Day 2 of UXI Live 2011 was a day of talks in Tel Aviv’s Kfar Maccabiah. Four morning keynotes and one closing keynote were the wholesome bread around the tasty meat of the four-track afternoon talks.

Design Principles: The Philosophy of UX—Whitney Hess

Whitney started out her talk by explaining that UX is establishing a philosophy about how you treat people (just as visual design is establishing a philosophy about making an impact). And just as visual design has principles (contrast, emphasis, variety, balance, and so on), so user experience design has principles.

She went on to lay out her ten principles of UX design. They are in the slides below, so I won’t waste space by repeating them here.

Are these enough? Probably not—each organization and each project needs its own principles to supplement these. She gave some interesting examples, ranging from Charles and Ray Eames to Starbucks, and gave some guidelines for creating your own design principles:

• Look at what your competitors are doing.
• Gather business goals, user needs, and brand attributes.
• Brainstorm across functions/capabilities.
• Limit your list to ten tops, preferably no more than seven.
• Make sure they do not conflict or overlap.
• Make them pithy and memorable.

She recommends using Jared Spool’s checklist to evaluate your design principles.

OK then. Now you’ve got a set of design principles. When should you use them? According to Whitney, always. But they are especially useful in project kickoff meetings, for prioritizing features, for brainstorming, for stakeholder presentations, and for resolving conflicts.

User Experience for Websites Designed for Smartphones—Barak Danin

Barak gave an insightful and entertaining talk about designing websites for smartphones. He started out by giving some statistics about the changing landscape of Internet use, and in particular the place of smartphones in this landscape. They are getting cheaper all the time (you can get a Chinese Android phone for $80) and the number of people using them is rising commensurately.

He talked about the stereotyped “mobile context” and how it is a mistake to make assumptions about context. (There are usually multiple contexts of use.) He advised looking at what smartphone users are doing right now on your regular site before thinking about building a site for smartphones.

When designing for smartphones, you have to prioritize carefully because of limited screen real estate, and bear in mind the many limitations (for example, no hover, finger size, availability of gestures, platform-specific expectations, etc.).

He finished by showing us Old Navy’s regular and mobile sites, pointing out the mobile site’s flatter hierarchy, lack of ads, store locator prominence, search box location, and link to the full site. There are a number of things here that are becoming conventions and we need to be aware of them when designing such sites.

How to Make Them Click—Amir Hardoof

How do we get people to do what we want them to do? How do we persuade them to part with their money in return for the product or service that we are offering?

According to Amir Hardoof, it is a process. And there are things we can do to to make it smoother. First off, a confused user will not buy. So we must not offer too many choices. People buy want they want, not what they need. He spoke about AIDA: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. He referred to a three-stage process:

1. We need to catch their attention. To do this, we first need to figure out what they want.
2. We need to decide what the one action is that we want them to take (and only offer this one option).
3. We need to figure out how to lead them emotionally from desire to action.

People act emotionally, not rationally. Amir explained that the most important motivating emotions are love, pride, fear, guilt, and greed. And that we need to be asking questions like:

• What is the user afraid of that will disappear when they click that button?
• What guilt can they assuage by clicking?
• What can they get for free or save by clicking?
• What are others saying? (Success stories)
• How many other people are doing it? (Herd effect)

People will pay good money if they believe that clicking that “buy” button will eliminate a negative emotion or increase a positive one.

He finished by contrasting two forex sites, FxPro, which appeals to the rational, and Etoro, which appeals to the emotional.

The Psychology of Decision-making—Dr. Chaim Shapira

Dr. Shapira is a brilliant man, a senior lecturer at Tel Aviv University, and an expert on game theory. But above and beyond all this, he is a comedian. As one person put it, he is “a stand up comedian for the intelligentsia”. For a full hour, he regaled us with hilarious stories and anecdotes from the worlds of economics, psychology, and current affairs. The only problem with his talk was that we were too busy laughing to pick out the serious points that he was making. Here are just a few:

• People tend to trust those that they consider to be “above” them (though this trust is rarely justified).
• We ignore events that do not support our existing beliefs and find proof that confirms them in insignificant, unrelated events.
• The less people know about an issue, the clearer and more obvious the solutions seems to them.
• People are very bad at thinking long term. Ditto for organizations and states (because they are run by, you got it, people).
• People are under the illusion that they are in control, even when they are not.
• People lack vision.
• In negotiation, to be rational when your opponent is not rational is not rational.
• People are prone to giving quick answers from intuition without actually thinking.
• People often mistake correlation for causality.
• The media are as guilty of these as anyone else, and they exacerbate them. They also concentrate on the negative and ignore the positive.

What can we take away from this as UXers? Apart from the need to be aware of these traits in ourselves, it’s the importance of keeping an open mind and to be willing to seek and accept advice.

UX Design for News Sites: Behind the Scenes at the BBC—Tammy Gur

Tammy Gur is a senior creative director at the BBC and is responsible for UX for the BBC World Service website, which has 127 million users across the globe, with content in 27 languages and 8 different scripts. The website is predominantly a news site. The challenge is to generate UX for a constantly-changing environment in a generic way that will fit each day’s news. The content is not separate—it is and must be an integral part of the design.

She took us through the recent major redesign of BBC Mundo, BBC World’s Spanish language site, serving the whole of Latin America (except Brazil), and which has fierce local competition in various different countries. This started with an “understanding phase”, where they gathered new business requirements, performed a deep competitive analysis, interviewed both journalists and users, and established a vision that was consistent with the BBC’s existing goals and values.

From their research, they concluded that the site must be up-to-date, include video, have clear navigation that exposes additional and related content, incorporate improved picture navigation, have an improved layout that allows for easier scanning, and reinforce the brand.

They also carried out a content hierarchy workshop with journalists, which resulted in the site’s structure hierarchy.

The site design had to fit into the same universal grid that all BBC sites use (part of the organizations’ Global Experience Language (GEL), which also includes things like typography). The final homepage consists of a main title, the current top story, rolling news with time stamps, video, in-depth articles (if any), popular articles, and topics. Exactly the same content is available via mobile (mostly not on smartphones in Latin America)—the content areas are ranked by importance, and the mobile rendering is based on this. The design and flows were validated against the needs of research-based personas.

The most important conclusion from this whole process? You must know how the content is written and published. For more, see Tammy’s recent Johnny article, User Experience and the design of news at BBC World Service.

Being John Malkovitch: Getting Inside the User’s Head—Ami Rotter

We don’t have a magic tunnel for getting into John Malkovitch’s head. But according to Ami Rotter, we do have tools like GotoMeeting that let us get into our user’s head, at least to some extent.

He showed us how at MediaMind they have used remote usability testing to test various new features and proposed interface changes. Most UX practitioners will already be familiar with this stuff, but it provided a good primer for the many attendees from other disciplines.

One interesting point that Ami made was that in addition to finding problems that you can then fix, usability testing sometimes generates positive feedback, which is great for team morale.

Future UX Trends that Will Affect the IT Space—Adina Hagege

Adina is director of information experience for Windows Server at Microsoft. She distinguished trends from enablers. Enablers are the technology behind the trend. A trend itself is an area where specific growth is taking place that is attracting sustained attention from our target audience. The trends she highlighted are:

• Gamification—using traditional aspects of gaming to make routine tasks more fun and engaging. (Principles: achievements and goals, competition, ongoing feedback.)
• Better together—the power of many people to share and co-create content. (Principles: shared content, simultaneous work, instant answers.)
• Power to the person—dynamically adapting a design to the user and not the other way round. (Principles: natural user interfaces, context is king, fun and productivity, identity.)
• Anywhere—do anything from any device, anywhere. (Thanks to cloud computing, powerful personal devices, and universal connectivity.)
• Insight not information—increasing quantities of information create a need to reduce cognitive load by providing processed and visualized data that can actually be taken in. (Principles: visualizations, decision engines, relevancy sorting.)
• Experience economy—people have learned to expect more from their purchases. (Principles: beyond point of sale, genuine interaction, customer care (people, not machines).)

How to Design for Facebook—Oren Shamir

Oren Shamir of McCann Erickson Israel talked about the research they have been doing about user behavior on Facebook. He started by giving us some statistics about Facebook usage patterns. For example, the average user has 130 friends and spends more time looking at pictures than anything else. They only create content once or twice a week. (But beware of averages! They can be misleading.)

Less than 28% of users have liked a brand page. But a small segment of users like lots of brands. Users who do like a brand usually do so to get discounts and coupons and to give feedback.

He went on to explain what companies can do in terms of fan pages and applications. In a fan page, more of the page is taken up by Facebook itself, but you get the wall and five tabs (which, unfortunately, are easy to miss). In an application, you get more screen real estate, but the user needs to authorize it, which is a barrier. And the longer the list of actions that the application needs to be able to do, the fewer people authorize it.

Their research was based on eye-tracking followed by immediate debriefing interviews. Some of the findings:

• In their feed, people mainly look at the feed itself. For an individual item, they read the text and only glanced briefly at the avatar.
• In brand pages, people are very content-driven. People looked at the tabs a lot, but usually because they didn’t understand them. apart from that, they focused mostly on the wall.
• Facebook search is terrible. People found the search box just fine, but often ended up on fake brand pages. It is hard to find a brand page and just as difficult to re-find it.
• There is a lot of inconsistency between different brand pages.
• There are lots of distractions, which makes it hard to complete tasks.
• Lots of people ignore the notifications.

There are several strategic questions that you need to be asking:

• Should you have a Facebook fan page, a regular site, or a mini-site?
• A tab or an application?
• A new page or a tab on the main page?
• How are people reaching us?
• How does it look on mobile?

He finished by giving some specific advice and recommendations:

• Keep flows short and focused.
• Use pictures wisely.
• Keep the order of your tabs consistent.
• It’s better to have a number of sub-pages than one brand page with lots of tabs.
• Give people content that they can share (short content, pictures, videos, etc.).
• Be social—respond immediately, look for friends.
• Put the value that you provide to the user front and center.

Oren finished up by showing us some examples of brands that are doing a good job on Facebook: Coca-Cola, Asos, Starbucks, and Samsung Mobile IL.

For more, see our recent interview with Oren.

The Right Way to Wireframe—Russ Unger

Russ’s started out by stating that unlike visual designers, we don’t usually show our work (specifically wireframes) to each other, at least not in public. And that this is a bad thing. We all have a lot to learn from each other, even if it’s just “Hey, that looks just like what I make. I guess I don’t suck after all.”

He went on to talk about a challenge that he took on with three other designers: Fred Beecher, Todd Zaki Warfel, and Will Evans. They took a good-cause site, Lend4health.com, which helps people lend money to people who need it for autism-related medical expenses, and which was being run with no budget and no design help, and designed the flow for making a loan. Each designer based his design on the same personas (researched and created by Gabby Hon) and found a visual designer to help him.

Each one selected a different tool to work with, and got to work figuring out the IA, creating a sitemap, sketching, wireframing, and then handing over to the visual designer to work their magic. They were not allowed to talk about the challenge until they were finished. Three of the videos that the designers created to show their process are available here.

Russ ended with some important principles:

• Sketching is thinking.
• Critique is essential.
• The best tool is the one you know.

See you next year!

Day 1 of UXI Live 2011 was a day of workshops in Tel Aviv’s Kfar Maccabiah. Russ Unger and Whitney Hess from the US were joined by a raft of local experts for a packed day.

Guerrilla User Research—Russ Unger

Russ led an extremely fast-paced workshop that really took us out of our comfort zones. He started out with a brief presentation in which he outlined the benefits of guerrilla research:

• It’s faster, less rigorous, and LESS EXPENSIVE than regular research.
• It provides sufficient insight to make informed decisions.
• You can fit it into just about any project.
• Some research is always better than none.
• It is a gateway drug to “proper” research.

He went on to give some examples of the kinds of testing you can do guerrilla-style, like man on the street, Rapid Iterative ProtoSketching, user/browser role-playing, A/B testing, unmoderated testing, mobile testing, and more. Then the fun really started. Russ had us (in groups) do a pitch and critique exercise, where each group had to come up with an email interface for grandma. Then he picked one group and its leader had to pitch their idea to the room, who then critiqued it. The next exercise went much deeper. Each person was tasked with sketching out ideas for a system for a hotel that would let guests check in, check out, order room service, etc. Then we pitched and critiqued in pairs. Each group then pooled its ideas and came up with a design, which we then went out and tested. With real people. We had to go out and accost people on the street and ask them to look at our designs (in return for chocolate). We also recorded what happened using our smartphones. (In this case, the whole group was there and saw the problems that the users had, but in real life, this would be invaluable for showing to stakeholders.) It was simply astounding how much this simple activity revealed. With just a couple of real people, we found several problems with our design that we never would have discovered without this research. Thanks, Russ!

Landing Page Design—Tamir Cohen

Tamir started out by asking the audience to define landing pages—what are they? We concluded that a landing page has a single goal, gives one answer to one clear question, and is usually part of a marketing campaign. Users reach them via search results, banners, or email marketing campaigns. In the first exercise, we had to define the audience for an imaginary site by creating ad-hoc personas. Knowing our audience is crucial if we are to meet their practical and emotional needs. Tamir stressed that it is very important to establish good communication with the marketing person who is responsible for the campaign—they have the information that we need (product information, audience, competitors, page objectives, etc.) The goal of a landing page is conversion, whether that is the user making a purchase, subscribing to a newsletter, downloading something, or whatever. And we need to have a good idea of the number of conversions we will get for the money we have invested. We were tasked with designing the skeleton of a landing page in just ten minutes, keeping in mind that you only have a few seconds to capture the user’s attention and get your message across before they decide whether to stay or leave. To do this, the page must be relevant, clear, inoffensive, and not confusing. You shouldn’t:

• Try to be too clever, with teasers or plays on words.
• Use flash intros—you will lose the user’s attention.

But you definitely should:

• Keep it simple.
• Focus, focus, focus—minimize distractions.
• Provide just enough information.
• Keep it clear and clean.
• Focus on the user’s needs and the value you can provide them. (Don’t focus on your offering.)
• Talk about the results that your offering will provide for the user.

Tamir concluded by explaining what a landing page is made of:

• The main area of the page should be dedicated to addressing the user’s feelings. It should arouse curiosity. If it asks a question, the answer should be “yes”. Use positive language.
• Secondary text should include more detailed information.
• If the page requires information from the user, the form should be as short as possible and make it hard (or impossible) for the user to make mistakes.
• Testimonials should be short and real. They should include the name of the person and some details.
• The text of the call to action button should be phrased as a clear action, and if possible it should incorporate the benefits to the user. It must be emphasized visually and look clickable.
• Use known marks as trust builders (e.g., ISO9000 mark, padlock icon, PayPal icon)
• Video has a huge impact, but not always in a good way. Unless used wisely, it is not recommended.
• Stick to no more than two or three colors. Use it for emphasis only where needed.
• Use only one font, and minimize the number of different sizes. Avoid decorative fonts—they reduce readability and are not always found by search engines.
• Be sure to say thank you if the user converts, and do it on a separate page. This page will help you accurately measure the number of conversions, and can be used to offer additional products/services.

Web Analytics—Assaf Trafikant

In the world of old-fashioned advertising, measurement was hard. But on the Internet, you can measure everything. And analytics tools allow to us not just measure and collect, but to analyze, report, and hopefully understand and then to use this understanding to achieve our goals, whatever they may be. But as Assaf explained, the available analytics tools give us our analytics data so nicely pre-packaged and presented that it is all too easy to just use the dashboard that we are given and look at it regularly, but no more than that. He advises taking a different approach—first to figure out who your (internal) audience is, find out the questions that they want answers to, and only then to start thinking about how analytics can help answer them. He stressed the difference between passive analytics (the ones that you can’t do anything about, like users’ screen resolutions and the percentage of people using smartphones to access your site) and active analytics (where you actively match the analytics to your questions). For UX specifically, the questions are usually concerned with user behavior: what do users click on? Does this feature work or not? How much time do they spend on different things? Do they scroll down this far? Analytics can answer all of these questions and many more besides.

Creating a Culture of UX—Whitney Hess

If an organization doesn’t have a culture of UX, your methods and professionalism don’t matter—it will be very difficult to push UX there. So we need to be business strategists, to broaden our focus beyond just our part of the outcome. We need to plan our moves carefully and work on convincing the right people. Negotiation and persuasion are core skills. Whitney presented five case studies that represent the different roles that UX practitioners typically have (sole UI designer at a small tech company, UX VP at a large marketing company, independent UX consultant, and so on). We organized ourselves into groups according to which of these roles we most closely identified with. Then Whitney had us do an exercise where one group member tried to convince the others of their case.

Whitney talked about a number of negotiation techniques from two books that she recommends: Getting to Yes and The Psychology of Persuasion. There are a number of different negotiating techniques that people can use, and it’s important to identify which they are using with you. She suggested several advantageous approaches:

• Work alongside the other person to attack the problem together.
• Don’t make assumptions about their opinions.
• Act differently from what they expect.
• Show them that you are able to shift your position.
• See things from their point of view and adapt.
• Focus on interests that are shared by both sides, not positions.
• Generate many possibilities before making a decision—creating solutions is a different process from making decisions.
• Make it easy for them to make the decision.
• Decide the criteria together in advance.

Then she gave us an exercise in which each group was given a real-life challenge tailored to the group’s persona. Each group was tasked with preparing a pitch to give to management in an attempt to improve our position and promote what is important to us, making use of the negotiation and persuasion techniques we had just learned. When we were done, Whitney told us how each situation had actually played out in real life. She concluded by revealing one last weapon that we have in our arsenal—if all else fails, we have the ability to say “no”. Stay tuned for our report from day two.

This week, Martin Polley and Dana Cohen-Baron talk to Oren Shamir, UI Leader at McCann Erickson Israel, about doing UX in an advertising agency, cross channel marketing, and designing for Facebook.

How did you wind up working at McCann?

Oren Shamir

I was looking for something where I could be involved in projects from start to finish. I wanted to be in touch with the product at every stage. That’s something you miss at a consultancy—each time, you go into a project at a particular stage and then hand it over to the client.

I’m very happy and proud of how it has developed. It has gone from not being anyone’s top priority—the user was the last to be considered—to today in many cases where that’s where the whole process starts. It is clear to everyone that you do user-centered design, you make wireframes, and only then do you start talking about technology and visual design. The whole process has been turned upside-down, at least in the big projects.

What’s different about being a UX person in an advertising agency?

Traditionally, advertising is one-way communication. They know how to translate all those great ideas that agencies have into TV or print commercials. But they were missing the deep understanding of the digital world. But digital media is not one-way, it’s always a relationship. Even if you click on a banner, it’s a relationship, because I need to make you love me so that you will click on me, and so you’ll remember. That’s already a relationship, so on one hand, I take all the important brand messages… there is a logic behind them, they are based on wisdom from the field (market research). But it’s important to me to bring that relationship component and implant it as deep as possible… I want to bring in the dialogue. I think our way of doing things is permeating up to our customers.

In the digital world, is there an opportunity to direct the message to more specific sections of the market?

The former CEO of McCann Digital called it “micro-segments”… You can characterize things much more precisely. That falls right into the world of UX—the ideal for a UX person is to create a custom-made experience for one person… You divide the audience as precisely as possible—like we do in user-centered-design… Greater understanding of smaller target audiences with solutions for the specific needs of each audience. [For example] mothers of babies under six months need a particular kind of diaper, but also a whole swathe of knowledge. When we give them that solution, we’re creating a relationship with them that isn’t based solely on what they buy.

Is there tension between the marketing people who want to push a message and you, caring about user interests?

Yes… I thought advertising was some sort of super-cunning monster that can influence us on all kinds of subconscious levels, evil, but not intentionally so… But I found that the superpowers I had attributed to advertising were somewhat less than I’d thought. The intentions are good, there’s a desire for truth there… People “don’t have to eat up your bullshit” from TV, they can Google you and find alternative information very easily. So brands have started to treat communication with customers on much more of an even level….

I thought advertising was some sort of super-cunning monster that can influence us on all kinds of subconscious levels, evil, but not intentionally so… But I found that the superpowers I had attributed to advertising were somewhat less than I’d thought. The intentions are good, there’s a desire for truth there.

I remember when I first joined, the idea was king—execution was less important. There was a lot of tension around this—the creatives’ role was to come up with ideas, and I came along and told them that in digital, good ideas aren’t enough—you can have a brilliant idea, but if the execution fails, you fail… This is something that brought me to Facebook, partly because of micro-segments—a great thing about Facebook is that it enables brands to be much more personal in their approach to the customer… I can reach those new mothers much more easily, because I know that they have found each other somewhere… It lets me reach these groups much more precisely, and that requires me to take content into account much more… I need to see how the content fits in, how this fits in with Facebook’s constraints, because you’re living in a very constrained world—half the screen is taken up by Facebook itself, and technologically you’re very constrained, legally you’re very constrained…

What sort of constraints do you face in this environment?

There’s the “Facebook arch”—the shape of Facebook that you can’t move. There are things you can play with, you can design it to look more appealing… There are navigation constraints… does it sit on the Cellcom’s main Facebook page, so it will be hard for people to find because Cellcom’s brand page on Facebook is so packed already? If you make it separate, just for a specific audience, how will they be able to find all the other things that Cellcom can offer them? On a regular site, it’s easy—I’d make clear hierarchies, who to prioritize and how… On Facebook, it’s like the wild west… You’ve got these five tabs—and they’re quite hidden away—if that’s not enough, you’ve got to start a whole new page, and then what do you do with that?

Tell us about your research.

I wanted to see how people manage interactions on Facebook—I didn’t have any information about that from other sources. We use eye-tracking and have already started with some users. We just say “OK, you’ve got an hour—you don’t have to use it all, here is your Facebook.” I’m interested in their interaction with their news feed, with their wall, with their friends’ walls, I’m interested to see what “catches on” in terms of types of content.

Facebook recognizes that I’m referencing some other page and they insert a link automatically. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, they’re doing my thinking for me. I’m interested to see how often people click on external links, how often they click on the name of a post’s author or on the names of the commenters. When they click, I also ask them if they clicked because it’s a friend or because they saw the picture. I’m also interested in relationships.

So you do regular usability testing, you assign tasks. And then you do a debriefing and ask questions?

The technology dictates that I do it afterwards. I let the user work on their own and most of the interaction with the user comes afterwards. The eye-tracking application records all the user’s actions, including eye movements. Then I play back all their actions, they see where the pointer was and what they looked at. The amount of information that is generated is astronomical—I sometimes fill up entire notebooks during a day of interviews, because every glance reminds them of something. Sometimes I stop and ask them specifically, “I see that you looked here and then didn’t click—why not?” “Why did you look for such a long time?”

So you really do a kind of debriefing with them about their behavior?

Yes… to try to reverse engineering their thought process, because the order of their eye movements is really the order in which they take in information, but what they think about the information is inside their head, so I try to get it out… Users never cease to surprise me, in what they tell me…

So have you come to any conclusions about how to “do UX on Facebook”?

I want to open people’s minds to the possibilities. Lots of people say “Facebook is Facebook, so what can I do?” and I say “Actually you can do a, b, c, and it will be effective.” Or it will be more beautiful, or it will be more engaging. And I’m searching for wisdom that I can share, about what works and what doesn’t, what bothers people on Facebook, and what I can do to improve things.

What is the scope of your research—how much time and effort are you investing in it?

Our original intention was to take 60 users, and have 30 do a free-form activity, and have the other 30 perform specific tasks. I don’t know if we will reach the full extent of the scope…

I estimated that if I let someone use Facebook for an hour, I will need to sit with them for up to an hour afterwards. It became apparent that sometimes it’s even longer. Most people don’t surf for an hour—they surf for 40 or 45 minutes, then I sit with them for an hour and a half, because there are lots of things that come up—it’s a shame to miss anything. And because the task is very open, the interview process is also very open.

How do you analyze the data?

Aside from the interviews, the Tobii generates hours of video. I asked my brother [a movie editor] “ How do you know which parts to take?” He said that with time, you build up an intuition. You watch the rough cuts, and you get a feel for what you can use. With time, I see that during an interview, I already know “I’m going to use this part”, I make a note… Sometimes I even grab the part that I want from the video right there in the interview. I don’t always go back over all the material. But there are moments that raise a question mark, and I know I need to go back to them… If I don’t remember whether it was important or not, then I go back and look at the video.

[when analysing video] with time, you build up an intuition. You watch the rough cuts, and you get a feel for what you can use.

So you give people a fixed amount of time to surf Facebook? At some point, don’t they say “I don’t want to do it any more”?

Yes, because Facebook is like a pile of M&Ms—they taste good, you can eat quite a lot of them, but there’s a limit to how many you can eat. At some point, they stop tasting so great.

Did you have some sort of demographic segmentation for these users?

I chose heavy users—the segment that includes younger people—that’s of greatest interest to my clients… In contrast to other usability tests, I’m not interested in finding usability problems in Facebook—there’s nothing I can do about them. But I am interested in seeing, in the context of regular use, the quirks in my little interface that I can help fix. Where do you trip up? Where do you get confused? Where do you do things out of habit such that you miss important things on the way?

What’s the connection between general Facebook usage and company or brand pages?

In an average user’s web surfing, people don’t reach a page like, say, the Huggies Facebook page. When do they reach it? In two situations.

One, because there’s a Huggies ad on Facebook that catches their eye. Some ads on Facebook are effective because I see the faces of my friends who have actually visited the Huggies page in the ads. If the page is relevant to mothers, and I see mothers there, and I’m a parent of small children, I’ll visit the Huggies page.

Two, if one of them posts something about Huggies on their wall, for example if the Huggies page has some game and he reaches some achievement that appears in my feed, there’s a good chance that I will click. It doesn’t happen often, because although each of us has tens or hundreds of Facebook friends, we usually only have a good connection with a few brands. Which means not enough brands are doing a good enough job of making a connection. Statistically, the chances of me coming across some interaction between a friend of mine and a brand by chance is not huge. But when it does happen…

As for how people reach brand pages… Facebook has some sort of highly secret, opaque algorithm… let’s say that we’re friends on Facebook, and you go to the Huggies page and do something there, some of your friends will see it in their feed and some won’t. And I don’t know how it decides.

Out of tens of thousands of people, a few thousand will reach your page, because of an ad or because of something in your feed. Now you’ve got them, you want to keep them there. You need to give them something that is worth their time. That’s where I come in. I don’t create the content, but I help to create the tool that keeps them there.

Do you think that what you’re learning about Facebook will be relevant to other platforms, like Twitter, like Google+? Or is it very Facebook-specific?

People are people… the psychological reaction to distractions or to disorientation are very similar. It doesn’t matter which system you are in. If your navigation is not good, you get sub-optimal results.

How do you distinguish between attention and distraction?

There are three levels:

1. The technical level—the eye-tracking software can tell me the length of the fixation for a particular location. I know how many fixations there were in a particular area, the distances between the fixations, and so on.
2. There’s intuition—after seeing lots of scan patterns, I know when its an attention pattern and when I’m just passing over something. Sometimes I don’t need the technical—I know that they just “zapped” over something and didn’t take anything in.
3. The third level is simply to ask. Often you see that they looked and you’re not sure if they took it in or not, so you let the video run for a few seconds, then ask, “Do you remember what was here, under my hand?” If they remember, then there’s a good chance they did take it in, and if not, there isn’t.

Are tools like Clicktale and the like comparable to eye-tracking?

The main thing that is missing with Clicktale is the “why”—I see that they moved the mouse and then either clicked or didn’t click, but I don’t know why. They’re not here with me—I can’t ask them. The Tobii allows me to get to the “why”. I show them where they looked and I ask them what they were thinking…

After experience with both tools, I see Clicktale as complementary to the Tobii. If I could, I would use Tobii on every interface, use what I learned to improve it, then use Clicktale to see how I can improve it even further.

Advertising is usually based on campaigns. Do you see this in brands’ Facebook presence too, or are they trying to build something more long-term? I’m thinking in particular about the Old Spice thing…

They got lots of followers and “likes”, but when the campaign ended, they lost those people… Our client is almost always the brand’s marketing department, who think in terms of campaigns—it’s hard to make that switch—you aren’t on stage shouting your message any more, you need to say it and then listen, then think and say it again a little differently, to be authentic… [It’s all about] giving value on an ongoing basis… It’s something that we’re aware of and some of our clients are also aware that now things need to be different, but some still don’t.

Old habits die hard—advertising people see things in discrete “piles”—I do a campaign, I see results, I leave it, I do a campaign… It’s also a matter of ROI, which is sometimes hard to demonstrate, just like in UX. You say, “You should invest in a relationship with your customer.” and they say “What for?”. You need to start showing them statistics to show that it generates loyalty, that they’ll buy one product and then another. And you don’t always have the statistics…

What about cross-channel? What a brand does on Facebook needs to match the TV commercial, which is campaign-based.

One client ran a big TV campaign and people went to Google to look for the brand, reached the site, and there’s nothing related to the campaign. It’s a classic mistake that happens again and again. So they say “OK, let’s put the banner that we’re already using on our site as well, and that will give us continuity.” No! They didn’t see it in those other places because of banner blindness, and they won’t see it on our site either because of banner blindness!

What you called “cross-channel”, we call “multi-channel plan”. So you have lots of properties spread across many places, each aimed at a different micro-segment. You do a broad campaign that appeals to everyone, then give the specific solution in the place where each one is looking for it. Some will go to your site, some will look for you on Facebook, some will look for you via a mobile application. Each one needs a connection to the campaign.

An engagement graph for your platform for a particular property might go in waves that are very small but very predictable. The engagement graph around campaigns goes in very big waves, with very high peaks and very deep troughs. You need to see how you can take advantage of these waves to benefit those waves—that’s the plan.

How do you measure effectiveness? What are your KPIs?

Facebook’s “Insight” tool gives great statistics… It tells you how much exposure a Facebook ad has received, how many clicks, conversion rate… for measurement and optimization of advertising, it’s very effective. They give us not-too-bad information about engagement, say, on the wall. When we manage a company’s wall, they can tell us how many saw a post, how many responded to it and when, which audience responded more and which less. But when it comes to custom-made things that are embedded within Facebook, Insight doesn’t see them—I need to embed analytics or some other measurement tool.

You’ve got the five tabs at the side and you have to click “more” to see more… I have absolutely no idea how many people click on each tab. I know which page they landed on, but they could have arrived there from an ad, from the wall, from the feed, or anywhere.

How do you know you’re on the right track?

We see it consistently—when we provide good content, when we give value, when we give people something that they want to use, they come. If they don’t use it, it means the interface is no good. If they don’t read it, it means the content is no good. But when the content is good, you get high engagement. On Huggies’ “Night Shift” [a Huggies Israel brand page] there were very high levels of engagement, even though it was during the deadest hours of the day—you wouldn’t expect people to visit that Facebook page at that sort of time, but somehow we struck a nerve with the right audience at the right time and with the right people, and they came in droves.

UXI Live 2011

Oren Shamir will be speaking about his research at UXI Live 2011, the only UX conference in Israel, organized by UXI (User Experience Israel). It takes place between September 7th and 8th in Tel Aviv, Israel.