Client Testimonial: The Webnographer remote testing solution was the perfect fit!

January 30th, 2012 by Sabrina

We recently worked on an exciting project with Travelport, a leading provider of global travel distribution systems. Travelport asked us to carry out a usability test on a new product that they had developed for travel agents booking hotels online, called Rooms and More. The research was carried out with travel agents in 5 different countries, and helped provide insights into the usability and user experience of this new product.

This is what Travelport said about working with Webnographer:

Prior to launching a brand new product in the market to our existing customers, we really wanted to hear from them.  As always, you make some assumptions in your initial designs, but we needed a way to test things out that would allow us to make changes before we rolled it out to everyone, and had to react to their feedback.

Faced with the choice  between a simple questionnaire [that does not really deliver quality results] and lab work [which gives you quality, but also has the drawback of costs and really limiting the number of people you can get feedback from], we found that the Webnographer remote testing solution was the perfect fit!

We worked with Webnographer to run our customers through a series of tasks, and the ability to see their real-time feedback, and then play back their session was invaluable.

James and Sabrina not only helped us define and design the testing, so that it brought us actionable results, but also delivered a well thought-out, extensive report on the tail end – allowing us to really focus in on the key changes we need to make.  We liked it so much, we signed up for more.

Sincerely,

Brian Batts
Head of Product, Consumer & New Ventures
Travelport

 

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UX Brighton 2011

November 10th, 2011 by Rodrigo


(photo by Katariina Järvinen)

Last week I attended the second edition of the UX Brighton conference. James Page, who I work with at Webnographer, curated the conference and co-organized it with Danny Hope. It was an opportunity to learn about several fields, from Anthropology to Information Architecture (IA) and User Experience (UX) Design. Here is my summary of the talks from that day.

 

Robin Dunbar – Connecting Anthropology and User Experience
Robin is the Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford. He opened the conference with a talk about the constraints on the digital world.


(photo by Katariina Järvinen)

He explained that humans can only maintain about 150 (Dunbar’s number) personalised and reciprocated communication relationships at a time. Organizations and social groups tend to split above this amount.

According to Robin, the quality of relationships is constrained by: kin versus friendships, language, gender differences, shared traits, religion or sense of humour. We use laughter (shared experiences that trigger endorphin releases) to compensate the small amount of time we spend on social grooming.

He concluded that in the urbanised global world relationships have become fragmented, but he believes that digital world can provide a solution to this challenge. Quoting Robin, “Laughter turns strangers into friends”. How can we make people laugh more together on the web and help them build global friendships? The challenge is on for designers.

Luke Hay’s notes provide a more extensive overview about Robin’s talk.

Andrea Resmini – Pervasive IA and cross-channel user experiences
Andrea who teaches Information Architecture at the University of Borâs in Sweden, talked about the concepts of Pervasive IA and cross-channel user experiences.


(photo by Katariina Järvinen)

He mentioned that users interact with a system with only their goal in mind, regardless the channel. According to Andrea, instead of finding multiple services in one place, they should perceive only one system – cross-channel approach, as Ben Claxton also pointed out.

Correlation (providing seamless integration between concepts of the system) and Place-making (space versus place – the latter is entwined with the social context) are two of the 5 cross-channel heuristics mentioned by Andrea.

He also explained that Pervasive IA relies in the idea of place: to make users feel at home. That idea needs to travel across all channels of the system’s architecture.

Mike Atherton – Beyond the Polar Bear
Mike is an Information Architect, who has been working with the BBC.


(photo by Katariina Järvinen)

His talk, “Beyond the Polar Bear”, shows a new approach to IA that expands from the popular book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web.

According to Mike, the ideas in this book are old and outdated. People don’t think in ‘documents’ (reference to web pages), they picture ‘things’. Design should be bottom-up: start by building a Domain Model of the ‘things’ instead of prototyping.

As he explained, the model should be canonical – every ‘thing’ should have a micro-site of its own. Many people arrive at specific pages through deep-links, and may not start their journey on the homepage.

Boon Yew Chew drew sketchnotes that provide a good overview of Mike’s notions about Domain Driven Design.

Simon Johnson – Dignity Through Design
Simon is a UX consultant that worked with companies such as Vodafone and Sky, on projects from lab-based usability tests to field-based research. He talked about the aging question and dignity through design.


(photo by Katariina Järvinen)

He showed that recent numbers show that people aged 50+ spend more time online than 18-24 year olds, and that they buy and use technology – people aged 55+ own as many iPhones as 24-30 year olds. More stats on this topic can be found at Simon’s blog.

Simon’s idea is that design should be inclusive – opposed to products designed especially for ‘old’ users. They rely on technology, with focus on the core functions – complexity and ‘jargon’ should be kept to a minimum.

The challenge in designing for older users is not on their age – but it is the attitudes and behaviours that we need to design for. Simon concluded that older users have needs just as varied as the needs of younger users. We need to do more than creating only one persona summarising old users’ needs.

John Mildinhall – the ROI of design
John currently works in research at Electronic Ink. His talk focuses on the Return of Investment (ROI) of design.


(photo by Katariina Järvinen)

Using different examples, John showed how the value for money framework (VfM) can be used in this perspective. As he explained, it consists of 3 key factors: Economy – relation between costs and inputs (raw materials); Efficiency – relation between inputs and outputs (product or service); and Effectiveness – relation between outputs and outcomes (improvement rate).

According to John, it is usually hard to convince companies of the value of design, and his examples showed how a design that improves all factors of a process can increase the return.

Maria Ana Neves – The Thinking Hotel
Maria is an entrepreneur, and designer of innovation and design strategies for Sintese Azul. She talked about creativity and The Thinking Hotel project.


(photo by Luke Hay)

The project started with the idea of a place where people could think and share ideas. The ideas then expanded into a game-led workshop of cooperation between different areas of business that generate original ideas.

She explained that her motivation was to shift from competitiveness to cooperation, from logic and rationality to imagination, and to increase creativity in a complex and ambiguous environment by requiring more co-creation between different areas in the future. The result, she hopes, will bring new skills and ‘ways of doing’.

Giles Colborne – How does distraction affect design
Giles has been working in usability and user centred design since 1991. He is the author of “Simple and Usable: web mobile and interaction design“. Giles talked about how distractions affect design.


(photo by Katariina Järvinen)

He explained how people are increasingly turning to mobile platforms, which promote distractive situations and multitasking – which is really switching between tasks. As an example, he mentioned the reduction by 20% of traffic accidents during a network failure in the US.

Giles recommended 6 strategies for coping with distractions: minimise distractions (turn off alerts), help focus (in forms highlight the current form field), increase motivation, decrease pressure (fewer choices, and allow choices to be changed later), facilitate recovery (for example in a racing game, it starts a few seconds backwards to allow you to re-orientate yourself), and understand the context of use.

The sketchnotes drawn by Boon Yew Chew also summarise these strategies.

Cennydd Bowles – Designing for the Wider Web
Cennydd was the closing speaker of the day. He is a digital product designer and writer, and author of the book Undercover User Experience Design. He talked about designing for the wider web.


(photo by Katariina Järvinen)

Cennydd’s vision is that design should consider all platforms, not “Normal” versus “Mobile” as it is today.

He then explained that “Design for future devices” is a mindset that should take into account all possible options available on devices – context (static or mobile), inputs (mouse, keyboard, touch), outputs (screen size, pixel dimensions), connectivity (bandwidth, offline web), ecosystems (content shifting, cross-device experiences), design deliverables (prototyping) and design processes (usability testing).

For an expanded view on all the device options mentioned by Cennydd, see Richard Powell’s notes.

I learned a lot from this conference. It allowed me to start looking at the different areas discussed in a new perspective towards UX. I also got the chance to meet experienced professionals in the field, each with their own bits of advice to give.

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World Usability Day

November 8th, 2011 by Rodrigo

 

On Thursday the 10th November is World Usability Day. As we have noticed that there is no event planed for Lisbon, we thought we would throw our doors open. We have just got back from organising the very successful UX Brighton conference, so we have not had much much time in planning or organising an event here in Portugal.
The event will be at our office. Sign up here for details.

This years theme of World Usability Day is EDUCATION: Designing for Social Change.

The focus is outwardly on how our organizations, our cultures, and our world impact usability.

We will explore and celebrate:

● Designing with an intentional outcome of sparking change in how people behave, communicate, and do things in the world; and 

● Examining the concept of cultures and how culture impacts usability.

Join the conversation on Twitter with hashtag: #wud2011

What is World Usability Day?

It’s about making our world work better.
It’s about “Making Life Easy” and user friendly. Technology today is too hard to use. A cell phone should be as easy to access as a doorknob. In order to humanize a world that uses technology as an infrastructure for education, healthcare, transportation, government, communication, entertainment, work and other areas, we must develop these technologies in a way that serves people first…

World Usability Day was founded in 2005 as an initiative of the Usability Professionals’ Association to ensure that services and products important to human life are easier to access and simpler to use. Each year, on the second Thursday of November, over 200 events are organized in over 43 countries around the world to raise awareness for the general public, and train professionals in the tools and issues central to good usability research, development and practice.

If you want to join us register here: http://wud-lx-2011.eventbrite.com/

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“Friday 13th – UX Horror Stories”
an Amsterdam Style UX Cocktail Hour comes to Lisbon

May 12th, 2011 by James

We hope that if you are in Lisbon on Friday 13th you can join us for a before dinner drink at São Pedro de Alcantara. If you want to come, please book a place here, so that we know numbers.

We are putting on a bus from FIL, where UxLx is being held, to São Pedro de Alcantara where the UX cocktail hour takes place. This is because everytime I tried to do travel in the past, using the Lisbon metro, I got hopelessly lost.  The Information Architecture and the signage in the Lisbon metro is not as easy as London, New York, or Paris.  It looks easy, but I get lost every time. It is also faster to drive.

The idea for the drinks came about while I was having a drink with Peter Boersma of Adaptive Path, after the Polish IA summit. We were worried that people at the Uxlx conference would have to spent the whole day in a dark conference room in the outskirts of Lisbon, and would miss seeing a city in daylight that Charles Dickens described as even more beautiful than Venice.

Peter started Amsterdam IA Cocktail Hour nearly 10 years ago, and they make a special effort to throw a Cocktail Hour every time a User Experience conference hits Amsterdam. The idea is that the pan-European attendees of the conference can mingle with the local community, who might not be attending the event. So the idea is to replicate Peter´s Amsterdam IA Cocktail Hour here in Lisbon. Peter’s idea has spread to Berlin, London (IA in a Pub), and Melbourne.

UX Horror Stories is a fringe event so is not part of UxLx. But we have slotted the event into Bruno Figueiredo planning. So, if you are going to the UxLx conference the bus will pick you up immediately after conference stops. Our drinks will finish at 8.30 pm giving you enough time to get to the dinner down the road at Cervejaria Trindade, where Bruno has organised the closing dinner, or just continue drinking with us.

The venue for the UX cocktail hour will be the Kiosk at São Pedro de Alcantara, which we believe has one of the best views of Lisbon.
View Miradouro de São Pedro de Alcântara in a larger map

If you are wanting to make your own way, ask any taxi to take you to the São Pedro de Alcantara Miradoro. We will be at the Kiosk (bar) at the North end of the terrace.

If you are taking our bus, the buses will be parked by Roundabout at the end of R. do Bojador. Which is a 2 minutes walk from the conference centre. It is by the river if you turn left outside the conference centre and walk towards the inland sea. The buses will leave once the conference finishes, around 18.30. You should keep an eye out for Peter Boersma, who will be leading the way to the buses.
View Bus Location in a larger map

The reason the theme is UX Horror Stories is because it is Friday 13th!

If you want to come, book your place for the event and for both the bus and event.

 

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Is there any Interaction Design in Portugal?

May 11th, 2011 by Miguel

One of the great Psychologists in User Experience, Don Norman, complained last month when he was in Portugal, about the high costs mobile phone operators charge when you roam outside the country in which the phones are registered. This week Norman will be giving the key note speech at UxLx, a Usability conference in Lisbon. What will be missing that day is any Portuguese Speakers. Should there be a Portuguese speaker? And what has Don Norman´s phone bill got to do with this?

When Don arrives he should buy himself a Pay as You Go card, thus saving himself a fortune, and so experience one of Portugal’s great Service Design innovations. In the 1990′s Portugal Telecom was the first in the World to introduce Pay as You Go for mobiles. This has changed the way we pay and interact with mobiles. The idea has spread across the world, and has vastly expanded the ways that people interact amongst themselves, particularly in developing countries.  For example, the idea has been adapted in Africa so that many millions of people have been able to replace physical banking with banking through the use of mobile phones.  This has allowed the usage of mobile phones to be fully democratised. You might be in the middle of a dirt road halfway between nowhere, but just as you can be sure the tiny tin stall by the road sells coca-cola, and you can bet they also sell Pay as You Go cards.

Before Don has the chance to buy a Pay as You Go card, he will have to go through immigration. Unlike America where he will wait in a queue for up to 45 minutes, in Portugal the immigration officer has been replaced by a robot that shortens passport control to 20 seconds. The system was developed by a Portuguese company called Vision Box. The robotic immigration officer has been exported to other countries, such as the Netherlands, Brazil, and the UK, making you look at your passport as something from the 19th century.

If Don´s luggage got lost, in a couple of years time he will be able to use Bruno Pereira da Silva´s idea to incorporate a special wireless chip into the bag, so that the bag can be followed anywhere in the world. Some airlines already tag suitcases, but these have a cost every time a bag is tagged, whereas the Bruno´s solution incorporates the devices inside the bag so that travellers only have to pay once.

As Don wonders if there are other Interaction ideas in Portugal that are different from the rest of the world, he will be able to do a Google search on that while riding the bus. Last year the bus/tram public company Carris introduced WiFi on some of its major routes, and plans are to extend the coverage.

One issue often experienced in Portugal is the long queues for an ATM. Here, ATM’s are more than a system to get cash, or check your balance. With the Portuguese ATM’s, called Multibanco, you can pay your utility bills, a flight, a train, or a concert ticket. Recently, a team of young scientists have introduced a prototype for you to vote in ATM machines using your citizen card.

So when Don leaves the airport, he will have already come across more Portuguese interaction design products than you would have guessed. This might seem unlikely for a foreigner, but a Portuguese would consider it quite obvious. Portugal has always been a land of inventors and creators.

The news at the moment may be full of the Portuguese current financial problems, but the one saviour to the country’s problems may be its latent creativity. Creativity comes out of need, and entrepreneurship out of necessity.

Portuguese people manage to find means out of difficult times through developing their ability of integrating different cultures, adapting to novelty, accepting change and creating, inventing.

Of course, the best known period was the Age of Discoveries when Portugal discovered the sea route to Asia. Nautical instruments were created and redesigned to serve the purpose of navigation. The importance of the Discoveries was not just the discovery of the new lands but enabling others to follow in the same footsteps. This necessitated the development of nautical instruments to know where you are, and the refinement of the map to plot your position.

Compass, astrolabe, armillary sphere, quadrant and backstaff: these were innovatory not just by virtue of their novelty, but by their utility.  In fact, the idea of the compass, a magnetic metal needle, placed in a bowel of water was probably introduced to the Portuguese, by the Arabs. To make the instrument useful at sea, it needed development.  The needle was enclosed and the compass rose painted around the edge thus allowing the sailor to know easily where he was.

Knowing the position of the sun and the planets was critical to plot your position on a map before the days of the GPS. Abraham Zacuto’s idea, 500 years ago, was to put them into a simple table and so make their use easy. Zacuto also developed the first astrolabe out of metal improving its
accuracy.

In the Age of Discoveries, The Portuguese connected the globe, bringing ideas from one culture to another. The chilli pepper from South America to India, filo pastry from the Near East to China (the spring roll), and even the famous Indian curry is a Portuguese introduction. What our country needs now is to rediscover and improve its ability to introduce ideas to the rest of
the world.

Sure the Age of Discoveries did not happen over night. Political will, economical investment and continuous hard work are a part of it, but from studying and experimenting we can find the same spirit again.

At the end of the day, Don may want a glass of wine. Helping him chose which wine to drink, is the “Social Wine Discovery service”.  Adegga takes the complexity out of choosing from the 1,000´s of wines and would allow Don to discover wines based on other people’s choice.  A by-product of Adegga has been AVIN.  AVIN is a unique identifier which gives every wine a unique number, rather like ISBN is to books. This enables you to quickly find a bottle of wine on the Internet.

Portugal might be facing serious backlash lately, but it is also the EU country with the highest increase in patent requests.  This article has barely scratched the surface of current Interaction Design in Portugal. There are start-ups producing iPhone apps like Weddar which allows users to report the weather conditions in their own city. And then there are also start ups which are basing their development here, such as TouchToGive and Webnographer, who has opened an office here because of untapped pool of talent.

Portugal continues to shape the way we interact not only with objects and but also amongst ourselves in everyday life.

——————————————————————-

Miguel Azevedo, is a specialist Remote Usability researcher working at Webnographer. He twitters at: @webnographer and blogs at: http://blog.webnographer.com/author/miguel/

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What usability experts can learn from cockroaches

April 21st, 2011 by Sabrina

James recently gave a talk at the Polish IA Summit on How Context Effects Behaviour. One of the stories from his presentation outlines that there is a lot that usability experts can learn from cockroaches. The background of the story comes from Dan Ariely’s latest book “The Upside of Irrationality”.

Usability experts often forget the affect context has on human behaviour. Most usability evaluations are still carried out in labs with an evaluator peering over the participants shoulder. And the affect that the evaluator may have on the participant’s performance is often forgotten about.

But even simple creatures such as cockroaches are affected by another cockroach watching them while carrying out a task.

In his book, Dan describes an experiment that was carried out by 3 scientists in 1969. Zajonc, Heingartner, and Herman evaluated how fast cockroaches could accomplish a task in 2 different test conditions. In the first, they were alone. No other cockroaches were around. In the second, the social condition, they had an audience. Another cockroach was watching them through a Plexiglas window that allowed both creature to see and smell one another, but that did not allow any direct contact.

What the experiment found was that, carrying out an easy task – simply walking down the length of a corridor – the performance of the cockroach in the social condition increased. They walked down the corridor faster.

However, when carrying out a difficult task – navigating through a complex maze – the cockroach in the social condition performed worse.

This is an example how context affects behaviour. It is not just a trait that affects humans, but even for cockroaches’ behaviour is affected by changing external conditions.

Of course Dan Ariely does not generalise the findings from research with cockroaches to humans. He carried out many other experiments that looked at how bonuses affect behaviour. Bonuses change the social context too. People plan in advance what they will do with their bonus – go on holiday, buy a car, a present for their partner.

What Dan found in his experiments was that bonuses are a tricky business to get right. If the bonus is too great, the pressure on the person becomes too great and they actually perform worse.

Changing the social context in which we evaluate websites and design, will change the way people behave.

Lab testing has value to get in depth interviews with participants. However, for evaluating people’s real behaviour on a website as well as their performance, usability experts should look to compliment their tool box with methods such as our un-moderated remote usability testing tool Webnographer, where people participate from their natural environment without an evaluator being present.

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References:

Dan Ariely “The upside of irrationality – The unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home,” (2010): 17-52

Robert Zajonc, Alexander Heingartner, and Edward Herman, “Social Enhanacement and Impairement of performance in the Cockraoch,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 13, no. 2 (1969): 83-92

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Related posts:

Why exams mean nothing out of context

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Two free workshops on Remote Usability in Lisbon in May

April 13th, 2011 by James

Last year we gave a workshop at UxLx, which was a huge success. This year we have opened an office in Lisbon. By coincidence we will be training staff at the same time in remote usability methods, so we have decided to open our doors to anybody who is intersted and around.

The two workshops coincide with this years UxLx conference and will be held in the afternoon of the 11th and 12th of May. Places are limited and they will fill up quickly, as the cost of our workshops is normally between 400 to 700 Euro. If you don’t want to miss out on this great offer, book your place now.

The workshops

Remote Usability is a collection of methods that over the last year has become increasingly popular. Most of us are designing and developing products that will be used anywhere in the world, but most of our research methods are tied to a physical location. Remote sets the researcher free from being tied to a place, and also enables the testing of more people.

By the end of the session you will become familiar with a number of remote research technologies, from remote ethnography to synchronous and asynchronous tools, and will be able to explain when such tools are suitable for user research. We also will cover the basics of asynchronous testing, which is significantly different from the usual user research methods. The workshop will demystify the basic statistics that will help you understand the results. You will also learn the basics about how to carry out international studies, from the legal issues to how to deal with translation.

The workshop will cover:

- The different methods
- Remote ethnography
- Surveys
- Synchronous remote research
- Asynchronous remote research
- Study design
- Recruitment Methods
- Basic Analysis
- International Studies
- Legal

The purpose of both workshops is to enable you to turn data and observations from Remote Testing into valuable insights upon which you can act.

To book your place for the workshop simply go to http://lisbonremote2011.eventbrite.com/

Image credit: Jvl

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BYÖC – Unconference

December 22nd, 2010 by James

Last week, we held our first Friday Wine Down Evening here in Lisbon, and some friends from outside our team came to join us. This included André Marquet, who helps organise TEDxEdges, and Sam Page, my brother and sometimes writer.

Inspired by the chalkboard-paint walls of LOW, a bar in Bairro Alto, we jointly came up with the concept of BYÖC (Bring Your Own Chalk). The idea is simple. It is an unconference and an unpowerpoint event, free to attend and present. Every participant can have 5 minutes to talk through their idea and drawing on the walls of LOW to illustrating their points.

All you have to do is bring yourself, your ideas and your chalk. It is that simple.

The first session will be at 7pm on 7th of January 2011. The address is R. da Barroca 75.
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Moving our UK office to Brighton: UK´s “Silicon Beach”

December 7th, 2010 by James

We have decided to move our UK offices to Brighton from Hastings, because Brighton has become a major hub for UX in the UK. It has the advantage of two Universities in the immediate area (Brighton University and University of Sussex) which both teach Human Computer Interaction; the cost of living is lower than London; local interest is fostered and sustained by local groups such as UX Brighton and it has excellent national and international transportation links. This latter was a particularly winning point, since we need easy access to the airport; we have clients spread across Europe, our head office is in Ireland and our R&D is carried out in Portugal.

Recently the Economist magazine had an article about the success of what they call ‘Silicon Roundabout’ in Shoreditch in East London. Very near to it,13 years ago, I initiated my first start up. The attraction then was the manageable rent whilst being near to the centre of London. Since then rents in the area have gone up, moreover hiring people in London is expensive not only because of high living costs, but because of the draw of high paying jobs in finance in the City. Being situated in ‘Silicon Roundabout’ is still necessary if you need to raise Venture Capital, since Venture Capitalists are famous for not travelling more than 5 miles. However we no longer need them.

We first started to come to Brighton because of UX Brighton. This started when a small group of like minded people decided to meet up for a talk every month. A year ago we helped Danny Hope, the founder of UX Brighton to put on a special event about Remote Usability. It was a roaring success so this year (2010) we helped him mount a full blown conference,UX Brigthon 2010, which was held in September at the University of Brighton. Meeting so many interested people has shown to us that there is a vibrant UX community in Brighton.

Brighton has many design firms that sign up to the User Experience mantra, like CogApp and ClearLeft, however in pure User Experience research there is really only one other firm in Brighton, Vertical Slice, that specialises in games research.

Photo from neilhooting

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Why exams mean nothing out of context

November 23rd, 2010 by Sabrina

One of the advantages of remote usability testing is that you are using participants in their real context.

Before we started Webnographer, James and I attended a lecture given by Robert Sternberg where he told the story about the maths ability of Brazilian street kids living in the in the favelas of Recife. This story helped both of us realise the importance of carrying out usability tests in context.

Three researchers (see: Carraher, Carraher, and Schliemann 1985) carried out research with children aged 9 to 15.  These kids had dropped out of school, and were selling sun screen, and chewing gum on the streets. The researchers worked out that they could set the kids questions by purchasing goods off them. For example, 1,000 minus 300  is the same as giving the kid a 1,000 Cruzeiros note for a product that costs 300 Cruzeiros. Multiplication can be done by asking the kids how much 3 of a product would cost.

In these tests the Brazilian street kids scored 98%. But when they were put into a formalised test setting, and asked instead of how much would 3 apples cost or what 3×9 is, the kids performance dropped to just 37%.

What is scary is that the researchers later tested middle class children in a private school. These kids did very well in the formal exam. But when they had to do transactions with real money in the street, using the same maths, they failed in being able to do the transactions.

This is one example of context and how it affects behaviour. We see it again and again with remote usability tests, that the context of the user really affects their performance. Test people where they normally use a website, and test people in an artificial environment like a lab, and behaviour will be very different.

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