Old computers not necessarily used by old people

Over the last few months I’ve conducted an awful lot of user tests with the over 60s. At last count it was over 50 users. So it was great to attend Bristol Usability Group last night where Andrew Arch from the W3C’s Ageing Education and Harmonisation project was talking about Designing for Older People.

Many of the recommendations we’d made to our clients in designing for the age group were backed up by the W3C guidelines.

Here are a few of the recommendations talked about:

• Browser accessibility functionality has a stigma attached as so is not often used by this age group.
• Including an in-page font-size control is perhaps the most useful and most common thing a designer can do
• This age group struggle with small hyperlinks and other small areas where they need to click – e.g. radio buttons with no direct html label tag.
• There is a danger of patronising this age group with ‘big’ and ‘blue’ text.  They still appreciate design.
• In designing for this age group there is an increase in usability for all user groups (Rather like the Usability Bonus the now defunct Disability Rights Commission discussed)
• Older people may not be familiar with using a mouse having only ever owned a laptop
• This age group is very wise so often have plenty to say in a user test meaning a typical hour’s test won’t cover as much as the same amount of time with a younger person

Thanks to Dave Ellender for organising and hosting the evening.  Great chatting all things accessibility afterward with Ann McMeekin and the BUG glitterati.

Update: Ann McMeekin has done a much more indepth write-up of Andrew’s talk

My internet World talk Social Networks: build your won or take advantage of an existing one was scarily full with standing room only.

One of main points was to listen to the chatter on twitter and facebook. I was doing the same through my talk and had some great feedback from people.

The audience did better than I did at summerising:

My slides are here:

I’ve written a whitepaper to accompany the talk:

• They’re talking about you online

A recent project I worked on for a high street bank showed that users who clicked on commonly used, important link could not get back to the application form they were completing. Hitting the back button through an error. The form data was gone, and so at that point was the user and the sale of the product, also gone was any good will on the part of the user toward the bank, the user was not going to recommend that bank to any friends. In short a lot of business could be generated for a small, trivial, easily fixable issue.

The will was there to fix that issue, estimates were made of the increase in business but it took months to make the change. Why? Well the estimates were in the tens of millions. Who would believe that making a little change would yield such huge results? The credibility of the recommendation was undermined by the crazy-huge estimate.

What bought this back to mind was a recent article by Jared Spool, the $300 Million Button. Jared talks about an increase of $300 million dollars from changing the text of button to read ‘Continue’ rather than ‘Register’. Simple, logical, unbelievable. I’d love to use this as a case study to sell usability testing, I dearly would, but I can’t see any business believing such a dramatic claim.

So, I hear you ask, how do you sell the benefits of usability testing? In a word modestly.

Finance Directors, without fail, always ask me “How much extra conversion can we expect from making the changes you suggest?” My experience may lead me to think 4%, 5% maybe 7%. I’ll always say 1 to 2%. Partly because I don’t want to to be held to this (who would?) but mostly 5% is a huge increase. For an average client I work with that could be millions of pounds. Who would believe that?

As always if you’d like an informal chat on the benefits of user testing get in touch. I can be honest, modest and realistic. By the way you don’t want to buy some of this oil I’ve got do you? Clear up that problem of yours in no time…

I’m doing a quick 12 minute SkillSwap talk this Tuesday on International Usability – things you never would have guessed all about the things I’ve learnt from international usability testing. The event is at the Pervasive Media Studio from 6pm.

More details:
-User experience Skillswap
-Book a free place

Then on Wednesday I’m on a panel – Working in the South West for the Web developer’s conference in Bristol. Again I’m focusing on the international work I do and how it’s possible to be international and still live in the South West. The event is all day at the Watershed in Bristol.

More details:
-http://www.webdevconf.co.uk/

Thursday is World Usability day and I’m running a free Usability Surgery with Stuart Church and Dave Ellender at the Pervasive Media Studio again in Bristol. Thursday evening brings Bristol Usability Group drinks in the Watershed Bar.

More details:
-http://bristolusability.org.uk/
-Usability Surgery on Upcoming

Drinks in the Watershed bar from 5.30pm
-http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1321355

I’ve put together 5 tips for international usability and published it over at cxpartners usability blog.

Thanks to Ed Mitchell for hosting and Laura Francis, Eben Halford and Fraser Stephens for presenting.

A small cog in some really big wheels
How to keep your head across multiple projects

Some links:

• That Book Getting things done by David Allen
• The template I use: Hipster PDA

…we invested $50,000 of our company’s money into a fund consisting of 10 companies we felt did a great a job at user experience. We wanted to test a hypothesis that companies who focus on UX will see it reflected in their stock price.

A great experiment to try. So to cut to the chase:

In the one year period of our test, our UX investment philosophy trounced the markets.

What we can learn from this. Invest in user experience, invest in companies that promote and follow good UX principles.

• UX Magazine – Investing in User experience

Interaction designers: the new rock stars of brands?
The emerging rock stars of brands may well be interaction designers. As brands move to digital platforms to help create customers, interaction designers will play a key role in determining which brands thrive, and which fall by the wayside

• Brands Create Customers » Interaction design: the new key to brands

It’s a nice thought, being a rockstar. Brian Phipps talks about placing interaction designer at the centre of crafting the experiences customers will have will organisations as the migration online continues.

On a number of recent projects I’ve worked on the brand values have emerged from the proposed interactions with the customer and have often been at odds with values agreed at an earlier stage. Increasingly the drive for simplicity has been at the forefront of the interaction and this has been reflected in the marketing activity around that – terms such as “Easy to set up, easy to run” “Taking the effort out of XXXX” rather than more marketing based straplines like “Working hard for you”.

These values give the customer the feeling of control, “We’ve made things easy for you to do what you want” is the underlying message rather than the traditional “Trust in us to do that for you”. The feeling of control can be over emphasised (especially amongst us cynical Brits) where the internet offers organisations from all over the world a global reach as a customer I want to feel in control mostly as I don’t know who you are. How can I trust you if I don’t know you? Pleasurable interactions make happy customers, happy customers begin to trust in the brand, increased trust i helps build the brand which of course leads to more business.

Expect more on this from me – mostly as I’m knee deep in it everyday.

There are rumours that Apple will introduce a similar system to the Zune in the next generation iPod.

What struck me about this approach is that they are solving a simple problem in an overly complicated way. Samsung approached the same problem by adding a speaker. Now music can be shared with friends, and the downside, everybody else in the vicinity.

Watching people use iPods and other MP3 players to share music with friends you often see one of those iconic white earbuds for one person and one for the other person. The obvious disadvantage of this is that you only get half the experience.

A simple solution, Apple and Microsoft could save themselves huge amounts of development time by adding a second, or maybe even a third headphone socket. That way music can be shared with a couple of friends, there’s no learning curve associated with sending songs over wireless and it’s a modest extra cost (certainly cheaper than adding a wifi chip)

In the meantime you can pick up this elegant social music plugin for any MP3 player for a few pounds.