Room with a view
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…