User Experience Versus Users

via UXmatters http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2013/12/user-experience-versus-users.php

By Paul Bryan

Published: December 23, 2013

“Recently, … it seems that user experience is increasingly playing a role in formulating designs that diametrically oppose users’ wants and needs for the sake of generating greater profits.”

The field of user experience has, from its inception, championed the notion that meeting users’ needs is the path to success for digital products. Recently, however, it seems that user experience is increasingly playing a role in formulating designs that diametrically oppose users’ wants and needs for the sake of generating greater profits.

The Growth of User Experience

By the early 1990s, the term user friendly was in common use for describing software that was easy to use. Throughout the ’90s, as more companies recognized that useful, easy-to-use Web sites led to fewer customer-service issues and greater profits, the topic of usability gained prominence. Around the year 2000, the field of user experience blossomed as more and more designers recognized that the design of digital products should focus on users’ complete experience with a product rather than paying attention only to ease of use. At each new step in this progression, meeting the needs of users was the primary goal. Over the past few years, user experience has enjoyed explosive growth, as evidenced by UX-focused LinkedIn groups with more than 60,000 members and international conferences like UXPA and UX STRAT springing up to meet UX professionals’ growing need for professional development.

Subverting Users’ Needs

“Where once the goal of user experience was to increase user satisfaction, companies are increasingly leveraging user experience in a manner that is contrary to users’ needs and, in some cases, even causing users harm.”

With great growth has come increasing sophistication in the practice of user experience, as well as in the role that user experience plays in digital product design and development. Unfortunately, not all aspects of this sophistication are positive—at least not for users. Where once the goal of user experience was to increase user satisfaction, companies are increasingly leveraging user experience in a manner that is contrary to users’ needs and, in some cases, even causing users harm.

Not long ago, I raised this issue in the UX Strategy and Planning LinkedIn group that I manage. I received some passionate responses that confirmed my suspicion that some companies are using user experience to better understand users’ needs, but then deliberately thwarting rather than meeting those needs.

Many of the comments that I received in response to this topic of discussion described Web sites that had poor usability or violated UX design principles. However, such cases have been common for decades, and they are not the focus of this column. The remainder of the responses—as well as my own research into this topic—fall into three distinct categories:

1. Not allowing users to do what they want to do
2. Impeding key task paths with forced interruptions
3. Tricking or persuading users to do something they would’t normally do

1. Not Allowing Users to Do What They Want to Do

“I love Apple products. … But their walled-garden approach to user experience has been a source of frustration to me for many years.”

This is the issue that got me to thinking about writing this column in the first place. I was working on a UX Strategy workshop that I was to give at UXPA in Shanghai—deep in thought and under the gun to complete the final presentation deck before the deadline—when the OS X Updates Available window shown in Figure 1 appeared in the upper-right corner of my screen. Unlike 99% of the other annoying pop-up windows that someone thought were a good idea, this one did’t have a close box, button, or link—or any visible way of closing it. There were two options, neither of which I wanted: Details and Restart. I discovered that the fastest way to escape from this cognitive pothole was to click the Detailsbutton, then quickly click Command-Q—all the while, silently cursing Apple.

Figure 1—OS X Updates Available window

Don’t get me wrong. I love Apple products. I own several MacBook Pros, a couple of iPads, an iPod, and a new iPhone 5s. But their walled-garden approach to user experience has been a source of frustration to me for many years. Why can’t I simply delete songs from my iPod without connecting to a computer? Why can’t I cut and paste files? No, I have to copy, change directories, paste, then return to the previous directory to delete the file. Training wheels in the OS that users can’t bypass are the Apple way.

More recently, some UX person at Apple thought it would be a good idea to remove the venerable Save As command in Lion. So now I need to go through a long chain of commands to accomplish the same thing. And I think about that UX person every time I do it and hope he or she has been fired—but not really. Apple must have realized the problems that this so-called innovation caused for users, because they’be re-enabled Save As in Mountain Lion.

Another user experience that prompted me to write this column was LinkedIn. LinkedIn is awesome! They have accomplished something amazing. Nevertheless, I get very irritated when a capability that I’be relied on for some time unaccountably disappears. All of the information that is necessary to do what I had been doing is still there. They just took out their UX surgical knife and—snip, snip—goodbye useful feature!

The UX Strategy and Planning group that I manage on LinkedIn now has a little over 8,000 members. Over the past couple of years, LinkedIn has taken away several useful group-management capabilities—presumably to create its own walled garden, so it can charge a fee for features that make the network useful. While this obviously makes sense from a shareholder perspective, it may make LinkedIn susceptible to an upstart competitor that figures out how to suck the data out of LinkedIn and return the most useful features back to its members.

One capability that I found really helpful was filtering group members by geographical region. I could tell how many people were in New York or in Europe, and this helped me in planning events like my UX STRAT Masterclass series. This capability just disappeared one day.

Members used to be able to communicate with one another without having to pay to send In Mail. I found this feature very useful for community building. But LinkedIn removed this capability, presumably to drive members out of the free zone and into their paid services.

LinkedIn has also reduced the abilities of group managers to control how content appears on the group’s main page, thwarting managers like me who curate the content carefully. They used to provide very logical displays of most-recent and most-popular comments, with Manager’s Choice items appearing at the top of the page in a carousel. However, in recent months, LinkedIn has rejiggered the formula that determines how items appear on the group’s main page—and to be honest, even though I look at it several times a day, I still don’t have any idea how the new content arrangement works, especially the Manager’s Choice feature. I imagine that they did this to push advertising slots upward in the visual hierarchy of the page, but it seems to have made the group landing page more random and less useful for getting a quick view into what’s happening in the group. Less control, more advertising. Snip, snip.

2. Impeding Key Task Paths with Forced Interruptions

“Most of the comments that I received from … group members … centered on such road blocks—that is, interstitial screens that interrupt users’ chosen path or content to display something they did’t select.”

Recently, I was sitting in Starbucks with my 14-year old daughter Carina. We were having a father-daughter work day, and both of us had our notebook computers out. For some reason, we were having a hard time getting on the free wireless network that Starbucks offers—and that I’be been using for years. It turned out that Starbucks had changed the sign-in user experience for its wireless network—from clicking a checkbox to agree to terms to watching a full-length commercial with a choice at the end to either follow the ad path further or go online, as shown in Figure 2. I finally figured out that closing the window after the commercial did’t take me online. I had to watch the entire commercial over again, then click the option to go online. I explained this to my daughter once I’d figured it out. She laughed incredulously and asked, “You’re joking right?”

Figure 2—Barrier to using Starbucks’s free Wi-Fi network

Most of the comments that I received from UX Strategy and Planning group members when I asked for input for this column centered on such road blocks—that is, interstitial screens that interrupt users’ chosen path or content to display something they did’t select. Inserting advertising into the path of free content was one of the main complaints.

Lan Guo wrote, “YouTube! Those painful commercials you have to sit through before you can skip.” Chris Mockus described the barrage of advertising that appears when watching TV or movies online: “You can pretty much watch anything for free in a browser, but have to survive a gauntlet of anti-usability, trying to get you to click an advertisement.” Michael Boyer pointed out Forbes.com as an example of content companies that display full-screen interstitial ads like that shown in Figure 3 before presenting the content that a user has selected.

Figure 3—Intrusive ad on Forbes.com

Nick Choo noted a couple of ironies in the full-screen ads: “OpenRice HK forces users to look at advertisements that cover the entire landing screen. Users have to close the ads before they can use the app. Funny, but I can’t remember any of the ads. It’s quite annoying, but … I’m still using [the app].”

Some commenters defended advertisers. Gabriel Patru wrote, “People expect ads when browsing for content. Yes, ad blindness is a behavior that is characteristic of heavy users and, most of the time, goes hand in hand with non-relevant ads. But, guys, online ads are still working. If not, they would naturally disappear.”

“It’s pretty clear … that ads are not working the vast majority of the time. The only people who don’t think that is true are the people embedded in the advertising world….”—Jared Spool

Jared Spool disagreed: “It’s pretty clear, as someone who spends a lot of time watching people use Web sites, that ads are not working the vast majority of the time. The only people who don’t think that is true are the people embedded in the advertising world—either advertisers or publishers that have decided they can survive only with advertisers.” Jared also proposed a solution: “But the smart publishers are seeing the writing on the wall and are moving away from ads. One doesn’t have to go much farther than the new designs coming out of the NY Times—like The Jockey—to see how they are moving away from pages riddled with ads, decreasing their page views and click-through revenue. I expect we’ll see more of this in the future, as business-model alternatives like metered paywalls become more prevalent.
Just because we’be done it for years doesn’t mean that everyone wants it.”

Danielle Cooley focused on other kinds of roadblocks: “I have seen a crazy rash of newsletter sign-up roadblocks lately and auto-playing videos that just has me going nuts. When did this become the new standard?” Danielle pointed out a recent roadblock with a surprisingly deceptive outcome: Clicking the close box took viewers to the promotion in the interstitial! Danielle explains, “One egregious [example] was the recent Slate debacle, where they put in a roadblock for their new online store (bad), then the X to close actually took the person to the store. Slate competitor salon.com [published] an article about it….” Figure 4 shows the offending roadblock.

Figure 4—Slate roadblock

Danielle also pointed out companies that present full-page offers to current customers who are trying to complete a task. She wrote, “This overlay appeared when I went to shutterfly.com, where I am already a customer. A sign-up form [was] the last thing I wanted to see.” Figure 5 shows the overlay.

Figure 5—Shutterfly newsletter sign-up form

Ronnie Battista took a different tack from most of the people who responded to my question: “I’ll be the first to hammer those commerce companies that either use deceptive, dark patterns or just obfuscate the process to extract primary or additional revenue in whatever form. When I have chosen to enter into a business transaction with you, to give you my money for your product or service, I expect an experience that demonstratively convinces me that I’m the center of your universe. Or, at the very least, that you’re not trying to get one over on me.

“But when it comes to anything free, it’s a completely different ballgame. As the saying goes—I’be seen this attributed to Facebook most often—“If you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” I’d put it this way: The customer is king; the window-shopper is meat. Free is free. If you did’t pay for anything, you aren’t owed anything, including a good experience.”

3. Tricking or Persuading Users to Do Something They Would’t Normally Do

“Many people who responded … were disturbed by UX designs that deliberately push or even trick users into making choices that benefit the company sponsoring the experience. These so-called dark patterns … are creeping into many Web sites and mobile apps….”

Many people who responded to my discussion thread were disturbed by UX designs that deliberately push or even trick users into make choices that benefit the company sponsoring the experience. These so-called dark patterns that are creeping into many Web sites and mobile apps have become so numerous that a Web site is now dedicated to them: Dark Patterns.

Gisella Famà, Senior UX Architect at Digitas Health, complained about the RyanAir flight booking process: “Every single page, tick box, and drop down is designed to make you pay more—and pay for things you did’t really want.” Gisella wrote that RyanAir’s site design is an "…example of UX completely designed on the client’s needs, without really considering the user experience and satisfaction at the end of the journey. User experience should be the best possible solution, considering both the client’s objectives and user needs.” Antonio Starnino concurred, “The Ryanair checkout process. Dark Patterns; dark patterns everywhere.”

As an example, Gisella described the approach that RyanAir uses to offer travel insurance to its customers, shown in Figure 6: “The possibility of choosing to travel without insurance, [with] no added fee is [hidden] on purpose…. You have to scroll down in the countries options to find it.”

Figure 6—Travel insurance offer on RyanAir

But Is This Really Wrong?

“Get the stakeholder [or] client to explain the problem they are trying to solve. Once you understand their problem, you will be able to present options and explain the risk of each option. Hopefully, you can find a way to solve the core problem that won’t hurt users.”

Jessica Hall provided some concrete advice for combating requests to design dark patterns: “I’ve received a few questionable requests in the past. Luckily, most of the time, the client or stakeholder [didn’t] intend to be irresponsible; they just didn’t think it through. I have two ways of handling this that have worked for me.

1. Work the problem. Resist the urge to recoil in horror, and get the stakeholder [or] client to explain the problem they are trying to solve. Once you understand their problem, you will be able to present options and explain the risk of each option. Hopefully, you can find a way to solve the core problem that won’t hurt users.
2. Use a business frame. Frame the user problem as a business problem. Shady tactics may work in the short term, but they have disastrous consequences in the medium-to-long term. Does anyone have data on how dark patterns are hurting businesses?”

Josephine Giaimo wrote, “Of course, revenue needs to be generated. The question is how to do so effectively and as part of an overall design philosophy that does not diminish, but empowers the user.”

Doug Morrow suggested that the key is respect: “Good user experience is based on mutual trust and respect. If I go into a store and am harassed and demeaned by the staff, I will leave and not come back. If, however, staff engage me with respect and courtesy, I am not upset when they ask if I ‘want fries with that’ or offer me a credit card….” Mike Cunningham agreed with Doug, but adds: “The question that has to be answered is: long- or short-term relationship? The [long-term view] of this relationship is at stake.”

Paul McAleer notes that there are some concrete disincentives for changing the status quo of UX dark patterns: “Conjecture based on experience: These dark patterns bubble up because they have very clear perceived value—whether it’s … true or not—that is, people click banner ads [or do] not remove defaults in checkout. Coming up with other options that would cater more to a user’s needs may cost more—time, money—and that carries additional risk. Some people simply don’t have the stomach for that.”

Mateus Barreto thinks that the issue is not just our being asked to create one or two sites whose user experience works against users’ wants and needs, but rather, that it’s starting to appear in UX job descriptions. He wrote, “It’s really not just about ads. I’ve seen job descriptions from Web agencies in which UX was basically defined as conversion optimization. While a UX practitioner must take into account all stakeholders—including taking business strategy very seriously—that is an absurdly myopic vision of the profession and bodes poorly for the perception of value [that] our work brings to companies.”

Conclusion

“I don’t want to do work that makes people buy things they can’t afford, don’t want, or don’t need. … However, I don’t think it’s wrong for other UX professionals to devise clever designs that push users from free to paid services.”

I don’t want to do work that makes people buy things they can’t afford, don’t want, or don’t need. There’s plenty of opportunity for helping people to satisfy their needs and reach their goals using digital tools, and that’s where I’d rather spend my time. However, I don’t think it’s wrong for other UX professionals to devise clever designs that push users from free to paid services. It’s a risky business—in that as soon as there were an equivalent free version, people would likely to switch to that option. But it’s not wrong.

Advertising will always be with us because marketers lack the imagination to design user experiences that entertain, engage, and inform, while also building awareness of a product or service. That’s where we come in. I don’t want to design roadblocks to content, but it’s not wrong to advertise.

Deception is clearly wrong. If the intent of a design is to obscure the fact that a site is adding costly options to a purchase without a user’s making a deliberate choice to add them, I consider that an ethical breach in which UX designers should refuse to participate.

- See more at: http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2013/12/user-experience-versus-users.php#sthash.RYzt9aQk.dpuf

Why 'Time Spent' Is One of Marketing's Favorite Metrics

via Mashable http://mashable.com/2013/12/13/time-spent-metrics/?utm_campaign=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial&utm_cid=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial&utm_medium=feed&utm_source=rss

BY LAUREN DRELLDEC 13, 2013

Time is money. Time is the enemy. Time is on your side.

We talk a lot about time, but the one thing we definitively know about time is there's never enough. For a marketer, that means you're going to have to work hard to get a minute or two from a consumer. You need to earn it, so if your site can garner a high time spent, pat yourself on the back for a job well done.

"Time spend is not a very actionable metric, it's more a sign that you've done the right thing," says David Marks, VP of product at StumbleUpon, whose average session length is an impressive 30 minutes for women, 22 minutes for men. Marks attributes the site's high time spent to the experience on StumbleUpon. "There are many reasons why people come to StumbleUpon, but a lot of it is focused around inspiring them, surprising them, entertaining them with unexpected content," he says. When users are browsing a category, they see hundreds of things they've never seen before that are very high quality about a specific topic of interest. "It's all about the experience, and a lot of it just holds people's attention," he says.

How Time Spent Is Earned

Marks says the StumbleUpon team pays a lot of attention to the very first user session, which correlates to how often users come back and how well the site retains them. "The longer that first session is, the more likely the user is to be happy and refer us to friends — it's a great predictor of how things are going," he explains.

But for StumbleUpon, that means the site needs to hit a home run on the first swing. Three things help determine how much time a consumer will spend on-site, the first time and any time thereafter — specifically for StumbleUpon, but also applicable to any content site — are:

• Do I care about this?
• Should I care about this?
• What's the quality of content?

StumbleUpon results for a search of "Mars"

One element that can't be overlooked when analyzing time spent is a site's organization and design. "The better the content and site organization, the longer users will want to spend on a site," says Jason Squardo, EVP of optimization at ZOG Digital. More time on-site means more engagement, which indicates a greater likelihood to purchase, sign up and share the content.

Time spent should be monitored along with bounce rate and pages per visit — knowing where users are spending more time and where they're bouncing means you can make real-time tweaks to optimize engagement. "While bounce rate is a great tool for identifying pages that are severely underperforming, time spent offers another angle by showing you how long users are spending on your site before moving on," says Jordan Bell, marketing manager at Advertise.com.

What Time Spent Can Teach You

Time spent also indicates user satisfaction. Unless you're masochist, you're not going to spend time engaging with a site if you're not enjoying it. The digital team at Discovery Communicationshas made the most of this idea. After several one-off live animal camera events with impressive time-spent results, like Shark Week's Shark Cam, the team launched Animal Planet L!VE in April 2013. The site is a digital destination for "ambient entertainment" with more than 20 streams of animals, from kittens to reindeer, and streams are viewable via AppleTV and on Roku, Samsung Smart TVs and Xbox. "The addictive, unfiltered content has spawned new cams and set a high bar for future products, with visitors averaging more than 12 minutes in the simple but engaging experience," says Stephanie Fried, VP of digital insights and marketing at Discovery.

Live video by Animal Planet L!ve

Of course, Animal Planet L!VE is primarily a desktop activation, and most consumers won't stream long videos like these on their mobile devices. And that's key to think about when analyzing time spent — the statistic can be different across different platforms, and even across devices on the same operating system, says Marks. People using an iPhone are going to have a different time on site than people using an iPad, and Android users actually spend 15% more time per page on StumbleUpon than iOS users. More broadly, mobile stumbling sessions are 13 minutes, much shorter than the site-wide average of 30 minutes (meaning desktop stumbling is closer to 40 minutes), since mobile is usually on-the-go, such as when people are commuting or waiting at a doctor’s office. That said, if you want to increase time spent for all of these variables, you have to research into the habits of users on various devices and platforms and optimize for that.

You can't "disentangle" product design from engagement and user experience — they hinge on one another, says Marks.

How Much Is Too Much?

Time spent is clearly a handy metric for interactive products (i.e. a game or choose-your-own-adventure piece) or content sites, but some businesses actually focus on cutting downtime spent. Take, for example, an ecommerce site. If a user has items in the shopping cart, the company will want to focus on making the shopping experience faster and more efficient, saysChristopher Penn, VP of marketing technology at SHIFT Communications. He cites a statistics from Amazon, which said back in 2007 that every 100 milliseconds of latency — time when a customer is waiting for something to load — represents a revenue loss of 1%. (Similarly, then-Googler Marissa Mayer had said "Users really respond to speed.") So while content wants to suck the audience in, microsites and landing pages often want to focus on reducing time spent on a page. Because once the user discovers the desired action, you don't need them to linger.

Whether your business will want to increase or decrease time spent, knowing what your site's actual time spent metrics are is half the battle, says Marks.

Whether your business will want to increase or decrease time spent, knowing what your site's actual time spent metrics are is half the battle, says Marks. You need to know the time spent and be able to compare it to other campaigns, comparable sites and industry standards if you're going to make use of the statistic and set feasible goals. You also, of course, need to know when time spent isn't really a top priority — perhaps you're looking for conversion, sign-up or a referral. But if you're in the business of content, there's one hard and fast rule.

"Try to add some value to the user, contribute something that will inspire, surprise or educate that person — at least on StumbleUpon, that kind of content does great," says Marks. "Time spend really is kind of a result [of good work], as opposed to a leading indicator."

Image: Mashable composite. iStock, akindo

Narrative Workflow Topics: Helping Users Connect the Dots Among Topics

8 Replies

I’m continuing my series of posts addressing why users can’t find information in help and what to do about it. The following reason received a high number of votes:

The answer is an isolated task, but the user needs a more connected beginning-to-end workflow.

This answer has received 66 votes. So far, the highest number of votes any response received is 78. (By the way, if you haven’t taken the survey, you can still do so here at the interactive poll.)

Leah Guren highlighted the problem of interconnected tasks in her talk at the UA Europe conference, noting that many smartphone guides might explain how to look up contacts, and also how to make a call, but not how to look up contacts while you’re on a call.

Help is typically written in a modular fashion. Most help topics focus on a specific task or concept, giving you a lot of detail and step-by-step instruction for completing that particular task.

But the task is often only one part of the solution. A user may need to leverage several tasks in context of each other to solve a problem.

An example of interconnected tasks

For example, at a previous organization, I wrote documentation for a meeting management tool. Secretaries would need to create a meeting, add items to a meeting agenda, send out the previous meeting’s minutes for votes in preparation for the meeting, route non-meeting items to an external voting process, arrange meeting items on an agenda, and so on — all within this web-based tool.

I wrote each task as a standalone help topic in a section called “Managing Meetings.” The model seemed fine if the secretary was already familiar with the application and just had a specific question, like how do I cast a vote for a meeting member who is on vacation? — or something similar.

But new secretaries or secretaries unfamiliar with the tool needed a lot more hand-holding. It didn’t make sense to give them all of these standalone topics. How would they know which order the tasks were to be completed in? Were all the tasks necessary to their role, or were some optional? When should a secretary complete each task?

Not every committee followed the same meeting process either. The tool was designed to support both formal and lite committee processes, with some committees voting and recording minutes, and others just displaying ad hoc agendas.

What was missing in the help file was a workflow or scenario-based topic. So I wrote some narrative workflows. The workflow topics went something like this (each bold-formatted word would be a link to a topic):

Mark is a secretary for the ACME committee. The committee has a meeting coming up next week, so Mark creates a new meeting and adds it to the calendar. Mark gathers agenda items and adds each item to the meeting. Mark also estimates the time for each agenda item and also adds times for guest visitors or other meeting events.

On the day of the meeting, Mark displays the meeting in agenda view on the projector while opening a second monitor to take notes. During the meeting, for each agenda item, Mark routes the item through several workflows depending on the nature of the item and the committee’s discussion. Mark can route an item through the voting workflow, the postponed workflow, or the resolution workflow. After the meeting, Mark closes the meeting and sends the minutes to all members for their review.

When the members finish voting on the minutes, Mark archives the minutes. If any committee members are out of town, Mark can vote on a committee member’s behalf.

See how this topic differs from the normal task-based topics? This is a workflow that tells the story of how the product is used. Most software has similar workflows for the user to follow.

Writing documentation for programmers is somewhat similar. As you reference techniques in an SDK, for example, you might say something like, “Now we leverage the length method to count the characters in the string, and then we use the push method to add it to an array and so on.

Programming builds on concepts and techniques, and it makes sense to link back to these other techniques as you explain how someone might use the techniques in context of each other. Simply having access to a list of methods with little understanding of how you use methods in context of each other requires the user to do the work of figuring out how it all fits together. Workflow topics explain how a person uses the various tasks in a harmonious order for a specific end.

To better understand the importance of workflow topics, consider a couple of analogies — with orchestras and connect-the-dots patterns. A flutist may know how to play the flute, and a drummer knows drumming, and a violinist knows how to play the violin. But do they know how to play in context of each other to create the sound of an orchestra? That’s what a workflow topic does: it teaches users how to move from a single instrument to an orchestra.

Or consider connect-the-dot patterns. It’s easy to make a straight line here, a curved line there, a right angle in another spot, but how do you bring all of those different shapes and lines together in context of each other to actually draw a picture? That’s the brilliance of connect-the-dot pages. They put all of those disparate lines in a sequential ordering that makes sense for a specific end goal (which, in the following image, is a picture of an elephant).

photo from flickr

The Problem of Linking

I think most of us would acknowledge the need for more narrative workflow topics. It’s a wonder why we don’t see more workflow topics already. My guess is that once we get so accustomed to working in an application, we become immune to the needs of a beginner user and forget about the person who needs more of a big picture and workflow before diving into the details.

Merely writing the workflow topics isn’t hard. In fact, it’s kind of fun because you tell a story of how your product is used, and if you can illustrate those steps, all the better.

But here’s where it gets tricky. How do you handle all of those links? For most people who write on the web, links don’t pose any special challenges. In fact, links are kind of an exciting prospect on the web because they feed Google with a lot of Pagerank. But most tech writers aren’t usually thinking about SEO as much as just getting the information complete and accurate and ready by the time the feature ships.

For tech writers who do multichannel publishing, links become a headache. You might build a grid listing deliverables against topics to keep track of which deliverables contain which topics so that you don’t link to a topic that isn’t included in a deliverable.

For example, you don’t want to have a link in your “Meeting Management Overview” topic that points to “Voting on Behalf of a Traveling Committee Member” if this topic isn’t in your output.

To get around the hassle of manually tracking which deliverables will support which links to which topics, some writers rely on “relationship tables.” These tables intelligently include links to topics only if the topic exists in the output.

Relationship tables sound like a neat idea, but in my opinion, they aren’t reader-friendly — the links get separated from the context in which the reader would expect the link, so the user has to know to look in the table below the content for links. You only hope that users reading about voting on behalf of traveling committee members will feel a need for more information and check the area they know to contain links.

Other tools like Flare allow you to run reports to see which links are broken or point to orphaned pages, helping you identify problems in the output. If you disregard the warnings, any links to non-existent topics will simply unlink the anchor text in the output, so it looks like someone forgot to hyperlink the text (e.g., For more information, see Voting on Behalf of a Traveling Committee Member.)

If you don’t have to worry about multichannel publishing, and you assume that the web is a single repository for your information, you can dismiss all the concerns about whether a topic exists in your output and simply link to the topic.

The challenge with web-based platforms, however, is being able to see all the pages that a page links to as well as all the pages that link back to a page. Any time you delete or rename a page, you’ll need to account for links pointing to the page and either update the links or add redirects.

Some platforms, like Drupal, are pretty smart about links. If you change a page name and URL, Drupal automatically creates a redirect from the old URL to the new URL. You can also add modules to see all the links pointing to the page you’re editing. But managing links is still a very manual process.

I’ll revisit links perhaps in the future, especially since I’m listening to a book on Google (In the Plex and plan to address SEO shortly. But I think it’s enough to say that links embedded in the context in which they’re relevant is the expected behavior on the web, reinforced by millions of sites that readers visit daily. If you implement any other linking strategy that may be more convenient for your content but which breaks readers’ expectations (such as omitting all links in content to help lower-literacy readers “focus” better), I think the content will ultimately fail in a number of ways on the web.

How many workflow topics do you need?

Another question to address is just how many workflow topics you need. The example I gave at the start outlined a very targeted use case and audience, but most products satisfy a number of different business scenarios and workflows. How many workflow topics you need depends on how many different audiences (or personas) you’re writing for.

If you’ve done some audience analysis and have a general idea that you’re writing for 5 different types of users, you can simply repurpose these user types and any persona sketches into 5 narrative workflow topics.

Or if you’re like me, you probably have a general idea of your users without any formal description of them. So here’s a great opportunity to formalize the use cases and audience for your product into mini-sketches that show how your product might be used.

Where do workflow topics appear?

Once you’ve written some workflow topics, where should they appear? It depends of course on the workflow you’re describing, but a good place might be an overview section at the beginning of your help sections or books. A narrative workflow provides a great overview topic, especially if you can link to all the pages within the section or folder.

If you have narrative workflow topics for each section, you could also stack these narrative workflows into various levels of detail. The extended example I provided earlier addresses managing meetings, but if the application itself is more broad, such as “administrative management,” you might have a larger narrative workflow that goes something like this:

Mark is an administrative assistant for ACME committee. Before he sets up any meetings, he first routes work orders for facilities maintenance into the system. During the meeting, he evaluates the work orders. After the meeting, he escalates the confirmed work orders into the mainframe system to communicate with headquarters. Headquarters then takes action on the work orders. When the work orders are completed, Mark then adds notes on the previous meeting’s agenda items to verify their completion.

Each of these links would point to narrative workflows that dive into greater detail. Of course it might be rare that one person would handle so many different tasks, and now the narrative is more of a list of possible actions rather than a story that shows sequence and workflow. But you get the point.

Why more narrative workflow topics aren’t present in help material

I suspect that while narrative workflow topics would be a welcome addition to help material, they aren’t as critical in help material as I originally expected. I wondered about this for a while, and the answer only occurred to me the other night while playing a complicated board game called Gingokopolis during “Game Night” at work.

One of the programmers brought the game from home, and although it looked visually interesting, it was pretty complicated. It took the programmer 20 minutes to explain how to play it. I have little interest in and ability with board games, but I wasn’t the only one confused. As the programmer explained this rule and that rule and so on, his words became meaningless and empty until one person said, “Let’s just start playing and people will soon get it.”

About 15 minutes later, the person’s prediction proved to be right — I did start to understand the game in ways that were only possible from actually playing it. Now the rules and instruction started to make sense.

And so it is with help. If you read the manual before you use the application, it’s the equivalent of someone explaining a complicated board game to you for 15 minutes before playing it. Only when you play it do the instructions become meaningful.

When people start playing around with an application, and figuring out its rules and concepts and interactions, eventually they’ll start to get it but will also have more questions. At that point, help becomes meaningful and relevant.

By the time the user consults the help, usually the user has already gotten the gist of how the application works and just needs clarification around the details. At this stage with the user, narrative workflow topics may be too basic and redundant with what the user already knows. This is probably the real reason why users haven’t been demanding narrative workflow topics in help material. Still, I think these topics have introducing new users to the general concept of “how to play.”

Additional Reading

• End-to-End Scenarios

- See more at: http://idratherbewriting.com/2013/09/12/narrative-workflow-topics-helping-users-connect-the-dots-among-topics/#sthash.KQuUagrQ.dpuf

via I'd Rather Be Writing http://idratherbewriting.com/2013/09/12/narrative-workflow-topics-helping-users-connect-the-dots-among-topics/

4 Tips for a Great First-Use Experience

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By Warren Croce

Published: May 6, 2013

“It’s impossible to understate the importance of a great first-use experience of your product or service.”

It’s impossible to understate the importance of a great first-use experience of your product or service. No matter how amazing your product’s capabilities are, if using it feels like a struggle the first time users try your product, you’ll have a hard time wooing them back.

What Is First Use?

Some people interpret first use very literally—meaning the experience starts the first time a person uses a system. While that’s certainly true, there’s more to it. In my view, first use starts with a user’s initial introduction to a product or service, continues as the user learns about what the product offers and signs up for an account or downloads the product, and concludes with the user’s actually using it for the first time. Your brand and how you want people to perceive it is also part of first use. For example, walking into an Apple Store is part of a first-use experience. If it weren’t, Apple could sell products off the back of a truck and save a bunch of money.

Why Is First Use Important?

“Your customers must be able to get up and running quickly and easily.”

The success of any product depends upon many things, but these three factors play pivotal roles:

1. Potential customers must understand what you are selling and why it’s worth their time and money.
2. Your customers must be able to get up and running quickly and easily.
3. You must deliver sustained value if your business is going to last.

I know this is basic stuff, but these factors build upon each other: Miss #1 and you can’t get to #2—never mind having the good fortune to be in a position to deliver #3. That’s why I like to think of first use as the first time a potential customer encounters your business.

Consider these four tips when crafting your first-use experience:

1. Be very clear about what it is that you are selling and why people would want it.
2. Make it drop-dead easy to sign up—or better yet, make signup an integral part of first use.
3. Incorporate step-by-step guidance, videos, and tips into the user interface.
4. Do usability testing.

Tip 1: Be very clear about what it is that you are selling and why people would want it.

“If, after looking at your Web site or marketing collateral for 5 to 10 seconds, a potential customer can’t repeat back to you what it is that you offer, there’s a problem.”

If, after looking at your Web site or marketing collateral for 5 to 10 seconds, a potential customer can’t repeat back to you what it is that you offer, there’s a problem. I often use Five Second Test to try out various homepage designs. It’s easy to run a study: You upload some screenshots and add a couple of questions that you want to ask users. Each user has five seconds to review your page and answer the questions. Then you get a nice little report at the end. It’s cheap, and it’s low overhead. You could do it today.

If you are still struggling with your design after a number of iterations, you might want to do the exercise shown in Figure 1, from Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm.

Figure 1—“Template for a Product Vision”

My product or service is:

For [target customer]

Who [statement of need or opportunity]

The [product name] is a [product category]

That [key benefit, compelling reason to buy]

Unlike [primary competitive alternative]

Our Product [statement of primary differentiation]

Forget jargon-laden mission statements. Take just a few seconds to state these parameters clearly and concisely, and you’ll be in good shape.

Tip 2: Make it drop-dead easy to sign up—or better yet, make signup an integral part of first use.

“The most engaging sign-up experiences are those during which users are actually getting something done, as opposed to doing busy work—that is, filling out a form.”

The most engaging sign-up experiences are those during which users are actually getting something done, as opposed to doing busy work—that is, filling out a form. There are many great examples, but here are a couple that stand out for me: Mindmeister lets users try a live demo and actually create something, then sign up afterward. Letting people use your product first is an effective strategy because, once users have invested their time, they can see your product’s value, and you’ve pretty much got them hooked. The same goes for Gliffy, where users start by creating a diagram. Only when they click Save does the site request their sign-up information.

There are some good resources that provide guidelines you can follow when creating your sign-up form. I recommend your reading Luke Wroblewski’s Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks. It’s a quick and easy read, and you’ll get practical advice for improving your sign-up form.

One guideline that I’d like to stress: please don’t ask for any information you don’t really need. The goal is to close the deal, not gather demographic information. You can ask for that later if you really must.

Another piece of advice I’d like to offer relates to the layout of your sign-up form: If there are only a few fields—which means you have a nice, concise form, way to go!—place labels above the fields instead of at their left. This is cleaner visually, and users can easily scan the form. Placing labels within fields is becoming more prevalent and may work okay if a sign-up form is very short and the label/value pairs are familiar—as for name, email address, and password. However, because a field’s label disappears once a user clicks the field and the field is in focus, I advise against taking this approach for longer forms.

Finally, your email confirmation message should do the following:

1. Reassure users that they’ve been successful.
2. Give users a place to go if they have questions.
3. Give users a clear call to action—Get started now! or some such.

Tip 3: Incorporate step-by-step guidance, videos, and tips into the user interface.

“One technique for getting users started is to bring them into a workflow right after they’ve completed signup.”

Okay, so you’ve hooked your fish. What you don’t want to do at this point is dump users into your product and leave them feeling like Alice in Wonderland. One technique for getting users started is to bring them into a workflow right after they’ve completed signup. Mint.com provides a good example of this approach, as shown in Figure 2. The Let’s get startedpage is the first thing users see after clicking Sign Up. There’s nothing left to the imagination here. Users won’t be falling into any rabbit holes. They can follow the three steps in this wizard to add an account. Plain and simple. What I like about this design in particular is that, if a user closes this window, the same three steps are behind it on the Welcome screen, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 2—Mint.com’s Let’s get started wizard

Figure 3—Mint.com’s Three easy steps on the welcome page

Another approach is to provide a getting-started video of some sort. Asana displays the video shown in Figure 4 immediately after a user has successfully signed up. Most important, they let users know that watching the video is going to take only 2 minutes out of their life—and it will probably save them a bunch of time in the long run.

Figure 4—Asana’s Learn how in 2 minutes video

Lastly, providing tips to help users get oriented with a user interface is a nice, warm, and fuzzy technique that I like to employ. Docracy does a nice job of incorporating tips into their design, as shown in Figure 5. The tips work well visually, and users can either continue moving on to the next tip or click the close box to stop viewing them.

Figure 5—Tips on Docracy

The main questions to address when designing tips are: How long do the tips stick around? Once a user dismisses them, are they gone forever? Is there some way to bring them back? Do they stop appearing after a certain number of visits? There are all things to consider.

Tip 4: Do usability testing.

“Because your product is new to participants in usability studies, they are precisely the right people to give you first-use feedback.”

I could write a whole article just on usability testing, so I’ll focus on just a few basics and explain why doing usability testing helps first use.

When I conducted my first usability study in 1999, it involved two-way mirrors and lots of machinery. Participants had to take time out of their day to come to our lab for a study. Of course, there are advantages to having participants sitting next to you, and I sometimes still do face-to-face studies, but overall, lab studies are not a lightweight approach. These days, we usually want to move quickly: test, iterate a design, and test again.

For usability testing, the main considerations are

1. in person or remote
2. moderated or unmoderated

Over the years, I have become a big fan of remote usability testing. There are now powerful, but inexpensive online tools that make the job easier. (I’ll talk about those in a minute.)

Regarding whether to moderate test sessions, here’s my advice: If you need data about why users are doing something and you want to get into their head, do a moderated study. You’ll be able to inquire about what they’re doing and why.

On the other hand, if the kind of data you need is more like Did users find the link within x seconds? doing an unmoderated study will probably be sufficient. You still have the opportunity for inquiry through questionnaires. There’s just no back-and-forth dialogue.

There is quite a range of tools out there, but here are my favorites:

• For remote, moderated usability testing—I use WebEx or GoToMeeting. Their main benefit is that you have a way to share your screen and can give the participant control of it. The moderator and participant can converse while the participant performs the tasks on the shared screen. Works like a charm.
• For remote, unmoderated usability testing—I have used UserZoom, which is a very robust tool, but at the expensive end of the pricing spectrum; and TryMyUI, which is at the cheaper end. I used TryMyUI recently to test a service that I launched, calledPortfolioSpring. Within a half hour, I had a study set up. Within two hours, I had feedback from six participants that was invaluable to me.

I recommend starting small with a tool like TryMyUI, then moving up to more robust tools as your needs change. One thing to keep in mind regarding some of the cheaper tools: participants probably won’t belong to your targeted user group. So, if your goal is to get feedback only from hipsters, aged 25 to 32, who are living in Brooklyn and working in a non-profit, you’ll probably have to upgrade to a more full-featured system.

So, why is usability testing important to designing first-use experiences? In general, doing usability testing gets you and your team out of your own heads for a while. You may or may not like what you learn, but you’ll get to see your design from someone else’s perspective—someone who doesn’t live your product day to day, who can offer a fresh point of view, and can tell you whether what you’re selling makes sense. Because your product is new to participants in usability studies, they are precisely the right people to give you first-use feedback.

In Summary

What I love about designing for first use is that it’s a focused design problem. Solving this problem is all about clearly communicating your product’s value, getting people to buy into it, and making them feel comfortable when they enter your world. I hope these tips have been helpful. They are just a few of the things you should consider when designing for first use, but can help you greatly in getting your team laser focused on creating a great experience.

Topic: Usability | User Experience (UX)