Design for Users

A little bird on a wire informed us yesterday there was a thought-provoking new post over on The BrandBuilder’s blog (thanks Reza!) “Be fearless!” Blanchard instructs us, in his inimitable style. How I wish I could, some days. He says that “courage is one of humanity’s greatest gifts” and that is such a beautiful observation. But what if persistent, underlying fears and hidden emotions are getting in our way, despite our best intentions?

I don’t know if any of you suffer from the same issues I do when it comes to business risk, taking chances, stepping out on a limb or going for what you truly want… but sometimes I am fearless, sometimes totally uncertain (but willing to take a chance if I knew the right direction) and sometimes I am positively paralyzed with either indecision, fear of the unknown, or fear of what I imagine might go wrong.

I was thinking about where these emotions and fear and uncertain meandering musings come from, and they are lodged in my body in different places. So I want to get literal for a moment… are we in touch with where, in our bodies, we are literally or figuratively having uncomfortable feelings that stop us? I have an image here of some places in our bodies where fears collect, and might cause us to hold back - maybe even unconsciously if we’re not aware we’re holding onto these thoughts and physical sensations.

What’s going on in your head?
Are you telling yourself the truth or semi-fiction based on hidden emotions? “We’re better than competitors… we suck next to our competitors… this is not good enough… we aren’t selling enough… we can’t get ahead… we aren’t closing deals… we need more budget… what am I going to do? I hate my job… my boss is out to get me… I can’t ever make my boss happy… I’m not making enough and can’t get another job… what if no one likes this design? What if I fail?” How many times are we smiling on the outside, with a running dialogue of fret, worry and fearful outcomes draining our mental energy? 

What’s going on with your mouth?
Are you mostly telling the truth, or telling lies? Are you stuffing feelings and impressions before expressing them for fear of retaliation or confrontation? Are you biting your tongue, rather than lashing out at an abuser? Are you loose-lipped or gossiping, and then regret it? Do you say things in a harsh manner and then regret it? Do you praise the people who are important to you enough, or show your gratitude in your speech, or do you curse the day you (or your family, friends, employees, managers, etc.) were born most of the time? Who renders you speechless? Who do you want to confide in most? Who do you love talking to? Who do you share secrets with freely? Who do you watch your mouth with or can’t trust with information? What makes you drop your mouth open and what do you feel when that happens? What are you eating that you feel is good for you (or not)? Who do you want to kiss?

What’s up with your eyes?
Do you see situations clearly or dimly? Do you think you see things (based on fears) that aren’t really happening? Are you in reality about what you see, or in denial? Do you help others see clearly, or try to mask the truth and pull the wool over their eyes? Are your eyebrows raised in shock or alarm? Do you feel helpless because your eyesight is failing you? Do you feel happy with the vision you have, physically and metaphorically?

How’s your hearing?
Are you listening to what people really say, or reinterpreting it to suit yourself once it passes from your ear to your brain? Are you listening to what customers want, or trying to get them to hear what you want from them? Are you open to hearing new ideas from unexpected sources? Do the people around you consider you a good listener, or do they know you won’t listen to a thing anyone says? What do you long to hear? Who’s whispering in your ear? Who says horrible things to you? Who do you wish would shut up? What do you still hear (in your head) from your childhood? Are the things people say to you accurate? Can you trust what you hear, and if not, what can you do about it?

How do your throat and neck feel?
Is your throat inflamed or “tight” physically? This can happen when we stuff feelings inside and don’t express them. Your throat literally constricts from the pressure of this repeated behavior. Does your neck move easily or is it locked up? A lot of people carry their stress in their neck - if it feels like the trunk of a hardwood tree, you need to examine whether you have stress that is going unrelieved piling up in that area… “the weight of the world on your shoulders” needs to be diminished so your neck will be unrestricted in its movements. You need to be able to move your neck freely so you can see everything that’s around you.

What’s going on in your gut?
Do you have nervous butterflies? Do you feel nauseous? Are you excited? Is your tummy doing flip-flops? Do you feel like you could upchuck if something doesn’t change? Is there a burning sensation in the pit of your stomach? When people blush, the lining of their stomach has an associated reaction that can make it feel like a flame is been applied. Has something either delighted you so much that you’re immersed inside that flame, or worried you so immensely that you feel sick? Does your gut send you a warning (intuition) when you are about to make a mistake or choose a path that you should reconsider? Do you digest the food you’re eating well? If your job, your marriage, your partners or your business is giving you ulcers, listen to your gut and make changes before more damage is done.

What’s going on underneath your skin?
Does someone give you the creeps or make you feel dirty inside? Do you warm to the touch of the people you’re with, or grow cold when they touch you? Does the idea you have or person you’re with give you goosebumps of delight, or chills of impending doom? Is someone under your skin, driving you nuts? Do you wish you could just get them out from under there, somehow? Would you rather be somewhere else, than where you are presently? What makes you feel alive and tingly, all over? What makes you want to crawl inside yourself like a turtle and hide?

What’s going on with your legs & feet?
Are you always on the move, and wish you could slow down, or do you love it? Are you mostly sedentary and hate it? Do you wish you could be somewhere else? Do you want to click your heels together, like Dorothy, and Go Home, more than anything in the world? Have you stood in the spots you most want to see? Are you face-to-face with people who matter to you? Are you running away from something or someone? Do you wish time would stand still around you, so you could catch up on life’s many chores? Do you fantasize about walking out on your job, spouse, children, parents or group of friends? Are you paralyzed from the waist down, and afraid to move? Do you want to run toward something, but feel your feet are stuck in place?

What is in your heart?
If your mind is aligned with both your integrity and your desires, you are probably following your heart, unencumbered, regardless of doubt, uncertainty, fears or setbacks and failures. Sometimes we want to follow where our heart wants to lead us, but there are obstacles in the way: our moral conscience, the moral compass of society, what the consequences are, what other people will think, what we feel we can manage, what we feel sure about… the path may not be clear at all times or navigating it may be fraught with complications. Sometimes we do things for the reasons in our heart, though our mind or our gut nag against it. But what makes your heart beat fast? What causes it to burst with joy? What closes it and causes you to turn away? What have you denied it? Where does it ache? What happens, if you have a business or relationship failure when something was terribly important to you, inside your heart? Is it broken permanently? Do you feel it has cracks? Does it mend fully, when someone dies, or we lose a job, or a friend or lover leaves? How weak or how strong is it? What will people say about your heart, when you leave this earth? What do you want your legacy to be? Where does your heart want your body to be, right this minute?

There are two ways we can deal with having all these bodily reactions, buried or repressed feelings, borrowing some thoughts from pop music below. I’m sure a lot of us have felt the way this first video describes - we don’t say what we wish to say, and stuff our emotions or bury them beneath the surface. This song is about a love relationship, but it applies to virtually any situation where the stakes are high. You may feel you’re playing it safe, but the huge gamble in living with things you’ll never say, is that you risk never having what you want.

Things I’ll Never Say

Or… as Eminem says, with characteristic bluntness:
Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity
To seize everything you ever wanted - ONE moment
Would you capture it or just let it slip?

Lose Yourself

The mind, to me, feels more like an unruly animal we have to tame, conquer and discipline at times, in order to move past fears and have the courage to keep taking action. But is what’s in the heart the most necessary factor for Being Fearless? It feels that way to me quite a bit. If I want something, even if there are many difficulties, and my desire is heartfelt and I am being true to myself, that helps propel me forward, in business, in love, in life. I’d love to hear what you have to say about it. What do you think it takes, to be fearless and make those plans a reality and your dreams come true (or die trying?)

I have found that being a user experience person has often meant arguing a lot. Your role in the company, is to be the user advocate, not the company advocate, so that your voice is a reminder and constant reflection of a product’s users… you represent them, and are paid for doing that.

But that means having to speak up, be confrontational at times, and be as persistent as you can possibly be when you passionately feel bad decisions are about to be made without being fired.

So this Twitter issue of removing a certain setting regarding seeing your friends reply to folks you don’t know, and the subsequent user experience fallout is the most beautiful train wreck a girl like me could ever witness. And it offers free lessons to anyone who will pay attention.

I have long been vocal about the fact that the one role not offered or filled at Twitter, is the role of a User Experience professional. They recently hired a Creative Director and front-end UI developer away from Google, to much fanfare. But those roles and those types of skill do not typically include enough understanding of human factors and behavior to have averted a UXP crisis of this magnitude. Obviously.

Here’s how the meeting would have gone at Twitter, had I been (for example) their User Experience Director:

Engineering Type: “We need to remove the ability for people to see other people’s @replies if they’re not following them anyway, because of….. (insert reason here. I don’t know why they felt the need to do this and Twitter has not explained.)

Creative Director: Cool. It’s just a checkbox on the Notices tab so we just take it off and we’re done.

Manager Type: Someone might need to post something for the damn users so we won’t get a million support questions. Gotta run… sales needs me.

Marketing: Hey! I’ll write a cute blog notice and talk about how it was confusing anyway, so we just helped everybody out!

Me: Are you freaking crazy??? A LOT of people use that feature because that’s how they find people they don’t know, to follow. Plus, they like to see what their friends are saying to each other. You can’t just yank that from the screen and write a cute blog notice! No way. We need to find another solution to address the (engineering issue reason) and not take away a well-used feature. You need to fix this on the back end. This is not the answer.

Much argument and debate would then ensue. History indicates I would eventually either win this battle, or a change would be made in a much different manner than it was with the #fixreplies debacle.

I am not saying this to be arrogant or tout my own user experience prowess. This is what a good user experience professional, in a position of influence, can do for your companies. It is a critical role… much more critical than software companies and product manufacturers realize. 

Right now, every 20 seconds on Twitter, there are about 50 more comments being made, mostly by outraged users, with the hashtag #fixreplies in it. Comments with “#twitterfail” and “Options Back” are also part of this user outcry. Thousands upon thousands of comments are being made by I don’t know how many users. But this bad user experience train wreck never had to happen.

From the removal of the feature with no warning or choice, to the subtly offensive tone of the notice regarding it “this is undesirable, and you all were confused” to the sheer chaos and confusion of many users who aren’t even quite sure what the issue is, to the aftermath of at least 16 hours or more and counting of vocal user upset, this feature removal has been handled badly in every particular.

8 hours ago at this writing, Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, tweeted “Reading people’s thoughts on the replies issue. We’re considering alternatives. Thanks for your feedback.” He knows people will see that and spread it around and some people will get the message. But that is not hardly enough, when your users are spending their valuable time complaining, in an attempt to elevate the noise so you will hear it. Because that is the point and the heart of the #fixreplies movement. Twitter’s users want to be heard.

So what does being heard mean? Ev acknowledged they are seeing the tweets, for anyone who happens to catch it. I would have preferred they make a status notice, as they have one up about maintenance and downtime later today. He also posted a year old blog post about this feature because it apparently has confused some people. The detail and communication in that post is better than the “Small Settings Update” blog post that accompanied this sudden feature loss last night. 

It’s never a good idea to completely remove a used feature without warning. You must always consider the purpose, tasks and emotions of the user if you want to take away a feature previously offered. Their feelings about it, are your problem. So like in any relationship that matters to you, if you need to make a change, it must be handled with the utmost tact, diplomacy and fairness as humanly possible.

Numerous problems with the update notice have fueled the #fixreplies outrage. Twitter won’t even tell us the reason behind the change. They said it was “confusing” but with tons of people having selected to use it, it cannot be that confusing. People aren’t dumb and have noticed this.

They spoke “down” to users by making this Big Brother-like statement: “Based on usage patterns and feedback, we’ve learned most people want to see when someone they follow replies to another person they follow—it’s a good way to stay in the loop. However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable.” The contradictions in that sentence slay me. They could have also said, ”We know you like to follow along with conversations and actually have the real data to prove it, however, we have decided that you are all wrong. Denied!” Never, ever insult your user’s intelligence or ability to make choices for themselves in your documentation, errata in blog posts or in guiding text on the screen. NEVER.

The behavior of users is really fascinating to watch. Twitter is lucky to have all of this free feedback. I would have killed to have it for products I’ve launched or had to roll changes out for in the past. What they will do with it, I have no idea. They continue to baffle me as a company, so I’m watching, with thousands of other PR folks, marketing people, brand and community managers to see how they’ll exit this scrape.

Twitter is the best way for visible brands and companies to get feedback on their products, services, campaigns and decisions. I’ll say that again, in case the point was missed… Twitter is the best way for visible brands and companies to get feedback on their products, services, campaigns and decisions. Do they understand this, for themselves?

Yesterday the phenomenal Brains on Fire company in Greenville, SC held its apparently legendary “Fire Sessions.” In a post written by Olivier Blanchard on the event, he pointed out that “internal culture” was the predominant theme, and that if you “build the right company culture, the tools pretty much become peripheral.” I think, from what I have seen and read, Twitter does have a strong company culture. But from a total outsider’s perspective, they seem to live in a bubble of their own making. They are far smaller than their user base. It is the users they do not seem to connect with (unless they’re celebrities.) 

Where is the User Experience advocate? Where is the Community Manager? Where is the team of people, working under the community manager, in different parts of the world because cultures and language and usage might be different, whereas the universal point of Twitter is the same: it is a connector. Where are the people, inside Twitter the company, who understand this, care about it and want to change the way they interact with their own users? Why is the Get Satisfaction support site, more lip-service than really utilized to communicate with people who take the time to write to Twitter in an attempt to share their frustrations and help them understand how to be better? These are my questions.

But my questions are not as important as this one… today, the number one question of Twitter’s user base, is “Will you please fix my @replies back the way I had them? I liked it that way.”

Are you going to not just listen, but take action, Twitter? We’re all waiting to hear from you.

Two well-known brand strategists engaged in a conversation on Twitter yesterday that caught my attention. Olivier Blanchard, The BrandBuilder and Gabriel Rossi were discussing some of the problems companies have, in their opinion, with marketing and branding.

Gabriel said “People who criticize Marketing & Branding need to learn to see the value of brands as a powerful socio-economic force“, and Olivier’s response was like a glass of cold water in the face: “… as opposed to looking at Marketing and Branding as the discipline of putting together ads, brochures and mailers.”

I’ve worked with so many companies on branding and marketing and that is what I do for them. In fact they often hire me because I am a “big picture” person who can help define and create the vision for the tangible brand, and then backtrack and execute the myriad of details to make it a reality. That has been my role, but I know that while appearance and physical materials are critical components of a successful branding effort, they are only the uppermost layer.

So often, my personal experience with companies is that we are focused on the appearance and business strategy and deals, but we don’t have time to go deep into the heart and soul of the brand and find ways to expose and communicate that. This problem reminds me of an artichoke, and I have slapped together a graphic here to try to demonstrate what I’m talking about…

The heart of a brand, like that of an individual, is vulnerable. It must be both soft enough to prove genuine caring, and strong enough to withstand scrutiny and adversity. But it is your core offering - not your products and services - and if you aren’t in touch with and know what’s in the heart, establishing lasting relationships with customers will be difficult or hit and miss. Do you want a shallow relationship with the people that interact with your brand, or a sympathetic bond that can withstand conflicts?

There are not enough hours in the day - I am all too aware of this, as I often find the bulk of my day being spent on putting out fires, or trying to take advantage of a new opportunity. It’s no wonder, between meetings, presentations, adminstration, lead generation, chasing down dollars owed and creating new content that digging very deep beneath the surface just does not seem to happen. In fact, I had to write this blog post over lunch and was not really present at the table with people, or it wouldn’t have happened. This happens to a lot of us, every day. Too many great ideas, lots of drive, but just not the time or resources to make it all happen now.

But we all need to try to carve out the time to make sure we are in touch with what matters most. Engaging people from the heart of your brand, being vulnerable and forging true and lasting customer relationships, is what will keep companies alive and thriving, through good times and bad times.

I want to thank my personal brand experts on Twitter for giving me great food for thought - not just yesterday, but quite often. The realization is one thing… figuring out what to about it, is a task for another day!

I’m running across a new problem with a number of clients and wondering if my user experience colleagues are having similar issues. The advent of web applications has resulted in a change for many software providers in the way they release software today.

Agile software development is a method in which software is designed, examined and delivered to the market swiftly, so that end-users can provide feedback and more feature changes can be made and adjusted within a few months time, rather than once or twice a year. For off-the-shelf software, such as Adobe, Apple or Microsoft products, this is not as practical a method as it is for web-based services. I’m not sure if large corporations have employed any Agile methodologies or not. The Wikipedia entry describes my issue perfectly:

Agile chooses to do things in small increments with minimal planning, rather than long-term planning. Iterations are short time frames (known as ‘timeboxes’) which typically last from one to four weeks.

So here’s the problem: I am often called in to redesign an existing product, that was designed primarily by developers and managers, and not by an interface or interaction designer, or with consultation by a user experience design specialist who could point out workflow and related product issues, as well as design a product brand identity. And that’s great - this is one of my favorite things to do. Redesigning a product is sometimes easier for me than designing one from scratch, because I can see the technology working - it’s like a live prototype to play with. To take an unpolished, but great idea, and make it even better for the users it was built for, is a lot of fun for me.

Historically, I come in, look at a product, talk about the business and marketing goals, and craft a “big picture” plan for the product line identity, interface design, workflow, help systems, etc. and then the big picture gets broken down into phases and tasks. But look at the Agile description again: minimal planning, small changes, releases every 1-2 months. That allows for feature by feature adjustments, not a total redesign of the workflow, layout, navigation systems, etc.

What’s a user experience designer with a great idea of how to make this product in front of her better, to do now? I don’t have an answer to this yet. I think when it comes to restructuring the workflow of a product to make it significantly better, executives need to understand there is a time for Agile, and a time to redesign, and redesign efforts take more in the range of 2-6 months to complete, in my experience. It all depends on how much is “surface” redesign, such as moving things around on the pages and creating a nicer look and feel vs. how much the deeper code has to be modified because features need to work completely differently than the developers designed them.

As is our habit in the software industry, we tend to look inward and not outward when creating processes that are supposed to make our business run better. Do we need the internal motivation of a release every 4-6 weeks to make things happen? Customers don’t necessarily demand a release once a month, they just need bugs fixed and problematic features redesigned so they can perform their tasks better. Can we design an Agile process that is flexible enough to allow for large-scale design changes when they’re needed? Why do we have to release something once a month? 

How are you handling this issue, user experience designers? I’d love to hear your advice and stories on how to combine Agile with big picture design or redesign approaches. A List Apart offers a wonderful article on Agile Design (below) but doesn’t really answer the “how” to make it work that I am struggling with. Is persuading executives to give me the time I need with developers to make the software better, the only answer?

More Agile & User-Centered Design Thoughts…

• The Agile Manifesto
• Getting Real About Agile Design by Cennydd Bowles
• Human-Centered Design Meets Agile (presentation)
• Agile User-Centered Design (discussion thread)
• Are Agile Projects Doomed to Half-Baked Design? (presentation)
• Agile Development Process & User Experience Design (interview with Charlie Kreitzberg) ”Certainly the developer’s view of a software product is very different from the experience of end users. As a result developers may not see some user experience issues as important. And Ux is concerned with engagement and relationships.” 
• User Experience Design vs. Agile Development (presentation)
• 12 Emerging Best Practices for Adding UX Work to Agile by Jeff Patton

The UX Booth, a neat new usability site, has an excellent article that could help so many users if they see, so I’d like to point my readers there: How To Pick Passwords That Protect Your Online Experience.

Since the phishing incident at Twitter that I recently wrote about, another issue happened this week where a hacker was able to use a dictionary cracker to get inside Twitter’s back-end, and he promptly started messing with celebrity users accounts, naturally posting the most immature tweets his feeble brain could come up with. The culprit was one employee who had used a dictionary word without altering it in any way. Ironically, the word was “happiness.”

This is a huge problem, as we all have a ton of passwords and it’s hard to keep track of them. I am going to investigate the product mentioned in the article above, called 1Password as a way to help me keep track of passwords so I can use unique ones and protect myself.

Hackers are STUPID… users don’t have to be! Please share the UXBooth article with your friends, coworkers and family members. It’s important!!

I love Twitter. An unabashed Twitter addict, friends and clients have figured out they can reach me faster there than by phone or email. I love Twitter so much, I have begun designing apps that utilize the api, which are not yet released. I preface this piece with this bit of info, because it pains me to have to bash the good people there in any way, but there is a big problem going on, that might hold lessons for other companies with web applications.

Some time back I wrote a post about how to launch a product. This one is about what to do when things go horribly wrong (and they will sometimes.) I’ve made up a new little term that I hope people will remember: CIA. When things go wrong, if you have even ONE user (and Twitter has hundreds-of-thousands active, millions registered), you are duty-bound to enact a policy of CIA to help the user base remain stable and calm.

CIA stands for “Communicate, Inform & Address” - I am borrowing it from the Central Intelligence Agency without permission because the sentiment is the same. But instead of keeping information private, in this case I am advocating sharing it with the people that matter most to your bottom line: your users.

This weekend, a totally stupid individual has decided to conduct phishing attacks on innocent Twitter users. The intent is to expose a Twitter vulnerability and publically humiliate people, from my vantage point. Other reasons could be to knock Twitter down, give it a bad name, or hurt its chances to earn revenue in early 2009, as they announced. The phishing attacks began last night and quickly escalated. Bloggers from news sites immediately began posting articles so that Twitter users could point others to them for information, which was helpful. But I wanted more information from Twitter about what they were doing, and what we could, as users, expect.

Here’s what they did last night:

A. They posted a “Warning” message in small text yesterday on the site, and linked to a short status update. Within a couple of hours they linked to this blog post which gave a bit more information. (It could have used an icon for attention & much larger text. This only appeared on the Twitter website itself, so those using clients did not see it.)

B. They sent 3 tweets from the @twitter account:

1. ! be careful of DMs with a link to blogspot.com that seemingly redirects to Twitter.com and asks for your credentials (we’re on the case) about 20 hours ago from Power Twitter
2. Don’t Click That Link! http://tinyurl.com/9sste4 about 19 hours ago from twitterfeed
3. Check out our blog post about “Phishing” http://tinyurl.com/88mas4 about 16 hours ago from web

C. They did something to their app or the server, which seemed to make things better overnight at least. 

Today, the phishing scam picked up steam again, with new and different messages and url’s. Some reported it on their blogs, but Twitter has done NOTHING visible to users. For the last several hours, I have been on Twitter communicating with concerned users and trying to track down information and piece together why this issue is still occuring.

A post went up today at a SANS security site that states: “It looks like the Twitter folks have it well under control” - I got this link from the list at yesterday’s blog post, which it points to, so they must have added it today. The problem is, yesterday’s news is no longer comforting when TODAY there is more stuff going on in your application. When this is extent of the security news coming out, how much can we trust that source for security information?

I am angry. Twitter has grown mighty fast, and they provide a great service for free, but the congratulations and revenue-generating plans are mighty premature when the site is notoriously buggy for basic functions, the free use of the api has created havoc, and users are largely ignored in times of crisis.

Why hasn’t anyone from Twitter responded to the Get Satisfaction question regarding this issue today? What is more important than this issue for the company? A football game? Frisbee in the California sunshine? Margarita’s on the patio? Shopping at the mall?

I could go on (and on), but Twitter’s problem and chaos surrounding it have sucked away too much of my life last night and today. Here is what I recommend for other web applications who face an issue of this type:

COMMUNICATE EARLY & OFTEN
When things are bad, your users NEED to hear from you, and if your brand does not contain the promise that you will be there for them, then you need to re-examine every single thing about your business. Don’t be a fairweather friend. The last communication from the @twitter account was 19 hours ago, and that is unacceptable. You better have your friendliest, most personable employee - I don’t care if it’s the receptionist or the CEO’s mother - out on the front lines, available and responsive, FOR THE DURATION OF THE CRISIS. 

INFORM YOUR USERS - KEEP THEM IN THE LOOP
Having worked with numerous security companies, I know there are things you just don’t want to say. But you can keep your users informed with non-critical pieces of information that will provide the comfort they need to have some peace of mind. And their comfort levels affect your bottom line and brand reputation, so I don’t consider it optional.

ADDRESS USER’S CONCERNS
Even at the risk of repeating yourself and the tedium that goes with that, you have got to be willing to address user’s concerns if you operate a web application - free or not. This phishing incident is important to users… they are concerned about a number of things: the followers they have lost, the password they gave out, where the source of this problem is, what they can do about it next. If you don’t have all the answers, don’t be too damn proud and arrogant to admit it! In Twitter’s case, surely they could say who they are working with and what they are trying to do to STOP the messages from coming through on their system, as Matt Cutts did from his Twitter account regarding Google’s attempts to do what they can from their side.

Every single employee of Twitter, no matter what their role, EXCEPT those developers working round the clock to block the bad guys, should be visible and available today, on Twitter, making blog posts, sending an email out with info, and at the Get Satisfaction site responding to questions. This is what I would be rallying the troops to do if I worked for Twitter today, in any capacity.

I am horribly disappointed in them right now. I am EXTREMELY concerned about releasing a Twitter-related app that I have worked so hard to design because my company and my users may be on their own when it comes to big problems. I want the security of knowing Twitter is not too egotistical to learn from grave mistakes. Many users will give them a lot of license here, because they feel they get the service for free and they don’t deserve much else. I give them no room for error, because talking to users is relatively cheap and easy! I admire the product and community a great deal, so my standards are high for them now, because they have done a lot that is right. This weekend, my admiration is dropping by the hour, and it saddens me. I love the cottage industry that has sprung up around them… books, games, applications, niche information. I have great plans and ideas for my product, Twitterface. But I am worried about Twitter’s priorities and perception of themselves, if what I have been witnessing in the media and this weekend is the best they can do.

If you design, sell or develop web apps, is this how you want your users to feel?

Additional links:
Advice on What to Do if Phished
Visual of Tweets
One User’s Experience

Comments are welcome. I know everyone will not agree with me on this issue. I wish everyone a totally phish-free week. I just don’t know that we will get it.

There is no single best way to have users sign up for an account online, because there are too many variables to be considered for this aspect of the user experience. Varying factors can include security, purpose of the account, understanding of the user at the time of signup, what information they must have ready and what they will have to do next, among other things. So to point to a cool new site - even a competitor’s - and say “I want a one-field signup process like that!” does not necessarily serve your needs or your user’s. In fact, there is an awesome site I recommend to people that suffers greatly from a confusing signup process because they tried to simplify it too much.

 

 

Getting people to signup is a marketing and conversion issue not covered in this article, but the signup experience itself is your user’s first impression of using the product for their own benefit. I’d love to hear your thoughts about this design and see other great examples of signup processes. Link me up!

A user interface designer relies on certain things: a fast, working internet connection, a big enough screen to handle the inevitable hopping back and forth from one window to another, some excellent music, and a steady supply of his or her favorite addictive beverage of choice… in my case, coffee or Coke Classic.

But those are just the accoutrement needed to set the stage. An interaction designer must rely on one or more tools with which to turn the brilliance bursting forth from highly stimulated and caffeinated synapses, into pure bottom line revenue. Well, ideally at least.

I have my staples, those products I cannot and will not live without, which happen to all be owned by the same company these days. Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver have fueled the development of most software products I have worked on. Though they will always be used for my ultimate design and final polishing, I’ve recently discovered a few products that make creating a prototype almost as easy as having a thought, and I want to share these finds in case other user experience professionals or developers looking to prototype new features might benefit from them.

Balsamiq Mockups Makes Rapid Prototyping Fun!

I happened onto Balsamiq Mockups via a Twitter comment by Alex Horstmann about how great this product is. One of the big back-and-forth debates among information architects and user experience designers is the level of prototype that should be created and presented. Info architects generally rely on wireframes… the outlining of sections and navigation elements and the like. People who design the product line branding and comprehensive user experience like I do, often go whole-hog and want to communicate all their creative ideas, along with the taxonomy, navigation, etc. It can be time-consuming to do that, and sometimes even a visual designer just needs to show a simple feature interaction concept. Historically, I love to sketch with pencil and paper. It’s been the fastest way for me to work a design problem out for myself. But then I usually want or need to share it with developers, and I have a sketch. Do I scan it, recreate it using one of my standard tools, or just get on the phone and describe it???

With Balsamiq Mockups, I can grab and place “sketchy” elements such as dropdowns, icons and other form elements onto a blank notebook page online, then save and send it to my team. Peldi Guilizzoni, owner of Balsamiq and developer of the product, sets a new standard for customer service, which is one reason why this product will always draw raves from me, despite my occasional gripes about Adobe Air, which is the platform the product is built upon. Meet Peldi and you will agree with me. This product was and is “designed for users” by Peldi himself. If you have a problem, he strives to fix it, and uses the excellent Get Satisfaction site to stay in constant contact with users who need help. If you have a request, Peldi will seriously consider it, usually implement it, and if he cannot or shouldn’t, he provides the research behind his decision and fully explains why not. That is RARE, even in this day of more transparent and more open applications.

And now maybe Peldi will know why it took me so long to put this review up - I can’t stop blathering on about how great he is with his customers, and stay focused on the software itself, which is why you’re here. So go see the software for yourself!

>> Try it now, before you buy it!
>> Twitter Balsamiq

Skitch Takes Screenshots to a New Level of Convenience

Working with software, I’ve taken a lot of screenshots. I’ve taken them into Photoshop and refashioned them completely, I’ve drawn circles and put giant pink “Please do not do this!!” messages on them, and I have often had to take multiple shots of a long web screen and then put together the hacked up pieces in a Photoshop file so I can have the long screen to work on or annotate. Thankfully, a new Adobe Air tool called Websnapshot has eliminated that issue, as long as you have a direct link to point to.

But Skitch, though it doesn’t take a screenshot of the entire web page, does so much more, that it is well worth the money you don’t have to pay for it. It’s in Beta and Free as of this writing. Here’s what Skitch does, brilliantly and easily: find something you need to take a screenshot of, open the Skitch application, snap the portion of the screen you want, draw circles, boxes and write notes on it to explain your issue, post it to your online account, then share the link with the people you choose. Nathen Harvey, Director of Operations at VisualCV, turned me onto this modern miracle. He uses it to communicate with users and developers, because he can snap a screen and put notes on it and distribute it within minutes. The ability to post a screenshot online and grab the link to send in an email, rather than having to save and send an attachment from your own hard disk space is truly awesome. Learn the lingo and try it! I love this tool.

>> It’s free… nothing to lose but a moment of time. Try it!
>> Twitter Skitch
>> See Nathen’s Skitch Message Online

GUIMags & GUIMagnets Makes Whiteboard Collaboration Productive Beyond the Meeting

Gathering in a conference room, brainstorming with smart people, the smell of fresh markers permeating the air… nothing beats it (sometimes!) But after hours spent in a conference room, what do you have? A lot of stuff on a whiteboard that has to be transcribed, remembered and implemented immediately, or all the hours of work are at risk of being lost forever.

Enter these little whiteboard magnets that are so obvious, you’ll wonder how you lived without them all these years. I love the GUImags story… the lead designer had some carpal tunnel issues, and was stuck at home healing. He used refrigerator magnets to make interface elements, and the Eureka! moment struck him: he needed magnets of interface elements to make design faster and easier. (And less physically debilitating!)

GUIMagnets is a similar product of laminated form elements. Rik Schot, a User Experience Designer in Nederland, was working on a website form (and no doubt, making frequent changes) when he realized there had to be a better way to prototype.

Now, there is a trick to this - you will have to take pictures and distribute them of the whiteboard designs, until GUImags partners with someone like Polyvision or Scanr, or designs a unique solution themselves. Output of the meeting is a critical element of this process and I hope they will come up with a full solution soon, because I think this could be a really valuable product in team settings. GUIMags mentions several other products coming soon that will aid your prototyping & collaboration: GUIBoards is a neat whiteboard with built-in resolution sizes that looks like a helpful concept.

GUIMagnets are sold on a laminated sheet, but GUImags come in a little briefcase - you’ll look so official when you show up for meetings!

>> Learn more about GUIMags
>> Learn more about GUIMagnets

Additional Products for User Interface Designers

Gliffy Does Diagrams in a Jiffy!

I so couldn’t help that headline. But Gliffy does seem really cool. I have known about them for several years, and they’ve rebranded themselves to focus on using their tool for online wireframing, diagrams, storyboards, etc. This tool is easy to use and would really come in handy for professional sitemaps and interaction flowcharts. They offer a free one-month trial, and paid subscriptions following that. I haven’t tried the wireframing options they offer, but it looks pretty neat. Check them out.

Dabbleboard - A Powerful Online Whiteboard

I just discovered Dabbleboard but have only dabbled in it so far… it takes a bit of getting used to. The concept is really cool though - you can draw online, instead of offline using pencil and paper, and then show your lovely sketches to others much quicker than you could sketch, scan and send.

I tried making a user interface as lovely as the Dappleboard example shown here, but couldn’t in the few minutes I spent with the product. I think you have to add some elements or something from this UI Toolkit. I’ll explore the product more when I have time. For me, Balsamiq Mockups was faster and easier to get started with, but Dabbleboard has one key thing I like, which is the idea of drawing electronically so I can avoid the step of scanning, or recreating sketches in a full-blown prototype before showing them to people. You don’t have to sign up to play, which is awesome, so try Dabbleboard out today and let me know what you think.

Have I missed any other cool prototyping or user interface-related products? I’d love to hear about them if you use something not mentioned here!
 

Two similar things happened today that have led me to write this post. This morning, about 9:40 am, I found a car I wanted to inquire about at the Carmax site. They have a handy, giant, green button that says “Send Us an Email”, so I did. I got a response back that said “Carmax is closed, but we will contact you on our next business day. Our business hours are 9-9 Mon-Sat, and 11-7 Sun. During these hours, we will respond within 60 minutes.”

Hmm… that’s a head-scratcher. It’s after 9:00 am, yet I got this message. About 30 minutes later, a salesperson called. Since the email said they opened at 9:00, I had decided to test drive a car after attending the Social Media Club KC breakfast Friday morning, so the timing was just perfect. However, the salesman said they don’t open till 11:00, that they only open at 9:00 on Saturday. Huh? Essentially, the auto-response email couldn’t be more wrong! Fortunately for Carmax, I’m already a fan. I have purchased several cars there over the years, and have faith that I’m getting both a good deal and a good car there, so this little snafu didn’t exactly turn me off, but what if I were a first-time customer??? Quite a different story, and not a good one, because now Carmax looks totally inept, when I know them to be quite solid as a business (at least in my dealings so far.) They just need to fix the message in this email and eliminate any inconsistency.

Then I discovered this most excellent web video program, called “Help! My Business Sucks!” In Episode #24, Andrew Lock describes a similar problem with 24-Hour Fitness. He wanted to become a member at a strange hour, and assumed their company name stood for round-the-clock service and access. Listen to his tale…

Isn’t that a fun program? I intend to tune in again, because I learned stuff beyond the customer experience story that will come in handy. I can’t wait to watch some more episodes.

Bottom line, these tiny infractions, errors, inconsistencies or whatever can add up to one big cold shoulder in a prospective customer. Don’t take the risk. Make sure your promises, marketing materials, company tagline, business name, motto, slogan, posted hours, etc. are 100% accurate and complete, and that you stand by them rain or shine. Err on the side of truth in advertising and customer service, and you will stand apart from your competitors and other businesses. Ultimately this will result in more buyers and profits, and more happy fans spreading the word about you and your awesome business!

I was blessed to get a simple link today on Twitter asking if I wanted to win a free handbag from Handbag Planet. Being the clothes and accessory horse that I am, the answer was naturally yes, but what I am now excited about is the approach they are using to launch their site. A true pro must be behind this, because it is the most well-done launch I can remember seeing in a long time. It made me think of the difference between “promotion for users” vs. “promotion for the company. When you want to sell something, it has to benefit the user or they won’t care, and your benefit almost recedes into the background. By setting this promotion up the way they have, Handbag Planet has virtually assured themselves some viral marketing and that people who love handbags will be terribly excited for the site to launch in about two weeks. I hope they will have a wide variety of merchandise to choose from, because that will be key in maintaining people’s enthusiasm. It would be really cool if they hooked up with Zappo’s and found matching shoes for these purses, and vice versa. Talk about a time saving benefit to users!

I wanted to blog about this the moment I saw it, from the design and marketing perspective. But HP entices people to blog about it by offering free contest entries for the free handbag after you’ve entered. Or you can Twitter about it, or send email… it is such a great idea, and one that they have made doing simple and easy. I want you to see the design execution. In two simple pages, they utterly captivate someone like myself who loves pretty clean design, and well, purses. I bought one yesterday at the spa I went to for a mani/pedi. Admittedly, I am these people’s audience. LOL! But we should all learn from them and think about how to apply the lessons for other purposes.

The signup page is a thing of beauty because of its brevity and giant pink call to action…
 

And then you’re pleasantly surprised by being allowed to choose your own handbag!

The final step is a marketer’s dream, but I won’t give away their secret sauce by posting that screen here… sign up to see it. I really think this promotion gets an A+ for generating excitement and engaging users to become eventual customers when they launch. Well done! I only hope that the user experience of the site, and customer experience when placing an order is as nicely executed as this launch promotion.

Sign up to win a free handbag and check the promo out for yourself!