Posted on Mon, Feb 22, 2010
I recently took a vacation to my home country of England (pronounced In-Ger-Land at football - sorry, soccer - matches). It's been seven years since I visited my home town of London which gave me chance to view London somewhat through the eyes of a "tourist."
Over the next few weeks I will talk about the usability of London from a tourist's perspective - the good, the bad and the unspeakably ugly.
To kick off the series, I thought this London Underground poster was rather fun. Usability is all about perspective after all...
It's certain you're a Londoner when "going south" means south of the river and "the north" starts at the Watford Gap. You call an 8'x10' patch of grass a garden, believe that Zone 6 is in the countryside, and when you say 'the city' you expect everyone to know which one you mean. Distance is measured in tube stops not miles, and you think nothing of travelling an hour across town for a quick drink with a friend. You can guarantee that you are in the background of at least 3 tourist pictures somewhere around the world, and that these tourists have seen more of the capital's sights than you have. You are always shocked that the 'stand on the right' rule doesn't apply outside of London, and yes, you know what 'apples and pears' means but you've never considered actually saying it. It's certain you will have run for the tube even though the next one is only a few minutes away, but at least you know there will always be something to read to help you while away the time.
Posted on Tue, Feb 09, 2010
Last week we conducted three days of usability labs with a different sort of twist. Instead of conducting the labs with one person at a time, we did them with two (that's a dyad in research nerd speak).
The labs were conducted by two moderators in separate rooms. After the labs were completed, the two users were brought together and invited to discuss their experiences with each other.
I was blown away with the quality of the conversation. I would simply instigate the conversation with something like, "Julius, I noticed you were having problems in the online bill pay exercise, why don't you tell Karen about that."
The conversational tone encouraged the respondents to talk openly and candidly about their experiences. Since the usability labs were fresh in their minds the respondents did a great job at not deviating from the subject at hand (which is sometimes a problem in qualitative research).
We're going to recommend this technique to more of our clients, but there are certainly some things to consider before you try this exercise yourself:
- Dyads require a lot of recruitment coordination. We used a great recruitment firm and allowed more time than usual for recruiting.
- The moderators need to be hard task masters. We agreed beforehand that each lab would take 30 minutes and we did everything in our power to stick to that. The last thing we wanted was a respondent to be waiting 20 minutes for the interview session while the other tried to complete the lab portion.
- The dyad interview needs to be conducted by an experienced qualitative interviewer. The questions need to be well-designed in order to encourage conversation and the moderator needs to be able to get all respondents to provide productive feedback. Although the results may seem like a natural conversation between two people, a lot of hard work is required to achieve this.
Posted on Mon, Feb 08, 2010
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Yesterday's Super Bowl was awesome (for the Saints), but how did you think the ads fared?
Can you believe there were a total of 32 in-game ad breaks featuring 116 commercials?
Unsurprisingly, the dominant advertiser was Anheuser Busch who ran 8 spots, followed by Doritos with 4.
As usual, advertisers used humor as a way to get Super Bowl viewers to remember their commercials - the Bud Light commercials ensured there were laughs aplenty.
While there were no wardrobe malfunctions this year, there was controversy surrounding a couple of the ads - Focus On The Family's pro-life commercial aired during the first commercial break and the video game, Dante's Inferno, (featuring the tagline "Go To Hell") both caused a stir.
This Thursday there is going to be a really interesting panel discussion about the Super Bowl commercials at AMA OKC. A hand-picked panel of advertisers will be providing their take on this year's successes and failures. Make sure you hop over to AMOKC's website and register.
In the meantime, let us know which commercials rocked your world and which ones didn't.