Yesterday I was privileged to be involved in a user testing and feedback session that they were running down in Brighton. Aarron Walter and Stephanie Troeth from MailChimp came down, and ran an hour’s session with me where we went through various aspects of the MailChimp interface, features that were available (including ones I wasn’t aware of), and various usability points were addressed. I felt it was incredibly beneficial to both sides – MailChimp, so that they can understand what works and what doesn’t for users, and from my perspective seeing different features and having the opportunity to raise problems I had with usability. Too many times I’ve used a product which feels unfriendly to use, that feels like it was designed for hardcore non-typical users of the product, or sometimes just “designed by developers”. And we know how that turns out… So it was great to be involved in contributing to any potential user interface changes; it definitely makes you feel more valued as a customer.

Aside from the obvious part of testing a user interface, it was good during the session to learn about different features that people maybe aren’t aware of – there’s a large number of different integrations available in the admin area – everything from Google Analytics (tracks MailChimp campaigns being sent out against page views, e-commerce goals etc, all inside your admin area) to Freshbooks (import contacts etc). I also discovered the MailChimp integrations directory – very cool. One very good point Aarron also raised was how I found out about new features – for example, just clicking around in the admin area through to email and Twitter updates from MailChimp etc. There’s no point having new features available if you don’t shout about them…!

Overall – more than happy to carry on recommending them where suitable – a company that listens to its users AND provides a great service too. And maybe the most interesting fact of the session? Learning Freddie the chimp’s full name…. not sure how common knowledge that is, so maybe I’ll keep that a secret for now ;-)

The first was some First Great Western sleeper tickets to get me to London for a client meeting. I spent quite some time choosing the tickets (it’s a complex business anyway) then working through the checkout process. At the end, I’m pretty sure I briefly saw the Verified by Visa thing appear in a frame only to vanish to be replaced by the page hosting the frame in the frame. How recursive. I got angry then started all over again (yep, my basket was empty) with another card (one with which I’ve always managed to duck around the Verified by Visa thing by carefully clicking the tiny ‘No thanks’ button).

The second purchase was my exciting new Android phone from T-Mobile. Another lengthy checkout process (since it involves a credit check etc.) only to be presented by Verified by Visa. Everything actually appeared to go through this time, although I got no acknowledgement email from T-Mobile. Later that day, they contacted me to say the card verification on the purchase had failed. I phoned them and a nice chap took my details again and pushed everything through. I got the impression that failure at the Verified by Visa step was not uncommon.

I’m clearly not alone in my hatred for it. Plus, it seems as though it fails massively in its attempts to add any security anyway.

So what can we do? As consumers, we need to moan and whine to to the e-commerce businesses we buy from. And they need to moan and whine to the 3D Secure providers to sort out their system and provide better, bullet (and user) proof e-commerce integration. I’ve never had to implement it, but I’m  willing to bet that it’s a complete nightmare, with poor documentation and very little support so e-commerce developers rush to fit (using nasty hacky javascript and frame solutions) and forget.

It’s no good spending time and money improving e-commerce to increase sales if a third party payment system mucks it all up for users at the end.

One way is to keep contact forms short and snappy with a small number of fields. Usually that’s how things start off but often after a while we see more fields creeping in (presumably to gather more ‘marketing collateral’).

Here’s a study which backs up what seems like the obvious assertion that fewer fields will mean more conversions.

Via Luke Wroblewski‘s Functioning Form.

Er, thanks. OK then, I will.

So, a brain dump of books/sites which I’ve attempted to add some structure to follows. I’ve stuck to stuff I’ve actually read or are in the process of reading initially:

Firstly, the book which gets lots of people interested and which we now class as pretty much mandatory reading for our clients (we often buy them a copy), let alone ourselves is Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think.

I first got into this stuff reading the work of Nielsen, Norman et. al. so:

• Alertbox – Jakob Nielsen
• The Design of Everyday Things – Don Norman (originally published as The Psychology of Everyday Things and updated in The Design of Everyday Things – but I don’t really know how much difference there is between them – any opinions?)

Overview / UX process:

• The Elements of User Experience – Jesse James Garrett

Usability testing:

• Usability Engineering – Jakob Nielsen

User research and presentation:

• Rapid Contextual Design – Karen Holtzblatt, Jessamyn Burns Wendell, Shelley Wood
• Communicating Design – Dan Brown
• The User is Always Right – Steve Mulder
• Disambiguity – Leisa Reichelt

Information architecture:

• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web – Louis Rosenfeld
• Information Architecture Handbook – Eric L. Reiss
• Card Sorting – Donna Spencer
• Boxes and Arrows

Interface design:

• User Interface Design for Programmers – Joel Spolsky
• Designing Interfaces – Jenifer Tidwell

Interaction design / inspiration:

• Analog in, Digital Out – Brendan Dawes
• Designing Interactions – B Moggridge

And stuff I’ve got lined up to read or am planning to read:

• Contextual Design – Hugh Beyer, Karen Holtzblatt
• About Face 3 – Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin
• Observing the User Experience – Mike Kuniavsky
• Mental Models – Indi Young

Here are some other folks’ lists:

• http://whitneyhess.com/blog/2009/06/30/so-you-wanna-be-a-user-experience-designer-step-1-resources/
• http://www.amazon.co.uk/User-Experience-Reading-List/lm/2OWXDHHPFH23O
• http://interactiondesign.sva.edu/blog/entry/requested_reading_recommendations/

Any more anybody?

Monday was a whole set of keynotes from some of the big names in user experience – the rock stars if you will. Eric Reiss from fatDUX (and author of one of the books that got me started in this stuff) talked about e-service (sometimes called service design) – thinking about all the touch points between an organisation and customers, not just websites. Luke Wroblewski brought some architectural thinking to interaction design projects in his talk titled Parti and the Design Sandwich. Dan Saffer made us think about how behaviour and function should drive the design of products and services rather than getting hooked up on form or mechanics (how often do we think/hear “we should build an ajax site for this”?). Jared Spool entertained after lunch with his take on making things intuitive, Jeffrey Veen shared insights from his work on the information design for Google Analytics and (the) Don Norman wrapped things up by reviewing the day and arguing how complexity is a good thing.

Then we had two days of smaller, more practical focused workshops. I spent Tuesday morning in Donna Spencer‘s session on Information Architecture. Billed as “No filler, no fluff, just pure IA”, it was just that. For me it was helpful in reassuring me that we’d been doing some of the right things (e.g. card sorting) but that we need to think a little more holistically. For example, you can’t just take the results of a card sort and build a site structure from it, it’s a tool to help you think about tricky parts of a site or get some initial ideas. In the afternoon, I stayed with Donna for a session called Designing for People. Again a fairly introductory session, for me this reinforced some of the things I learnt about people in HCI modules of my computer science degree and put them in the context of the web (which barely existed when I studied them the first time around). So we learnt to think about and leverage things like human memory and visual attention in the web design and development work which we do day-to-day.

Wednesday morning saw me plumping at the last minute for a session on sketching. Not something I’d have normally picked, but I’d heard such good things from those who’d attended it the day before that I decided to give it a go. The session was called Quick Sketching for Interaction Design and was run by two really nice chaps called Mark Baskinger and William Bardel. They took us back to basics with pencil and paper sketching. We drew lines, we drew squares, we drew circles, we added perspective, then we drew arrows. We brought these things together to illustrate problems and sketch process flows and design ideas to address them. My drawing was terrible – it was  pretty embarrassing having my squares corrected in red by NatBat – but I’m going to buy a sketch book and test Mark’s assertion that we can all get better with practice. The session concluded with a group sketching exercise where we explained the many pains of laundering a duvet visually (where are the pictures, Al? Not good enough for your portfolio?!). The chaps are working on a book on sketching and I’m definitely going to keep an eye out for that one coming out.

Finally on Wednesday afternoon I went along to Leisa Reichelt‘s session on design research. Leisa discussed the range of techniques which can be used to bring users into the design process and focused particularly on user interviewing. For me this was great as it’s something we’ve been trying out at White October to try to get useful user insights for little cost. It was reassuring to see that the process I’d pretty much made up for interviewing was close to that which Leisa has been practicing for ages.  I wish she’d had more time to go through the analysis side of things, but I’ve got some good pointers of what to think about and where to learn more. Leisa is a prolific live tweeter and the dumps of her tweets on her blog give some good insight into the various sessions she made it along to – well worth a scan through.

Other sessions I would like to have made it along to include Richard Rutter and James Box’s session on wireframing. I heard good stuff from developer-y folks who went along to that to learn how Clearleft use jquery and other tools to produce rapid prototypes for demonstration, discussion and testing.

Just a quick story which I think sums up my overall feelings for the event. At the beginning of Leisa’s session, she asked us to introduce and tag ourselves BarCamp style (no mean feat with 30-40 people in the workshop). The most common tag by far was ‘inspired’. We were nearing the end of a packed three days so the fact that so many were inspired rather than tired has got to be good news for the attendees, the speakers and Clearleft alike. I met lots of friendly, interesting and helpful people and learnt so much so a big thanks to all those involved. The UK UX scene is really picking up now and it’s an exciting time.

My phone stopped sending texts last week, giving a fairly terse error. My phone is a Palm Centro, so it’s unusual. The first place I turn for help with it are always forums on the interweb. That’s what I did. The error code it gives, it turns out, is a carrier/network error. That signalled bad news to me: I was going to have to phone T-Mobile and ask for their help. I knew that this would be a nightmare: I’d have to wait a long time, they would want to ask me lots of questions about the error and the phone but they wouldn’t know anything about the Palm Centro since they don’t sell it (I bought it sim free for use on any network).

Lo, I had to wait about half an hour, the chap started asking me all about my Nokia N61 (an awful phone I’d ditched within about 2 days of getting it from them) and didn’t know anything about the Palm. He wasn’t interested in the fact that I’d done the research on the error which had concluded it was a network problem. He said that the network where I was was working fine and suggested that since the phone wasn’t one they sold or supported, I’d have to find another phone to test my sim in and/or try another sim in my phone. I’d have to do all the work in other words.

Well, fair enough I guess. I haven’t done anything more yet (apart from continue to have to phone people who send me texts to explain that I can’t reply). But then, the kicker. Today, T-Mobile sent me a text. It was a survey asking me how I rated the help I got from the support call. A text, yes. I had to reply…by text.  So whilst I desperately wanted to reply “1. Not at all” I couldn’t of course. Brilliant. Clearly it’s an automated system which would happen for every support call. But then, wouldn’t a lot of support calls tend to be about problems with texts or the phone generally? Wouldn’t it make sense for the customer service dude to be able to set a flag to say: “Don’t send this person a text to survey their satisfaction with my call – it won’t work”?

For me, T-Mobile have added insult to injury. They’ve failed to help me and then rubbed my face in it. My contract is long over. Maybe the quickest way to sort my problem would be just to jump ship…

Like a lot of web apps the site has pages where the user interacts with data on a page, completing their action by clicking a button.  For example a list of products that they browse with an ‘Add product’ button at the top:

Controls at the top of the Magento product list page

Often the page that you’re looking at will be long with lots of information on it, or with lots of information for you to fill in, and as you scroll down the page you lose the controls at the top.  What Magento does is: as the controls reach the top of the page (where they would normally disappear), they detach from the page and follow you down as you scroll, staying constantly visible at the top of the page.

Magneto controls follow you down the page as you scroll down

This is a neat application of DHTML, used to make life easier and more intuitive for the user, and not just for the sake of fancy graphics.  We murmured our delight in the office when we saw it…