Information Architecture

Me-too brochureware banking

Take a look at this template.  Header and navigation at the top, large hero to the left, with three product panels beneath.   Log-in to account is on the right with information on security and help beneath.  If you want to be an information architect for a bank, it would appear this is all you need.  This is your cookie cutter to success.

Webpage tempalate

Don’t believe me?  Start with Lloyds TSB.

Lloyds TSB homepage with overlay

Yep, that seems to fit.  how about Halifax.  Almost the same grid being used there.

Halifax with template overlay

Can’t be coincidence can it?  Let’s look at HSBC… There’s the hero again. And the three content boxes. And internet banking on the right.

HSBC homepage with overlay

This is getting a bit repetitive.  What about Santander?

Santander homepage with overlay

There’s a pattern going on here. Looks like they are all at it! Does any other industry segment from such ‘me-too’ism? If it was the right model to be using it wouldn’t be so bad, but their consistency is around consistency of what they do. No-one is really thinking about the customer and what they want. Barclays gets close, but there’s little in the way of understanding customer needs and goals. Little to support customer journeys. It’s all about the Bank, with Products and Services. And Access your accounts on-line! (And ‘We’re so complicated we need help on our home page’). And if everyone else does it obviously we are doing The Right Thing. Does this matter? Isn’t there a better way to design a bank’s brochureware pages?  I’m looking for examples.  I fear I’ll be looking for a while.

Bank home pages all the same

Thinking inspired by the Agile UX retreat

In the quest to get agile and UX to get along better, and following successful retreats in the US, last weekend Johanna Kollmann brought together a bunch of agile and UX folk for an Agile UX retreat in London sponsored by.  Giving up a weekend was hard, but was worth it, meeting a great bunch of people and sharing thoughts and experiences from the agile and UX camps.  So what did I learn.

Rethink what we do

Coming out of the retreat it is clear that the way we do UX today needs a fundamental rethink.  As UX professionals we have fought long and hard to gain credibility and traction in organisations for what we do, but we need to be ready to evolve and embrace the changing world around us.  A world where IT no longer needs to have detailed specifications signed off before development start.  We no longer have the need (or the luxury) to do the up-front research that we are used to doing.  We no longer need to sign-off detailed wireframes before handing them over the fence to the developers to implement.  Software today really is soft.  It is more about creativity than engineering (see below).  The serialisation of activities is inefficient and wasteful.  It is time to ask how do we focus upon doing what is needed and when, working in parallel and infecting the whole system with user-centric thinking rather than siloing it into the upfront design.  This after all is what systems ergonomics is about; a forerunner to UCD that we know today, thinking about the macro (a broad system view of design, examining organizational environments, culture, history, and work goals) as well as the micro (fitting the task to the human).

But I am digressing from what I wanted to blog about, the Agile UX retreat.  Some key takeaways for me included Anders Ramsey‘s analogies to the restaurant and the theatre.

Thinking analogies

Think of a restaurant.  We have the kitchen, the back room world that is focussed upon delivering consistency of servings.  Everything in the kitchen is utilitarian, serving the purpose to meet this goal.  At the front of the restaurant we have the dining room where the dishes (of consistent(ly good) quality) made in the kitchen are served.  The dining room is all about the ambiance.  Quality here is far more subjective, but a successful restauranteur will be as passionate about the dining room as she is about the food that is cooked in the kitchen.  This is the way that software is all too often built, with the kitchen and dining room being separate entities, however the way they are organised, paid for and owned, there’s little communication between the two.  To quote another Ramsey, Gordon, it is a Kitchen Nightmare.

Anders’ second analogy to consider was the Theatre.  An overly simplistic representation is that the director starts with a script.  From the script he iterates the production.  The producer’s role is to provide the director with what he needs to make the production successful.  Just be ready for the premiere which is on a fixed date.  In the lead up to the premiere the director assembles the cast, the crew and they rehearse.  They’ve got a strawman plan to work from – MacBeth, but how they implement it will evolve according to the stage, actors and artistic direction the director wants to take.  The producer does not care how or when they rehearse, she is only concerned with the success of the end goal.  As they rehearse they increase the fidelity of their performance until they premiere (go live).  but even then they are not done.  They are happy to accommodate changes to the performance, and if something different happens that clearly delights the audience they will happliy incorporate that into future performances (releases).  Sure, the audience is seeing a performance of Shakespere’s MacBeth, but it is a unique performance that has taken the initial plan and evolved as it has been created.

And so should we approach software development.  Not as an exercise in engineering, where our raw materials are fixed and highly stable, but as a creative artform, where our iterations are rehearsals for the premier and ongoing performances.

Thinking tensions

I’m sure there are more, but some examples of tensions that emerge when we try to work together:

AUX promotes rapid open communication and sharing but designers fear sharing.  (They worry early designs will be seized upon before they are ready)
AUX promotes visualisation and use of walls but corporate policies prevent this
AUX promptes doing just enough, just in time but a legacy of deliverable expectations gets in the way (research is rarely bought by the developers who will ultimately consume it).

Thinking people

At the end of the day, success comes down to people.  Agile zealots have done Agile no favours when they bang on about business value and see anything other than code as waste.  Good product design needs vision, it needs research to ensure you are building the right thing for the right people.  No one has the right to tell a UXer that testing ideas or building a prototype or undertaking research is waste if it is right for their context.  But it doesn’t need to take the time it does today.  The UX community needs to get out and spend time with the development community and understand how software is built today.  UXers need to start seeing developers as partners rather than consumers of what they do.  What if we aligned our teams around the products we build rather than the functional silos that the roles describe?  Bringing agile and UX together is more fundamental than arguing about the process (one iteration in front, washing machine cycles etc), it is about fundamentally changing the way we build software; see it as a team activity that works collaboratively rather than a factory production line with process gates and separation of responsibility.

More on the #auxretreat twitter feed

Follow fast

I’ll pick on a random industry. Let’s say you are an airline. Part of your digital strategy includes a refresh to your website (maybe you were inspired by this presentation I did a while ago on digital for airlines!). You’ve built a business case and secured funding for the project.  First things first, you get a design agency in and set them to work.

Some sort of competitor analysis is performed that proabably includes features and functions that “we like”, (for example ‘the tactile sliders in kayak.com. We like!  And an iPhone-like coverflow, got to have one of those…)

The information architect takes these ideas away and starts building wireframes and the creative team produce designs that bring these wires to life.  The team come up with lots of new, innovative ideas.  This is after all a ‘refresh’, and ‘innovation’ was probably one of the words in the brief.  The creative is fresh and ‘of the moment’, the IA has developed some new interaction models that are unique and compelling.  The business is sold on a new, innovative way of interacting with their customers, something that no one else does and will blow all their competitors away.

I’ve been bouncing ideas around with Luke Barrett (and because he doesn’t blog, I’ll write them down for him) around this approach; specifically the value of innovation against ‘follow fast’.

Luke reminded me of a project we worked on together many years ago. Before we started designing webpages we did usability testing. We did usability testing of the competitors, and of sites that were getting a lot of press as ‘innovative’.  This was at a time that boo.com had just started and the client were talking about how cool an avatar would be on their site, just like boo. We put people in front of boo.com and watched them suffer. Clearly the avatar was an idea good on paper, terrible on execution.  So we killed it.  Not on our site.

We observed what worked and what didn’t on a multitude of sites with real users. Then, like magpies, we took what was good and worked. Nothing particularly innovative, (let other people do that), we took the best of what existed and delivered on that.

So back to our airline. How about a different approach where they start by usability testing their competitors. Ask participants to book tickets on competitor websites. Understand what interaction elements work, what don’t.

Those kayak sliders, cool for geeks (maybe), but how about the target audience that flies and buys online with you?  It may not be cutting edge design, but Does a drop down work better?

The coverflow may be cool on your iPhone, but how successful is it for people seeking a holiday?  A static list has worked for websites till now (and it wasn’t so long ago that horizontal scrolling was the Great Taboo), just because Apple do something that looks cool for a particular purpose on their products, doesn’t mean you have to follow by scrapping your navigation.

There are no prizies for (design) innovation (other than for some award that the design agency may covet). The only metric that counts is conversion rates and the ability of the website to deliver the business case. Leave others to do the crazy innovation stuff, let others go through the dip when they launch new features, make sure you have got the platform and expertise right and be ready to follow fast.

Test Driven Design

I recently worked with a client where one of our deliverables were wireframes that illustrated how pages would be laid out and how the UI would work.  We were quite pleased with the results, there was some quite complex AJAX based functionality that provided a really immersive, goal orientated experience that looked like it would make finding products easy and enjoyable.  Testing the initial wireframes with users was an enlightening exercise, and demonstrated that the wireframes we had developed were not yet ready – users were not able to fulfill the goals they were set.  More worrying, some of the complex functionality we were introducing just did not work (some of the navigation, filters and sorts were confusing, just presenting information on a single page would suffice).

Usability testing often gets discussed and is a good intention but all too often budgetary or time constraints mean it never happens.  The user testing I refer to here impacted neither.  We did our testing in a meeting room, the customer sitting at one end with a facilitator, and the team watching on the projection screen in the same room.  We used a talk-aloud protocol walking through the static powerpoint wireframes that were linear in their presentation according to the ‘happy path’ to realise the customer goal.  Someone took notes as we went through the wireframes (in the notes section at the bottom of the PowerPoint deck).   It was quick and dirty but produced results.  After a couple of sessions things that we, too close to the design, had missed.  Changes to the wireframes took a few hours and allowed retesting the following day.  Indeed we made some quite significant changes to the user interaction model.  When we re-tested the wireframes the improvements were evident.  The feedback was more positive; there were fewer blank faces, less confusion and “I’ve no idea what to do next” was never uttered.  This was true iterative design in cycles that took a few hours.  Compare this to the days if code was involved.

Where does this fit into the agile way of delivering software?  In the agile/ lean zealot’s passion (and impatience) delivery, and their (dogmatic?) assertion that anything but code (working software) is waste, they loose focus upon what is really important, that of overall product quality.  Product quality is not only zero/ minimal defects and meeting the business requirement, but also delivering something that is usable and delightful to use.  Developers may do Test Driven Development, but this is based on assumptions that what they will code is right.  TDD should start earlier in the process, Test Driven Design.  It takes time to write your tests up-front, but we know it to be a good thing.  So why not design the user interface (wireframes) and test that up front?

What’s a URL?

Do you know what a URL is and what to do with it?  It sounds like a stupid question, of course you know what a URL is, everybody does! But you’d be wrong.  Having observed countless users interacting with websites, it is striking how many people enter the URL into their search engine.  My hypothesis is that the URL bar in the browser is something technical and best left alone.  But don’t just take my anecdotal evidence for it, look at the top 500 search engine keywords– in the top 20, four are URLs that could have been typed into the browser address.  Look at the keywords in your web analytics, almost certainly (if yours is a B2C proposition), your URL will come in the top ten keywords for your homepage.

Lesson number one: people are not as tech savy that you think they are.  If they don’t know how to use URLs, what other assumptions are you making about your customers in the product you are developing?

Lesson number two: your URL is not as important as your ability to be found in the search engines.  It is refreshing to see an increasing number of companies not giving any URL in their print or TV advertising, rather “search for us on google using <insert term>”.  But before you go off engaging SEO snakeoil merchants, the basics of optimising your website for search engines (SEO) are hardly rocket science (especially if you are an already trusted brand), and Google let’s you in on a lot of their secrets which is 80% of what any SEO company will tell you.  Only google give it to you for free.

Shoddy web experiences are still too common

Imagine the Vodaphone shop on the high-street is open for business, the phones are on display but there are no sales staff around. You wait a few minutes, call out (thinking there might be someone “out back”) but nothing. Nobody there. It’s the same thing everyday, the shop is open for business but no-one to help you buy. Or maybe there is a sales person, but anytime you ask them about the hot product you want, the iPhone, they respond to you with nonsensical gibberish. It’s hard to imagine the high-street outlet doing this, but on the web this kind of thing is still sadly common place. Take a look at Donna M’s recent rant. Because it is a website (probably within the constraints of some dated CMS), a shoddy experience is permissible.

Real world forms

In the real world, when I get an application form I’ll flick through the pages and have a look at what is required. I can choose which fields I complete in whatever order I like. If I want to take a break half way through I can. I can complete it when I like and how I like.

So why aren’t web forms like that?

The usual format for a web form starts with some copy that describes the form (which people skim through at best). The user clicks to the next page and the form commences. There may be a step indicator showing progress through the form, but almost certainly progress through it will be linear. You have to complete each page before progressing to the next. If you are lucky you’ll be able to click to previous completed steps. But the experience is nothing like a real-world form. And when was the last time a real-world paper form “timed out” half way through, demanding the user to start over again if they left it idle for ten minutes?

The web forms we see today are a relic of their tecnological past. There is no reason why they must be linear, (and if there is logic in the form, there is no reason why the user can’t explore the different routes – you do that with a paper based form). There is no reason why the user can’t click to whatever page in the process they like (just like with the paper form). There is no reason why a page must be completed before progressing to the next. There is no reason why the form should time out and forget everything the user has entered. Fields can be saved as they are completed against an anonymous user, until the user wants to provide personal credentials.

Bottom line – the web has moved on. Instead of reflecting technical constraints of yesterday, it can adopt more real-world metaphors. But do we have the courage to start introducing new paradigms? Are users, information architects and usability experts so ingrained with broken web metaphors that they will shun a new model, (a real world model) of completing a form?

So here’s a rough example. It’s an application form for a savings account. Ignore the content, field labels etc, it is more the model that is illustrated.

1. The user can move between the sections (tabs) to see the fields that are required. There is clear feedback on each tab that it has not been completed. The “Direct Debit” section is optional hence no indicator. The ability to save the application is seperate.

Application form, step 1, nothing filled out

2. The user selects “Bank details”. They’ve not filled out all the fields on the first tab “Personal details”, but it doesn’t matter. There is clear feedback that this tab is yet to be completed.

Second tab on the application form, the first tab has not been completed

3. The user clicks right through to the confirmation tab. There is nothing to confirm so the page remains blank, with a prompt to fill out other sections.

Step 3 of the application form

4. When sections are completed the indicator on the tab changes to show completion. Here the user has completed step two ahead of step one.

almost there

5. Finally, when all sections are completed the user can review the entire form.

Confirmation screen

I’m not saying this is perfect, it’s a start. A start to re-thinking the way we design forms on the web and think about modelling them on real world behaviour instead of technical constraints of the past.

Consistency when things are poor

Call it a pattern, a heuristic or a rule of thumb. A fundamental one of those to ensuring usability is consistency. This may be external consistency – for something behaves in the software in a similar way elsewhere. A good example might be the ‘x’ button in the top right hand side of an open window. It is universally a call to action to close the window. If the designer created a button labelled “C”, and placed it on the left hand side this would result in confusion. It is not consistent with the users’ expectations from using other applications. The second type of consistency is internal – do things behave in a consistent manner throughout the application? This may be both in behaviours (e.g. buttons with the same titles perform the same action), and in look and feel – a website has a visual identity and coherence, assuring a continuity of experience.

There may be examples of where internal consistency is not possible. For example a brochureware site that uses a third party for fulfilment or payment. Paypal is a good example of this – the user is taken out of the shopping experience and into a paypal experience. This can be successful if there is clear signposting and use of the paypal imagery on the shopping site to assure the user.

So what happens when you have a large, legacy website that you acknowledge to be pretty poor in the usability front and want to introduce new functionality, or want to rebuild it. If you play the consistency card too strongly you may continue to be consistent with the old design and behaviours. This begs the question, is it better to introduce something that is internally inconsistent, but fundamentally better? This becomes even more an issue when you look to rebuilding your site in an incremental fashion.

As an information architect I can help you design your site architecture – the look and feel, navigation structure, user journeys etc., but this will probably be in its entirety. To build this new site will take time, and assumes a “big bang” whereby a completely new site will be (re)launched. Yet there are probably business imperatives to fix specific areas. If we build in an incremental fashion, and take the agile approach of focussing upon delivering business value, we are not going to have a fully redesigned site to go live with. We are probably going to have (for a short while at least), some parts of the site that are new and some that are old.

Going back to my original question, we can either build this to be consistent with the old site, or do something tangentially better. If we do the later it will probably be significantly inconsistent from other parts of the site, or the original parts of the site. It is in this scenario that I am inclined to throw away the consistency pattern. You may have internal inconsistency if you have a clear roadmap to throwing the old and the new functionality / design is proven to be usable, accessible and intuitive. With this the case, the interaction behaviour and visual identity of the new functionality must become the benchmark to which future functionality is consistent with. And you must clearly signpost to the user what is going on; customers will generally be forgiving if they understand that the changes are in their interests.

Confirmation – undo

The traditional pattern for the on-line banking “make a payment” GUI is:

  • What you are about to do (text)
  • Select “From account”
  • Select / enter “To account” (Beneficary)
  • Enter Amount
  • (Optional) enter “when” (you want payment to be made
  • Confirmation (“you are about to pay this amount from this account to that account. Are you sure?”)
  • Post process confirmation (“You have paid this amount to that account from this account”)

So here is a question. Are those confirmation screens really necessary. What if you made your payment, hit the “OK, make the payment” button and it is done. An alert appears (like when you do something with google) that says what you have just done with an “undo” call to action (“I’ve made a mistake, I don’t actually want to make that payment afterall”). The assumption there is that the user knows what they are doing – we assume a happy path with the opportunity to go back rather than placing “confirmation” barriers to completion which are probably unread anyway. There will be considerations of when the payment is actually made; does it hit the clearing systems when the user hits the pay button (not that it ever does anyway). Does the undo option disapear after a period of time (i.e. five minutes), or when the user navigates away from the page the alert appears? But let’s leave the implementation to one side.

I like the idea of undo instead of confirmation. However, I have a hunch that it will not fly when we show it to customers, because people are so ingrained with the “confirmation” dialog. I’m waiting for the response “I’m not sure I like that” from customers who use the current website, because it different, unexpected and is wholly inconsistent with what they have today. But what they have to day is based upon legacy technology and the immaturity of the platform.

So a suggestion. Let people undo. Tell them what they’ve done after they’ve done it (positive feedback), with the opportunity (in the banking environment in a time boxed period) to rectify their errors or change their minds. Do away with confirmation dialogs. Everywhere. (Do you want to save this document? – instinctively I say “no”. It is only later that I realise my mistake…) Here’s to a web that places minimal barriers to task completion.

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