adrianLiem

User experience is a new term emerging in the world of design and technology and, like many other catchy phrases or trendy jargon, it can be easy to have misconceptions or different views on what the terminology is all referring to. Far be it for me to provide the definitive answer to what user experience is, but I can at least offer this thought as a starting point: user experience is a super-set of qualities that include emotional reactions to intangible features such as brand, but user experience is also groomed by the interactions people have with a company and its product.

The other night I was driving home with my brother, coming back from a family dinner. We stopped at the corner of 33rd and Arbutus, and half a block east my brother noticed a TV ad. We were probably almost 100 feet away from the buildig, and granted, it must’ve been a big TV, but even from this distance we could immediately recognize the company being advertised.

The ad featured silhouettes dancing in front of a colourful backdrop, each holding a little white rectangle in their hand. What I was seeing was something simple, dynamic, engaging, and fun.

You can probably figure out what the brand was from that description alone. But after going online, low and behold I see almost the exact same imagery, triggering the same emotional reaction as the TV ad I saw from 100+ feet away.

Does this look familiar?

Photo courtesy: http://www.apple.com/itunes/

Steve Jobs has been highly acclaimed of late for the re-emergence of Apple as a leading company in the technology sector, and a lot of Apple’s success isn’t only about the technology — really, the technical sophistication of an iPod is nothing to be in awe of. What is equally impressive, if not more, is the brand awareness Apple has created for their new line of products headed up by the iPod.

That immediate brand recognition doesn’t just come from an ad running on TV a few dozen times a day, nor does it come from magazine ads or bilboards. It comes from a deep understanding of how people perceive things around them, how people interact with each other and with technology, and how to then design the product and every touch point with the company to reinforce this understanding.

Apple products create a sticky emotional reaction through their brand which in turn has been driven by their understanding of the entire user experience of being an Apple customer. This is a company that not only knows their audience and target market, they know how to communicate with them, how to sell to them, and how to build products for them.

When you start talking about brand and you start talking about emotional reactions and look and feel, DESIGN plays a huge role. And here for Apple, at least, their success in design isn’t only designing an effective marketing campaign or designing a nice-looking website, Apple’s design extends beyond promotion. The strength of Apple’s design work is in designing a product with the user experience in mind.

The iPod is well-known for its sleek design. It’s clean. It’s simple. It’s easy to use. What does it do? It plays music. It’s fun. It’s hip (even if that word isn’t). It’s entertaining. It’s engaging. All of these adjectives describe the look, feel and tone of the ads AND also the actual product itself along with the experience of visiting the website or using the software.

Bottom line, what’s the lesson to learn? Apple’s success as a company today can largely be attributed to its success in focusing on the entirety of the iPod user experience. Apple has a product that not only looks nice, but behaves nicely too.

A common challenge I face on a daily basis is getting people to understand some of the newer fringe technologies that are quickly becoming integrated into daily practice across the web. One such challenge is explaining the concept of RSS, or more broadly, content syndicated through XML, and today I realized one of the root causes for the confusion or apprehension that can be out there.

Just today I helped launch a redesigned job postings page for the University of British Columbia: UBC HR Staff Job Postings. My contribution mostly involved some work on information design / page layout, along with adding in RSS feeds which included the addition of an RSS icon:

After a little while, one of my co-workers asked, “Why aren’t we using the ‘official’ feed icon?”

The ‘official’ icon?

“The one with the waves,” he said (or something to that effect).

Hmm. Good question. The best I could answer at the time was, “Well, when we first drafted this page, there was no ‘official’ icon.”

We had initially started work on the page several months earlier, and at the time, there were a handful of feed icons being used. Take a look around news sites today, and you’ll still see a smattering of varieties:

Business Week uses this:

The Economist uses this:

The New York Times uses this:

Well, after doing some research into it, it turns out this choice of icon for web feeds is somewhat of a contentious issue, but one that is being worked through as I type.

According to Feed Icons, “A new standard is being established to identify syndicated content.” The “official” icon? It’s the one with the waves:

Why is this important?

Well, it’s hard enough to explain the concept of content syndication – why compound the issue by displaying the words “RSS” or “XML”? This is technical jargon which the average person really doesn’t need to know about.

The technology behind content syndication through XML, while being increasingly adopted by all sorts of web properties, is still a fringe technology that the mass market of everyday people hasn’t fully adopted yet. Although this is changing on a daily basis, those of us who work in the industry on a daily basis should be taking it upon ourselves to help establish conventions to improve the consistency and create a common standard that will ultimately help the people we are trying to communicate to.

This, is the power of an icon.

One single consistent standard icon to identify syndication feeds will help the mass user adoption of this new technology. No more confusion, no more questions about what RSS stands for or what XML is or what this thing called Atom is all about.

With each variety of an RSS/Atom/XML icon we throw out there, we only compound the problem and create greater confusion and uncertainty which will undermine the adoption of the technology itself.

So, the bottom line? Help spread the good word. Visit Feed Icons, learn about this movement, and make your contribution to the betterment of online communication.

If You Liked This, You Might Also Like:

The orange icon… – A post from the Microsoft Team RSS Blog

The New Standard Feed Icon – A little bit of history behind the icons

The Globe and Mail’s RSS News Feed page – Are you a designer or developer? Or do you have any hand in how syndicated content is being offered online? If so, I’d highly recommend taking a look at what might be one of the best examples of introducing feeds to the general public: The Globe and Mail’s RSS News Feed page. It’s not only an elegant piece of work from a technical perspective, but it’s also incredibly user-friendly. I’ll take a look at this in another post, but for now go check it out and learn from it. Within a year’s time, and with any luck and a lot of hard work from the web monkeys in the world, this will be the new standard.

I attended a seminar from VanUE tonight hosted at the Habaneros office downtown. It was a talk given by Paul Sherman, Director of User-Centered Design & Usability at Sage Software and also Vice-President of the Usability Professionals’ Association, on the topic of “Partnering With Change Agents in Your Organization: A Story About Collaborating With Six Sigma Practitioners To Make a Better UI”.

It’s always interesting to hear about the “battles won” when it comes to user-centered design. It would have been interesting to hear more about the team dynamics that emerge when you take a very business-centric process model such as Six-Sigma and combine this with UCD. Nonetheless, there was a lot of useful information to learn from.

Some of what I tought were the key tips were:
1. Collaborate: find natural partners, leverage your strengths, and present a united front to stakeholders
2. Build the business case
3. Manage the project well
4. Get over yourself (where “yourself” refers to “you” as a UCD practitioner — which I really like, because there really IS a tendency for those of us who pride ourselves on understanding user needs to be well, proud of what we think we know…)
5. Learn to influence
6. Be humble, respectful…and tenaciously persistent.

There were also some insightful comments made throughout the talk and the night about the interplay of different disciplines. One of the observations Paul had shared was that “very few of us (“us” as in UCD practitioners) can implement as well as we can research, evaluate & redesign”. Similarly, at another point it was also mentioned that having strong project management skills, in fact having skills grown out of formal training, can also be tremendously beneficial.

Indeed, this is where the collaboration and partnering becomes incredibly valuable. It can be very hard to be all things to all people. But it sounds like if you can do that, you’ll be a very valuable person to any UCD team.

An interesting article appeared in today’s Globe and Mail, Backlash forces eBay to reverse pet plan.

eBay had been considering plans to allow users to sell pets through their online auctioning system, but after these plans were revealed on a discussion board, the company received thousands of messages urging eBay to uphold its previous policy of banning the sale of pets online (with the exception of fish and snails). In response to this outcry from their users, eBay changed their minds and, as before, pets will not be allowed to be sold.

This story reveals either a SNAFU on eBay’s part, or a little glimmer of brilliance.

The SNAFU: If it was only by chance that a manager revealed this plan on a discussion board, it’s likely that eBay would have already dedicated resources towards developing this new service – and even if it was only some initial costs, it would still have been costs that could have been avoided.

But, the potential glimmer of brilliance: What if eBay had only been brainstorming this idea internally (with the only sunk costs being the time and people involved in meetings and planning) and then used the discussion board to put out the feelers to see what their users thought about the idea? What a clever way to get meaningful feedback directly from their users — users who, by being those who frequent the discussion boards, are likely some of the company’s most valued customers.

The lesson learned: If you have an idea for a service offering, it’s absolutely vital that you develop a strategy for assessing how this service will be received by its target audience.

By doing a little more due diligence and employing user-centered design processes, you can save yourself from a lot of extra costs (not to mention a lot of extra work) by focusing on services and products that will gain user buy-in.

You may not have the luxury of your own discussion board to test the waters, but there are other channels to gather feedback. You could use direct lines of connection like a mailing list or an invitation for feedback posted on your homepage. You could also try indirect lines like tapping into a discussion board or online community where you know your users frequent, or attending events where your target audience is and actually talk to them face to face (imagine that, f2f contact!), or carry out some market research of your own and piece together a picture of your users based on information, case studies, and examples that already exist online.

The bottom line, know your users.