Over the past few months we have completely overhauled the participant experience for OptimalSort. Those in the know may have noticed that a beta version has been available for opt-in for a few months. Today I am excited to say that the shiny new OptimalSort is now out of beta.

Runs on your tablet (no Flash required!)

How about some moderated card sorting around the office, in the lab, or out on the street guerrilla style? Now you can card sort with your iPad or Android tablet! You can card sort anywhere. Take it to Starbucks to recruit.. amazing. Remember, you can always print the cards out on paper too if you want to work offline entirely.

Instructions, in context

Surprise: User testing of OptimalSort has shown that some people skip straight past your instruction page. OMG how could they? So, we’ve put the instructions right there in the middle of the activity. In context.

Moveable groups

Your participants can now move the groups around as much as they like! The groups will automatically tile into sensible columns so you cannot overlap and lose anything. If your participant wants to reorder their groups, or put one next to another, hey presto, they can do it! Free-ee-DOM!

Images on cards

The new OptimalSort supports images! Sort all your shoes in categories. Sort icons. Sort photos by how they make you feel. Click to zoom. Show the label or don’t show the label. The possibilities are possibly endless!

Your color, your way

OptimalSort is blue no more. With a much more flexible base colour palette you’ll now see your chosen brand colors coming right through the card sort. Improved readability! Improved brand compatibility!

Read More

Now, I don’t want to make too much of a big deal about this feature. There is a very limited number of situations where you should use it, but if you really need to offer people a card label, a brief hover/tap description AND link to read more about what is on the card then you can do it. Sometimes you really do want people to actually understand what they’re sorting because the audience will understand what they’re looking for, and other times you really want that gut reaction. We get it. You got it.

Partial results saved

It used to be the case that you only got OptimalSort results when someone completed their card sort. Now, every time a card is dragged OptimalSort will save the current progress. This means you can see everything, even if people abandon the activity part way through. You can choose whether or not you want to include this data in your analysis.

Speaking of “include”

Have you noticed that you can now exclude individual participants from your results without deleting them? And the preference is saved automatically so you won’t have to hunt them out again tomorrow.

In my role as Accounts Manager I work hard to ensure that our customers can pay us efficiently. If we extrapolate this out just a little to include “want to pay us” I often find myself involved in user experience design projects along with the rest of the team from the support desk to the public website, the tools themselves and even the payment gateways and background processing services.

As a user researcher you want to understand how to help your users to find you easily, access your products or services easily, and here’s the big one for many (at least from my perspective): pay you easily. No friction. When I’m shopping online there is nothing more satisfying than a frictionless transaction. Sensible navigation, concise information, big clear “Buy Now” buttons and intelligent payment forms. Boom. Happy shopper, happy shop.

On the flipside there is nothing more frustrating when I’m shopping online and barriers are put up to make payment difficult. Confusing navigation, complicated information, unclear process and unfair or unapparent limitations and surprise transaction rejections. Slap. Sad faced shopper, poker faced shop.

Recently, I tried to reactivate an old subscription with an online software-as-a-service tool but was stunned to find that I couldn’t simply upgrade online and that my only option was to call them. Inconceivable! Reluctantly I sent an email with my account details stating that I wanted to upgrade to the plan I had previously used. I got a reply asking for my phone number, so they could discuss plan options with me. I am Gen Y and the last thing I want to do is talk to someone about plan options when I’ve already told them the plan I want to be on. Too messy, too convoluted. Boring, repetitive, tedious; you get the idea. I know what I want, I’ve already told you what I want, and I want to buy it right now.

This experience lead me to cancel our account altogether (which took several emails) and to use one of their competitors (who I’m happy with). If there had been a simple “upgrade now” button they’d be making $299 per month from us. I hate to think how much they’re losing from other would-be customers like me. Actually, I’m also afraid to think how much they might be making from people they upsold over the phone!

At Optimal Workshop we too have experienced difficulties offering easy forms of payment that suit our customers. I present to you my experience a while ago setting up AMEX as a payment option:

AMEX

This should be simple, right? Just another credit card. Complete a form, load it up, done. Uh, not quite. After eye-gauging month after month of form filling, anti-money laundering documentation, notarised copies of passports for all directors (who were, of course, in 3 different countries), and of course additional fees, we received our first AMEX payment in November 2012. Eleven, (11, ELEVEN!) months after we began the process! Of course this isn’t all AMEX’s fault entirely, the most time consuming hurdle was finding someone in Cambodia who could notarise a passport copy. I’m still having nightmares about it.

Despite this lengthy administration process it has ultimately been worth it as this payment option now brings in about 10% of our revenue, most of which appears to be additional revenue rather than simply an alternative payment method.

Manual invoices

Before all this we did actually accept AMEX indirectly, via PayPal, if you requested a manual invoice. Of course this can sometimes take a day or two if I’ve got a lot of email to get through, or over weekends. Paypal appear to randomly disallow transactions from time to time and it seems that lot of US companies have rules against using Paypal for business purchases while only issuing AMEX cards to staff. So we had to start accepting AMEX more directly.

Incidentally, if your company prefers to pay on invoice you can still request a manually generated invoice from me. If you supply a Purchase Order Number I’ll even treat it as a Promise To Pay and get your account activated right away. I don’t want the internal cogs at your organisation to hold up the research!

Do Not Honor

Recently, I’ve seen several “Do Not Honor” messages pop up in our payment system. A “Do Not Honor” message does not mean insufficient funds, if this were the case I’d see a “Declined” message, but instead for some as yet unexplained reason either the card holder’s bank or company is not allowing the transaction. They don’t seem to be stolen cards (who’d steal a credit card and then go buy some user research tools anyway?). Although I’m yet to get to the bottom of this issue I have noticed it is only happening with US credit cards (so far) and I believe it could be due to either the bank’s or the company’s own rules about purchasing over the internet from far, far away vendors like us. Sigh.

So, you can see that helping people pay you, particularly if you are a non US company operating in a global marketplace, is still fraught with tricksy payment issues that have to be monitored and mitigated. In this rambling post I’ve only scratch the surface of this issue, of course there’s an endless list of things to consider between awareness and purchase!

I welcome any feedback or comments, particularly if you have suggestions about how we can help you pay us!

Guidelines:

1. Be consistent in the casing of the card labels

   It is quite common to see participants assume that card labels that have all their words start with a capital letter must be a higher level heading for something. Cards should not suggest any pre-existing structure or classification.

   For example, we changed “Company Structure and Organisational Values” to “Company structure and organisational values”

2. Avoid obvious patterns in the card labels

   If participants see several cards that start with the same word then they consistently group the cards together without paying much attention to the meaning of the cards. It’s important to try and remove these type of clues.

   For example, we used the terms “Wellington – where to buy a phone” and “Where to buy a phone in Nelson/Marlborough” instead of starting both cards with “Where to buy a phone in”

3. Use representative cards in a category, rather than an exhaustive list

   It is not necessary to have every page in a category represented as a card. What we are looking for are cards that are representative of a given class of information.

   For example, including all the items under an “HR” category would add extra load for the participants without gaining much additional information.

4. Exclude well known cards

   There is usually little value in including cards that are linked on most pages of a website.

   For example, “Site Map”, “Glossary”

5. Be consistent with the granularity

   The purpose of a card sorting exercise is to make the participants group the cards. Any headings placed in the list will make people want to place other cards under them, instead of other groupings which may be more natural. This may just confuse and frustrate people.

6. Include enough cards of a given type for groups to be formed

   It is important to ensure that the content has enough similarity to allow groups to be formed. If the content chosen is too varied or there are too few cards, participants will not be able to create natural groupings.

   For example, two or more job cards, two media releases cards, two case study cards, etc.

7. The terms should be meaningful to the participants

   Labels need to be short enough so that participants can quickly read the card, yet detailed enough that participants can understand what the content is.

   For example, “Wild ideas” was changed to “Wild ideas competition” to ensure that participants understood that Wild Ideas was an actual competition.

See also Card Sorting: Pushing Users Beyond Terminology Matches

Do you have more tips for creating great cards? Please add them in the comments!

What motivates people to respond to your surveys?

1. “This looks interesting”

   Sometimes the topic or the website itself sparks their interest. They may be curious about the method of survey, perhaps they’ve heard of tree testing. Or they may just enjoy completing surveys. Smith describes this as leverage-salience theory where interest is a key driver in the decision to participate.

2. “Show me the money”

   Some respondents do it purely for the money or the shot at the prize. Their time = the reward. Otherwise known as social-exchange theory. In our experience you’ll get a much better response rate if you offer an incentive in exchange for their time and effort.

3. “I’d like to help out”

   The respondent may know the company and feel an obligation to complete the survey in recognition of the time, effort and money spent by the researcher and the company they represent. Smith suggests that cognitive dissonance theory explains why people feel this way; they will feel bad about themselves if they do not help out.

4. “My opinion is important”

   Respondents believe their opinions are valued and that their answers will be put to good use and may even benefit society in some way. Such as completing Microsoft error reports in the hope that one day, one day soon, the problems will go away!

   According to Ed Halteman the two main reasons people participate in surveys are:

   • they feel their participation will affect something they care about, and
   • they want to share their opinion with someone who will listen and act on the information.

5. “I’m bored anyway, let’s kill some time”

   Online surveys that can be completed anywhere at any time can increase in appeal when faced with a long wait at the doctor’s office or when that term paper needs attention. No theory here, just personal experience.

Regardless of their motivation to respond to your survey, universal rules apply: keep the survey short (for example, we recommend no more than 8 to 10 tasks per participant in a tree test), keep the instructions simple (don’t put the onus on the participant to understand your survey), and thank people for their participation!

You’ve already done a little user research. You’ve brainstormed with your team and consulted a range of stakeholders. You’ve even reviewed your analytics and tried to derive what people were trying to achieve when they did what they did.

This is Treejack’s new Tree Coverage Graph

Now that you’ve done all this and come up with a list of common tasks worth testing you stroke your beard (imaginary or real) and ponder to yourself:

Will these tasks adequately test my tree?

Well ponder no longer. We’ve just released a new [beta] feature called the Tree Coverage Graph for Treejack. This chart will show your tree with all the correct answers and direct paths highlighted at once so you can see at a glance whether you’ve covered the parts of your tree you were trying to test.

You can sign in right now and go to any of your existing Treejack studies to see the Tree Coverage Graph. As always, your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Tree testing won’t predict the impact of visual design; layout and colour will most likely have an affect on the choices people make. There are three broad visual cues for guiding users through a website: labels; icons; and character (colour, typography and form). It is vital that these three cues work together in harmony as people view and interpret the information you present to them.

While a particular label and icon might make perfect sense to you, if your website users are confused or misinterpret the visual cues then they are left wondering, “What do they mean and how do I get to where I want to go?”, or may simply ignore it. It is a rare and determined user who doggedly perseveres to find information on a website that irritates and confuses them.

The issue is that if you always test everything at once, like when you observe someone using your website, you are sometimes left wondering whether the solution for your issues is related to the labeling choices, the hierarchy, the layout, the colours or other aspects of the visual design.

Visual design and the impact on usability

As Joshua Porter wrote in his article, “Design is a means to communicate, not mere styling.”

The visual elements on a website create a personal and subjective reaction. The colour and font selections might read as regal to one user, whereas another might dislike them and consider them outdated.

The visual organisation of elements on a page also plays an important part in communication and if the visual contrast is too low everything will look the same to users and nothing will stand out, conversely if the visual contrast is too high then all visual elements will compete for attention and in the end nothing stands out.

Isolate the navigation and labeling

The beauty of tree testing is that the impact of visual design is eliminated entirely, allowing you to focus this part of your research on the information architecture testing and be confident of your outcomes and recommendations. By isolating the site structure you can see more clearly how the tree itself performs, and revise it until you have a high performing structure.

Once you have completed a series of tree tests, ideally including a benchmark test based on your existing tree, you will have strong quantitative evidence to show the most effective paths your website users take to complete common tasks and find important information on your site. Note I said “your website users”, not yourself, and not your web designer or your manager.

Labeling and structure are often influenced by the internal structure of an organisation, how the staff think about themselves, how things are categorized internally. For example: acronyms, departmental divisions, marketing terminology, made up words and brands. I’d bet that not even all your internal staff will have a consistent understanding of this terminology, let alone your website users. Tree testing will surface these issues and separate them from discussions regarding layout and visual priority.

If you’d like to find out more about tree testing take a look at Treejack.

Treejack’s Pietree shows where people thought your content should be

Excerpt:

“…we were able to deliver a comprehensive set of findings 
and recommendations to help inform the redesign effort. By 
highlighting what worked well with the existing site, we were able to make recommendations for change without losing what worked well so as
 to minimize the jarring effect of a redesign for existing users. 
Better yet, we were also able to deliver quickly and at a low cost.”

Please read the full article: Quick User Feedback

Years ago, when I was starting my career in User Experience (UX), a big project came up that required a full time UX role. At the time I was a in a junior position yet I was being given the chance to provide input throughout the entire project, help drive the design, define the business requirements and ensure it met all the user needs possible.

It was an exciting proposition, however there was one problem; it was based in a bank! I tried everything I could to remove myself from this project, as I couldn’t imagine anything worse; after all, there is nothing appealing about dealing with finances!

Twelve years on and I am still working for a bank; in fact I’ve worked in several banks and all I can say is, oh how wrong I was!  You see there is one thing about finances; absolutely everybody has to deal with them! Whether you love to budget and have savings goals, or don’t want to think about it at all, you still have to use money.

That is what makes it a UX dream!

Most industries are limited by a few target demographics but in every financial project, you need to go back to the basics, investigate who is using it, the why, when and where. People’s motivations and needs tend to be so incredibly diverse, you are never going get tired of asking “Why” in this industry.  If having an extremely varied demographic wasn’t challenging enough, the dramatic evolution of technology is also changing how people are dealing with and even thinking about their finances.

Two years ago if your bank didn’t have a mobile application or at least a mobile strategy it wasn’t a major concern. Nowadays as soon as a bank introduces a new mobile feature, social media sites are bombarded with comments from customers banking with competitors, saying, “When do we get this?” Times have rapidly changed and the public has a much lower tolerance for waiting for new features to be developed and that alone has had a huge impact on how we carry out UX in the financial field. We no longer have time to do lengthy and large scale usability projects as the technology, user needs and business needs can change radically in that time. As UX professionals, we have had to adapt to this changing landscape.  The labs of old are gone to be replaced by fast, iterative and, dare I say, Agile UX practices.

So what does a truly diverse demographic and swiftly changing technology give us?

In my particular situation, it gave me a marvelous opportunity to re-evaluate how I practiced UX, evolving it and integrating these new techniques into project teams a lot more easily than ever before. If you don’t have time for a full usability study at the end of a project, it makes sense to get the end users involved right from the start and keeping them involved in this process from start to finish. Yes, this is what the UX community has been saying we should do for years, but now it also makes sense to the business and development teams too.  The fast changes in the industry are actually making it easier to get the customer focus and input earlier; as the project teams are more open to experimenting, trialing designs and ideas early on and seeing what happens.

So is working in the financial industry boring for a UX professional?

Hardly! Being a UX professional in this type of business landscape impels you to be drawn in to the evolution of UX.  Every day is filled with potential and fresh challenges making the practice of UX in banking a whole lot more rewarding!

Natalie Kerschner
Senior Usability Analyst, BNZ Online

Time’s pretty precious. It’s the currency we spend to get things done. Seems to me, more often than not, things end up taking more time than expected.

I’ve produced an interactive infographic to celebrate World Usability Day 2012 that illustrates how UX designers around the world are winning back time, a most precious commodity for all of us.

Early 2012 saw a significant milestone when an Optimal Workshop customer used our online card-sorting tool, OptimalSort, to rack up the 1,000,000th user test on Workshop’s tools.

The passing of this milestone set me thinking.

“How much time is saved everyday across the world as the payback of UX design and usability testing?”

The question intrigued me. At first, the answer seemed elusive. Many knowledgeable UX designers and information architects simply had no idea of their impact on the world.

In October in an inspired moment, I decided to set about devising something to explore the question. Writing this, I do question if it was such an inspired moment – I’ve invested way more time than I had available chasing the answers!

So I’m really pleased now to introduce you to:

Quantifying the value of UX design –
an interactive infographic

I hope you like how it drills down and illustrates how UX designers and information architects around the world are winning back time.

Thanks to you and the UX community for making my world a little easier to navigate and way more enjoyable.

Tweet your thoughts about how #uxsavestime

Many thanks to all our wonderful customers for your support and feedback over the past 3 years as we’ve built Treejack together from a concept to an amazingly useful tool.

Optimal Workshop was recently announced a finalist in the Innovation in Information Communications Technology category.

From the awards website:

There are many innovations in our world that go unrecognised, yet have become a regular and essential part of our daily lives. The New Zealand Innovators Awards seeks to unearth & celebrate the great innovations, inventors and organisations that have invested in developing new products, services and ventures as well as improving the performance of their people & teams.

In our submission, we said:

We introduced Treejack to help people validate their proposed new information architecture (IA) designs before going ahead and implementing them but we’ve found that people are also using the tool for benchmarking, for testing multiple alternative options and as a regular measurement activity. Not just for validating large changes. This has meant a gradual but pivotal shift in the way many of our customers are doing their day-to-day work. Treejack provides our customers with real numbers they can take to management for decision making on what might otherwise have seemed to be the domain of a copywriter or graphic designer. With Treejack people can measure the impact of changes to their IA.

We are proud to have played a role in impacting how information architects work and the time and frustration we’ve saved humanity trying to find information on websites.

May I please here give a big thanks and acknowledgement to our users and customers. In a truly user-centric way our innovation has been informed and guided throughout by your feedback and input. And this is the way we’ll continue working in the future.

A total commitment to user experience is one of the best ways to innovate and bring products to market. We’re really very pleased to have been recognised in these awards.

The winners are announced tonight. I’d better hit that publish button.