See Dana at the 2011 Summit

This week we are featuring Dana Chisnell, who will be speaking at this years 2011 MIMA Summit, October 12th.  She is an inde­pen­dent researcher cur­rently work­ing on usable secu­rity and research meth­ods for social media usabil­ity.  You can find Dana on twitter @danachis.
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What do you think are the most interesting changes happening in usability today?

There are a few interesting developments going on in usability these days. First, more and more organizations are beginning to understand that features only take them so far. They’re starting to see that expectations are higher than lots of features that work adequately. Now, organizations are looking to unify the customer experience across all channels. Toning down the business speak, it’s about having the best possible interaction with the customer at every possible touch point.

To get there, teams are sharing responsibility for doing user research. It is becoming less likely that there will be one person responsible for doing all of the usability testing. Instead, designers and developers get skills for interviewing, moderating, and observing people using designs. I think this is excellent. The more present the user is in the heads of the designers and developers, the better the experiences will be.

In terms of tools and techniques, I see a lot of teams embracing remote usability testing. They want to get a broader view of the user base, which is good. The technology for doing remote usability testing is very good and very inexpensive now. If you haven’t done remote usability testing, the concept is simple. Rather than bringing people into a lab setup, you connect with participants online through a screen sharing tool like GoTo Meeting or WebEx (there are lots of others out there, too), and a voice connection of some kind. This way, you can see what’s going on with the user’s screen and you can get lots of verbal feedback and interaction. You can take it up a notch if you and the participant have web cams. In that case, you can see each other and the screen — not so different from sitting next to each other in the same room.

Now, some teams would like to just let usability testing run itself by doing “remote unmoderated usability tests”. I think this is one of the worst ideas to come along in a while. The whole point of usability testing and user research is to *observe* people using a design. When you conduct unmoderated testing, you have to rely on what participants *tell* you with no opportunity for follow-up questions. There are people who do beautiful unmoderated studies, but a) they do live observation and other data gathering methods as well, b) they spend a lot of time and energy designing the study and piloting it to get out of it what they need, c) they never do unmoderated testing before other methods.

Otherwise, I think we need a Reformation of usability testing. This is what my talk at MIMA will be about in October. The classical model of usability testing — setting up a controlled situation with one participant and one design, where the participant is performing set tasks — is not serving design very well.  Tasks aren’t what they used to be. Testing doesn’t scale: the usability testing methodology was created when user populations were much smaller and were likely to get training. There was no mobile or social. Satisfaction was fine, because the best we could do is eliminate frustration. But users expect much more than not sucking, and there’s enough competition in most sectors that it’s easy for users to go where they have a better experience.

One place we get stuck, is we only know how to test for what we know about. But then designs hit the market and all these apparently unpredictable things happen. We’ve got to figure out how to test for things we don’t know about. We have to create a larger set of techniques taken from other practices that we don’t pay much attention to right now to do a better job with user research and usability testing. I can see a day when we do very little classical summative usability testing and when most of the “testing” that is being done combines pieces of lots of different methods.

From design to launch, what organization do you think does usability really well? and why?

Two of my favorite web-based organizations are Netflix and Zipcar. At every point, the experience is superlative in both cases. I don’t know a lot about the inner workings of Zipcar, but Netflix has always done tons of user research, lots of prototyping, and heaps of testing of designs.

Marriott also gives amazing customer experience, and I know for a fact that the Marriott.com team lives and breathes usability. Most of the hotel reservations on the book for Marriott come through www.marriott.com, so it is crucial to the entire business that there be no obstacles to purchase, of course. But beyond that, Marriott as an organization has a vision and a belief system around what they want the customer experience to be — from the web site to checking out of the hotel (and beyond) — and they work very hard to ensure that the experience is excellent.

What is the most common usability mistake you see over and over?

Not involving everyone who has a stake in the design in the user research and usability testing. Everyone. When everyone involved in a design, from the CEO to the QA testers, know who users are, what they do with designs, and why, the business works better, and the infrastructure can seem less constraining. If you want users to love your design, fall in love with your users. Know them. Be able to tell stories about real people using your designs.

Next, is rushing. Everyone needs to ship. I get that, but there are times when it pays to get the design right (or closer to right) rather than shipping right now. There’s always a cost to rushing and it almost always shows up in the call center when customers start phoning or emailing that something doesn’t work the way they expected to. If that money and time were redirected to user research and usability testing, the organization would be healthier and the customers would be happier.

Ah, but I suppose you want to know about usability mistakes in user interface designs. I guess I’d have to say the biggest usability mistake is copying designs or elements of designs from other products or services without thinking about whether its appropriate or not. Amazon does mega menus, everybody does mega menus. (By the way, they didn’t work for Amazon, so they took them down, but you still see mega menus on other sites all over the place.)  Usability is behavioral. So, you have to know how users behave and how they want to interact with your designs.

What is next in the digital decade?

There’s a lot of talk about designing for delight. Delight is nice, but it’s thin. And, done the wrong way, or at the wrong time, or too much, and it gets annoying. I’m thinking that we all need to look a bit deeper. If you were to personally carry out this transaction with the customer, what would you want that to be like? If you were to design the perfect day for your user, where would your product or service fit into that day — how would that product or service make the day perfect?

I have a theory that the next stage is to be looking at getting beyond eliminating frustration to creating experiences that are truly pleasurable, put users in a state of flow, or emphasize purpose and meaning. And this is part of that Reformation I mentioned above. Designing in the framework I’m thinking of — pleasure, flow, and meaning — will take much different skills and thinking from what you get from the usual psychology, human factors, or human-computer interaction program. We user experience designers are going to have to learn about behavioral economics, linguistics, network theory, anthropology, and sociology, among other disciplines and practices, to do a better job of designing than just creating a satisfactory interaction.

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Hear Dana and other great speakers at the MIMA Summit

Follow Dana on twitter @danachis

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A special thanks to Jill Gutterman, a MIMA board member, for hosting this interview. Jill, is a Director of Interactive Marketing at Rasmussen College and a MIMA Board Director. Jill Gutterman’s philosophy in life is simple: Have passion for what you do and keep learning. It’s this philosophy that has been a driving force behind Jill’s forward-thinking 12 year professional career in digital marketing. Jill graduated magna cum laude from Wright State University, in Dayton, OH with a degree in psychology.

In celebration of the digital decade, it’s time to take a look at TV, mobile and tablet trends.

Join us as we mark the 10th Anniversary of the MIMA Summit to discover more trends at the 2011 MIMA Summit, register today!

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A special thanks to Chris Havranek, a MIMA volunteer, for developing this content.  Chris is a User Experience Specialist at Hello Viking.   Chris also has a B.S. in Branding, Marketing and PR from MCAD. He can be found on Twitter at @ChrisHavranek.

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Avinash Kaushik

One month and counting for this years MIMA Summit – hope you are as excited as we are!  This week we are featuring thoughts from our morning keynote Avinash Kaushik is the co-Founder of Market Motive Inc and the Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google.  For those that have not had the pleasure of attending one of his presentations, get ready on October 12^th to become an analytics evangelist and much more.

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This year’s summit is focused on the embracing the digital decade, what would you say was the greatest achievement in the last ten years of marketing?

Our ability to have deeper, more meaningful, relationships with our current and potential customers.

In the past most companies were a few steps removed from the consumer. Partly due to a lack of connectivity platforms. Partly because of intermediaries. Partly because of, frankly, a lack of interest.

The web changes all that. I can be P&G and I can have an existence were I can have a direct relationship with consumers. Speak to them. Listen to them. Engage them in marketing / experimentation / everything. I can learn and react and grow so much faster, and be more relevant.

This brings about very disruptive change to our marketing, people, processes, everything. But all of it, I think, for good. And I’m excited about the possibilities.

Oh and I love that the digital decade’s brought with is tons of cool gadgets. I love ‘em all!

You’ve been blogging for over five years, do you have any inspirational words for the next generation of bloggers?

Do it. Put yourself out there. Forget your resume, do the work and show that you know what you are taking about.

I recently wrote a blog post on the impact of five years of blogging on me. You’ll find it here: An Incredible Analytics Experience: 5 Years of Occam’s Razor (link: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/incredible-analytics-experience-5-years-occams-razor/ ). It outlines my learnings and surprises.

The biggest surprise was the ability to manage one’s brand. Checkout the two tag clouds in that post.

A bit of practical advice I would share with any new blogger (or Social Media participant in a professional capacity) would be this: Quality wins over quantity. Every time. Never hit Submit (or Post or Tweet or +1) unless what you are about to share meets this simple rule: It is something incredible, relevant, of value?

You are the co-founder of Market Motive, how do you think traditional education will change in the next ten years?

The core reason for starting Market Motive was that at the moment the traditional education path does not prepare a student to be successful in the digital ecosystem. Be it in fields like Web Analytics and Search Engine Marketing or evolved fields such as Online PR and Social Media. We bring together the best of the best in the world and create a curriculum that can help jump start anyone’s digital career.

That is the problem our traditional education paths will have to solve. How to teach when books become stale as soon as they are published (not classical mathematical technique books – wonderful, still relevant, must learn stuff, rather for our digital eco system)? How to teach kids emerging programming techniques being requested in bleeding edge jobs – well before they become mainstream and “cool”? How to complement tenured faculty with Subject Matter Experts who have zero “teacher training” or credentials?  How to ensure that a student’s education delivers a balanced mix of traditional and bleeding edge skills?

Hard problems to solve. Universities and colleges are going to have to evolve, perhaps faster and more radically than they might be comfortable with.

In your consulting practice, what are the biggest analytic mistakes you see over and over?

Two.

First, believe that data collection will magically make companies data driven. Almost all of the resources in the filed of digital analytics currently are focused on javascript / website tagging magic, collecting ever more copious amounts of (usually irrelevant short lived) data, and subsequently puking it out. Very rarely do companies invest analysis of the data they already have and in people who are smart enough to know the difference between reporting analysis. [link: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/difference-web-reporting-web-analysis/]

Second, more painful mistake, a lack of any connection between data analysis and business strategy. I am a rabid advocate of using processes like the Web Analytics Measurement Model and having a crystal clear understanding of what one is solving for, before touching the data. If you know where you are going, it is much easier to get there and everybody is happy!

This week, I was at dinner with some top notch experienced digital marketers and the topic of attribution reporting came up; many want this nirvana of reporting but feel it is unattainable without a great resource investment.  With your ability to simplify complex analytics can you offer a line of hope?

We have an ever growing number of media channels to reach our consumers and bring success to our business. So the desire to understand which activity is productive, and which parts stink, is super important.

There are a number of ways to skin this cat.

One path people take is to try and look at the end of a transaction, figure out all the prior media touch points, and then use some logical reasoning to attach some value to each media touch point (a banner ad, a search query, a direct visit etc). The challenge with this path is that there is no right answer, and it is very hard to figure out when one is wrong (!).

An alternative path is to use the glorious path of controlled experiments. Media Mix Modeling, for example, does not require the almost futile quest to “attribute credit.” Rather it says regardless of the last touch point prior to a transaction, what’s the optimal mix of media that delivers the highest possible number of transactions at the lowest possible cost. I believe solutions like this are the best way to solve our problem.

It is a harder way to solve the problem (hence few will attempt it – all the more reason you should do it!), but it delivers delightfully yummy results.

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Learn more about Avinash Kaushik and analytics by visiting his blog Occam’s Razor.  Avinash will be kicking off  the MIMA summit with his morning keynote, if you want to see him register for this year’s event.

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A special thanks to Jill Gutterman, a MIMA board member, for hosting this interview. Jill, is a Director of Interactive Marketing at Rasmussen College and a MIMA Board Director. Jill Gutterman’s philosophy in life is simple: Have passion for what you do and keep learning. It’s this philosophy that has been a driving force behind Jill’s forward-thinking 12 year professional career in digital marketing. Jill graduated magna cum laude from Wright State University, in Dayton, OH with a degree in psychology.

Reasons to Celebrate the Digital Millennium at the Annual MIMA Summit

What better way to celebrate the digital Millennium—the technological and Internet boom between 2000 and today—than to attend the biggest annual marketing and technology conference in the Midwest. Here’s a little glimpse into what the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) is toasting:

Celebrate 2000 where computer users feared their personal computer would blow up as midnight on New Year’s struck, the Microsoft™ Windows 2000 released, and the dot com era booms.

Celebrate 2001 where AOL and Napster reigned king, Linux source code first appeared; and where mobile computing gear, USBs, MacAfee computer security software, and the first Apple iPod™ surfaced.

Celebrate 2002 where e-commerce spiked for the first time and Apple introduced Mac OS X 10.2.

Celebrate 2003 where internet privacy becomes a hot topic in courtrooms and newsrooms; and where Mozilla, MySpace, Microsoft™ Windows and Spybots come to life.

Celebrate 2004 where Google gives birth to the now most popular email system in the world, Gmail.

Celebrate 2005 where YouTube™ came into the world, beginning what is now the fastest growing online marketing tool in the world; and where Skype and other videoconferencing systems are incepted for personal and professional communication.

Celebrate 2006 where GIF images become free to the public, Intel introduces the duo processors, and blu-ray and HD change the way we view television.

Celebrate 2007 where the iPhone and Droid start dueling and Smartphones get more pocket play than wallets.

Celebrate 2008 where Apple introduces iMac; and where corporations start to invest in social media marketing to reach the gaggle of consumers.

Celebrate 2009 where Microsoft releases Windows 7, where the economy is gloomy but interactive marketing shines.

Celebrate 2010 where content marketing and mobile marketing reigns king, more that 750 million in 2011 worldwide enjoy Facebook.

Celebrate 2011 by attending the 10th annual MIMA Summit

Here’s when we are doing it:
Join keynote speaker and web analytic evangelist, Avinash Kaushik, over 750 information-hungry attendees, and 40+ riveting speakers and Internet pros on October 11-12, 2011 at the Minneapolis Hilton.

More information and online registration here: MIMA Summit

Here’s the value:
Pricing starts at $45. MIMA members can enjoy savings around $100 with the full-conference, early registration. (Hint, hint: Is this impetus enough to become a MIMA member?)

MIMA Summit

Early-bird registration ends Friday, so either register NOW or tie a string around your finger to help you remember to sign up before the clock strikes midnight on the 1st.

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A special thanks to Allie Gray Freeland a MIMA volunteer, for hosting this post. Allie serves as the Interactive Communication Specialist at Rasmussen College. She is a five-year veteran of online marketing world and received her degree in Journalism from the University of Minnesota. Check out her credentials