader at the top of a sustainable ecosystem, built to pro-actively defend their ideologies via responses in a moments notice from any type of Democratic Party or citizen retort.

Democrats, on the other hand, are renowned for tearing each other up during the primary season, unwittingly exposing each candidate to the Republican propaganda machine; a media machine that instills doubt in the minds of the casual electing public with repetitive rhetoric. So without the head-on-a-swivel organization of the GOP, each potential Democratic leader has to build his/her own pyramid of a strategic platform on the fly, sans the years of networking, research and coordination.

The results of such a non-strategy should be obvious. I mean, imagine how well an upside-down Egyptian pyramid would’ve worked out?

The Democratic Party claims to be the party for the common man, but through their actions they actually project the appearance of being selfish and petty. Individually, they don’t seem willing to barter for their place in a sustainable, Democratic Party structure, as they far too often seem overly anxious to take the weight of the world on their individual shoulders.

This me first perception can be illustrated in numerous tangible forms; their website is a classic example:

In the topical, global navigation, one category (People) reads as an attempt to describe the make-up of the Party. Rolling over the navigation nomenclature speaks volumes to their organization as a Party. What the Dems seem to want to do is show people that they have a broad set of programs and focus geared to numerous types of people.

What it says to me is that the Democrats cut the population into discrete targets, placing ethnic groups next to the disabled community; farmers next to Gays, Lesbians, Bisexual and Transgenders, etc. Sprinkle in each religion, old people, small businesses, unions, families, women and students and you have the American mixing pot.

Yeah, right.

Which groups did the Democrats leave out? How about Caucasian, middle-aged men?

By creating this hodge-podge of American faces on a single level labeled People, such a representation in the navigation screams, “Us white guys can help you needy and poor minority slobs out… Vote for us.”

What kind of an inclusive message is that? How does that message leverage the very diversity they’re trying to represent through their party? It fails miserably.

Imagine an African-American, bi-sexual woman coming to the site to find out more about the Party. Wouldn’t she feel a bit more like a cattle poster — with dotted lines drawn on her psyche, trying to leverage her leanest and most tasty parts — than as a partner in a political movement?

What about an atheist, homophobic, union member? Or a young, white metrosexual? Would this unspoken classification of European ethnicity as the default power representation model made someone feel uncomfortable?

Don’t get me wrong, compared to this current administration and the spin cycle of the right, the Democrats are still a beacon of hope… but an asteroid hitting the White House right about now would get the same props from me.

If the Democrats want to expand their reach into the Independent voter arena, they’ll have to start off by throwing their egos out the window, begin working together with a purpose, show some sack by speaking with conviction on topical issues and begin to create some form of a strategic plan to combat those evil, memory laden, pachyderms.

And fix the damn website.

Designers are held to such a double-standard, especially designers of the interactive media.

The stereotype of a designer is that he or she is, more likely than not, self-referential with their work. Business cringes when faced with the prospect of bringing in a new designer to a product team, as visions of a self-glorified, controlling, pompous designer wandering the halls, makes business and technology folks toss and turn in bed at night. I mean, come on, all designers are "shiny-shiny" types, looking for that Golden Pencil or Webby Award, right?

Business folks talk about wanting designers who have a rationale before, say, changing the paradigm of interface behavioral patterns or suggesting a different approach to the usefulness of the experience in the first place. Business wants a designer who has a process which substantiates their output; a smart, talented, non self-referential designer, able to take their domain (the business) into account when designing interfaces.

Okay. Fair enough.

So designers expose their craft, expose their thought processes, expose their methodologies to businesses and product teams in order to show that they get it. Seasoned designers are able to have a conversation about a business model; they can talk shop with engineers; they can subjugate their own system design preferences in order to understand the needs of the end user and the possibilities that lie beyond the present implementation model. The aforementioned approaches aren’t options to the craft; these are the multi-disciplinary skill sets required for the role.

Well, in steps technology with skin in the game to spare. “Innovation comes from rapid iterations of features” they say. “Okay” the designer adds, “Let’s just make sure we’re focusing on the right features, useful to people.” Instantly, product management begins to cringe, project managers start to steel up, cats sleep with dogs, etc.

Remember that the intent of crafting an interface is to create a representational model that reflects, as close as possible, the end user’s mental model regarding the goal and tasks at hand, not as an implementation model of the existing technology. So why is this method of getting to the interface so scary? Why is it so terrible to actually talk to “outside” people about product concepts? Designers create user archetype(s) and scenarios to represent the potential user base and their needs and desires in a product. If the synthesized findings confirm internal product vision, they can then be translated by the design team to craft interface behavior. This is how refined, holistic user interfaces are created across a single product, an entire domain and even into external product and brand communication. This is a cross-team, collaborative process which may or may not fine-tune the product offering, but definitely will improve the behavior of the user interface.

So is the hesitation from the fear of leaks to competition? There are ways to perform research without letting on who you are and even the concept of the actual product. And it can be done rather quickly. Or does the hesitation stem from a more human place; personal competition and the perceived loss of skin in the game?

If my non-designer colleagues in this field believe that user experience design begins and ends at the interface level, where it gets pretty, then I guess I understand the hesitation to leverage our methods. Maybe us design types should “just get drunk and throw paint on the canvas.”

Personally, I’m going to stick to my seltzer and keep asking questions.

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.

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 noticed something the other day about my online shopping pattern: I don’t browse and I hardly ever buy on a whim.

After contemplating such startling, introspective findings for awhile (uhm… finished), I started to wonder whether this could be the case with most people that shop online? That got me to thinking more, so I mosied on over to Amazon.com to perform an off the cuff user interview/usability study of myself and my tendencies, comparing them to the holistic user experience of the site.

I admit it wasn’t very scientific, but what I discovered was interesting.

• When I shop at Amazon, 99 times of 100 (I multiplied this session by 99) go directly to the search field and enter a product attribute.
• After landing on a results page, I choose a product description page.
• 4 out of 10 times (ballpark figures folks), I’ll review a few user comment reviews on the product as a the final check before deciding to make a purchase or not.
• If it’s a go, then WHAM! I’m in the cart experience and out the virtual door.

What I just described is the Amazon shopping experience from 1996-97. It’s a utilitarian approach and it fits me when it comes to shopping, especially in the real world (but that’s a whole other conversation.)

Online shopping, for me, is about keeping your recommendations to yourself, don’t clutter the page with collaborative filtered data such as ‘purchase circles’ or ‘listmania,’ and just let me find what I’m looking for and get me out of the store… fast.

My assumption is that this is how most people use Amazon. I could be wrong. I’ve been known to be… often. But if that were the case, even if the numbers were only 30% that followed my shopping pattern, wouldn’t the overall user experience be a bit too much? Wouldn’t Amazon be relying too much on quirky collaborative filtering techniques to become the next generation shopping experience?

I mean, first there’s a welcome page, then the Sean store, then a trailing history of what I’ve viewed, then recommendations built dynamically based on those views and presented throughout the UI. On top of all of this there is untargeted and targeted marketing messaging (hmm, sometimes in the form of recommendations?) presented to me at each turn…

Who’s handling the UXdesign here? How many marketing MBA’s are in a room with a cornered IA or DBA hatching plots to create cross-pollination of product silos? Come on, do I really care that people who bought my book also wear clean underwear from Target? Is this the smartest Amazon can be?

Amazon deserves credit for recently removing some of the superfluous features of the site from the main experience and placing them into the well hidden ‘explore’ category on a secret page somewhere in their navigation scheme. But the powerful information that this site could provide the customer should be generated at the customer’s whim.

Please, Mr. Bezos, we’re living in the realm of customization. Allow us to create our own product page. Let us choose if we want these extra features and how we want to view them. I understand there’s a fine line between satisfying the needs of your retail partners and pushing product, but when in doubt, bite the bullet and go with the us, the people, the customers.

Amazon is now six years old, the ancient mother of e-commerce sites. Now would be the time to design an experience for individual shoppers. Create a completely personalized shopping experience through customizable interaction design. It’s the next step in online shopping, and you know how the saying goes in the retail world: the customer is always right.

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.