Precedent #usabilityfail seminar part one

UsabilityFail Stop wasting your marketing budget on bad usability Mark Sherwin & Dan Baker

@PrecedentComms #PrecSem #UsabilityFail

Usability

Desirability

User experience

“I can easily use it”

“I like the way it looks and feels”

“I like the product”

“Is the product useful to me”

It starts by being useful...

Functionally people must be able to use it...

The way it looks must be pleasing...

The overall experience

Executing well on all of these areas creates a positive user experience. Research and testing is need for each.

Utility

Common Sense Fail iTunes Legal Agreement: g. Blah blah blah... You also agree that you will not use these products for blah blah blah... the development, design, manufacture, or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.

More than two thirds of companies (68%) recognise a strong link between long-term business performance and customer experience.

Econsultancy Multichannel Customer Experience Report, 2010 http://econsultancy.com/uk/reports/multichannel-customer-experience-report

Hands up if you have a digital marketing budget

Quick straw poll:

Keep your hands up if you also have a usability or user experience budget

Quick straw poll:

Keep your hands up if your usability budget is the same or more than your digital marketing budget

Quick straw poll:

― Search Engine Optimisation

― Pay Per Click advertising

― Referrals from groomed sites

― Engaging Social Media

― Integrated offline marketing

...and it’s a utter waste if they walk away

Increasing spend 100% may deliver 5000 users, but only add 100 enquiries

Optimising the journey by an additional 2% will add 100 new enquiries

tangible benefits

‘Begin with the end in mind’

Business objective

Goal

KPI 1 2 3

Business objective Grow level of membership in the organisation Raise profile of organisation Increase commercial revenue

Goal

More new members

Retain current members

Become synonymous with our central issue

KPI

Complete registrations

Complete renewals

we

Increase in inward links

Increase in qualified enquiries

1 2 3

More service sales

37% 100%

$80k $1m

intangibles

Spend 10% = Improve 83% Jakob Nielsen

...so how do we do it?

set the direction

Using journeys to inform activities

understanding your users

• What do your users want to do? • What do you want them to do? • What barriers do your users face?

You are not your users. Neither is your boss.

Dr Alan Mackintosh, GP, 40Key tasks

• Alan is a busy man with little free time between work and family life. He subscribes to updates from alumni relations and the events section of the site to keep up to date with new information

• He keeps an eye on upcoming events and lectures, trying to find time to attend one or two a year

• He finds and keeps in touch with other alumni though the website and especially enjoys reunions when they are arranged

• Research is another important area , keeping him up to date in his own area of expertise. Some old friends from his student days are now work at the University, and he is always interested in reading work they publish

You would like to promote

• Alumni benefits and networking events/opportunities

• Upcoming events and seminars particularly alumni events and those related to medicine

• New research that’s being carried out

• News feeds, so that Alan can subscribe

• How, when and where alumni can donate to the University

Persona 4: Alumni

“I keep an eye on upcoming events and research my old friends at the University are doing. News feeds are important as I’m a busy man”

Alan is a GP, living in Hertford, Herts, with his wife Alana and their two small children; Isla 9, and Hamish 7. Alana is pregnant, so there will soon be yet another addition to the family. After Alan graduated his first job was in Scotland, after which he moved to Cambridge for his GP training. His main interests are art history and photography, but he also enjoys bird watching, playing golf, art galleries, theatre, music and the pub - Alan is a big fan of real ale. He is not politically active, but he supports the coalition government.He accesses the internet both from his PC at work and at home using his laptop and his new iPad. Websites he visits are Flickr, the Independent, Amazon, eBay, Waitrose, Expedia, Wikipedia and Art. His parents live in Edinburgh so he is still in touch with the area and the local community. He has an interest in distance learning.

Web usage

Access to other information platforms

Use of your website

Strength of relationship with you

why usability fails

Why usability fails

1. Lack of consistency

2. Lack of clear navigation to common

goals

3. Lack of orientation in the process

4. Lack of error handling

5. A lack of clear closure

6. No easy reversal of actions

7. Lack of control / flexibility

8. Content is unclear and hard to read

9. Too much information / memory

required to perform action

Jakob Nielsen

User-centred design process

Usability testing

Watching people try to use what you’re

creating / designing / building

(or something you’ve already created / designed / built)

with the intention of

– making it easier for people to use or

– proving that it is easy to use

Steve Krug

Usability testing: scale and fidelity

1. Define your audience and their goals

2. Create tasks that address those goals

3. Get the right people to test with

4. Watch them try and perform the tasks

The Micro-usability test

The Micro-usability test

A quiet space

The Micro-usability test: with stakeholders

Stakeholders in a different space A quiet space

Check your unexpected bounce rates

Check your unexpected exit pages

What does it cost?

so what does it cost?

now who’s going to own this?

Attracting people to the site

Delivering what people do on the site

Making the

site work Manage site

Marketing

Services /

Products

Web Team IT

Attracting people to the site

Delivering what people do on the site

Making the

site work Manage site

Marketing

Services /

Products

Web Team IT Usability

– Customer and stakeholder workshops

– Requirements gathering and analysis

– Competitor analysis

– Analytics reviews

– Ethnography and contextual inquiry

– Focus groups

– Depth interviews

– Surveys

Take the time to understand your business and customer needs

– Experience vision

– A/B testing

– Persona development

– Scenarios and use cases

– Mental models

– Information architecture development

– Prototyping

– Usability testing

– Longitudinal studies

business goals + user goals = positive UX

The golden rules 1. ignore the myths 2. consistency is king 3. content, content, content 4. focus on forms 5. mobile is a must 6. accessibility is relevant