Speak easy, or is that easily?

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Our sister company Optimal Usability won a Plain English Award recently for their clear and concise web content. So I thought now would be a great time to speak about plain English power in our branch of the Optimal family.

I’ve always thought plain English (or any other language!) is to content what usability is to design. It just makes things easier to read, to understand and to act on. It means not trying as hard to be comprehensive as comprehensible.

A quick test for plain English is whether you can understand something after just one reading. This rule of thumb guides all our communication: on our website, in our usability products, even our emails.

Plain English doesn’t mean boring, dumbed down or even everyday English. We are often dealing with complex information and that makes the challenge even greater, and more rewarding. Turning technical specs or instructions into plain English can sometimes feel like translating from one language to another. You’ll know you’ve nailed it when that sentence you’ve laboured over finally feels effortless.

If I was to offer just one tip for making your writing crystal clear it would be:

  1. Read your writing aloud
    You’ll stumble over anything that doesn’t need to be there.

And then if you begged me for another pearl of wisdom it would be:

  1. Put it down for a few days
    and then go back to tip #1

Of course plain English wouldn’t have the universal profile it does today without the schadenfreud factor. Every year crimes against clarity are celebrated for their ability to confound as much as perfect specimens are held up as shining examples.

After you’ve checked out the winners in the WriteMark Plain English Awards be horrified at the ‘brainstrains’ and the Plain English UK Golden Bull awards.

My personal favourite is from the Canadian Emergency Medical Service news report after a man had been attacked and lost part of his ear. They reported it like this:

‘He was missing a body part to the side of his head due to the assault. Luckily he was [in] stable and non-life-threatening [condition].’

Sometimes you need to know how not to do something before you can learn to do it well.

Be saved!

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Just before Christmas we rolled out an update for OptimalSort, Treejack and Chalkmark introducing automatic saving of surveys.

This means you no longer have to save your survey manually because it will be saved automatically each time you make a change. You can still hit the save button too if it makes you feel good!

Why autosave? Two reasons:

  1. We want to save you time wherever we can. The less time you spend saving the more time you save. Of course we’re gambling that everything you do is worth saving…
  2. There were a couple of places in the app where it wasn’t very clear whether or not your changes had been saved. Adding new tasks in Treejack or Chalkmark for example. It felt like you’d completely added a task to your survey, and it looked that way, but you had to press the ‘Save’ button. Why!? Why would we assume you don’t want that task until you explicitly say so?! Personally, I feel much better now that we assume you want to keep everything unless you explicitly press ‘Delete’.

In short, we are always working to improve the user experience for our users, just like you are doing for yours by using our usability tools.

But how will I know if my survey has been saved?

Once you’ve made a change to your survey (and click outside the changed text field), we will automatically perform the save for you. While a save is occurring a small spinner will appear on the ‘Save’ button and it will be temporarily disabled. Once the survey has been saved a message will appear underneath the button saying “Save successful”. How appropriate :-)

Online or offline card sorting?

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From time to time I hear people say that they prefer online card sorting to offline card sorting or vice versa. I think they complement each other! (and you should do both)

Let’s start with a quick rundown on the major differences in outcomes from moderated and unmoderated card sorting.

Remote & Unmoderated Card Sorting (Online):

  • Unlimited scale. You can have as many participants as required to get the answer you need.
  • Much closer to “fire & forget”. Set up a study, fire it out to potential participants, enjoy the afternoon in the sun.
  • Relatively cheap. Compared to the cost of having a facilitator, note taker, clients on site, reception, coffees, compensation… remote testing is clearly cheaper to conduct.
  • It can be difficult to know why things happen. Qualitative results are not nearly as apparent because participants are not facilitated, moderated, steered and often not recorded. You don’t get to hear them thinking out loud or discussing decisions.
  • Great for gathering quantitative results. If you have a hunch of your own or as a result of qualitative tests then remote and unmoderated user testing is a great way to back it up with some numbers.

In-Person & Moderated Card Sorting (Offline):

  • Limited scale. You can only bring in as many participants as you can afford in terms of time and budget.
  • Relatively heavy investment per participant. Each participant will have associated costs and will create work for you. (I’m not saying it isn’t worthwhile, it generally is, I’m just pointing out the differences)
  • Great for gathering qualitative results. This is where you get insight into how people feel about what they’re doing or saying in the study.
  • It is usually too expensive to get quantitative results from moderated testing. Yes, you will undoubtedly uncover most of the problems and convince yourself that something must be done, but many situations call for more.

So what should you do?

I recommend that people conduct from 1 to 5 offline, in-person and moderated card sorts to get a good understanding for themselves of how other people would organise their content and the rationale for it. Then I suggest that people conduct an online study using OptimalSort to put some numbers behind the hunches. By the way, I don’t mean to belittle any professional observations by calling them hunches, I’m just making the point that however duly convinced you might be it is usually not unreasonable for a stakeholder to want more data if a change will impact thousands or potentially millions of other people (or dollars for that matter).

If you are fortunate enough to have crystal clear direction from your qualitative research to propose an immediate way forward then I suggest you could skip the online card sort and move directly to validating your proposed new information architecture using tree testing. Either way you should be validating your chosen labels and content hierarchy using Treejack after a card sort.

We believe there is so much value in both qualitative and quantitative research techniques that we want you to do both. To assist you with this we have recently implemented an important change to OptimalSort: You can now print your OptimalSort cards (from a generated PDF) for moderated and in-person paper based card sorting and easily get the results back into OptimalSort for analysis alongside your quantitative research data. Hooray!

Step 1: Print the cards

OptimalSort's printed cards

OptimalSort's printed cards are printed with crop marks for easy cutting

Step 2: Sort the cards

OptimalSort paper card sort

Please don't analyse this card sort. I just laid them out to look pretty.

Step 3: Scan the groups back into OptimalSort

OptimalSort works with common barcode scanners

OptimalSort works with common barcode scanners so that you can quickly get your results into the tool for analysis

I’d love to know what you think of this new feature and whether it will be useful to you in your own card sorts. It certainly beats trying to moderate card sorts around a screen or retrospectively entering participant sorts by doing multiple sorts yourself (you know who you are!).

The Pietree: Visualising Tree Test Results

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Treejack's Pietree Visualising Tree Test Results

Treejack's Pietree Visualising Tree Test Results

A couple of months ago now I presented this poster (at a monstrous 4′ square) at Euro IA in Prague to an excitable group of enthusiastic Information Architects, Content Strategists and UX Designers. I believe it was just prior to the piano sing-a-long in the hotel lobby!

For some reason we’ve never officially announced Treejack’s Pietree, probably because it has always been somewhat of an experiment. So far though the experiment has been a wild success. People love it. Even Dave O’Brien, the guy who [loves spreadsheets, and] built the first prototype of Treejack for his own use now uses the Pietree as his primary method for understanding his study results.

In short, Treejack is our online user research tool for validating proposed information structures and labels. Usability testing a taxonomy you might say. The Pietree shows you where your participants went in your site IA in response to the task you set them, and what choice they made at each point along the way.

You can choose to view it in vertical format rather than radial if you’d like to, and you can hide all the nodes that got no visits for this task.

Of course, being a baby there are still some issues with the Pietree visualisation, like scalability for example. Deep trees are sometimes both slow to render (in animated browser based SVG) and too large to view effectively onscreen. However we’ve got some more enhancements in the pipes to help out with these issues (and see the PPS below).

If you’ve got a tree test coming up, or you’ve got some old results in your account I highly recommend you check out the Pietree, and please let us know what you think of it.

PS. I thoroughly recommend the Euro IA conference, it is a fantastic mix of culture and opinions and a lot of fun to boot.

PPS. Did you hear when I said it is an SVG?! Do you know how awesome that is? It mean you can view source (until we add a special Download As File feature), copy the SVG part into a text file and open that file in Illustrator or Inkscape and print it out on a large format printer! THAT is how awesome it is. THAT is how I made the poster :-)

Chalkmark Heatmap Updates

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We’ve just released some updates to Chalkmark’s heatmaps:

  1. You can now optionally choose to view your image in greyscale with the heatmap overlaid. This can be very helpful if your screenshot or mockup is particularly colourful causing the heatmap to get a little lost.
  2. Individual dots on the heatmap are no longer elliptical, but instead they are now circular as they should be!
  3. The colours are much hotter than they were previously. Significantly less application of lavender.
  4. Your heatmaps are now available as a downloadable PDF. Long time friends will remember that this feature used to be there but got dropped in the midst of our major platform upgrade last year. It has returned. Oh joy!
Got all that? Image greyscale. Dots circular. Less lavender. Downloadable PDF. Fantastic.
Wireframe Heatmap from a Chalkmark Usability Study

Wireframe Heatmap from a Chalkmark Usability Study

Thanks for listening. You can see these things for yourself in the demo (except the PDF because downloads are not currently supported for shared results), or by logging in and looking at your own existing usability studies.