It sounds like I’m selling usability when I talk about the return on investment that applied usability can bring to a project. But it’s a fact that research has shown again and again. An article on the Bentley University Website says that a user-centred design approach will benefit an organization in at least three ways:  

• Reducing product development costs;
• Increasing sales (transactions or purchases);
• Improving the product’s effectiveness and efficiency.

Read our slideshow, Why Usability Matters. And yes, I guess I am selling usability.

Do you have any other points you’d add to this chart? Let me know and I’ll credit your ideas on this blog if you want.

Download PDF (72 Kb): Usability Differences Between Web and Print Media

Rating: 10/10  Notes: Somehow this feature still functions effectively when children are adults, and regardless of their expanded height or girth.

2. Visual acuity and sightlines

Rating: 10/10  Notes: Most subjects seemed to have 360-degree vision (“eyes in the back of their heads”), could spot micro stains on shirts from 12 yards away, and had the ability to discern the difference between lying eyes and eyes that were telling the truth.

3. Heart responds to physical, emotional needs of children.

Rating 10/10  Notes: Tests have found that mother’s heart was fully scalable as it expanded easily to accommodate needs of higher number of children or children with exceptional physical and emotional needs.

4. Ability to process information and carry out tasks efficiently.

Rating: 10/10  Notes: Stress tests such as combining one wailing infant with a second child who needed his lunch packed for school resulted in high efficiency ratings. The ability to assist in math homework calculations while sorting laundry or talking to a client on the phone also impressed our analysts.

5. Recovery and reset capability.

Rating 9/10  Notes: Our observers noted an extremely high resiliency under long durations and task overload. However, many mothers lacked the ability to conduct effective self-care and general self-maintenance. We recommend that children enable mothers to have at least one annual 24-hour period where mothers can reboot or at least undergo defragmentation at a salon or spa.

6. Fully integrates with second and third generation systems.

Rating: 10/10  Notes: Over-the-shoulder tests found that mothers functioned perfectly with grandchildren and even great-grandchildren, although analysts noted that purchases of chocolates, toys and savings bonds seemed to be markedly increased from that of the first generation. We recommend that those with grandchildren and great-grandchildren be titled “Mother 2.0.”

OVERALL RATING: 100%

Comments: Happy Mother’s Day to my Mum and to mothers everywhere!

(We welcome additional data from other usability tests conducted on mothers, too!)

I’ve tweeted this before on my Twitter pages @usabilitydesign and @socialmediamash, but I have to expand on this issue here because I think it’s going to be something that is going to become an issue for Twitter micro-bloggers.

In case you’re new to Twitter, or not familiar with how it works, when you post a 140-character-or-less micro-blog on Twitter that includes a link to something you’ve referenced, Twitter will either handle that link one of two ways. If the link is not too long, Twitter will convert it to a clickable link and leave the URL as it was when you entered it.

The usability issue

If your combined text and URL is greater than 140 characters, Twitter won’t convert the URL to a TinyUrl then count your characters based on the length of the shortened URL. You have to either provide a shorter URL yourself OR shorten the text part of your tweet, which is a usability issue. Why should a URL count in the 140 characters you’re allowed?  

However, your post is less than 140 characters long, but the URL itself is quite long, Twitter will automatically convert it to a “TinyUrl,” (see http://TinyUrl.com), which is a shorter format link that redirects to the link you had specified. Nice of Twitter to do that for you, but here’s the problem. 

The security issue

Anyone can set up a Twitter account if they have a valid email address, and unscrupulous people who are phishing for your personal data or trying to install a virus or worm on your computer can use TinyURLs to mask what URL they are sending you to. You don’t know what the URL is until you click on the TinyURL version and open the site. By then it could be too late for you,

The TinyUrl.com site actually offers a more secure way to share a link that is being rediercted by a TinyUrl. It’s called “Preview,” and if you use the Preview version when you are manually creating your TinyUrl, then people who click on your TinyUrl link are first redirected to the TinyUrl.com site where they can see the actual URL and decide whether they feel it’s safe to click through and go to the site or not.

When Twitter automatically shortens URLs to TinyUrls, however, we don’t have a way to let people review the link before they visit the site.

A reasonable solution for both issues: embedded URLs

 Here’s a solution that Twitter could implement, if they really care about this issue.

If Twitter gave their users the ability to embed a URL in the text of their tweet… e.g. instead of entering a long link such as http://digitalpractices.org/2009/04/15/twitter-links-are-a-major-phishing-risk that Twitter will shorten into a TinyUrl, the message could simply refer to this blog post that I wrote, and thus Twitter users wouldn’t have to use up so many of their allotted 140 characters to include an URL. This would solve a usability issue on Twitter.

As for security, Twitter followers and browsers could simply hover their cursor over the link to see what it is. That way, they can at least have a fighting chance at finding out whether the link looks like it point to a legitimate Website rather than a creepy phishing site or some shady IP address spreading malware.

What do you think? Are you concerned about phishing or malware attempts when you click on TinyUrl links in Twitter posts?

Here are 5 quick tips on naming your business, from the experts at BrandNewPerfect.Name:

1. We want the perfect domain name.

In the beginning, everyone pined over what seemed to be the perfect domain names – the obvious ones like realestate.com, entertainment.com and internet.com (how would you like to own the ‘internet’?). Then some creative upstarts such as Amazon.com came along and proved what everyone in the advertising world knew already…it’s not what your name is, but who knows your name. So if your brand came first before the Internet you’ll want to maintain that as your domain name (e.g. Metro-Goldwyn Mayer is MGM.com), but if you’re a new company, why now develop your brand with an original name, the way Twitter.com and Zoosk.com did (visit http://www.go2web20.net/ to see the names of new Web 2.0 companies). Coining a new name often makes it a lot easier to get the dot com you want, too.

2. Hey, that’s our name!

In many cases the “perfect name” for your company is already being used by another business, or else they’re using a similar sounding name. Before you even try to register a new business name or domain name, do a thorough search of the Internet, which can help you determine whether there are similar names being used anywhere on the planet. Check different spellings of the name, too. And even if they are being used, that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to use your version. Find out if the name is trademarked. Are they in the same business as you? If not, it may not be a problem for you to call your business Purple Rose Florists if the only other similar company is Purple Rose Tattoos. You can also do a variation in the spelling of the name, or include other words in the name to distinguish it or make it more specific to your business, e.g. Great West Technology can be turned into Gr8 West Tech, or Halcyon Communications can be turned into Halcyon Wordsmiths International. Avoid trademark issues by consulting a lawyer so they can do a search for you in your own country and other countries as well, where the laws may be different.

3. We wish this weren’t our name!

Sometimes your current name and brand is a liability when it sounds too similar to something with negative connotations. Imagine if you ran a store in New York City called Twin Towers Photography? In a real life case, Greenleaf Marketing in Springfield, Missouri, decided to rebrand itself as Red Crow Marketing because their original name sounded too similar to Greenleaf Companies, a real estate company being investigated by state agencies. In those kinds of situations, it makes sense to go through the effort, expense and even risk of rebranding under a new name.

4. We need something that sounds edgy, contemporary.

Rebranding yourself with an edgy, Webby-sounding name doesn’t usually work unless you completely re-style your entire company, and even then it might just seem blatantly superficial and disingenuous to customers and business partners. If you’re a drycleaning company and you re-brand yourself as “e-Clean”, you’d better find a way that people can order drycleaning pickups online or some other Web-related services, otherwise you’ll risk sounding foolish. On the other hand, it doesn’t hurt to style yourself after what you want to be and where you want to be rather than where you are now. Should a name say something about what your business does? Not always. It helps if the name is intuitive to people so they can tell what you do, but once you build a brand you don’t need any further descriptors. For example, does the Coca-Cola Company need to be called Coca-Cola Carbonated Beverages? Instead of simply describing your company by what it is, e.g. American Glassworks, try creating a name that describes its qualities, what it does for the customer or client, or what kind of impact it will have. As a name, Yahoo! didn’t literally describe what the company was offering, but it did describe the exciting experience of finding new sites on the Internet.

5. We want to see our name up in lights.

Not every name will have a symbolic or visual quality, but that’s an important consideration because when it comes time to develop your brand expression – e.g. your corporate colors and logo – how would you like your graphic designer to depict your company. And is that going to be the right image for your company? The name Lion Security lends itself to an instant visual, and it suits that kind of company because it portrays power and strength, but would the same visual suit a retail story selling baby clothes? Perhaps, if it were visualized as a cartoon lion sitting beside a lamb. The point is that the way your name will be visualized is also important in the selection process, not simply the originality or availability of the name. Let’s not forget that a product or service can have its own unique name and sub-brand, too. Rather than just calling your new product “Digital Widgets,” to use a hypothetical example, find out whether your marketing experts or consultants suggest creating a sub-brand with a distinctive name (e.g. Widgetmania) that can be promoted both together and separately from your corporate brand. There are pro’s and con’s to sub-branding…but that’s another topic for another post.

Disclaimer: This article is offered for informational purposes as a free public service and should not be construed as legal advice. Consult your lawyer on all legal issues relating to domain names and trademarks. ]]> http://usabilitydesign.digitalpractices.com/2009/02/23/how-to-win-at-the-name-game/feed/ 0 http://usabilitydesign.digitalpractices.com/2008/10/03/a-dailysplice-of-social-media-for-businesses/ http://usabilitydesign.digitalpractices.com/2008/10/03/a-dailysplice-of-social-media-for-businesses/#comments Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:46:30 +0000 Garth A. Buchholz http://usabilitydesign.digitalpractices.com/?p=180 When most businesses hear about the rise of social media – i.e. blogging, podcasting, social networks such as Facebook – their reactions can be paraphrased as “Interesting, but how is that going to help our business?” or “I don’t want my employees wasting their time socializing on the Web.”

With social media, the emphasis is on interaction, collaboration, and user generated content. Unlike broadcasting or publishing an ad, getting your corporate message out via social media requires an understanding of the technology, an embrace of creativity and innovation, and a willingness to launch your corporate message and your brand identity into the blogosphere (as the world of blogs has been called), then wait to see where it lands.

There are all kinds of “social media consultants” out there selling seminars and books about how your business can benefit from it, but businesses need to look no further than DailySplice.com, a one-year-old social media software startup in Victoria, British Columbia.

Founded in 2007 by a group of business and computer science students at the University of Victoria, the company has developed a product called Splice Station that makes it easy for organizations to record podcasts (a digital recording of an audio or video broadcast delivered over the Internet or downloaded to an iPod) then deliver them on their own websites.

The University of Victoria has two two Splice Stations, one for business podcasts and one that plays Software Engineering podcasts. Vancouver Island’s AbeBooks, recently acquired by Amazon.com, is also using Splice Station to channel audio and video content through a specialized player on its website.

“It’s innovative and easy to use.” says Richard Davies, PR Manager for AbeBooks.com, a Victoria company that was recently acquired by Amazon.com. “Book lovers can find the world’s most interesting book reviews and interviews by visiting the AbeBooks.com website and looking for the Shelfsound logo.”

As if those examples from the world of business and the world of academia weren’t perfect enough illustrations of how social media can be used, another type of organization in Victoria Island has also started podcasting using Splice Station.

The Saanich Police have become perhaps the first police service in Canada to use audio and video podcasts on their website at saanichpolice.ca. Click on “Podcasts” on the homepage and you’ll find links to news and information as it happens (such as a live report about Pat Bay highway traffic) to crime prevention, safety tips, unsolved crimes, media releases and media clips.

The department’s public information officer, Sgt. John Price, says “Podcasting is the fastest growing communication medium in history…the Saanich Police want to be part of that medium.”

This article was originally published in Vancouver Island Business. Garth A. Buchholz is the President and Chief Usability Analystof DigitalPractices Media Inc. (Garth@DigitalPractices.com)

1. The Web Strategy doesn’t follow the Business Strategy.

Whether you’re designing for a Fortune 1000 corporation, a SOHO business, a government agency or a non-profit, your organization has a direction and a purpose, and your Web strategy must reflect and support that purpose. Read The Chemistry of Web Strategy.

2. The Web Design doesn’t follow the Web Strategy.

Assuming your organization has taken the time and effort to develop a documented Web Strategy, your entire Web Design (or redesign) project must be aligned with the objectives of this strategy as it is aligned with your organization’s Business Strategy (see #1 above).

3. No one has developed a content strategy.

Among all the discussions about the site’s presentation design (graphic design), its tools and applications, and its navigational structure, has your Web Design team given any thought to developing a Content Strategy? If your team cannot clearly answers questions such as “How is all the site content being prioritized?” or “What is this content supposed to achieve for us? ” or “Who are the 2-3 target audiences for this content?” then you need to write a Content Strategy or a Content Requirements Plan.

4. Users are not consulted in advance about the Web Design.

Web analytics, surveys, focus groups, use cases, heuristic reviews — these are some of the tools of usability analysis. Often organizations will undertake a major Web Design or redesign project, then afterwards consult their users to try to confirm whether they did a good job designing the site. You can’t please everyone, but once you know how people want to use your site (task flow) and what content and applications are important to them, then you MUST consider these when developing your prototype Web Design.

5. Users are consulted too much about the Web Design.

Don’t be held hostage by user feedback or usability studies, either. When you continue to over-research what people want on your site, you can set up expectations on the part of your users that cannot be reasonably met. As well, you cannot possibly offer everything on your site that users want because the site has to align with your Web Strategy, which has to align with your Business Strategy. (See #1 again)

6. The Web Design is confused with “look and feel”, “colors” and “branding”.

Too often, early discussions about Web Design and redesign centre around “look and feel”. “How will our content fit the new design?” asks the marketing and communications staff. “Let’s not talk about Web Design yet,” say the developers. “Give us a few possible designs,” say the senior executives. If you are leading a Web Design project, one of your first tasks should be making the entire organization know that Web Design is not just about what the site will look like, but also how it will be constructed, how it will be used, and how it will be managed. Yes, branding is a part of Web Design, but it’s not all about branding, either.

7. The Web Design has no muscle.

Web sites that perform tasks for their users must have muscle to do it. That means not just search engines, payment processing, and other applications and databases that make the site work, but also the static content and how its information design helps users with the task of scanning, reading and interacting with content. Sites should be designed based on task analysis and task flow rather than by gathering heaps of content (focus on how it will be used to tell you what will be used).

8. The Web Design has no brain.

Web sites with muscle also have to have a brain that controls the muscle. The brain is the documented site architecture and interaction design — making the site logical and intuitive to most people through the application of best Web practices as well as a by thoroughly following how people want to use the site. The site’s critical navigation design has to be based on task flow so it will make sense to users.

9. The Web Design has no soul.

The soul of Web Design is the collective mass of human beings behind it that may hide behind the “Browser wall”, but nevertheless must imbue the site with humanity and human qualities. A Web Design has no soul if it doesn’t use the language of the marketplace. It will also have no soul if it does not provide ample means for users to contact the Web site’s owners and administrators. And a good Web Design also should have some images of the people who are behind that browser wall.

10. The Web Design is not scalable.

If a single generation of a Web Design cannot be sustained because it cannot accommodate new content and applications without distorting or mangling the original design, then it’s not scalable enough. A Web Design should allow for continuous improvement of the site, a kind of progressive evolution that allows for change as the rule, not the exception. While it’s common to implement minor site design changes through small variations, and to conduct major site redesign every couple of years or so, Web Designers should always be designing for the unforeseeable, the Black Swans, and should always design two years into the future. Not “what we are now,” but “what we will become.”

For more information on Web Design Strategy, contact Garth@DigitalPractices.com.

(click on thumbnail image above to view full size diagram)

However, most people use more than one navigation choice during a single session search for content, and each choice during that session is determined, more often than not, by a specific task flow. For example, if you know what you’re looking for on a retail site, you’ll want to navigate by the product or service categories, but if you encounter problems, you’ll want to navigate by organizational structure (e.g. finding which part of the organization is responsible for a product or service) to seek help.

So in the first case, your navigation is driven by a scenario where you are purchasing something, and in the second case it is driven by a scenario where you are wanting to contact someone or some area of responsibility.  

The chart below outlines some general reasons users make navigation choices, although a more refined analysis can be done when one is looking at specific case studies or organizations. Keep in mind that at any stage of the search, depending on the user’ previous experiences, they may give up and abandon their navigation efforts altogether.

Rather than feeling that their own search/navigation methods failed, or are lacking the necessary skills, most people will instead feel frustration, resentment and even anger, and blame the site design or site administrators for their lack of success.

Granted, in a secured network environment, there are less unknown variables for Web metrics analysis than for Internet sites that can be accessed by anyone, from any browser in the world. Yet because of these assumptions, many corporate cultures still do not analyze Web metrics to help their intranets succeed. When organizations develop and support a metrics-driven intranet, they can understand better how their employees use the intranet, align it with corporate goals more effectively, and plan future content and services using metrics as part of the business case.

Corporate cultures may often resist gathering intranet metrics because of additional costs, lack of understanding or lack of expertise. Yet Web analytics can help organizations determine return on investment for each employee who uses an intranet site by providing figures on improved customer service, increased conversion rates (sales), reduction of paper costs, and improved productivity. To help promote a culture of intranet metrics within private and public sector organizations, the following scenarios illustrate how Web analytics can benefit intranet operations and planning.

Intranet Redesign Projects

Intranet redesigns are, by necessity, a collaborative multi-departmental effort that spans various internal interests within the organization. Competing objectives can lead to complex governance, strategy and content management issues for an organization, e.g. Who makes the final decisions about what kind of intranet we should have? Who owns the intranet and its content? Who is responsible for managing and updating content? Intranet analytics can help business decision makers prior to an intranet redesign as well as afterward, when steady state governance guidelines are in place to help the organization oversee the daily management of the site.

If an intranet is being redesigned, an intranet metrics analysis can inform business executives and stakeholders about how the intranet was being used in the past, such as what its most popular and well-visited pages and downloads were, and what were the peak business hours when employees were using the intranet the most. (This can be especially useful if the intranet supports customer service or client-related applications, and a spike in usage might indicate a staff reliance on the intranet to help them perform business functions.) When an intranet site is redesigned to improve its usability, Web sites can increase their desired metrics by up to 100% (Source: Jakob Nielsen, Return on Investment for Usability, 2003).

After the launch of a new intranet site, or after a major intranet redesign is implemented, it’s critical to the success of the project to be able to gather hard measurements to provide a counterweight or reality check against the subjective responses. A new intranet or redesigned intranet almost always attracts a lot of attention within an organization right after its go-live date, and often a fresh new site also garners praise from internal users who are excited about it and eager to use it. Thus, initial feedback gathered from surveys, polls, focus groups or other subjective evaluations may mislead the owners of the intranet into thinking that their project was an unqualified success. However, checking metrics such as usage patterns, clickthroughs, bail-out rates, length of sessions, top pages/documents and other criteria can provide a more balanced view and help stakeholders analyze what’s right – and even what’s wrong – about the new site.

The Online HR Office

The Human Resources department in any organization often owns the intranet or at least is one of its primary stakeholders. Many intranets also have an HR site for managers as well as an HR site for employees. Intranet analytics for these online HR “offices” are not only important to determine how many employees are using the HR site(s) and how often, but also to link key intranet metrics with training, retention and recruitment initiatives, to name a few.

For example, any online registration for courses or eLearning modules can be tracked through site metrics, and intranet analytics can tell HR management and training leaders whether there are corresponding numbers between the number page views and the number of actual registrations for courses. If page views are high but registrations are lower than expected, management will know that the site is doing its job but the courses themselves may not be drawing interest, for any variety of reasons. HR leaders can also survey employees in advance of curriculum planning efforts to determine which courses would receive the most uptake, and which courses should be dropped from the course calendar.

Employee retention and recruitment efforts can also be determined and reinforced through Intranet analytics. While employee retention or employee job satisfaction is often considered a “soft benefit” because it can’t be measured, intranet analytics provide a way to measure its impacts. An analysis of employee usage for the IBM intranet site showed that 80% of IBM employees access the intranet daily, 68% view it as crucial to their jobs, and 52% are more satisfied to be an IBM employee because of information available on the intranet (Source: Liam Cleaver, IBM, From Intranet to the On Demand Workplace, 2005).

Recruitment initiatives can also be analyzed. Providing new and younger employees with current technology, including a best practice intranet site, has been found to be an important incentive when recruiting. Intranet analytics can demonstrate the value of such incentives by tracking new hires by login ID and analyzing their intranet usage patterns. As well, activity on new content and applications can be reviewed to determine different usage patterns between veteran employees and new hires. New employees may themselves be interested in seeing overall site stats to give them an understanding of how the online community is using the site.

The Employee Community

The impact of the “Web 2.0″ movement on Web sites has run deep and wide through the Internet. While the concept of an intranet community has been promoted since the 1990s (e.g. Amy Jo Kim’s book, Community Building on the Web), the last few years have seen an increasing expectation on the part of users that sites should be built by an online community, for an online community.

Yet intranets cannot simply pay lip service to community-building. Organizations with intranets may want to build not only an overall sense of community for the site, but also use Web 2.0 functionality to create and measure sub-communities within each division, department or business unit. Blogs, message boards, forums, chat rooms, shared space for virtual project management, event calendars, classified ads and other community-builders not only generate content but valuable Web metrics. A survey of intranets found that the most important metrics they tracked were not just page views (71%) and unique users (79%), but also community posts (67%) and registrations (63%) (Source: Forum One Communications, Online Community Metrics, 2006).

Intranet analytics are especially important for building a model of community activity patterns. Ultimately, the purpose of community-building on an intranet is to advance specific business objectives, such as enhancing information sharing and knowledge management. By tracking patterns for topics, streams or threads on a blog or forum, for example, senior management can obtain valuable data on the nature of internal business discussions and employee activity relating to specific business issues and changes.

As well, some content management systems use intranet metrics to push the most frequently accessed content and/or the newest content to top level pages so users are always aware of which content has just been posted and which content pages are most popular. This can be especially useful on forums where topical discussions drive user-generated activity and content.

The Customer Service Toolkit

On the Internet, the most important metrics are related to conversion rates – sales, transactions processed, clickthroughs, customer service support requests and customer satisfaction analyses. On an intranet, however, customer service success can be measured by intranet metrics in terms of how effectively it can be used to support the business activities, such as the ones above, for the organization. Customer service support on the intranet can be achieved through knowledge management tools, decision-making support tools, user forums for customer service staff to share information and post solutions to problems, and customer relationship management systems, to name a few. All of these can generate hard numbers that can be interpreted through intranet analytics.

Existing or new systems can be measured to help determine staff efficiency gains and diagnose minor customer service issues before they escalate into serious problems. As well, intranet metrics can help determine softer benefits such as employee morale, consistency of information and communications and customer perception of internal processes, i.e. it seemed to be easy for the company’s customer service staff to answer questions/process a purchase/resolve an issue, therefore the company must be well-managed. A research report on employee portals states: “The Employee Portal may help your sales team respond quicker to customer queries. The customer perception of quick and reliable service may lead to increased sales. However, it may not be possible to attribute the exact increase in sales as a result of this initiative.” (Source: Tan Shong Ye and Thyag Venkatesan, Going Beyond ROI, CIO Asia, 2006).

Intranet metrics for customer service pages and applications can also be shared with staff, not as a way to focus on shortcomings or dismal numbers, but to help find solutions and identify successes.

Conclusions

Intranet metrics should be linked to business drivers as well as to targeted performance figures for the site. On intranets, organizations know specific variables that may not be as easily available to Internet sites – who the users are, the maximum number of users who will visit the site, the type of browser they will be using, and when usage rates will drop off entirely (after office hours). Given that some of these variables are fixed, it is reasonable for organizations to set targets for their intranet metrics based on business objectives. Intranets are a substantial internal investment.

The methodology for intranet analytics should be revisited and audited regularly to ensure that the metrics are not being misinterpreted, but overall most organizations can benefit from sound analytics practices for their intranet metrics. Increased automation and customization offered by Web metrics tools and intranet applications provide greater control and accuracy to the figures they generate. As well, intranet metrics should be strategically shared with all members of the organization, including management and staff, rather than just the Web team or I.T. department. An analytical understanding of how people use their intranet is the most important way business leaders can learn how to improve their intranet and its return on investment.

Originally article by Garth A. Buchholz published by the Web Analytics Association.