Hands-On Task Management: From Interaction Design to web Strategy

Hands-On Task Management: From Interaction Design to Web StrategyMike AtyeoJ Boye TutorialTuesday May 3, 2011 V1.2

Mike Atyeo Contacts Phone (613) 271-3001 Email info@neoinsight.com Web www.neoinsight.com Mail Suite 374 300 Earl Grey Drive Ottawa, Ontario Canada K2T 1C1 Strategic design(613) 271-3001 x101mike@neoinsight.com Gord Hopkins User Experience Specialist (613) 271-3001 x102gord@neoinsight.com Scott Smith Competitive strategy (613) 271-3001 x103scott@neoinsight.com Lisa Fast Experience Designer (613) 271-3001 x104lisa@neoinsight.com

J Boye Tutorial: Hands-On Task Management: From Interaction Design to Web Strategy Introduction(s) The Top Task Law Round in Circles: Sweat the small task-oriented stuff Top Tasks on the Home Page Faces, images, banners and attention: Task-oriented R&D Create a culture of testing Organizing the Task-focused organization

Going the J Boye way... “I really like this conference format and the composition of the audience, because you’re not bothered by vendors, not bored by consultants, but you meet a lot of experts with whom you can share experiences.” “At many conferences, the main question is: “what should we do?”, which is always theoretical, but here it is: “how did you do it?” “Many thanks for a great conference. I found the day really useful and came back buzzing with ideas.”

The 3 key changes to website strategy Manage tasks Not websites Get the focus off technology and silos Prioritise resources around top tasks Use the ‘long neck’ to focus Measure task performance As a key, continuous organizational performance indicator Data on behaviour (not opinion)

Web phrenology There are usability issues we see time and time again – they’re common to most organizations There are also recommendations we make that clients find hard to implement – there are common challenges and barriers Lisa Welch

Category Category Category Cause Cause Cause Cause Cause Cause Cause Cause Cause Cause Cause Cause Cause Cause Cause Cause Cause Cause Problem Statement Cause Cause Cause Cause Cause Cause Cause Cause Cause Cause Cause Cause Category Category

Amdahl’s Law Performance improvement is proportional to how much a program uses the thing you improved.

Top task identification Not all tasks are equal - the top 4 tasks garnered the same number of votes as the bottom 43 1. Find a Person 2. Procedures, Policies... 3. Corporate News 4. Training, Learning 30,000 Intranet users... 4 Countries...

The Long Neck Target audiences’ votes on their top tasks Tasks 15

Not Quitethere yet The Top Task Law Performance improvement is proportional to how much your users use the thing you improved.

The Top Task Law Priority tasks users want to do on your website Tasks supported by your website

The Top Task Law Total website quality improvement is proportional to the frequency and importance of the improved tasks to users. Corollary To get the biggest ROI on improvements to your website, concentrate on improving the most frequent and important user tasks.

Aside... http://www.slideshare.net/lrosenfeld/redesign-must-die

Round in Circles: Sweat the small task-oriented stuff

Top paths on top library pages HOME ENTER: 76% EXIT: 49% CIRCULAR: 17% 21% 5% 5% E-Library E-Reserves Departments ENTER: 15% ENTER: 14% ENTER: 8% EXIT: 9% EXIT: 61% EXIT: 62% CIRCULAR: 12% CIRCULAR: 5% CIRCULAR: 15% 23% 22% 18% 11% 9% 18% 11% 5% 3% Netdoc/ Subject E-Journals(alpha) Netdoc/ Title HOME Departments E-Library HOME E-Journals(alpha) E-Library 17% 5% 5% 15%

Top Tasks on the Home Page Top tasks should be very easy to do quickly, without errors Users should be able to start a top task on the Home page

http://redesignland.blogspot.com/

Start a Top Task on the home page

Mega-menus bring many top tasks up to the home page

Relationship of Task Priority to Information Architecture One or two top tasks can be started on home page Categorized links on home page lead to high priority tasks Medium priority tasks accessible from level 2 landing pages or ‘hub’ pages Low priority tasks start three levels down architecture Maybe some of these shouldn’t even be done on the website 1 Votes 2 3 4 5 Tasks

“Find a person” test results 115 tests of find a person tasks... 4 companies, 3 countries... 44% Failure rate 14% Disaster

Time wasted unnecessary / irrelevant email = 30minutes Estimated cost, 10,000 employee organisation = $152million If 1% about finding people, cost = $1.52million CohesiveKnowledge.com shared cumulative results from more than 1,000 corporate employee surveys conducted in 2005 as feedback from their email efficiency workshops

Faces, images, banners and attention: Task-oriented R&D

Faces Are Engaging but Still Worth Testing Tullis, T., Siegel, M & Sun, E. (2009) Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Boston, MA. Each participant started at the same page with one of these 4 conditions Quantitative: 800 employee participants & qualitative: 40 Eyetracking Participants

Main Page for Faces Study Task: How much would you need to increase your 401K contribution so that you get your full match from your employer?

Impact of images on task time and success Users were less accurate and took longer with the faces

Where the participants looked: eye-tracking ,[object Object]

The eyetracking revealed the why.

People tended not to look at the ‘faces’ boxes.

Despite the fact that a high proportion of the gazes are to the right hand side.

And the layout of the page directs attention to the right.

Note that they didn’t glance at the image and ignore it – they didn’t even look at it.

So this happens subconsciously: people aren’t making a conscious decision to ignore the image.

And it happens very quickly – within milliseconds.,[object Object]

almost no fixations within advertisements users don't fixate within design elements that resemble ads Heatmaps from eyetracking studies: The areas where users looked the most are coloredred; the yellow areas indicate fewer views, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didn't attract any fixations. Green boxes were drawn on top of the images after the study to highlight the advertisements. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/banner-blindness.html

U.S. Census Bureau home page: 86% of users failed to find the country's current population http://www.useit.com/alertbox/fancy-formatting.html

‘Banner blindness’ video example Video example 49

Exercise: Concentration http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGQmdoK_ZfY&feature=player_embedded The way we view a web page is different to the way we use a web page

Organizing the Task-focused organization

Allocate scarce resources to the ‘long neck’ How much relative resource to apply “Strategy renders choices about what not to do as important as choices about what to do... Some managers mistake ‘customer focus’ to mean they must serve all customer needs or respond to every request...” Michael Porter Which 5% of tasks to focus on. Tasks

Manage users’ tasks 5% of a website delivers 25% of its value. There are a small number of ‘top tasks’ which users prioritize far above others. These top tasks should be the basis for: ,[object Object]

Matrix organization - responsibilities Managers with responsibility for specific tasks. Managers with responsibility for specific UX functions.

Management tools for change Skills & Training Process Responsibility & Reward Technology Standards and Guidelines Targets and Measures Budgeting, Project Planning

Hands-On Task Management: From Interaction Design to web Strategy

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