So all summer I was working with the incredible team at Ogilvy Chicago to design and launch Chicago2016.org, the digital efforts for Chicago’s bid for the 2016 olympics. I lead UX and IA for the project as well as was heavily involved with the social engagement aspects of the digital campaign.
You can check out the team’s work at:
www.chicago2016.org
Chicago2016 on Facebook
The bid is also twittering, which I am managing as a volunteer. You can follow us at @chi2016
But, one of the most exciting things I got to do this summer as part of the 2016 project was to present at the inaugural Chicago New Media Summit, our presentation is below. I am trying to get the audio for it, so we can create a screencast.
So I didnt blog all summer…
It was a good summer. A busy summer. I started working at OgilvyChicago leading their UX team, and working on a couple really cool projects, including one that I think is the passion project of my career.
As a Chicagoan, I am passionate about this city, and was constantly missing it when I was living on the East Coast. So, its a little over a year after I have gotten back to Chicago and I have the pleasure of leading UX activities for Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics.
I’ll talk more about it in a future post.
So this evening I decided I wanted to pick up a pair of Nike running shoes. I have been looking at the Nike+ shoes as they can tie into my ipod. I found a pair I liked at Nike, called Nike+ Zoom Jasari. Then I hopped over to Zappos to purchase, as I am a loyal shopper and a big fan.
I did what every consumer does when they know exactly the product they are looking for on a retailer’s site, I searched. I used the search terms Zoom Jasari.
Instead of getting back a couple of shoes that fit my query, or even a “hey we didn’t find what you were looking for”, I got back the following page:
This page is really useless to me, unless I want to sort through every Men’s Athletic shoe Zappos has. I didn’t even know what this page was at first glance.
So I then tried to be more specific and added to the search query: Nike Jasari, hoping it might return something a littler better, as I was giving the site the brand and the name of the shoe. I got back the following page:
What I got back is the Nike brand landing page. I didnt ask for it, as if I wanted to scan through all 467 Nike mens shoes Zappos sells I would have done that from the get go. This is a common practice for search: Mapping search queries to specific pages. It makes sense some of the time, but having worked on a number of high end online retail sites, I have seen it overused which I feel leads to a less than optimal experience.
I think a better experience would be to display results and maybe have links to appropriate brands, or if there is no product available as in my initial query, why not just tell the customer, so they dont spend 30 minutes search for naught.
I still love you Zappos, but I guess I’ll buy them directly from Nike… :(
Over the weekend I was spending some quality time working with friends on a new app we have been planning for a while. The app is going to have a twitter component, so we were monkeying with the twitter api, and then the idea came about for UXTweets.com, which is basically a little app that displays tweets from the public timeline and have common UX terms associated with them.
Not really groundbreaking, but it was something we threw together in about 2 hours. The concept is inspired by weallhatequickbooks.com.
Right now, we are using the following terms: user experience, usability, design, information architecture, and personas.
Let me know what you think!
I wasn’t upset about skipping the IA Summit for From Here To There, until I saw some of the presentations on Slideshare. One that really stuck out and I wish there was audio for is Brandon Schauer’s The Long Wow, where it looks like Brandon talks about experiences that unravel through use, such as Nike +.
I have been very interested recently in products/experiences that seem to become better through use.
Good examples are games that unlock more levels as you play more and more.
A recent example I ran into of this is Brain Age, a “brain training” game for the Nintendo DS. I recently bought a DS, and picked up Brain Age to try using it.
On initial use it was moderately entertaining as there were only 3 training programs. I was somewhat unsatisfied by the limited amount of programs Brain Age had. I started using it once or twice a day for a few days, and as I started using it, more and more training programs became available, and the “game” became more and more fun to use, and my usage increased.
How can we build website experiences that become more and more interesting or compelling to use as our participation increases. Conventional thinking says that personalization and customization are keys to making the experience more useful to the consumer. But what if site features only became available once a consumer uses a site a number of times. For example, what if an e-commerce site exposes features like advanced search, 1-click checkout, and maybe a different navigation, only after extended use.
I think I may have to try a bit of this on the new social shopping project I am currently working on to try and make the experience more fun…
I had dinner this evening with a friend who is a junior IA. He has only been doing IA work for about a year, as he started off as a graphic designer, and has moved into our world, quite successfully. At dinner we got talking about books and such and he asked me if I was teaching a class on IA, what books would be required reading…
So this post is for Greg…
Top 10 Favorite IA/UX books in no particular order:
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte
Grid Systems in Graphic Design by Josef Muller
The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst
Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte
Beautiful Evidence by Edward Tufte
Visual Explanations by Edward Tufte
Dont Make Me Think by Steve Krug
Communicating Design by Dan Brown
A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander
How Buildings Learn by Stuart Brand
I have two caveats for this list. I intentionally left off the Polar Bear book. Mainly because I think everyone has to have read it before, and that a lot of the content is focused on the hard-core library science side of IA, which in my mind is becoming a separate specialty in the IA field.
If I could add a number 11, I think I would also add Indi Young’s new book, Mental Models.
I would love to hear from others who may have other suggestions, as well…
Friends know I am a little obsessed with graph paper. When I saw these shoes, I knew I must have them….
I may have to buy two pair and sketch on one of them…
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With a bit more free time on my hands, I have been reading a lot more…
Creating Breakthrough Innovations - Set of HBR articles on Innovation
Innovation:The Psychology of Influence - Rereading this great book
Word of Mouth Marketing - Andy, shared officespace with my last company, and other than being a great guy is also pretty dang smart about this whole word of mouth thing…
Authenticity - Book by Gilmore & Pine, authors of The Experience Economy
Creativity Today - Interesting creativity handbook from Europe
Influencer](http://www.amazon.com/Influencer-Change-Anything-Kerry-Patterson/dp/007148499X) - Not exactly sure what its about, but highly recommended to me.
Adland - History of Advertising
Peak - By the CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, a chain of seriously hip hotels. This is probably the biz book of the year.
I have used moodboards in several projects in the past, collaborating with the project’s design lead. Most of these moodboards included a lot of collaboration, and incorporated design cues the design lead wanted to explore as well as external site elements we felt may impact the final design.
They do help the design team explore and narrow design elements, but they can sometimes lead to difficulty when being explained to the client. I have seen clients who didnt understand that the moodboard was not the final design. To rectify some of this confusion, I have successfully presented moodboards in the same meeting as a wireframe review, which allows the client to put them into context.
I just read Bronwyn’s post Just Not In The Mood, and while I agree with moodboards smacking of uncompleted work, I do think they provide a value. I do agree with them being derivative and such, but is there a way we can conduct these design explorations in a meaningful way to document the path of our exploration to the final design.
I have been playing with adding design exploration elements(specifically external site elements) into my personas. It has helped explain the persona’s use of other sites, and I think it may have some value. The problem is personas become more like “user posters” and are not so portable…
As some of you know I recently left my position at The Well, and have been on the search for my next position. A couple of the prospective roles have me working once again with large brands that sell high quality, high value products. This is an area I especially enjoy, because it is at the intersection of branding and commerce, and is a challenging place to play.
In doing some research I keep thinking about the value of sites like GetSatisfaction and tools like IdeaExchange to help companies better connect with the customers by providing near immediate customer service(GetSatisfaction), and allowing your customers to help prioritize what you should be building or selling.
Salesforce’s IdeaExchange came out of the Dell IdeaStorm project, which from what I read has been a wild success for Dell. I just came across another IdeaExchange customer, who at first glance seemed like an odd company to be using IdeaExchange.
Starbucks…
The I thought through it and realized that any company having a consumer facing presence is going to have/need their own ideaexchange. Starbucks is just trying to get closer to their customers and this allows them to gather valuable customer interest data cheaply and without the need for extensive research studies.
It also gives the customers a voice in your development process. Until recently that voice was only heard in focus groups, user interviews and other traditional research methods.
