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.

It’s been around forever, but for me, this site never gets old. It’s based on the film connections of Kevin Bacon, and illustrates the power of super-connectors in network models (and that whole six degrees thing). But, did you know there are actors that are more connected than Kevin? Read on…

Approximately 24 years after Apple got it with the Macintosh and many of their other products, AdWeek surmises in an article that User Experience is a reflection on the brand, as Viaspire points out. (A manager of mine with one of those fancy MBA titles pointed this out to me in 1998, so I know it’s not some new thing, but back then, User Experience wasn’t a term until Jesse James Garrett could make money off of it).

Well, duh.

Not to further point out the obvious, but whenever a company touches a customer, it’s a reflection on the brand, whether it be through a website, a commercial, or the actual product. Phenominal User Experiences with the correct amount of Marketing bring profitability (read: Apple’s record quarter of Mac Sales, Amazon’s success as a retailer, eBay’s branding as the world’s largest garage sale).

Again, it’s not just a technology thing — the company has to live and breathe it.

It’s all a reflection of the brand.

I picked the Los Angeles Angels Network because it’s my favorite baseball team, but the authors have created a bunch of applications for all the major sports teams, and each is branded to each team. If I were to create an application that was for sports and the MySpace platform, this is it (even though it’s obviously a port from Facebook).

The sports network applications are very rich experiences that has all the information about the team, trivia questions about the team where you are ranked with other group members, and you can talk smack about other teams. The canvas surface of the application has a summary page that drives traffic into all of the other pages of the application, and it’s very dense with content even if it is a bit overwhelming.

This is an extension of the MySpace platform because it also has commenting, essentially creating not only a group for fans to meet, but also drawing in other content they can find out about the team. It’s a mini-portal, done right.

Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):

• Usefulness: 4
• Usability: 5
• Fun Factor: 4
• Stability: 5
• Monetization Opportunities: 5

I’m a huge fan of Yelp.com because it allows me to be snarky in reviews, and generally the audience is pretty knowledgable about places. I’m not a fan, though, of their Information Architecture.

What ever you do, make navigation options obvious

It didn’t occur to me until a year and a half after using the site (really, a year and a half!) that messaging was connecting me to my internal email or in box at Yelp. Now, I’m a fan of cute, and it works on some sites, but not on most, especially a social networking review site. They really need to name it something obvious like InBox or Mail, because users don’t want to have to search for basic functions. It would really nice if there were a constant reminder of how many unread messages I had.

Talk is also a bit esoteric (I would have used Message Board or Forum, and there’s plenty of room).

I wonder how many page views they gave up because Yelp users don’t realize there’s a message board on Yelp?

No…really.

What is Section 508?

Section 508 is the section of the Rehabilitation Act that requires most websites, especially government sites, to be Section 508 compliant. Why is this important?

Ask Target. They were the first major corporation to be face a lawsuit (and more importantly, face a very expensive class-action lawsuit) over the accessibility of their site.

Now that I have put the fear of god in you, what can you do to make SharePoint accessible?

Just enough so you won’t be sued first.

Start with learning semantically correct and table-less HTML

Remember tables being used for layouts? That’s gone, and so is hacking together website layouts with inline styles. In the most literal of senses, it’s about learning HTML and CSS the way it was meant to be used: using style sheets to define everything, using headers like H1, H2 and H3 to establish hierarchy, and truly separating content from layout.

How effective is this in today’s CSS world, minus the occasional box model hack? Very. There was a site I built for a friend of mine, and we completely changed the order of content to make it more SEO friendly without changing the layout of the site. Seriously.

The best tip I was giving a developer I work with was how to define styles:

• .style1. .header = bad
• .style1 H1 = good

Using CSS styles and defining HTML elements is not only good practice, but works best and sends less HTML code down the pipe. Most importantly, remind editors and users that ALT tags, TITLE tags and LABEL tags not only mean something, they are very, very important to users that use alternate means to use websites.

Add tools that can be added easily and quickly

Start with the checklist of checkpoints listed by the W3C. Most of the items are more relevant to multimedia technologies like Flash, but it would be good to review them and understand them. Remember, you have to know what the rules are before you can break them.

Hi Software provides a set of master pages, web part plug ins and other tools, like this great conversion application that calculates font sizes in EMs. EMs are generally defined as the width of the letter M, and that can vary by font and by platform. By using EMs, this allows browsers to easily resize fonts.

The master pages released with the package contain a set of best practices, and the plug ins do some really simple search and replaces that correct some potential issues that can occur with screen readers. The plug ins are so simple to program, you could concievably write additional plug ins to catch other HTML issues before the users catch them.

Telerik’s rich content editor for SharePoint is not only fully packed with features, it’s jam packed also with accessibility features too, and much more accessible than the out of the box editor.

Test your site against the Cynthia Says tool. This will give you a list of changes you may have to make to make your site more accessible. For the record, there’s about 10 or so issues I need to fix to make this site more accessible.

Find other resources for tips

• Planet MOSS has a great article about accessibility and tips
• The Mossman reminds us that regular expressions are your friend
• Chamina points out the exact pain points of SharePoint 2007 and accessibility

Don’t sweat the small things, and use common sense

The best approach is a common sense approach. Screen readers aren’t going to freak out on a single cell table, but they will freak out if the whole page is a set of tables. If you take the approach is that it’s about return on investment (hitting the highest risk areas, and leaving other areas to chance), you’ll be okay.

Many of us have an entrepreneur streak in us, and what we’ve signed may limit that streak. It’s good to know your rights just so when it comes up, you’re prepared.

I’ve had this disscussion a few times with companies, sometimes with lawyers involved because of faulty NDAs and other work contracts, and the result was a common sense three point discussion as listed below. Non-disclosure and non-compete agreements are a different topic, which I’ll probably cover at some later point after a hard drinks.

This is a quick guide to the topic.

If you work for them as a full-time employee, they own the work and the copyright

For example, if you are a programmer, and there’s a bunch of this nifty code that you’re writing up, and you want to use it on your own application, there’s a good chance that you could get sued or cause a lot of problems at your work. Since most of us are on laptops nowadays, even using their equipment to design and build puts you at risk, and I would recommend that you do any of that work on your own time and on your own system.

Some companies, like Apple, go so far as emphasizing that even during your off time they own your ideas (for the chance that you are going to solve world hunger while watching Letterman), so if you are working for one of those companies, it might be a good idea to limit your ideas to sleeping. The smart companies discuss plans for you to profit off of those ideas in a business startup environment.

If you work for them as a contractor, and you haven’t signed a work-for-hire agreement, you own the work and copyright, are giving them implicit license to use it

Wikipedia has a great article about work-for-hire, but the best description I can think of is this: If you develop this new system that solves world hunger, and you develop this system on your client’s dime, there’s nothing stopping you from selling your system that solves world hunger down the street, and even more so, your competitors.

If you have designed something that is really cool, and you want to protect it, I recommend that you register it with the U.S. Copyright Office even if you don’t intend on reselling it. It’s more to protect yourself from the client.

If you work for them as a contractor, and you have signed a work-for-hire agreement, they own it

Signing that agreement gives them all copyright ownership to it and the right to control whatever you do. Smart consulting and development companies make you sign this contract. For most applications, signing one of these agreements isn’t that much of an issue because, frankly, what we do probably replicates some business process or application that isn’t terribly unique, so even if we were to own the copyright, it wouldn’t really matter, because it applies specifically to that work.

However, if there was something you invented that was unique and valuable as a business process (and I don’t mean inventing a shopping cart), you could patent it, and prevent others from using it only if you haven’t signed the work-for-hire agreement.

If you have any questions, speak with a lawyer

there are many experts in copyright and patent law that have much knowledge than I do, and if you are working on an idea that’s got a lot of potential, it’s best to talk to them. the money is worth it.

I was asked the question where a new information architect could get started to learn about the field and I explained that there are experiences all around us that enable all of us to learn. It could be anything from buying speakers for your television to how to book an airline ticket: all of us is uniquely qualified to start as one if we’ve used a computer, and all it takes is just observing how users think and use technology to improve what we have today.

After that explanation, during which her eyes glazed over, the response was, “How about just telling me what books to read.”

Here are five books I like a lot.

Note that none of them (well, one) is written by one of the user experience experts that are most often cited in blogs. There are many authors out there that present equally valid points that should get equal time, and I found these books to be extremely useful and valuable. Most of the books describe the patterns and theory of information architecture and user experience, but a couple of them go into detail about the tools we use to communicate, and how we fit into the software development and web design process.

The last five books I would read if I wanted to learn about information architecture

Why We Buy: The Science Of Shopping

By Paco Underhill, Why We Buy is a great read on the observational study of why people shop, how they shop, and what they buy. Most importantly, it sets the stage for triggers for the motivations of completing an action, which is the basis of all interactive interactions.

This book is not too scientific, but honestly, you can look other places for that; what we’re seeing through the eyes of Paco is the emotions of browsing and shopping in the real world.

Don’t Make Me Think

By Steve Krug, Don’t Make Me Think is the cut-and-dry version of information architecture and the best methods of web navigation. Covered in 216 pages are enough screen shots, design patterns and quick points that just about anyone can get started on building their own websites or improving them dramatically.

What I like most about this book is that Steve doesn’t talk down to the reader like some other specialists, he informs the reader in a very comfortable, friendly tone.

Designing Interfaces

By Jenifer Tidwell, Designing Interfaces most importantly shows exactly what is most important about designing software and web sites: that all applications should follow a very well defined set of a patterns so the user interactions follow exactly what the user expects.

Jenifer’s book goes into excruciating detail of what interface widgets to use when, and why the widget should be used, how to use them, and examples of how the widgets were used in other applications.

Web ReDesign 2.0: Workflow The Works

By Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler, Web ReDesign works through not only examples of wireframes, site maps, and how to quote projects, but looks at the project management process of web development. What I like best is that the book shows exactly how Information Architects, Web Designers, Programmers and the client fit together in an orchestra of what happens before, during and after a site launch.

Kelly and Emily also do a masterful job of including other expert voices and opinions like Christina Wodtke and Lynda Weinman about what it takes to launch a successful and user-friendly website.

Grids for the Internet & Other Digital Media

By Veruschka Götz, Grids is a out-of-print but very valuable publication that goes into amazing detail about the usage of grids for interactive applications (not just the Internet but also for multimedia applications and print design).

The book also covers the lost art of typography, how it should be used in websites, and usage of type on a grid. Even if you aren’t a designer, you’ll appreciate the clear and concise examples displayed in a very modern fashion of this title.

Upload a photo and get a really bad retro picture of yourself in a yearbook.

That’s a hoot.