You are a weary business traveler at an international train station. And you have one pressing problem: you are hungry. Luckily, you spot a baguette chain store and decide to take a closer look. Their baguettes look amazing, especially that one on the right; fresh tomatoes and mozzarella in a crusty French baguette. Yes, that is it. You want to buy it, but no one behind the counter seems to be paying attention to you. “Hello, excuse me?” But there is no response. The staff are ignoring you. “Hello”, you raise your voice, “can I have this baguette please?” The guy behind the counter looks at you, and without a word, grabs the baguette you pointed at. “Anything else – tea, coffee, juice?” replies the guy, evidently annoyed that you bothered him, and hands you your baguette wrapped in a paper bag. “No, thanks, here’s the money. Bye.”

One transaction complete.

You walk away with the precious paper bag in your hand, looking forward to devouring that wonder of a baguette, while trying to forget about the unpleasant guy behind the counter. After all, you got your baguette, so it is all good. You board the train, take a seat, and realise that the baguette looks significantly less mouth-watering than the one you saw just a while ago. It is all squashed and looks as tired as you are. You start unwrapping it...oh no, it is stuck to the paper bag. You wrestle with it for a few minutes. Pieces of the paper got torn away and glued to your baguette. And why is the bag so ill-shaped anyway? Has anyone actually considered how people will be eating the baguette on a train? No. It turns out that the fancy paper bag is completely inappropriate in this situation.

At this point you are rather disappointed with your baguette and all the hassle it has caused you. But it looked so good in the store! Anyway, you decide not to buy this baguette again. What is more, you actually also decide not to buy from this chain’s store again.

More transactions? Unlikely.

What we can learn from everyday interactions

You might be thinking this has nothing to do you and your online business. But it does. Regardless of whether you are selling baguettes or monthly subscriptions to a Software-as-a-Service online CRM platform, you need to consider the same things to create a positive customer experience and build a base of loyal customers that keep coming back.

There are a few lessons we can learn from this baguette fiasco:

• Don’t focus just on your product, but also on how you are delivering it.
  Even the best product could be ruined by a poor purchase and post-purchase experience.

• Don’t ignore customers, however subtle their interest in your product.
  Have customers phoned your call centre to get help because they failed to buy your product through the website the day before? Have they still not bought your product a week later? Then you should be following-up with them.

• Don’t try to up-sell and cross-sell, at all costs, all the time.
  Pick your battles wisely and focus on the most susceptible moments. Customers might not be ready to buy another product right after buying the first one. They might want to learn more about the first product before buying another product from you.

• Don’t assume everyone will use your product in the same way.
  Learn about your customers, their preferred ways of doing things, and their context of use. Then design your product so that it could be appropriated for multiple situations that are likely to occur.

• Don’t design just for the product’s peak usage moments.
  Think also about the moments when the product is not being used, or when it is being shut down. Or thrown away. Let your products disappear from the scene gracefully.

Next time you experience a pleasant or unpleasant interaction with a service or product in the physical world, think how it would translate into the digital world. And vice versa. Both worlds are a great source of inspiration for each other when designing.

It’s great to get a fresh perspective on user experience practice once in a while, and my recent trip to Berlin for UX Camp Europe allowed me this opportunity in an international context.

More than four hundred user experience (UX) practitioners and enthusiasts gathered in Berlin last weekend for the second pan-European ‘unconference’ UX Camp Europe 2011. The philosophy of barcamps and unconferences is that all attendees should also participate in one way or another, either by giving a talk or at least by engaging in discussions. Furthermore, these events encourage informal presentation formats as well as open sharing and discussions.

The two days were packed with great talks and workshops, with plenty of partying before and after the event.

Each day there were eight parallel streams, and so there was plenty of choice of sessions to attend. I started the first day by attending two sessions on Agile UX, gave my talk on communicating and selling UX design deliverables, then attended an inspiring afternoon session on change management and content strategy, a workshop on the KJ method (collaborative prioritisation method), and Eric Reiss’s keynote 10 war stories you won't see on Slideshare.

Day two, I chose Actionable Web Analytics, Responsive Designs, a session on researching and prioritising user tasks in design, and two sessions by Tobias Jordans - on Axure specifications and on small interaction design details that make a big impact on the user’s experience.

The number of attendees across the two days and the quality and variety of the presentations suggest that UX is thriving across the whole Europe.

Thanks to all the participants and organisers for making it such a wonderful event. We will hopefully see each other again next year.

...

(Coverage of UX Camp Europe 2011 on Lanyrd.)

A few weeks ago, I flew from the London Luton airport and was surprised to see this low-cost airport equipped with a few automated customer service assistants. The airport is trying to reduce costs everywhere and so replacing real humans with automated assistants that work nearly for free comes as no surprise.

Upon reaching the departures hall, a male assistant (picture below) reminded me that certain items are not allowed on board aircraft. Later in the security check hall, another female assistant informed me that liquids should have been placed in transparent plastic bags and laptops were to be taken out of bags.

I was queuing for the security check for just a few minutes but the messages became very repetitive. What had been a useful reminder, quickly became rather annoying noise. I noticed there was a human operator standing not far from one of the automated assistants, telling passengers which queue to join. After observing this guy for a while, I asked him whether he found the automated assistants a little bit irritating. (A leading question, I know!) Almost instantly, as if he had uttered it for a hundredth time that day, he replied, "You tune it out mate. You just tune it out!" He also told he had been working there with the new ‘colleagues’ for two weeks then.

The way he replied instantly made me realise that work shifts with the non-human colleagues are probably not very popular with the airport staff. No wonder, imagine a colleague of yours repeating the same line for the whole day. For the whole week.

Automated Virtual Assistants are an interesting invention. They surely get much more attention than a boring notice board on the wall. However when designing a customer journey within a service, it is essential that all stakeholders are taken into account. In this case, while virtual assistants might be fulfilling the short-term business needs by reducing costs and speeding up the queue, their implementation means that neither the customer’s nor the staff’s experience is improved. On contrary, they might be potentially causing friction. In the long term this may damage the brand, affect traveller’s choice of airport, and would make staff more likely to quit their jobs.

Service design needs to address the customer experience holistically, and any potential knock-on effects need to be considered. Subtle changes could make all the difference. All airport customers follow the same route which makes careful positioning and Directional Sound a possible solution. This would ensure the message gets heard in context without becoming just annoying noise.

The speaker line-up for the recent Lightning UX mini-conference event would easily make for a major industry conference, so it’s no wonder the tickets sold out so quickly.

Sponsored by SapientNitro and Foolproof  / Flow, Lightning UX brought together eight speakers to present their thoughts on various user experience matters. The rules? Eight presenters with five minutes each. I can say for myself, and others I spoke to, that Lightning UX, January 2011 was a big success.

The talks

Boon Chew opened with the story of his life. He explained how he ended up in the UX game; starting as an aspiring comic artist in his college days, through a senior developer role, to a UX Designer. He credited Alan Cooper and his books for making him realise that building products without a clear vision of the users and their needs is simply wrong.

Second presenter, Jonathan Kahn, spoke about the importance of Content Strategy. He reminded us that it is not just about the content factors (where Information Architecture currently makes the biggest impact), but also about the ‘people’ factors, such as publishing workflows and governance.

Cennydd Bowles took to the stage afterwards with a thoughtful rant titled ‘The Dip’, and urged the user experience industry to reflect on its direction, re-gain more humility and focus on results.

Next, the importance of modularisation and the benefits of using design patterns in the design process were illustrated on an example from the automobile industry by Tyler Tate.

Harry Brignull continued the parade of inspiring ideas with a short case study about a company trying to put lipstick on a pig by hiring Search Engine Optimisation consultants to fix, what was actually, a much deeper problem the company faced due to a missing Customer Experience Strategy.

The last three talks kicked off with Alex Horstmann’s performance (a presentation is too weak a word for his captivating rhetoric). Alex drew on a few Ghost Busters metaphors and spoke about the importance of talking the business language when advocating user experience. And we agree! We are all about Sales Process Optimisation, and also know that applying User-Centred Design is good for the business. As a bonus, Alex also gave us tips on defeating the big marshmallow man!

Lucy Spence stressed the essential role of research in customer acquisition and retention initiatives. She also mentioned that sometimes it takes a brand new concept or idea to move a product forward, despite not knowing the outcomes upfront.

Finally Rory Hamilton concluded with an awesome talk using the Uncanny Valley theory from robotics science to demonstrate how to optimise customer interaction touch points in a service design lifecycle.

If you want to know more, you can have a peek at sketch notes by Lucy Spence, and short videos of Tyler’s talk and Jonathan's talk.

All in all, a rapid-fire of excellent short talk and tons of ideas to mull over and digest.

Huge thanks to Lee McIvor for organising this.

Registration is a crucial initial step that most online businesses have to impose on people along their journeys. Registration is necessary to check people’s authenticity and start meaningful conversations with them based on the provided details. Capturing people’s details correctly is paramount since storing, for example, an incorrect email address opens the door for trouble down the line. With an incorrect email in the database, not only does the business lose the opportunity to reach out to its customers, but the business’s bottom line may suffer. For example, I have heard about cancelled orders due to mistyped email addresses.

It is no wonder then that registration forms try to make sure details are captured correctly. But how to do it while still preserving a positive user experience? Registration forms basically represent a barrier for people to be overcome before they can do what they actually want to do – finally use the website!

Here is how others have tried to handle this (with varying success):

Confirming entry

I frequently see a registration form that has duplicated Email or Password fields. Now, this is a little bit annoying, especially if both Email and Password need to be confirmed (as below).

In the above example, the person’s interaction flow is significantly interrupted by having to answer two identical questions. As per Don Norman’s model of 7 Stages of Action, answering each single question on a form is a small diverting action on the person’s journey towards accomplishing her goal.

Disabling copy & paste

Harry Brignull wrote about a registration form that does not allow pasting into the ‘Confirm email’ field. Quite creative, but I agree with Harry that it could feel patronising, especially for the more tech-savvy people (who know how to copy-paste). On the other hand, it prevents people (hopefully) from simply replicating a typo made in the first field. And typos are arguably one of the commonest kinds of incorrectly entered details. Now let me ask, why do most websites actually use the wording ‘Confirm your email’? Let’s use ‘Re-type your email’ instead, and it might not be necessary to awkwardly disable standard system interactions like pasting.

Repeating key details before submit

A more elegant solution is not to display the second confirmation field at all. But how can businesses eliminate the eventual errors on forms then? I quite like concept prototypes created by Jonathan Knoll and Russ Unger, that repeat the entered email just before submitting. Jonathan and Russ have produced multiple variants, but variant 5 (picture below) is my personal favourite. It puts the entered email within the person’s locus of attention which is at that point in time on the Submit button.

Unmasking passwords

What about passwords, that are by default masked on most forms (even at registration)? First of all, I believe masking a password does not bring any value in most usage scenarios. Nielsen calls for the death of masked passwords, and I am happy to agree with him. However, as opposed to offering a checkbox to mask the password, as he is suggesting, I think the way to go is actually offering a checkbox to unmask the password. After all, in most contexts security is more important than interaction efficiency.  MailChimp is doing this already, and based on a recent live demo of FontDeck, it seems like we will be seeing this pattern more often.

A pattern for unmasking passwords is also frequently used on mobile devices. This is due to the lack of tactile feedback provided by touchscreen keyboards when inputting a password. Moreover, people also cannot rely on their motor memory (remembering the finger movements like in touch-typing, as opposed to the actual password characters). People often utilize the motor memory to enter passwords with little conscious effort, and this does not translate so easily to touchscreen keyboards as visual identification of keys is needed.

Most mobile interfaces support people by revealing the last character entered for a short time and then masking it, thus giving people the necessary feedback. I am not aware of any website doing the same, but it might be a solution for standard monitor-keyboard setup too. On the other hand, the utility of this short-time revealing is debatable since most people type so fast that revealing the last character and masking it with a time delay is very difficult to implement seamlessly.  Try it for yourself - here is an example of automasking.

Inline validation

Another powerful weapon against incorrect entries is inline validation. Validation can only catch a small proportion of specific errors, but it is generally a good approach since people are notified something is not quite right before they hit the Submit button. Therefore it eliminates the need for the dreadful error messages. “Fatal error - you have not filled in all the details!”. “Oh my god, fatal error - someone actually died!” screams the user in horror.

There are multiple ways of implementing inline validation. Luckily for us, Luke Wroblewski put a few validation variants to the test. Based on his study, validation ‘after’ (after the person indicated that she was done answering a question by moving on to the next one) is the winning option - both in terms of efficiency and satisfaction.

So what?

Incorrectly entered details in online forms are a frequent problem that can cause a lot of hassle down the line. However, when designing forms, make sure you use a sensitive approach to minimising those errors and do not make the people do all the hard work for you.

I would love to hear about your tips for minimising errors in forms.