Whatever happened to discovery?
It’s a cool, sunny late Autumn Sunday morning. You live in the countryside; the nearest village is a mile away. It’s been a while since you bought a Sunday paper. But for some reason, you want one.
Instead of getting in your car, as you normally might to do to drive the mile to the village to buy milk or go to the pub, you decide to walk. There are paths through the fields behind your house that take you to the top of a hill and then down to the village – which is actually less than a mile to walk.
You pull on some wellies and a jacket to keep warm and you set out. Along the journey you encounter several people out walking – some walking their dogs. One of them is a neighbour you haven’t seen or said hello to in over a year. You stop and talk, and find out that there is a developer planning to build several houses on a strip of land just down the road from you. Thirty houses.
There goes the neighbourhood you originally chose for feeling rural.
You continue walking until you get to the top of the hill and you look down both ways, past your house and into the rolling fields beyond. And then the way you are walking, down towards the beautiful picturesque village that you and your partner first fell in love with when the two of you were looking for a house in which to live.
You remember that it was a house that you wouldn’t have looked at because it wasn’t part of your specific search parameters when you were looking. But a friend had spent time out this way and they’d recommended you might want to have a look anyways.
You continue your walk down into the village, and you purchase your Sunday paper. The walk home is less eventful, but the clear morning air, conversation, and the views have reinvigorated you.
Over 17 years of working in digital, I’ve watched the language of design for the web change from flash interactive, “content is king”, design and functionality-rich experiences, to “efficient user journeys” and targeted search.
I listen to clients talk – as though it’s a badge of honour – about how less than 8% of their “users” come in through the home page, as they are deep-linking to their content from search engines like Google.
In many cases, content has become easier to find, with large e-commerce and content laden sites getting search, filtering and SEO down to a science. Given the mathematics and organisation methodologies involved – it is in fact a science.
It’s great that we can find things so quickly. After all, isn’t it true that we have so little time to do things as it is? Like taking that leisurely walk for the Sunday paper.
But what have we lost in the last 17 years while striving to make everything so easy to find – and so quickly?
While search accuracy has increased, discovery has taken a tumble. It’s often the case that as adults, we don’t set out to discover things. This was something we did as children – what’s behind that hill, how does this work, why is that the case? We don’t have time. We’re too busy. Remember?
As adults we set out to find things. We use search to do this. We jump to a result, and do a rapid assessment. If it meets our needs, we are finished. If not, research shows that we often “pogo” back out to the original search and either select another result, or search again.
Along that journey, where is the opportunity for exposure to new things? Where is the chance to find out about things happening that affect us? Perhaps we could have an app for that.
When do we slow down, just enough, to remind us of why we love or want to know more about the thing we are searching for to begin with… or to discover the unexpected along the way?
There is certainly a place for both search and discoverability in our lives. It’s about remembering to find a degree of balance. And sometimes reminding clients that up-sell and discoverability are not necessarily the same thing.
As always, all comments welcome.
Mobile Cloud Summit video
A couple of weeks ago I ran a panel at the Mobile Cloud Summit on Evolution of the Mobile Cloud, which looked at the impact of Mobile Cloud on User Experience. I really enjoyed the panel and its participants, which included Windahl Finnigan from Cap Gemini, James Clarke of Thin Martian, and Jules Ehrhardt of ustwo.
Apart from the fact I quite obviously need to go on a diet and get to the gym, the panel was engaging and the participants engaged and quite obviously experienced.
And now I see what people mean about my accent. Doesn’t sound quite American… oh well.
I hope you enjoy watching the panel: http://vimeopro.com/quadriga/mobile-cloud-summit-in-tech-city/video/30120511
UserZoom UX Seminar Series: The Evolution of Mobile from a User Perspective
On Tuesday, 4 October I’ll be on a Mobile Surgery panel at the UserZoom UX Seminar Series: The Evolution of Mobile from a User Perspective. Other speakers at the event include: Carina Hoogeveen, Account Director, UserZoom, Arthur Moan, Country Manager UK Ireland, UserZoom, Anders Rosenquist, the ZAAZ Head of Mobile, David Murphy, Editor, Mobile Marketing Magazine.
The event takes place at one of my favourite haunts, The Hospital Club, located at 24 Endell Steet, London WC2H 9HQ, from 2pm to 6pm.
To book the event go to: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2139617654
Prototyping as an ethos
When car manufacturers design a new automobile, they develop requirements, conduct research, draw designs, make scale models, test scale models in wind tunnels, computer model their ideas, build full-scale prototypes, test them, and iterate the designs – all of this before putting them into production.
What they don’t do is go right from drawing them on a piece of paper or having some ideas to putting them into production.
So they don’t base their decisions on a paper prototype or a list of words. Why? Because a car is a 3 dimensional experience. It is an experience of the senses. It is an interactive experience. You really need to understand it before you put it into production. Mistakes would be costly.
Most people, if you asked them to draw a picture of a car would do so. And the exercise would result in many different shapes, sizes, features, etc. However, if pressed, most people don’t actually believe they could design a car for production.
So why, then, do so many people believe they can design a website?
When done properly, websites go through a process of understanding requirements (those of the business – and the users), which can mean conducting research and workshops with all constituents to understand needs, desires, etc. All of this informs design and function. We sketch, we wireframe, we prototype, we test, we revise, we design, we build, we test, etc. There is a process that we follow, not because we want to be difficult, but because we are often delivering something, that in todays world, can sit at the core of a business’ strategy.
We wouldn’t want to take our responsibility lightly, because to do so could be catastrophic for the companies for whom we work.
So if we take our responsibility seriously, why don’t our clients? Why do they so often try to cut corners, cut out research and prototyping, shudder at the idea of iteration (which will equal cost now but provide potential benefit later), and railroad us down an agile path that promises iteration, but so often delivers linear, scaled-back development with no opportunity to evolve already built functionality?
Prototyping and testing gives you a real opportunity to test, iterate and re-test. It allows teams to incorporate learnings (other than their own) so that the end results more closely resemble the type of result that users might actually find useful.
If I could I would present a counter argument to this process to try and give some sense of perspective, but through all of the prototyping and testing I’ve been a part of throughout my career, there have always been a set of beneficial learnings that have come out the other end, and a set of clients (marketers, tech teams, stakeholders) who sit back and think ‘we didn’t know that before’.
I’d love to see more time built into projects for prototyping and testing because I enjoy it when projects are given a chance to be successful and clients are given a chance to shine when their results bear fruit.
And isn’t it better when we share our work while it has a chance of being improved than after when it is too late?
What’s that on your shoe?
Just a bit of rainy afternoon levity following on from my last post.
Mobile Cloud Summit
On 21 September, 2011 the Mobile Cloud Summit will take place in Hoxton.
It is a one-day event that will focus on how cloud-based applications delivered via smart mobile devices are transforming business and society. It will also focus on the Mobile Cloud investment opportunity and will be an opportunity for leading IT companies, investors, entrepreneurs, and the tech media to get together and discuss.
I will be moderating a brand new session at Mobile Cloud Summit called The Evolution of the Mobile Cloud.
For more information on the event, visit the Mobile Cloud Summit website.
You can also track the event on Lanyrd.
UK Government
It was during my time as Founder and Managing Director of phunQube, a digital product design company, that I began my relationship with Directgov. We conducted research around authentication methods, providing wireframes, prototyping and user research. I continued my relationship with Directgov, post-phunQube, as a consultant.
I held two roles with Directgov, Head of Product Design and Head of Innovation, and later provided consultancy to the Cabinet Office, via the COI, to the Cabinet Office’s data.gov.uk project, which was being spearheaded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
While at Directgov I managed a team of Product Designers working on a variety of projects, to include developing a new semantic prototype of a future Directgov site. We conducted research, requirements capture, wireframe design, functional specifications, prototypes and user research. It was a true UCD project which underwent iterative design and testing.
I also set up the first Directgov innovate team, a skunkworks focussed on rapid design and prototyping, working with open source technologies, and developing relationships between Directgov and the open source developer community. We also defined and developed widgets which could be deployed and used by other Government departments, and mobile apps for transport and job search.
As part of this role I was also the Directgov Board member and one of the founding members of Dotgovlabs, a joint innovation initiative between Directgov, BusinessLink and NHS Choices.
I was also quite involved in Barcamps and Hackdays during this period of time.
BBC & BBC Worldwide
Over the last five years I’ve had the pleasure of working with the BBC on a number of occasions. These included when I was Managing Director of phunQube and we worked on Top Gear and Lonely Planet. In the Top Gear project my team and I worked on everything from requirements capture and prioritisation, to UX Strategy and Tactical UX.
I later contracted for the BBC through Digital Optimist on the Digital Media Initiative (DMI) program where I was Head of User Experience. I built a team from the ground up and ran teams in Agile and Waterfall environments on the development of a digital television production platform, the BBC digital archive and rights management system.
The project continues to roll out in stages and has a long term vision to replace several legacy systems and become the digital work platform for the BBC, supporting its move to Salford and other regional locations.
Lonely Planet
In 2008, while Managing Director of phunQube, my team and I worked with BBC Worldwide, Lonely Planet and Poke on the re-design of the Lonely Planet website – after BBC Worldwide’s acquisition of Lonely Planet.
Our work initially entailed myself and one of my Senior UX team spending nearly a month on-site in Melbourne, Australia working with the BBC Worldwide and Lonely Planet teams to define the scope and requirements of the project. The entire project, which took several months and involved the entire phunQube team, involved requirements capture and prioritisation, customer engagement strategy, strategic and tactical User Experience, prototyping and user research.
Lonely Planet went on to win the Best Travel site in the 2009 Webby People’s Voice Awards.
