I attend user groups occasionally, and last night was the Orange County MOSS User Group (I think that’s the title). I do it because it’s good to get out to actual users as opposed to design’y people that worry about the color of the button, where most people just want a button that works.

Long story short, one of the people had an interesting paradox: how do you get people to use SharePoint when they are using the voice mail system for everything?

He works for a local restaurant chain, and most of the users are restaurant managers that are too busy managing their restaurant to report on issues. They are supposed to log the going’s on in MOSS, and now instead of using a diary, they use the voice mail system, because it records all the messages.

He’s talking about some of the issues, and there are some very interesting patterns, most of which are cultural because of the nature of the users he’s dealing with.

I suggested that instead of trying to force them onto SharePoint, do the opposite and let technology do all the work — there’s some voice mail software that will transcribe the message to text, and save the audio message. You can probably hook that up to MOSS, and thus save the messages and the voice mails themselves for archival. Sure, there’s a loss of potential meta data, but that could be cured other ways.

But it brings up an interesting point: how many of us have run into an environment where user adoption issues are so severe, the technology just doesn’t get used? Square hole, round peg, right? That’s why we write personas, so we can understand the culture of the people that we work with.

In this case, the restaurant managers are not computer users — if you studied their usage patterns, they are probably recording their voice mails on the way home after a long day on their feet (and they would drive home and record the message instead of sitting in front of a computer). So sitting them in front a blog probably wouldn’t happen.

Any suggestions?

How we deal with clients and how they view our professionalism is sometimes more important than what we know, especially in the field of User Experience where our knowledge is treated at about the same level as a fortune teller. I've told some of my reports that likable and professional is more billable than  knowledgeable.

I asked this question over at LinkedIn (I've grown to like the site, and it really is a powerful networking tool). I'm going to publish some of the answers every week, and you can respond to them, or not. Sometimes the answers will repeat – my apoligies. I will give credit where credit is due, and I'm going to try to live by some of these.

This was submitted by David Coerchon:

• Not delivering
• Involving himself in the customer’s company internal issues
  
• Not listening
  
• Thinking the project might last forever
  
• Not thinking to learn for the next project
  
• Thinking it’s over when he leaves the customer

From Use It:

1. Non-Standard GUI Controls
2. Inconsistency
3. No Perceived Affordance
4. No Feedback
5. Bad Error Messages
6. Asking for the Same Info Twice
7. No Default Values
8. Dumping Users into the App
9. Not Indicating How Info Will Be Used
10. System-Centric Features

Imagine if you could keep track of all of your friends and what they are doing on social networks, and at the same time your friends are notified about what you are doing? FriendFeed does that, and more.

You can share your notifications one of two ways:

• Enter the link to what you are working on manually, or…
• Link your social network settings, automatically, so when you do something at Yelp, it gets published on Facebook.

The setup was fairly easy — I did so in about ten minutes.

The list of networks they have so far:

Digg, Google Reader, Mixx, Reddit, Bookmarking, del.icio.us, Furl, Google Shared Stuff, Ma.gnolia, StumbleUpon, Gmail/Google Talk, Jaiku, Pownce, Twitter, Seesmic, Vimeo, YouTube, Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, SmugMug, Zooomr, Blog Blog, Tumblr, iLike, Last.fm, Pandora, Goodreads, LibraryThing, Amazon Wishlists, Disqus, LinkedIn, Netflix Queue, Netvibes, SlideShare, Upcoming, Yelp

I’m lucky — the third time I dropped out of college, I was moving towards a Journalism degree. That taught me a lot of things (write less, write in inverted pyramid, headlines are very, very important), and many of those things apply to the Web more so.

Here’s a few tips that I’ve found, other than this article about writing for the internet:

• Write clear, concise headlines. No one does this better than Jakob Nielsen — they don’t necessarily have to be completely accurate, but the headlines should be interesting enough so people actually want to read the article.
• Write in inverted pyramid style. One of the first methods of writing I was taught was writing in the inverted pyramid — put the most important items first. This comes from journalism where sometimes articles have to be edited down because of space constraints, and even has more importance because of the difference of screen sizes. The inverted pyramid has an additional benefit: search engines love this method of writing, so much so that it’ll index these pages much higher.
• Long paragraphs should be edited down. For many of the news stories I used to write, we’d use only one or two sentences per paragraph (again, easier to edit). The same goes for the web. If it’s longer than a few sentences, think of breaking up the paragraph so it’s easier to read.
• Long articles should be paired down, or split into multiple articles. Studies have shown that people read 25 percent slower on screen versus print. Who wants to read a 500 word article on an iPhone?
• Articles should almost designed so they can be scanned. Notice how I use bold to illustrate main points, and normal text to elaborate. Bullet lists to illustrate points, quotes from other articles split out, and many paragraphs breaks make articles easy to be read.

It’s all about writing for the medium, and remembering the target audience. If you don’t, you are failing them.

I know this has been around for a while, but I still think it’s relevant — Mike Davidson does a great job of showing how to design an effective MySpace page. He also gives you a sample page to start from so you can customized based off of that.

Amazon, Apple, Google, eBay, Craigslist.

What you could say about them all is that their products (or their websites) is the brand, and in essence is part of the User Experience, because it’s pretty much how the user feels about the products and the company. It’s really an extension of the thought that User Experience is at the intersection of marketing, usability and business.

How much does User Experience mean for each of these examples? For all of them, it means everything.

Apple has made its mark by building products so cool and so easy to use that they have their own fanatical customer base.

Amazon is so good, you expect it to find books for you.

Google, it’s all about straight forward applications that feel right.

eBay’s improved usability and the garage sale feel of the pages (not in a derisive manner, of course) makes it the biggest marketplace in the world where everyone can sell, buy, and participate.

Craigslist’s free-for-all design that’s grey works in part because it has the feel of the non-profit with humble living spaces in Inner Sunset, San Francisco.

For each example, how their products work and how they feel is the User Experience and brand, and prove that superior design means superior results. It also shows in some cases (Apple, for example) that superior User Experiences mean people will pay for more them than other products (how many other MP3 players can you name?) in the same way people will pay for better cars like BMWs.

In fact, their User Experiences are so good, they are their own marketing vehicles. Is yours?

The Product Usability Web log has a good article talking about the gap between what the designer knows and the user is capable of in the design of applications.

The designer-user gap

This is what Jakob Nielsen (or his ghostwriter) in his Alertbox column is calls the designer-user gap. Nielsen identifies three levels of designer-user gaps:

• Level 1: The Designer Is the User (he completely understands how the product works, and so do the users)
• Level 2: The Designer Understands the Product (and the designer is in the dangerous position of knowing more than the user group)
• Level 3: Designing for a Foreign Domain (where the designer has the problem that he knows much less than the user group)

The reality is that we are almost never the target audience, so when we say that to some executive that wants it red or blue, the truth is that they may be closer to the target audience than we are.

We could use the Nielsen Norman group definition…

“User Experience” encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products. The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother. Next comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to use. True user experience goes far beyond giving customers what they say they want, or providing checklist features. In order to achieve high-quality user experience in a company’s offerings there must be a seamless merging of the services of multiple disciplines, including engineering, marketing, graphical and industrial design, and interface design.

…because, well, they get paid a lot of money.

But, I like to keep things simple. This is what User Experience means to me:

For quite a while, I drove a BMW Z4. It’s a nice car, but most amazing is the placement of the cupholders: they’re right underneath the left and right air conditioning and heating vents, and when you pressed on them, they would pop out. Among all the other things that the car had — a lot of power, a stereo that would increase in volume when the car was going faster, seat warmers, and a power top, excellent handling — it was the little things like the cup holders that made it an excellent user experience. In the time I drove that car (for several years), I never spilled a drink.

The Z4 was in the shop for a while, and I rented a Chevy Aveo for almost three months. Among other things about the car (other than the running joke that a friend of mine came up with a different name for it every time he talked about it) I didn’t like, the cup holders were in the middle, between the seats. I spilled drinks in that car five times. The were a lot of things I didn’t like about the car (poor handling, uncomfortable seating, brakes that were similar to what Fred Flinstone had to do), but what stuck out most was the cup holders.

That’s what user experience means to me — you never know what the end users are going to complain about or like about your product, but you do know that everything they see is something that could be criticized as a poor user experience. It could be that the product crashes every five minutes, or that help text was poorly written, or that it takes ten steps to go through something that should take five, it’s the complete experience. It should even be to the level that users don’t know they want a feature, but it works just as they expect it to.

User Experience specialists act as holistic evaluators and product managers that recognize any that could limit the effectiveness of the product. In that sense, User Experience architects act as gatekeepers, working with all teams (Development, Quality Assurance and Marketing) to make sure what goes out the door is an excellent product.

Good question. I don’t know the exact answer (is there an exact answer for anything in technology?), but this article does a really good job of covering common sense approaches to site collection governance and MOSS. There are a few issues — what if you need to rollup content across site collections — but most of it is straight forward advice.