User Centred Design

At Foviance, our job is to help the world’s leading brands understand their customers better. That means uncovering who they are, along with their expectations, goals, behaviours and attitudes. We use this knowledge to deliver an experience that pleases end customers while ensuring commercial success for our clients.

Before we begin helping clients develop their websites, we try and learn as much as possible about the business, its objectives and its customers. This is because we are a user experience and research firm, not merely a design agency. Many companies will pay for a redesign that is essentially just a makeover that shuffles various content elements around to provide a new look and feel. This approach fails to measure the quality of the user experience when interacting with a website, and will miss even basic issues with navigation, such as inappropriate titles and taxonomy.

We take a user centered approach to design that examines exactly what a site needs to do to improve the experience of those who use it. We undertake benchmarking and user testing to see exactly how customers are interacting with a site. We look at competing sites in the same market as our clients, to see what they’re doing. We also study best practice sites, such as Amazon, or Flickr.

This is what we term the ‘discovery phase’. Sometimes we uncover content that a client didn’t remember it was hosting, or find long forgotten functionality that is no longer working. None of this is good practice. We conduct site audits and click on any and everything. If a site is particularly vast, we might suggest delving only as far as sections and sub-sections within the main site is the best use of time. Once we have gained a deeper understanding of what a client actually has on its site, we can begin building a site map, or an organisational chart that reveals whether all content is in its optimum place. We validate this with card sorting exercises to ensure customers are aligned with our thinking.

Think of this process as if we were taking all the goods from a supermarket out into a car park, then restack the shelves in the most logical way for customers. This is done by breaking content down into cards, Post-its, objects in online tools - it doesn’t matter as long as it makes sense when we show our thinking to a sample of real customers, this helps to establish trends of opinion. In this way we are able to either validate current structure or create a new recommended site map as a basis for the design phase.

In the design phase we use wireframes on Visio, PowerPoint or even whiteboards. At this stage we still work in greyscale, but we are able to define elements and inform navigation. A new recommended sitemap will reflect this as well as the improved taxonomy, enabling customers to find things more easily and enjoy their experience more. Multiple wireframe iterations and rounds of user testing refine the process before it is handed over to a graphic designer to lay on brand identity and image. The graphic designer benefits from the groundwork and has a purely design exercise, retaining all the navigation, organisation and content rationale of the wireframes while ensuring colour, palette and sufficient scalability.

So this is how we do User Centered Design. It’s a sound methodology that has been rewarded with many success stories. If a client comes to us with a site that isn’t performing and a set of targets, this is how we get them to where they need to be. Can a serious business afford not to do this? Well, we believe that it is vital to get user input into design and functionality of all services, otherwise redesigners aren’t informed, they are simply based on assumptions - a dangerous strategy. A business does know its customers, of course, but without user testing, these impressions can’t fail to be at least partly a reflection of internal opinions that require independent verification.

At Foviance we understand the complexities involved through experience, and know that user testing of services in the early stages will definitely save money and time - wireframes are cost-effective and easy to change compared to a finished site. Sometimes it pays to bring in a specialist. Everyone is a photographer, but can everyone take professional quality pictures every time?

Interview with Fergus Roche, Head of User Experience at Enable Interactive, facilitated by Sven Krause

Fergus, you currently work as Head of User Experience at Enable Interactive design agency. What career path resulted in you becoming a User Experience Consultant? What skills have you developed along the way that hold you in good stead today?
The user experience industry is pretty young, so you’ll find that people come to our industry from design, technical, client services - all sorts of routes. I worked as a business analyst, notably in the pre-IPO days of Lastminute.com. I received one of the best commercial digital educations money can’t buy. It was brilliant there - very open, lively, rapidly expanding - all the things you’d expect of a big start-up. Following that I continued as a business advisor, and then worked as a producer in digital agencies, then over time the percentage of user-centered or information architecture oriented work just increased from say five percent of my job to 100 percent of my job. The obvious key experiences I bring to the role from my business analyst days are requirement gathering, process mapping, and aligning things strategically - that side of things. I deal with a lot of that in the work that I do now, running workshops for clients and taking a user-centered approach early on in projects to minimise risks. I try to harness my previous experience, as is often the case, and now I head up user experience at an agency called Enable Interactive in Bristol.

Can you sum up the concept of user-centered design in a way in which a non-technical person would easily understand?
I’ll have a go! It’s about realigning the way in which you design from the viewpoint of the user - so outside-in. You then need to use this viewpoint throughout the design process. In some ways it could be viewed as being in opposition to the older engineering process, which is from the bottom up. Instead of starting with the technology side of things and fitting the user into the tool or application, we turn this around. A useful information architecture, or IA example would be the traditional librarian approach to data management of a fixed set of absolute taxonomies for cataloguing information - I guess a user-centered approach is at the opposite end of the spectrum.

Why do you think forward-thinking businesses should be interested and engaged in a user or customer centric approach to their websites and other digital channels?
If I were talking to a business that knew nothing about this approach and thought it sounded a bit wishy-washy or woolly, then the clearest example I could give would be to cite Apple, as a lot of people in our industry do. In 2008 the iPhone was the second or third biggest selling phone in the US behind Blackberries, and Apple had never made a phone before. The iPhone is simply a brilliant piece of user-centered design, and it’s made a paradigm shift in phone design that is being copied by most other manufacturers. But this approach, like in Apple’s case, has to come from the top down, from director level. They are the ones that need to drive a user-centered approach to ensure it is properly adopted across an organisation. It’s not something that your design or tech team can all of a sudden start implementing. It impacts sales, marketing, all across the board in fact. It must be understood and bought into at board level within a company.

Fergus, you recently presented at the UPA conference in Turin on the use of ’storyboarding’ in the User Centered Design process. Could you tell us about ’storyboarding’ in a user experience context, and why this technique is proving to be so popular with businesses and their end customers?
Storyboarding, and visualising things generally, allows you to show an audience of project stakeholders quickly what it is you propose to do. The reason to use storyboarding, doing it roughly and quickly and sticking it up on the wall, is that you can very quickly talk through how you expect something to be used. The idea is to create a shorthand way of visualising a project without the constraints of actually building the thing. It’s a very successful approach used across the film and animation industry that allows you to quickly sketch out a process, a product, or a website. With Foviance recently for example, we used storyboarding to quickly sketch out a user journey through a website. It’s a really easy way for members of a multi-discipline teams to look at storyboards from their individual perspectives and think “Okay, I can see how that bit works with that bit.” It gets people on the same page really quickly and helps them work effectively together. I think it’s applicable for service design, process mapping, product design, website creation, campaign work - all sorts of things.

It must be a challenge though, to take people who have learned meticulous processes and get them to change mindset and adopt these new methods?
People have always been afraid of drawing and being confident enough to show it to other people. In a commercial environment it can prove daunting, especially for people who quit drawing as children. But I’ve been doing this a while now, and I show doodles across the board, to colleagues or in multi-million pound pitches and at no time has anyone ever said “You can’t do that! That’s not professional!” Start small, show them almost in passing, see how they react, slowly start rolling it out maybe on internal projects, work quick and dirty and see how it goes. I’ve found that me and people who are using it are always surprised how useful and engaging the process is and how positive people’s reaction to it are. Everyone can draw a story and make it understood by another person; it’s about feeling free to do it and not being shy about it.