Ignite Seattle Looks Promising (and I'm giving a talk)

I'm talking at Ignite Seattle on Wednesday. It's about UX, but it's pretty different than any UX talk you've seen before -- and it's only 5 minutes long. Here's the blurb:

Worst Case User Experience: Alzheimer's
When the time came to move my father-in-law into an Alzheimer’s facility, I approached the problem as I approach any technical problem -- I needed to meet the needs of the user, even if he didn’t know them and couldn’t express them. I crafted an experience (a UX) for him in his new home which meets those needs and I worked to make sure that the actual move itself did the same.

Obviously, I think my talk will be interesting and entertaining, but, from the titles and descriptions, it promises to be a great evening.

Here's the full lineup:

8:30 - First Set of Talks 
Hillel Cooperman (@hillel) - The Secret Underground World of Lego
Dawn Rutherford (@dawnoftheread) - Public Library Hacking
Roy Leban (@royleban) - Worst Case User Experience: Alzheimer’s
Shelly Farnham (@ShellyShelly) Community Genius: Leveraging Community to Increase your Creative Powers
Dominic Muren (@dmuren) - Humblefacturing a Sustainable Electronic Future
Jen Zug (@jenzug) - The Sanity Hacks of a Stay At Home Mom
Ken Beegle (@kbeegle) - Decoding Sticks and Waves
Maya Bisineer (@thinkmaya) - Geek Girl - A life Story
Scott Berkun (Scottberkun.com)- How and Why to Give an Ignite Talk

9:45 PM - Second Set of Talks
Scotto Moore (Scotto.org)- Intangible Method
Secret Guest Speaker from Ignite Portland
Mike Tykka - The Invention of the Wheel
Jason Preston (@Jasonp107) - Goodbye Tolstoy: How to say anything in 140 characters or less
Chris DiBona (@cdibona) - The Coolness of Telemedicine
Ron Burk - The Psychology of Incompetence
Katherine Hernandez (@ipodtouchgirl) - The Mac Spy
Jamie Gower JamieGower.com) - I Am %0.0002 Cyborg
Beth Goza (@bethgo) - Knitting in Code

Matching User Experiences

At Thursday's UX Office Hours , a funny thing happened -- somebody came in wanting to talk about user experience. The reason I say that's funny is that, most of the time, people come in wanting to talk about their user interfaces, not their user experience. They bring in mockups, screen snapshots, prototypes, and actual products and web sites. And they want to know what to do to make it better. Almost always, I have to pop the conversation up a level, to talk about what they want to accomplish for their users, rather than how they should move pixels around. Part of what I try to do is to educate people so that, when they walk out, they're better equipped to move forward. So, what's the difference between UI and UX?

In a nutshell, you want to give your users a good user experience. A good experience means they'll be able to accomplish what they want, they'll be happy with your product, etc. One of the ways to get a good user experience is to have a good user interface. You might think that makes no sense -- how can it be that UI is only one of the ways to provide a good UX? What other ways can there possibly be? Well, here are a few:

• Provide functionality or content that your users can't find anywhere else, that they absolutely need
• Do things automatically for your users, so they don't have to see any UI
• Build a system that is fast, that, once learned, allows your users to do things faster than they can anywhere else
• Same, but replace "fast" with "better" in some context specific to your business
• Pay your users money (yes, this is real -- look at Google AdSense, Amazon Associates, or Ebay)

And what should you do? You should work to understand your users and then do those things that will give them the experience that you think will accomplish your business objectives.

Back to the guy who came in yesterday. It was a great discussion and I hope I was able to help him better understand what he needed to do. One slightly surprising thing was that his company has two very distinct classes of users and he was trying to figure out how to craft an experience that met both of their needs. Unlike a system like Ebay, where buyers and sellers are largely similar people, or Monster, where the point of the site is for job seekers and job posters to interact with each other, his two classes of users weren't similar and weren't going to be interacting with each other. I told him that he should build two completely separate UIs for these two groups, that to try to build one interface would end up serving nobody well. After he left, I thought of some great examples:

• Google provides completely different experiences for people placing ads, for people putting ads on their sites, and, of course, for people seeing ads on the net.
• Amazon Associates provides a completely different experience for associates than they do users who see associates' links.
  

While his business is different from these, the same rules apply. And the bar for the quality of the UI is different for these different classes of users -- the interface for people creating and placing ads,or creating associate links is so much less important than what the people seeing ads or an associate link get. The first group of people are making money, so they're incented and a bad UI won't stop them from using the service. But, if the ad or link UI is wrong, nobody will make any money.

To provide the best product for your users, you want to create an experience that matches them. Sometimes, that means figuring out the classes of users you have and building different experiences for them.

What's in a Name?

My son tells me that Kinko's is crazy to change their name to FedEx Office. When they bought Kinko's, FedEx changed the name to FedEx Kinko's, and now they've changed it again, to FedEx Office. They're not completely done with the brand changeover, so you can still see the Kinko's name in some places.

Why the change? Well, FedEx management apparently believes that "Kinko's" is a weak name, that doesn't adequately reflect the "broader role of providing superior information and services." This branding expertise comes from the same company that insisted on being Federal Express, not FedEx, long after everybody but company insiders used the short name. But even an 11-year-old can see that Kinko's is a unique, original, memorable name. And the name has a long history, starting from when the company was founded in 1970, through the expansion to 1400 stores, right up until FedEx bought them for $2.4 billion dollars. Couldn't part of that value have been in the name?

It seems that FedEx wants Kinko's to be something more than it is today. That's all fine and good. They bought the company for synergy, with the hopes that the sum would be greater than the parts. But, you make that synergy work through products and services, not just the name. When I go into a FedEx Office store, with the exception of the shipping counter, it's pretty much the same way it was before, so all the new name does is buy customer confusion.

As if all this wasn't bad enough, FedEx has compounded it by doing something truly stupid. If you look in the phone book for Kinko's, because you're familiar with them and you want to use their services, you'll be out of luck. You see, FedEx Office can't be found in the K's. This doesn't help customers learn the new name. Rather, it takes customers who know the old name and it sends them away. At least www.kinkos.com redirects to an appropriate place on the FedEx web site.

Companies can get this right and Macy's is a great example. Macy's parent company, Federated Stores, bought The Bon Marché (a Pacific Northwest clothing chain) a few years ago. Macy's similarly changed the name to Bon-Macy's, and then to just Macy's. But Macy's is already known nationwide as a clothing retailer, whereas the FedEx name is still not associated with office services. And, when you look for The Bon Marché in the B's in the phone book, you'll find them, three years after the final name change. They're not sending customers away.

Avoid Fictitious Use Cases

I have a stereo hidden in my kitchen cabinet, with wires that run to speakers in the wall. It's nice that the stereo's hidden away, but it's a pain to use. I wanted to connect it to the iPod on which we have all our music, and I recently discovered that Creative makes a wireless device that seemed perfect. I could put the iPod in a wireless dock on the counter and attach a wireless receiver to the stereo. Or so I thought. It turns out that Creative didn't really think things through.

The system consists of two parts, the Xdock and the X-Fi Receiver. There are only two ways you can possibly use this system, but the system doesn't really support either way.

The first way is to use the Xdock by itself and connect it to your stereo. But, there are no standard RCA audio connections to do so. The only outputs are S-Video, video, and audio optical. And, oh yeah, there's a headphone jack on the front. So, they've substituted an audio optical connection (and a mini one at that) for the universally standard RCA jacks. Just to make sure that I wasn't out of touch with the current state of the art in receivers, I checked on Amazon. Sure enough, the majority of stereo receivers that I looked at did not have audio optical connectors. RCA jacks are still the standard. So, even if you want to connect the Xdock to your stereo, the vast majority of people will be unable to do so. And, for me, there's nothing in my house that I can connect the Xdock to.

The second way is to use the Xdock as a transmitter and the X-Fi Receiver as a receiver. This is the usage that I bought them for. If you read Creative's web site, it sounds like you can control the whole thing from the Receiver. And that would be great. You tuck the X-Fi Receiver away in a cabinet or behind your stereo and just use the Xdock. Unfortunately, the very first thing that I wanted to control -- the volume, duh! -- can't be controlled by the Xdock. Only the volume control on the Receiver itself controls the volume of its audio output. It's as if the folks at Creative hadn't even thought of the obvious use of the transmitter/receiver pair.

Interestingly, the volume controls rotate continuously -- they're soft controls with the true volume level being set in firmware. So, of course, I expected both volume controls to work, and my initial assumption was that I had missed something in setup (the documentation is rather scanty). Sadly, there was nothing to miss.

So, how do the people at Creative think their devices are used? According to the support staff at Creative, "the sole purpose of the [X-Fi] Receiver is to be used by a user who would like to listen to the same music being played on the Xdock but not on the same volume level." What? The sole purpose for the X-Fi Receiver to exist is so that two separate people can listen to the same music, in different rooms, at different volume levels?! Yeah, there's a product need crying out for a solution!

I wouldn't have faulted Creative if they hadn't put volume controls on the product at all -- after all, the output has to go to an amplifier and most amplifiers have volume controls. If that had been the case, or if the sentence above had been on Creative's web site, I simply wouldn't have bought them and I wouldn't be a disgruntled customer. But, to provide controls that only work to support a fictitious use case, in a product that doesn't support multiple, obvious use cases -- that makes no sense.

Why I'm Switching From Chrome To Firefox

When Google Chrome came out of Beta, I switched to it as my primary browser. I like Chrome very much, but now I'm switching back to Firefox. There are a couple of reasons. The biggest pain is that I see this message a lot:

There are a lot of sites that routinely use forms as you navigate through them. Amazon, one of the biggest sites on the internet, is one of them, but they are hardly alone. When you go Back in Chrome, you frequently see this page. I never want to see this message again. I don't want Chrome resubmitting the form for me. It's almost always the wrong thing to do and that politely worded message is almost always incorrect. I want it just to show me what was on my screen 3 seconds ago. For example: when I add something to my wish list on Amazon, Amazon adds the item to the wish list and shows me a bunch of suggestions. If I click on something that looks interesting, then go Back, Chrome wants to resubmit the form that I didn't even know existed. If I don't, I can't see the suggestions again. But, if I do, Amazon tells me that the item is already on my Wish List and still doesn't show me the suggestions. How about this instead: a message that says "This page may be out of date."

But, wait, there's more.

I was in the midst of giving a demo of Groupthink using Chrome and a page simply didn't work. It loaded, but nothing was live in the page. What's going on? It turned out that one of the JavaScript files I needed wasn't loading because I didn't have a network connection (everything else was loaded from the server I was running locally). Had I been using Firefox, I would have seen a note about errors in the lower right corner of the window. But Chrome showed me nothing -- it just made me look bad.

I use Faves for permanent bookmarking (if you haven't tried it, it's the best bookmarking service out there, bar none). This means that I don't have very many browser bookmarks. But, I do have about a dozen that I use all the time. One obvious one is the Fave It! bookmarklet, but I also have a bunch that I use every day (Puzzazz, draft.blogger.com, App Engine Local Admin and App Engine Server Admin are my top bookmarks). In Firefox, these are easily accessible from the Bookmarks menu. In Chrome, I have two choices -- permanently give up screen real estate for an ugly bookmarks bar, or use the bookmarks dialog. How about a Bookmarks menu?

Those are the biggest items, but there are other nits:

• I run Chrome in full screen mode. When I drag out a tab, I'm doing it because I want to see it, not because I want most of it to be off-screen.
• When I don't have very many tabs, how come they're not wider? It's not uncommon for me to have five tabs that are all named "Amazon.c..." and, of course, I can't tell the difference between them. Even better, provide a way to show little thumbnails underneath all the tabs, either as an option or as a temporary state.
• Chrome conveniently will only auto-enter addresses that I've actually typed. I like that. But, it will also auto-enter incorrect addresses that I've typed and there doesn't seem to be a way to get it to stop doing that.
• Why doesn't the History show me the URLs of the pages? There are lots of sites out there on which every page has the same name. And why can't I right-click on an item in the History to open it in a new tab?
• If the cursor is positioned over a Flash control (which I have never clicked in), Backspace doesn't work to go back. If the cursor is positioned over an image which has been opened, Backspace doesn't work to go back.
• When I open a link from another application (like Outlook), Chrome opens a new window instead of a new tab. That is, unless it's already done that once, in which case it uses that window. But, in either case, I still end up with two Chrome windows instead of one.
  
• It seems to me that Chrome expires cookies early sometimes. As a result, I'm logged out of sites that I expect to still be logged into. I've had Chrome suddenly stop accepting cookies, for no apparent reason (fixed by quitting and relaunching).
  
• Pages that look like they're complete sometimes continue to have a spinning disk indicating the page hasn't loaded.
  
• What was the idea behind not having visible buttons for the prev/next menus? I will say this is better than the brain-dead single history menu that Firefox 3 introduced, but is it really necessary to be so minimalist that there isn't even an affordance for a common action?
  

There are also a few features that I'd love for Chrome to have:

• Narrower window mode -- unfortunately, there are still lots of web sites that stretch all the text to full-width on my 24" monitor, making it harder to read. Amazon, one of the most popular sites on the Internet, is one of these sites. I'd like to be able to tell Chrome that certain web sites should be given a narrower window width. Yes, I can drag the tab out and shrink it, but it would be great if it could be done automatically whenever I visit the site.
• A real debugger. I'll settle for having Firebug work, but I think the devs at Google can do a lot better.
  
• Support for the Web Developer toolbar, or something like it. I'm not a big fan of the Web Developer toolbar (it's pretty clunky), but I use it in Firefox because there are a bunch of really useful features. The ones I use most often: Disable Cache, Disable JavaScript, control over cookies, form overrides, and View Generated Source.
• I'd like a master password like Firefox has and I'd like the saved passwords actually encrypted with that master passwod. Instead, I tell Chrome to not remember passwords.
  

If it weren't for the problems, I actually prefer Chrome over Firefox. It's faster and it's less cluttered. It's elegant. I like how it automatically updates. But problems like this make Chrome look a lot like a Beta product, despite the fact that Google pulled off the Beta label.

I look forward to switching to Chrome again when it really launches.

UX Office Hours Takeaways On thisDev

I blogged about a bunch of takeaways from my once-a-month UX Office Hours today on my thisDev blog. Some tips on focus, pain, priorities, competitors, and stickiness.

Check it out here.

Look At Your Own Product

I had UX Office Hours at StartPad again today. Two of the people that I talked with today were building very different products, and we had very different discussions about them, but the takeaways were very similar. I promised not to publish details, so what I write today will be a bit vague.

The first person is building a web service for Windows users that is supposed to be an integral part of their workday. He'd built a lot of behind-the-scenes infrastructure plus a Windows application for his users. The good news was that it all worked pretty well. But the bad news was that he had built an interface that is similar to some of the parts of Windows and Office that users find the most confusing.

The other person is building a Facebook application. The good news was that he has a unique value proposition which I think will go over really well with users. But, before new users get to the value proposition itself, he's asking them to refer their friends, then he was giving them lots of messaging about the value before delivering any actual value.

Both developers had made the assumption that what was good for somebody else was good for them. Yes, Windows and Office are very successful, but that doesn't mean that any particular pieces of their interfaces are good, nor does it mean that emulating those pieces is good for another product. Similarly, there are tons of Facebook apps in which the very first thing you do is invite your friends -- send them imaginary chocolates, virtual flowers, or make them a knight in your kingdom. But, that doesn't mean that's the right thing to do for all applications. In both cases, the result of these assumptions was a number of unnecessary obstacles placed in front of potential users. And, as I've said before, every obstacle is a reason for users to go away. Instead of looking at how other products do things, they need to look at their own product -- put themselves in their users' shoes and think about what will drive adoption.

On the positive side, both products had resisted the temptation to broaden their reach. They were both focused on doing one thing really well and I have to say that it's great to see it (one of them had even implemented and then removed a de-focusing feature). As a result, I think both of them will have a relatively easy time modifying their products to better reflect their users.

My next office hours are December 11th, 2:00-6:00PM.