WalMart’s milk jug: great design or flop design?

The New York Times is reporting that WalMart’s new fangled milk jug is getting mixed reviews.

What’s not to like? Plenty, as it turns out.

The jugs have no real spout, and their unorthodox shape makes consumers feel like novices at the simple task of pouring a glass of milk.

The design of the milk jug is so bad that WalMart has taken to doing in-store demonstrations of “how to pour” with this new jug.

This jug is a design flop! Right?

Well not so fast. It seems that the designers of the milk jug created it for a specific purpose: to save money. The new jugs are stackable, saving shipping costs and space. The company saves up to 70% of labour costs using these new jugs. The milk arrives at the store fresher, sometimes even the same day. This jug is a great design! Right?

The truth is somewhere in the middle. If business requirements trump user needs, this product is a winner! It saves time, energy, and most of all, money. It’s easier to ship, easier to manage, and much more efficient.

But if user needs trump business requirements, then this jug is a total flop. No  one knows how to use it. They spill it. Their children can’t pour it themselves, forcing parents to spend more time to use the jug. They feel stupid when they can’t pour it correctly.  Talk about crying over spilled milk! WalMart’s new milk jug off-loads all its design failings onto its users, keeping all the benefits of the new design for itself.

WalMart is famous for putting its business needs ahead of its workers and its communities. Off-loading the negative effects of this milk jug onto its consumers? That’s another in a long line of WalMart putting itself and its shareholders first.

Great design aligns business and user. There are trade-offs in every phase of product design. But not knowing what your users before making a design change makes it impossible to do this. The verdict? Not a total flop, but clearly a business-driven design. Truly great design balances the user’s needs with the business’s needs.

Online Surveys 101

Folks,

Below is a (very!) brief overview of online surveys. This slideshow, via slideshare, is intended for people in the Web design industry. IAs, designers, media planners, strategists, usability researchers, and producers will learn if they should, in fact, do a survey.

What is design anthropology?

Dori Tunstall has written a fantastic post that details how a simple card sort can become a deeper exercise in analysis. Dr. Tunstall is a PhD anthropologist and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She explains how anthropology takes design research to a deeper level in card sorting, a common technique for information architecture:

“In addition to the information architecture, I delivered statements about the continued meaning of gender classifications. In the course of conducting the card sort, I learned that men and women continued to classify domestic products based on stereotypical gendered spaces of male equals outside/garage, and female equals inside.”

Dr. Tunstall clearly lays out some of the deeper implications of design anthropology later in the post. This is a must read for anyone looking to deepen their design or research practice.

Why music on mobile phones is not music

The music industry is in a pickle. CD sales are falling, big-name artists are signing with touring companies. Independent artists are having a go on their own. The solution, the industry thinks, is to sell its music through mobile phones.

They are dead wrong. Here’s why.

Mobile phone users don’t use music in the same way that music listeners do. Music listeners — whether at home or on the go with their iPod — are listening to what the artist has created. Even “digital” forms of the music are still relatively analogue because the listener cannot slice and dice the music into a new mashup. The best she can do is skip a track (which she has done since the times of vinyl).

Music on mobile phones has both “listening” and impression management behaviors. Mobile phone users use music more often to present a version of themselves to the public world than they do to actually “listen.”

Music on mobile phones has truly become what Nicholas Negroponte calls “co-mingling bits.” Mobile phone operators have already sliced and diced the music into snippets for its users to use in various ways. The ringtone is one version. The “ringback,” which a caller hears when he’s waiting for his friend to answer her phone, is another version.

Now mobile phone users can download all sorts of “co-mingling bits” off the Web. Some of these bits happen to be musical. Some of them are unrecognizable from what the artist originally intended.

This kind of behavior is not listening to music; it is impression management. What is the effect, for example, when your friend hears Paranoid while he waits for you to pick up the phone? What is the effect if it were I Can Hear You Breathe?

Music companies think  this new form of music consumption can save the industry. They hope that album sales will be replaced with mobile phone downloads of full tracks. They are wrong.

Consider the following numbers from eMarketer.

Full track downloads as percentage of ringback and ringtone downloads:
2006: 23%
2007: 33%
2008: 47%

While the share is growing, it is certainly not replacing album sales. Artists should recognize that mobile phone music is not “music” but the public adornment of their art. And music companies should recognize that mobile phones will not save a bloated and dying industry.

The Brand as A Self: Web Design as Impression Management

Brands have few opportunities to come alive, and the Web is one of those opportunities. Make sure the brand gives off the right impression. Researchers have found that a company’s Web site particularly shapes how a person views that company’s innovation and concern for its customers. In other words, the Web site is even more important in “giving off” the right impression.

Brands introduce themselves to people much in the same way that people introduce themselves to people. And just like for humans, brands often “give off” more information than they explicitly mean to provide. This is especially true for Web sites: the brand online is the same as a “self,” and must manage its impression just as people do.

We have all experienced this: you meet someone and develop an immediate sense of what they’re about. You have figured out that this person works in, say, finance, and he has money and children and likes nautical sports. You also find him curt, arrogant and a bit full of himself. Is it something he said specifically? No, not specifically. He did snap at the waitress. And he did mention something about a regatta. He also casually tossed his credit card down when the bill came, rudely brushing aside protestations from the most senior person at the table.

One of my favourite theorists, Erving Goffman, tells us there is an impression you GIVE, and then there is the impression you GIVE OFF. “Selves,” as Goffman puts it, engage in impression management using subtle symbolic signals.

Designers often implicitly think of their particular product — whether it be a kitchen product or a print ad — as something that “gives off” an impression. But this is much more important for immersive experiences like Web sites. A company’s Web site in particular is an immersive experience that gives off countless symbolic cues.

Some observers call this phenomenon “cross channel synchronicity,” or simply just “user experience.” The Web site is key to “giving off” the right impression for a company and its brand because it is the living embodiment of that company.

How should graphic and interaction designers create their products? Keep in mind the following:

• The brand is a “self” on the Web. This is a great opportunity but designers also run the risk of “giving off” the wrong impression immediately through interactions that suggest a stand-offish, arrogant, or selfish brand.
• Brand-critical interactions must be done right: I have had many clients who appear unconcerned about appear small interaction problems of their Web site. But if these interactions revolve around mission-critical symbols of your business, make sure they’re done right. If your brand identity if “fun,” ensure that interactions are full of fun, not hard work. If your brand identity is “trustworthy,” over-communicate that message in interactions.
• Provide the expected “props”: In an earlier post, I showed how individuals use symbolic cues, or “props” to manage impressions. Doctors use stethoscopes, for example, despite the fact that fewer than 40% of them know how to use them properly, mostly because patients EXPECT them to carry them. Web site designers should remember what users expect in terms of “props.” Does your brand really need AJAX? Are visitors surprised to find their is no flash element? Are visitors expecting form fields to have in-line editing?

Designing for time use

We all seem to be running out of time. Time use is an important but often overlooked aspect of design. What do designers need to know about time and time use?

• Types of Time

We don’t all use or experience time in the same way. Scholars call two types of time “monochroncity” and “polychronicity.” Polychronicity is defined as the extent to which individuals do more than one task at once. “Polychrons” tend to overlap tasks, dovetail their activities to “hit more than one bird with a stone” and are overall more comfortable with a variability in time sequencing. Monochrons, by contrast, prefer strict planning, a knowable a predictable sequence of events, and a general uniformity in the understanding of time.

These two types of time mean two types of design outcomes: one that is intended for the multi-tasking user and one that is for the single-tasking user. Designers should know ahead of time which type of time to incorporate in their work.

• Temporal Impact On Creativity

Madjar and Oldham found that time orientation, time pressue and task rotation is related to creativity. People who were polychronic and rotated through creative tasks (creating marketing plans) tended to be produce more creative results. Monochronic people tended to produce more creative results when they proceeded sequentially through tasks. Both groups had less creative results when they perceived intense time pressure.

• Tips for Designing For Time Use

1. Temporal Disruption for Users: Recognize you are disrupting users’ temporal process, which is often taken-for-granted and invisible. This disruption can be significant in that is will increase stress, anxiety and may elicit negative responses. This is especially important for designers of technology. Research has shown there is a large and often unintended impact through poorly designed technology.
2. Agency/Client Temporal Disconnect: For those of you in agencies working with clients, recognize your own working process may differ from your clients’. This may result in miscommunications about expectations of temporal consistency. Your clients may be monochrons and expect you to be the same.
3. In-house Temporal Disconnect: Managers tend to have more control over their work flow. They also tend to order themselves monochronically. But those further down the totem pole tend to have little control and are often polycrhonic as a result (often unwillingly). Managing a good design practice is ensuring that every worker has some autonomy in their temporal practice. Let monochrons be monochrons.
4. Your Own Creativity: Are you monochronic or polychronic? Your team likely has a mixture of both. Find out which one you are and try to engineer situations that match your orientation.

What Designers Can Learn From Facebook’s Beacon: the collision of “fronts”

The blogosphere (and even the regular old newspaper-sphere) is alight with stories of Facebook’s online advertising flop, Beacon. What can designers learn from this flop? It’s not about privacy; it’s about the presentation of self. People have different “selves” for different places — virtual or otherwise — and designs must be consistent with these variety of selves.

Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow posted an interesting story on InformationWeek that predicted the decline of Facebook because of its own success. He predicts that the more people that are one Facebook, the more confusing it is. Your “creepy coworkers,” your boss, and your friends you met at Burning Man are all in the same “place,” making it confusing, embarrassing and difficult for everyone.

What Doctorow is really describing is sociologist Erving Goffman’s notion of “the front.” Using the theatre as a metaphor Goffman argued that we actually “perform” multiple selves. Each place we go has a “front” that we learn to incorporate. A front has a wardrobe, a setting, a decor, make-up, a script and stage direction. We have a “front stage self” that we perform for everyone to see, a “back stage self” for only our closest intimates to see, and a “core self,” which is deeply private.

A doctor, for example, has a front that includes an office, a lab coat, a stethoscope and medical jargon. This is her “front stage” self. But when she’s talking to her best friend, she may use a “back stage self,” being less formal, not wearing a lab coat, or using less formal language. Her “core” self is secretly wishing she were a full-time marathoner, but she tells no one that.

Facebook’s Beacon didn’t work because it forces people to use multiple fronts AT THE SAME TIME. If I tag a recipe from Epicurious.com, but I broadcast that fact to friends that perceive me to be a party girl, I have a collision of fronts. If my boss demands to be my friend, I have a collision of fronts. If I rent The Notebook on Netflix, and my friends think I am a Goth, I have a collision of fronts.

Facebook’s Beacon forces its users to combine multiple selves. Goffman considers the collision of fronts to be a source of embarrassment or shame. Take, for example, the hilarious “Meeting in a Swimming Pool” gag on Just for Laughs. Swimmers have their swimming front (including a bathing suit, casual demeanour) and forced into a meeting, with its serious demeanour and fully clothed attendants. This is embarrassing.

Facebook has done the same thing by forcing its users to expose their selves to different fronts simultaneously. It is embarrassing, even shameful.

What Designers Can Learn From Facebook’s Beacon

• Discover your users’ fronts: If you are designing a product or a virtual place, ask your potential users what they consider the character of this “place” to be. Is is a formal place? Is it a casual atmosphere? What kinds of “props” are expected here? What would be an embarrassing topic of conversation or incident?
• Design using the theatre metaphor: Make the product consistent with that place, as if you were writing a play. Ensure that what you design is part of a script that users understand or expect.
• Pay attention to embarrassment: If your users mention shame or embarrassment in any way, gently press them about it. Discover the character of the “collision of fronts” that is the source of that embarrassment, and, above all, avoid forcing users to feel embarrassment.

Update: The New York Times is reporting that Facebook’s lawyers have not succeeded in having documents about its founder Zuckerman removed from an online magazine. These documents are “embarrassing.”

Update (12/19/07): Mashable is reporting that FB is now allowing people to “group” their friends, but they haven’t quite mastered the collision of fronts problem.

Why Web analytics won’t help interaction design

The data provided through Web analytics offer promise to interaction designers by pointing to potential user experience problems. But interaction designers who think they should base critical design decisions on Web data are misguided at best and downright irresponsible at worst.

Web user experience practitioners recently embraced web-traffic measurement as a user experience research method. This is not necessarily a bad thing — gathering design insight from a variety of sources is always advisable. The problem comes when interaction designers (and the data analysts that advise them) base critical user experience decisions on these often incomplete and even misleading data.

My beef with Web analytics boils down to two points:

1. Web analytics are notoriously unreliable. Web traffic researchers continue to struggle with accurate visitor counts and missing data points, compromising both the validity and reliability of the method (Chatham, 2005).Practitioners are dogged by day-to-day limitations in both the techniques and the underlying technology, which limit their ability to reliably produce analyses that are universally accepted as legitimate (Wiggins, 2007).
2. More troubling, is the claims that Web analytics capture meaningful data about the user experience. Certainly Web analytics capture important information about server loads, form completion, navigation patterns, and browser types.The unspoken belief, however, is that user keystrokes and mouse clicks represent the sum total of what there is to know about a Web site visitor’s experience. If you base user experience decisions on Web traffic measurement, you assume that an individual person intentionally initiates these keystrokes and mouse clicks for meaningful reasons.

Ask yourself, have you ever initiated a mouseclick unintentionally? Have you inadvertently typed in a URL? These mistakes of intention are not registered by Web analytics tools.

In his book Observing The User Experience, Kuniavsky argues that Web analytics have the same amount of insight as a “jewelry store clerk” who has a “much better understanding of customers” because they watch everything the customer does.

Web analytics are not equivalent to a jewelry store clerk gathering subtle, nuanced information about a person visiting their store. They are the equivalent of a blindfolded, deaf jewelry store clerk who uses a complex system of tapping to communicate with store visitors, who may or may not know the unique tapping language of that particular clerk.

Interaction designers must base critical user experience decisions on the results of qualitative research, rich with “thick description,” and subtle cues. Basing such decisions on Web analytics would remove the all insight into users’ actual intentions.

Web analytics tools have their place in interaction design. They should be limited to:

• Measuring appreciable increases in specific, observable goals, such as form completion
• As a final test after a battery of in-person, qualitative usability tests
• As an infrastructure monitoring tool
• As a lead generation or campaign effectiveness tool

Any other uses of Web analytics reduces interaction design to nothing more than blind counting of meaningless signals.

This is an abridged version of Ladner, S. (forthcoming). “Watching the Web: Suggestions for Improving Web-based Measurement.” In Jansen, J., Spink, A. and Taksa, I. (eds.). Handbook of Log File Analysis. Idea Group: Hersey Pennsylvannia.

Further Reading:

Chatham, B. (2005). What’s On Web Analytics Users’ Minds? : Forrester Research.

Gassman, B. (2005). How to Choose An Advanced Solution for Web Analytics. Stamford: Gartner Research.

Kuniavsky, M. (2003). Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman.

Lecompte, M., & Shenshul, J. (1999). Designing and Conducting Ethnographic Research. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press.

Wiggins, A. (2007). Data Driven Design: Using Web Analytics To Improve Information Architecture. Paper presented at the Conference Name|. Retrieved Access Date|. from URL|.