This Bold Perspective post on never showing clients wireframes kicked up some good debate.

Hertz apparently refers to customers by number — 18 for a regular ol’ customer, 12 for a VIP, 3 for a drunk.

Tumblrs we like right now: Running a Startup.

OK, tell the truth: Do you wear pants when you work from home?

I thought of Facebook only as a social networking site until a few months ago, when I started trying to build a Facebook page for my blog. All of a sudden, as opposed to being a typical end user, I became a user who might be a business owner or an advertising or PR representative for a company or organization. To those users, Facebook can be a “marketplace” to attract and engage with more customers. With help from a friend who works on Facebook’s ads team, I was able to get some ads credit to try out the process of creating, modifying, and eventually evaluating my ad strategies.

And, of course, wherever there’s a user, there’s a user experience!

After spending one hour going through the process of building my first Facebook ads, here are some interesting thoughts from a UX perspective:

• Have a unified portal

Instead of going through one unified portal for building an ad, users can start from multiple places: Facebook Ads, Facebook for Business, Facebook Pages, or of course your own page that you would like to use ads to promote. Each of these portals seems to have an independent information architecture. If the user is patient enough to navigate around, he or she should be able to find all of the information needed to get started, especially the button labeled “create an ad.” However, the whole experience is still very fragmented. It almost seems to me that multiple teams within Facebook are managing this process at the same time — and they probably don’t talk to each other too much.

Have a unified feel and flow if you are trying to get the same users to do the same thing — which, in this case, is to create an ad on Facebook.

• Always assume your users are starting from ground zero

The concept of Facebook Pages kept popping up when I was trying to read tutorials on Facebook ads. It took me a while to understand that having a Facebook page is the precondition to having an ad on Facebook. All ads have to be associated with a page. However, this idea got buried in articles describing how you should “target your user,” “group your business,” or “track your ads.” With a UX background, I’m always looking first for the user flow in any system — even a system as simple as an informational website. As a novice user, in this case, I had no idea how to start a Facebook ad from scratch. I read things like “build your presence with a page” or “talk to your consumers using your page,” but nowhere did I see something like: “In order to create an ad, you need a Facebook page for your business as a first step.”

Trying to educate your users about too much at one time usually overwhelms them. In this case, “how to create an ad” and “how to create an effective ad” are for users at different stages. Mixing basic flows with all the other information and strategies you would like your users to learn will likely confuse them. So assume your users know nothing about the platform. Hold their hands, step-by-step, for the basics before teaching them tricks. A PR person from Starbucks probably doesn’t need to review this basic knowledge, but the owner of the cafe around the corner who wants to advertise his little shop on Facebook would need the concrete steps.

• Have support ready for users along the way

This point is actually a positive one! Creating an ad is by nature more complicated than creating an event on Facebook, as there are more details and customizations involved. Instead of setting a goal for a service like, “Create a system so that users won’t make mistakes,” why not have a more realistic goal, such as “Design a system that has high ‘recoverability’ so users know what to do when they have questions or make mistakes”? Facebook’s neat “question mark” feature was a great help when I was working through the flow.

For systems with fewer details or shorter learning curves, using a click or hover-over effect to hide extra information when it’s not being actively requested is an unobtrusive way to have help ready whenever users need it.

You would expect Silicon Valley companies like Facebook to come up with products that are unified, user-friendly, and well-supported, but when it comes to business users, that might not be the case. Similar to some notorious enterprise software, Facebook still requires users who would like to post ads to download and sift through pages of start guide PDFs, and trying to figure out the step-by-step flow for building an ad for the first time can be a struggle. If Facebook ultimately wants to let every small shop owner quickly get the concept of Facebook ads and build ads for their business (without shelling out for an online ads consultant), there’s still room for Facebook to improve.

Two weeks ago, I visited the Exploratorium to experience an exhibition created by Tibetan Buddhist monks to showcase their scientific illustrations about the human sensory perception and the crossover between modern science and traditional Buddhist beliefs.  As this was the first time any outside audience was seeing their work, the monks as well as the scientific and education community in collaboration with this project were eager for questions and feedback from us to make improvements, sorta like a usability test.  And I was a bad user.  Funny I write about this because we just had a staff meeting on bad users or what we call “trainwreck users”.

Though I wasn’t wrecking trains, I would rate myself as a poor user.  I had little patience and time for reading through the exhibition panels. I didn’t ask any questions. I was more interested in having a picture taken with the monks and getting to know about the Dalai Lama and what it’s like in Tibet, only I didn’t have the courage to go up and talk to them.  I didn’t give  much feedback. If this were an actual usability test situation and the museum had recruited me, they shouldn’t invite me back to do more.

But as a museum goer and attendee of the museum’s “After Dark” event, my trip to the Exploratorium was a successful one. I enjoyed good food and wine from their cafe, my friend and I were inspired by things we learned from the exhibits and we had several conversations about them.   We gave the Exploratorium good business so I don’t feel too bad about being a bad exhibition user.

Some highlights for me from the exhibits:

• A look at some research studies on what kind of impact meditation has on the brain

Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas is talking about a past study at Harvard University where the participants who were put in mindfulness-based stress reduction conditions showed actual growth in areas of the brain (left Hippocampus) that plays a role in memory and processing information.

• A Master Chanter performing low pitch chanting and looking at the science behind overtone singing.

So, the findings from Dr. Simon-Thomas suggest that if contemplative practices help improve areas in the brain that are involved in laying down memories and retrieval and integrating information it with past knowledge, it’d only make me kickass at everything I do, especially for my work,  and the corporate world (and the rest of the world) that much more productive.  I look forward to seeing more results on the effects of meditation in the work place.

A topic for another research study anyone?

Ah, the task of interviewing job candidates. Millions (billions?) of dollars are spent by companies to recruit, effectively screen, develop, and retain talent — otherwise known as people. Bodies of literature, predictive tools, and educational tracks are dedicated to the cause of effective talent selection and development.

Well, hmm. A person is a system — with an interface.
And hey — we specialize in evaluating and designing optimal interfaces! Today’s interview should be a cinch, then.

Step 1: Identify target user profiles (e.g., client, colleague, sales prospect) who will interact with the system interface (a.k.a. the ideal employee we want to hire). Understand their motivations, challenges, domain knowledge, etc.
Step 2: Identify primary (most frequent and critical) use cases for interacting with interface.
Step 3: Create scenarios simulating target use cases and establish pass/fail criteria.
Step 4: Conduct session with interface (candidate) and identify issues. Score pass/fail and rate severity of issues.
Step 5: Don’t forget to collect equally important “satisfaction” data.
Step 6: Analyze and consider both performance and satisfaction data to gauge total user “Experience” and make recommendation to hire or not hire. You can also recommend system design changes, though unless you hire this system, you cannot implement changes, and it’s unlikely you will be retesting….

So yeah, sure, the above is over-simplified and only mildly clever, but there’s a lot of truth in there. Evaluating people against a particular set of functions that they will be required to support isn’t so different from evaluating a less-human machine. The interface must be equipped and designed to provide for the most optimal Experience possible. So turning ’round the (one way) mirror for a moment to examine the Experience we each provide to our “users”….

How’s *your* interface? How easy are you to interact with? How intuitive is it for others to engage with you? Are you “friendly” and engaging? Compelling, even? (Let’s leave “sexy” alone for now.)

Perhaps you are! But what about upon “first exposure”? Is the experience interacting with you just as easy for people meeting you for the first time as it is for people who know you well? Or is there a learning curve to overcome? Do you have the dreaded “discoverability” issues? How would your users rate the overall experience of interacting with you?

Do others ever become frustrated trying to achieve a goal by interacting with you? Are you available when your “users” need you? Do you offer clear feedback? Are you responsive to input? Are your responsiveness and your actions predictable?

Is your system state always clear to others? Are you easy to navigate with clear calls to action? How about trustworthy — offering security for private information? Are you modal or modeless (business vs. personal, for instance)? Does your system adapt to different user types?

And when someone makes an “error” interacting with you (offends, misjudges, embarrasses, or annoys you), do you provide warnings and a clear path to recovery? Or perhaps you slow down, become unresponsive, crash, shut down, throw a 404, perhaps deny their password (my personal fave).

Ultimately, we want our clients and colleagues to have a productive, low-stress, enjoyable Experience each time we interact. Our reputation and bottom line demand it. And as with a product or website, even if a candidate’s core features (skills) are solid, it’s one’s UI that makes or breaks the Experience.

McDonald’s Germany crowd-sourced a burger, which comes on a pretzel bun and is topped with ham. Could this work at U.S. Mickey-D’s locations? Maybe different burgers for each state?

We know we’ll be watching Design & Thinking, a new documentary about design thinking, whenever it comes to a theater near us. A Bay Area screening, please?

An oldie but a goodie on simplicity, with a quote we love: “Nothing says Send Message like the words ‘Send Message.’”

Pick up milk while you commute home? Peapod has created a QR-code-powered grocery store aisle in a Chicago train station.

Tapping shortcuts on your phone: a 21st-century Morse code?

Lately with clients I’ve started (somewhat jokingly) calling us “UX therapists”. This is because no matter how much someone might want to focus on the UI, the front end designs, the pixels, as the output of our hard work, most of the time this is just the tip of the iceberg. The real work: the blood, sweat and tears, the endless design sessions and workshops, the arguments, discussions and brainstorms – all of this represents the thinking that got us to the final design. Without the thinking you have pretty pixels that are more or less useless. There’s a constant pressure, especially with engineering mindsets, to separate the church and state of design process (the thinking) and design output (the pixels), but this, I believe, is a big mistake.

So as UX therapists, we spend the bulk of our time thinking deeply about design problems, and creating the space for our clients to tackle problems and questions they wouldn’t be able to on their own. There’s a reason real therapists ask dozens of questions: it’s not their job to tell you what to do, but more to give you permission to work on your own sh*t in a safe environment – and provide guidance along the way. Dr Phil might only have an hour-long show, but he spends many many hours behind the scenes actually hashing out things with his clients.

The key, then, is to make sure that we, as designers-cum-therapists, make our clients understand that while they will get beautiful, functional and intuitive designs in the end – they have to pay attention to and engage with the process as well, or everyone will suffer.

… thinking about the evolving definition of excellence,

… loving that visual recording is getting its moment in the sun,

… mulling over “the long nose” of innovation and what change really means,

… and chuckling at this jumping lamb.

What have you been reading lately?

As someone who’s written and taken plenty of surveys, I get a kick out of Likert-type wording creeping into my everyday life. If someone asks me how my dinner was, I imagine myself placing it on one of those scales — ”good” or “very good” or “excellent”? (“not very delicious,” “delicious,” “extremely delicious”?)

I recently encountered a couple of businesses using different Likert-like endpoints in their marketing and communications. In one case, a doctor’s office I visit has declared a mission to provide “very good service.” The office’s automated appointment reminder points out that the call is part of the office’s “effort to provide you with very good service,” and a recent communication asked me to please notify the office if anything was “less than very good.” Every time I hear this, I giggle. “Very good” can be a reasonable endpoint for a Likert-type question (as a complement to “very poor,” for example), but it also has the effect of seeming like a low bar. Why strive for “very good”? Why not go all the way to “excellent”?

On the other hand, I spotted a truck for a carpet installation service driving down Highway 101 over the weekend, and its advertisement promised “the most outstanding service experience ever.” Not just outstanding — the most outstanding ever? Now that’s a company that’s not afraid to aim high!

So: Set the bar lower, presumably expecting to vault over it? Or go for sky-high expectations from the start? I’m not sure it matters as long as the actual service is the best it can be, but the two approaches certainly leave me with different feelings about a business’s confidence in its ability to deliver. What do you think?

Our client and friends over at Threadflip launched this week to a lot of fanfare, with spots on TechCrunch and elsewhere all over the web. The novel clothing marketplace is making a splash with its luxurious feel and awesome user experience, and should be poised to reinvent the way women swap clothes.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Threadflip’s design greatness is due in some (large!) part to our very own Amaya Lascano, who put her stylish fingerprints all over the UI and user experience while working with the Threadflip team. So kudos to Amaya and Threadflip for kicking serious UX butt – here’s to Threadflip being a huge success.

My initial reaction was to laugh, in part because it was being relayed to me with a laugh. It was clear that these execs ‘get it’, but didn’t quite know how to do it.

After a bit of office banter on this new awesome usability metric, we thought this was likely spurred by a focus on customer support calls and cases filed. Those negative events tend to attract executive attention. This feels like a softball as we are tailor-made professionals to provide an answer to their problem with all our wondrous user experience and usability tools, metrics, and magic-wielding methods. Although, I can’t help but feel compelled to invent a measure for, Absence of Customer Displeasure ™.

I have a feeling this client engagement will go quite well