Megan Leigh McDonald

Is there such a thing as too much change? That seems like such a taboo thing to say out loud. I don’t want to be seen as someone mired in the past or unable to move forward through a dynamic and fast-paced work environment. As I look back on the many clients I’ve had over the years, I see countless professionals and offices with diverse processes. And I see this diversity of what is considered ‘process’ and ‘change’ as one of the many great mysteries of life itself.

I believe ‘process’ is the way we handle change in business and that it’s dictated by several natural laws:

1. The Law of Entropy: The amount of energy it takes to change is inversely proportionate to the lack of change that preceded it. This plays into our everyday experiences at work when people become complacent, don’t rely on data to drive decisions or foster an atmosphere of ‘group-think’. There can be a lot of change that seems to happen as most of the group follows very easily with the strongest personality. But this may not be vetted to be the best change or change that matches the company’s goals. It takes vast amounts of firm hand-holding to turn this kind of environment around. It seems to me, that there is a tendency for a large staff turnover when this happens.

2. The Law of Inertia: The amount of resistance is directly related to the amount of momentum needed to change. Somewhat related to Entropy, Inertia is more about the consistent action necessary to gain speed. If you know your goal and you move toward it, only to be constantly derailed by resistance, one never builds up enough speed to efficiently reach the destination. And, of course, the danger of getting thrown off course only grows with each setback.

3. The Law of Matter: This has more to do with the conservation of energy and its transference from one form to another. If you think of a business process like this, we have a whole lot of kinetic energy at the beginning part of our process and need to take the thoughts whirring around in the brains of a bunch of professionals and transfer it into a product that at the end of the day, transforms into dollars spent by consumers. There are plenty of things we can spend our energy on, but if we don’t realize that execution is a process of taking one form of energy and translating it into another, we may never get past the beginning stage.

There is a point when we think far too much and act not enough. This goes even for the people whose roles are at the very beginning of a process, for those are the people who set the pace and get the ball rolling for the rest of us. As a UI Designer, I get my energy from Product people whose ideas, creativity and understanding of data mixes with mine to produce something wholly different — wire-frames and mock-ups that visualize a different reality for our users. And so on and so forth throughout the rest of the PDLC.

I think process and change are the same things. I think because we’re a business comprised of people in the natural world that we need to look at ourselves in relation to that. What we do each day is molded by these abstract and often hidden concepts. Taken from physics but somehow very relevant, we are always part inertia, part resistance to entropy and part efficient transfer of energy whether we’re walking down the street or sitting in a board room.

To start off, just want to explain why I haven’t been writing for the past few months. After relocating for a new job up in San Jose at PayPal (yay), I am starting to really feel at home and making some time to devote to my writing again. So on with the show…

Dreaming of Solving Problems
The other morning I struggled to wake up while listening to NPR (yes, I know…doesn’t exactly get the blood pumping but I like it).  I laid there like a quietly vibrating half set brick, my mind sliding in and out of consciousness. I remember work being part of the dream scenarios. In the midst of this I had a very sober thought about some of the problems I was trying to solve in my projects — that actually I define my own life as the problems that I choose to solve.

Indeed, man in general can define our own history in terms of the problems we chose to solve at given times. For instance, early man took on the problems of how to process the raw foods they hunted or gathered into more easily consumed forms, i. e. how to make fire.  The sixties were ‘How do I get/give more love?’ The seventies were ‘How do I get more sex?’ And the eighties were ‘How do I get more time?’ The nineties seems to have been ‘How do I get more happiness?’ The 2000s are not over yet but so far seem to be asking the question ‘How do I get more balance?’

Each decade really can be compressed and defined by one question. I am considering illustrating this idea on a time-line to put it into more of a cultural evolutionary perspective.

 So what does this have to do with Usability and User Experience? 

Everyday at work I advocate and take on a somewhat nurturing and protective role of ‘my/our’ users. I do think of them as real people that I might know, like cousins or friends of my parents in the small town that our family comes from. They all have stories and needs. Every day, I think of them when I must dig deeper as I struggle to understand the product and the vast technology behind it in a highly diverse cultural environment.

What I do is not just work. I choose to solve problems that affect people’s financial and small business problems. I seek to be of service in facilitating between users and business needs. It’s a crucial role in our ever-changing tech industry today and I’m certainly not the only one, so I have no worries that I’m Atlas about to be crushed by a lofty goal. And I think as much as I can own the problems I choose to solve, the larger entity that I work for also chooses to solve problems for users and makes it possible for me to advocate as I do for better experiences on our sites.

I reflect on people I admire like Mother Teresa, Gandhi, Sylvia Earle, Rachel Carson and other great people or entities who affected a lot of change. Those people and  organizations chose to take on a problem that probably seemed so large and unconquerable that most people simply gave in and understandably ‘let go’. I’m quite fascinated by people who despite the odds, struggled, focused and made progress against highly complex sets of circumstances. And I’m also fascinated by companies who do the same. I am left questioning whether the business of solving problems online is philosophically any different than anyone else solving a social problem.  It’s all a form of ‘User Experience’…called the ‘human experience’.

Gotta’ love Monday meetings. No, seriously I am *not* being facetious in the least. Our wonderful Exec David Wolfe is a very inspiring person to work with and every Monday I get to absorb another piece of his genius. (note: I am *not* a suck-up)

Today’s session outlined the basic tenets of both Agile and Waterfall methods, with no judgment. Without demon-izing the Waterfall Method, we defined the basics of any methodology and moved on to point out the different situations in which one or the other would be useful.

I’ve worked with Agile’s predecessor, the Beckian XP. Reuters Financial Risk Management Team embraced these programming methods with ferocity back in 2001. As the User Experience Designer on a Development Team, I watched us go from heavy Requirements Documents to the lighter, more story-oriented cards. It felt like a sudden release from an entrenched way of being. Back in the beginning of that position, we were handed a heavy document that was constantly updated and edited, but never really veered away from.

The creativity of the Developers was often left out and the frustration at having to execute on requirements that were spelled out so clearly was palpable in our Tuesday morning meetings. So when we moved onto XP, the developers and PMs and Business Analysts integrated together in a really exciting way. Suddenly, we were identifying certain peoples’ roles as ‘customers’. These people spoke for the customer. As a UI person, I got to interview the people who were standins for our customers. I was able to take that information and pour it into my wireframes and designs.

Planning meetings with developers were dynamic as we sketched out flows on our white boards and had the option to change things around quickly instead of being tied to these heavy documents.

The big takeaway for me was that when a company or a project is in a high growth stage, it’s often really difficult (actually impossible) to predict what requirements will be from the beginning. Waterfall attempts to eliminate change and the cost of change by using prediction. I like astrology. I think it’s fun. But I realize life changes day in and day out. So the only way to actually deal with change, for me, is to embrace it and be nimble enough to keep pace with it, especially if a new idea is more efficient, productive or revenue-generating.

So, I pose this metaphor: if there was a Celebrity Deathmatch between Agile and Waterfall, I’m thinking Agile would win by sheer ability to stay on its toes. Anyways, this is an open call to all animators…I want to see this on YouTube!

Just wanted to pop into my blog for a bit and say how much I’m enjoying ‘barcampla4′. What is barcamp? A tekkie conference that started in San Fran from what I gather and then started emanating outwards. It’s only about 4 years old and brings together some of the most passionate, actionable people in the tech industry to learn and share. Kind of like burning man meets Agile Methodologies. The session board is set up just like a task or story board at work. People grab a large post-it and write out the topics and stick them into the slots on the board. How perfect is that? I wish I weren’t missing the overnight campout…pout.

I really enjoyed the session from www.planjam.com. A developer and the Designer presented the new site design. Really cool people and I like their product. There’s a lot of potential for the travel industry there as well as ‘white label’ APIs for social networking sites.

Following that was an hour long problem session. There were a lot of really technical terms about email and databases flying around me and the energy was amazing. I know the developers at work would love to do a barcamp session like this every so often just to bring up general site issues - maybe we can do it once a month over lunch.

This session now is about Vlogging and how to incorporate it into Wordpress. Yay. Don’t know if I really need to put videos on this wordpress site but I’m going to think about it.

In re-reading this book, I have re-discovered valuable excerpts and insights into what I do everyday. There are a few quotes I want to blog about. Nothing fancy today, just a few somewhat random thoughts about User Experience.

“…good design makes users more effective”

Truly, this is the point of good design, although the term ‘design’ is such a broad-based, multi-interpreted word. In the ‘real world’ the title ‘designer’ is often used as a ‘catch-all’ for someone who can do graphics, maybe produce a website and possibly provide some basic usability. But looking more closely at this word, it probably should be more narrowly defined. I read very quickly a prediction (on Adaptive Path or some random Tech article) that the job descriptions calling for a ‘do-it-all’ kind of person would be supplanted by very specific, more narrowly defined descriptions.

Consequently, the kind of designer that I naturally became and am still becoming is a more user-centric one. I studied media user behavior in Graduate School and appreciate a more academic analysis of website usage. I remember back in the day with WebTrends, how the data was focused on uniques and visits and clicks and various user statistics like browser type. But now, using Omniture’s SiteCatalyst I’m completely blown away and (dare I say?) excited. It’s the kind of thing that gets me up and moving in the mornings, for lack of a caffeinated beverage.

Something about examining the numbers is kind of like being a detective. I get to root out where the problems are, where people have trouble using a piece of software or web application. I can’t help it, I did love Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden. So this aspect of my job is the one part that gives me the greatest satisfaction. I get to improve the experience for the user. I get to make the user more effective at what he/she does.

There is a huge difference between teaching the user to use the system and designing a system that works for the users because ‘good design makes user more effective’.

I was just reading over a PDF that I downloaded from Omniture. It’s a case study for this travel company lastminute.com which I follow a bit in the news. The two guys who started that company have also started one of my favorite travel social networking companies — www.wayn.com - Where Are You Now?

So this PDF, available for download off of the Omniture website, lays out the business problems that lastminute.com was experiencing. Their problems were overarching big picture problems like trying to figure out what the steps were that customers took between typing in keywords and booking trips, not to mention the customers that dropped off in between these steps.

They used a term I’m not familiar with — ‘look to book’ — I like that. It really describes the kind of user role that would be a ‘browser’ essentially. This really brings me back to graduate school and the persuasive theories in my ‘User Experience Communication’ course. I used this one particular bell curve in a paper I published about CyberHate websites. Basically on one end of the bell curve you have a certain percentage of people who are never going to subscribe to ‘hate sites’ or buy your product. Then on the other side is, for the sake of this example, an equitable percentage of people who will absolutely buy your product. That being said, it’s the large grey area in between those two groups that comprise the biggest opportunities in terms of convincing a person to convert from a ‘maybe’ to a purchaser.

I digress though.

To get back to lastminute.com’s case study, they did an A/B test through SiteCatalyst and discovered that the horizontal menu bar was more successful than a vertical one. After implementing the horizontal navigation, they increased their click through rate from the top navigation menu by 700% which is so insanely successful I can’t imagine what the UE and PM teams must have felt when they crunched the numbers and saw that kind of jump. It must have been an ‘awesome’ moment of triumph.

The other interesting angle to this is the SEM side of things. They were able to analyze how particular keywords performed by tracking the drop off rates on landing pages. When they identified high fallout rates, they looked at the keywords and the content of the page to determine how well they matched. In many cases, they weren’t EXACTLY what the customer was looking for and they were able to improve the experience and reduce the fallout rates.

It definitely makes me think about how to relate this to work. I already have an idea and can’t wait to whip it off to the appropriate person(s).

So when this really cool, knowledgeable Product Manager started, she got me re-interested in Twitter. It’s a simple social tool, really. It is basically a thread of random thoughts that tile down your page. Entwined in it are the random thoughts posted by any of the ‘friends’ that you ‘follow’.  It seemed cute and kind of superficial at first. But then it grew on me. I set my account to send text messages to my phone when anyone on my friends list posted to twitter.

Suddenly, I could see through the lonely moments of a friend who just moved here to the West Coast. And I could see the daily musings of my boss.  I caught up on the workouts, sunsets and random sighs that people in LA so often spend alone. It was a way to capture those comfortable almost-silent moments when stream-of-consciousness and chemistry bind two people together in an even tighter weave.

I was just starting to appreciate that when the Malibu fires gave me another new reason to appreciate twitter.  Sunday morning was full of smoke with fires on 3 sides of my apartment building (all within a mile of it). The electric was out which meant the television, radio and internet were all down.  And on top of that, cell phone service was shut down in the area to allow the firefighters and police to communicate. But…my text messaging worked. I was able to send texts to family and friends while I packed my most valuable items and drove away to Santa Monica. But I don’t have a lot of my coworkers phone #s. Not everyone at work feels comfortable dancing across that line between personal and professional.

I did however, have Twitter and since I’d set it up for phone, I texted to the site and was able to keep people at work posted that way. They were concerned about me and other friends in Malibu and wanted to know how things were. I was able to communicate to the website. It made me think about emergencies and the last one I was in, 9-11. After 9-11, the company I worked for, Reuters, handed out little cards with emergency call numbers. In the event of another emergency, we were to call into the central number so that Reuters would be able to inform our families of our safety. Interesting though, on 9-11 most peoples’ cells didn’t work either. However, text messaging to a central service set up like Twitter would work very well.

Anyways, most people think about social tools and networks in this very hipster-fresh ‘MySpace’ way that often seems quite frivilous.  But I believe the word ’social’ to have a greater depth than whom is snogging whom or what Saturday’s game was like. I believe ’social’ encompasses all the ways that we communicate and share our lives, from fun to emergency. Social tools have the capacity to change lives, to affect people positively as well as negatively.

Watch out for Twitter, I think it has a great deal of potential.

I have to say that I really love this tool in Omniture.  One of the best things about it is being able to go into a page that I’ve designed or partially re-designed and to see the top overlays for links on the page. This is especially useful for me in a current project in which I am looking specifically at a set of features I rearranged on the page. I can tell that one of them is outperforming the rest and this raises questions between me and the other UE Designers as to whether to push the information further up the page or to punch up the other features a bit more.

I remember when I first saw this tool. It was like love at first sight when I saw it displayed on one of the other UE Designers’ monitors.  I have no idea how any UE Designer can live without it.  I realize it’s more of a Product Management tool, but I use it anyways to track the effects of the items I move or add to pages. It allows me to see that I drove a 10% increase in click thrus from the home page to a payment page, for example or that I increased conversion by 55% by adding in a highlighted area above a form on a registration page.

The Omniture training we had at work really didn’t cover ClickMap but there were a lot of useful items covered. I remember ‘back in the day’ using early versions of WebTrends or AWSTATS to see some general information. But in the past 8 years that I’ve been in this industry, so much around analytics has changed and I am just ga-ga over numbers suddenly. I have been reliving my days in graduate school when I studied web technologies as a ‘new media’.  That was only ten years ago but feels like a lifetime when I see how sophisticated and powerful these reporting tools are.

I’m so hyped on this I think I may become an Omniture ‘groupie’ or at least attend the next conference I can find. Hmmm, I can’t find any information about Omniture Summit 2008. I’m sure it’s quite expensive and since I’m not a Product Manager, I may not get to represent the dotcom I work at.  There are however ‘webinars’ that Omniture provides for $199. It might be worth it for me to spend the money myself to learn more about it.

So once in awhile I pick up a standby classic and re-read it just to see if I understand the material in a new way. I have to say most of Steve’s book is awesome stuff, things that I picked up in bits and pieces from seminars, classes and other books and papers. The great part of his book is that he brought all those bits and pieces into one place. He makes really good points. The bit about taking information out of the page is something that really struck me this time and coincides with current work. The best solution to making things stand out sometimes is not adding to the page but taking away. In the trenches it’s not always easy to see that we’re just moving some information from one pile and into an even bigger pile of information. It’s too much like cleaning your apartment by moving it all into the closet. Sooner or later, someone’s going to open it and file an insurance claim you.

But enough of metaphors. The most valuable part of this book for me at this point in time though is the very end in the chapters about testing. Focus groups and ‘garage sale’ usability tests are relatively new to me. As a UE Designer in my current position, I participated in a formal focus group of our products last year. It reminded me of my grad school days and the scientific way I approached the business of design back then before getting thrown into the ‘real world’. Focus groups carry an inherent academic slant to them and sometimes convincing people in business of their worth is an obstacle.

I was overjoyed then to be able to participate in two more rounds of informal, internal usability sessions that followed. The last few chapters of Steve Krug’s book are like a recipe for getting some interesting exploratory research results for very little money and relatively little effort. It’s amazing that more people don’t conduct these. It definitely makes me crave to either set more of these up at work and of course will be a deciding factor in any new positions I consider in the future. It actually makes me interested in possibilities within usability research firms themselves. I’ll have to explore more on the Internet about companies like this. It appeals to my academic side. I have urges to dig up my old publications from graduate school.

At any rate, Steve Krug’s book “Don’t Make Me Think” always makes me think…hmmm, I wonder if he read this blog, would he be slapping his forehead right now?