Christmas eve

  • Monday, 24 December, 2007
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There once was a time that on Christmas eve that I’d be crawling round the pubs getting the worse for wear.  Older and a maybe a little wiser; I’ve just committed a major fraud – I’ve downed the sherry, nibbled at the carrot and filled my daughters stockings with presents – Santa exists.  Honest.

And now I can’t help myself.  I check my mail and scan the blogs I subscribe to and I read something that makes me nod my head in agreement – Robert Hoekman laying into user centred design.  He is so right – most projects don’t have the time for the luxury of doing user-centred design properly.  That is not to say that it can’t be done.  Thirty days to develop personas?  How about thirty minutes?  You can be agile and do user-centred design, at ThoughtWorks we do it all the time.  I’m looking forward to his follow up posts.

What’s in a name?

  • Thursday, 29 November, 2007
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So only 1% of google searches use “advanced search”. Is this because the word “advanced” (especially in the world of IT) speaks of complexity and language that only people in the know understand. Anders Olausson suggests if it were labeled differently, “easy search” or “better search” (because that is what it actually is) more people would use it and the result would be more efficient searching. There’s a lesson here when labeling functionality and features. All to often the project team in development will refer to something by its technical name, and this will manifest itself on the user interface. Yet if these names are not those of the users language this will at best result in user annoyance, and at worst result in the feature being unused.

Innovation and the idea approval index

  • Wednesday, 28 November, 2007
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I’ve written in the past about organisations setting up test and learn capabilities, and how languages such as Ruby on Rails make this so much easier. Sadly, even with the best will in the world it is not unusual for these internal skunk works outfits to fail. Scott Berkun’s recent post gives a good reason why; they score highly on the Idea Approval Index where the higher the number, the harder the innovation is.

If you are going to be serious about test and learn it is essential to remove barriers to its success, and that means removing bands of bureaucracy and sign-off. Identify the number of approvals you assume will be required then plan how to eliminate them. What strategies can you put in place to keep stakeholders in the loop, but at a distance so they can’t kill the innovation before it’s given oxygen to breathe. Realise that what is being tested is a “beta” and market it as such. Give clear terms and conditions, use controlled environments (for example testing on staff within the internal network), anything to prevent it being subject to the usual legal / compliance / architectural constraints.

Lotus notes, outlook and Office 2007

  • Tuesday, 27 November, 2007
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I’m no fan of Lotus Notes. I prefer to use Outlook to read Lotus Notes; there is a connector that makes it possible to read your mail and use your calendar without ever having to open Notes. So it was happy days until I got a new laptop which only had Office 2007 installed. Office 2007 may be great, but the connector is not compatible and it meant having to go back to using Notes again. A couple of days of that and I was tearing my hair out. Even the promise of Lotus Notes 8 would entice me to stick with the experience.

So, how do you run Office 2007 and use Outlook as your mail client on top of Notes? It is possible… Office 2003 needs to be installed first with the notes connector working. Then install Office 2007, selecting to keep the old version of Office, perform a “custom install” and in the installation options remove all outlook components. You must not install Outlook 2007.

Result? Happy days again – Office 2007 goodness for all but Outlook! And I can live with email and calender in Outlook 2003 using Outlook’s text editor to write mail if it means that Notes can once again be an unused Shortcut on my desktop.

Was it just a simple database query?

  • Friday, 23 November, 2007
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So the sensitive personal details of 25m people has been lost and there is a huge political furore over it. Whose fault is it? As far as I can see, (and this is my personal opinion,) blame must lie with IT, specifically the IT contractor and either the contract they work with or the perception of that contract.

The National Audit Office asked HM Customs and Excise for child benefit in “desensitized form”. Sensitive details were specifically asked to be removed, ostensibly to make the file size smaller. This would require a bespoke query to be run. It was deemed too costly so it was assumed that a full extract of the data would do. The fact that this was then burned to a CD, posted unregistered mail and lost is not the point (that is stupidity). What is the point is the IT contract prohibits the business (in this case the governmental offices) to do their job properly.

What sort of contract demands extra payment for a simple database query for “NI numbers, child benefit numbers and children’s names in order to select a risk-based sample of cases to audit as part of anti-fraud work“?

Surely this is an extra request that an experienced database analyst could easily run in the course of a day? If not you must ask why not – is it because the database is badly designed with nested tables and stored procedures and stuff that would make a decent DBA go eugchhh (I’ve seen that happen). If this is the case, the IT contractor has done a bad job; if an electrician worked in your house and left a mess of an electrical installation, would you keep employing them, even if they were cheap?

Maybe however it would not have incurred a cost and this was just the perception; “we must not… run additional scans/filters that may incur a cost to the department”. If this was case it suggests a breakdown in the relationship between the business and IT, with tendency towards the confrontational and transactional rather than co-operation and partnership.

Organisations that outsource their IT often fail to realise what the true costs are. Anything outside the terms of the contract is a change request. It is not unusual for the request itself to incur a cost (someone has to write the documentation, specifiy the design, estimate the effort) before a line of code is written. (At one organisation I worked with that had outsourced their IT function, I was told that to add some basic client-side field validation to a single field on an application form on their website was likely to cost in the region of £60k). The business starts to believe that everything costs and IT becomes a hindrance and a vicious cycle commences.

How could things have worked differently? Let’s say the HMRC IT department was run on more lean/ agile lines. With agile it embraces change. The request comes in (let’s assume such requests are not regular occurances) and in the morning stand-up the BA describes the request and asks the developers for its feasibility in a word. Someone says “yes, I ran a simiar querry last month, it’ll take me ten minutes”. (In reality double or treble that estimate), but it will not have an imact on the developers ability to get thier prioritised work completed. Alternatively the developers say “given the database structure we have inherited that’s a lot of effort” or the project manager says “another request?! pritoritise it like the others!” and it is prioritised in the weekly iteration planning meeting (pushing something else out) and then it gets done.

My hope is that when the inevitable investigation takes place, they don’t just look at the policies and procedures, but also at the underlying structure of the way that IT is managed.

Small shops do themselves no favours

  • Tuesday, 13 November, 2007
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Walk around London and it’s hard to miss the Maestro “Cash Is Dead” advertising campaign. You’d never believe this in many small bricks and mortar retailers; try to purchase something with a card for say £7.99, pull out the plastic and the shop keeper shakes his head and points to the sign – “no card payments for under £10”. What sort of madness is this that retailers refuse to accept money because it is the wrong sort of money?

OK, so there are interchange fees; a card payment is probably going to incur a charge of around 2% of the transaction. For the retailer there is therefore an incentive to prefer cash. But at what cost? (Perversely for the banks they penalise against not using cash, despite the handling for cash being so much more than an electronic transaction).

Let’s say I am buying something for £7.99. Let’s say the cost price for the item is £3.50. That’s £4.49 gross profit. Obviously this doesn’t all go into the retailers pocket; the tax man takes his share in VAT and there are the operating costs. I’m no retailer, but let’s assume that a whopping 90% of the gross pocket is swallowed up in costs, leaving the retailer 45 pence net profit. Now of this, the bank is going to take 15 pence from the retailer for me using my card. Which the retailer is not happy about.

And this is the mad part; for the sake of 15p the retailer is willing to loose the sale (OK, that is 36% of his net profit – and that is a lot, but isn’t cash flow king?). He has given me a shocking customer experience, not allowing me to buy from him this time (and I’ve got a memory – not going there again). I’ll go down the road to the supermarket where they will not only accept my card – but give me cashback as well!

There is of course, an alternative. Give the customer an option of using the card, passing on the card fee. For most customers, the opportunity cost of paying slightly more but getting instant gratification is probably more acceptable than either driving several miles out to the supermarket, or having to find a local ATM.

Consistency when things are poor

  • Thursday, 1 November, 2007
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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.

Unleashing innovation at speed

  • Monday, 29 October, 2007
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It sounds clichéd and old hat, but it is true. Truer now than ever before; the web is an enabler for new ideas. It provides you with the tools for disruptive innovation. Sadly for too many organisations it has become a hindrance.

A recurring theme with many organisations is the length of time it takes to take an idea to market. Especially in retail financial services, where you would expect lead times to be short it is not unusual for innovations to take a year to implement. This seems crazy, it’s not as if there is a physical product to manufactured.

So where are the hold ups? More often than not, they are rooted in the organisational structure. Innovative products often cross business boundaries; whilst customers only see the a single brand, different product teams only see what they are responsible for. They have own objectives that often conflict with other parts of the business; gaining agreement and consensus across all parties can often be a time consuming and painful experience that slows and often kills innovation.

Then there is the technology. Changes to systems have to be scheduled (along with every other request). Unproven ideas are put to the back of the queue. The business starts to perceive IT as a hindrance rather than an enabler and lines of conflict are drawn up.

Channel is the next hurdle to cross. Typically a face to face channel or telephony will be easiest, but getting something on the web? Now a new area of the business needs to be involved, the Internet Channel Team who interface between the business and IT. They’ve got to design web pages, get the creative done, produce requirements for technology to build (and schedule into deployment for which the dates are even further into the future), do usability testing… Long lead times are inevitable.

And then, before the innovation sees the light of day, someone new comes in to rationalise the product portfolio, the innovation doesn’t quite fit in with their new priorities and it is quietly ditched. This half hearted attempt at innovation has taken a year, cost in excess of a million and has come to nothing.

There has to be a better way.

There is. Do things at speed. You can start by sticking some amphetamines into ideation phase. Someone’s got an idea; identify who has a vested interest in it succeeding (or failing) and get them into a room to thrash it out. This doesn’t need to take long. Workshops are best limited to 90 minutes at a time (after that people get Blackberry withdrawal symptoms and loose interest). But if all the stakeholders are geographically dispersed, a structured day’s off-site might be the best solution. Avoid letting people dial in or video conference, this is one meeting where people have to be there in physical presence. Also avoid having too many people in the room, especially when forming ideas (there is a trade-off between having the right people and too many people to make the process unmanageable). Start with the users, the customers, the people whose lives will be changed by the idea. Scribble out personas -describe who they are, what their goals are, the perceptions of your company, of technology. Print out pictures of people that represent the personas, rip out photos from magazines, anything to bring them to life. As the idea takes shape, turn it into pictures. Draw out the customer experience. What would the persona do at each stage. Far better to do this than write it down in a document that can be open to interpretation. Illustrate the touch points. What does technology need to do. (Can we be pragmatic and use roller skate implementation rather than getting bogged down in an integration quagmire?)

Now is where it gets interesting. There once was a time when you would need to invest time and money into producing a heavyweight business model and business case for the innovation. You still need a business case, but at this stage it probably doesn’t need to be too robust; make some basic assumptions then test it. All too often business cases are built on flaky assumptions; build something quick, test it and get real data to build your models on. Again, this is about doing things at speed; a couple of weeks after the first workshop there is no reason why a small team of developers can’t be actually building something to bring the idea to life. So the team is using Ruby on Rails to build a proof of concept. There may be disquiet that this doesn’t fit into the current technology stack – doesn’t matter, it is a proof of concept. Six weeks later the proof of concept is done. It is not a static, prototype that demonstrates linear page flows, it is fully featured and fully functional. It can be usability tested (but more likely you were doing that on wire frames alongside the build). What then? In two months you’ve taken your idea and turned it into something tangible.

Why not put it into the market for real. Whilst IT might not want this Ruby “thing” on their stack, that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible and can’t be done. Large organisations have a testing ground of consumers inside a secure environment – their staff. Use them to beta pilot the idea? Friendly customers are delighted to be part of product development – put it out to a small and selected group of customers, and have some smoke and mirrors processes to handle fulfilment. The objective is to prove the viability of the idea, get data to make informed decisions and make your collective mind up quickly. To fail fast or succeed cheaply.

Confirmation – undo

  • Monday, 22 October, 2007
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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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