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Groups. All three of them have groups has major functionality, and none of the three have added groups as a component of the top or main navigation. Since all three of the services need advertising and page views to a certain extent, you would think each would try to drive traffic to groups.

My opinion? I think groups are underused; with the right approach, groups could be mini social networks upon themselves. For the services above, maybe they haven’t gotten there. But, if they could increase traffic in highly targeted and focused groups, why don’t they?

The hardest lesson I had to learn early on in my career as UX designer is to be willing to take risks and start all over again. I think this is baggage from my days of working with the waterfall process and designing products that will be “set in stone” (products that ran on Playstation and CD-ROM). You get the sense that once they are done, that’s it. You have no chance of ever changing them again, so it’s too risky to veer off in a new direction.

I spent my evening at Barnes & Noble yesterday, reading “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch. It is a dying man’s guide on how to live your life. Randy Pausch was a computer science professor, and in his Building Virtual Worlds class, he gave out “The First Penguine Award.” The title of the award came from the notion that although the water is cold and there might be predators in it, someone’s got to to be the first penguine to jump in. The award celebrated “glorious failures” and encouraged “out-of-the-box” thinking.

I think every designer has that moment when you know that something is not quite right in the design, but you can’t put quite put your finger on it. Over the years, I’ve learned to trust this instinct as a sign that better ideas congealing in the back of my mind and I must be willing to scrap everything and just start over. Sometimes the risk pays off and I would come up with a completely new design paradigm. Other times, the excersise would provide additional insight and new strategies for tackling the design problem. Fortunately or unfortunately, I’m not an egomaniac designer who ignores budgets, so sometimes I would eat the extra hours just to produce something great.

I am always about learning and process first, and money second. Besides, there’s always something about being the first penguine that energizes you. And THAT is priceless.

I love that Michael J. Fox picture, and that phone.

A very direct, relevant list from Blonde 2.0.

1. Choose Your Networks Wisely
2. Don’t Spread Yourself Too Thin
3. Give Character to your Profiles
4. Be Consistent
5. Birds of a Feather Flock Together
6. Put Your Heart in It
7. Be Active Regularly
8. Submit Quality Content
9. Nobody Likes a Spammer
10. Don’t Stress Yourself Out!

So while I was napping, Target settled with the National Federation of the Blind for $6 million, ending a class action lawsuit that stated Target.com wasn’t accessible to blind users. One percent of that would have probably fixed the Target site before this happened. Target of course admitted no wrongdoing, which means that no precedent has been set (and there will be yet another court case to prove the legal standing of Section 508).

(Oddly enough, Section 508 was declared to be valid only for physical spaces in a lawsuit against Southwest Airlines. That verdict was passed down in 2002, but it doesn’t appear to be a California-based court. In any case, I’d rather protect the site than pay for lawyers if I were CEO of a corporation.)

Is your site safe?

Just another reminder that doing a few things goes a long way in protecting yourself from issues regarding SharePoint, and the lawsuit went a bit further: if you live in California, local laws actually protect you more is you suffer a disability.

If you need consulting for your business, don’t hesitate to send us a line.

I like designing web sites, because they’re more visible and by that standard, more glamorous. However, I like designing business process applications better, because applications are more function focused. The success of an application is dependent on how well I’ve thought out the workflow and functionality. It is not clouded by marketing.

Here’s a road map on how to design strategically for a business process application:

1. Design strategically for maximum productivity. When you’re designing a web site, you want to maximize clicks and time spent on a page. When you’re designing a business process app, you want the user to complete each task as quickly as possible. The less time spent on a task, the higher the productivity.
2. Prioritize features for roles by frequency of use.
3. Design for maximum scalability and flexibility as businesses can shift direction to respond to market conditions.
4. Differentiate between usability problems and workflow problems. Sometimes what is perceived as a usability issue is really a company’s production and/or red tape problem.
5. Identify and provide solutions for current online and offline workarounds.
6. Don’t just document and design for the current workflow. Look for ways to streamline the company’s current online and offline workflows.
7. Identify other systems (i.e. ERPs or legacy systems) that your application will have to hook into.
8. Flowchart primary and exception use cases to catch functionality loopholes.
9. Templatize functionality/behaviors as much as possible to optimize learnability, user adoption, and minimize development time.
10. Gather users’ input often throughout the process by conducting quick-and-dirty prototyping.
11. Work closely with the training department to address usability and user adoption issues. When a company has been using a legacy system a long time, it is a cultural shift to move to a new system.

So in the past few days, I’ve been bombarded with the “I’m hosting a panel at SXSW and I want you to vote for me!” requests on Facebook and RSS Feeds.

I appreciate the idea of publicizing some of the panels through this method, and I’m going to try my best to make my trek to Austin, but I really don’t like the idea of placing the vote for the panels up to the community. I understand it’s only 30 percent of the vote, and it’s an influencer, but not a decider, but still — Jason Calcanis’  comment about the web now being a self-promoting place (from the king of self promoters, and he’s shameless about it) holds true in this process, because the blogs have become an increasingly commercial place, this blog included.

Here’s why:

The selection of panels becomes a popularity contest

One of the results of the web and social media is that for many of the print media establishments, they will award certain prizes to the people who will drive circulation instead of who is really deserving. For years, Motor Trend did this for the car of the year: the company that spent the most advertising dollars got to pick which of their car, and that gave us the Chevrolet Citation. Magazines today like Maxim our now picking some of their girls for print based on how many (fake) MySpace friends they have.

From someone who lost student body elections nine times in high school, I will never like this. I’m not going to read through 1300 panel ideas to see the one that is most valuable — no one is. Most of the presenters will be picked because they’ll have a friend on the panel, or can shout the loudest.

Valuable (but more obscure) panel ideas and presenters never see the light of day

To a certain extent, someone’s going to get screwed because they don’t have a big enough name, or work for a big enough company. They should reaching out and looking at blogs and emerging companies with great ideas to see if there are any good ideas of undiscovered talents that are worthy of a spot at SXSW.

It’s a derivative of the old Groucho Marx story, I don’t want to be part of any club that has a membership requirement. I think if you are trying to hard to be there, you really don’t belong, you know what I mean?

Maybe that’s why I like the barcamp model: there aren’t 1,300 panels, and it’s done on a smaller scale. Some of the panels are going to suck, but there’s going to be that gem in there that will make the conference. And it’s not some popularity contest — you get there early, you get on the list.

I don’t want to be spammed

This is wasting my valuable time, because none of these people are explaining the merits of their panels — it’s more of the, “Just go vote for me, dammit.” They aren’t presenting a compelling argument for me (well, some of them are like this one, but more of them are like this, this, and this, which is ironically called Curating the Crowd Sourced World) to decide if I even want to pay for a plane ticket and a hotel room to Austin for the event and the panels.

The ideas should be judged purely on the merit their value to the audience and their ideas, and not on some popularity contest. Sometimes social networking goes too far, and I think this is one example. That is all.

We don’t come up with all the great posts (I wish we did!), but there’s a great post over at Conversation Agent about designing by committee, and it has to do with a project that had too much money thrown at it. It’s a good read of how a project can stall with too many stakeholders. Conversation Agent listed a well-defined process of to limit the impact of too many cooks in the kitchen.

Read on…

YouTube has recently launched a new feature for users to add customized annotations to user generated content videos. This feature opens up a whole new set of possibilities for user experience. Users can now add descriptive text about the video, link to other YouTube videos, or create interactive mini movies with multiple endings.

What remains to be seen is if these annotations are integrated within search. This would provide more relevant search results that are pulled from the video content itself. It’s about time, since companies are finding new ways to manipulate the number of views.

Wow! I can already see so many implementation models. What’s exciting about this is that this feature puts content at the forefront. It just isn’t another stop light or coffee stand that a company throw out to aggregate or pull in more cheap traffic.

Content rules!

I use a lot of personal experiences in the real world because they are much easier to explain than what’s on a screen, and I like pointing out that even in that world, User Experience is a hard thing to perfect. So, for now, I’m going to use a recent purchase of a home theater to illustrate some of the finer points of User Experience.

If you have an online store, whatever you are selling represents your brand

So I found myself with a few more hard-earned extra dollars, and schelped my way down to Best Buy. I looked through some home theater systems, and found one that I thought I would like, a Yamaha system. I bought it, stuffed it in my car (it barely fit), and tried unsuccessfully for hours to set up the system.

I’m not an electronics geek (and please don’t assume so, just because I wrote a blog). It’s like being a doctor — you’re at a party, you say something about being into technology, and pretty soon, everyone is walking up to you telling you about about their broken cupholder on their computer. I have the same problems everyone else does, and did so with this system.

Not only were the instructions too long, but it was just a hard to use product, and I imagine there’s some MBA in some office somewhere at Yamaha thinking, “You know, if we make this hard enough, Best Buy can make some extra money off of Geek Squad.” These same MBAs compute all kinds of numbers regarding return rates, and they fully expect a certain amount to be returned because they are just hard to use.

From a product management perspective, I would think it would be cheaper to make a product that would be easy to use because there would be a lower return rate — Apple gets this, and to a certain extent Microsoft does, because their consumer products are not too bad to install — but what do I know? Best Buy doesn’t care, because in reality, returned product is the responsibility of the manufacturer and not the retailer.

Because I bought it at Best Buy, my though process is, “Yo, Best Buy sells lousy products that are hard to use.” I know this isn’t the case, but I decided just to return the system, because I wanted an easier system to use. If I couldn’t install it, how am I going to be able to change it?

Your policies can be your own worst enemy

So I schelped back to Best Buy (a different one, because the first one was closed early on a Sunday), removing the system from my car (did I mention it weighed over 50 pounds?), and got to the return desk. I had a new system picked out, and was so close to buying a new system when their customer support manager came over and said to me, “Yo, you have to take it back, because there isn’t a remote control with the returned system.”

“You mean I have to stuff this thing in the car again and come back to get a refund and/or exchange?”

“Yes, because our policy is that we don’t want anything happening to the system. If it were to happen, we don’t want it to be our responsibility.”

The store policy is I couldn’t leave it there because they didn’t want to be responsible for what could happen in their store.

(Read that again, just so you get the full effect.)

Customers don’t care about policy — they just want to be happy that their dollars are well spent, so if you implement policies regarding returns that make it hard to return merchandise, or your systems make the users jump through a bunch of hoops, they will not become return customers.

I left the Best Buy and drove directly to Target down the street and picked up a Bose Home Theater system that was more expensive, had less features, and took me exactly 10 minutes to set up without a hitch.

Because of their policy, Best Buy lost a customer on a higher margin sale and I was willing to forgive them for the previous misstep of having a product on their floor that was hard to use. This is because not allowing me to return a $5 remote control a day later.

Whatever you do, don’t make your customer feel stupid

So that now I am perfectly content with my new Home Theater System, I returned to Best Buy to get my money back. Hell, it’s nearly $400 with taxes, and I just wanted this box out of my back seat.

I get there, I have everything I need to return it, and the cashier makes the dreaded call to the Home Theater department for a consult.

The sales expert walks over, looks at the system, looks at me, and says, “If we set this up, and if it works, will you take this back with you?”

“No, I just want to return the system, I spent too much time on it already.”

“But if we set this up…”

“You don’t understand, I don’t want the system. It’s too hard. I just want to return it.”

End of conversation.

The point: if a customer is unhappy with a product or a website, you’ve lost them. You can’t get them back with this approach, because it just makes them feel stupid. Customers want to buy a product and me done with it; if it turns into a long, drawn out experience that requires too much support, that’s a product they will never be happy with.