User-Centered Design - Kelikuru.com

About two years ago, TG was a fan of Crime Scene Investigation Las Vegas (CSI:LV), fascinated by watching its episodes, characters and plots.  Both William Petersen and Marg Helgenberger are great actor and actress. Interesting story-lines, intriguing idea to solve their cases and all characters have very unique personalities but share the same characteristic: Attention to Details

Today I enjoy watching Fox’s compelling drama “Lie to me“. Dr Lightman ( played by Tim Roth) has the blessing of reading facial expressions and involuntary body language in such a way that he can find if someone is telling a lie.

Hey, anything to do with user research or user-centric design?  Certainly, the drama shows TG how to observe users while they are using our products. Don’t get me wrong, TG is not saying that our users are deliberate liers. It has been so common in the past cases that our users are not willing to tell the truth. It happens so often in Chinese community as our education and cultural belief make us to do so in order to save “face”. 

Observing user behavior becomes the de facto method to figure out the gap between who we think they are and who those users really are. The drama was said to be based on the scientific research of Paul Ekman. who spent his lifetime to study human faces and categorize them into different “emblem”

 
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This post continues to showcase how faceted search is deployed with a view of improving user experience. The last post presents a set of websites using left column to narrow down search results. TG would like to show some exemplary sites which take a different approach - faceted search at the top.

First and foremost, TG is particularly thankful to Hbeidi Xie, who contributed and shared her experiences in coming up with a faceted search design solution. Heidi noted that the design should be based on use case; a comprehensive users’ task analysis and user behavior pattern are crucial to the success of creating an effective search tool.    

Oftentimes, website functions and features are launched without conducting a prior research. Many would argue that there’s a strong need of time-to-market, hence everything has to be done fast. Right!! only if the product is what users want and how they want it to be.  TG agreed with Heidi that there’s no perfect solution as it may become obsoleted as time passes by. A workable design solution to a particular product is what we care. 

Should the faceted search be positioned at the top or on the left?  TG think it does not matter. So long as the tool is simple enough to help users perform their tasks and get what they are looking for, we shall accomplish our jobs.    

Wikio.com :

An information portal with a news search engine that searches press sites and blogs. TG is fond of vertical display of faceted search in particular as it does not require any scrolling, all attributes are condensed at the top and accessible in many occasions.   

 like.com :

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We have briefly discussed the barriers of designing faceted search and we need some inspirations from current design by other site operators. Actually we are not alone, there are many of them working on different types of solutions in an attempt to offer a painless Faceted Search user experience. This post showcases some of the exemplary websites in shopping category mostly. The first set has its faceted search built on the left.

Yoox.com :

A global internet retailing partner for the leading fashion & design brands. It has a very simple faceted search to begin with - top designers and top categories.

Buzzillions.com :

A product review site. TG found the site is exceptionally clean, stylised wth minimalism design. Its faceted search tells users how many products are found upfront, what filter(s) has been applied during the process of searching

Yahoo Shopping :

Part of Yahoo! family of site, the site has a clear indication of what the users are looking for _ Women’s Sunglass by using a bold header and small tagline. Tabs on the left hide and show a number of facets on each attributes.  

Target.com :

An online retail store in United States. The C2C shopping site has a nice play of red and white colors, key items jumps out from the white background.  Site designer tries to control the number of attributes to be displayed above the first fold in the first place, which reduces the painful experiences of scrolling up and down

PriceGrabber. com :

A site that can allow users to compare the prices on all the most popular products. The strength of the sites’s faceted search is to allow multiple selection of filters and do it in one-go. Yet, the knife is not double edges, user may find it annoying to scroll down and click on the Update Results button

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Faceted Search- a guided navigation tool with growing popularity in web 2.0 age. There are many ways to call it before: refined search, filtered search, narrow-down search or even vertical search. The naming convention has become a de facto standard for e-Commerce, product-related shopping websites and most often in travel industry.

Being lost in a search maze is a big disaster to many users, site operators have suffered most eventually. With faceted search, it is destined to help increase findability and speed up search for a desirable item.

In designing a usable faceted search, TG found the major hurdles coming from:

• Too many facets, values and attributes that stakeholders want to display online. They thought the more options provided to users, the more useful and usable they are. Jakob Nielsen in his latest email - “Guesses vs Data as basis for design recommendations”  mentioned that excess features can hurt review and users are not quick learner, they tend not to learn

We see how little users care about learning fancy Web techniques. People just want to get in, get their stuff done, and get out. They don’t want to learn.

• Lack of complete understanding of use cases as a result of not having a full analysis of user’s search patterns and behavior, making it difficult to display facets in different scenarios with levels of importance 
• Attributes are not mutually exclusive as taxonomy is not well-designed. Users will find facets missing while making their choices
• How to create an effective layout to interact with users? Should it be on the left or at the top? How to capture users’ attention without distracting them from product display? How to create an initutive user experiences in using the facets? How to reasonably group the facets and values according to users’ expectation? How to indicate the facets are selected and unselected. There are many questions to ask in the interactive design level  

Authored by Stephanie Lemieux, “Designing for faceted search” gave us a shortlist of Dos and Don’t in using the search tool.  While working on a project to improve faceted search, TG found it a big help in referring to the guidelines.

Another good article is from Jep Castelein, who has done studies in “10 Rules for Faceted Search on Travel Sites”

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Tencent  (HKSE0700) (腾讯), founder and CEO Pony Ma Huateng ( 馬化腾)  has given insights into product development strategy. In part one - Tencent Pony Ma speaks of User-Centered Design  he briefly touched on the following areas:

• Product’s core value is essential to develop a good brand for the company
• Adding product features should be handled with discreet care and always get ready for trade-off for better user experiences

In this post, Mr Ma spent more time on talking about the criteria of being a product designer, the keywords cover:

Be alert and sensitive to your product, use your product everyday  – Product designer should be aware of the fact that QQ is literally providing “services”, which involve the intricate process and framework building of content, structure and application. They should roll up their sleeves and start using the products themselves everyday.

Where to get feedback, problems or issues in using products? – Users seldom proactively tell us the problems. The best way to get users’ comment is to hunt them down in forums, RSS readers and blogs.

Be the most nasty and picky user of your own product – Product designers should be attention-to-details and be critical of their own products. Find the weakness of the products, come up with a solution and make a swifted change.

3 golden rules in designing products – #1: Avoid disturbing users just because of fullfilling a small number of users’ expectation. #2: Ease of use and #3: Simplify your design    

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How Tencent  (HKSE0700) (腾讯), - which is better known for its QQ instant messaging service, formulates its product development plan with a view of improving user experiences?

Tecent’s founder and CEO Pony Ma Huateng ( 馬化腾)  has given his viewpoints in an article which can shed more light on its product development strategy.

Mr Ma told his staff loud and clear that the core values of product design is to meet with users’ expectations. it should help users save their time, increase their productivity and cater for their needs.

How to make it happen? Mr Ma has a few points to make:

Not to create a “me too” product, try to push technology to its limit  — Users would probably compare products in order to get the best one in the market. Using QQ audio player as an example, many users would choose between Baofeng player (暴风影音) and QQ. it would be beneficial for QQ audio and video player to focus its core service as a “faster, smaller, fluid, no ad, and no-plugin player”. What QQ audio player can outdo Baofeng player will earn Tencent’s  word-of-mouth branding value in the market.  

Thinks twice before you make a move, act cautiously to add a new product feature– Once the core servcie is built up, product design team should make sure that the established brand are well protected. Every new feature or step they make to improve the product should be planned thoroughly. It requires double effort to gain back users’ confidence if the brand is tarnished as a result of immature design process 

Know when to give up in exchange for a better user experience  — In designing a new feature, product designer will have a lot of ideas, the end product may only satisfy 10% users while at the same time may upset the rest of 90% . If there is a forseeable conflict, it would be wise to get ready for a trade off and give up the idea that gets users into trouble   

Focus on high-end users as they are the opinion leaders in forum and social media – Creating value for high-end users would result in high rating. For example, users can now make use of other email systems within QQ mail.  Smart users as they are, they can tell Tencent has taken them into consideration and they will spread the words in forums.

 
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