Virtual Floorspace

Customers access business web sites to achieve a goal or specific purpose. They are rarely there just to look around, unless they are looking for a job and want to understand the company better. Customer goals can often be grouped into distinct modes, such as reading content, finding products or documents, purchasing products or services, learning new processes or procedures, etc. Understanding these modes is important when designing the interactive space, to enable customers to easily enter a mode that clearly facilitates the activity and presents options related to that mode in a consistent way.

For example, in a resort web site or kiosk, guests may be looking for leisure activities, finding products they forgot, reading about the history of the area, etc. Each of these modes should be simple and straightforward to find in terms of access points, make it easy to achieve the most common and most valuable goals, and represent the task using design components that appear especially suited to the activity (i.e. high affordance). The modes should not be cluttered with lots of options that are unrelated to the mode customers have indicated they want to work in. Marketers often want to surround and interject this experience with lots of selling options, but many times this is interpreted by users as visual noise that damages the perception of the experience and isn’t effective. Looking at the analytics for such off-task design elements, I’ve nearly always found clicktrhroughs to be near zero. If they have to be there, make sure they are not obstructing progress in the primary activity. Billboards are okay, but on the side of the road, not in the middle of the road. And spaced apart so that the visual signal to noise ratio is at a reasonable level.

Copyright 2009, Paul Bryan, Usography Corporation (http://www.usography.com)

Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/uxexperts

Uncategorized analytics, customer interviews, e-commerce design strategy, e-retail, in-depth interviews, interview protocol, methodology, planning user research, qualitative research, task analysis, user research, web design

In previous posts, I discussed a customer interview module for task analysis. It started with capturing the customer’s general list of activities associated with the task. After capturing a customer’s lists of activities related to the task, present to the customer a more comprehensive list of tasks that map to current or future features and content. Creating this list should be part of your preparation for the session, based on a cognitive walkthrough of site paths, and prioritized on the basis of business objectives. For example, one business objective at SeaSide Resorts Unlimited is that people will check the kiosk for local happenings before they stand in line at the concierge desk, because the kiosk has more exhaustive information that can be printed. So, in the task list that will be presented to users, the task of finding local happenings on the kiosk should be included.

Add any tasks that participants mentioned when listing activities that were not present in the task list. Then discuss each task individually, asking participants to list every step they are aware of taking when they complete that task, whether online or offline. Participants may not be willing to think at this detailed level without some prodding and probing. One thing that I’ve found that helps them engage at a more detailed level in the task analysis module is to draw out a process flow or map, and allowing the participant to view it, ponder it, and add extra details or move steps around. When you finish drawing the task flow, ask the participant to read through it one more time carefully to make any final corrections or additions.

The result of this exercise should be a comprehensive, prioritized set of task flows that can be used as an input to user experience design, and as an assessment tool to evaluate design.

Copyright 2009, Paul Bryan, Usography Corporation (http://www.usography.com)

Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/uxexperts

Uncategorized customer interviews, customer research, Depth interviews, design strategy, e-commerce design strategy, e-retail, methodology, task analysis

A task analysis is a representation of user tasks, related to the web site in question, that are performed to achieve one or more goals. The task analysis defines key tasks, priorities, sequences, and relationships between data sources or entities involved in the tasks. Researchers hopefully have an idea about the most important tasks from previous interviews, web analytics, stakeholder meetings, the development team, or the project sponsor.

The task model resulting from the task analysis contains a prioritized list of tasks, grouped according to user type or site function. The task model usually includes relevant information outside the specific task steps, such as motivations for action, business value, pain points and gaps that represent opportunities. A detailed task models shows dependencies among related tasks, subdivides tasks into individual steps, and may indicate data types and other supporting information required to complete the steps. Task analysiss and user types are interdependent; each evolves as the other is better understood.

A task model shows how people accomplish their goals using a series of online and offline supports. The model should:

• Focus on tasks with the highest associated business value
• Prioritize tasks
• Note dependencies and relationships between tasks
• Capture category-specific purchase patterns
• Note differences between user types
• Note opportunities that can be exploited by the new system
• Include enough detail about sub-tasks to suggest a technical solution

Uncategorized customer interviews, e-commerce design strategy, e-retail, task analysis, user research