Gerry Duffy

Gerry's bio

Gerry Duffy has worked on a range of projects in gaming, banking and retail. A particularly interesting project he has been involved with, is measuring emotional engagement, EEM™, applying the research findings to a real user experience. Gerry holds a Masters degree in Human Centred System from City University.

"In addition to finding reliable ways of measuring emotional engagement, I am very interested in the usability and user experience with mobile devices. Mobile is the future of technology, and is an area that poses new and interesting challenges, both for businesses and for user experience experts."

The buzz around the office on Wednesday at Foviance was electric as journalists from the UK and Europe gathered to hear about our latest research into Electroencephalography (EEG). The research, commissioned by CA, tasked Foviance with proving or disproving the existence of  ‘web stress’ – a term coined by them to describe the meaning the stress or displeasure a user experiences when faced with slow or poorly performing websites – and it produced some interesting findings and a wake up to call businesses that trade online. Read more…

I have never been a fan of shopping on the high street. I try to avoid it until it is absolutely necessary and then, and only then will I brave the crowds, and the queues, and the obsequious shop staff. Shopping online is a better alternative, in my mind anyway. There are, of course drawbacks to shopping online that you don’t get on the high street. When buying clothes for example, you don’t get to see or feel them before you buy, never mind try them on. Although some sites offer video options which allow you to see what the clothes look like on, it is not the same. Read more…

I signed up to Waterstone’s card a couple of months ago (I was caught off guard at the counter when asked if I wanted to sign up.) I said ‘Yes’, instantly regretting it as I knew I would never use it. If you use the card when you buy books, you get points; on top of that, you get subscribed to their newsletter when you sign up – all pretty standard stuff. After a couple of months of receiving these emails, I decided that I wasn’t particularly interested in receiving them anymore. And this is when this ordinary experience started to go astray. After clicking on the link to unsubscribe, I was presented with a page that allows you to ‘manage everything to do with your email subscriptions’ – their words. However, in truth, this page only lets you sign up to receive more emails or change the email address to which you receive the mail – not exactly enabling you to manage everything to do with your email subscriptions.
After spending a couple of minutes looking for the unsubscribe option, I gave up, instead opting to mark the newsletter as junk mail and let the spam checker take care of it for me. I have since come across another mailing list which gave me food for thought. It employs a different tact - it gives the user a choice whether they want to unsubscribe or try the emails for another couple of emails – the number determined by the user. Empowering the user in this way is more likely to keep customers happy and in doing so, retain them. In addition to the Waterstone’s loyalty card that I do not use, their emails are now going straight in to my junk mail – which effectively closes the door on any future correspondence from them. And although this experience hasn’t put me off Waterstone’s completely, I believe that as important as it is to get the user experience right when opting in, it is equally important to get it right when you are opting out, otherwise you risk annoying customers and shutting them out for good.

The enterprising people at Nokia have set up a $5 dollar comparison website. This interesting site allows you to see pictures that have been uploaded by people around the world showing (you guessed it) things that cost $5. The website aims to explore the relative value of $5 and is asking people to upload their own images. Nokia admit that the amount is an arbitrary one but are most interested in exploring how low cost communication can be brought to the masses (3.3 Billion) still without mobile communication. Being able to tap into this considerable market would be very profitable for whoever gets there first.

It is an interesting concept in these frugal times, but is it one that is going to provide an insight into how to break into this untapped market? I am not convinced. I think it is a novel way to while away 5 or 10 minutes but that’s really as far as it goes. The most interesting thing about the site is what it highlights – the value of 5 dollars around the world. But of course communicating value it is not always as simple as displaying a picture of what it’s worth. Others have tried to highlight value in different ways, Boden for example have a formula that purports to measure the value of their clothes: value = price (£) / times worn.

However, highlighting the value in what we do as an industry is a different story. Companies do not always realise that investing in usability or the user experience can reap huge rewards. But I think, to be fair, a lot of companies are coming around to this way of thinking. However, with all the belt tightening and credit crunching that is going on at the moment, some have opted to try and save by cutting spending on evaluations. This could well be to their detriment as more prudent companies recognise that now more than ever is no time for cutting corners when you are trying to get an edge in a competitive market.

There are a number of ways to stay ahead of the game – analytics can help you measure success and failure and point to areas that cause users to drop off, not to mention understanding who is visiting your site and why. If this is carried out both pre and post user testing, its real value is clear. By combining analytics with user testing or an expert review you can get a more holistic view of your online offering. For cross-channel insight you can think about throwing emotional research into the mix. If your belt tightening is starting to make you feel the pinch maybe it is time to consider some of the above!

Since the advent of the mobile phone we have seen them move from being a large device used by a very select few to their current ubiquity, with some people owning two or more phones. How did we manage before we had them? However we did it is unimportant; the mobile phone is here to stay. This mobile evolution happened fairly rapidly and over a short space of time, which is due in no small part to the efforts of Nokia, who conquered the market in the late 90s and has seen off growing competition from other mobile manufacturers in the last couple of years. The legend of Nokia lives on and it has managed to keep hold of a sizeable share of the market, although the credit crunch seems to be loosening its grip, albeit marginally – Nokia’s Q4 market share figures for 2008 are down 3% from the previous year’s Q4 share of 40%. That said they are still leagues ahead of their nearest rival. I think the key to their success story can be linked to their heavy investment in user testing and focus on easy to use products. Nokia users are known to be steadfastly loyal and shriek at the thought of using another type of handset.

We face a number of challenges for designing usable interfaces on these shrinking devices. For one we need to contend with the increase in the number of applications and games that are freely available, mobiles are being used in many new and varying ways. Addressing how to make this interaction easy and engaging while on the move is a formidable task. The change from testing in labs to testing in the field will be an important one. Testing in lab conditions will highlight a high proportion of the issues but many more will be missed. Things like mid-day sun can be simulated to a certain extent but not walking and texting at the same time or looking after a child and trying to find someone’s contact details simultaneously. By using small cameras which can be attached to the handset which records participants’ interaction is one way. Another is to make use of embedded software which records users’ interactions, relaying the keystrokes and menu selections back to usability specialists to be analysed. However it is done, mobile testing is going alfresco. Far from being left out in the cold mobile manufacturers should take to the streets.

Recently I decided that it was time to move house, a change is as good as a rest, or so they say… It is also the first time that I have moved house since I moved to London, nearly two years ago. The first time was a less than pleasant experience; I was unfamiliar with the city and ended up traipsing from east to west swallowing hours of my time, only to find houses that looked like something out of the Young Ones.

This time it would be different. I knew the areas that I wanted to live in and the kind of place I wanted, so if I stuck to that, what could be simpler? Well… after viewing the first couple of places I realised that it was not going to be the straightforward task that I had hoped for. The descriptions of some of the rooms promised a lot, but, sadly, failed to deliver. I had resigned myself to more traipsing. This was until I spotted an ad that provided a link to a Youtube video of the available room. The video showed the room and the rest of house, which I thought was very clever. What it did was give potential tenants an insight into what was being offered and did it in a clear and concise way. Not only do you get to see the room without having to make the trip over there, but you also get the impression that there might be interesting people who approach things a little differently living there.

I didn’t get a chance to view the room, or meet the people, it was gone by the time I got round to calling them (which probably tells its own story). So the search goes on… but it did leave me thinking – How can we communicate the benefits of investing in usability studies as clearly as the video on Youtube showed the room? And what tools have we got in our kitbag that help us to do that? Research into emotional engagement is forging the way. By using tools like EEG and fMRI, we can paint a clearer picture of what keeps a customer engaged and on the website, while also placing a spotlight on the areas that are causing confusion. These objective measures provide a more reliable indicator than their subjective counterparts – interviews and surveys – which are useful tools but in some instances can be unreliable, with participants over reporting successes and under reporting failures. This type of data is pretty powerful stuff and will help convince even the most ardent sceptics of the importance of investing in usability.

Making use of this sort of technology can only lead to an increase in the customer’s user experience and may lead to products getting snapped up as quickly as the room did…

User experience has come to town, and it has come armed with EEG. EEG stands for electroencephalography and looks to be the new weapon of choice in user experience. It has been mentioned in the press quite bit in the last year or so, most notably for its use by Microsoft in the development of their new Halo game. Once limited to the medical domain, where it was used to diagnose cognitive disorders such as epilepsy; now it is being touted as a quantitative measure of a user’s emotional journey. It works by monitoring changes in people’s brainwaves and relaying this information back to a computer. The output is a number of measures – these provide an objective measure of the extent a person has to think about what they are doing, how much they are concentrating on their current task, and how emotionally oriented they are.

But isn’t this all a bit far fetched and the stuff of science fiction films? I do not believe so, and having being involved in some research in this area myself I feel equipped to comment. Usability has been evolving and has moved from the realm of quantitative measures, such as task completion times and number of assists, to qualitative measures gleaned from self reporting techniques, such as questionnaires and focus groups. The next stage in its evolution is into the emotional – user experience. But don’t take my word for it, HCI heavyweights such as Don Norman have already written about this (see Emotional Design). Furthermore, it can be seen that by triangulating the EEG data with other measures of user experience a high correlation does exist. Not only does it provide a means of pinpointing the highs and lows of a user journey, it provides us with a user experience yardstick with which we can measure these peaks and troughs.

Although EEG is still in its infancy and for now shouldn’t be thought of as some kind of user experience panacea, I believe it is a good starting point and something that can be used in conjunction with other techniques. As it grows and develops, so too will our understanding of user experience. Better make way for the new kid or there may be a showdown…