Blog

Happy to be speaking at the IA Summit (not that happiness is everything)

2011-12-16T22:30:22Z

I was truly thrilled and honored to be selected to speak at the 2012 IA Summit. I've been going to the Summit for years (first time was in Vegas), and have always found the content to be top notch and the community to be even better.

So here's the proposal for the talk. I'm happy to hear feedback or suggestions as I put it together.

Happiness is overrated.

It's almost a mantra in the user experience world: you should aim to "delight" your users. You should stud their experience with moments of “wow”. You should exceed their expectations.

And when you do it well, you’ll create loyal customers, and even some social evangelists who will happily spread the word of your awesomeness across the web.

It’s conventional wisdom. But is it true?

Research conducted by the Corporate Executive Board (my old company), delved into the relationship between customers’ levels of satisfaction, and their loyalty to a brand. The study, which focused primarily on customer service websites and call centers, casts doubt on the dollar value of delight.

Delighting users doesn’t necessarily make them more loyal or profitable. In fact, your highest-value opportunities for boosting user loyalty lie in helping the ones who aren’t happy by eliminating their most common irritants.

During this talk we’ll get into:

How bad customer experiences affect the bottom line compared to good ones
Our individual and organizational bias toward designing for delight
The top two drivers of user dissatisfaction, and how to avoid them
Real-life examples of websites that have been updated specifically to build loyalty through better online experience
The importance of service design to customer loyalty
A new metric to measure (and present to senior management) the success of your service design

User Research Methods: What vs. Why X Surface vs. Strategy

2011-06-07T16:04:43Z

A recent conversation about user testing new features and designs induced me to get a little more organized in my thinking about the right method for particular testing goals. Two key dimensions to consider are:

User Dimension (X Axis): Is our research goal to better understand how users are behaving on the site (aka, what users are doing), or is it more about understanding their underlying goals, tasks, and assumptions (aka, why users are doing what they do)?
Product Dimension (Y Axis): Are we more interested in how well our product is aligning with user goals and tasks in terms of features, content, and high-level structure (aka, our product Strategy*), or are we measuring how well the design is presenting the product through visual presentation, IA, and labeling (aka, our product Surface*)?

* Surface and Strategy are designations borrowed here from Jesse James Garrett's Elements of User Experience. Surface is represented by the eyeball icon; Strategy by the lightbulb.

Given those dimensions, I tried to map the relative usefulness of various research and testing methods. What are your thoughts? How would you arrange these research methods?

The UX Hierarchy of Needs To Be Fixed

2011-03-28T17:55:32Z

This is a poster presentation for the 2011 IA Summit. Download the poster PDF here.

Here's a summary of the proposal:

The UX Hierarchy of Needs To Be Fixed is composed of a graded set of user consequences for UX defects. The idea is that, when facing a backlog of defects in a product nearing launch, you should fix defects in the more severe categories — the ones at the bottom of the pyramid — before tackling ones that are higher up. The categories are, from most to least severe:

Goal/Task Loss. The defect consistently blocks the user from completing a critical task or goal, either due to system failure or severe usability issues. Such issues include unexplained data loss, unrecoverable errors, and critical browser incompatibility.

Confusion. The defect leaves the user unable to find the path to task completion without considerable effort or multiple missteps, causing a high risk of task abandonment. Examples include multiple unclear paths, requests for information that the user does not understand, and unrecognizable calls to action.

Frustration. While the defect does not cause the user to lose the path to task completion, it adds considerable effort and cognitive load, ultimately creating a moderate risk of abandonment. Examples include missing desired features, difficult language or jargon, and requests for information that the user cannot obtain without considerable effort.

Inefficiency. The user can complete all tasks and goals, but completion takes more effort or inconvenience than is necessary. Examples include multi-step processes that could be completed as one, system slowness, and annoyingly strict security requirements.

Love loss. The defect has no impact on task completion or efficiency, but it reduces the brand affinity or overall delight that the user feels. Examples include typos, misaligned graphics, and misuse of color.

The hierarchy is intended to qualify the impact of a defect on a single user. But to prioritize defects, product managers must also consider other factors including:

the business criticality of the affected features
how many users will be affected
the business importance of the affected user segments
the effort required to implement a fix

These factors are represented on the poster as well.

The hierarchy is informed by my own work as UX designer and product owner on various web projects as well as collaboration with other UX professionals, but it is still a work in progress. I hope that presenting this poster at the IA Summit will spark some conversation, and help me refine and clarify the hierarchy further.

Careless Jarvis

2010-08-01T20:47:01Z

So tweeted Jeff Jarvis, quoting Lauren Ashburn completely out of context. The topic on today's Reliable Sources, under the banner "The Poisonous Press: Invective Attracts Attention", was whether the increasingly nasty partisan political dialogue has bled into journalism. Here's the exchange around Jarvis' quote:

Kurtz: People at this table who went into journalism used to think it was about informing the public, digging out inconvenient facts, and now is it all about getting hits on your blog, getting your cable ratings up, getting your circulation to stop declining if you're in this business (holding up print newspaper)? Is that what it's about?

Ashburn: You know I think that, what I was trying to say before, is it really comes down to money. There is no money on the internet. There is no money right now in corporations, in major news organizations, budgets are being cut. How many people did CBS cut? Three hundred out of its news force, four hundred? Something like that? There is no money. And if there's no money, you need to. . . I think the bar is higher to do things that will gather that traffic and get circulation.

(Full transcript here)

Ashburn's language certainly could have been more precise, but it's clear that her "no money on the internet" statement referred to shrinking budgets in internet news operations. It certainly didn't mean anything along the lines of "you can't make money on the internet" which was Jarvis' inference.

Sometimes I think Jeff Jarvis' ethos is, Don't let the facts stand in the way of a chance to show how old media doesn't get it.

GS Graduate School IA Class: Week 7: UX and Agile

2009-11-17T21:01:53Z

Here are my slides from the week 7 lecture on UX and agile. We started with the ball point exercise (PDF explanation), then moved into the lecture.

Lecture slides from GS-IA Week 7: Agile and UX

View more documents from Dave Burke.

Andrew McAfee's six ways to "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory" in Enterprise 2.0

2009-11-05T15:23:00Z

I caught the stream of Andrew McAfee's talk at the just-finished Enterprise 2.0 conference, in which he says that we're in the midst of a "tipping point" of Enterprise 2.0 adoption, but that there are still ways to ruin a good thing.

(Watch the whole video on demand at E2TV.)

Here are my notes from his six ways to "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory" in Enterprise 2.0 adoption:

Sign up and pass around: IA and UX course at GS Graduate School

2009-09-21T18:22:56Z

I am excited to be joining Thom Haller in teaching the Information Architecture and User Experience course at the GS Graduate School this fall. We plan to make it real-world useful, and applicable for current practitioners as well as those who would like to learn more about the field.

So please sign up, and pass along to others who might be interested.

More details on the course after the jump. . .

Transitions 2009 Conference presentation: Agile development at The Washington Post

2009-06-29T18:34:33Z

Thanks to all who organized and attended the Transitions 2009 conference at GW University. Here are the slides from my talk about how The Washington Post used agile methods to build a new product, TastePost.

View on SlideShare

Building communities inside the enterprise: wiki case study from The Washington Post

2009-06-01T17:39:00Z

Here are the slides from my talk on implementing a wiki for collaboration and documentation at The Washington Post. This was delivered to Thom Haller's Information Architecture course at the USDA Graduate School.

Building community inside the enterprise

View more documents from Dave Burke.