Strategy Blog: Viget Labs

M. Jackson Wilkinson - Former Staffer :

If you're in the US, there's a good chance you have April 15th on your mental calendar, if not circled on your desk calendar with a bold, red sharpie. It's the due date for individuals to file their tax returns, and while about 60% of us file well ahead of time, the rest have a fair propensity to procrastinate a bit and file within the two weeks leading up to the deadline. There's good reason for this procrastination — no one likes paying taxes.

Last week, our landlords friends upstairs at Tax Analysts (great tagline: "Respectfully Disagreeable Since 1970") asked us to take a look at the website at the center of this early-spring anti-holiday, IRS.gov. While they were looking for input around functionality and a bit of visual design, we noticed some interesting things that we thought were worth covering here.

The short of it: you almost definitely hate IRS.gov, but not because it has no redeeming qualities.  You just can't help hating the IRS.

Continue reading "‘Tis the (Tax) Season"

Stephanie Hay - Project Manager :

Last December, I visited a financial planner.  It was well worth the time and hassle of tracking down recommendations from folks whom I trust.  It was enlightening but also daunting -- I had a lot of work ahead of me to get prepared for retirement at 30.  (Tsk, and some call me an idealist).

Anyway, among the many great recommendations was to explore investment opportunities available in any of a number of companies.  So, I started doing some research and now have intimately experienced the user flow and options available to me behind three major financial institutions, which I refuse to name because I don't want anyone to steal from me.

Here are some observations I've found in my micro-research:

Decision paralysis on the home page is alive and well. One of the companies had no visual or content hierarchy -- it was literally line item after line item of everything I could use them for.  This is OK if I'm just scanning for a certain keyword, but it's also anxiety-inducing.  Another company had much better visual hierarchy -- for example, there was a question on the home page that asked "New to Investing?" -- but then led me to a landing page with enough choices for a seasoned investor.  The conversion funnel could be more effective if I felt a guided experience rather than a free-for-all.

Two of three companies structured their user experiences around their own internal organization. This is amazingly annoying when I want to move money from point A to point B and have to sign into two different interfaces and have confirmations from both.  Why on Earth would you require your users to jump through these hoops just because your internal territories are so deep?  However, one company did invest obvious love and care into audience research and ease of use, which then made the other two seem even more bureaucratic.

Pop-up explanations are everywhere, but never seem to help.  Maybe this is just me, but I don't really need a glossary when trying to manage my banking online.  Instead, I need answers to questions that seem nowhere to be found (like, when setting up bill pay for an individual, does the date I choose dictate when the check is cut or when it's delivered?).  Or the answers are off on some page beyond my current view, which makes keeping things in context very difficult.  But, to remedy this, see the next point:

Live chat works.  I feel weird typing this, but it's true.  On each of the three companies I was researching, I used the live chat option and found stellar results -- one of which was so pleasurable thanks to friendly customer support that they earned my business.  (A follow-up call afterwards gave me the warm fuzzies, too.)

Overall, I was amazed that two of three financial institutions I surveyed are capable of managing millions (billions?) of dollars for people but aren't better equipped to manage their users' experiences intuitively.  Maybe I'm expecting too much?

Jackson Fox - Senior User Experience Designer :

Way back in December my colleague Mindy set out her web design goals for 2009 , and included "Continue to improve my understanding of User Experience design" at #4 on her list. We've got a well-stocked UX bookshelf a Viget South, and Mindy's post got me thinking about the books I recommend to people who want to learn more about user experience design, information architecture, usability, and interaction design. I set my own goal of putting together a "UX canon" that I would be able to share. Well, it's nearly March and I've yet to finish my reading list. Thankfully, the design faculty at the School of Visual Arts did me a favor and posted there own interaction design reading recommendations. It's a pretty good list, and has most of the books I had in mind to include in my own reading list. I highly recommend that you check it out, and in the spirit of sharing, I do want to recommend five books that didn't make it onto the SVA list:

The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper — I think you could call this the book where I found religion. Inmates isn't a practical book, but it embodies all of the frustration about interface design that I felt as a Computer Science student in college.

The Human Interface by Jef Raskin — Raskin has a fondness for oddball interface paradigms, but this is another book that is more about the spirit that embues user experience design than the actual practice of the craft. Fun Fact: Raskin's son Aza is now leading UX efforts for Mozilla.

Tog on Interface by Bruce Tognazzini — Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini was part of the legendary design team at Apple during the early years of the Mac OS, and this is an engrossing look at much of the thought and effort that went into crafting many of the fundamental interface elements we now take for granted.

Contextual Design by Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt — SVA is a design school, so I guess it isn't surprising that they don't have much in the way of design research books. Contextual Design presents the case for ethnographic research methods in UX design.

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (3rd ed.) by Peter Morville and Lou Rosenfeld — Finally, I want to recommend the classic and definitive Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. Effective organization of information is critical to creating usable designs, especially on the web, and this is the book that formalized IA as a practice.

Stephanie Hay - Project Manager :

Since starting at Viget in February 2007, I've received a few requests from friends and clients who want to know what project management tools we use for tasking our teams. Also during that time frame, I've auditioned three different platforms, including Fog Creek Software's FogBugz,  Thoughtworks' Mingle, and now Unfuddle, whose features and flexibility seem most promising for our particular needs.

I should note that, before my time, we tried and abandoned XPlanner; same with Mantis.  Later, we even built our own tasking tool, Viget Labs Project Management (VLPM).  Ultimately, though, we learned that maintaining and building upon internal applications is unrealistic when paying clients have deadlines and expectations; so the search began for an external product that could support us (and, ideally, be customized as we grew and our needs changed).

Of course, each product we've tried has its pros and cons, which I describe here in my personal reviews (that's a disclaimer!).

Continue reading "Exploring Project Management Tasking Tools"

Kara Davis - Former Staffer :

Dice, according to the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, are "small cubes of plastic, ivory, bone, or wood, marked on each side with one to six spots, usually used in pairs in games of chance or in gambling."

They also form the basis of online reviews in Norway. Some context:

"...the newspapers next morning, both locals and national seemed to give a careful "thumb's up," most of them landed the dice on four out of six eyes, I guess I was around that too?"
- from a Bob Dylan fan site

"JABULANI receives 5 and 6 on the dice from main newspaper"

I'd never encountered dice as a rating system before, but I have it straight from a good source that it is quite common in Norway, and I've found examples on several sites.

Continue reading "Rating Stuff in Norway"