Gary Barber has set me a challenge on twitter to blog about ‘Educating clients on User Centred Design (UCD) when they have big egos…’
This is something that I have become expert at over the last 8 years in the UCD industry 
So I’ll start with some definitions:
Educating: Countless meetings to describe what you do. You must focus on the opportunities that UCD provides and case studies of things that you have done for clients before (even though they are hard to find because those people with big egos don’t always track the right data!)
- Make this easier by having stuff written up before hand. Even get case studies from overseas and from big organisations that will make your clients listen.
Clients: The person who pays the bill. That is, the person about 2 rungs up the ladder from the ones who really care 
- Find out who this person is and meet them.
UCD: Involving ‘people’ in the process - hopefully those who will use the system in the future. Best if done before any coding is even considered.
- Need I say more.
Big Egos: These people come in different flavours:
- They think they know UCD after one training session on it.
- They have time and budgetary requirements to meet, no matter what, and their project has already started.
- And most importantly, they want to look good in front of their peers by showing that they are doing the right thing…
Solutions:
Big ego flavour 1: These people can be convinced of the best way to do things.
Have patience.
Big ego flavour 2: They need to be convinced to stop what they are doing and ask the person with the purse for more time and money. If you aren’t ‘in‘ with the big nobs already you will be on the back foot. Stakeholder interviews at the start of every project help over come this hurdle.
Have patience.
Big ego flavour 3: This group is the best. Make friends with them (read - understand what makes them tick) and then tell them all the things that could go wrong if UCD isn’t used.
And have patience.
On a transactional website it is just the same! If things don’t happen in the ORDER that people expect, and WHEN they expect it, then they will get frustrated, leave, not recommend it to their friends and not return.
Common processes, like that of a restaurant experience, form in society and are know as Social Scripts. Vgotsky (1963) suggests that they are a form of higher mental function that help us to create meaning from social interactions. And Ratner (1996) adds to social script theory and suggests that these social scripts are motivated.
Activity Theory describes expected social interactions at a finer level of detail, in a specific context and can be is used to inform artificial intelligence systems. It also notes that some aspects of the social interaction may go completely unnoticed by the people in it. For example, you may not see the chefs in a restaurant who are preparing your meal, but without them you would have no meal!
When building technology interfaces we must understand the Social Script that already exists in a particular context of use. For example, if you are building an Internet Banking website for the first time, you must understand the Social Script that already exists in a bank and all the things that contribute to a successful banking outcome. Remember, we used to do it face-to-face!
Have you experienced any ‘broken’ Social Scripts online lately?
References and example scripts of dining in other contexts are listed in this article
Check out this YouTube clip of some guys using a Tobii x50 eye tracker in a panoramic set up for all kinds of fun immersive applications.
Card sorting is a useful tool for UX designers and is described here on Boxes and Arrows by Donna Maurer from Canberra.
Sam from Optimal Usability in NZ has created the online card sort tool Optimal Sort
It has been available for some time now and they have finally released it commercially! Well done guys!
It’s great for open and closed sorting in preparing your information architectures.
Open: You don’t know what the categories are that your content will go into.
Closed: You know the categories and need to put the content in them.
From the OptimalSort site:
A way to understand users
Card sorting involves users of a website ’sorting’ cards into groups that make the most sense to them. The stuff that is on the cards is the stuff that is on the website. This process provides insight into how users think about information.
Running a succesful sort:
At Objective Digital we use OptimalSort in a number of ways:
- To manage a card sort in ‘live’ testing internationally. You just ask people where to put the cards and do it for them online.
- To run remote card sorting and validate what you’ve found out in workshops face-to-face
What other ways do you use it?
Man, this on has got me THINKING!
A group of academics has created an AI tool that simulates eye tracking heat maps on web pages. For Free…
It’s called Feng-GUI. All you need to do is type in your URL (5M limit) and your done! All the world can see it too BTW.
And here’s some details on how it works from a PhD.
It even has a firefox plugin, that doesn’t work on my Mac.
So here’s my site on Feng Gui:
The number of ‘how’s?’ here is absurd!
- How do they do it?
- How many people did they sample to get the data?
- How is it useful?
- How does it take into account context of use, demographics etc…?
- How do they ‘tune’ it?
Now for a test - here’s a site done by 53 people in face-to-face setting by realeyes.it in the UK.
And the Feng-GUI:
At this stage it looks pretty useless to me! Seems to focus only on images. Ah, people do read stuff! Not to mention the site doesn’t work on a Mac and when a page size is too large there is no error message on the page to tell you this.
At the end of last year U.S.News rated Usability and User Experience Specialist as one of the top 31 jobs in the US. The jobs were judged on Salary (US$98,800), Job Satisfaction, Training Difficulty, Prestige, Job Market Outlook. And they reckon you need a Masters Degree too!
So it’s about time the Universities listened up and created some more relevant courses for us to hire people from!
I’m sitting here keeping an eye on my three week old at 3am, so I thought I’d hook up with some more ppl on LinkedIn.
Normally, I just look through the contacts of ‘my’ contacts and invite people that way. BUT All I needed to do is think of every company/partner I’ve ever worked with/for/against and type their company name into the search box and there you have it - All the people should have linked up with but hadn’t!
Obviously the smaller the company the easier it is to find people you know.
Feel free to Link In with me!
When explaining usability to business people I often use the restaurant analogy to describe why they should consider involving the people who use their website in its development.
In a restaurant, if things don’t happen in the ‘order’ that customers’ expect they may leave, not recommend it their friends and not return.
You’ve experienced this one! You’re at a restaurant and if the waiter forgets to offer you a drink when you sit down for dinner you get a little irritated. Then he doesn’t offer you dessert straight after your main is done and you start fuming. Finally, he doesn’t bring you the bill once you’re finished. You get really mad and hopefully tell the maitre de!