Trading cards of UX luminaries was well under way by day 2 of UXLX. Today, we had topics ranging from site strategy to comics.

Strategic User Experience – Leisa Reichelt

In this workshop Leisa Reichelt takes on a huge challenge: she tries to clarify what strategic UX actually involves and how it can help us as designers create better experiences. One of the first challenges she needs to take on is the explanation of strategy itself. For a lot of people this is a very vague thing, even for those high up in organizations. Too often making a profit is seen as the strategy of a company, while in fact this is only a possible result of it. To know what the strategy of a business is we have to look at its purpose, which should always lie outside of the business itself.

Strategy is often mixed up with tactics, so Leisa gives us a very simple example:

• Strategy: we need to take the hill, men
• Tactics: fat guys go behind rocks, skinny guys behind trees

After this she continues and gives her definition of strategic UX: “UX activities focusing on achieving a significant organizational goal where a digital interface is a significant aspect of the product or service offering.” So when we really want to make a difference as designers and not only want to design the shell we should start getting involved on the correct level and try and talk on a strategic level. But before we all get enthusiastic Leisa warns us that this is very difficult to do, since a lot of managers in high positions only want to talk to people who (in their eyes) understand business and they don’t believe that designers can do that. One tip is to move away from our solution and design based position and move towards becoming facilitators. We are great in listening and translating what others think, want and need and formulate it in a clear way. And if you are able to introduce UX attributes in the process to help clear things up that is a win-win situation, especially when the managers feel that it’s actually a business attribute.

During her talk (the session didn’t really turn into a workshop, but was actually a 3-hour presentation) Leisa showed us the different levels in the process where we as UX designers can get involved. She described three levels:

• Business strategy: value proposition/experience strategy, product description, target audience, business model
• Customer experience strategy: experience map & touchpoints, personas, design principles, KPIs & metrics
• Tactical execution: prioritization, strategy led design, design evaluation, methodology

Leisa took on a challenging subject, but really managed to bring an important message across. At the same time there is still so much we need to learn and understand that you can fill a book with it, and fortunately that is something Leisa is working on at the moment.

Know Thy User: Personas — Steve Mulder

Anyone who’s come near a Cooper book (and a lot who haven’t) will know of those famous yet much debated method known as personas. Steve Mulder’s informative presentation got down to the nuts and bolts of using them, from large scale surveys to life-size cutouts.

Mulder stepped through the foundational reasons that we need personas (business results depend on satisfying users, you are not your user, learning about users requires direct contact, knowledge about users must be actionable, decisions should be based on users) and then suggested that personas are defined by three things

1. goals
2. behaviours
3. attitudes

The session was filled with useful tips for using personas. Some of them included:

• Surveys — aim for 100+ completios per segment, make it less than 15 minutes long, ask about behaviour (not importance), clear, familiar language…. use scales (not y/n), randomise answers when appropriate, don’t avoid open-ended input fields, break up into pages.
• Competitor analysis pages can include how they relate to various personas (i.e alongside all the other checklists have ones for the personas).
• Persona pages should have realistic photos (cheap or free sites for images include http://www.sxc.hu http://morguefile.com http://istockphoto.com). Other interesting ideas include writing the mini-story in first person so the persona is talking to you.
• My favourite tip was about the roll-out of personas. While you can do the standard one page summary, other more creative methods include making cards, life-size cut-outs (not for everyone but interesting), making a persona space where you deck out a cubicle as it would be for a persona, newsletters, and having the persona faces in the top left of all your wireframes to remind you who you’re designing for!

There was also a lot of discussion about how to bring in personas into a workplace not particularly amenable to them — much like Leah Buley’s talk the day before, the answer given was to quietly start using them and then air them if they show success.

Site search analytics – by Louis Rosenfeld

One of the morning workshops was held by the renowned Louis Rosenfeld in his role as “ information therapist” as he put it. The topic was site search analytics: what to make from the stuff people type in the search bar of your website. That ‘stuff’ can be quite interesting, because it indicates what users want, as opposed to what they need from a stakeholders’ point of view. If you bring those two together, you can greatly improve on your content as well as your search.
Search queries, because they are peoples’ own words, are semantically rich data. To get a feel for that he did an exercise and let the audience play around with a query data file in Excel to see what could be extracted from that. One group came up with an impressive correspondence analysis. What this really showed was that with little effort you can start making quite a difference.
After the break he presented an interesting case study from Vanguard which showed how multiple metrics can back up a feeling that something could be wrong with your new search engine. He rounded up with some practical tips on how to make site search better and get others in your company involved as well. All in all a great introduction on this fairly new subject.

Lessons from Bill Hicks — Ian Fenn

Ian Fenn beat the post-lunch slump with his entertaining — and more insightful than you might expect — video-packed ode to great comedian Bill Hicks. Fenn actually had the fortune to inverview many years ago in his then role as a BBC radio reporter and was impressed with ever since, but realised many of the skills that made him a great comedian could be applied to UX. His Lessons from Bill Hicks were:

1. Be honest. “Sometimes you have to tell stakeholders your baby’s ugly.” Hicks’ could be outrageous, but he was always honest.
2. Do your research. Get your facts straight, and above all be clear rather than dumbing down. (Hicks could also do devastating political comedy since he did his research and pulled no punches).
3. Actively listen. Change if the audience isn’t listening to you. Hicks was a master at reading the audience and changing his tack on the fly if need be.
4. Switch perspective. Comedy is about the unexpected, and Hicks could easily make fun of both sides of a particular issue, such as smoking.
5. Refine your work. Comedians work at their act for a long time — Hicks’ “How Tall Are You” skit was refined over 30 years!
6. Tell Stories. Great comedians know how to spin a story, such as Hicks painting a vivid picture about how weed should be legalised!
7. Have a vision. Jared Spool talks a lot about this in UX. Hicks usually finished his show on an inspiring note, with all his ideas about how we might have a better world — having that dream can inspire others too.
8. Leave a legacy. This has also been talked about in UX — what will you leave behind? Hicks died in 1992 age 32, but even now there’s eleven thousand clips of his on Youtube, and he’s mentioned on Twitter every 15 minutes. To top it off, a documentary on him was released last year. His legacy lives on.

Fenn talked about sharing the stage with Hicks, and part of the fun was (usually NSFW!) clips. Check out the Hicks’ movie trailer for a feel for them.

Product Personality — Jeroen van Geel

Our very own Jeroen Van Geel but the lightning in lightning talks as we went through a fast paced presentation about cars, cigarette ads and Craiglist .
Product personality is more than just Henri the vacuum cleaner. Many products have a strong personality — be it an HP laptop and the OLPC or the new VW Beetle — but in all too many cases on the web, all pages in a specific category look the same (be it travel sites or car ones).

Why use product personality? Van Geel recommends reading The Media Equation to understand just how important the connection is, but the key reasons are:

• Humans automatically attribute human behaviour to everything
• People prefer like-minded personalities [and products] (there is a famous computer test where people were asked to use choose between two identical computers, one named Linus and the other Max. People chose the one that was most like them).
• Undiluted product personalities are more trusted than contradictory ones (having a defined personality and sticking to it makes it seem more reliable)
• People judge on first impression

Some good examples come from the branding world. Cigarette brands often had very strong personalities (the Lucky Strike personality is very different from Malboro), and cars have a long history of it as well (take the Alfa Romeo and the VW Beetle). These products have values that are used everywhere.

But there are examples from websites.

• Whitehouse.gov in the Bush era was formal, authoritative, traditional, old fashioned; the new one is still authoritative and traditional, but is now also more caring.
• Ebay’s colourful new site is personal, confident, fun. Craigslist, on the other hand, looks very different and comes across as pragmatic, independent, no-nonsense, unorganised, a friend helping you out. It’s key to realise that though Craigslist site looks cheap, the company has made an active decision to have it that way, and benefits by thus appealing to a different audience.
• Finally this can be applied on a micro-level, Amazon and Woot’s sign up pages are very different — the former uses formal language and red text for required fields, the latter chatty and understated text.

There’s a whole area that this can step off into — a question was asked about the personality of interactions — but it was yet another reminder of the importance of meaning and storytelling in UX.

Sell yourself better – by Jason Masut

This really was a lightning talk as no second got wasted as Jason ran us through his UX Portfolio tips. Drawing from 10 years of experience and seeing lots of bad portfolios (80% of recent ones) he sparked the discussion about improvement at IA London and came up with some tips.
His tips in short:

• a proper introduction of yourself, at least descriptive and well structured, if possible enhanced with things like a visual design touch, quotes from others or an infographic about yourself
• demonstrate how you work, which means the process and not only end results. To do so photograph your workshops, keep some of your sketches and outputs and edit some video, e.g. on paper prototyping.
• share your project experience, with attention to all phases of the design process. Don’t do an exhaustive summary and show deliverables as well.

A good portfolio is always useful, not only if you want to look for a new job. It can help you to remember and improve on what you’ve done before and can be helpful for others as an example.

To get you started: Jason’s tips are available on www.betteruxportfolios.com

See What I Mean: Communicating with Comics — Kevin Cheng

Comics are a great tool to communicate concepts, visions and other complicated stories. They are easily understood by people and can depict a lot of detail in just a few tiles. Drawing comics forces a designer to really think about the message that he wants to bring across. They force you to think about what’s the essence of the message you want to convey and at the same time it’s possible to leave a lot of details out and still get a clear image. This last part is because people automatically fill in the blanks. During the workshop Kevin showed us several examples where these techniques were applied and he had us draw stick figures, facial expressions and in the end an entire comic.

But the main message of Kevin’s presentation is not aimed on drawing techniques, but at the message that comics can bring across. In a series of slides he shows us examples of comics that are focused on product features, introduced entirely new products and attempted to explain very complicate technical issues to a non-techy audience. One of the more interesting examples here is the Chrome comic which was used to explain the benefits of the Chrome browser to a broad audience.

Chrome

Depending on the role in the company that you have there can be different reasons to use comics:

• CEO, decision maker: distill a vision and share it across the organisation;
• Marketer, sales, business development: get the attention of potential clients and customers;
• Engineer, design: crystallise problem and solutions and get team feedback;
• Product manager: compact reminder to keep focus on vision.

The Super Bowl. That one Sunday a year where the majority of Americans crowd around their televisions to watch the championship football game — or, more commonly, the commercials. Volkswagen’s 2011 contribution, entitled The Force, was not only one of the more memorable ads, but also an intriguing study of emotion.

In The Force, a young child, dressed as Darth Vader wanders the house trying to control items with the Force. Failing, he hears his father come home and is excited when, through remote key start, the engine revs up.

While this is a cute commercial, what makes it fascinating the the child’s expressions.

The child in question is wearing a Darth Vader mask that offers no emotion and is designed as such. Still, at every event of attempted force control we clearly read his disappointment. Up to the point where he runs past his father to the car and the surprise on his face when it starts. I am not alone in this observation. Everyone I watched it with and spoke to afterwards felt they saw the same thing.

But this is impossible. By design Darth Vader has no face and no emotion. But the creators of the Volkswagen commercial were able to make us look past this and to the face behind it. Universally the audience knew the looks on the young boy’s face as defeat after defeat until he finally mastered the Force. Maybe this is because deep down we all remember being children wanting to be a Jedi (or a Sith). Whatever the reason, it is impressive the writers created so much empathy from a masked character. Authors employ this a lot – in novels, films, and now commercials. How can systems evoke emotion without a face? A lot of designers humanize their products with humanizing features but how can technology be humanized in a more subtle and evoking manner?

Otto, Dental Floss Dispenser

——–

Otto image from Alessi

If interaction design really is the business of behaviour change I believe this must apply two ways. While it’s true that design can influence users and engender cultural change, this is always a product of our more tangible work: changing the behaviour of technology. As a user-centred designer of technology my goal is simple: to make its behaviour humane. But how should I approach this?

Humanity implies emotion and, beneath that, personality. These areas lie beyond the frontiers of classical HCI and usability. Fortunately, as often happens, we view the distant summit and see others have already planted the flag. Toymakers, for instance, have explored the art of bestowing personality on products for years. The results are fairly crude, but I defy anyone to watch the torture of a Pleo and successfully suppress a twinge of guilt. Even in its moments of crisis, Pleo has a distinct personality; that is to say, it conveys emotional information

Channels for personality

Perhaps the most obvious conduit for emotional content is appearance.

From BMW's grill to Pixar's Wall-E

The designs above show acts of visual anthropomorphism, where gesture and expression alone convey personality. They create empathy through closure, a projection of the self as explored in Scott McCloud’s classic Understanding Comics. Pareidolia, the brain’s propensity to recognise faces everywhere, is a powerful trick. Even an oval, two dots and a line create an unmistakable expression; with detail we can add further emotional nuance.

Closure: excerpt from Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

We can also convey personality through message. In the words of Russell Davies, the rise of devices with personality will lead to a surge in “bubbly writing and objects talking to you in the first person”. Here, an Innocent smoothie prudishly asks us to avert our gaze from its most vulnerable area.

Innocent drinks carton with text "Stop looking at my bottom."

But anthropomorphism needn’t be visual. Consider how R2D2 conveys personality through sound alone – his shrieks and bleeps mapping to human expressions of emotion (See Chris Noessel and Nathan Shedroff at dConstruct 2009 [mp3, 43 minutes]). Similarly, IM programs happily announce incoming messages with a rising fanfare and send replies with a descending farewell.

These can be effective ways to communicate personality, but I’ve recently been reflecting about the fuzzier area of expressing personality through behaviour.

According to psychologist Kurt Lewin behaviour is product of the person in question and his environment (check out Lewin’s equation). Our behaviour changes with context. This suggests that we can only form an opinion about someone’s personality through exposure to various scenarios; a single interaction isn’t enough. However once we’ve formed this mental model, we believe it so thoroughly that we become blinded by it, believing that someone’s personality causes their every action – the fundamental attribution error.

Behavioural variance – acting differently according to our environment – is a celebrated part of being human. Anyone who lacks it is boring. Myself, I act quite differently as a Cardiff City fan than as a grandson, since the contexts are very different. At a party you’re expected to drink beer and flirt with girls, not quietly read a library book, if you expect to be invited back.

Dreary technology

This is why I look at modern technology with mixed feelings. As a tool, it’s unsurpassed. But when we engage with it on any human level, it doesn’t respond in kind. Technology has no behavioural variance and very little personality.

Yes, predictability is a key tenet of usability. High-risk systems must respond to input in forseeable ways: an air traffic control system, for instance, needs to be entirely unwavering. But as we’re learning to appreciate the power of play and emotion in our design activities, is there scope for non-critical technology to display behavioural personality?

Mobile devices, for instance, are increasingly a medium of sensory input as well as informational output. We’ll soon carry devices capable of reading our fingerprints, calculating our position and learning our closest social ties by analysing our SMS and email habits. Adding further richness, recent declarative technology encourages users to publish information that designers can use to build emotional responses:

Google map showing current location as Alton Towers theme park

Facebook status showing a user's engagement

So let’s imagine a Twitter client that asks if you really want to send that drunken tweet (maybe you should have read that library book after all). A mobile that loves going on rollercoasters. An MP3 player that longs to play (and listen to?) a new album for once.

Getting personality wrong

Looking, sounding or acting like a human is desirable only if the human is one we like. Some of our early forays have been spectacular failures. For an archetypal example of botched anthropomorphism, look no further than our most hated paperclip.

Designed to save labour and improve UI learnability, Clippy instead came across as smug and invasive. Not only did his brash tone rub many up the wrong way, but he was irritatingly clingy, appearing on simple tasks where users didn’t need or appreciate help.

The despotic HAL illustrates the other extreme of dislikable machine personality. Clarke and Kubrick created a terrifying villain for 2001 simply by highlighting the unflinching rationality of computation. HAL’s cold-bloodedness is the opposite of humanity. Our heroes are irrational, given to senseless acts in the name of compassion. We can all empathise: who hasn’t done something stupid when in the grip of emotion?

Appealing machine personality lies somewhere between the shores of impassivity and fake friendliness. Social psychology research tells us that we like people who share a similar personality to our own, and people who like us (reciprocal liking). Servile flattery isn’t the answer, of course, but through deep user understanding and reliance on our trusty companions trial, error and feedback perhaps designers will uncover a sweet spot.

We may speculate a few guidelines for conveying personality through behaviour (any additions would be welcomed):

• Personality should be easily overwritten. If you need to make an emergency call, your handset must revert to functionality above all else.
• Personality should be secondary to function. Clippy was disproportionate: his personality overruled his potential usefulness. Not only does this reduce usability, but we risk giving users false expectations of a system’s capabilities.
• Personality should be appropriate to the medium. It may be that desktop computers aren’t an ideal platform for behavioural personality; we still regard them largely as tools of business or home organisation. Mobile phones operate in our intimate space and it’s well known that people form emotional connections with their handsets. Could the mobile arena provide sensible starting points for exploration?

This is largely a thought experiment for now, and it’s clear that behavioural anthropomorphism would raise practical questions. How should users tell devices to stop their shenanigans and get on with the task at hand? Do I want my computer, and whatever systems it’s connected to, to know that I spent the night at my girlfriend’s flat? Would a machine object if I do something it doesn’t approve of?

Any attempt to give technology personality will be divisive. Succeed and we make the technological world a slightly more humane place. Fail, and we create an army of Clippies.

Related resources

• Why is that thing beeping? A sound design primer
• Russell Davies “Materialising and dematerialising a web of data” (mp3, 44 minutes)

Special thanks: Rebecca Cottrell
Photo credits: Duncan, estoril