We’re information architects, web analysts, designers, and developers on a mission to engage our digital audience by applying design, information architecture, analytics and strategy to build an all-around solid user experience. Think of our work as the “fit and finish” bodywork and detailing to a car – but instead of a car, we’re implementing final touches to a web project. We welcome you to follow along with us, as we share our insights, best practices, and solutions in web strategy and design, usability and information architecture, research and measurement, mobile and social media!
1. When an app is published and nary a soul downloads it. An all-too-common problem for brands and app developers in today's overcrowded app marketplace. 2. When an app is downloaded by a consumer but is rarely interacted with by said consumer.
I've got 50 apps on my iPhone4. Another 50 or so on my "vintage" model - a 2G iPhone I still use for gaming with the kids. Many of the apps do fantastic things, like turning my phone into a videoediting bay, and enabling me to record R&B tracks in autotune. (What could be more fantastic than that?)
But aside from the standby apps of social, stocks, weather and maps, there's one app I use more regularly than any other. One app that has increased my brand loyalty and usage: The GreatClips app.
Like a rooster that crows each morn, once a month, I open my trusty GreatClips app. It tells me current wait time, store hours, and … here's the best part… it lets me choose my store location and check in ahead of time so I don't have to sit and wait. Simple, powerful, and very valuable for someone like me, whose idea of torture is sitting in a haircut waiting room on a sunny Saturday.
When it comes to low switching costs -- meaning low brand loyalty -- you can't get much lower than men's haircuts. But the GreatClips app has succeeded in making me loyal to the brand.
As marketers and product managers, we're all scurrying to leverage mobile to increase brand affinity and capture positive ROI. But instead of trying to dream up the next great mobile innovation, the simplest path to avoiding App Rot is to identify your customer touchpoint where the greatest utility can be delivered, like GreatClips did for customers like me. Most of the time, you'll find that the less complex the better, and the less sexy, the better.
Rather than trying to recreate your desktop experience on mobile, or stuff every marketing exec's ideas into a company app, why not start small and simple, with a mobile experience that will do one thing really well for your core market segment? Your customers will thank you, and they'll tell others. And word-of-mouth is the most powerful marketing of all.
As the Interactive Practice Lead for the ICF Ironworks' Tysons Corner Office, I have the good fortune to manage and work with some very talented digital strategists, information architects, interactive art directors, content strategists, research analysts, and front-end developers.
I was thrilled to learn this week that The UX Booth, "a publication by and for the user experience community," accepted and published an article by our own Colin Eagan.
This is something that started out as a whiteboard sketch, and evolved as Colin bounced the idea off of other peers, and incorporated their feedback and input.
Colin introduces a new model, based on traditional elements, to quickly help a project team identify why a digital project might be heading off-course, and prioritize their efforts to get things back on track.
Anyone associated with a digital project team will benefit from this article. Here are a few more reasons why:
It challenges how most people think about framing a project
It articulates and visualizes challenges that you're probably familiar with, but could never quite describe
It offers tangible solutions to improve your chances of success in the long run
New OS makes good use of “Mobile-first” interaction design
As people I work with will tell you, I’ve always made it a point to use PCs over Macs to do design work (yes, Adobe software works on
Windows) so you’d think I would have had a Windows phone for a while now.
Unfortunately, like most Information Architects, I’m also a perfectionist, so
it has taken me forever to find a non-Apple phone I like. But given that my
previous phone still had something called a “physical keyboard,” I finally made the plunge with
Windows 8 Mobile. Apparently I'm not alone, since sales have been surging. So let my procrastination be your good fortune as I provide
to you some thoughts on why I like it thus far.
The Device
I opted for the Windows Phone 8x made by “Quietly Brilliant”
HTC, which runs on 4G LTE (available on the three largest carriers at oddly
varying prices – BestBuy was
giving them away in-store for $1 on Black Friday if you have AT&T, which, I
do not). The 8X is speedy with a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, has an HD Gorilla
Glass display with 1280x720-pixel res, and front and back cameras (2 megapixel
front, 8 back). At just 4.6oz, I liked the weight and form-factor better than
the Nokia Lumia 920 (although it may seem “heavy” if you use a 4oz iPhone 5). It has 16GB of
internal storage, and 7GB of free Microsoft Skydrive storage. Ok you get the idea.
Windows 8 Usability
Has Already Recieved Some Bad Press
A notable feature of Windows 8 is that mobile, tablet and desktop share the same "common core" software, theoretically standardizing the user experience across platforms. Last week Jacob Nielsen
came out with a critique of Windows 8 UX, calling it “weak on tablets, terrible for PCs.” Actually, he
called it “a monster that terrorizes poor office workers and strangles their
productivity,” but he is prone to understatement. (As a side note, it looks like while W8 sales are down but way too early to know why). I
haven’t used 8 extensively enough on either of those platforms to have an opinion
as to its monstrosity, but most of the issues cited – flat style that lacks
discoverability, low information density, swipe ambiguity— do appear to be less
apparent on mobile.
Mobile UI Seems to
Avoid Most Pitfalls
As you know if you were an early adopter of the Windows 7
phone (which you weren’t), the Windows 8 mobile OS takes its core functions
from the old Metro UI (apparently Microsoft is now saying the 7.8 update is
coming to WP7.5 devices early 2013). Some of the key features are the Live Tiles (the iconic “grid” look) on
the Start screen that you can customize, invitation-only Rooms for sharing
info, Photo integration with SkyDrive, and Games with Xbox. Overall, I have
found that the interface is intuitive. Some early reactions:
Live Tiles
emphasize Content-First principles. A recent movement in experience design has been the push to lead with content over navigation. As opposed to app
icons in iOS, Microsoft’s Live Tiles surface the latest content under each
application. This doesn’t work consistently yet, but the overall idea is right. Nielsen may have a point about desktop information density,
but for mobile it seems appropriate.
Customizable
(but not too customizable) look and feel. Microsoft does a good job of
allowing users to customize the interface, but within reasonable design
boundaries that preserve the brand. For example, I liked that you can change
the Smart Tile color to one of 20 or so in a pre-determined pallet. Also most Live
Tiles can be re-sized to one of three pre-set dimensions.
Touch precision.
As mentioned, I had gotten somewhat spoiled by having a physical keyboard on my
previous phone, so I was worried about this, but the touch precision on the
keyboard is quite strong, and Windows incorporates a powerful auto-fill
feature.
Accessibility.
Options will vary by device, but the OS supports functionality for large text
size, screen magnification, and high contrast. There are also some cool “Attentive
Phone” features.
Can Mobile Design be Too
“Clean?”
There were some key features found on most phones that have
been stripped out of the Windows 8 UI that seem to be sorely missed by users. A
good way to gauge this is to check out which early custom apps are most
popular. For example, the Connectivity Shortcuts app is at the top of the list with Twitter in terms of popularity, and all it does
is allow users to see if their Wifi is on (along with Bluetooth and Data Plan).
What’s more, the design is pretty bad (the icon on the free version doesn’t
even match the grid dimensions of the Start screen). Other popular apps are
ones that display the battery level (which ironically, one reviewer points out,
drains the battery) and, get this, a clock. Some of these things are visible
at the top of the screen in the native OS, but you have to swipe down to find
them, and they disappear when you leave the Start screen.
Microsoft Really
Wants You to Use Bing
As a previous Android user, it is interesting to note
that the physical buttons on the phone have switched from four to three –
removing the “Menu” button. If I were to remove one, I’m not sure this would
have been my first choice, since it now requires more swiping to bring up an
advanced features menu on any given screen. The Search button seems less critical by
comparison, but obviously if Android has a Google search button, then Microsoft
needs a button for Bing. You will use Bing whether you want to use Bing or not.
Wait for Windows 9?
Nielsen’s take on Windows 8 for tablet and PC is that it’s
the next Vista – i.e. we should wait for the next Windows 7, which presumably will
be Windows 9. Whether you think that should also extend to mobile or not, Windows 8 is a good case study for
larger questions about Universal Design – is it actually best to start with
Mobile First and build up from there? Or do you risk losing the benefits of
larger mediums through oversimplification? These are options we’re used to weighing as designers when it comes to building a Responsive website or mobile app, but things get
substantially less clear cut for an entire operating system.
As for me, I’m glad I finally got around to
being an early adopter.
Back in the shop, the interactive team revisits some of this season's “stickiest” User Experience topics from An Event Apart
It’s been a busy few months for User Experience events, with UXWeek out in San Francisco in August and several recent iterations of An Event Apart. While big conferences are great for building excitement around new ideas, the real challenge is always translating this energy back to project work. We find it’s useful to rehash event learning a while after the fact to see what’s been most memorable in practice. Here are a few practical highlights looking back on An Event Apart DC.
Photo Credit: Ashley Bush
In case you forgot: Content First!
For those who couldn’t attend, An Event Apart is a three-day conference for “people who make websites.” Daily sessions focused on content, design, usability, and code. One of the most coherent themes at this year’s events was content strategy, with many sessions either relating to how to craft effective content, design for it, and make it work on multiple devices.
LESSON WORTH REVISITING: Mobile is the New Normal
Mobile statistics show that a growing number of Americans (31% of those with cellphones) are becoming mobile-only internet users. And organizations, particularly government agencies, are preparing to focus on the responsibility to get ALL of their content available on mobile devices. But content poses a design problem for both mobile and the web.
Sticky Ideas:
Stop “dumbing down” content for mobile – particularly government agencies. For many Americans, mobile is their only access to the web.
Treat content as a service. Use the process for going mobile as a filter for what your content should look like: concise and focused.
Rethink the back button. Now that mobile is the new normal, designers need to expanding thinking beyond standard interaction conventions. For example, the latest iOS allows web browsers to “slide” the screen back in place of having to click on a back button. Passwords could be gestures on a touch screen vs typing in characters. And Windows 8 for desktop is actually inspired by mobile, not the other way around.
Photo Credit: Ashley Bush
LESSON WORTH REVISITING: Dive Deep to Understand Your Content
Content should be at the core of the entire web design process. Developing content requires an effective strategy that includes processes or systems that enable content creators to produce “good” content for designers to use when designing. This requires getting to know your content at a much deeper level than previously.
Sticky Ideas:
Know Your Artifacts. Understand the artifacts the systems intend to produce, and gain an intimate knowledge of them.
Spend time understanding the stakeholders, the content management systems, and the processes they use. Use content audits as a way to understand the individual elements of content.
Employ people with knowledge. Young people are not a guaranteed avenue of innovation. Tap into wells of knowledge to produce rich content.
LESSON WORTH REVISITING: How to Design for Content First
Good design starts with good content, and content precedes design. Everyone agrees that content should drive experiences, but pulling this off is easier said than done. Many of the speakers this year covered how the rules have changed when it comes to crafting and designing for content.
Sticky Ideas:
Design without content is just decoration.
Beware patterns. Design that does not serve people does not serve business. When you do things that are anti-user, you are designing anti-user patterns.
Designers must say ‘no’ tactfully with data and examples to design requests that are bad for users. This means not bombarding pages with links, irrelevant content, navigation, and more.
And More Great Stuff to Recollect...
There was lots of additional, practical advice for designers coming out of the talks that is worth recalling, on topics like iterative design, effective use of meetings, and working with clients. For more details, you can check out Ashley's complete notes on the ICF Ironworks Facebook Album.
We hope you enjoyed this review. Now back to work making stuff.
Idea Forge is a series from the ICF Ironworks’ Interactive Group that highlights practical uses for big ideas in User Experience design. For the latest thoughts hot off the forge, follow our blog at fitandfinish.ironworks.com
Discover How the Gamestorming Technique Adds Structure and Fun to the Ideation Process
Are your team Brainstorms suffering from idea drought? In our latest Idea Forge, we take a look at some of the practical implications of Gamestorming – a technique that ups the ante for the process of generating big ideas. We caught up with UX Architect Larry King at a workshop where he explained this technique and how he’s used it in the field. Watch to see how Gamestorming harnesses the power of Structured Play and learning theories like Distributed Cognition to help you seek out unexpected solutions to specific business problems.
At ICF Ironworks we’ve used Gamestorming both internally and with clients, often at the Strategy Phase of interactive projects. Some examples:
Helped Define an Approach to Social Engagement. Worked with an insurance industry client to hone their social media strategy through games like Cover Story, which helps envision end goals, and Affinity Map, which assigns ideas into meaningful groups.
Found New Ways to Encourage Community Content. Created a variety of custom games like Brainwriting and Associative Barriers for a membership association client to explore ways to engage users online and encourage the development of community content.
Lots of Other Uses. We use it internally as well for problem solving– some favorites are the 3-12-3 Brainstorm, Campfire, and Ethos Logos Pathos.
For more on Gamestorming, make sure to check out http://www.gogamestorm.com/ from the authors of the book “Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers and Changemakers.” You can see some of the latest Games submitted by readers as well as the new Gamestorming iPhone app.
Idea Forge is a series from the ICF Ironworks’ Interactive group that highlights practical uses for big ideas in User Experience design. For the latest thoughts hot off the forge, follow our blog atfitandfinish.ironworks.com
Responsive web design, a term and technique developed by Ethan Marcotte, is an approach that ensures a web page looks good on any screen size or orientation. This approach is becoming especially important considering the wide variety of devices that might display your web page today and in the future. Today, a user may be viewing your site on everything from a 320 x 480px smart phone all the way up to a 1680 x 1280px wide-screen monitor. Throw in all the upcoming tablet sizes (4.5 in, 10.1 in, etc.) that can be used in either portrait or landscape, and you can begin understand the diversity of visual platforms that you must now consider when serving up a site.
Responsive web design is primarily enabled through the use of a new feature in CSS3 called media queries. Media queries allow you to detect various parameters associated with the browser's view-port. Based on these parameters, different layouts, navigation and/or images can be served to the user from a single code-base. For instance if a user is using an iPhone in the common portrait orientation, media queries can detect the size and orientation of the device and serve up custom CSS to optimize the layout.
The site styles for an iPhone sized screen emphasize branding and primary navigation links while teasing content to scroll to below.
This layout comes from the same code-base as the example above. The site styles for a wide screen view (1440 x 900 px) reveals additional primary navigation links along with more imagery and content.
The concept of responsive web design is not without its pitfalls. For instance, mobile browsers tend to load all of the content for the full size site while only displaying the mobile optimized content. Also, responsive web design requires more code to serve up an optimized page for a mobile browser, thus requiring more bandwidth and more CPU usage than would be necessary for a site coded for mobile only. Finally, there are browser support issues, as in it doesn't work in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6,7,or 8 and some non-WebKit mobile browsers.
I liken responsive web design to CSS table-less layouts back in 2005. It wasn't always the easiest to do back then due to various issues including difficult browser support. Today, few would even consider using tables for layout in a modern website. I believe the issues keeping responsive web design in the world of boutique web designs will begin to fall away as mobile bandwidth, CPU and browser support issues begin to disappear. The future of web design will be responsive, and this approach will likely be business as usual in the near future.
Stepping Back to Look at the Biggest Issues Facing Clients in the Year Ahead
Is your web design "Responsive" enough to look good on tablet displays that haven't been invented yet? Do you have an analytics plan in place to capture usage data beyond the "page" level? And just what exactly is your digital strategy for 2011? Interactive teams from Ironworks' multiple offices met this month to discuss answers to these questions and more. Join us as we recap our latest thinking on Web and Mobile Strategy, Responsive Design, and Analytics.
Our final segment from Usability Week 2010 in San Francisco looks at evaluating the user-friendliness of recent trends in web design. Learn what's hot and what's not in design for site navigation, search, e-commerce, and augmented reality.
See Colin Eagan's video report from the Nielsen Norman Group's Usability Week 2010 in San Francisco. Colin is an Information Architect from our DC interactive team. Look for more reports later this week.
We've got a lot of great ideas lined up for the near future, but the first thing we decided to shoot was a simple conversation. Interactive is a pretty collaborative and opinionated group, so rarely a day goes by that we don't end up talking about current web events, theory or the like. It just made sense to document and share one of these conversations.
Larry King and I have been having this discussion on the future of mobile applications for a while now, and it's a fun thing to talk and ponder about because we're rapidly approaching a crossroads. What will the mobile application landscape look like in 5 years? Will the iTunes store be but a painful memory?
If you're interested in the mobile space and want to hear what we think, head on over to the Ironworks YouTube channel and watch our newest video, Mobile Web Apps vs. Native Apps
Welcome to "Fit & Finish", the Ironworks User Experience blog. We are very proud of the talented team (led by Bill Buell) of information architects, designers, developers and strategists that we have at Ironworks. You can look forward to us sharing our ideas, best practices, creativity, humor and useful resources on this blog. We welcome your active participation with comments and questions.
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