Savings.com site new feature, "UX'ed" by Charles Erdman

The Work

As part of their effort to continue building and launching features, I helped “architect” a new area of the site called “Answers.” This new service was a concept the company thought would deepen users’ relationship with the core service by engaging the emerging community in a new activity- becoming shopping guides. Savings.com has an active community of power users who scour the web looking for deals and coupons they can share on the site. “Answers” generates solutions or opinions to any question revolving around the researching and purchasing of products, services or merchandise.

I crafted the User Experience after careful examination of other Answer sites that have emerged on the web over the last year. Creating a forum for questions and answers is now a valued offering for many sites, not just Savings.com. It decreases call service volume and deepens the relationship with the brand. My workflow involved competitive research; feature inventories; whiteboard sketching of initial concepts and interaction patterns, before building finished wireframes.

UX process included white boarding an annotated wires by Charles Erdman.

Reference Sites

Here is a list of the sites I reviewed in order to architect an experience that was inline, and possible superior, within the context of Savings.com. Take a look and see what you think. By the way, Get Satisfaction is a Q/A site you can actually port and skin to your own company website. Pretty cool if any of you need it for your biz…

Mahalo.com
Yahoo Answers
Get Satisfaction
Deals.Woot
Aardvark

Client Site: www.savings.com
Partner’s Site: www.thegroop.net

P.S. I’m currently helping a team build the User Experience for the new MySpace re-design and re-brand, which will launch in October. Be on the look out for my next post to promote the upcoming releases of Focus (a UCLA and Dept. of Defense program), Quixote / Smashbox (Los Angeles production company) and JCPenney Rewards.

Generating ideas collaboratively shapes concepts faster resulting in effective UX sprints.

At The Groop, we’ve developed a number of ways for capturing the ideas we generate in a collaborative environment. The main caveat for these sessions to be effective is that the team have the capacity for honest dialogue. Most of all, though, the team needs to stay “idea-flexible.” If egos are at play in the room, the session stops being of value.

The value is that we can quickly work through our ideas; self and group edit; and arrive at a collective solution. It’s one of the steps needed to creating a successful user experience.

Once we have an agreeable solution, we package it into a final video. Videos are a great way to disseminate the thinking to other team members that may either be remotely located or simply needing to be kept abreast of progress. How fun is it to know “you’ve got mail” and it doesn’t require reading!

This video shows Jose Caballer and myself working towards a solution aided by the Groop’s team mascot- June.

Would you have considered Facebook to be THE driver of a massive communication change at the end of 2007? Not if you’d looked at the company’s audience of an estimated 50 million users. As 2009 closed out, that number had skyrocketed to 350 million. Now it is ubiquitous with the term “social media.” Whole economies are emerging around it, just like feeder businesses that follow a Walmart store opening (Chili’s, The Olive Garden, etc.). It was perfectly placed to capture a culture shift that was a natural outgrowth of an always connected world.

So what are the emerging trends that will result in new or redefined business verticals? Read on for a few of my predictions…

DIY PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

The idea of Design With Others or Open Source Design is an emerging trend and growing market with huge opportunities for success. The idea-economy is the natural outgrowth of the information economy. We are in an age of democratized industry where an idea can go through the idea to physical product cycle with little cost from the traditional POV.

Example process for a new widget:

1. Design on Google Sketch Up >

2. Generate physical prototype with $1000 3-D printer >

3. Outsource manufacturing using alibaba.com to a factory capable of profiting from low volume runs. >

4. Streamline payments using PayPal to avoid traditional byzantine terms of manufacturing and shipping using letters of credit and bank transfers. >

5. Sales and distribution using product aggregators like foodzie.com, ftmarkets.com and etsy.com. >

The collective intelligence and “can do” spirit of garage tinkers is unleashed on global markets allowing consumers to purchase products that help them feel “special” in a world of ubiquitous homogeneity.

“RECOMMENDATION GENOME PROJECT”

Pandora-like algorithms have begun and will continue to be the method for navigating the myriad of choices that we are confronted with in a hyper information and communication world.

Recommendation networks will leave no decision  to chance. Just some of the topics these networks will and already address:

- Food

- Finances

- Insurance

- Interpersonal Relationships (Friendship, professional, sex, intellectual, activities, etc.)

- Shopping

- Hobbies

- Music

- Entertainment

This is the rise of mathematics as a way of predicting compatibility with every possible interaction humans make in their personal, professional and community lives. No decision will be left to our own intuition or “sixth sense.” In fact, the ability to have intuition may be a “sense” that is breed out of future generations.”If you like A, then you will like B” will become the method for geo-navigating through life.

The benefits are huge for any mobile company able to truly harness this power. We are in the nascent stages of a quiet revolution that will ultimately speed the consolidation of power in the hands of the elite minority.

Examples:

http://recommender.strands.com/home.php

http://labs.strands.com/

http://scouta.com/

http://www.thefilter.com/

ONLINE LEARNING

We are a culture of options. The perception of inexhaustible possibilities leads to a lack of the general population’s depth of knowledge in any one subject. Generalists will proliferate until a crisis of collapsing social structures (political, education, health care, social security, agriculture, etc.) results in government mandated vocational training.

As a recent example of this darker trending prediction, recall the end of Soviet Communism in ‘89-’91 as a precursor to what will occur in other first world societies. During Soviet Russia, a student received vocational training in high school and was expected to achieve a Graduate-level education. This generated intense specialization and, arguably, a more educated society. After the fall of communism and the capitalization of the economy, the education system adopted a liberal arts approach similar to the U.S.. It has had a disastrous effect on the society, which now expects material wealth with decreasing personal investment. In other words, more options with less effort.

The spoils will go to companies that focus on online, time-shifted learning. Over the next five years, expect an explosion in home-based learning programs as our public education system fails. Until the government mandates vocational training, the “Cultural Creatives” and “Learner Tribes” will seek out greater education opportunities through collaborative digital networks.

By the way, what is currently the largest university in the world? Is it Ohio State or the University of Texas- each with 50,000 students? Nope. It’s the University of Phoenix. According to NPR, they have over 400,000 students, the majority of those being online.

SELF-REFERENTIAL MEDIA

The link economy in the short term is a bonanza of opportunity for companies and individuals who can harness “reputation manipulation” in real-time. Over the next 2-3 years personal publishing through blogs and micro blogs will solidify itself as the legitimate information source.

Over the long term, it may be increasingly difficult to find unique and articulated voices in a world that shares the same media messaging mind space. Diversity of opinion may be harder to come by.  “Re-tweet publishing” will lead to continuous self-references within common interest groups generating spiraling circles of news. Cross pollination will eventually decrease as distinction declines resulting in a loss of diversity. The “radical” will, in reality, be much less radical.

The ability to be “special” is fleeting. Warhol’s 15-minutes of fame has been slashed to 15-seconds in a world of hyper-speed PR blitzes and dumbed-down media sound bites. The shelf life of any given media source that labels itself as outside the establishment is painfully short due to dilution of being “it”.

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So there are just a few thoughts on “trends”. More were included in the study that looked at cloud computing, open APIs, micro-transactions, slow foods, personal space, etc… All interesting stuff that I will write about in future posts!

That last line is important. Exposing content is generally an editorial decision. That is changing, however, as news sites begin to seek ways of displaying what people are most viewing or emailing. We are rapidly moving towards balanced exposure of amateur and professional interests. One way of distinguishing between professional and amateur has been found by the NBC affiliate in Washington D.C.

The NBC Washington station has done an excellent job of using social commentary to surface articles to its home page that may or may not be the same choices as the editorial staff. Like other media outlets, they are interested in what people are reading most. But they go beyond that simple metrix to mine and surface how their readers are feeling about a news piece.

Its ingenious. Next to every article, you can rate how you feel about the subject matter. Your rating is tallied and the percentage for each feeling category is displayed right next to the article. You read the pulse of the community in real-time. No need to call your neighbor to poll them on how they feel. You already know how your community is reacting.

Also, these feeling ratings are a fantastic marketing tool to generate interest in the article. It’s a crazy, smart feature that I will definitely copy for a future project. I love it!

1. Here’s the home page. Notice the first sentence under the site’s identity. They used a script font to distinguish it from the rest of the content throughout the site. Script suggests hand written = people powered… nice design decision.

Note the copy below the header… “Locals are laughing…” It’s a hot link to the news article.

2. At the news article, you now see all prior readers’ feelings. Note that you can do this without logging in… no membership required, just anonymous polling.

3. The polling tool shows the current sentiment before you indicate yours. It encourages participation. Once you make your choice, immediate feedback is provided and you “feel” your voice has been recorded.

My selection is registered without a page refresh. It shows what I voted for, and encourages me to share it. Brilliant.

Imagine this same concept being used for policy oriented issues that are digitally distributed in the form of news articles, PR releases, videos, white papers, etc. Immediate feedback in an easy to use format. Get ready for the new democracy!!

If our tools allow us to produce project artifacts faster, can our solutions remain a product of deep consideration?

Over the last year, I’ve been following Adobe’s release of a very particular piece of software that has got me excited. It’s called Catalyst and it will create a new set of challenges for the field of user experience. Let me first explain what it does…

Adobe Catalyst, currently in beta form, allows for a visual designer or a UX architect to import either a Photoshop (.psd) or Illustrator (.ai) document and create interactive elements. Catalyst use the assets and layers brought in with the original document. This is a tremendous leap forward in two important areas- the selling of ideas and the production of approved designs. Let me focus on the former.

In the UX discipline, a core deliverable is the wire-frame or page schematic that documents a number of important components. It communicates everything from the site / page navigation and content hierarchy, to the proposed interactivity (ie, what happens when I click here). These documents have always been delivered in a static form. You print them out and present them to the client. They are not intended to represent visual design. They are intended to document how each page will function and its content development needs.

The benefit, and possible danger, of Catalyst is that we can now present clients with wire-frames that are interactive. Formerly, if you want to communicate “states” of a drop-down menu, for instance, you had to show each static step as a different drawing. With Catalyst, you can now interact with the element and see the changing states. Wow! That’s a huge leap forward in comprehension and can help everyone on the team better understand what you proposing to build.

If pictures are worth a thousand words and video is worth, umm, a thousand pictures, then scrolling / clickable wireframes are worth…? The more interaction is demonstrated, the fewer leaps the imagination must make.

The danger? Well, honestly, I believe there is something good about NOT demonstrating more detail in the early stages. The closer we approximate the final product, the greater likelihood clients will find that execution sufficient. Taking a project through a full process of discovery, strategy, architect, design and engineering (the common approach) allows for ideas to mature. It allows for a team to live with a client’s business and the proposed solution, rather than quickly producing and launching.

Please note that there is sometimes value in doing fast iterations and testing them in the market. That is a great strategy for a start-up who is exploring which ideas gain traction. I don’t debate that strategic wisdom. I only pose the question- if our tools allow us to produce project artifacts faster, we best be thinking how our solutions remain deeply effective.

Until I write about that subject, however, let me guide you back towards Adobe Catalyst. Learn more about the product and download a demo of Catalyst at Adobe.

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Jared Spool. You know him, you love him, and you can see him when he keynotes MX: Managing Experience on March 7th.

He’s graciously allowed us to repost this article so we can give you an idea of what his MX talk is based on.

The 3 Qs for Great Experience Design
By Jared M. Spool
(Originally published: Oct 06, 2008 here)

For more than seven years, we’ve studied how the great user experience teams succeed. We’ve looked at a variety of variables to isolate what it takes. We’ve looked at management structure, employed methodologies, best practices, and hiring qualifications. We’ve looked at team communication techniques, requirement gathering techniques, the target industry, and the geographic location. All said, we’ve inspected about 250 different variables for dozens of organizations across a wide variety of industries, educational institutions, and government.

As with most things, most variables don’t play a role. However, we found three key variables as being critically important: vision, feedback, and culture. Using these three variables, we’ve created corresponding questions to help us quickly rate a team’s experience design prowess. Teams that answer these questions well are far more likely to create great experiences than the rest of the pack.

Factor #1: Understanding the purpose of vision
Here’s the first question we ask: “Does everyone on your team know what the experience will be like interacting with your offerings five years from now?”

When the answer is affirmative, any team member can describe what the user’s experience will be like in five years. They’ll tell us a story, like this real one from a century-old insurance company:

“An insured home and car owner, having just had a tree fall on their garage, will log into the site, explain the damage, upload pictures, and get initial claim approval to start temporary repairs and get a rental car—all within a few minutes. Within the next 24 hours, inspection appointments and a detailed damage assessment are scheduled and reviewed, and the repairs are underway within 48 hours. All the payments are handled electronically from the insurance company, with a single NET-60 bill sent to the policy holder for the deductibles.”

This story is an experience vision. It outlines how the person, in this case someone who insures both their home and car with the company, can make a joint claim and quickly start the recovery process. Notice that the story doesn’t describe the specifics of the design or the system — that’s not important. What’s important is understanding the experience of the policy holder.

While this particular story may not sound that interesting or difficult to someone outside, for this organization it’s a radical departure from today’s experience. Their business units currently don’t talk to each other and pretend that customers don’t exist beyond their own individual products. So, this integrated vision shows a radical departure and eliminates much of the frustration caused by today’s organizational reality. For this organization, five years is aggressive for the substantial, under-the-covers changes that this vision will require.

We like looking five-years ahead because it gets beyond the immediate reactive requirements and starts considering what a great experience could be. If we only looked one year ahead, we’d be stuck with the current realities. If we look too far out, we get into the realm of science fiction.

Because everyone on the team has the same vision, they are all on the same page for what it takes to succeed. Think of it as a stake in the sand on the horizon. Everyone can see the stake and knows when they are taking baby steps towards it and when they are moving away. The stake can move at any time (and, for some organizations, does frequently), but that’s ok, since everyone can see the change and start moving in the new direction.

Struggling teams can’t answer this question affirmatively. They either have never considered beyond the problems of the day or everyone has a different vision. Working to have a solid vision that everyone shares will go a long way to help these teams.

Factor #2: Having a solid feedback mechanism
While the first question deals with where the team is going, the second question deals with where the design has been: “In the last six weeks, have your team members spent at least two hours watching people experience your product or service?”

We’re looking for teams that can answer affirmatively no matter when we ask. That means they are regularly watching the users and learning from them.

These observation sessions can happen in a variety of ways (and in the best organizations, the variety is wide). They can be usability tests or field studies. In each case, each team member has spent a minimum of two hours observing the current experience.

Note that we’re not talking about surveys or satisfaction measures. Those instruments are often flawed and only give a very small piece of the picture. In the best case, they can tell us whether users are frustrated or delighted, but they can’t tell us why. The team needs to observe the experience, in a detailed manner, to really get the information required to make the critical decisions.

Six weeks is an important period. In our research, the average team member works on an experience design project for twenty-four months. This means they’ll encounter a minimum of 16 separate experiences during their tenure, working out to be an average of 48 observations for a four-member team during that period. All of that detailed information can’t help but create better informed decisions in the design process.

Longer than six weeks and the exposure to the users starts to wear off. It’s far less likely that a team member will say, “What about when we saw Fred have problems with accessing multiple policies?” when Fred’s experience happened months before.

Many struggling teams have never had a single member observe the experience of using their design, even though, in some cases, millions of users interact with the design every day. In other cases, they only get data from indirect sources or they’ve had limited exposure during their tenure. When this happens, each member of the team can only talk to their own experience of using the design, which is very likely to be at odds with how real users experience it.

Factor #3: Living a culture that relishes “failure”
The first two questions are straight-forward and make sense, from a strategic perspective. You have to know where you’re going and you have to know what you’ve already built. The last question, on the other hand, can seem counter-intuitive: “In the last six weeks, has your senior management held a celebration of a recently introduced design problem?”

In most organizations, problems are not cause for celebration. However, in a culture that pushes for frequent small changes, problems become opportunities for improvement. Teams that answer affirmatively have established a culture that not only accepts failure, but relishes it as a way to learn about the users and their needs.

At a major software corporation, the CEO regularly holds parties to give out a valued award, shaped as a full-size life preserver, to individuals who have created “learning opportunities” by introducing a problem into the design. Of course, the CEO acknowledges that the problem wasn’t introduced intentionally. But, because it made it into the design, the organization learned important lessons they can use going forward. Receiving the life preserver award from the CEO has become a high honor within the company.

For example, a technology company recently experienced a massive server outage as, upon the release of a highly-desired new feature, millions of users tried to upgrade simultaneously. While the server outage was a major embarrassment (reflected in the press and on Wall Street), it was because of a successful marketing and design campaign for highly-desired functionality. Despite the momentary crisis, the organization simultaneously learned how to create desirable enhancements while also learning the impact that it has on their infrastructure — both valuable lessons they’ll refer to for years to come.

The best organizations hold these celebrations frequently, because they are constantly learning from their mistakes. By making the learning process explicit, through their acknowledgement and reward, the culture starts to look for it. As the old saying goes, “That which is measured gets done and that which is rewarded gets done well.”

Struggling organizations do not hold celebrations of what they perceive to be design problems. Instead, they’ll punish the “culprits” and put new product-preventing policies in place to stop it from re-occurring. Soon, the original stimuli for these policies are forgotten and the organization is doomed to repeat the mistakes.

Driving Towards Improvement
The neat thing about these three questions is their applicability to constant improvement. Teams can self assess and look for opportunities to answer the questions better.

A good team may have a start to the vision, but hasn’t communicated it to everyone who has influence over the design. The team may occasionally get feedback on their current experience, but hasn’t seen anyone recently. And there’s always opportunities to highlight the latest things they’ve learned, even if it was a difficult learning process.

While further research could show there are other factors that influence a team’s success, it’s clear to us that these three factors are critically important. Fortunately, improving them has little downside, making them a serious candidate for any amount of investment the organization can afford.

Problem: moving groups towards successful completion of project milestones is often hindered because the solutions are developed independent of the team.

Solution: stand up, grab a dry board marker and draw. Documentation started. Team approval secured.

Digital agencies and design shops produce a lot of smart documents for their clients. They spend time in meetings discussing the strategy and high-level execution requirements. Once the tasks are assigned, we retreat to our separate corners; develop some documentation from the POV of our specialty; and  return to the conference room looking to get confirmation that our interpretation was correct.

If not correct?… sorry… keep evolving or even start back at square one. The idea is to keep refining as we get group buy-in, often wasting everyone’s time with small incremental movement towards a solution.

A faster path is to use the first or second meeting to begin concrete ideation using white board markers to diagram the strategy and architecture. When you’ve got people in a room, use them! Harness the collective knowledge to develop the screens right there! Take a stab, defend a position… but stay flexible and fluid in order to generate ideas and layouts from the whole team.

White board sketches provide clarity and concensus.

In some recent projects, we relied on our collective wisdom to short circuit the normal process. It’s as if we jumped from square two to square eight without a penalty. At first, the idea of throwing about your ideas without time to consider the implications or confirm your instincts is scary. We all want to be right- or at least smart -when we put ourselves in front of the team.

Ideation isn't meant to be pretty, but expressive as we move towards specificity.

If the goal is to find the best ideas, then starting with a sketch gets all them on the board and, if orchestrated properly, allows for the entire team to voice their opinion up front, not later in the process.

Sketch for a flash video editor.

These shots show diagrams of ideation sessions that went directly to wireframes. The process looked something like- (a) generalize; (b) specify with drawings; (c) photograph; (d) make it look pretty. When the first round of wireframes were presented, it confirmed what everyone had already agreed to. The process was sped up ten-fold without loss of knowledge or insufficient time to marinate.

Home Page Sketch

Landing Page Sketch

Resulting Wireframe

A job well done = fast, effective and delivered with the collective genius baked in…

Problem: When presenting the discoveries made about a client’s business, we have historically presented documentation that is largely ineffective because it subscribes to the idea that breadth creates value.

Solution: Present large info-graphic boards that communicate the structure of a pertinent narrative. Introducing “Site-Scapes!”

While working with The Groop on a project for the country’s largest employer and one of the top public universities, we took the bulk of our discoveries from three sources and made them come to life with a “Site-Scape”. Our definition of a Site-Scape is a mash-up of user definitions, brand attributes and the service’s value proposition (i.e., a clear statement of the tangible results a customer gets from using the product or service). The original idea for these “design-scapes”, as they were known, began with Henry Min, formerly of The Groop, and Jose Caballer, Chief Creative Whip at The Groop. We’ve now evolved them to add more structure around the Discovery Phase deliverables.

The challenge with any documentation that presents insights is to surface those insights in context. This is where they generate the greatest understanding and ultimately validate why the client hired us. When presented out of context, they fall flat and fail to generate the desired “eureka” moment…

That said, the goal of this Site-Scape was to visually communicate three things:

1. An affirmation that we understand the user (s) and their needs.
2. Provide references to our proposed features- by Phase -and their organizing principles.
3. A suggested visual language we might develop for the design.

Reading from left to right, we first identified our three primary users paired with their needs. We reminded the viewer (client) of the interviews conducted with the program trainers and constituents by using quotes placed to underscore a particular program need. Instead of developing wireframes we expressed their essence: possible features that support the value proposition and the suggested actions each might demand of the user.

The Site-Scape led the viewers eye along a path of visual forms- the same path a user takes as they work through the site and that reflects the real-life experiences the service is designed to address. All of this impresses upon the client our understanding of who this site is intended to serve. Simply put- we get the needs of the end-user.

Lastly, we did provide supporting documentation. In this context it becomes less critical to the story of our vision summarized by the Site-Scape. Ultimately, our goal, is to make the supporting material irrelevant. As Site-Scapes become more symbolic and referential they become more powerful. I don’t foresee these visualizations holding the same symbolism of the paintings of Leonardo Di Vinci or Albrecht Dürer, but it’s something to shoot for!

In one four-hour meeting we accomplished what would have taken much longer in a “traditional” deliverable presentation. I’m factoring in the reality that presentations normally require (1) orientation to the materials; (2) explanation of the materials; and finally, (3) the client’s time spent digesting all of it on their own time.

On a higher level, the goal of any presentation is to create a story the listener engages with no matter their learning style: visual, kinesthetic, or auditory. Our goal is to allow clients to move towards faster, more immediate comprehension of our solution. After all, we are betting that this is exactly what we will deliver as a final user experience.

If you’ve had experience presenting “alternative” documentation to clients, I welcome your comments. I hope to hear from you.

Mr. Mau was spot on with this statement and it is exactly the experience I had checking out a bike in Paris, France. The process was rife with usability gaps making me aware of the system’s design.

Problem: A difficult check-out process discourages use.

Solution: Create two entry paths into system for repeat and first time users.

On one early Parisian morning before my family had awaken, I left our hotel and approached a bike station. The kiosk was inviting and after first reviewing the display screen and then the input device, I started punching buttons. I selected my language (British) and then started the process of checking out a bicycle.

The verification and selection process essential is broken down into two phases which was never communicated to me. I’ll start with the first.

Phase One:

1. Activate screen
2. Indicate length of rental pass: one day or one week
3. Chose payment method
4. Swipe card
5. Enter card PIN
6. Card confirmation
7. Receive receipt of day pass purchase and pass number.
8. End session.

Now I should have been on top of this, but during the first phase, I swiped my card and made my first mistake. I was focused on the main screen to provide feedback on my card status. What I missed was that the second screen – located at waist height – was waiting for me to enter my PIN number. Since I didn’t see this prompt, the credit card verification process failed and my card was declined.

I had to re-initiate the process with another card thinking my funds had run dry. I finally realized my error and looked down. I felt a bit foolish, but completed the task. The kiosk printed out a receipt and thanked me for the business. Wait, how do I get the bike? Was I going to be charged for a bike that I didn’t have? I was NOT feeling secure in this transaction (a key usability principle of all digital task flows).

I started the process again, unknowingly starting phase two.

Phase Two:

1. Activate screen.
2. Enter in the day pass number.
3. Receive confirmation that the account is active.
4. Indicate that you do not need help or want to check the status of your account. Instead, select the equivalent of “rent a bike”.
5. Enter the bike number you wish to rent.
6. Bike position is now primed for you to remove the bike (maybe it stays that way for ten minutes?).
7. The screen indicates that the process is now complete and “signs off” returning to the home screen.
8. Walk to bike position, press button and remove bike from the station.

At the point where I was prompted to chose a bike number, I left the kiosk to go inspect the bikes. I wanted one that was clean and had inflated tires. Of course, during this time someone could have come in and started their own checkout. When I returned to the kiosk with my memorized bike number, the screen had timed out…

Obviously the system should have prompted the user to chose a suitable bike before initiating the checkout process. OK, let’s start this again…

After going through the necessary steps again and getting to the seventh step, I notice that the prompt is NOT asking me to choose from all the bikes available, but from two of the approximately twenty bikes available at this location.

I walk out to inspect which of the two is in the best condition and upon my return find the screen has timed out again. This was now officially frustrating…!

This was a longer process than I had anticipated. I was being required to learn the system through trial and error. If this was a website, I would have moved on to another task by now. My time for a ride around the city in the early morning light was being eaten up simply trying to figure out how to checkout a bike- the purpose of the program.

The point of this post is to show how interfaces in the real world are similar to online or mobile ones. If it’s poorly executed, we are aware of the flaws and our perception of the whole business proposition is negatively affected. Each application must be designed with the end-user in mind. Usability design practices must be observed to develop tasks flows that are intuitive and consistent.

My solution for this problem would be to have two entry methods in to the system. The first is for newbies who are being acquainted with the system and require greater guidance. The second is for repeat users who are on the fast track. If this simple solution were instituted, it might encourage a larger population to use the bikes. I know I’m not the first tourist to be frustrated by this process.

A communal bike system is an excellent resource and should be a model for all urban areas. However, this execution failed to live up to the promise. It felt like the processing requirements of each technical system (identify verification, payment transaction, time/place stamping, etc.) were poorly integrated.

Ultimately, I had a very enjoyable bike ride. I experienced Paris at a human pace while getting exercise and using no petroleum. I will use the system again, but next time, I’ll know how to work with its eccentricities to get to my ride faster. Fortunately for government, there doesn’t exist a competing rental program.

What I did not know, was that I would be confronted with visualizing my own world! A company called Wordle scanned Erdworks and generated a tag cloud ranking the most commonly used words on the site.

As I uploaded my URL and waited for the applet to scan the site content, I began to ponder what words would be most visible. I made a split second assumption and, when the scan was completed, was proven completely wrong. I had not anticipated that there was a concentration of words surrounding the green movement. I had assumed there would be more language around user experience design.

What this reinforced was how basic assumptions can be evolved or challenged through the use of smart information graphics. This quick experiment quickly made a relatively large amount of complex data understandable.

I have a new found respect for the ubiquitous tag cloud navigation element as an effective communication tool. Thanks Wordle!