Decoding Taylor Swift: A data-driven deep dive into the Swiftie psyche 👱🏻‍♀️

User research and design can be tough in this fast-moving world. Sometimes we can get so wrapped up in what we’re doing, or what we think we’re supposed to be doing, that we don’t take the time to look for other options and other ways to use the tools we already know and love. I’ve compiled this list over last few days (my brain hurts) by talking to a few customers and a few people around the office. I’m sure it's far from comprehensive. I’ve focused on quick wins and unique examples. I’ll start off with some obvious ones, and we’ll get a little more abstract, or niche, as we go. I hope you get some ideas flying as you read through, enjoy!
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#1 Benchmark your information architecture (IA)

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Without a baseline for your information architecture, you can’t easily tell if any changes you make have a positive effect. If you haven’t done so, benchmark your existing website on Tree testing now. Upload your site structure and get results the same day. Now you’ll have IA scores to beat each month. Easy.
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#2 Find out precisely where people get lost

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Use Tree testing Pietree to find out exactly where people are getting lost in your website structure and where they go instead. You can also use First-click testing for this if you’re only interested in the first click, and let’s face it, that is where you’ll get the biggest bang for your buck.
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#3 Start at the start

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If you’re just not sure where to begin then take a screenshot of your homepage, or any page that you think might have some issues and get going with First-click testing. Write up a string of things that people might want to do when they find themselves on this page and use these as your tasks. Surprise all your colleagues with a maddening heatmap showing where people actually clicked in response to your tasks. Now you’ll know have a better idea of which area of your site to focus a tree test or card sort on for your next step.

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#4 A/B test your site structure

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Tree testing is great for testing more than one content structure. It’s easy to run two separate Tree testing studies, even more than two. It’ll help you decide which structure you and your team should run with, and it won’t take you long to set them up. Learn more.
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#5 Make collaborative design decisions

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Use Optimal Sort to get your team involved and let their feedback feed your designs: logos, icons, banners, images, the list goes on. By creating a closed image sort with categories where your team can group designs based on their preferences, you can get some quick feedback to help you figure out where you should focus your efforts.
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#6 Do your (market) research

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Card sorting is a great UX research technique, but it can also be a fun way to involve your users in some market research. Get a better sense of what your users and customers actually want to see on your website, by conducting an image sort of potential products. By providing categories like ‘I would buy this’, ‘I wouldn’t buy this’ to indicate their preferences for each item, you can figure out what types of products appeal to your customers.
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#7 Customer satisfaction surveys with surveys

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The thoughts and feelings of your users are always important. A simple survey can help you take a deeper look at your checkout process, a recently launched product or service, or even on the packaging your product arrives in, your options are endless.

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#8 Crowdsource content ideas

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Whether you’re running a blog or a UX conference, Questions can help you generate content ideas and understand any knowledge gaps that might be out there. Figure out what your users and attendees like to read on your blog, or what they want to hear about at your event, and let this feed into what you offer.
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#9 Do some sociological research

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Using card sorting for sociological research is a great way to deepen your understanding of how different groups may categorize information. Rather than focusing solely on how your users interact with your product or service, consider broadening your research horizons to understand your audience’s mental models. For example, by looking at how young people group popular social media platforms, you can understand the relationships between them, and identify where your product may fit in the mix.
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#10 Create tests to fit in your onboarding process

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Onboarding new customers is crucial to keeping them engaged with your product, especially if it involves your users learning how to use it. You can set up a quick study to help your users stay on track with onboarding. For example, say your company provided online email marketing software. You can set up a First-click testing study using a photo of your app, with a task asking your participants where they’d click to see the open rates for a particular email that went out.

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#11 Quantify the return on investment of UX

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Some people, including UX Agony Aunt, define return on UX as time saved, money made, and people engaged. By attaching a value to the time spent completing tasks, or to successful completion of tasks, you can approximate an ROI or at least illustrate the difference between two options.

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#12 Collate all your user testing notes using qualitative Insights

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Making sense of your notes from qualitative research activities can be simultaneously exciting and overwhelming. It’s fun being out on the field and jotting down observations on a notepad, or sitting in on user interviews and documenting observations into a spreadsheet. You can now easily import all your user research and give it some traceability.

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#13 Establish which tags or filters people consider to be the most important

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Create a card sort with your search filters or tags as labels, and have participants rank them according to how important they consider them to be. Analytics can tell you half of the story (where people actually click), so the card sort can give another side: a better idea of what people actually think or want.

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#14 Reduce content on landing pages to what people access regularly

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Before you run an open card sort to generate new category ideas, you can run a closed card sort to find out if you have any redundant content. Say you wanted to simplify the homepage of your intranet. You can ask participants to sort cards (containing homepage links) based on how often they use them. You could compare this card sort data with analytics from your intranet and see if people’s actual behavior and perception are well aligned.

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#15 Crowd-source the values you want your team/brand/product to represent

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Card sorting is a well-established technique in the ‘company values’ realm, and there are some great resources online to help you and your team brainstorm the values you represent. These ‘in-person’ brainstorm sessions are great, and you can run a remote closed card sort to support your findings. And if you want feedback from more than a small group of people (if your company has, say, more than 15 staff) you can run a remote closed card sort on its own. Use Microsoft’s Reaction Card Method as card inspiration.

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#16 Input your learnings and observations from a UX conference with qualitative insights

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If you're lucky enough to attend a UX conference, you can now share the experience with your colleagues. You can easily jot down ideas quotes and key takeaways in a Reframer project and keep your notes organized by using a new session for each presenter Bonus, if you’re part of a team, they can watch the live feed rolling into Reframer!

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#17 Find out what actions people take across time

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Use card sorting to understand when your participants are most likely to perform certain activities over the course of a day, week, or over the space of a year. Create categories that represent time, for example, ‘January to March’, ‘April to June’, ‘July to September’, and ‘October to December’, and ask your participants to sort activities according to the time they are most likely to do them (go on vacation, do their taxes, make big purchases, and so on). While there may be more arduous and more accurate methods for gathering this data, sometimes you need quick insights to help you make the right decisions.

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#18 Gather quantitative data on prioritizing project tasks or product features

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Closed card sorting can give you data that you might usually gather in team meetings or in Post-its on the wall, or that you might get through support channels. You can model your method on other prioritization techniques, including Eisenhower’s Decision Matrix, for example.

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#19 Test your FAQs page with new users

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Your support and knowledge base within your website can be just as important as any other core action on your website. If your support site is lacking in navigation and UX, this will no doubt increase support tickets and resources. Make sure your online support section is up to scratch. Here’s an article on how to do it quickly.

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#20 Figure out if your icons need labels

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Figure out if your icons are doing their job by testing whether your users are understanding them as intended. Uploading icons you currently use, or plan to use in your interface to First-click testing, and ask your users to identify their meaning by making use of post-task questions.

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#21 Give your users some handy quick tools

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In some cases, users may use your website with very specific goals in mind. Giving your users access to quick toos as soon as they land on your website is a great way to ensure they are able to get what they need done easily. Look at your analytics for things people do often that take several clicks to find, and check whether they can find your ‘quick tool’ in a single click using First-click testing.

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#22 Benchmark the IA of your competition

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We all have some sort of competitors, and researchers also need to pay attention to what they get up too. Make life easy in your reporting by benchmarking their IA and then reviewing it each quarter for the board and leaders to be wowed with. Also, not a perfect comparison, as users and separate sites have different flows, but compare your success scores with theirs. Makes your work feel like the Olympics with the healthy competition going on.

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#23 Improve website conversions

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Make the marketing team’s day by doing a fast improvement on some core conversions on your website. Now, there are loads of ways to improve conversions for a check out cart or signup form, but using First-click testing to test out ideas before you start going live A/B test can take mere minutes and give your B version a confidence boost.

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#24 Reduce the bounce rates of certain sections of your website

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People jumping off your website and not continuing their experience is something (depending on the landing page) everyone tries to improve. The metric ‘time on site’ and ‘average page views’ is a metric that shows the value your whole website has to offer. Again, there are many different ways to do this, but one big reason for people jumping off the website is not being able to find what they’re looking for. That’s where our IA toolkit comes in.

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#25 Test your website’s IA in different countries

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No, you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to go to all these countries to test, although that’d be pretty sweet. You can remotely research participants from all over the world, using our integrated recruitment panel. Start seeing how different cultures, languages, and countries interact with your website.

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#26 Run an empathy test (card sort)

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Empathy – the ability to understand and share the experience of another person – is central to the design process. An empathy test is another great tool to use in the design phase because it enables you to find out if you are creating the right kind of feelings with your user. Take your design and show it to users. Provide them with a variety of words that could represent the design – for example “minimalistic”, “dynamic”, or “professional” – and ask them to pick out which the words which they think are best suited to their experience.

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#27 Test visual hierarchy with first-click testing

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Use first-click testing to understand which elements draw users' attention first on your page. Upload your design and ask participants to click on the most important element, or what catches their eye first. The resulting heatmap will show you if your visual hierarchy is working as intended - are users clicking where you expect them to? This technique helps validate design decisions about sizing, color, positioning, and contrast without needing to build the actual page.

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#28 Take Qualitative Insights into the field

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Get out of the office or the lab and observe social behaviour in the field. Use Qualitative Insights to input your observations on your field research. Then head back to your office to start making sense of the data in the Theme Builder.

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#29 Use heatmaps to get the first impressions of designs

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Heatmaps in our First-click testing tool are a great way of getting first impressions of any design. You can see where people clicked (correctly and incorrectly), giving you insights on what works and doesn’t work with your designs. Because it’s so fast to test, you can iterate until your designs start singing.

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#30 Multivariate testing

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Multivariate testing is when more than two versions of your studies are compared and allows you to understand which version performs better with your audience. Use multivariate testing with Tree testing and First-click testing to find the right design on which to focus and iterate.

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#31 Improve your search engine optimization (SEO) with tree testing

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Yes, a good IA improves your SEO. Search engines want to know how your users navigate throughout your site. Make sure people can easily find what they’re looking for, and you’ll start to see improvement in your search engine ranking.

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#32 Test your mobile information architecture

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As more and more people are using their smartphones for apps and to browse sites, you need to ensure its design gives your users a great experience. Test the IA of your mobile site to ensure people aren’t getting lost in the mobile version of your site. If you haven’t got a mobile-friendly design yet, now’s the time to start designing it!

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#33 Run an Easter egg hunt using the correct areas in first-click testing

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Liven up the workday by creating a fun Easter egg hunt in first-click testing. Simply upload a photo (like those really hard “spot the X” photos), set the correct area of your target, then send out your study with participant identifiers enabled. You can also send these out as competitions and have closing rules based on time, number of participants, or both.
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#34 Keystroke level modeling

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When interface efficiency is important you'll want to measure how much a new design can improve task times. You can actually estimate time saved (or lost) using some well-tested approaches that are based on average human performance for typical computer-based operations like clicking, pointing and typing. Read more about measuring task times without users.

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#35 Feature prioritization and get some help for your roadmap

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Find out what people think are the most important next steps for your team. Set up a card sort and ask people to categorize items and rank them in descending order of importance or impact on their work. This can also help you gauge their thoughts on potential new features for your site, and for bonus points compare team responses with customer responses.

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#36 Tame your blog

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Get the tags and categories in your blog under control to make life easier for your readers. Set up a card sort and use all your tags and categories as card labels. Either use your existing ones or test a fresh set of new tags and categories.

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#37 Test your home button

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Would an icon or text link work better for navigating to your home page? Before you go ahead and make changes to your site, you can find out by setting up a first-click testing test.

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#38 Validate the designs in your head

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As designers, you’ve probably got umpteen designs floating around in your head at any one time. But which of these are really worth pursuing? Figure this out by using The Optimal Workshop Suite to test out wireframes of new designs before putting any more work into them.

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#39 ‘Buy now’ button shopping cart visibility

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If you’re running an e-commerce site, ease of use and a great user experience are crucial. To see if your shopping cart and checkout processes are as good as they can be, run a first-click test.

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#40 IA periodic health checks

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Raise the visibility of good IA by running periodic IA health checks using Tree testing and reporting the results. Management loves metrics and catching any issues early is good too!

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#41 Focus groups with qualitative insights

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Thinking of launching a new product, app or website, or seeking opinions on an existing one? Focus groups can provide you with a lot of candid information that may help get your project off the ground. They’re also dangerous because they’re susceptible to groupthink, design by committee, and tunnel vision. Use with caution, but if you do then use with Qualitative Insights! Compare notes and find patterns across sessions. Pay attention to emotional triggers.

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#42 Gather opinions with surveys

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Whether you want the opinions of your users or from members of your team, you can set up a quick and simple survey using Surveys. It’s super useful for getting opinions on new ideas (consider it almost like a mini-focus group), or even for brainstorming with teammates.

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#43 Design a style guide with card sorting

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Style guides (for design and content) can take a lot of time and effort to create, especially when you need to get the guide proofed by various people in your company. To speed this up, simply create a card sort to find out what your guide should consist of. Find out the specifics in this article.

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#44 Improve your company's CRM system

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As your company grows, oftentimes your CRM can become riddled with outdated information and turn into a giant mess, especially if you deal with a lot of customers every day. To help clear this up, you can use card sorting and tree testing to solve navigational issues and get rid of redundant features. Learn more.

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#45 Sort your life out

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Let your creativity run wild, and get your team or family involved in organizing or prioritizing the things that matter. And the possibilities really are endless. Organize a long list of DIY projects, or ask the broader team how the functional pods should be re-organized. It’s up to you. How can card sorting help you in your work and daily life?

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#46 Create an online diary study

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Whether it’s a product, app or website, finding out the long-term behaviour and thoughts of your users is important. That’s where diary studies come in. For those new to this concept, diary studies are a longitudinal research method, aimed at collecting insights about a participant’s needs and behaviors. Participants note down activities as they’re using a particular product, app, or website. Add your participants into a qualitative study and allow them to create their diary study with ease.

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#47 Source-specific data with an online survey

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Online survey tools can complement your existing research by sourcing specific information from your participants. For example, if you need to find out more about how your participants use social media, which sites they use, and on which devices, you can do it all through a simple survey questionnaire. Additionally, if you need to identify usage patterns, device preferences or get information on what other products/websites your users are aware of/are using, a questionnaire is the ticket.

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#48 Guerrilla testing with First-click testing

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For really quick first-click testing, take First-click testing on a tablet, mobile device or laptop to a local coffee shop. Ask people standing in line if they’d like to take part in your super quick test in exchange for a cup of joe. Easy!

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#50 Ask post-task questions for tree testing and first-click testing

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You can now set specific task-related questions for both Tree testing and First-click testing. This is a great way to dive deeper into the mushy minds of your participants. Check out how to use this new(ish) feature here!

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#51 Start testing prototypes

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Paper prototypes are great, but what happens when your users are scattered around the globe, and you can’t invite them to an in-person test? By scanning (or taking a photo) of your paper prototypes, you can use first-click testingto test them with your users quickly and easily. Read more about our approach here.

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#52 Take better notes for sense making

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Qualitative research involves a lot of note-taking. So naturally, to be better at this method, improving how you take notes is important. Reframer is designed to make note-taking easy but it can still be an art. Learn more.

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#53 Make sure you get the user's first-click right

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Like most things, read a little, and then it’s all about practice.We’ve found that people who get the first click correct are almost three times as likely to complete a task successfully. Get your first clicks right in tree testing and first-click testing and you’ll start seeing your customers smile.

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#54 Run a cat survey. Yep, cats!

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We’ve gained some insight into how people intuitively group cats, and so can you (unless you’re a dog person). Honestly, doing something silly can be a useful way to introduce your team to a new method on a Friday afternoon. Remember to distribute the results!

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#55 Destroy evil attractors in your tree

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Evil attractors are those labels in your IA that attract unjustified clicks across tasks. This usually means the chosen label is ambiguous, or possibly a catch-all phrase like ‘Resources’. Read how to quickly identify evil attractors in the Destinations table of tree test results and how to fix them.

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#56 Affinity map using card sorts

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We all love our Post-its and sticking things on walls. But sometimes you need something quicker and accessible for people in remote areas. Try out using Card Sorts for a distributed approach to making sense of all the notes. Plus, you can easily import any qualitative insights when creating cards in card sort. Easy.

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#57 Preference test with first-click testing

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Whether you’re coming up with a new logo design, headline, featured image, or anything, you can preference test it with First-click testing. Create an image that shows the two designs side by side and upload it to First-click testing. From there, you can ask people to click whichever one they prefer!

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#58 Add moderated card sort results to your card sort

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An excellent way of gathering valuable qualitative insights alongside the results of your remote card sorts is to run a moderated version of the sorts with a smaller group of participants. When you can observe and interact with your participants as they complete the sort, you’ll be able to ask questions and learn more about their mental models and the reasons why they have categorized things in a particular way. Learn more.

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#59 Test search box variations with first-click clicking

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Case study by Viget: “One of the most heavily used features of the website is its keyword search, so we wanted to make absolutely certain that our redesigned search box didn’t make search harder for users to find and use.”

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#60 Run an image card sort to organize products into groups

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You can add images to each card that allows you understand how your participants may organize and label particular items. Very useful if you want to organize some retail products and want to find out how other people would organize them given a visual including shape, color, and other potential context.

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#61 Test your customers' perceptions of different logo and brand image designs

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Understand how customers perceive your brand by creating a closed card sort. Come up with a list of categories, and ask participants to sort images such as logos, and branded images.

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#62 Run an open image card sort to classify images into groups based on the emotions they elicit

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Are these pictures exhilarating, or terrifying? Are they humoros, or offensive? Relaxing, or boring? Productive, or frantic? Happy memories, or a deep sigh?

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#63 Run an image card sort to organize your library

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Whether it’s a physical library of books, or a digital drive full of ebooks, you can run a card sort to help organize them in a way that makes sense. Will it be by genre, author name, color or topic? Send out the study to your coworkers to get their input! You can also do this at home for your own personal library, and you can include music/CDs/vinyl records and movies!

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#64 HR exercises to determine the motivations of your team

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It’s simple to ask your team about their thoughts, feelings, and motivations with a Questions survey. You can choose to leave participant identifiers blank (so responses are anonymous), or you can ask for a name/email address. As a bonus, you can set up a calendar reminder to send out a new survey in the next quarter. Duplicate the survey and send it out again!

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#65 Designing physical environments

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If your company has a physical environment in which your customers visit, you can research new structures using a mixture of tools in The Optimal Workshop Suite. This especially comes in handy if your customers require certain information within the physical environment in order to make decisions. For example, picture a retail store. Are all the signs clear and communicate the right information? Are people overwhelmed by the physical environment?

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#66 Use tree testing to refine an interactive phone menu system

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Similar to how you’d design an IA, you can create a tree test to design an automated phone system. Whether you’re designing from the ground up, or improving your existing system, you will be able to find out if people are getting lost.

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#67 Have your research team categorize and prioritize all these ideas

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Before you dig deeper into more of these ideas, ask the rest of the team to help you decide which one to focus on. Let’s not get in the way of your work. Start your quick wins and log into your account. Here’s a spreadsheet of this list to upload to card sort. Aaaaaaaaaaand that’s a wrap! *Takes out gym towel and wipes sweaty face.
*Got any more suggestions to add to this list? We’d love to hear them in our comments section — we might even add them into this list

When it comes to designing and testing in the world of information architecture, it’s hard to beat card sorting. As a usability testing method, card sorting is easy to set up, simple to recruit for and can supply you with a range of useful insights. But there’s a long-standing debate in the world of card sorting, and that’s whether it’s better to run card sorts in person (moderated) or remotely over the internet (unmoderated).

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This article should give you some insight into the world of online card sorting. We've included an analysis of the benefits (and the downsides) as well as why people use this approach. Let's take a look!

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How an online card sort works

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Running a card sort remotely has quickly become a popular option just because of how time-intensive in-person card sorting is. Instead of needing to bring your participants in for dedicated card sorting sessions, you can simply set up your card sort using an online tool (like our very own OptimalSort) and then wait for the results to roll in.

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So what’s involved in a typical online card sort? At a very high level, here’s what’s required. We’re going to assume you’re already set up with an online card sorting tool at this point.

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1. Define the cards: Depending on what you’re testing, add the items (cards) to your study. If you were testing the navigation menu of a hotel website, your cards might be things like “Home”, “Book a room”, “Our facilities” and “Contact us”.
2. Work out whether to run a closed or open sort: Determine whether you’ll set the groups for participants to sort cards into (closed) or leave it up to them (open). You may also opt for a mix, where you create some categories but leave the option open for participants to create their own.
3. Recruit your participants: Whether using a participant recruitment service or by recruiting through your own channels, send out invites to your online card sort.
4. Wait for the data: Once you’ve sent out your invites, all that’s left to do is wait for the data to come in and then analyze the results.

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That’s online card sorting in a nutshell – not entirely different from running a card sort in person. If you’re interested in learning about how to interpret your card sorting results, we’ve put together this article on open and hybrid card sorts and this one on closed card sorts.

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Why is online card sorting so popular?

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Online card sorting has a few distinct advantages over in-person card sorting that help to make it a popular option among information architects and user researchers. There are downsides too (as there are with any remote usability testing option), but we’ll get to those in a moment.

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Where remote (unmoderated) card sorting excels:

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• Time savings: Online card sorting is essentially ‘set and forget’, meaning you can set up the study, send out invites to your participants and then sit back and wait for the results to come in. In-person card sorting requires you to moderate each session and collate the data at the end.
• Easier for participants: It’s not often that researchers are on the other side of the table, but it’s important to consider the participant’s viewpoint. It’s much easier for someone to spend 15 minutes completing your online card sort in their own time instead of trekking across town to your office for an exercise that could take well over an hour.
• Cheaper: In a similar vein, online card sorting is much cheaper than in-person testing. While it’s true that you may still need to recruit participants, you won’t need to reimburse people for travel expenses.
• Analytics: Last but certainly not least, online card sorting tools (like OptimalSort) can take much of the analytical burden off you by transforming your data into actionable insights. Other tools will differ, but OptimalSort can generate a similarity matrix, dendrograms and a participant-centric analysis using your study data.

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Where in-person (moderated) card sorting excels:

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• Qualitative insights: For all intents and purposes, online card sorting is the most effective way to run a card sort. It’s cheaper, faster and easier for you. But, there’s one area where in-person card sorting excels, and that’s qualitative feedback. When you’re sitting directly across the table from your participant you’re far more likely to learn about the why as well as the what. You can ask participants directly why they grouped certain cards together.

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Online card sorting: Participant numbers

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So that’s online card sorting in a nutshell, as well as some of the reasons why you should actually use this method. But what about participant numbers? Well, there’s no one right answer, but the general rule is that you need more people than you’d typically bring in for a usability test.

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This all comes down to the fact that card sorting is what’s known as a generative method, whereas usability testing is an evaluation method. Here’s a little breakdown of what we mean by these terms:

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Generative method: There’s no design, and you need to get a sense of how people think about the problem you’re trying to solve. For example, how people would arrange the items that need to go into your website’s navigation. As Nielsen Norman Group explains: “There is great variability in different people's mental models and in the vocabulary they use to describe the same concepts. We must collect data from a fair number of users before we can achieve a stable picture of the users' preferred structure and determine how to accommodate differences among users”.

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Evaluation method: There’s already a design, and you basically need to work out whether it’s a good fit for your users. Any major problems are likely to crop up even after testing 5 or so users. For example, you have a wireframe of your website and need to identify any major usability issues.

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Basically, because you’ll typically be using card sorting to generate a new design or structure from nothing, you need to sample a larger number of people. If you were testing an existing website structure, you could get by with a smaller group.

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Where to from here?

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Following on from our discussion of generative versus evaluation methods, you’ve really got a choice of 2 paths from here if you’re in the midst of a project. For those developing new structures, the best course of action is likely to be a card sort. However, if you’ve got an existing structure that you need to test in order to usability problems and possible areas of improvement, you’re likely best to run a tree test. We’ve got some useful information on getting started with a tree test right here on the blog.

Emotional. Playful. Delightful.These words resonate with user experience (UX) practitioners. We put them in the titles of design books. We build products that move up the design hierarchy of needs, with the goal to go beyond just reliability, usability, and productivity. We want to truly delight the people who use our products.Designing for delight has parallels in the physical world. I see this in restaurants which offer not only delicious food but also an inviting atmosphere; in stores that don’t just sell clothes but also provide superior customer service. Whole industries operate on designing for delight.

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The amusement industry has done this for over 500 years. The world’s oldest operating amusement park, Bakken, first opened for guests in 1583 – about 300 years before the first modern roller coaster. Amusement parks experienced a boom in growth in the US in the 1970s. As of November 2014, China had 59 new amusement parks under construction. Today, hundreds of millions of guests each year visit amusement parks throughout the world.I've been fortunate to work in the amusement industry as the owner of a digital UX design company called Thrill & Create. Here is my story of how I got to do this kind of work, and my observations as a UX practitioner in this market.

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Making user-centred purveyors of joy

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I've been a fan of amusement parks for most of my life. And it’s somewhat hereditary. Much of my family still lives in Central Florida, and several of them have annual passes to Walt Disney World. My mom was a Cast Member at the Magic Kingdom during its opening season.Although I grew up living east of Washington, DC, I spent most of my childhood waiting for our annual trip to an amusement park. I was a different kind of amusement enthusiast: scared to death of heights, loath to ride roller coasters, but so interested in water rides and swimming that my family thought I was a fish. The love for roller coasters would show up much later. But the collection of park maps from our annual trips grew, and in the pre-RollerCoaster Tycoon days, I would sketch designs for amusement parks.

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In college, my interest in amusement received a healthy boost from the internet. In the mid-2000s, before fan communities shifted toward Facebook, unofficial websites were quite popular. My home park — a roller coaster enthusiasts’ term for the park that we visit most frequently, not necessarily the closest park to us — had several of these fansites.The fansites would typically last for a year or two and enjoy somewhat of a rivalry with other fansites before their creators would move on to a different hobby and close their sites. The fansites’ forums became an interesting place to share knowledge and learn history about my home park. They also gave us a place to discuss what we would do if we owned the park, to echo rumors we had heard, and start our own rumors. Some quite active forums still exist for this.

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Of course, many of us on the forums wanted to be the first to hear a rumor. So we follow the industry blogs, which are typically the first sources of the news. Screamscape has been announcing amusement-industry rumors since the 1990s. And Screamscape and other sites like it announce news not only in the parks but around the industry. Regular Screamscape readers learn about ride manufacturers, trade names for each kind of ride, industry trade shows, and much more. And the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions (IAAPA) keeps an eye on the industry as well.Several years ago, I transitioned from being a software developer to starting a user experience design company. It is now called Thrill & Create. I was faced with a challenge: how to compete against the commoditization of freelance design services. Ultimately, selecting a niche was the answer. And seeing IAAPA’s iconic roller coaster sign outside the Orange County Convention Center during a trip to Central Florida was all I needed to shift my strategy toward the amusement industry.

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What UX looks like in the Amusement Industry

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Periodically, I see new articles about amusement parks in UX blogs. Here are my observations about how UX looks in the industry, both in the physical world and the digital world.

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Parks are focused on interactive rides

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The amusement industry is known for introducing rides that are bigger, taller, and faster. But the industry has a more interactive future. Using cleverly-designed shops which produce some of the longest waits in the park, Universal Studios has sold many interactive wands to give guests additional experiences in Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley.

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At IAAPA, interactivity and interactive rides are very hot topics. Interactive shooting dark rides came to many parks in the early 2000s. Wonder Mountain’s Guardian, a 2014 addition to Canada’s Wonderland, features the world’s longest interactive screen and a ride program that changes completely for the Halloween season.Also coming in 2015 is the elaborately-themed Justice League: Battle for Metropolis rides at two Six Flags parks. And Wet‘n’Wild Las Vegas will debut 'Slideboarding', which allows riders to participate in a video game by touching targets on their way down the slide, and is marketed as 'the world's first waterslide gaming experience'.

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UX design is well-established for the physical space

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Terms like 'amusement industry', 'attractions industry', and 'themed entertainment industry' can be interchangeable, but they do have different focuses, and different user experience design needs. The amusement industry encompasses amusement parks, theme parks, zoos, aquaria, museums, and their suppliers; the attractions industry also includes other visitor attractions.Several experience design companies have worked extensively on user-centered themed entertainment.

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‍Jack Rouse Associates, who see themselves as “audience advocates”, have worked with over 35 clients in themed entertainment, including Universal, Ocean Park, and LEGOLAND. Thinkwell Group, which touts a 'guest-centric approach to design', showcases 14 theme park and resort projects and attractions work in 12 countries.Consultants in the industry have been more intentionally user-centered. Sasha Bailyn and her team at Entertainment Designer write regularly about physical-world experience design, including UX, in themed entertainment. Russell Essary, owner of Interactive Magic, applies user-centered design to exhibit design, wayfinding, game design, and much more.

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In-house teams, agencies, and freelancers are becoming more common

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Several large park chains have in-house or contracted UX design teams. Most mid-sized parks work with in-house marketing staff or with outside design companies. One company I know of specializes in web design and development for the amusement industry. Smaller parks and ride companies tend to work with local web designers, or occasionally free website vendors.

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Some of the best redesigns in the amusement industry recently have involved UX designers. Parc Astérix, north of Paris, hired a UX designer for a redesign with immersive pictures, interesting shapes, and unique iconography. SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment, working with UX designers, unifies their brand strongly across their corporate site, the sites for SeaWorld and Busch Gardens, and individual park sites. The Memphis Zoo’s website, which showcases videos of their animals, was built by an agency that provides UI design and UX design among their other services.

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Sometimes, amusement sites with a great user experience are not made by UX practitioners. The website for Extreme Engineering has a very strong, immersive visual design which communicates their brand well.  When I contacted them to learn who designed their site, I was surprised to learn that their head of marketing had designed it.

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What I think is going well

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Several developments have encouraging me in my mission to help the amusement industry become more user-centered.

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UX methods are producing clear wins for my clients and their users

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My clients in the industry so far have had significant fan followings. Fans have seen my user-centered approach, and they have been eager to help me improve their favorite sites. I told a recent client that it would take a week to get enough responses from his site visitors on an OptimalSort study. Within a few hours, we exceeded our target number of responses.

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When I worked on redesign concepts for a network of park fansites, I ran separate OptimalSort studies for all 8 fansites in the network. They used comparable pages from each site as cards. We discovered that some parks’ attractions organized well by themed area, while others organized well by ride type. Based on this, we decided to let users find attractions using either way on every site. User testers received Explore the Park and the two other new features that emerged from our studies (Visit Tips and Fansite Community) very well.

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Although not all of the features I designed for The Coaster Crew went live, the redesign of their official website produced solid results. Their Facebook likes increased over 50% within a year, and their site improved significantly in several major KPIs. Several site visitors have said that the Coaster Crew’s website’s design helped them choose to join The Coaster Crew instead of another club. So that's a big win.

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In-park guest experiences and accessibility are hot right now

IAAPA offered over 80 education sessions for industry professionals at this past Attractions Expo. At least nine sessions discussed guest experience. Guest experience was also mentioned in several industry publications I picked up at the show, including one which interviewed The Experience Economy author B. Joseph Pine II.

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And parks are following through on this commitment, even for non-riders. Parks are increasingly theming attractions in ways that allow non-riders to experience a ride’s theme in the ride’s environment. For example, Manta at SeaWorld Orlando is a flying roller coaster themed to a manta ray. The park realized that not all of its guests will want to ride a thrilling ride with four inversions. So, separate queues allow both riders and non-riders to see aquariums with around 3,000 sea creatures. And Manta becomes, effectively, a walkthrough attraction for guests who do not want to ride the roller coaster.

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The industry has also had encouraging innovations recently in accessibility. Attractions Management Magazine recently featured Morgan’s Wonderland, an amusement park geared toward people with physical and cognitive disabilities. Water parks are beginning to set aside times to especially cater to guests with autism. And at IAAPA, ride manufacturer Zamperla donated a fully-accessible ride to Give Kids the World, an amusement-industry charity.

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Several successful consultancies are helping amusement parks and attractions deliver both a better guest experience in the park and better results on business metrics. And that's something I'm definitely keen to be a part of.

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Amusement business factors with UX implications

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While this is not an exhaustive list, here are some factors in the amusement industry which have UX implications.

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Investment in improvements

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To keep guests interested in returning, parks reinvest between 5-10% of their revenue into improvements. Park chains typically allocate one capital improvements budget — for new attractions and any other kind of improvement — throughout their entire chain. Reserving enough capital for guest experience improvements is a challenge, even when each touchpoint in a guest’s experience has make-or-break importance. Progress in this area has been slow.

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A shift in focus away from high thrills

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While ride manufacturers continue to innovate, they are starting to encounter limits on how much physical thrill the human body can handle. A new world’s tallest complete-circuit roller coaster should open in 2017. But that record, only broken one other time since 2003, was broken 5 times between 1994 and 2003. So the industry is shifting toward more immersive attractions and "psychological thriller" rides.

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Increased reliance on intellectual property

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While some parks still develop their own worlds and characters for attractions, parks today increasingly rely on third-party intellectual property (IP), such as movies, TV shows, and characters. Third-party IP provides guests with a frame of references for interpreting what they see in the park. For example, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter enjoyed a very positive reception from guests due to its faithfulness to the Harry Potter books and films. In the same way, fans will notice if a themed area or attraction is not faithful to the original, and will see it as a broken experience.

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Bring your own device

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Many guests now carry mobile devices with them in the parks. But so far, guests have not been able to use their mobile devices to trigger changes in a park’s environment. The closest this has come is the interactive wands in The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Most parks ban mobile devices from most rides due to safety hazards. And amusement parks and museums are both beginning to ban selfie sticks.

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Multiple target markets at the same time

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Because parks look for gaps in their current offerings and customer bases, they very rarely add new attractions for similar audiences several years in a row. My regional parks tend to handle additions on a 5-10 year cycle. They alternate year by year with additions like a major roller coaster, one or more thrilling flat rides, a family ride, and at least one water ride, to appeal to different market segments, as regularly as possible.The same goes for in-park UX improvements. Themed environment upgrades in a kids’ area appeal to few people in haunted attractions’ target audiences, and vice versa.

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Empathy

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According to the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA), the fact that most people today will never see sharks, elephants, or pandas in the wild is making conservation efforts more difficult. Zoos and aquaria, in particular, have a large opportunity to allow families to empathize with animals and efforts to conserve threatened species. But, according to an International Zoo Educators Association presentation, most zoo and aquarium guests go there primarily just to see the animals or please their kids.

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Ideas for improving the user experience of websites and software in the amusement industry

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My primary work interest is to design digital experiences in the amusement industry that support the goals of their target users. To understand where the industry currently stands, I have visited several thousand websites for amusement parks, ride companies, suppliers, zoos, aquaria, museums, and dolphinariums. Below, I've documented a few problems I've seen, and suggested ways companies can solve these problems.

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Treat mobile as a top priority

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Currently, over 500 websites in the industry are on my radar as sites to improve. At least 90 of them are desktop-only websites with no mobile presence. Several of these sites — even for major ride manufacturers — use Flash and cannot be viewed at all on a mobile device.The industry’s business-to-consumer (B2C) organizations, such as parks, realize that a great deal of traffic comes from mobile and that mobile users are more likely to leave a site that is desktop-only.

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These organizations recognize the simple fact that going mobile means selling more tickets. IAAPA itself has capitalized on mobile for their trade show attendees for several years by making a quite resourceful mobile app available.However, at IAAPA, I asked people from several business-to-business (B2B) companies why their sites were not mobile yet. Several told me that they didn’t consider mobile a high priority and that they might start working on a mobile site “in about a year or so.” Thus, they don't feel a great deal of urgency — and I think it's time they did.

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Bring design styles and technologies up to date

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Many professional UX designers and web designers are well aware of 1990s-style web design artefacts like misused fonts (mainly Comic Sans and Papyrus), black text on a red background,obviously-tiled backgrounds, guestbooks, and splash screens. But I've seen more than a few live amusement websites that still use each of these.Sites that prompt users to install Flash (on mobile devices) or QuickTime increase users’ interaction cost with the site, because the flow of their tasks has been interrupted.

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And as Jakob Nielsen says, "Unless everything works perfectly, the novice user will have very little chance of recovery."

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If a website needs to use technologies such as Flash or features such as animation or video, a more effective solution would be progressive enhancement. Users whose devices lack the capability to work with these technologies would still see a website with its core features intact and no error messages to distract them from converting.

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Organize website information to support user goals and knowledge

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Creating an effective website involves much more than using up-to-date design styles. It also involves the following.

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Understand why users are on the website

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Businesses promote products and services that make them money. Many amusement parks now offer front-of-line passes, VIP tours, pay-per-experience rides, locker rentals, and water park cabana rentals, which are each an additional charge for admitted guests. And per-capita spending is very important to not only parks’ operations, but also their investor relations.Users come to websites with the question, “What’s in it for me?”, and their own sets of goals. Businesses need to know when these goals match their own goals and when they conflict.

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The importance of each goal should also be apparent in the design. One water park promotes its changing rooms and locker rentals on its homepage. This valuable space dedicated to logistical information for guests already coming could be used for attracting prospective visitors. Analytics tools and the search queries that they show are helpful tools for understanding why users come to a website. Sites should supplement these by conducting usability studies with users outside their organization. These studies, in turn, could include questions allowing users to describe why would visit that website. The site could use this knowledge to make sure that its content speaks to users’ reasons for visiting.

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Understand what users know

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Non-technical users are bringing familiarity with how to use the internet when they visit a website. They quickly become perpetual intermediates on the internet, and don’t need to be told how buttons and links work. I've noticed amusement websites that currently label calls to action with “Click Here”, and some even do so on more than one link. This explicit instruction to people is no longer needed, and the best interfaces signal clickable elements in their visual design.

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Similarly, people expect to find information in categories they understand and in language familiar to them. So it's important to not make assumptions that people who visit our websites think like us. For example, if a website is organized by model name, users will need to already be familiar with these products and the differences between them. Usability testing exercises, such as card sorting, would contribute to a better design and solve this problem.

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Design websites that are consistent with users’ expectations

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Websites that aim to showcase a company’s creativity and sense of fun sometimes lack features that people are used to when they visit websites (like easy-to-access menus, vertical scrolling, and so on). But it's important to remember that unconventional designs may lead to increased effort for visitors, which in turn may create a negative experience. A desire to come across as fun may conflict with a visitor's need for ease and simplicity.

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The site organization needs to reflect users' goals with minimal barriers to entry. People will be frustrated with things like needing to log in to see prices, having to navigate three levels deep to buy tickets, and coming across unfamiliar or contradictory terms.

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Design content for reading

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Marketers have written about increased engagement and other benefits resulting from automatically playing videos, animated advertising, and rotating sliders or carousels (all of which usability practitioners have argued against). And this obsession with visual media has sometimes taken attention away from a feature people still want: easy-to-read text.There are still websites in the industry that show walls of text, rivers of text, very small text for main content, text embedded within images, and text written in all-capital letters. But telling clients, “Make the text bigger, higher-contrast, and sentence case”, can conflict with the increasing reliance on exciting visual and interactive design elements.

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‍Goal-directed design shows us what that problem is.  For example, if people visit a website to learn more about a company, the website’s design should emphasize the content that gets that message across — in the format that users find most convenient.I recently worked with a leading themed entertainment blogger to improve his site’s usability. His site, Theme Park University, provides deep knowledge of the themed entertainment industry that readers cannot get anywhere else. It first came to my attention when he published a series of posts on why Hard Rock Park in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina – one of the most ambitious new theme park projects in the US in the 2000s — failed after only one season.

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As a regular reader, I knew that TPU had truly fantastic content and an engaged community on social media.  But users commented to us that the site was cluttered, and so didn't spend much time on the website. We needed to give the website a more open look and feel — in other words, designed to be read.The project was not a full redesign. But by fitting small changes into the site’s existing design, we made the site more open and easier to read while retaining its familiar branding for readers.  We also made his site’s advertising more effective, even by having fewer ads on each page.As D. Bnonn Tennant says, “Readership = Revenue.… [A website] has to fulfill a revenue goal. So, every element should be designed to achieve that goal. Including the copy. Especially the copy — because the copy is what convinces visitors to do whatever it is you want them to do on the website".

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Three final ideas for getting UX a seat at the table

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In helping take UX methods to the amusement industry, I have learned several lessons which would help other practitioners pioneer UX in other industries:

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1. Explain UX benefits without UX jargon

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When I work for clients in the amusement industry, the biggest challenge that I face is unfamiliarity with UX.  Most other professionals in the industry do not know about UX design principles or practices. I have had to educate clients on the importance of giving me feedback early and testing with users often. And because most of my clients have not had a technical background, I have had to explain UX and its benefits in non-UX terms.

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2. Be willing to do non-UX project work yourself in a team of one

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As a business owner, I regularly prospect for new clients. The biggest challenge in landing projects here is trying to convince people that they should hire a bigger team than just me. A bigger team (and higher rates for a UXer versus a web designer) leads to bigger project costs and more reluctant approvals. So I have had to do development – and even some tech support – myself so far.

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3. Realize clients have a lot on their plates — so learn patience

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The other main challenge in selling UX to the amusement industry is project priority. Marketing departments that handle websites are used to seeing the website as one job duty out of many. Ride companies without dedicated IT staff tend to see the website as an afterthought, partially because they do most of their business at trade shows instead of online. This has led to several prospects telling me that they might pursue a redesign a year from now or later, but not in the near future. That's OK because I can be ready for them when they're ready for me.