SXSW: Designing the First 15 Minutes
Presenters:
Daniel Burka - Tiny Speck
Rob Goodlatte - Facebook
I’ve seen Burka speak before at FOWD last year in NYC, and He put on a great workshop. I was looking forward to hearing him speak again, and he didn’t disappoint. Burka and Rob had a friendly rivalry going on-stage for a bit which added a sort of ‘entertainment’ factor to the entire presentation. Really great session and I think I’ve got some pretty good video snippets of a few important bits.
Burka started off with a story of how he and his girlfriend needed to buy a car because they had just bought a burmiese mountain dog, and a bike just wasn’t going to cut it as transportation. I’m not going to relay the entire story, but as he was going through it, I instantly recognized the key points he was making with the ‘Car Buying Experience’.
Here’s the experience in annotated form:
As a UX designer, I automatically relate this to my first time experience with a software or online service website, and very offer such service before wanting something from me. This was a big part of the session along with a few other key issues.
Have Empathy for your Users
*watch out for the audio spike around 1:10
Date Before Demanding Commitment
Let your users try out the service and create something that they’re invested in. Sites like Geni.com & JobSpice.com allow you to start using their service right away and then when you want to ‘save’ what you’ve created, they ask you to sign up for an account. The likely hood of them signing up is much more likely if they had been asked to create an account first.
You can’t always do this, so Burka recommends ‘Providing a Treasure Map’ of the great features and be fast at displaying the incentive.
Ah-Ha!
Rob expanding on this with a story of how they discovered the ‘Ah-Ha! Moment’, of facebook, while doing some useability testing. The short of it is that this women had the worst possible sign-up experience, but as soon as she got to add friends to her account she grew this huge smile on her face from recognizing someone she hadn’t seen in years. From that point on FB new their single biggest incentive was connecting people. As a designer we need to find the single biggest incentive of the product & PUT IT FIRST!
Feedback Cycles
Providing new users with feedback can help guide them on the right path and help support and encourage them in this ‘new environment’. The more instant the feedback, the better the experience. One quick example is instant feedback during form validation. Being able to tell someone that the user name they wanted isn’t available before they fill out the rest of the form (or submit it), keeps them happy and increases their confidence in the site.
Education as an Experience
With new online services and application their all lots of things that you can once your inside, but simply being told what you can do is ineffective, overwhelming, and intrusive. Rather we look at how games use ‘Quests’ to teach people how to ‘play’ the game.
A great example of this is the LinkedIn profile completion progress bar. It provides you a goal to attain, and then gives you the list of tasks you need to complete to achieve that goal. Another example is the ‘To Do List’ on Yammer. These quests/task list also give you the sense that your in control of what your going to do with the service, and prevent the sense of being forced into doing things.
We can also ‘teach’ the user through guided mechanism’s such as the Tumblr registration does. After signing up for an account it focuses on one area of the interface, darkens the rest, and ASKS you to perform a task. It then runs through the 4-5 major tasks you will use within tumblr, and after that your up, running, and on our own. The great part about it is that I can exit out of the ‘guided path’ at any time that I want, and it only appears when you first register.
This can be integrated into the previous concept of feedback cycles by setting smaller goals at first and then broadening those goals into larger ones, once the first have been completed.
