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Inside Usability Insights Spring/Summer 2010


Loss Prevention!

By Cynthia Zimber

While working on our new company brochure, I brainstormed about the essence of what we do as user experience practitioners. I asked questions like: What problems do we solve for our clients? How do we help them be successful with the products and applications that they launch? What is the true value of what we do?

In the end, we realized that if we were to boil down our value proposition, we would say we are loss prevention experts. As Stephanie Rosenbaum, our CEO and Founder put it: "User experience professionals are loss prevention experts. Frustrating devices and interfaces, confusing navigation, and unfamiliar terminology all reduce profitability--investing in user experience is a proven way to prevent these losses."

This concept fits pretty well with research I have found. With websites and online applications in particular, a company can never know how much business is actually lost because of a poor interface, confusing navigation, or obscure terminology. When a product purchased from a retailer is returned, the reason is often specified; a bit more data is collected that helps with identifying design problems. But even then, because of word of mouth reporting (*on average people tell ten others about a negative experience) it is not known how many people terminated a planned purchase when they heard something negative about the product from a friend.

Now with Twitter, Facebook, and other social broadcast venues, the statistic I mentioned is likely multiplied a hundred fold or more. We can tell thousands of people instantly about a negative experience with very little effort, so how can that lost business possibly be calculated?

Considering website usability, **Forrester has a Web Site Review methodology that they recently applied to 36 sites, and only one site received a passing score in their evaluation. To cite Forrester: “These usability flaws could have been avoided with user-centered design and testing techniques like card sorting and heuristic evaluations” and suggests that "usability expertise is integrated throughout the design process.” The good news is that preventing loss is much simpler than identifying after the fact how much revenue may have been lost.

* From Cost-Justifying Usability, Second Edition, 2005
**Forrester: Interactive Agencies Struggle With Web Usability by Vidya L. Dregg, 9/25/09

Curious About Bioinformatics?

By Larry Rusinsky

Bioinformatics—the application of computational and statistical techniques to biomedical research and analysis, especially in genomics and genetics. Our client, the National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics (NCIBI) at the University of Michigan develops tools for use in bioinformatics. These tools help researchers by providing integrated access to gene, protein, and metabolite databases from NCIBI and other sources, and then provide data visualization techniques to explore relationships, for example, between certain genes and proteins.

Tec Ed recently developed task-based, minimalist documentation to enable biomedical researchers to achieve their goals efficiently. The manuals structure information according to the most important or most frequently performed tasks that researchers need to perform using the tools, and provide succinct step-by-step directions.

Here are a few samples of the tools documentation we created:

Annotated screenshot from the NCIBI MetScape manual

Screenshot from the NCIBI MetScape manual



Tec-Ed in Germany

The UPA 2010 Conference (Usability Professionals Association) was held in Munich, Germany, from May 24-28. The theme was "Embracing Cultural Diversity—User Experience Design for the World" as the conference took place in Europe for the first time. Tec-Ed played an active role on the conference program:

  • Laurie Kantner co-presented "Mentoring to Build UX Skills in Business Environments" with Deborah Sova, including the results of a survey on mentor and mentee experiences among UX professionals.
  • Lori Anschuetz activated an Idea Market titled "What is the role of translation in multinational user experience research studies?"
  • Laurie Kantner and Lori Anschuetz presented "Multiple Facilitators in One Study: How to Establish Consistency."


Tec Ed CHI 2010 Highlights

Tec-Ed was well represented at April’s CHI 2010, with Jennifer Carlson presenting a case history, Garett Dworman serving as Courses Co-Chair, Stephanie Rosenbaum co-facilitating two discussions, and our student intern, Mike Harmala, participating in the CHI Student Design Competition. (See details in our Winter Newsletter).

First, the big news: Mike Harmala and his University of Michigan School of Information teammates won the CHI Student Design Competition! We are very proud of this accomplishment as Mike and his team were competing with 10 other semi-finalist teams. Mike’s winning team concept was “Night Beacon,” a mobile application and social system empowering people to walk confidently at night. Created with user-centered design and research, Night Beacon enabled people to form walking groups with others following a similar route. Bravo to Mike, and also congratulations on his graduation with an M.S. degree in Information Science!

Here are a few Tec-Ed “takeaways” from interesting sessions at this premier conference on human-computer interaction:

  • Mike Harmala

    Attractive Phones Don't Have to Work Better: Sprint Nextel researchers studied how attractiveness plays a role in a user's perception of usability and performance. It turns out that attractiveness of the phone's interface independently influenced how participants rated usability, but they suggested that other factors are also at play.

    Fear & Death session: "Passing On & Putting to Rest" looked at how people use technology for mourning and bereavement from death, and how future designs could be sensitive to these issues.

  • Jennifer Lee Carlson

    What Makes a Good Design Critic? Food Design vs. Product Design Criticism. This lively panel discussed how design criticism for food and software interfaces shares many similarities: both rely on user feedback, both realize that great design needs to work within the context of how it is being used; both interactive design and restaurant experiences appear to be effortless to the end-user but are anything but that; both must excite users, inspiring the element of “craveability.”

  • Stephanie Rosenbaum

    About 10 years ago, I attended a lecture by Australian anthropologist Genevieve Bell, who at that time had been working for Intel only two years. Her descriptions of ethnographic field research methodology—and of helping corporate management learn from research results—encouraged me to become an early “missionary” for the value of field research. As a result, today almost half of Tec-Ed’s research engagements are ethnographic field research, so I was especially pleased when CHI 2010 selected Genevieve Bell as the Opening Plenary Speaker.

    Dr. Bell’s exciting presentation on “Messy Futures: Culture, Technology, and Research” took us on a worldwide tour of the implications of culture on technological innovation. She recommended that researchers study how technology is used in “academically taboo” subjects such as religion, politics, sports, and gender.






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