Influencing Usability

A recent article from US consulting company ServiceXRG has published its research to confirm what I have also believed for a while:

That you can significantly influence your users by providing a positive user experience on your website.

The report (freely available here) provides supporting evidence to explain its main finding:
1. Customers perceptions are influenced by online experiences
2. Customers have purpose, but need help obtaining their goals
3. Effective tools and content are essential to lead customers to their desired outcome
4. The content customers need does not exist, or if they do find it, the quality is less than they expected

Based on interviews with 503 online customers and 311 companies, this research shows how customers use the Web to make purchase decisions. It explains what companies can do to provide users with an experience that meets and exceeds their expectations.

http://www.idealinterface.co.uk/ is lucky enough to be asked to work on developing usable and persuasive interfaces. This assists both the company bottom line and the online experience of the user.

Ambient Findability

Peter Morville wrote a book, as part of the well-regarded O'Reilly series, on navigating your way around large & complex amounts of information, called Ambient Findability

Although its not the greatest of books covering HCI and Information retreival, it does cover the subject in a useful and conversational way (its ideal for the consultant to pick and and refer to as well).

In his book, amongst other subjects, he discusses some themes that are interesting to this blog:

1. Pareto's Principle (otherwise known as the 80/20 rule):
Where 80% of the effects comes from 20% of the causes*.
Although obvious, it should always be rembered that companies should identify where they need to maximize their attention and to focus on those things that affecting them most.

2. Emotional Design
The wonderfully 'human' concept that 'Attractive things work better' (or put anther way, by a good friend of mine 'have you ever had a car that drove better when it was clean'?)


3. Human Information Interaction
I find it an interesting theory that working within information environments utilises a combination of 2 laws:

a) Moore's Law:
Computing power (number of transistors) will double every 2 years

b) Mooer's Law:
An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it.


Now.... assuming computation power continues to increase over time (Moore). There comes a point where it possible to create an attractive (intuitive, responsive, adaptable) interface to a system, thus improving the retrieval and making it virtually painless (Mooer) for a user to find all the information they need.


One question to therefore ask is: "when is that date?"
Or possibly and what is more contentious to ask is: "Haven't we already reached it and are just being lazy?"


* lets think of them as influencers, bloggers, commentators, etc.

Beyond the Walled Garden - the User Interface

Ryan Singer of 37 Signals (Basecamp, etc.) gives a presentation on effective User Interfaces:

http://www.slideshare.net/carsonified/ryan-singer

Which leads me to consider how you could even hope to show a user the level of information/control being managed beyond the 'walled garden'. Assuming you could somehow measure this level, the UI would have to be both complex (potentially showing numerous content areas/places) and simplistic enough to be utterly usable.

The worry is that people don't consider measuring the impact or regard it as too difficult.