Reprinted from mStoner’s Intelligence Newsletter

Power to the Paper (Prototype)

by Patrick DiMichele

You’ve researched and planned your site down to the last detail, and your information architecture and design are underway. What’s missing? Visitor feedback. No matter how well you think you know your visitors, honest and timely comments from visitors can ensure that you’re heading in the right direction, and can save you valuable time down the road.

You may be asking yourself, “Who has time for that?!“ And it’s a good question. It’s not unusual for site production to require all the time allotted and sometimes more. But building a large, complex website doesn’t mean that usability testing methods also need to be large and complicated. If you’re short on time and money but still in need of actionable feedback from website visitors the solution is simple - paper prototypes.

Sketch it, wireframe it, design it
In a nutshell, paper prototypes are simple, printed representations of the website interface you’d like to test. Depending on how far along the process of defining the information architecture or designing the interface you are - the paper prototypes could be hand drawn sketches, quickly constructed wireframes, or even print-outs of fully designed interface mockups.

The actual format the prototypes take is less important than the end goal, which is to validate our ideas with the people that matter most - your visitors.

Quick, not dirty
If the project is a website, sketch the layout and navigation of a few key pages and get some feedback from visitors. Testing pools with as few as five people can provide meaningful feedback. And the testing environment doesn’t have to be high-tech - it can be as simple as three people sitting at a table - the visitor, the moderator and the note taker.

Find a quiet space and run the visitor through a simple usability protocol that asks him to find important content, evaluate essential features, or interact with key tools.

Did he find the most important content easily? Are your website features interesting and engaging? Are the fancy tools you’re about to ask IT to build easily understood? If so, great. If not, it’s time to revise. Detailed feedback this early in the process is enormously valuable - and it’s a whole lot easier to erase a pencil drawing than to rearchitect, rewrite and redesign an entire website once it’s launched.

Iterate, iterate, iterate
With each round of feedback and revision, you’ll get closer to the right solution. As the information architecture and interface evolve, it makes sense for the paper prototypes to become more polished. If you started with a rough sketch of the interface and have collected a few rounds of feedback, you should now be asking for visitor input on print-outs of fully designed mockups.

With each stage of review you’ll become more aware of what’s working, what’s in need of revision, and what needs to be thrown away.

Obviously there are more intense and detailed testing methods available. We and our clients have had great success with MORAE testing, which allows us to track user eye movements and mouse clicks to more thoroughly understand visitor response to our sites in progress. But when time (and money) are short, why not go back to the basics? Paper prototyping can ensure that you have the critical visitor feedback you need and in the course of just a few weeks, you can be confident that you’re on the road to success.

Reprinted from Good Experience by Mark Hurst

“Innovation” is one of the most popular buzzwords of the current moment, perhaps second only to “Web 2.0.” Buzzwords often bring on lemming-like behavior in some people, so I’m naturally skeptical about the recent run of cover stories and business books on innovation. Still, I have come across some worthwhile thinking on the subject, so here’s a crash course in recent writing about innovation.

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My friend (and past Gel speaker) David Bodanis wrote an outstanding essay for the Financial Times about a month ago, called “Sparks Flew,” about innovation. Bodanis reveals the secret: “Immerse your innovator in the hot new thing,” and “Now the trick: tell your innovator to try the reverse of what everyone else is doing.” That’s true innovation: *not* doing what the lemmings are doing.

“Sparks Flew”:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/294a331a-075a-11dc-80b9-000b5df10621.html

David’s book “Electric Universe” contains many of those case studies in more detail. I recently read the book and highly recommend it:
http://urlx.org/amazon.com/abdd7

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Last week’s Economist had a cover story on “Apple and the art of innovation.” The thinking should be familiar to any customer experience practitioner: Apple’s innovation revolves around the user, not the company itself or its products.

Apple illustrates the importance of designing new products around the needs of the user, not the demands of the technology. Too many technology firms think that clever innards are enough to sell their products, resulting in gizmos designed by engineers for engineers. … … Nintendo has done something similar with its popular motion-controlled video-game console, the Wii. Rather than designing a machine for existing gamers, it gambled that non-gamers represented an untapped market and devised a machine with far broader appeal.

“Lessons from Apple” (site reg. required, unfortunately):
http://economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9298983

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Finally, two other books to consider:

Scott Berkun’s new book “The Myths of Innovation” describes some of the common pitfalls in innovation-related thinking and how to overcome them. Scott has run the Sacred Spaces tour at my Gel conference for two years; it’s no surprise that the examples in his book are thoughtful and well-rounded. href=”http://urlx.org/amazon.com/f9916

Scott Rosenberg’s book “Dreaming in Code” covers the story of Mitch Kapor’s effort to build “Chandler,” an ambitious piece personal organization software. Anyone interested in innovation in software processes would find this a useful case study to study. It addresses the question, “Why is good software so hard to make?” http://urlx.org/amazon.com/dcdb1

Post a comment here:
http://www.goodexperience.com/blog/archives/004255.php#comments

I was playing around on one of my favorite sites to kill some time while waiting on a deployment to complete, when I found Nirvana. It’s located at http://www.endless.com/, just in case you were wondering. Endless Shoes and Handbags is a shoe shopping site that is nothing short of amazing. If you thought sole searching on the Internet was difficult, and you hate waiting for the shipment to arrive, just to find that they don’t fit, your day has come.

I started fiddling around in women’s shoes, looking for something in the Athletic department. It didn’t take me long to figure out that I could filter my search by size, color, heel height, width, and price. This isn’t novel but the way it’s presented sure is nice. Try finding all of the Women’s vegan shoes in brown, size 9, that oh, by the way, are on sale: (red emphasis, mine)

Since brown is the new black and you can only wear Merrells so many days a week, I decided to join everyone else and get a pair of wedge sandals. Check out the cool zoom feature so you can make sure every little detail, down to the contrasting stitching, is to your liking:

At $55.89, no wait, $50.89 if I get overnight shipping (yippee!), I think I gotta have ‘em.

A few minutes later…

OK, it really doesn’t get any better than this. Endless just happens to be partnered with Amazon, so all I had to do was enter my Amazon user name and password, and voila! my shipping address and credit card info was already there. Whoever designed this thing gets MY vote for President.

Less than 24 hours later…

They have arrived! They are fabulous. Now I think I want some in black…

While we were on vacation last week I read a story in USA Today about 25 things that have disappeared or almost disappeared. One of them was crank windows on automobiles. My first car not only had crank windows but a crank sunroof as well (whose crank I stored in the glove box because it wouldn’t stay on).

Today I had the opportunity to ask a motorist to roll down his window (I was on my bike), so to do this I made the “roll down your window” sign - my hand in a fist, moving in a circular direction. But it occurred to me later, that I’m probably at the tail end of a generation that understands this, the international sign for window lowering.

What do kids these days do to get the same response? Index finger indicating a button press? Maybe they learned the international sign from their parents? Or maybe they eliminate the problem altogether and just text each other from inside the car.