Breadcrumb Navigation

Seeing Breadcrumb Navigation Examined (via The Hot Strudel) reminded me that I’d been meaning to write a post about breadcrumb trails for a while now. The post contains a quite survey of various uses of breadcrumbs. It’s worth a peek.

First of all, here’s what I conclude about breadcrumbs in DWN:

 

Breadcrumb trails are popularly believed to increase the user’s understanding of site content and structure

by providing greater context. Studies have shown, however, that breadcrumb trails are infrequently used,

don’t necessarily increase navigational efficiency, and may not increase understanding of the site structure.

They are therefore usually supplemental to some other mechanism and often not the only way to navigate.

See:

Bonnie Lida, Sping Hull, & Katie Pilcher, “Breadcrumb Navigation: An Exploratory Study of Usages,” Usability News 5.1 (2003).

Bonnie Lida Rogers & Barbara Chaparro, “Breadcrumb Navigation: Further Investigation of Usage,” Usability News 5.2 (2003).

Since then, however, I’ve been see new, innovative uses of breadcrumb trails. In particular, they can be part of the main navigation, as with WalMart:

Or, with the German site www.manufaktum.de the breadcrumb trail is the main navigation:

Unlike WalMart, Manufaktum also allows for direct access to other levels of the nodes of the hierarchy represented in the breadcrumb via a dynamic menu (aka fly-out menu), shown in the image above (open for Leuchten).

Overall, this provides both a great deal of focus to navigation–the breadcrumb shows a single path–but also provides access to the entire site from a single mechanism. Here the breadcrumb isn’t a supplemental type of navigation, but instead is recast as a primary navigation means.

So maybe breadcrumbs aren’t just quite dead yet. It really depends on how they are implemented. Perhaps we’ll see even more innovative uses of the mechanism in the future.

 

 

Follow-up Post – European Commission: Design as a driver of user-centred innovation II

In April 2009 I posted about a European Commision looking at Design (with a capital D) as a driver of innovation. Charlotte Arwidi from this commission has now made public the results of a public survey on the report itself. See the full results of the survey here.

In a nutshell :

“91 percent of responding organisations consider that design is very important for the future competitiveness of the EU economy; 91 percent consider that initiatives in support of design should be taken at EU level.

96 percent think that initiatives in support of design should be an integral part of innovation policy in general, 74 percent think that design should be part of EU innovation policy.”

I’m not sure if the sampling of the survey is good, however. Seems there might have been a high degree of self-selection. So, yes–of course a very high percentage of people coming with a Design background will think that Design is an important part of EU innovation policy.

Still, there are some good take-aways from this latest survey. In particular, when asked about barriers to Design the questionnaire reveals:

“Respondents were asked about the most serious barriers to the better use of design in Europe. Multiple answers were possible. The most important barrier is considered the “lack of awareness and understanding of the potential of design among policy makers” (78 percent of organisations; 76 percent of private persons). The second most important barrier is considered the “lack of knowledge and tools to evaluate the rate of return on design investment” (64 percent of organisations; 62 percent of private persons). The third most important barrier is considered the “lack of awareness and understanding of the potential of design among potential design customers, i.e. private and public organisations”

The least frequently selected barriers are the “lack of designers/design companies with the right skills and/or capacity”, and the “lack of high quality design education in Europe”, indicating that there is not a lack of skilled designers in Europe. This conclusion is however partly contradicted by some respondents who suggest that Europe lacks designers with professional skills such as management, marketing and communication. This is described as a problem for designers in their communication with potential clients. Several respondents added that business managers, in particular in SMEs, do not understand design and that, due to this lack of understanding on both sides, designers and their potential customers “do not speak the same language”.”

Seems there are enough us out there with the appropriate skills, but Designers’ talents aren’t necessarily being used effectively. Hopefully, the commission can make a difference and bring awareness to the potential Design can offer innovation.

All of this, BTW, represents what I believe to be a paradigm shift in innovation. Organizations are shifting (or adding) focus from innovation through technology and operational efficiency to innovation via design and user experience. Let’s just hope Designers can capitalize on the opportunity and get their deserved place at the innovation table.

John Ferrara on Measuring Relevance

John Ferrara is an expert in online search systems. His recent article in A List Part is one of the first ones I know of outside of the academic literature that takes a systematic look at relevance. See: Testing Search for Relevancy and Precision.

“Relevance” in information retrieval is an old concept. Each year since 1992, information scientists gather at the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) to test and evaluate retrieval methods on large collections of documents. This conference is considered an extension of the Cranfield Experiments, indexing studies started in the 1960s that are regarded as the beginnings of modern information retrieval.

The primary measures used then were recall and precision. Briefly, recall is a measure of whether a search system is returning all of the possible relevant documents, or completeness. Precision is a measure of whether only the most appropriate documents are returned, or exactness. Virtually all measures of search system relevance since then have relied on these two measures. But neither are easy to really measure, and there are no practical guides for doing so.

The problem is that recall and precision are system-centered measures. Tests really just look at whether the system is functioning sufficiently from a technical perspective. But as you start to unravel relevancy in a broader context, things quickly move away from simple binary measures: it’s not a yes-no question. For instance, you get grey areas like partial relevance–when only a part of document is relevant to a person’s information need.

In a previous post, I recount some of Tefko Saracevic’s extended concepts of relevance that include more human-centered aspects. In addition to recall and precision measures, which we can call Technical Relevance, he sees four other types of relevance. To summarize again briefly:

• “Topical or subject relevance: relation between the subject or topic expressed in a query, and topic or subject covered by retrieved texts, or more broadly, by texts in the systems file, or even in existence. It is assumed that both queries and texts can be identified as being about a topic or subject. Aboutness is the criterion by which topicality is inferred.
• Cognitive relevance or pertinence: relation between the state of knowledge and cognitive information need of a user, and texts retrieved, or in the file of a system, or even in existence. Cognitive correspondence, informativeness, novelty, information quality, and the like are criteria by which cognitive relevance is inferred.
• Situational relevance or utility: relation between the situation, task, or problem at hand, and texts retrieved by a systems or in the file of a system, or even in existence. Usefulness in decision making, appropriateness of information in resolution of a problem, reduction of uncertainty, and the like are criteria by which situational relevance is inferred.
• Motivational or affective relevance: relation between the intents, goals, and motivations of a user, and texts retrieved by a system or in the file of a system, or even in existence. Satisfaction, success, accomplishment, and the like are criteria for inferring motivational relevance.”

But, as John wisely points out in his opening, user experience designers most often have little to no control over search relevancy. Part of the problem, I think, is that relevance is invisible–to stakeholders, to engineers, to designers, and to users. It’s not something you can easily put your finger on. And so, discussions around it are limited to what you get out of the box from search providers or, worse, don’t happen at all.

I suspect most information retrieval experts will cringe after reading John’s article in A List Part. It has none of the academic hygiene established in the field over the past four decades, it makes unsupported claims, and it’s far too simple of a model.

That’s probably why I like it.

Measuring relevance is far too important to be locked up in the ivory towers of academia. Search is now everywhere, and it’s fundamental to our information seeking experiences online. John gives step-by-step details on how to go about getting some measure of system relevancy. It’s hands-on and practical. His approach relies on recall and precision, for sure, but doesn’t carry any of the baggage academic measures require.

I’d personally like to see this framework extended to include qualitative feedback from users, perhaps addressing aspects like situational relevance or affective relevancy as well as partial relevance. But John has put a stake in the ground with this article, filling a gaping hole in user experience design, I believe. Hopefully this will open more discussion on the topic. Bravo.

Bad Navigation – #1 Usability Sin

(via Usability News): Neil Walker has a brief article over at Net Imperative called The Seven Sins of Usability. The number 1 sin:

Inconsistent and confusing site navigation

He writes:

Effective site navigation is important from the outset of a visitor’s journey so relevant links should be included to take visitors directly to related landing pages from search engines. Marketers need to remember that search is closely linked with the way their site works. Once on a site, visitors do not want to waste time clicking around to find what they want and will leave if they cannot locate the necessary navigation buttons. Do not rely on visitors to use forward and back arrows to navigate their way around as many people prefer to click directly through to the next page so clear signposting is essential for users to find what they are looking for. The key is to have a strong structure that is simple, effective and consistent throughout.

I agree that you shouldn’t rely on the back and forward buttons of the browsers, but I’m not sure about the blanket statement that people “prefer to click directly through to the next page.” Maybe, maybe not. Really, you’re navigation should supporting the optimal movement through your site without relying solely on the back button, but you should also account for the back button in your scheme.

Clear signposts–yes. Strong structure–sure. Consistent, effective navigation–of course. But it’s not that easy to achieve. Designing good navigation remains one of the thorniest parts of web design.

#4 refers to an overuse of industry jargon. This is also something I cover in Designing Web Navigation in Chapter 5, “Labeling Navigation.” Here an excerpt from that chapter:

Speak the Language of the User

The site should speak in terms visitors can understand naturally. It’s easy, however, for site designers to assume that others know the same terms and abbreviations they do. This may not always be the case. There are several aspects of labeling that potentially cause a mismatch in understanding. You should avoid company lingo, technical terminology, clever labels, and abbreviations while using the appropriate tone of voice.

Avoid Company Lingo
Company lingo creeps into web sites all too easily and all too often. Such jargon confuses more than it helps. In rare circumstances, where a brand name has become a household word, for instance, marketing-speak might be acceptable. But if you are inventing new products and words, chances are the “outside world” won’t understand them. And people don’t click on what they don’t understand.

Realistically, however, some products and services have trademarked names. There may even be business requirements to have a term appear in its trademarked form. In these cases, qualifying and enhancing a label with explanatory text would be helpful. Include the jargon if you have to, but explain it for better understanding.

Avoid Technical Terminology
Most visitors to a given site are not as web savvy as those who created it. Not everyone knows what a plug-in is, what a secure server refers to, or even what they can do with a sitemap. If visitors have to choose a bandwidth to view a video clip, will they know how many megabits their Internet connection is? Perhaps not. It’s best to use everyday language for clarity.

Be sure to consider the subject knowledge of your site’s target visitors; technical terminology can be precise and specific to those who do understand it.
For example, internal intranets or B2B sites may assume prerequisite knowledge of the domain, therefore technical terms will not cause problems. Or, a web site for programmers to share and exchange knowledge may require a deep understanding of the subject. On general web sites, however, subject-specific language and technical terminology may confuse, be sure to clarify any uses with simple text as well.

Avoid Clever Labels
Clever, cool, or cute labels are usually self-defeating. It may be more interesting to come up with labels that play on words while designing a site, but it’s not fun for people trying to navigate by them later.

If you feel compelled to use a witty or playful label, be sure to explain it such a way that it is understandable. Provide context or other cues as to what the label should convey. Don’t assume that people will be curious or will explore the category to figure out what a label means.

Both clever labels and abbreviations present particular problems for non-native speakers of the site’s language. Labels that play on words, use slang, or refer to idioms may be completely meaningless to a non-native speaker. Abbreviations may also require prior knowledge that can confuse. If your site has an international reach, be particular careful about the labels you choose in these respects.

Avoid Abbreviations
Abbreviations save space, but can prevent people from scanning for the right keywords quickly. Some visitors may not even understand certain abbreviations at all. Not everyone knows what FAQ, PDF, or RSS mean, for instance.

If you use abbreviations, be sure that visitors will understand them. Intranets and business-to-business sites may be able to use abbreviations without problem if users are domain experts. But on the open Web, abbreviations can stop people in their tracks.

Even so, there may be situations where common abbreviations are OK. The abbreviation “IRS,” the Internal Revenue Service in the U.S., is so pervasive in America that it would be difficult to find an American visiting the site who doesn’t know what IRS stands for. There is a clear shared reference amongst American taxpayers. Links such as Contact IRS and About IRS are fine in this situation. Even the URL uses the abbreviation: http://www.irs.gov.

Note that screen readers often have a hard time with abbreviations. The vocalization software tries to make words out abbreviations. Abbreviations for U.S. state names, for example, may sound like ahhk for AK (Alaska) or wah for WA (Washington). You can use an abbreviation tag to correlate abbreviations with their full meaning.

Use Appropriate Tone of Voice
Labels on an investment banking site generally have a different tone of voice than those on a teen music site. The one is formal and business-like; the other young and modern. It’s important to understand the appropriate tone a certain target audience expects.
Tone of voice also supports brand. Whether or not slang or popular terms are used, for instance, can reflect the values of the organization. How visitors are addressed is also important. Whether you call personal profile My Stuff or Your Personal Information makes a difference. A mismatch in tone of voice to brand may negatively affect credibility as well.

Article Of The Future

Cell Press, a publication by Elsevier Science, has an interesting effort to re-invent what an online scientific article looks like. They’ve launch a very light beta with two different prototypes, and they’ve invited the scientific community to provide feedback on this. See the Article of the Future beta website.

The Cell Press Content Innovation Team states their goals:

“The project’s goal is to take full advantage of online capabilities, allowing readers individualized entry points and routes through the content, while using the latest advances in visualization techniques. We have developed prototypes for two articles from Cell to demonstrate initial concepts and get feedback from the scientific community.”

I quite like this effort. It reflects the importance of how information in presented, which in turn affect user’s interaction content.

The team’s name is also quite interesting: “Content Innovation Team.” All too often innovation efforts are focused on technology and functionality. For a large a publisher like Reed Elsevier it really makes sense to innovate content.

It seems like the folks at Cell (finally) realized that as they move away from offline content formats, they can’t just take a shovel-ware approach of dumping their data online. Data is stored, but information is experienced. And this experience can even affect the user’s understanding of the content and the insights they draw from the material. It’s not a trivial matter. It’s also not an easy problem to solve–don’t underestimate it.

I would also add that offline content should also be innovated. That is, now that Cell is moving online, what does that mean for its offline formats both in the near term and the long term? Online content could completely replace offline, but it could also complement it. After all, people still enjoy reading books and journals as hard-copies. For example, perhaps a very condensed print version of Cell with only abstract could be distributed to subscribers. With a short, unique code the user could then get the full text. Or maybe they could swipe in a barcode to call up the online version?

Review: The Innovator’s Guide to Growth

The Innovator’s Guide to Growth, by Scott Anthony, Mark Johnson, Joseph Sinfield, and Elizabeth Altman. Harvard Business Press, 2008. http://www.innovatorsguidetogrowth.com

“Innovation” is a term that’s hard to define precisely. It can mean different things to different people at different times. Newness, invention, change, and creativity are generally associated with innovation. Still, as a field of inquiry its boundaries are blurred.

For companies looking to innovate their businesses, this vagueness presents challenges. How do you start innovating? How do you know when you’re innovating? How do you manage it? Or even more elusive: how do you measure the outcome of innovation? How do you calculate ROI? All of this begs the larger question, Is there even a process for consistently innovating?

Some people believe there isn’t any single method for companies to innovate. Scott Berkun, for one, author of The Myths of Innovation, has this to say to the common question, How do you systematize innovation?:

It’s as absurd a question as asking how to control weather or herd cats, because those approximate the lack of control and number of variables inherent in innovation. [1]

Berkun cites an interview with Steve Jobs in Business Week as an example [2]:

Business Week: How do you systematize innovation?

Steve Jobs: You don’t. You hire good people who will challenge each other every day to make the best products possible. That’s why you don’t see any big posters on the walls around here, stating our mission statement. Our corporate culture is simple.

“You don’t” is not the answer managers want to hear. (BTW, if Apple is not trying to innovate, they are doing a good job it!) Notice Jobs focuses on corporate culture instead. Innovation seems to come from within at Apple—it’s about the company’s attitude, ethos, and vision.

A key problem in systematizing innovation is the fact most attempts at innovation don’t succeed. Embarking on an endeavour that has more than a 50% chance of failing can hardly be considered a “system.” What’s more, innovations often have a long gestation period from first conception to becoming a viable business venture—sometimes decades. Bill Buxton refers to this as the “long nose of innovation” [3]. He writes:

The bulk of innovation behind the latest “wow” moment (multi-touch on the iPhone, for example) is low-amplitude and takes place over a long period—but well before the ‘new’ idea has become generally known, much less reached the tipping point.

But it really doesn’t make much business sense for companies cross their fingers and hope that one-in-a-thousand ideas develops into a viable solution.

Or does it?

Consider what’s going on at Whirlpool. A recent Business Week article outlines their program for letting thousands of ideas bubble up. [4] Each idea is then systematically reviewed by trained innovation experts with a formalized process. The i-box, or so it’s called, is a detailed score card used to evaluate innovative ideas.

Another key element in Whirlpool’s innovation program is the i-board—a 15 member panel that regularly reviews innovative ideas and funds them, as needed. Such a program takes a lot of commitment and lot of money—an estimated several million dollars a year in North America alone. But it pays off in the end: Whirlpool hopes to have $4 billion dollars in sales from its new innovations.

Whirlpool’s approach represents what’s called “green housing.” Essentially, green housing is about letting new ideas live as long as possible before either killing or supporting the idea. The company ?What If!, a consultancy in business creativity, describes green housing as follows:

Green housing is the behaviour that protects young ideas when they are at their most vulnerable, and nurtures them into healthy growth. It is an interactive behaviour that enables people to get the most out of their initial thinking by supporting each other’s ideas.

The reason green housing is so important is that creativity is rarely a sudden flash of inspiration leading to the perfect invention…We believe that green housing behaviour is at the heart of creativity in business. [4]

This makes sense. History is riddled with examples of innovations not being recognized as such on first sight. It took six years for the Wright brothers to sell an airplane commercially. Western Union turned down Alexander Graham Bell’s idea of the telephone. Yahoo! turned down Google when approached by Brin and Page at the end of the 90s. Even with a detailed scorecard, like Whirlpool’s i-box, recognizing the potential of an innovation very early in its lifecycle is difficult, if not impossible.

Still, most managers can’t place bets on every idea—even every great idea—that comes through the door. Nor can most companies fund an endless garden of inventions indefinitely. Businesses need more structure around the innovation process.

Enter The Innovator’s Guide to Growth.

If the outcome of innovation can’t be predicted consistently, the forces that shape and act against innovation can be. Perhaps this is splitting semantic hairs, but it’s an important distinction to understand before reading book. The authors explain:

Some managers believe there is no way to guide the innovation journey, because innovation is just random and unpredictable. If innovation is indeed a black box, the best that companies can do is let a thousand flowers bloom, in the hope that one of them sprouts into a substantial growth business. This is a bit like releasing a thousand monkeys into a room full of word processors and hoping they’ll produce Shakespeare. If you are lucky enough to have it happen once, you surely wouldn’t expect it to be repeatable.

Research over the past two decades has shown that many successful strategies for new growth actually adhere to a specific pattern. (p. 121).

And that’s what the Innovator’s Guide to Growth is really about: the observable, repeatable patterns of the innovation process. It’s a complete how-to book for managers looking to create growth through innovation. It takes the hit-or-miss approach out of the equation and provides a rational framework for understanding and managing innovation. And it’s based on years of experience observing and consulting companies on innovation from top experts in the field.

What’s more, the authors of The Innovator’s Guide to Growth also agree that innovation should come within. Ultimately, this is the book is about how companies can transform their organizations internally.

Disruptive innovations—in the Christensenian sense of the word—is a key lever to growth according to the authors. To recall, disruptive innovations are products, services, or approaches that transform existing markets or create new ones by trading off performance in favour of simplicity, convenience, affordability, or accessibility. This contrasts sustaining innovations, or innovations that maintain established performance improvement trajectories by offering demanding customers better performance. Disruptive innovations, on the other hand, change the competitive playing field fundamentally. The authors emphasize:

Our belief is that if you want to influence or shape a market in which you compete, sustaining strategies are the key to achieving your goal. But if you want to redefine a market, create a new one, or defend against attack from below, disruptive strategies are essential to success. (p. 5)

A brief note on terminology: In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen’s best-selling book from 1997, the author introduces what he called disruptive “technologies.” Here, he meant “technology” to mean “the processes by which an organization transforms labor, capital, materials, and information into to products and services of greater value” [6]. That is, he wasn’t only talking about hardware and capability—although those, too, could be disruptive. But “technology” is a loaded term that triggers specific associations, and many people misunderstood Christensen’s sense of the word: they assumed he was talking about hardware and capability. Later, in The Innovator’s Solution, the sequel to The Innovator’s Dilemma, Christensen changes the phrase to “disruptive innovations.”

Now, in The Innovator’s Guide to Growth we’re starting to see the phrase “disruptive strategies,” as evidenced in the quote in the preceding paragraph. This shift in focus—from “disruptive technology” to “disruptive innovation” to “disruptive strategy”—represents an important conclusion in The Innovator’s Guide to Growth: true disruption rarely comes from the features and functionality of a company’s offering. It’s not about technology, but instead business models: they are the key to disruption. As Mark Johnson and colleagues conclude in a recent Harvard Business Review article:

Truly transformative businesses are never exclusively about the discovery and commercialization of a great technology. Their success comes from enveloping the new technology in an appropriate, powerful business model. [7]

Keep in mind, too, that disruptive innovations aren’t the same as breakthrough innovations. Next generation mobile phones with faster transfer rates, 5-blade razors, the Airbus 380: these are all breakthroughs, but they are not disruptive. Ten-seat planes used as taxis, $25 mobile phones that only make calls, and online word processors with limited functionality that are free: these are disruptive. Simpler. Cheaper. More convenient.

In any example of a disruptive innovation you’ll see hard tradeoffs being made along one dimension in favour of another dimension. Mastering tradeoffs is therefore a key element in disruption. Sometimes, this means turning conventional wisdom on its head and, above all, breaking the rules. Disruptive offerings typical don’t compete along the traditional dimensions as the rest of the mainstream market.

The authors give several examples of these kinds of counterintuitive tradeoffs and rule-breaking that leads to disruption. They cite the following examples, among others:

• “Everyone in the mop category know that a map was a onetime purchase, until Procter & Gamble introduce Swiffer, whose consumable cloths now produce close to $1 billion in annual revenue.
• Everyone at Dow Corning knew that the company couldn’t afford to compete in the commodity end of its business, until its Xiameter distribution channel became a booming growth offering.
• Everyone in the music industry knew that people who had access to pirated music wouldn’t pay anything for MP3 files, until Apple’s iTunes showed how a well-designed, reasonably priced model that was tightly integrated with Apple’s iPod music player could thrive.” (p. 7-8)

This suggests looking at all of the assumptions that currently drive a mainstream market and reversing though assumptions to arrive at disruptive innovations.

The consequence of not making hard tradeoffs is what the authors call overshooting. In the pursuit of increased profits, companies naturally tend to pack more and more performance in their offerings. The result is that the average person over-served and, in the worse case, can’t use the product or service at all. But here is the dilemma: these companies have to add features and functionality, or sustaining innovations, to even compete in the market in the first place.

Consider the popular netbook. For about $300 you can easily surf the web and do basic word processing. Most people can get most of things done they need with the  netbook. This is referred to as “good enough” design.

Sales of netbooks took off, and entrants into the laptop market disrupted that space. This disruption, however, was only temporary: market incumbents quickly—and seemingly easily—matched the “good enough” design and offered their own netbooks. Today, nearly all of the computer manufacturers offer netbooks. Still, the initial disruption put companies like ASUS onto the map of a crowded playing field.

The Flip digital video recorder is another example of “good enough” design. This device does essentially one thing: makes short videos. It’s small and convenient to use. A built-in USB connector allows you to upload videos to your computer within seconds after filming (and directly to YouTube, as well). And there’s only a few buttons, so the learning curve for nearly every function is about 2 minutes—without training and without the help of manual. The Flip is really defined by what it DOESN’T have: there are no menus, no settings, no video light, no optical viewfinder, no special effects, no headphone jack, no high definition, no lens cap, and no memory card.

Again, this approach works: the Flip Ultra has been the best-selling camcorder on Amazon since its release. And it gained about 13% of the video recorder market in its first year. As David Pogue, technology reviewer for the New York Times concludes about the Flip:

The lesson is one that the electronics industry seems to miss over and over again: that creeping feature-itis often impairs your product instead of improving it. In the Flip’s case, the size, shape, ruggedness, low price and one-button simplicity take it places where no real camcorder would go. [8]

But it’s not easy to disrupt, particularly for market incumbents. Disruptive innovation strategies require deep organizational transformation. This means making tough changes—in business models, strategies, and company culture. For most managers, it’s a real paradox: how do you maintain your current targets while starting low-end ventures that don’t have predictable returns? The Innovator’s Guide to Growth shows the way—or at least a way. The authors present a clear framework for guiding this transformation.

The authors outline three larger phases in building business innovation, reflected in the first three parts to the book:

1. Indentify opportunities: Chapters 2-4 discuss customers and their activities. The authors show that segmentation is important, including identifying non-customers. Understanding jobs people are trying to get done is then the real first factor in identifying innovations.
2. Formulate and shape ideas: In this section, the authors recommend to start by focusing on ideas that solve customers’ problems or unmet needs. But also look at competitors and how the ideas and company fit into the market.
3. Build the business: The two chapters in this part focus on managing the innovation process internally, including how to form and manage innovation teams.

A fourth and final section of the book describes building the right capabilities for innovation, thus amplifying the internal transformation theme. The last two chapters discuss the institutionalization of innovation as well as implementing metrics to measure progress and success.

The Innovator’s Guide to Growth should appeal to a broad group of readers. But user experience designers, in particular, should find large parts of the books very familiar. There were many times in reading the book that I thought to myself “right on, brother” or “that’s obvious” but also “no duh.” It seems large part of innovation frameworks, such as the one outlined here, overlap with user-centered (UCD) design principles, particularly customer insight and indentifying opportunities. But shaping ideas and developing concepts are also something designers particularly good at.

UCD and innovation ultimately have the same goal: the creation of solutions that bring businesses value by solving customers’ problems. In other words, both ultimately want their innovations to be adopted.

UCD seems to focus on only part of the innovation equation, however. And really, this is a short-coming of the UCD movement in general: practitioners have, by and large, failed to tell business and system developers really what to do. This is where The Innovator’s Guide to Growth fits in: it’s not only about knowing your customers, their problems and creating solutions to address those problems, but also how to transform businesses to capitalize on innovations.

Beyond this book, there is a quickly growing body of literature around business innovation that has lots of commonalities with UCD methods. This presents a real chance for UCD and designers in general—to make a difference with our methods and perspectives and to gain status in the business world. Of course, there has been a dull rumble about “design thinking” in business literature, and there have been calls for business types to real on the left-brain thinking of creative types. But many business innovators and strategists really don’t know that the decades of UCD approaches even exist. And they are, in part, re-inventing their own methods.

We really need much more cross pollination between both sides, I believe. And it shouldn’t only be the turtle-necks reaching out to the suits: the business types should seek out designers to help them solve their business problems, particularly when talking about innovation.

A wealth of case stories make this book down-right interesting to read. Each chapter ends with tips and questions to help, making the material in the book more so practical. There are even checklists (such as the Disrupt-O-Meter on pages 155-157) and an accompanying website with downloadable spreadsheets and documents (www.innosight.com/resources). The FAQ at the end of the book is also quite practical.

The structure of the book promotes an enjoyable front-to-back reading, but the chapters can also be accessed individually and in any order. It’ll prove to be an invaluable reference source on any innovation manager’s desk. Anyone looking to implement a complete innovation program should own this book. But also, just about anyone in an organization looking to transform itself will get something from the Innovator’s Guide to Growth. It’s highly recommended.

[1] Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation. O’Reilly, 2007.

[2] “Voices of Innovation: Steve Jobs,” Business Week (Oct 2004): http://compuserve.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_41/b3903408.htm

[3] Bill Buxton, The Long Nose of Innovation,” Business Week (Jan 2008). http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jan2008/id2008012_297369.htm

[4] Jessie Scanion, “How Whirlpool Puts New Ideas Through the Wringer,” Business Week (Aug 2009). http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/aug2009/id2009083_452757.htm

[5] What If?!, Sticky Wisdom. Capstone, 2002.

[6] Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma. Collins Business Essentials, 1997.

[7] Mark W. Johnson, Clayton M. Christensen, Henning Kagermann, “Reinventing Your Business Model.” Harvard Business Review (Dec 2008).

[8] David Pogue, “Camcorder Brings Zen To The Shoot,” New York Times (Mar 2008). http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/technology/personaltech/20pogue.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Subjective Factors in Information Seeking

This article in JASIST caught my eye:

“The role of subjective factors in the information search process,” by Jacek Gwizdka (Rutgers), Irene Lopatovska (Pratt). Forthcoming.

“Subjective factors” are any and all of the feelings and perceptions users have while seeking information:

In this article, we refer to ratings that were self-reported by searchers as subjective factors. This broad term includes affective (e.g., positive and negative feelings), cognitive (e.g., perception of being lost), and evaluative (e.g., judgment of task difficulty) measures that reflected searchers’ perceptions of self and the search environment.

Not surprisingly, the authors show that stuff like emotions and subjective perceptions play an important role in searching for information online:

The findings confirm some previous results as well as extend them. For example, we found the link between objective search-task difficulty (e.g., the amount of time spent on the task, number of pages visited, etc.) and the perception of task difficulty; the link between the mood and search behavior and outcomes. All these findings are in line with previous research on the role of subjective factors in information seeking.

Our original findings suggest that better mood before and during the search correlates with better mood after the search, but also correlates with worse performance on the search task and lower satisfaction. We based our analysis on statistical correlations. The effects of controlled factors , and the relationships between variables with a strictly defined order in time allow us to talk about plausible causal effects. If causal relationships are verified, the finding implies that mood might be a major predictor of search outcomes (regardless of the task or the interface), and individual differences between the searchers (optimists vs. pessimists, searchers experiencing positive vs. negative affective states, etc.) might have a major effect on search outcomes. To a certain degree, this finding also questions the efforts to design pleasurable search experiences since feeling good during the search does not seem to translate into better search task outcomes. Due to the potential importance of these findings, they should be further investigated and validated.

Very interesting that mood plays affects success of a search outcome.

I’ve written and talked about the potential role emotions play in information seeking in the past. In fact, the authors cite my 2006 JASIST article: “I’m feeling lucky : The role of emotions in seeking information on the Web.” And I presented a model at the 2004 IA Summit in Austin called the Information Search Experience (ISX).

Or see a previous blog posting with an excerpt from Designing Web Navigation, where I also briefly mention emotions and information seeking.

Kate Rutter on Slime Mold

Kate Rutter gave a presentation at the IA Summit in Memphis this year on slime mold.  That’s right, slime mold. What’s that got to do with IA and UX? Nothing. And Everything.

Hear the whole presentation on Boxes and Arrows. In a nutshell, slime mold aren’t animals or plants. They’re really both. They change and adapt to their enviroment.   To have effective projects, we have to deal with our organizations and environments. This isn’t trivial to UX work. In fact, I think THE biggest challenge. And we can learn from slime mold.

You gotta read the article to really get the point:

• Web version (html)
• Print version (pdf)
• Current Bulletin issue (html, not a permalink)
• Complete Bulletin issue, August/September 2009 (pdf)

Web Design and Typography

via InfoDesign

The folks at Information Architects Japan have an interesting article about typography online. The title says it all: Web Design is 95% Typography.  A little exaggerated in propotion but they make a good point: typography online is often neglected and misunderstood. I agree with this point. Finding a good information design specialized in online typography.

The resources at the end of the article are really good.

The problem I have with this article, though, is that it’s not well written. (Note that this comment is not based on grammar alone as I realize the authors may not be native English speakers–it’s more about the structure and argument presentation). This is something that annoys me more and more. Maybe I’m getting like a grumpy old man as I get older, but writing also seems to be a forgotten craft. There are some bad writers out there. But content still is kind, you know.

Maybe I’ll write an article with the title “Web Design is 95% Writing Well.”

Personas and Innovation

In preparation for my talk at the Euro IA conference this year, I’m re-reading Diffusion of Innovations by Evertt Rogers. I came across this statement and immediately thought of personas:

One of the most distinctive problems in the diffusion of innovations is that the participants are usually quite heterophilous. A change agent, for instance, is more technically competent than his or her clients. This difference frequently leads to ineffective communication as the two individuals do not speak the same language. (p. 19)

Personas are a way for designers to conceptually deal with a hetergenous target group. They build the necessary empathy for the user to allow us designers to “communicate” effectively with them through our designs. They also help focus our attention. But in light of the above quote, personas may also lead to solutions that are more readily adopted by the target population. Why? Because the use of personas in design results in more satisfaction for the users they represent. As Alan Cooper says in The Inmates Are Running The Asylum:

The broader a target you aim for, the more certainty you have of missing the bull’s-eye. If you want to achieve a product-satisfaction level of 50%, you cannot do it by making a large population 50% happy with your products. You can only accomplish it by singling out 50% of the people and striving to make them 100% happy. It goes further than that. You can create an even bigger success by targeting 10% of your market and working to make them 100% estatic. It might seem counterintuitive, but designing for a single user is the most effective way to satisfy a broad population.

So if a common goal of innovators is to have a target population actually adopt the innovation at hand, personas are a tool that help meet that goal. Now, that might sound obvious but it’s good to have an explicit reasoning that marries the concept of innovation adoption and personas. You can throw on to your pile of arguments for using personas.

And vice-versa: when developing an innovation or innovation programme be sure to use personas to focus your attention. This means that personas should represent dimensions such as adoption rate in the persona description (e.g., early adoptors or laggards?).  Focusing on both ends of the spectrum at the same time may be more harmful than helpful in many cases.

Paper on the Effectiveness of Personas

A new research paper investigates the effectiveness of personas in design teams to arrive at usable designs: Real or Imaginary: The effectiveness of using personas in product design, By Frank Long. People have advocated the usefulness of personas for a long time now–from Cooper to Pruit and Adlin. It’s good to see some more solid evidence to support the use of personas.

Here’s the abstract:

The use of personas as a method for communicating user requirements in collaborative design environments is well established. However, very little research has been conducted to quantify the benefits of using this technique. The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of using personas. An experiment was conducted over a period of 5 weeks using students from NCAD. The results showed that, through using personas, designs with superior usability characteristics were produced. They also indicate that using personas provides a significant advantage during the research and conceptualisation stages of the design process (supporting previously unfounded claims). The study also investigated the effects of using different presentation methods to present personas and concluded that photographs worked better than illustrations, and that visual storyboards were more effective in presenting task scenarios than text only versions.

Design de Navegação Web – DWN in Portuguese

Got an unexpected package this morning: a copy of Design de Navegação Web, the Portuguese translation of Designing Web Navigation.

Emotions and Design – Mood Maps

via Steve Baty, I came across a post by Will Evans called Design Ethnography & Mood Maps. He touches on two of my favorite topics at the moment: ethnography and emotions in design. In particular, Will introduces the concepts of Mood Maps to record user emotions. In a nutshell, mood maps are about mapping the emotional states people have to phases of a process.

This is similar to what I recommend in what I call the Information Search Experience (ISX), which I presented at the IA Summit in Austin TX in 2004. See my presentation: Information Search Experience: Emotions in Information Seeking. Of course, I was focused on information seeking in my model, but the principle is the similar: uncover the different states of emotions people have and map them back to phases of a given process. Here are two publications where I also present this idea:

• “I’m Feeling Lucky: The Role of Emotions in Seeking Information on the Web,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57(6), 813-818 (April 2006).
• “Feeling Lucky? Emotions and Information Seeking,” interactions, v. XI.5 (September-October 2004).

I also present this very briefly in Designing Web Navigation. Here’s the excerpt from the end of Chapter 2:

Emotions in Information Seeking
Information seeking on the web, in particular, is an emotional experience. Unfortunately, confusion and uncertainty tend to dominate feelings of enthusiasm and optimism. For many web surfers, the joy of discovery and pride of learning can be rare feelings against a backdrop of frustration and a sense of being overwhelmed.
When discussing the emotions users have while finding information on the web, it is critical to look at common situations and states users are in. Here is where patterns in basic human information-seeking behaviors give rise to a framework for both evaluating and designing web-based search and navigation systems.

Information Search Process
A holistic approach to explaining the user’s experience in information seeking, the Information Search Process (ISP) is a model of searching for information with a difference: it takes emotions into account. Developed by Carol Kuhlthau, a professor at Rutgers University, the ISP has six stages:

• Initiation – The user becomes conscious of a gap in knowledge. Feelings of uncertainty and apprehension are common, and the main task is to recognize a need for information.
• Selection – Uncertainty often gives way to feelings of optimism and a readiness to begin searching. The task is to identify and select the topic to be investigated. Thoughts are forward-looking and attempt to predict an outcome.
• Exploration – Feelings of uncertainty, confusion, and doubt return. A general inability to precisely express an information need commonly results in an awkward interaction with the search system.
• Formulation – Rising confidence and decreasing uncertainty mark a turning point in the process. Forming a focus becomes the chief task as thoughts become clearer.
• Collection – Interaction with the information system is most effective and efficient. Decisions about the scope and focus of the topic have been made and a sense of direction sets in. Confidence continues to increase.
• Presentation – The goal now is to complete the search and fulfill the information need. A sense of relief is common, as well as satisfaction or dissatisfaction (in the case of a negative outcome). Thoughts center on synthesizing and internalizing what was learned.

Kuhlthau also observed a “dip” in confidence often seen after a seeker began looking for information and started to encounter overwhelming, perhaps conflicting information. This contradicts the previous assumption that confidence steadily increases as more information is found. A seeker “in the dip” can experience uncertainty, confusion, and even anxiety until a focus is formed or a search is broken off.

The existence of that dip suggests a gap between users’ natural information use and information system design. Acquiring more information in initial stages (particularly in Exploration) increases rather than decreases uncertainty. In terms of emotions, searching for information is a discontinuous endeavor with highs and low of confidence and certainty.

Tailoring the ISP
In an attempt to avoid the dip, you can use Kuhlthau’s theoretical model as the framework for navigation design, tailoring an ISP to reflect the actions, thoughts, and feelings for your site visitors. The steps are:

1. Segment users and create profiles. An ISP only applies to a particular target group.
2. Identify the information seeking stages and user goals for each. The established phases will serve as a starting point, but must be adapted.
3. Record the typical feelings, thoughts, and actions at each stage.
4. Map stakeholder goals to each stage. What is your organization trying to achieve and how does it fit in with the natural navigation process of users?
5. Derive features and requirements for the site that map to each phase in the seeking process

This is best summarized in a large table. The columns are labeled Actions, Thoughts, Feelings, Features, and Business Goals. The rows are the stages in your tailored ISP.

20 User Experience Books You Should Own

UX By Design has a list of 20 UX books they feel every designer should own. See their post 20 User Experience Books You Should Own.

Designing Web Navigation is #4 on the list. I’m not sure if this is a ranked list or not, but it’s still nice to appear towards the top. AndI’m in good company–places 1-3 rightfully go to:

1. Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World, by Peter Merholz
2. Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning, by Dan Brown
3. Contextual Design: A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs (Interactive Technologies), by Hugh Beyer

Breaking The Rules of Web Design

via The Hot Strudel…

Interesting article over at Web Designer Depot called “10 Web Design Rules You Can Break.” The examples are quite interesting and inspiring. Horizontal scrolling and mystery meat navigation? Why not!

I disagree with the fundamental premise of the article though: ALL so-called design rules can be broken–not just these 10. This is a point I try to make in Designing Web Navigation.

From the preface of my book:

Web navigation design is a craft. You must employ creative problem solving skills to arrive at a practical solution by considering and examining different possibilities. Intuition plays as much as a role as skill, experience, and science. Rarely is there a single, optimal solution. As with any design practice, navigation design is about balance, tradeoffs, and exploring alternatives. For this reason, you won’t find all the answers in this book. Instead, I offer a systematic approach to the problems of navigation design. Navigation design is really about asking the right questions at the right time.

If design were ever about following rules, you could conceivably create an algorithm that generates a web design. That’s not how it works. You have to use your brain.

Also, the Web Designer Depot article provides a lot of examples, but doesn’t qualify them as successful or not. That’s the real measure of a good design, in my opinion: does it help reach the ultimate goals of the site? It’s the only “rule” you shouldn’t break.