Customer Research
Running Online Divide-the-Dollar Studies using WebSort
Divide-the-Dollar is one of my favorite elicitation techniques. If you're not familiar, this technique is used to understand what people value – and in what proportion. Participants in the exercise divide a pool of money (or poker chips, sometimes) among a set of options, making judgments and trade-offs.
The Problem
I don't use Divide-the-Dollar as much as I could. Why?
First and most critically, there are very few online tools that can be used to orchestrate the exercise. Many of our clients and their customers are remote, so we tend to rely on online apps when we can. The main online app that is designed for this purpose – MindCanvas – is expensive and possibly unsupported. While it's possible to build a spreadsheet to manage the logic and capture the data, the experience is rough at best when working with end users.
Second, running onsite tests with a human moderator is expensive and incurs a lot of overhead. Scheduling, dealing with no-shows, and conducting the exercise all eat into budget and schedule. It doesn't scale well and discourages quick, guerrilla-style studies.
So the problem is technical: the tools aren't there. But on my commute in to work, I realized there was a way to do this if I thought about the problem differently.
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Using Remember the Milk as a Capture and Coding Tool
Built as a to-do list, Remember the Milk is surprisingly capable as a qualitative analysis tool.
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Closing the feedback loop with a little help from your friends
I was at the Agile 2009 conference last week to give a talk based on a project we did with Choice Hotels, this is the short version of my presentation. A quick thanks to everyone who came to my talk at the conference, and to everyone who provided feedback afterwards!
I like to think that most designers accept that integrating user feedback is critical to the success of a project. I also like to think that I’m not alone in struggling to find time and budget to undertake a thorough research phase on every project. As a group, UX designers have found a lot of ways do design research quickly (and cheaply) in order to make the best use of the time they have available on a project. On a recent project we found just such a solution that allowed us to gain critical insights while overcoming hurdles that made doing user research difficult.
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Lessons from Thomas Vander Wal: Reputation and Social Comfort
Earlier this month, we hosted a workshop here at Viget led by Thomas Vander Wal centered on Social Design in the Enterprise. I think it went great, and thanks to those who attended as well as to Thomas. A few of us went bowling afterward, and for those who didn't: you missed out.
Thomas led us through a series of challenges and practices that try to help the necessary challenge of pushing the needle in an enterprise environment -- while the consumer web may be satisfied with a 1-9-90 model and widespread participation inequality, the enterprise web requires a much higher level of participation. Thomas was a tour de force when it came to knowledge-dropping; I don't think I'm unlike other workshop attendees when I say that I spent the weekend sparking new ideas as some of the concepts Thomas talked about sunk in.
The thing is, while some of these concepts are crucial to enterprise products, most of the concepts are still very relevant to the consumer space as well. I just want to take a second and look at two things that I found interesting during and after the workshop.
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Sure, Those Colors Look Nice - But Can You Prove They’ll Work?
For the past several months, I've been working with a client who is based in North America but who operates regional offices in various parts of the world where their (tourism industry) product is offered. Over the past year, we've collaborated with this client one country at a time, through their North American central office, updating some of their country-specific web properties. It's been a cool opportunity for the team to experiment with tweaking web designs to work in cultures that we haven't designed for in the past. One of the best lessons learned (well, more confirmed than learned), is that good web design (as any other form of art) transcends regional boundaries. A good web design in America is also a good web design in Norway, France, or Australia because, at the end of the day, the best web design gets out of the way and lets the content and features pull users in and through the conversion process. So far, we've found that user intuition about how to get from Point A to Point B in the purchase process doesn't vary by location - everybody is looking for the same information.
However, we also found that aesthetic preferences, as you might suspect, vary a great deal between nations. The preference in one country might be for ultra-sleek, clean design with little imagery and a neutral color palette. In other places, users seem to prefer a richer, bolder palette full of evocative imagery and depth. Given those widely varied and utterly subjective preferences, we faced a new challenge with our current design project in this space: How do we define a design that not only works but also looks "good" in Germany, in Australia, in France, in the UK, and many other distinctly different parts of the world?
Our first attempt was to employ our standard process of presenting three mood board options and finding the most preferred of the three. In this case, we had the opportunity to ask our users (during usability testing for the same product) what they thought about the mood boards. For this exercise, we came up with three distinct directions. One that was sort of business-y, one that was fun and lively, and one that was neutral. We asked users how they would describe them and which they preferred. After weeks of interviews, we were able to finally discover that the mood board results were totally inconclusive. Each country had a preference, but with 4 countries responding to 3 mood boards, we couldn't possibly have come up with a less definitive answer. Germany preferred one, France preferred another, the UK preferred the third, and in Australia there was no clear winner. Obviously, none of these design concepts was the "right" answer.
Beyond that, even within the countries that preferred a particular design direction, the feedback was contradictory. For example, we presented a mood board similar to the one below.
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