How software is contributing to the current finacial crisis, and some pearls of wisdom from “Why Does Everything Suck.”

The truth is our economy has been in trouble for a long time. It is the "too smart for the room" guys that, at some point in, I would imagine the 90's, figured out how to make money without actually creating any value.

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In times of breaking news and shocking events, it’s best to have a go-to website for news and content, and there’s no substitute for the old grey lady, the New York Times. While they might not be groundbreaking in their site design, this is one of the easiest sites on the web to navigate, the content has gotten better in recent years, and there’s just something about reading a newspaper of record.

And…

(I know, it’s been around for a while, but it’s still nifty…)

If you want to see something really cool, try the SilverLight version of the paper. It’s slick because it downloads the paper local, so you can read it offline. If looks like the real version of the New York Times, complete with the type, and if you resize the window, it resizes the article and the number of columns.

It automatically syncs when online like RSS Feeds, and the advertisements are overly obtrusive. It’s not free (and I’m a firm believer that all content shouldn’t be free) but at $15 a month, is cheaper than getting the paper delivered.

Would you pay $15 a month for this service?

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When a form has been completed, indicate status clearly and not just with a single line of text

I’ve been promoting the blog a bit lately, and that means filling out a lot of contact forms. One of my pet peeves (and this isn’t just the Sharepoint Blogs site) is that many contact forms have a single line of text that reads something along the lines of, “It’s been sent.” Usually, it’s so small, people resend the same message over and over again. My first assumption is, “Did I do something wrong? Where’s the error text?”

I’m going to make everyone a deal — I’ll write a “thank you for sending us a note” page for free if you need that if you promise to endlessly promote me on your site.

Please spend the extra 15 minutes to add a secondary page that knows the message has been sent and confirms it to the user.

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From a mailing list I’m on. Classic.

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion USD. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gramm, lobbyist for UBS, who (God willing) will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a former U.S. congressional leader and the architect of the PALIN / McCain Financial Doctrine, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. As such, you can be assured that this transaction is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully,

Minister of Treasury Paulson

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Clever Workarounds has a very long but strong post about how the complexity of SharePoint exposes organizational gaps because SharePoint is such a comprehensive platform. Another interesting observation: information technology people might not be the best people to plan a SharePoint implementation, because of the struggles of governance.

Is there a product that screams more for competent Information Architects and User Experience experts than SharePoint?

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Most clients think they know their business and when they approach User Experience professionals, they’re anxious to get wireframes cranked out. How do we get clients to take a step back and engage in  strategic type activites to optimize their technology solutions?

For me, this didn’t happen overnight. I stopped obssessing about whiz-bang interfaces and took an active interest in helping clients think about design in terms of return on investment. Because I always spoke my mind and  articulate ideas in terms of how they drive the bottom line, clients began to include me in strategic meetings. Below are some of ways I incorporate strategy focused activities into my process.

Propose the Value Proposition

When I first consult with new clients about a project, I  let them know  that  analysis and research are an integral part of my process. It allows me, the UX designer/Business Analyst/IA Minion  to understand their business from the inside out.  I explain that analysis, interpreting metrics, product roadmapping,  etc. can optimize return on investment. By interpreting indicators on usage patterns, we can  pinpoint what’s not working and leverage winning features. The result is a cohesive product vision that differentiate the client from their competitors.

Speak About the Project in Business Terms Not Usability Goals

Articulating your design in business terms is a great marketing strategy. Before my first formal meeting with the client, sometimes even before the contract is signed, I always  conduct a quick site  audit. This gives me a fresh perspective before I know anything about the project and clients love a fresh perspective. I record my impression on branding, business objectives, and how well the design and implementation drive the business objectives.  I always think in terms of return on investment. This gives me fodder to speak about the project in business terms as opposed to design terms.  Incidentally, if I get the contract, I bid the hours I spent back into the job. If I don’t get the contract, then it’s good PR.

Request for Quantitative and Qualitative Data

Request for reports at the first meeting. Be prepared to explain what trends and patterns you hope to discover or why you want look at data for specific feature sets. If you don’t yet have an idea which reports you need, tell the client that you will email a list of reports that you want pulled. This lets the client know that research is an integral part of your process.  It the project is a start-up, conduct topic and keyword research  to  define search volume.  For qualitative analysis, inquire to see  whether any surveys or focus group testing have been conducted and  what the findings were.   Finally, ask the client how or if  the business has responded to the results from analytics and surveys.

Prioritizing Requirements and Use Cases

Don’t be a gatherer of requirements. Be an expert. When conducting interviews with stakeholders, don’t just gather requirements. Work with clients to prioritize requirements and use cases based on business objectives and the research that you’ve conducted. You may propose new requirements to refine and simplify workflows.   Always couch your input based on business objectives and the bottom line.

Use Business Objectives,  Usability Goals/Strategies  as the Measuring Stick for Your Design

I always preface wireframes with business objectives  and usability goals. Clients gets sick of this after subsequent meetings, but they learn quickly to evaluate wireframes based on the real business goals. This is also helpful when your wireframes are circulated to other team members, because the business objectives and usability goals is a reminder of the foundations of the project.

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One of the struggles with working as a consultant is clients that want everything in the world (and are willing to pay for it), yet don’t focus on the features or items of their implementation that they really need, and sometimes that is written directly in the statement of work. This happens in the corporate world, time after time. Clients are just like everyone else where the features that sometimes come from the CEO but have no return on investment associated with it.

Here’s how I work with clients to help define what they need instead of they want, and I’ve included an  Use Case Prioritization Excel Template to start with. It’s simple, and meant to be that way, because long documents aren’t read.

Make a list of use cases that are relevant to the implementation

This is where I always start — what are all the percieved use cases the client needs for system success? When you develop requirements, there will always be additional use cases that will come out of disccusions,  the client’s going to have a pretty good idea of what they need to start with, because they called you, right?

Keep the assembly of this list simple, like an Excel document, and that document would have such fields as the use case, who the use case sponsor is, the opportunity, the cost (do a rough swag on this, and more often than not you are going to be 50 percent off because of unstated requirements), the priority (high, medium, low, or an agreed on numbering system as in the example document), and other notes. The sponsor’s important because like it or not, a CEO’s much more important to the project than a QA lackey.

Rank use cases based on importance

Some of the use cases will be absolutely necessary (i.e. if you are working on SharePoint, editing of pages and user permissions would be an absolute requirement). Some requirements, however, may not be as important, such as  localization.

Even if that is a requirement, you can have two stages of implementation, planning for localization as a stub and setting up URLs for this versus a full implementation. Because of this, I would list this as two separate use cases, judging this as the simple versus complex implementation.

The importance should be judged on the opportunity, cost, and whether or not it’s an important feature for launch. One of the things to remember when developing use cases is that some can be accomplished through manual processes, like having the database administrator change data through raw SQL if the task doesn’t happen very often. No feature that has only an impact of making or saving $500 a year should be implemented, period.

Develop the system based on that list

The list is your bible for development, and if you stray from it, the development process goes awry. This list can also change; if you get a few iterations down the path, you can reorder items based on changing priorities of the client (or your project sponsor). Remember, this idea is to keep the features light and iterative so changing requirements don’t mean reordering the whole list or building a completely new system.

Keep track of progress with the list

Sometimes with software development, progress is the invisible path that no one sees. If you use the use case prioritzation list of keep track of where you are at (hopefully with honest developers giving you feedback), both the development team and the client will get a true nature of where they are at. In some situations, several use cases might be co-dependent on the same development components, and that should be noted.

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My job is changing.

I can already feel it.

It started last year when I began getting interested in analytics, but it’s really transforming. now. I’m not a web  analyst, nowhere near. But more and more clients are hiring me to help with product roadmapping. More and more, I’m looking at product design  and marketing strategy  from a chicken and the egg perspective.

Recently, for several projects, I’ve started with the analytics, the traffic, the market research, search volume, then work backwards to define the solution, the return on investment. So I have the egg, I have to figure what kind of chicken lays that egg.

Usually, clients will build a solution, then develop campaigns to drive traffic to it, but lately, I’ve been getting projects that are reverse. It’s not, “If you build it, they will come.” It’s more like, “They’re here. Now build something that they need.” I’m not just designing some test feature. I’m designing actual  new sites with little more than a domain name as a requirement.

My role initially, is  to conduct excersises with my client  to  clearly define the following:

1. Market sector
2. Value proposition
3. Business Objectives
4. Strategy and brand for the user experience
5. Marketing Strategy

After this excersise, my goal is to have a mission for the user experience, because a deep user experience will brand the solution. At heart, I’m still an interactive designer. It’s what I love to do. But building a sound business foundation for your design is critical to its success. If you don’t do this, then if you build it, they will not come.

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I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about automation and touch screens (I think something along the lines of a Microsoft Surface was on CSI: Long Beach Miami last night, close to that nifty technology in Minority Report), and the discussion about ordering food at restaurants came up.

She said something that was translated into, “you know, wouldn’t it be cool if there were touch screens to order food at restaurants.” At that point, I went off on a rant.

There are a few cases that I can think of where technology has improved customer service. Recordings starting the 411 process on most phone directories is one, some directory operations at government operations another, but for the most part, there’s nothing better than a human being when fuzzy logic is needed, or the questions undefined, like, “can I have my burger medium rare?” Self-checkout systems are gathering adoption momentum at supermarkets, but there’s always going to be a certain market segment that’s going to want to talk to Sally the checker.

Here’s why I think that touch screens will always have a low adoption rate at restaurants.

If it takes noticably longer for a computer to perform the task than a person, user adoption will never happen.

I ate at one of those uWink restaraunts, and they have touch screens at every table. You can order food, drinks, almost everything to order. The hope is that the server just brings it out to you.

The problem?

It takes forever to order.

We spent over 10 minutes trying to figure out the interface. That’s about 7 minutes longer than if a server comes over with a piece of paper, and writes down the order. By the time that server could have returned with my beer, we were still entering our order.

Anything that stands in the way of my beer getting to me quicker is a bad thing.

The technology is too expensive.

Each of those stations costs about $1000. Mutliply that by 40 tables in a restaurant, plus replacement costs for sticky fingers, crashed hard-drives, whatever. Do you think most restaurant owners want to spend an extra $100,000 in technology costs on top of the environmental design of the restaurant? And what happens when the system goes down?

Owners love to replace employees with computers when it makes sense financials. It makes sense for ATMs, because they’re open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week without having to take a coffee break. But replicating the same technology at multiple stations isn’t the same thing.

People just want to be taken care of.  

Self-service technology has come along way, from support forums on most electronic websites to banking at ATMs and online (I still don’t understand why ATM service fees are so high when it’s cheaper for banks to do business that way instead of having human intervention, but that’s another rant). But in a few situations, people just want to have a sense of getting valu, for their money. Using a touch screen at a restaurant isn’t getting value for my money, but having a server wearing a tie is.

Your thoughts?

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I love books. I have a ton of them. OK, maybe not a ton, but I estimate I must have about 600 books or more. In my days as a graphic artist, I’ve designed two book covers, so I have an affinity for the art of cover design and the construction of books. I read everything from technology books, fiction, and non-fiction. For awhile, I tried to keep all of my books, but I can no longer do so. My shelves are busting at the seams. Once I read a blog about a guy who kept only 10 books. If he bought one, he had to give one away. I strived to be that guy, but I tended to read too fast and couldn’t give them away fast enough.

My list of must-have-books-that-will-always-remain-with me-in-case-I-am-ever-stranded-on-a-desert-island already total up to 50 books or so. I needed an easy and convenient solution to stop my habit of buying books. I’ve been to the local library, but find that it doesn’t have enough of a selection. I’ve even read all of the reptile books from the animals section, but that’s another story. It’s people like me who donate books to the library.

Enter Swaptree.com

It’s a site where you can trade books, music, movies, and games with other users. It’s a one-to-one trade. Simple as that.   I signed up about a year ago, but didn’t use it very much, because there were few users who wanted  exactly  what  I had and vica versa. It was difficult to have matches. When I reactivated my account last month, I found that swaptree had improved the trading algorithm, where users can form a trade ring of sorts.

Since then, I’ve successfully implemented 4 trades. Seems like I’m trading every week.  I don’t even have to go to the post office and haven’t been to the bookstore since. I can print the postage online and swaptree will bill me the amount at the end of the month.

The  only painful part is entering in the  ISBN code of the items  I  put up to trade. However, the UI manage to  alleviate some of the pain by displaying a drop-down of the thumbnail of the book as soon as the system recognizes the UPC, even when  I’ve entered it partially. That way, I can confirm that the item I’m entering is correct.

It is  nice to know that I am not killing more trees with my habit. Hi, my name is Ha Phan and I’m a book-a-holic.

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