Internet Changes Everything

User Experience: Part of a Much Larger Whole

User Experience: Part of a Much Larger Whole | MarketingProfs.com

January 24, 2006

Too many consultancies and agencies equate Customer Experience Management (CEM) with User Experience. They are not the same.

User Experience, or "Usability," is focused on the interface discipline of CEM. It is used primarily in reference to the analysis, design, and/or development of human-to-technology interfaces. Some examples:

* Visual, navigation and informational Web design
* Interactive applications with decision trees (e.g., register, search)
* Easy-to-use interfaces for complex technical systems
* Product designs for devices (wireless, PDA, iPod)
* Information and visual design within devices (game, DVR, computer)

User Experience is an important part of CEM, but like Experiential Marketing, it's a part of a much larger whole. User Experience architects focus on creating functional, intuitive interfaces (online or systems applications and technological devices) that enable customer interaction and transaction. CEM practitioners focus on the comprehensive interaction of customers in both online and offline channels.

Contrary to popular belief, User Experience is both an art and a science that requires a complex array of skills. Individuals who "do" usability can't possibly embody all those skills—although if you find any rare individuals who do, you should pay them a mint!

Dave Rogers of gotomedia recently wrote an excellent item about this in the gotoreport. Many of us will connect with Dave's frustration. To complement his article, here's just a sampling of the functional roles that might found on a more complex user experience project:

* Business owner/manager
* Business specialist(s) (e.g., marketing, merchandising, departmental)
* Business analyst
* Product manager
* Project manager
* Information architect
* Content manager
* Taxonomist
* Creative director
* Interactive designer
* Graphic/visual designer
* Product designer
* Production artist
* Writer
* Programmers (interactive: Flash, Javascript, XML, AJAX, etc.)
* Programmers (systems: complex array of custom and out-of-the-box systems)
* Usability analyst(s)
* Testing manager(s)
* Testers (unit, system, client, platform, users)

While it might be natural for any individual to assume 2-5 of those roles, many of you feel the pain of being asked to manage many—or all—of the roles outlined above on your own, or within a limited internal team.

My advice to you: Keep educating your company about the nature of user experience with articles like this one. Be sure to tangibly demonstrate the results and forge ahead! Fortunately (job security) and unfortunately (you may have no life!), this isn't likely to get much easier.

The demand for user experience professionals is likely to increase. Here's why:

1. Electronic channels are being integrated into traditional channels with increased frequency. As a result, usability professionals are instrumental in helping us become more proficient and creative about how we use them.

From increased integration of coupons, kiosks, wireless promotion... we'll see more folks with traditional usability expertise being drawn into the broader CEM discussions. For example, the kiosk design team may be included in discussions on how to optimize kiosk use with in-store placement and visual positioning.

2. Companies are beginning to apply more concentration on creating a more "seamless" customer experience across channels. Collectively, this will force an increased demand for individuals with expertise in mapping out comprehensive experiences and designing interactions. This is a much-needed skill that must be applied within, and across, traditional channels in order to effectively track and streamline the larger customer experience.

3. User experience resources are accustomed to a customer-centric design bias (vs. business centric bias). They are therefore more familiar with behavioral customer dynamics—in addition to channel dynamics—and greatly suited to helping design interactions from a customer-centric perspective.

4. A growing awareness within companies for the need for user experience staff will drive increased hiring capability. This is already visible in the job market today, as increasing numbers of user-experience job descriptions present themselves. The ongoing challenge will be to get the position descriptions correct. As Dave points out in his article, most companies expect way too much from a single resource.

As consumers continue to adopt new technology, and use technologically driven channels for interaction and transaction, user experience (human-to-technology) competency will continue to be a critical factor in driving effective customer experience. This is especially true as technology continues to evolve and devices begin to mature and converge, generating entirely new products and services for consumers.

Usability, as a part of CEM, will work to ensure technologically driven customer interfaces meet customer need, while additional attention will be focused by CEM practitioners on streamlining, synchronizing, and improving holistic customer experiences across online and offline channels.

February 1, 2006 at 08:02 AM in Consumer devices | Permalink | TrackBack (114) | Top of page | Blog Home

Sub-$100 laptop design unveiled

BBC NEWS | Technology | Sub-$100 laptop design unveiled

Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Labs, has been outlining designs for a sub-$100 PC.

The laptop will be tough and foldable in different ways, with a hand crank for when there is no power supply.

Professor Negroponte came up with the idea for a cheap computer for all after visiting a Cambodian village.

His non-profit One Laptop Per Child group plans to have up to 15 million machines in production within a year.

A prototype of the machine should be ready in November at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunisia.

Children in Brazil, China, Egypt, Thailand, and South Africa will be among the first to get the under-$100 (£57) computer, said Professor Negroponte at the Emerging Technologies conference at MIT.

The following year, Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney plans to start buying them for all 500,000 middle and high school pupils in the state.

Professor Negroponte predicts there could be 100 million to 150 million shipped every year by 2007.

Virtually indestructible

The laptops will be encased in rubber to make them more durable, and their AC adaptors will also act as carrying straps.

The Linux-based machines are expected to have a 500MHz processor, with flash memory instead of a hard drive which has more delicate moving parts.

Mock-up of the sub-$100 laptop
The laptop will be more rugged and flexible than ordinary ones
They will have four USB ports, and will be able to connect to the net through wi-fi - wireless net technology - and will be able to share data easily.

It will also have a dual-mode display so that it can still be used in varying light conditions outside. It will be a colour display, but users will be able to switch easily to monochrome mode so that it can be viewed in bright sunlight, at four times normal resolution.

When Professor Negroponte saw the benefits of donated notebook PCs that Cambodian children could carry around with them, he immediately set about planning the sub-$100 machines.

The project has some big-name supporters on board, including Google, which is working on thin-client applications. Thin client computing means several machines can share programs when linked up to a central "brain", or server.

Making them so cheap would mean that developing nations would be able to afford to bulk-buy them, although Professor Negroponte thinks that even $100 remains too expensive for some.

He said he is committed to the idea that children all over the world should be equipped with technology so that they can tap into the educational and communications benefits of the net.

Power is a big issue for developing nations in particular when it comes to technology, which is why the hand crank will be fitted to supply extra juice when it is needed.

By using innovative technologies, such as electronic ink displays, the MIT team thinks it can reduce power consumption even further on the computers. Such displays require very little power to work.

Image of the Simputer
The Simputer is a handheld solution for developing nations
There have been several projects to build and distribute cheap computers for developing nations in order to close the digital divide.

A sub-£100 box, called Nivo, has been developed by UK not-for-profit group, Ndiyo. It runs on open source software and works as a thin client.

The Simputer has also been developed for developing nations. It is a cheap handheld computer designed by Indian scientists.

September 29, 2005 at 06:25 PM in Consumer devices | Permalink | TrackBack (26) | Top of page | Blog Home

Goodbye, Blackberry way

The Times Online guest contributors Opinion

Camilla Cavendish
There is a solution to information overload and desperately needing to send 500 e-mails a day...
I REMEMBER with great fondness the chairman of a well-known company who once admitted to me that he preferred to race up ten flights of stairs to his office rather than start the day furiously jabbing the lift button. Since he couldn’t bear to slow down, he just went faster.

We are so in thrall to hyperactivity that Britain is littered with people who simply must send 500 e-mails a day from their electronic keyboard, whether they are flitting between world-changing meetings or the holiday villa and the pool. One friend has ordered her husband to bubble-wrap the hand-held interloper and mail it home from Tuscany. What he sees as a liberating gadget, she sees as tyranny.

“Blackberry thumb” is now the must-have medical ailment. One can only thank heavens for the Futuro Thumb Stabilizer, a flesh-coloured glove that is flooding in from America to support us through this difficult period. And not a minute too soon. Even two years ago The Priory, famous for treating drug and alcohol users, was reporting increased numbers of patients who could not stop sending text messages on their mobiles for up to seven hours a day.

We are being crippled — literally — by two related delusions. The first is the idea that there is enough time to do everything, if only we manage our time properly. The self-help industry has made a fortune out of this fallacy, but it is simply not possible to cram in everything the magazines tell you to do and still sleep at night. The second is the feeling that we must be in constant contact with the universe — that disaster will strike unless the client gets that Powerpoint presentation, the deal goes through, the call is made, this very minute. Perhaps we overstate our own importance in order to compensate for perpetually failing the time-management test.

In an article for Harvard Business Review, the psychiatrist Edward Hallowell has claimed that modern executives are suffering from a syndrome that he calls Attention Deficit Trait. This is not a neurological condition like Attention Deficit Disorder, but is created by the way we work. Its symptoms are “distractability, inner frenzy and impatience”. Uh-oh. “Modern culture all but requires many of us to develop ADT,” he says. “Never in history has the human brain been asked to track so many data points.” And never before, he might have added, has status been so invested in being constantly in demand.

The frontal lobes of the brain, Hallowell says, can get overloaded. When they are faced with making the sixth decision after the fifth interruption in the middle of a search for the ninth missing piece of information, they start to panic. The deeper, primitive parts of the brain then shift into survival mode, dimming intelligence and leading the manager either to make impulsive judgments to extinguish the danger, or sometimes to avoid taking any decision at all. The manager loses creativity, forgets the big picture, cannot control his irritability.

Sounds familiar? When Alastair Campbell got into trouble for e-mailing a screed of expletives to the BBC’s Newsnight programme in February, a former aide may have been more perceptive than he realised in commenting that it was time to “disengage the Blackberry and re-engage the brain”.

If ADT exists, it might explain why the nation’s productivity has barely improved despite technological progress and longer working hours. Since Gordon Moore stated 40 years ago that the number of transistors on a chip would double every 24 months, Moore’s Law has held remarkably true. Computer processing power has grown exponentially as we have increased transistor density. Yet maybe humans have just got more dense at the same time, because our processing power is finite. We can ’t just strap on another two megabytes of memory.

And we dissipate what we’ve got. I bet the clever people who invented those chips didn’t sit in open-plan offices with colleagues handing round baby photos and gossiping about last night’s soap opera. I bet they didn’t do their own typing because it was too difficult to find a secretary, let alone pluck up the courage to ask her to get off the phone. I bet they didn’t tune in to the news every two minutes: they were, after all, where it was at.

The rest of us have subscribed to a gospel of connectedness that has kept us team-building, communicating, keeping on top of every spurious event in the global village, until we can barely concentrate long enough to enter our credit card details. We don’t even question the open-plan office. It has been around so long that we have got used to arriving earlier and earlier to get some real work done before the noise begins and drowns out all creative endeavour. But that is absurd. When I came to The Times three years ago I regularly sought the solitude of the fire escape to check whether my argument was coherent. (I soon got over that, as you can see.) I felt pretty silly, but then I went down to the City and found bankers sitting side by side wearing ear defenders — more commonly seen at clay pigeon shoots — to focus on their mind-boggling calculations.

We are fatally attracted to distraction. The MindGym, a company that coaches executives, has found that people consistently encourage interruptions in their working day, even when they think they are doing the opposite. They are flattered to be asked for advice or information, so interruptions reinforce the sense of their own importance. And that self-importance in turn makes them demand to know everything that is going on.

What is to be done? Should we check ourselves in to a caring institution? Junk the gadgets? Don’t be hasty. The ADT thesis in itself should help us to recognise that much of our frustration is of our own making. Campaign for an office with a door. Get some perspective on your minor role in the universe. Many problems solve themselves if you leave them a while. Oh, and don’t take the “crackberry” on holiday.

camilla.cavendish@thetimes.co.uk

August 4, 2005 at 05:15 PM in Consumer devices | Permalink | TrackBack (137) | Top of page | Blog Home