Ask A User

The Agile2010 conference was a wonderful learning experience.  I presented “Getting Started with User Research,” an intro-level session, and I quickly found out that many people attending the UI/UX Practices Stage were already very experienced in UX and Agile (not just the presenters). I was thrilled to find so many more people that I could learn from between sessions, which just added to the overall feeling of a very friendly and welcoming conference.

I’ve included some comments in this post about the presentations I felt were most thought provoking and fun to attend.

Beyond Sprint Zero: Using Collaborative Product Discovery to Plan Agile Projects

Jeff Patton was perhaps the most exciting speaker I had the pleasure of being in the audience for. His views on integrating Agile practices with UX are spot on. One slide showed a puzzle with a piece in the middle taken out. The removed piece was the solution and around the “hole” were all of the pieces that make up the context of that solution. The context he described included: business strategy, users and goals, product stages, and regulatory constraints. Yes!

Jeff also spent a great deal of time emphasizing that the target solution needs to be outcome (solutions that create maximum positive impact and happy customers) and output (ideas, features, capabilities, specifications, requirements) needs to be minimized. This is of course in an environment of constant, incremental, development. What a happy place the world would be if there was less output and more happy outcome!

I was drinking the Kool-Aid strong until he introduced “simple lightweight “pragmatic” personas to learn what you don’t know about your users.” The idea of doing this didn’t bother me as much as using the word “Persona” to describe the result. I totally agree with the method of gathering everything you know, putting it into a template for a persona and seeing what you are missing. But the idea that someone might refer to that as a persona does bother me, because a well-done persona is based on research and traceable to that research. Many of my clients are uber concerned about using the correct corporate terminology for various UX activities, that it has caused me to get very tied up in semantics. In the end, what is really important is that people realize that talking to users is extremely important, regardless of what it is called.

Improving Customer Conversations

Esther Derby helped attendees to improve their interviewing skills. While this was review for me, it was extremely helpful to hear how she presented the topic and what techniques and activities people were familiar with. Esther has a great approach to interviewing, is a wonderful presenter, and gave conference attendees a bag stuffer that included questions that would help them to change their organization by changing their questions.

The Right Way to Wireframe

Todd Zaki Warfel presented “Opening the Kimono“, which included a brief exercise and explanation of the 6-8-5 technique (6-8 small sketches in 5 minutes) for sketching wireframes. It was wonderful to see many of the techniques I learned 10 years ago and that I feared were perhaps out-of-fashion, are still being recommended by those the IxDA community reveres as its best.

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I hope to attend Agile2010 again in the future. I met many fun, smart, people and learned a lot as well. I highly recommend it if you are looking for a good conference that mixes Agile and UX.

In this third installment of  ”Building a Great Usability Lab” we discuss the user’s perception of the testing environment and their experience in that environment.  The user’s experience within the environment is just as important as their experience with the product being tested. You should design your testing environment so that it is approachable and flexible.   An environment that is unfamiliar to the participants can be unwelcoming and uncomfortable.  Ensuring that your setup is flexible and easy to manage will help minimize frustration in both participants and testers. While all of these suggestions may not be possible, use what you can to improve your studies, and make your participants more comfortable.

Approachable

The testing environment should seem familiar to the participants. This can be tough when your participants range from elementary school kids to upscale financial advisers, but it can be done.

Have a variety of seating options available including:

• standard chairs that support large people (300 lbs.) and that are adjustable for height.
• smaller seats and tables for smaller people.
• adjustable height tables for additional participant flexibility, such as for those in wheelchairs.

Overall the environment should be welcoming and comfortable without being too casual.

Design the room so that cameras and sound recording devices are not overwhelming. Use smaller cameras and sound recording devices. Mounted cameras can work well, and you can try hiding them (though a camera poking out of an oddly placed plant is not hidden).

Take care not to place mirrored glass  in the participants line of vision or in a distracting place.  The best way to avoid their line of vision is by having them enter the room through a door on the same side of the room as the mirrored glass.   They are unlikely to look behind them as they enter.

During testing, the participant’s side should be visible through the glass so that observers can still see facial expressions, but without having to worry about it being distracting to the participant.

Once the proper tone is set and the test has begun it is unlikely that these kinds of environmental factors will be disruptive.  However, the environment should be created to minimize the possibility and effect of distraction.

Flexible

Usability testing setups often vary between tests.  Knowing as much as possible ahead of time  about the types of studies you will be conducting will help you to build a lab that makes your tests a pleasant experience.

The three most important things that will make your lab flexible are having:

1. accessible hardware for adding and removing devices;
2. appropriate permissions on the lab computers that will allow installation of software and adjustment of settings
3. a technology person available at the beginning of each study and during the studies, should they be needed.

Allowing (and encouraging) participants to use the technologies they are familiar with will increase the accuracy of your usability testing.  Designing your desk and cable management setup to facilitate these things can be critical.  It is also very important to identify changes to the “standard” configuration that are needed BEFORE the usability study is scheduled to begin.

Having a flexible technology base can also be very helpful in creating a hardware/software setup that is familiar to the user.  For instance, when testing with people who work in your state government office, we would not recommend using the new 30″ cinema display.  The computer should look and act like other computers the participant has interacted with (same operating system, similar monitor/keyboard layout).

The effect that standard keyboards and mice can have on the environment should not be overlooked.  Participants often will set expectations based on the environment and can be unintentionally influenced.  This is especially true in eye-tracking studies,  and you should consider using a system like Tobii, which tries to looks like a regular monitor.

Creating a lab that is approachable and flexible for both the participants and your team, gives you the best opportunity to conduct meaningful studies with minimal frustration.

In previous entries the usability lab room setup was discussed as well as the issues of noise and interruption control.

What a great week for usability! The World Usability Day kickoff this year was in Shanghai, China at the beginning of the User Friendly 2009 conference. That event was followed (and preceded) by events in 42 countries with over 130 events this past Thursday, Nov. 12, 2009.

I attended a great event in Cleveland, Ohio, hosted by NEOUPA (North Eastern Ohio Chapter of the UPA – follow them on Twitter @NEOUPA). Excellent speakers, interesting exhibits and at the bookstore I was able to pick up a copy of User Experience Re-Mastered: Your Guide to Getting the Right Design Edited by Chauncey Wilson. I’m still getting into it, but it already looks like it will be a classic I will recommend to those new to the field.

About World Usability Day

World Usability Day (WUD)was founded in 2005 as an initiative of the Usability Professionals’ Association to ensure that services and products important to human life are easier to access and simpler to use. Each year, on the second Thursday of November, over 200 events are organized in over 43 countries around the world to raise awareness for the general public, and train professionals in the tools and issues central to good usability research, development and practice.

Web developer Joshua Smith and I (Carol Smith) paired up to present on Usability & Utility: Improve the User Experience at PodCamp Ohio today. This is the second time we’ve had the pleasure of presenting together and we were able to freshen up the material quite a bit in the interim.

We presented to about 40 people, many of whom participated in a lively conversation. Those are the best kinds of presentations!

You can download a PDF of the slides at Midwest Research, LLC.

The presentation included a brief introduction to usability and user experience, including a description the user’s experience from functional, emotional, sensorial and social points of view. There will be a separate blog detailing these soon.