UserGlue UserBlog » 2008

It’s Time For Forever Web: Forever Learning, Changing, Learning, Improving

Written by Russ on June 20, 2008 – 1:18 pm

Sub-title: Beta is BS and Users Deserve Better

“Always in Beta” is one of those latest phrases that does a really good job of getting under my skin. Beta implies to me that something is purposefully not yet complete and that there are going to be some mistakes.

Some companies, like Adobe, do a really good job of utilizing a beta release program to snuff out issues that real users find and that are not in a “control” group of their selection.

That is a good thing.

However, launching a website and slapping a “beta” label on it often seems like an excuse to put garbage on the web very rapidly (in order to prove a business model, have a prototype, start to engage users, show to VCs, etc.). A “live” beta online often seems to be a mash-up of incomplete thoughts or a good reason to shrug shoulders and let issues fall off like water on a duck. Live beta mistakes are often paid for, in spades, by the users.

That is a bad thing.

We need to rid ourselves of excuses, take ownership and admit to users that, while we are relentlessly pursuing wickedly-awesome user experiences, we can make mistakes. Users need to know this and in return, they should realize that all mistakes made in the pursuit of a good user experience will ultimately lead to a correction of the mistakes down the road.

That, however, is not a beta, nor an excuse. It’s an honest, persistent state of being.

If You Build It Poorly, They Will Leave

We’ve all heard it before. There is a really good chance that many of us have said it before: If the user experience is bad, users will leave.

We’ve said that users who cannot find something are users who believe “it” does not exist.

We’ve said that we have to engage our users. We have to test our designs. We have to get to know our users to find out what makes them tick. We have to be committed to our users.

We have to do all of those things—OR ELSE.

Frankly, we say a lot of stuff and we stomp around with our “clients just don’t get it” hats on and the attitudes that all of this stuff is always right.

Maybe—just maybe—we’re not entirely right.

In fact, I think we are missing the mark more than just a little.

Crazy Talk? I Don’t Think So.

First, there are somethings we need to acknowledge and, in some cases, come to terms with.

We, as User Experience Practitioners, are NOT entirely right with all of the things that we say, all of the claims that we make and all of the preaching that we do. Even so, there is some good news…

Clients are starting to get it. It has been a slow coming, but more and more, we have jobs that are in demand. We have clients who want to make “things” better and more usable. We have clients and companies that think that an “Information Architect” or a “User Experience <something>” or a variation of those titles is something that is essential to their core process and that they need to hire those types in order to start things moving in the right direction.

Sure, often times they think we’re the cure, but much like launching a website without any sort of promotional efforts, we cannot simply happen in a vacuum, right?

Right.

There is a shift. Conference attendance appears to be up. Conferences appear to be happening every week and weekend in cities across the globe.

The tide is turning.

Value—or perceived value—is beginning to be majorly associated to User Experience Practitioners.

We are in demand.

And a lot of us are arrogant.

And a lot of us think that whatever we think is right.

Which is even more arrogant.

The User is ALWAYS Right

Nope.

Neither is your UXD Team

I am so sorry to tell you this, but the user is not always right. Of course, I’m also not naïve enough to actually think that I’m the first to put this copy. I’m not making an effort to be controversial—there is no controversy about it. It’s a fact—and even though we strive to provide users with what (we think) they want, they often do not even know what they need. For more case studies on this, well, look around the space you are currently occupying. Nearly everything in that space around you has an 800 number associated with it to a call center that deals with all kinds of customer requests (thank you, Mark Dronen). There are a lot of calls received to those call centers from people who need some assistance or support—and a lot of calls are also receive from people who have misused the product (let’s leave intention out of this for the moment).

Users often are the culprits of innovation as the mis-use something that was intended for another purpose. In the case of Flickr, companies may adapt. In the case of someone trying to use a hammer as a weapon, well, it’s not supposed to be a weapon. So, you know, the user is not always right.

Obviously, however, neither are clients.

Neither are you

Neither am I.

Can you swallow that? You’d better. At the core of all of this is something that we, as User Experience Practitioners, live in every minute of our professional lives:

The User Experience Never Ends

We all agree on that, right? We’ve all had someone ask us this in an interview as they’re trying to be clever and weed out the (ahem) fakers amongst us. If you have not experienced this, well, maybe hiring companies are finally figuring it out that we can all guess the correct answer to the question by now.

So, if the User Experience never ends, then we need to come to grips with the notion that the design process never ends, right?

Right.

It also means that we are forever striving to meet any number of objectives that are allegedly for our users and also happen to meet business goals and/or objectives, make stakeholders happy and make the people who sign the checks continue to sign those checks.

It means that, while we serve many masters and we must ALWAYS remain ever-diligent to our user goals/needs/objectives (and, ahem, that’s our one true master, right? Right.) and we do our best to accurately interpret them—nay, sell them—to our clients to deliver what is often perceived as a lesser evil, or that which is least wrong. Right?

Right.

As long as we’re being honest here, let’s remember that we’re very much steeped in the world of throw-away work (or “tries”) and iterations (“near misses”) that get us to an eventual sign-off (“conditional” or “x level” of “approval”) in order to get us to the point where prototypes (more “tries”) can lead to revisions (“post-approval enhancements”) prior to ever getting beyond development (“serious commitment”) and going live (“really serious approval”) where real users will give us real feedback that we will (should) turn into enhancements and improvements (“deviations from our best guesses and influenced decisions”) which can lead to another new project (“try, try again”).

Whew.

So What?

Now that’s the big question that should always be asked—and answered. No one should be surprised this heading is here as long as I am the author.

Everything we do when it comes to user research and user testing is done from a sampling. We do this to make best assumptions as to what behaviors are and what feedback is that can drive our projects/products to being the best that they can do for the largest possible audience.

So, we have to admit and be willing to accept a few things:

Some of those users are wrong. We need to either convert them, provide them with something that is useful to them or we simply need to find the right way to get rid of them. Sometimes users are not right for whatever it is that we are doing, and that’s okay.

We have to be willing to lose some users. We have to accept that we cannot be all things to all users and any change will bring about a risk in losing users. Because of this, we have to set an expectation to users that we are working very hard for them; we are evangelizing a never-ending user experience on their behalf and, by gosh, sometimes we have to get it wrong to get it right.

We have to get companies to admit that, along the way, there may be some mis-steps and there may be some mistakes and there may be some things that tested well but fail upon delivery. We have to get companies to talk about the fact that they are actively striving themselves to try and meet the moving target of user needs and that sometimes something goes a little wrong.

We have to talk about it. Our community needs to be able to educate our clients that this will happen.

We have to get clients to talk about it. Clients have to not only admit all of this to themselves, but to their users, as well. And no, they cannot call it BETA. Or my head will explode.

And we have to get customers to understand that one mis-step—maybe even two, or three or “x” mis-step isn’t a deal breaker. It is not enough to leave a company, a brand, a product for.

In fact, an acknowledged mis-step is all the more reason to stay with a company, a brand, a product.

Why?

Because, in my humblest of opinions, any company that is willing to make mistakes—and claim those mistakes as their own—in order to make “something” better for its users, is a company that a user should want to be connected to.

Really.

Keep Doing What You’re Doing. And More.

So, dear User Experience community, keep up the good work of educating your clients and evangelizing the never-ending UX Lifecycle. You’re doing a great job and I’m right there beside you in the thick of it all everyday.

(Really—I am!)

Do not forget, however, to educate your users. Help them understand that improvements and enhancements (or modifications, adjustments, tweaks, etc.) are being done their behalf.

Help them understand that we, and our clients, are learning from them and that every engagement they have with our clients is an engagement that we are all learning from—for them.

We may will make mistakes

We may make a left at Albequerque when we should have taken a right.

We may really, really make some wrong decisions on their behalf.

But it’s on their behalf, and that is important—because if we weren’t willing to make mistakes on their behalf, we would not be willing to learn from them so that we can better serve them.

We are constantly in flux, Some places claim to be “always in beta”. That’s lame—the intention may be to put out the message as I have been describing, but it’s also an excuse to never deliver a complete thought to users, and that is not what this is about.

Users are not stupid

Live Beta is the lie that is used to “go live” with mistakes and incomplete thoughts. It is an excuse to let someone else, sometimes users, write the requirements. It is a scapegoat that ensures that no one has to fully take the blame for an idea gone wrong. It’s “beta”, after all.

(There is a caveat here—some companies, like Adobe, Microsoft and others engage in live beta product releases that are successful and that are close to completion. They get a pass for certain cases.)

And to clarify: Beta releases are for a select group or for a select period of time–or both. Mini-releases and updates are just that: mini-releases and updates. They do not constitute a beta, they constitute making improvements, enhancements and updates. They fix something broken. The beta should be over by then, so let’s just stop the lie.

Forever Web is the truth we use to let users know that we have though through all that we’ve learned and we’ve navigated the numerous corporate political battlefields to put forth the best that we can deliver. Forever Web let’s our users know that we are willing to make the mistakes on their behalf to move closer and closer to providing the best experience.

Oh, and that we’re going to keep doing it as long as we’re around.

Posted in Rant, Usability, User Experience, User Experience Design | 4 Comments »

Unboxing the Roku Netflix Box – And Using It, Too

Written by Russ on June 5, 2008 – 11:29 pm

The Roku Netflix box arrived at my doorstep today, and FedEx’s handy email updates of the tracking status made it very difficult to make it through the rest of my meetings before commuting home. When I did finally arrive home, the tiny little box was sitting next to the substantially larger box of a Wii Fit, that somehow managed not to help me begin a new workout regime tonight.

The Roku Netflix box is simple. It’s easy to set-up if you know how to, well, set things up. I’ve got a receiver that supports 2 additional zones in my house, and I run everything through it–the HD DVD, the SqueezeBox, the XM Stereo, the Cable TV and any random kids toy that we connect to the front of the receiver.

Picture-taking aside, it took me less than 2 minutes to get everything connected and ready to use. Your mileage may vary; I have 2 Cat6 connections behind my TV which made it easy to borrow from existing appliances to get this up and running.

To start, the Roku Netflix box has a small footprint. I have a SqueezeBox 3 and it is slightly larger than half the width of that, but shares similar dimensions of height and depth. The remote is incredibly simple–and the packaging came with the batteries needed to operate it. Call me crazy, but that’s one of my favorite “little” things companies can do and let’s me quickly get to the task of setting up the new toy

The Roku Netflix box offers you many different options for connecting to your television. There are Composite, HDMI, S-Video and even Optical Audio in addition to the Component connections–which is what I used since the cables were handy I just wanted to see this thing in action.

When I connected the Roku Netflix box to my receiver, the power supply and the Cat6 connection, I noticed something:

On the box, component connections were: yellow, red, white.
On the receiver, component connections: yellow, white, red.

Who’s right, who’s wrong? Why aren’t they the same? Just curious.

Keep in mind that this box does not currently support High Definition, but it has been mentioned that the ability to do so could be given via a software update.

The next thing I noticed was that there is NO POWER BUTTON.

Got that? The only way to turn this device off, as far as I can tell–and I did go through the user guide–is to unplug. That makes me a little nervous from a bandwidth perspective, but I assume that when the screensaver kicks in the device sort of sleeps and there are no worries. But still, I worry a little.

Now that everything was connected and powered up, I went through a pretty quick-and-easy couple of set-up screens. What was most odd was that, after I chose my connection type, the box went for a software update, updated itself, restarted and then re-asked me what my connection type was again.

I’m not sure I understand why settings were apparently reset/not retained, but the steps were simple enough that it’s probably a non-issue.

All of the rest of the connection verification steps were taken care of again and the box recognized that it was not registered as of yet and provided me with a code that was good for 30 minutes on the Netflix website. I assume that after 30 minutes I’d need to restart/refresh or it would do so for me.

Naturally, I went to the appropriate URL and registered the box.

The Roku Netflix box informed me it was all registered-up and ready to go and after a few moments of lading, it started displaying a carousel view of my Watch Instantly queue. Initially, the covers of the selections were blank, but in about a half minute the imagery started displaying.