“Do you have a good hotel recommendation in York?” asked one of my best friends this morning. “Nah, “ I replied, as my experience from our stay last year was pretty lackluster. During a one-day stopover, I booked a room late in the afternoon at a quaint hotel.  We checked-in, dropped our luggage in the room and went for a walk in the city. Upon our return later that night, we noticed a strange and unpleasant smell coming from the bathroom. But we were tired and had an early wake up call the next morning so we didn’t have the will to complain; instead we shut the bathroom door and went to bed. This is how we “resolved” the smell issue. We woke the next morning, checked out and went on driving towards Scotland. None of the checkout staff asked if we were happy with our stay and we did not bother mentioning the unpleasant smell.

Why am I telling you this? It’s because here lays one of the biggest challenges for many companies as they attempt to address usability issues with their products. Many managers believe analysing user support calls will yield the usability issues facing their users and then they’ll fix them.

Sounds reasonable? It is natural to think so. The data is available as most companies keep support call logs so all you need is smart analysis. With minimal effort, you can get a big list of usability issues to resolve. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The problem with such an approach is that many users do not provide accurate feedback or any at all (as in my example above). People often think complaining is inconvenient and are skeptical as to the service they’ll receive after doing so. But, as a company, the fact that a customer does not log a complaint does not necessarily equal satisfaction. Your customers might be resolving their problem the same way we did – hiding it or ignoring it. Slowly but steadily those dissatisfied customers may drift away until they are gone forever. It’s the users who do not renew contracts or upgrade to the latest version and when you find out it’s usually too late. Support analysis will give you valuable data insight and knowledge but will not paint the full picture of consumer sentiment around your product or service.

Your overall customer base can be placed into three buckets:

• Customers who absolutely adore your offering and care about providing feedback, good or bad. They write add-ons, blog about you and praise your brand publicly. You usually get a lot of information from them with little effort.
• Potential users who are not your customers. You attempt to grow your user pool by acquisition strategies but certain people are just out of your focus, which is fine. You might, however, be surprised to learn that some were a customer at one point.
• And then there are your silent customers. They simply use your product or service without giving away too much information. The majority of your customers will comprise this group and are the most likely to drift away without you even noticing until it is too late.

Coming from the world of support and user services, I know how important it is for users to provide input and even I did not file a complaint. Plumbing issues can occur in any hotel and it could have resided in my memory as a “great little hotel that upgraded us to a magnificent suite after we told them about the odor problem.” Instead it’s the hotel I did not recommend to my friend.

So, what should the hotel have done to keep me a happy customer? What should you do to prevent users from drifting away? First and foremost, acknowledge user support and services as one of the organisation’s most important activities. This is how customers see you and is a major way for them to establish a positive opinion about your brand.

When you put your mind to it, you can develop practical steps to ensure the following:

• Make it easy for customers to provide input, whether positive or negative. A good example is “Love Film” DVD rentals service (owned by Amazon). When “Love Film” sends a DVD, a customer will also receive a pre-paid return envelope and feedback form already populated with comments / problems commonly reported by other users. Instead of having to freehand, “This DVD is scratched”, a user simply has to check the box.
• When you do receive a user comment, show it’s important to you. Make the user feel you have taken their feedback to heart and provide fast, courteous and impeccable service. Apologise and compensate!
• Most importantly, be proactive. Do research. Perform user testing of your products not only before releasing them but also over time because circumstances can change the way your product is used (E.g. people, technology, social norms, context of use, etc.). You must invest in user research; test user journeys over and over again during the product life cycle. Do not rely on users to provide you with voluntary feedback.

The above steps serve as a way to start a conversation with customers and continue the dialogue, creating brand loyalty. Don’t let your customers drift away. Instead, create an experience that makes them recommend your nice little hotel in York to their friends.

A couple weekends back I went to the Glastonbury Music Festival. It was in England. In June. In a field. It rained. It got muddy.

This is a festival with a main site area of nine square miles and a population of around 170,000. It contains 35 main stages hosting countless performers, plus a seemingly endless selection of stalls and shops, over a period of 5 days. Just a few of the headline acts this year were U2, Coldplay and Beyoncé Knowles.

I watched with interest last week as people struggled to get into and around the festival site. Groups of friends donned wellington boots and waterproof ponchos as they heaved bags, crates, tents and poles along muddy paths and across miles of farm land. There were exhausting tales of four-hour queues to get into the site, followed by yet more time trudging round and round the site trying desperately to find a spot to camp. Customers pitched tents, their hair clinging wetly to their skin, and dragged crates supermarket beer through the mud, all before sitting on a damp and dirty groundsheet and sampling their room-temperature wares.

Now, this immediately struck me as odd. After all, in this business we constantly preach the importance of making your customers’ lives as easy as possible. We tell you that they don’t want to work hard, that everything must be laid out for them, that they’re fickle people who will drop out as soon as you make it difficult. Why should Glastonbury be different?

Well we’ve hit upon a contradiction. There is such a thing as making your experience too easy, too pleasant, too… bland. If a customer doesn’t have to think at all, they will simply switch off. Any tiny difficulty will suddenly earn significance and the customer will not be engaged enough to bother with it. They’ll actually be more likely to drop out of the process than their harder-working counterparts!

Before you think I’ve gone mad, let me explain some rules…

The rules of making your customer work

1. Brand. Before your customer will work for you, he/she needs to know who you are. Glastonbury has been running for 41 years – it has an international reputation and is the UK’s largest music event of each year. Everyone’s heard of it and the core customers, the ones who attend year after year, are absolutely dedicated to it. They use it to help define their personalities. They plan their lives around it. It is even their religion. When you talk to people about why they go to Glastonbury they’ll tell you it’s “for the vibe”. Is that really something that a company can create, or is it just a customer perception created at least in part by the sense of accomplishment that follows struggling to get there?

2. Investment. The customer has to have invested in your product before they start work. The people I watched queuing up in the rain for Glastonbury had each spent around £200 ($320) on a ticket months and months before the event itself, and there were no refunds. These people had already decided that the product was worth investing in and had handed over their hard-earned cash, so their minds were set – they were going to get value from their tickets.

3. Value. And that leads us nicely onto the most important rule. The customer has to know exactly what they’re going to get at the end of this, and that it’s worth all their effort. You wouldn’t suffer through mud and rain if you weren’t going to get to see Beyoncé at the end of it. Equally, you wouldn’t fill out a lengthy web form if it wasn’t going to give you some sort of reward. If a customer has a goal in sight and they know how to reach it, then there’s no stopping them.

4. Competition. Sense has to prevail – if your competitors are offering the same thing but making it simpler to achieve, then there’s just no point in trying. You absolutely must have an edge that justifies the effort, or you’ll lose people at the first hurdle. Glastonbury works because there’s nothing in the UK comparable to it. It’s the biggest, it’s been running the longest, it books the most exciting acts. If an identical festival sprung up next door with a concierge service included in the price, we’d be telling a different story. And if your business has a twin, you must make sure yours is the easier to engage with.

The benefits

So, even if you have everything in the list above, why would you want your customers to work hard? Isn’t it still a negative thing? Well, there’s no customer more loyal than one who’s invested effort into your brand. It’s part of a cycle – if someone has gone out of their way to learn about you and your product, if they’ve spent time interacting with your brand, then they’re familiar and comfortable with it and willing to do the same again. They will overlook some mistakes, forgive little flaws. They feel a sense of accomplishment, they’ll stick with you above your competitors and they’ll spread the word to their peers. And who doesn’t want a core group of customers with that strong sense of loyalty and evangelism?

If Glastonbury wasn’t such hard work, maybe it would never have achieved such success.

Why measure time?

When conducting user experience studies, it is useful to measure certain aspects of the products performance, such as number of errors and level of user satisfaction. Time is a metric which seems like a no brainer because it is absolute, easy to measure, and easy to interpret. Timing how long a user takes to complete a process or activity gives a concrete figure which is sometimes easier for clients to accept than qualitative findings. Often a client may wonder how they can decide if a product has ‘passed’ or ‘failed’ a user test, or how performance can be increased to upturn KPI’s. Time is also a metric which fits into the ‘efficiency’ category, which, along with ‘effectiveness’ and ‘satisfaction’ makes up the ISO9241-11  standard for measuring usability.

Limitations of timing users

However, there are several considerations to make before time is to be used as a valid usability metric:

Methodology

If you are going to use ‘think aloud’ methodology, timing the participant is out of the question as the result will be skewed by moderator questions, time to think about and respond to these questions, and time to re-focus back to the original task at hand. Timing sessions requires using alternative methods

Context

Time taken has different meanings depending on the context. Some activities, like game playing, are used as a ‘time killer’, so although interesting, time spent is not a useful usability metric. Information seeking is equally hindered by times when the user is confused, interested, or distracted causing them to spend longer. Arguably the most useful context in which to time a user is when they are completing a registration process and moving through fields; here we can be fairly certain that the user does not want to be in this process, but have been forced to move through it to progress to a subsequent goal (banking, blogging etc). Therefore the time spent should be as low as possible.

Number of participants

Nielson recommends testing with 20 users when measuring time or other quantitative metrics to ensure that the confidence level is acceptable. In practice though, timing even a few users can provide a frame of reference when comparing multiple sites or versions of a site

Actionable data

If you know that it took users a mean time of 4 minutes to complete a process…is that good…bad…better than average? How much should you aim to reduce that by? What was the factor that caused them to take that amount of time? Having a comparison is necessary (either your site over time, or your site versus competitor sites.)

Practical advice

If the study is a benchmarking or performance assessment type, a time metric would be useful to indicate general efficiency. Whereas if the goal of the study is to uncover why the interface is performing badly, or to uncover usability problems and how to fix them, timing the session may prove less fruitful. In either case, the decision whether to time a usability session must be made very early in the process such as shortly after the kick off meeting; this way all involved parties are clear about how to prepare the test materials and what is expected of the reports.

If the session is to be timed, consider using retrospective think aloud which asks the user to explain their thought processes after the event (they remain silent whilst using the interface, either with or without a moderator present). Alternatively, ‘stimulated retrospective think aloud’, also uses a memory aid such as replaying a video of the actions they took on screen, to elicit the participants’ thoughts on what they did. This approach is more thorough but takes more time and resources.

Ultimately it should be understood that the usability session is a qualitative event and therefore the implicit and explicit actions of users can lead to more insight and actionable recommendations than a measure of how long users spent to complete a task.

Within the information design sphere there is always a need to meet multiple objectives; please your client, please the end user, meet business requirements, and stay within technology limitations. One of the most fundamental questions this can raise is the extent to which your design should be radical, cool, or revolutionary, as opposed to standard, simple and conformist. I think there are two participants to consider when meeting this dilemma:

User needs

The underlying purpose of the design should be to meet the user’s needs; there is no need for a website if no customers or potential customers want to visit it. On the surface, the initial visual impression of a web site can have a big impact on the user. However, over time, the user will become accustomed to the design and lose their passion for it (compare your reaction at first touching an iPod to your 1000^th interaction with it). This is not to say that visual appeal is not important, just that ease of navigation is more important (excluding specialist scenarios like gaming). One of the most memorable quotes I ever heard in a usability test was “Just give me the information I require in a manner I anticipate!”, in response to a wacky design which did not place information in the expected locations.

Client expectations

Some clients see ‘design’ as being equal to ‘creative’. It can be challenging to convey that the aim of information design is to build a taxonomy which gives the greatest information reward with the minimal time and effort expended, and that the output of this (e.g. wireframes) might not look very pretty. We have found that it helps to set expectations for this as early as possible (e.g. in the proposal), and to describe the benefits of good information design.

At One to one Insight we always design the taxonomy, terminology and interactions first, before laying the creative design on top. We help clients to understand that in the long term, users will keep using your interface if it is easy to navigate. Additionally, a wireframe offers more creative scope than may at first meet the eye; portraying a menu horizontally across the top of the page in a wireframe might look bleak and standard, but the creative team can then give that menu shapes, colours, textures and shadows, even making it appear part of a scene or background, as shown on the examples below:



Conclusion

We feel that the underlying structure of a website is at least as important as the visual appeal, and that both of these contributing design factors should be designed separately, to avoid creating dependencies where the visual design dictates, and therefore compromises the information design. Only once the information architect has completed the structure of the site should the creative layer be applied. This creative layer could be radical in its nature, but we believe that standards emerge for a reason. It is beneficial to conform to commonly accepted patterns, such as navigation menus being in a row at the top or column at the left, and beginning the with ‘Home’ link (for example). These standards allow users to learn one pattern and apply it to hundreds of interfaces which ultimately increases usability.