Jared M Spool News & Articles

Next time you have a chance to watch someone reading a map, look for the first thing they do. They'll likely do the exact same thing everyone else does: find themselves on the map.

It doesn't matter what kind of map it is, whether it's of their neighborhood or an amusement park. They'll open the map and find something that is personally meaningful, such as their house or their favorite roller coaster.

Psychologists call this 'grounding'—the natural behavior of initially finding a known reference point in a foreign information space. Once the person has grounded themselves, they can then use the starting point to understand the rest of the space.

While grounding helps people adjust to complex situations, it can be detrimental when it happens during the design process. If, while conjuring up an interface, designers ground themselves in the design, they run the serious risk of creating an interface that only they can use.

The history of social interface design can be divided into two periods: Before Flickr and after Flickr. In the first period, any social interface functionality was added as an afterthought to the design—something to layer on top of the core functionality. In the after Flickr period, teams were now considering social components as core to their design's value.

2010 is proving to be about user experience. Even in the past few weeks, we have covered the trends and needs associated with improving usability online, from web design to promoting transparency.

With the upcoming MX: Managing Experience conference that will focus on usability and user experience best practices, we'd like like to revisit the three key variables Jared Spool once indicated as being critically important to the field.

Personas are a flexible and powerful tool for user researchers. They're also one of the most misunderstood. When done well, they ensure the team focuses on the needs and delights of their users.

Right now, in a far off cubicle, someone is designing an e-commerce checkout application. It’s not unusual. There are thousands of existing e-commerce sites with their own checkout applications. And I can bet in the future there will be thousands more.

On most sites, users look to on-site Search after they've scanned the page for clues to the content they're seeking. A quality Search experience is critical to making users happy, yet many teams don't spend nearly enough time looking at that experience.

One place to start is the Search Log. Spending a little quality time with it, on a regular basis, is a great way to learn more about how people use your site.

It had been going so well. The shopper, a grandmother looking for a holiday gift for her two grandsons, had decided to buy a Wii video game the boys really wanted: The Beatles: Rock Band.

In Google's search box, she typed "wii beatles rock band", following the instructions the boys' dad had given her, which produced many promising results. Being a loyal Kmart shopper, she was excited when Kmart's site showed up in the sponsored listings and clicked on the link without any hesitation.

That's where the problem started.

CNN.com's designers have gone out of their way to make their work difficult. They could have built a very simple home page with just their logo and a handful of links:

• The Most Important Story
• The Second Most Important Story
• The Third Most Important Story
• An Unimportant, Yet Entertaining Story
• Yet Another Story about Michael Jackson

If this was CNN's home page, the designers could go home and not have any work for weeks. After all, what is a news site's home page but a list of links to the most important stories? (And the unexplainable insatiable curiosity about Michael Jackson's latest antics.)

Yet, these links aren't effective for users because they're missing a key component: the Trigger Words. Trigger words are the words and phrases that trigger a user into clicking. They contain the essential elements to provide the motivation to continue with the site.

Jimmy is looking for a law school. For the last 10 years, he's been an electronics engineer at a very innovative company. He's realized he enjoys working with his company lawyer to file new patents and thinks he could be a good patent lawyer himself, especially with his high-tech engineering background.

Jimmy was excited about exploring schools. With us peering over his shoulder, he started searching Google for a local school, finding one that he recognized as having a great reputation.

Reaching the landing page of the school's site, he told us he had three questions he needed answered: Does the school go into enough depth on intellectual property law, especially patents, to make Jimmy happy? Would Jimmy find the school affordable? What does it take to complete a law degree through evening courses?

Unfortunately, the site didn't help him with his questions.  While there seems to be a "concentration" on intellectual property law, he couldn't tell how much depth it went into or the expertise of the instructors. He knew there must be a section that talks about tuition and financial aid, but he couldn't find it. Moreover, he couldn't find any detail on the evening program, especially how big the class load was and whether it’s practical to do while working.

Jimmy was the perfect prospective candidate for the school, yet he ended up considering looking elsewhere because the site had failed to address his tasks.

User research works best when you match your participants to the people who will use your designs. It makes sense that teams would try to use the demographics, often compiled by the organization's market research team, as the basis of their recruiting efforts. However, this can be problematic.

Creating an effective search results page takes hard work. In the first installment of this article, I introduced how designers need to understand the users' tasks and ensure every result delivers great scent. In this installment, I'll elaborate on the specific principles of the scent of information that play an important role when designing search results.

When creating a search results page, it's unfortunately too easy to produce an ineffective design. We know this because, in the course of our research, we've studied hundreds of search results pages. Many of the pages we've studied hurt the user's experience purely because of their design.

Somewhere, right now, there's a team creating a new design with some amazing, never-before-seen functionality. And to take advantage of that awesome, groundbreaking functionality work, their users will need to login.

Login functionality isn't new. It's not awesome. It's not very challenging to develop. Teams are designing this functionality as if it's never been built before.

But it has been built before. Teams, all over the world, have built login functionality into their applications about a million times. And yet, here we are, doing it all over again.

All this re-creation and re-invention isn't just inefficient, it leaves the team open to problems. Because it's not the sexy part of their project, it's likely to get less attention, resulting in an unusable and frustrating experience.

This is where the Re-use Trinity -- Patterns, Components, and Interaction Design Frameworks -- comes in.

Recently, in a set of interviews UIE conducted with avid users of Netflix.com, the online DVD rental web site, we asked "What are the things you like best about the site?" Lots, apparently.

The team was happy to be together. Forty-six folks from eight different offices, traveling from all over the world, had come together for their annual meeting.

They were excited to be there. It was good to see faces of people who were often just an email address or voice on a conference call. It was nice to reflect on all the great things they'd accomplished.

Over the past 3 years, the team worked diligently on server reliability, eliminating dead links, and consistent navigation and branding across all 200 of the sub-sites. They'd installed a new enterprise-wide content management system, a better process for editorial work, and new application tools to help their franchise owners sell more high-margin products. By all measures, the web site had become a critical element in their multi-national business.

Yet, there was still an unsettled tone amongst the group. Given all the progress they'd made, they felt they still had a long way to go. They weren't sure what the next step was.