User Experience

Keyboard accessibility is one of the most important aspects of web accessibility. There are a whole host of reasons why certain users will find mouse usage difficult or impossible. Some users may have no use or limited use of their hands or arms and rely on the keyboard or alternative input devices to navigate websites. Blind people using screen reading software almost exclusively rely on keyboard navigation.

Recently, in my role of auditing websites for accessibility, I have come across a number of websites that make keyboard navigation impossible, because critical sign-posting allowing users to see where they are on the page are missing.

When keyboard users navigate websites, they jump from link to link using the tab key. They can see where they are on the page because the link with the focus has a dotted border around it. These borders should be visible by default, like they are on the BBC website but on a number of websites I have visited, they have been removed. Maybe the web designer considered them ‘ugly’ and removed them (this can be done by setting the physical appearance of the ‘outline-style’ property to ‘none’) because they spoilt his or her design of the page, not realising the huge impact this has on users with disabilities.

Dotted borders on the BBC website appear
around links that have the current keyboard focus.

The simplest way to ensure that a visual indicator is present is to do nothing and let the dotted borders appear by default. However, these dotted borders are not always easy to see, especially if background colours are being used. To make them obvious, CSS techniques can be used to display a different background colour when the link receives the focus. This is a great technique and can be seen in action on the Easy Slideshare website.

Links with the current keyboard focus can be made
more obvious by adding a different background colour. 

A clear and distinct visual indicator is essential for sighted users that rely on keyboard navigation. Without them, websites become impossible to use as users are not able to see where they are on a page.

The rise of the power of user generated content is leading organisations to offer new ways of enticing participation, and an innovative example I will be following is that of Simon Seeks.

There are plenty of sites vying for participation, in the form of user generated content: some offer to pay up front for the content, while others hope that by linking into other successful social networking sites, that they will boost their usage, and a confident few are content to start by carefully seeding, hoping that the community will grow, simply through brand, interest or both.

However Simon Seeks offers rewards based on both conversion and loyalty. Registered users of the site write reviews. If their review leads to other users booking a holiday, they are then given financial rewards back. Conversion and loyalty are not new, but it’s a model of encouragement that I have never seen before.

I guess the hope is that if reviewers are rewarded with something in context, it should lead them to have another experience, and in return, for the site can hope for loyalty, and more crucially, another review posted of that new experience.

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?

We’ve all been there. Sitting round a conference room table discussing with our colleagues about the design of the website, the flow of a particular user path or the layout of a particular page. Opinions differ on what would work best, whether the call to action button should be red or blue, square or round, flat or bevelled. We all know best, because we’re experts. Aren’t we? In some cases it may not matter how expert we are, because the loudest voice will win or the most important person’s opinion will be the one that counts.

This is what happens in the absence of good data to guide decision making. It becomes subjective and vulnerable to interests, politics and personal preference. Good optimisation strategies are built on good data, coupled with an ability to drive through change. In the ‘red versus blue’ debate, what better way to find out than to try both of them and see which one works best? That’s the basis of a testing and experimentation programme. A/B testing and its more sophisticated cousin, multivariate testing or MVT, have been around for years as techniques in direct marketing and other analytical disciplines. These techniques allow you to test different versions of a page or different combinations of different elements on a page to see which one works best. Although the analytical techniques have been around for years, it is only relatively recently that they have begun to get adopted and gain traction in online marketing.

A/B testing is conceptually very simple but can be difficult to execute. To see whether the blue button would be better than the existing red button, two different versions of the page would be created, one with each different button. As visitors arrive on the website one set of visitors would be shown version A, and the remainder would be shown version B. The effectiveness of each page is measured according to whatever success criteria are the most relevant. Multivariate testing uses a more sophisticated set of algorithms to allow you to test multiple versions of different elements of a page at the same time.

Whichever testing regime is the right one, the challenges historically have been in implementation. It can be technically challenging to manage the process of setting up different versions of pages, splitting the traffic between them, setting up the measurement and then analysing the results. This heavy lifting has now largely been addressed by the availability of specialist testing and experimentation platforms such as Omniture’s Test & Target, Autonomy’s Optimost or Google’s Website Optimiser. Whilst the implementation of these services is not trivial, they manage the whole testing and experimentation process from deployment through to results.

The challenge for organisations then, still remains “What to test” and “How to test”. Analytics, survey data and usability evaluations can all help to identify the priorities for a testing programme. Start at the greatest pain points but also sort out the operational processes around the initial deployment on pages that are not too complex or mission critical. Marketing landing pages are often a good place to start. The question then becomes how should the page be tested? The challenge here is to ensure that you come up with a good test design. In our ‘red versus blue’ debate, are these the best options to test? What about green or orange? You could test those as well but in reality the number of variants that can be tested is limited. It’s important to ensure that you’re testing the right things in the right way. For me, this is where user experience expertise adds value to an analytical testing programme. Customer experience experts can identify which variants are likely to be the most effective and ensure that the test is as efficient and as effective as possible and the analytics experts can run the experiments and do the analysis.

Testing is a powerful tool in the site optimisation toolkit but it’s important to test the right things in the right way.

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.

Very often, when users encounter difficulties operating on digital systems, be it on a mobile or when browsing a website, they start to blame themselves for a lack of attention or carefulness. But when something goes really wrong, it can’t be anybody’s fault but the system designers.

Once upon a time…Well, on a business trip to Paris last week, I arrived late at the hotel and before retiring for the night, wanted to check e-mails and entertain my mind before switching off. The only available option to connect to the Internet was a local pay per use WiFi network (not controlled by the hotel). Just like in airports, you connect to the Wifi network, reach a portal page, buy your credits, go back to the portal with your given login details and eventually start surfing. Sounds straightforward…

So, off I went: I connected to that network, accessed the portal page, found the link to the credit purchase page, selected my deal, typed in my credit cards details and email address and reached the confirmation page. And it read that my login details had been sent to the email address I provided them with. This would have worked out assuming I was connected to the internet, but five seconds later, I got redirected from the page back to the portal: “Please enter your login details to connect to the Internet”… I may have sworn at this point.

This left me dismayed and seriously annoyed. So, on the verge of believing I was a complete idiot as I MUST have missed something, I went down to the reception asking for help. They explained that there were many others before me who’d encountered the same problem and they were kind enough to let me use their computer to check my emails. This slightly brightened up my overall experience but certainly did not solve the core of the problem.

How can such a conceptual flaw be? When there is a serious and consistently reported fault, why has not been fixed yet? Who is to be blamed: the hotel for not doing anything or the provider for delivering a bad user experience? What impact must this issue have on the customers’ perception of the hotel (they all surely don’t separate the Internet provider from the hotel)? So many questions that prevented me from “living happily ever after”…

I attended the eConsultancy user and customer experience roundtable last week, where I was able share knowledge and experience about the current state of play online, and listen to stories from others working in the field.

I was heartened to hear from the majority of those attendees working in house, their plans for 2009 are largely intact, as budgets concerning customer experience are still available - this is in line with a recent US based article I read from Forrester. And it is not surprising in the current climate, that for some, measurements are moving more to customer engagement, rather than simply conversion.

Multi-variant testing was discussed, as some attendees currently use the technology; while others appeared sceptical of investment (financial outlay, design, technical) - they are more interested in placing their efforts into refining concepts and copy as a part of an iterative design process, engaging with customers along the way.

Lastly,  the discussion I valued the most was on measuring customer experience using more than just the online channel. For example, looking at channel management from call centre to web, click to call functions, and the total cost of a sale. Here I got the feeling that the industry is moving in the right direction, but there are few organisations out there who have really taken the time to define comprehensive channel management programs. At the moment the majority of approaches are of a more tactical nature, focusing on particular products. Let’s hope that with maturity, will come broader approaches.

This week I talk with Matt Davey, CEO of NextGen, one of the biggest innovators in slots over the last number of years so it was a pleasure to meet with Matt.

NextGen have pioneered the concept of game development that is independent of any platform. This has led to an increase in the quantity and quality of games that operators can now offer on their site which has greatly improved the user experience.

In the interview he provides a number of key insights into the key differences between land based and online casinos and what the two can learn from each other. He also talks about the different markets that NextGen operate in throughout the world. Finally we discuss the upcoming innovations in slots that will have a major impact on user experience. Matt highlights two key innovations - the ability to use 3D graphics to create a more immersive experience and the social aspect that users clearly engage with as can be seen with the success of bingo.

• Episode title: Matt Davey from Next Gen Gaming on Slots
• Episode number: 3
• Series: Innovations in eGaming
• Duration: 16 minutes

Listen now:

Or, Download the Matt Davey podcast (7.5mb)

As always, please leave any comments you have or send me an email.