Zipf’s Law in Product Design: A Practical Guide

Zipf’s Law in Product Design: A Practical Guide

by | Nov 26, 2023 | Blog, Product Design

How Zipf’s Law of Least Effort Drives Product Adoption

Humans are lazy. we are always looking to get the biggest outcome for the least possible effort. We are wired to choose the path of least resistance. And we do so on a daily basis without even thinking about it. It’s automatic. And we’re not alone. As far as we know, everything in nature does this; from plants to clouds to lighting and the stars in the sky. Conserving energy is born into all living beings. In nature, you never know how long it will be before you find your next meal. Your life depends on conserving energy.

This means that we will always choose the more easy, effortless option over the more difficult one when we do something. Anything really. Even speaking. And that is what George Kingsley Zipf observed: we humans have a tendency to decrease the amount of energy that they put into talking. Linguists call this, “the economy of effort”, which is when sounds change over time to save effort.

If we take the English language as an example, we can see here that it’s changed so much over time that we are still able to understand the English that was spoken in the time of Shakespeare, some 400 years ago, but Shakespeare would probably not have been able to understand the English that was spoken 400 years before his time. And that is because the people speaking that language are sloppy and simplify the language. words like ‘going to’ become ‘gonna’, ‘it is’ becomes “it’s” and ‘because’ becomes ‘cos’ and so on.

The evolution of the English language from the 5th century to the current day

The principle of least effort is extremely important to keep in mind when you design or improve user flows. User flows make up a website’s or app’s underlying structure. As a designer, you should know that goal-oriented users have one or more clear goals in mind that they want to achieve. In doing so, they are always on the lookout for shortcuts. Something simple that conserves energy, and I mean brain energy, and that prevents cognitive overload, which is when you drain your brain’s energy supply, wins the day.

And let’s get something out of the way while we are here: the 3-click rule. You may have heard about it at some time in your career. The 3-click rule and states that the maximum amount of clicks towards a goal should never be more than 3. Studies have shown, however, that fewer clicks do not correlate with higher user satisfaction. the number of clicks is not as important as the flow towards the user’s goal, provided you make the steps invisible and provide constant feedback on the user’s progress.


Image: Henrik Ishihara Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

If you work in the field of service design, product design, or User eXperience design, you have seen the above image many times before. It shows a path with an obstacle in the middle which is obstructing the flow of the cyclists. Clearly, the cyclists’ goal is whatever lies at the end of that path and they will get there in the most effortless way possible. So they simply go around the object that blocks their way.

The obstruction blocking their, way stops the cyclist’s flow, which causes friction. Just like a dam that blocks the flow of water in a river or a mountain blocking a gush of warm air reaching the other side, unless the reward is worth the effort, it will do anything to avoid that friction and go around it. People are no different.


Image: Henrik Ishihara Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Ikea understands this well and offers its customers their own shortcuts in their stores. in fact, if you have ever been to one of their stores, you can see that it is built around the journey that people take. window shoppers or ‘browsers’ can simply start at the beginning of the journey and ‘stroll’ past all the displays and installations and gaze at the ingenuity of some of the solutions the designers came up with and dream about how they can fit that into their homes and then have something to eat in the restaurant.

But if you’re goal-oriented and know exactly what you want, then you can either check the map to see where you need to go directly or you can ask the friendly person at the entrance of the store and she will guide you there.

Just like the riverbed is the river’s underlying structure, this is IKEA’s underlying structure that everything flows through. It is what ensures that the customer’s journey through the store feels effortless, except for their labels of course.

Ikea knows that its key is to remove as much friction as possible if you want people to focus on the items in the store rather than focus on their journey through the store. they aim for a frictionless flow to help users achieve their goals.

So let’s recap:  What we have seen so far is that everything in nature strives to minimise effort. That friction due to obstacles —which I use in the broadest sense of the term— is inefficient and costs energy, and that something frictionless is easy and efficient and saves energy. We also saw that the underlying structure of ‘something’ determines the amount of friction that someone encounters. That is all you need to remember for now.

To further illustrate this point let’s look at some people from the past: Henry Ford provided a more frictionless assembly of his cars by introducing a moving assembly line in his factories. Sakichi Toyoda is famous for introducing lean manufacturing at Toyota which minimises waste which decreases friction, and Ikea provides an efficient process from beginning to end with a high-value addition for the customer in the shape of seamless journeys that offer shortcuts.

What Ikea does in its stores it also does on its website: it offers a frictionless experience. The underlying structure is akin to the experience in the store. It offers a clear overview of what is there, a very good search functionality, and a frictionless journey for both browsers and goal-oriented shoppers.

I take Ikea as an example for this story, but that’s only because it illustrates so well how to combine the law of least effort with a commercial experience.

HOW TO DO IT

There are several methods that you can use to remove friction from your flows. First of all, you need to identify them. Identifying friction points can be done by observing your visitors when they use the website. That way you can see what issues (=friction) they run into when they perform one or more tasks.

Two of the most important methods that I know of how to do this are:
1. Real-time. By being in the same room with a participant and just look over their shoulder to see what they do and what problems their run into.
2. Look at the data. I advise you to ask a web-analyst to help you with this.

For the first method when you choose to observe people in their real-life environment, you should start off by defining a few key-targets that zoom in on the issue that you are trying to uncover. Not too many, 6 or 7 should do the trick. These will help you find the friction points for the journeys that you want to understand and improve. Make sure you have either a prototype ready or use the live website and let the user just go through the journey until they achieved their goal. This is just one observation technique that is part of a much wider net called ‘field studies’. Its main purpose is to get under the skin of the people who visit your website. The information that we get from these studies is generally called soft data because it requires interpretation and is hard to turn into numbers and charts although that has just been made easy with the help of AI.

The second method is to look at the data. When a web-analyst gathers information about a user’s activity on the website she can see what the majority does or doesn’t do. She then turns this information into numbers and charts —the hard data— and offers insights and advice for improvement. It resembles the good ol’ heuristic walkthrough but based on numbers and not on knowledge.

It goes without saying that combining both methods offers the best results, which is why I encourage designers to partner-up with analysts. Especially one that understands that people are not rational even though numbers and charts say they are.
So if you can wait before you start making pages and interactions without having actual knowledge about your users on board. Knowledge of friction-points that people run into will help you design better solutions. It’s the key to making invisible flows (because that is what good flows are) is knowing where friction points are and how to get rid of them. Deal with the major ones first and then work your way down to the smaller ones.

Eliminating all friction from your flows makes for happier customers and happier customers are returning customers.

When a machine replaces a human: implications and opportunities

When a machine replaces a human: implications and opportunities

by | Nov 29, 2022 | Product Design, Psychology

This was supposed to be a rant. Me going to the mattresses against the awful service of my supermarket ever since it was rebuilt and placed self-checkout machines.

I was going to complain about the fact that I have been checked three times this week and every time I got checked I felt like a thief. Or rather I felt that they thought I was a thief.

The girl, she couldn’t have been a day older than 18, even asked me to give her my date of birth, because I had bought 2 units of wine.  That amounts to one glass for those who don’t know. “You can see I’m over 18 right?” I said. She gave no reply, just that cold ‘I-know-you’re-a-thief’ look – I’m sure she’s going to be a politician one day.

When I finally finished scanning every item, I paid for my groceries and went to the car. I felt violated. I would show them. Safely at home I started researching the self-checkout phenomenon to write a fact-based blogpost where I would complain about this violation to my rights.
As I started absorbing more and more information I started to understand that these self-checkout machines are a haven for shoplifters.

Up to 20.000 euros per week was stolen from the store. Golly

One supermarket even went so far as to place a cardboard police officer between the machines to deter potential wrongdoers.

I feel bad now for grunting at the girl who checked my bags. Because now I understand where it came from.

I guess that’s it right? If you understand why, then it is easier to deal with.

Edit: Since I wrote this post. the supermarket placed a security guard at the self-checkout machines and no more bags are being checked.

How I survived a heart-stopping near-death experience on a night dive

How I survived a heart-stopping near-death experience on a night dive

by | Jun 12, 2021 | Blog, Product Design

My Near-death experience

A few decades ago, when I was in my 20’s, I lived in the southern tip of the country. I had successfully passed my exams (Art & Media Technology) and as a present, to myself, I took up diving. We mostly practised in a public swimming pool. On occasion, however, we practised in the wild in one of the surrounding lakes.

Then one day it happened.

For your one-star licence, the requirement is that you swim underwater blind (with a black piece of plastic in your goggles). We went outside to one of the lakes to make it more realistic. (This exercise is to test how well you do in murky waters.)

The distance wasn’t all that great, but being unable to see and being underwater does something to a person. One starts to imagine all kinds of things. Sharks, Piranhas, THE LOCH NESS MONSTER.

I think that I couldn’t have been in the water for more than 2 minutes when I felt ‘a force’ pulling me back by my right leg. Ever so slightly at first. I thought I was imagining things. But then it happened again, and again. Oh my goodness! SOMETHING CREEPY WAS NIBBLING AT MY LEG!

I swam to the other side of the lake as fast as I could while that ‘thing’ kept on biting at me. It was obviously looking for the right time to bite my leg off. My heart was racing like crazy and I swam like there was no tomorrow.

As I catapulted out of the water like a penguin on Antarctic ice, I quickly pulled off my flipper and goggles to fend off ‘the monster’. And then I saw it.

It was a fish. A small fish that was still attached to a fishing hook and line. The line had caught my flipper. The poor thing was a big as the palm of my hand and probably fighting for its life.

My team looked at me wide-eyed unable to appreciate my near-death experience.

“You okay?” the instructor asked

“su..sure,” I said panting heavily

I passed that exam also, but to this day it is still the scariest 60 seconds of my life.

Key pillars of UX strategy: how to unlock success

Key pillars of UX strategy: how to unlock success

by | May 7, 2021 | Blog, Product Design, UX

In short:

  • A UX Strategy is a plan to achieve an end goal.
    It’s a multi-step step approach that answers to the following three questions:
    1. Where are we now?
    2. Where do we want to go?
    3. How are we going to get there?
  • Before you embark on this journey you need to understand what level of UX maturity your organisation is at. There are 4 levels of maturity. Only spend time on a UX Strategy if the company is at level 3, otherwise aim your efforts at increasing the UX maturity of the company.
  • Second, when you’re on level 3, get executive buy-in by showing them what the benefit of a UX Strategy is for the company. Do this by answering the following two questions:
    1. What is the benefit for the user?
    2. What is the benefit for for the business?
  • Once you have buy-in from the executives, work on your UX Strategy by applying UX-methods such as:
    UX Research,
    stakeholder & domain expert interviews &
    desk research.
  • Then, for more impact, boil your findings down to a one page plan (or a blueprint) like the examples on this page.

What is UX Strategy

UX Strategy is a plan towards achieving a goal. It consists of 4 to 5 steps that describe:

  • Where we are now,
  • Where we want to go,
  • How we’re going to get there, and
  • How much time we have to get it all done.

UX Strategy can be viewed on an organisational level (how do we make the entire organisation UX aware?) or at a project level (what will we do to achieve our goal?)

I looked at many UX professionals who discuss UX Strategy from their own perspective. I ended up with 6 of them that stood out. I took the similarities and the differences in their approach and combined that with my own experience. I share my findings with you in this post.

The 6 professionals are:
A. David Juhlin ⤵ – Five Levels of UX Strategy
B. Jared Spool ⤵ – UX Strategy Means Business
C. Jim Kalbach ⤵ – UX Strategy Blueprint
D. Jaime Levy ⤵ – UX Strategy
E. Robert Hoekman Jr. ⤵ – Guide Your Design With a 1-Page UX Strategy
F. Daniel Birch ⤵ – Five pillars of UX strategy

“Strategy is a story told to others about how challenges can be overcome. It is about persuasion: convincing others to work with you or explaining to adversaries the consequences if they do not.”
– Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman –

A. Five Levels of UX Strategy – David Juhlin

We will start with David Juhlin because of his focus on the Business strategy first and UX strategy second. He discusses 5 levels of UX strategy that range from UX strategy on product level to a UX strategy on a global level(image right). I will skip the industry and global levels. These are irrelevant for most companies.

An important point that Juhlin raises is to be aware of what the business strategy of the company is. Because ‘offering the best at user experience’ may not be what the company strives for.
“A company that bases its business strategy on superior technology” Juhlin says “may stop at delivering a good enough experience for its users.”

I bit off more than I could chew on several occasions where I tried to lift the level of UX maturity in a company only to be confronted with the fact that that is not what the company was looking for. Avoid that.

David Juhlin’s 5 levels of UX strategy

“A great UX strategy is the approach that best supports the company’s overarching business strategy.”

Via various examples he shows how a well implemented UX strategy boosts a company’s sales and how that is a good argument to level up your UX Strategy.

Most of corporate UX occurs on a project level (the smallest circle). This often means applying best practices . Few companies can lead in this field. Only those who have the means to invest time and resources to develop a ‘leader strategy’. When they do, it’s almost immediately copied by others.

He emphasises to benchmark progress as the organisation grows and scales its UX strategy. He offers various methods to do this such as Attrakdiff, Net promoter Score (NPS) and the System Usability Scale (SUS).

“The reason for the product, application or the site. Why we create it, who are we doing this for, why people are willing to use it, why they need it. The goal here is to define the user needs and business objectives“

“The reason for the product, application or the site. Why we create it, who are we doing this for, why people are willing to use it, why they need it. The goal here is to define the user needs and business objectives“

B. Jared Spool’s “UX Strategy Means Business”

UX powerhouse, Jared Spool also considers the business side of things before it comes to UX Strategy. His philosophy is that if you want to move the UX needle forward then the first thing you need to do is convince executives that your UX design ideas make the organisation stronger: The Need to Think and Talk like an Executive.

What Jared Spool teaches is how to get (the executives of) your organisation ready to embrace a custom UX strategy. You do that by showing what’s in it for them and answering the following 5 questions:

How might our UX design initiative:
1. Increase overall revenues? ⤵
2. Decrease operational costs? ⤵
3. Increase revenues from new business? ⤵
4. Increase revenues from existing business? ⤵
5. Increase shareholder value? ⤵

1. Does our UX design initiative increase overall revenues
A colleague told me once “Everything we do here is to help the salespeople sell”. This is true even for non-profit organisations. With that in mind look closely at your team’s UX design initiatives. Do they help salespeople sell? If the answer is ‘no’ then the initiative may not be in the company’s best interest.
Answer the following questions with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ with every design initiative you take:

  • Does this initiative increase direct revenues?
  • Does this initiative increase indirect revenues?
  • Does the investment in our design return value to our organisation?

At least one of these questions should be answered with ‘yes because…’

2. Does our UX design initiative decrease operational costs
A poor user experience costs organisations money. When we find costs associated with poor UX, we can decrease operational costs such as:

  • Support costs
  • Efficiency costs or
  • Development costs

3. Does our UX design initiative increase revenues from new business
Sometimes products and services are too complicated for new users to understand. This keeps them from becoming new customers. If your designs can make it easier to onboard new users then that’s a good argument for how to increase revenue from new business

4. Does our UX design initiative increase revenues from existing business
Renewals, upgrades, and purchases of follow-on products and services can be the lifeblood of some organizations. “Poor design turns existing customers away, while enticing follow-on products or upgrades is a great way for design teams to add to the organization’s bottom line.”

5. Does our UX design initiative increase shareholder value
Shareholder investors are looking for a long-term return on their investment. You need to ask yourself if what we do today still holds true 10 or 15 years from now. Can what we do now help to build a better, more solid organisation in the future?

Armed with your answers to the questions above you can start the process of convincing executives to invest in a UX strategy plan. Items C to G teach you how to make a UX Strategy on project level.

“It’s important that we can answer at least one of the above questions about our UX design initiative. If we can’t, what value is the initiative bringing to the organisation?”

C. UX Strategy by Jaime Levy – How to devise innovative digital products that people want

Levy is a heavyweight in her own right. She’s been into UX before the field was established. She also has business strategy as her starting point.

The image to your right is from the book “UX Strategy” by Jaime Levy.

It shows four dinner plates that form her UX strategy. Levy calls this the discovery phase. Each plate (or tennet) represents a principle:

Levi’s 4 tenets of UX strategy

Tenet 01: Business strategy
Business strategy is the reason that the company exists. It makes sure that a business grows in its market and beats competition. It describes how a company plans to achieve its desired objectives for the next 3 to 5 years.

Traditionally companies do this by continually utilising a competitive advantage which is either cost leadership (e.g. supermarket price wars) or differentiation (e.g. Starbucks coffee).

Levi introduces a UX competitive advantage with differentiated user experiences.

Differentiated user experiences add value to a product because it makes it more appealing to more people. If more people use your product, and tell other people about your product, it leads to higher use and more success.

Tenet 02: Value innovation
Value innovation is developed by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne and is the cornerstone of market-creating strategy; the task of finding opportunities in a blue-ocean market. Its goal is to render your competition irrelevant by creating a new demand and changing the market. The opposite is called a ‘red ocean strategy’ which is fighting competitors in an existing market.

Tenet 03: Validated user research
Validated user research is making sure that the idea (MVP) you end up with is something that users like (and will pay for).

Tenet 04: Killer UX
Killer UX is exactly what it sounds like: an aesthetically pleasing product or design that provides value to the user.

“ The purpose of any strategy is to create a game plan that looks at your current position and then helps you get to where you actually want to be.”

C. Jim Kalbach – UX Strategy Blueprint

Author of the 2014 book Mapping Experiences: A Complete Guide to Creating Value through Journeys, Blueprints, and Diagrams

He is also the owner of the website Experiencing information on which he shares his UX Strategy blueprint like the one you see on the right (the information, not the design). The Blueprint can be found on his website.
His blueprint consists of six planes or steps that each have their method and function. They are:

How might our UX design initiative:
1. Challenges ⤵
2. Aspirations ⤵
3. Focus areas ⤵
4. Guiding principles ⤵
5. Activities ⤵
6. Measurements ⤵

Start with the ‘challenges’ and ‘aspirations’. Then fill in the other fields. When all fields are filled cross things off, move sticky notes around, rework ideas, crumple it up and start over again until you are satisfied

1. Challenges
Strategy implies the need for change, a desire to move from point A to point B. From where you are now to where you want to be. Identify what the challenges are that keep you from reaching that desired outcome?
Strategy is about problem-solving. What problems are you solving? Focus on these areas:
α. Individuals → Adoption, Engagement, Persuasion, Friction
β. Experience → Coherency, Modernisation, Innovation
γ. Process → Efficiency, Effectiveness, New methods, Political

2. Aspirations
What experience do you ultimately want to deliver? Strive for something aspirational like “We want to differentiate our service through a specific type of user experience, which would drive adoption”.

Consider how you will impact your customers’ work and daily lives. How does your solution transform what they capable of doing and who they ultimately are? Your aspirations should inspire your teammates.

3. Focus areas
Indicate your primary focus for these five topics in a straightforward, factual manner:
Users→ Who will use your solution? If you have personas, list the ones that are most relevant to the success of this strategy.
Regions→ What are the countries, languages, and cultures that are in play?
Services→ What products, services, platforms, and technologies are included in the strategy? Scope out the ones that aren’t.
Use cases → Indicate the key scenarios of use at a high level. For instance, in e-commerce settings will you focus on finding products, the purchase process, or both?
Areas of UX → What areas of UX will make the most difference? Highlight aspects such as information architecture, interaction design, visual design, content strategy or branding, as well as attributes of usability such as control, learnability, or discoverability, among others.

4. Guiding principles
In business strategy, the guiding principle indicates how you’ll win against competitors.
For UX strategy, the guiding principles are the approaches you’ll take to overcome the challenges and solve the problems you’re facing.

Strive to be specific:
What rules of thumb must be in place to reach your aspiration?
What mantras would you give design teams to consistently execute towards the same goal?

Strategy provides consistency in behaviour. How will you get everyone paddling in the same direction?

5. Activities
What types of UX activities are needed to implement the strategy and achieve your aspirations?

This includes such things as user research, concept development, sketching, screen design, prototyping, and testing, as well as creating patterns or guidelines.

Keep in mind you may need new capabilities to execute your strategy. Strategy isn’t a re-configuration of existing skills and resources, rather how you’ll maximise chances for success.

6. Measurements
How will you know your strategy is on track? How can you show progress and success? Often benchmarking and comparison is needed.

This means you’ll likely have to measure aspects of your user experience (e.g., satisfaction) before and after work begins. Ultimately, your measurements should support the business goals. Find metrics that show the positive impact UX has on business. Be specific with goals like “increase sales by 5% by streamlining checkout” or “reduce calls to the support center by 15% by providing better self-help online.”

You’ll probably find overlap with the information you provide for these six elements. That’s a Good Thing: strategy is an interlocking set of choices you make to overcome adversity and reach a desired position. The overall logic should make a coherent storyline.

“Strategy is about uncovering the key challenges in a situation and devising a way of coordinating effort to overcome them for a desired outcome”

E. UXPin’s 1-Page UX Strategy by Robert Hoekman Jr.

Hoekman’s approach to UX Strategy is akin to the UX Strategy Blueprint by Jim Kalbach . Just like Kalbach’s blueprint, Hoekman also divides his approach into six exercises that are each subdivided into smaller tasks.

Teams should start off by getting the message right. Align team members in a project kick-off to ensure that everyone is on the same page at the start of the project.

“What good UX strategy actually entails is researching and recognising the constraints and concerns from all sides and painting a big red target on the wall so that everyone involved can make decisions that serve researched, vetted, and defined objectives.”

UXpin’s ‘s UX strategy represented as the different approaches to get to the top of the mountain

F. Daniel Birch

According to Daniel Birch at Justinmind , UX Strategy boils down to why and how you’re going to implement user experience in your software.

He spreads his approach out over 5 pillars. Each pillar shows what steps to take to end up with a UX Strategy that works every time.

Daniel Birch’s 5 key pillars of a UX strategy

1. Understand who your users are:

2. Understand your Value:

3. Know how to solve the problem:

4. Have a clear vision:

5. Continuous feedback and iteration:

“The reason for the product, application or the site. Why we create it, who are we doing this for, why people are willing to use it, why they need it. The goal here is to define the user needs and business objectives“

G. UX Real

I believe that a UX Strategy lies somewhere between Lean UX and Agile UX. If Lean UX is about reducing waste within the design cycle itself, and Agile UX frames UX design inside the Agile development framework, then this UX Strategy plan caters for both. Here it goes:

1.

“In Corporate UX time = money2, so “

UX Planet’s 5 key pillars of a UX strategy

From Doubt to Adoption: How Crypto Mirrors the Rise of the 90s Internet

From Doubt to Adoption: How Crypto Mirrors the Rise of the 90s Internet

by | May 7, 2021 | Blog, Product Design

In the interview I had yesterday with a lead UX of a bank, I asked him, “what about crypto?”
He told me that a bank faced security issues when it came to crypto, but that they were looking into it.

The rise of cryptocurrency feels like the coming of the internet in the 1990’s. here in Europe at least, it wasn’t until the mid 1990’s that it got a bit of traction in the public media. It was still a novelty. For innovators and early adopters. I was so enthusiastic about the internet and its possibilities that my partner and I tried to sell it to companies. Like Alexander Graham Bell trying to sell the idea of the telephone to Western Union, we got waved away. Not one person believed it would serve any purpose in the future. Zero. Zip.

Now look at it.

When I look at cryptocurrency I see blockchain. I see a similar mechanism to what I did in the 1990’s. A bold statement I know.

Blockchain’s vehicle to adoption is cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is what steals the headlines. In 2015 I bought my first few Bitcoins at 210 euros a piece. I gave one to my son who was 16 at the time and told him to play with it. “Use this fake stock to understand how the real stock market works”, I told him.

Spending that amount of cash on something that could at best be described as “Monopoly money” felt like a reckless thing to do. And then I went and bought more.

* * *

Very few people I knew owned bitcoin or had even heard of it. Let alone Ether or some obvious copy called Litecoin. Very few people understood what it was. What purpose it served. Would serve.

But very few people understand the power of efficiency. What blockchain does is to take out the middleman. Take away human decision making. It’s a logical step after the adoption of the internet. Satoshi Nakamoto is today’s Nicola Tesla. His/their white paper is genius.

To the non-believers at the time I said “don’t buy a bitcoin for yourself, buy one for your children”. But I only got binary responses. Just like websites in the 1990’s, it was a hard sell. And I wasn’t even making money off of it.

Now look at it. That 210 euro bitcoin turned into several tens of thousands of euros.

I wish I had never sold it.

I wish I had bought more.

I wish I had listened a lot more to the feeling in my gut and ignored the so-called facts.

Oh irony

Tunnel Vision: A Nurse’s Fight Against Media Frenzy and Legal Turmoil

Tunnel Vision: A Nurse’s Fight Against Media Frenzy and Legal Turmoil

by | Apr 21, 2021 | Blog, Product Design

Warning: This post contains a strong opinion

A woman who worked as a nurse on critically ill patients (90-year-olds with cancer, premature infants so underdeveloped that they had little to no life expectancy) was charged with 17 cases of murder after her colleagues rattled on her. She was then reported by her superior to the authorities. What happened after was nothing short of the modern equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition.

It became one of the most famous processes the small country had ever seen. Reporters were all over it. The stories they printed started off and ended with an air of suspicion. Unfortunately for the prosecution, they had no evidence and thus had no real case. Panic struck by this, they turned to statisticians to produce calculations of the odds of her being guilty. The number was 342 million to one that she hadn’t done it. One hard metric. Who could disagree with math?

Court illustrators were also on board the guilt train, drawing her more like a witch from the stories of the Brothers Grimm than a real person. The way she was portrayed in the media emphasised the negative image they tried to create about her. Sunken cheeks, a pointed nose and an icy look, she was depicted as a diabolic figure. A witch. After her acquittal, she said that what she suffered from the most were the misleading sketches.“I didn’t recognise myself”, she said, “All I saw was a murderess ”.

Over the following years, the case resembled a witch hunt rather than a fair trial. Throughout, the nurse maintained her innocence. And you better believe that the prosecution put the thumbscrews on real tight. This strong-willed woman, however, never budged.

Not unlike the world’s most notorious witch hunt in Bamberg Germany where more than 1000 ‘witches’ were put on the stake by Johann Georg Fuchs “Hexenbrenner” von Dornheim, here too the lawyers, journalists, prosecution and judges smelled blood. They were already convinced that she had done it, they knew the outcome that they were working on, now they only needed to prove it. Their only evidence: a team of hysterical adolescent nurses who ratted on a colleague and a handful of bloodthirsty prosecutors.

And bloodthirsty they were. One only has to look at the face of the (independent) judge while she reads out the ruling of the court to know what hate looks like. The Nuremberg trials is childsplay compared to this.

In the beginning, the voices that spoke in favour of the nurse drowned under the roar of those shouting “justice”. I picture the scene of a raging mob with pitchforks and torches walking over to Victor Frankenstein’s house to ‘kill the monster’.

But the nurse was a far cry from being a monster. She had a history of helping people where and whenever she could. All that she wanted in return was to be liked, loved even. A warm place to stay. A home. People who could keep her safe from the world. What she got were anger, mistrust and betrayal.

It was in a society that prides itself on being one of the most democratic in the world: Holland. A country that fights for equal rights and fair justice. A country that tells China that there is something wrong with how they approach human rights. That country was about to lock a nurse up for life for doing her job. When it was time for the verdict, the judges were so brainwashed by their own emotions that on the judgement day they gave her the impossible sentence that would eventually lead to her release. As they read the verdict out “life in jail and compulsory admission to a psychiatric institute for an undetermined period of time” I heard her cry out in the courtroom “But I didn’t do it!”. That didn’t matter. After an evil look from the judge, they put her behind lock and key for no less than 6 years. Six years before justice took its course. Everyone with a clear eye could see that something was wrong, and slowly but surely other, louder voices raised out of the crowd.

With the help of two very dedicated people who fought the misgivings of justice, another kind of story started to develop. That of a judicial error. That of a witch hunt of an innocent woman. Slowly but surely other people started telling other stories too. Stories of a beautiful person who had been led to the pyre. And after 6 years the minister of justice stepped in and demanded her immediate release. In hindsight, it is clear to see how wrong the trial was. How badly put together. But why were so many people convinced of her guilt?

Researchers point at two psychological effects to explain this phenomenon:

➡ The availability bias. This is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person’s mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision.

➡ The Confirmation bias. This bias suggests that people don’t perceive circumstances objectively. They pick out those bits of data that make them feel good because they confirm their prejudices. This way, they may become prisoners of their assumptions.

UX research

These phenomena also plague UX researchers. I have seen it in others and may have succumbed to it myself. Before you start the research you ‘already know’ what the outcome is that you are looking for, subconsciously.

People who make suggestions that do not align with your thinking are ignored.

The person (often the person who initiated the research) who benefits from certain results cherry-pick only that feedback that supports it. I have had owners of companies ignore the conclusions of my research, and 5 out of 8 candidates, entirely because “they did not know what they were talking about”. For a follow-up session, this person requested to speak to just one person from the previous who gave “the right type” of feedback. I kid you not.

This is why UX research is best done by people who are 100% independent. I have worked with a company called Braingineers who ‘read’ focused brain activity (frustration, attention, joy) of the candidates as they perform the tasks silently. These metrics are easy to analyse and because it is hard data, nobody challenges them. Even if it is not what they want to hear.

Unfortunately, this is not possible when you are a suspect

Europe’s Religious Divide: From Historic Clashes to Today’s Beliefs

Europe’s Religious Divide: From Historic Clashes to Today’s Beliefs

by | Apr 7, 2021 | Blog, Product Design

One part of Europe is Protestant and the other part is Catholic.

I heard someone say that the Germans are ‘to blame’ for this divide.

In 9 CE the Romas were defeated by the Germans in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. The Roman general Publius Quinctilius Varus lost 3 legions, roughly 13000 soldiers. It was a great victory for the Germans. In the 19th century, the prevalent thought was that this battle ended Roman expansion into northern Europe. What a marvellous victory. In the 19th century, this story was food for German nationalist who gobbled it up with hide and hair.

The German confedaration was a divided nation in the 19th century. Consisting of many different states.

Map of German Confederation 1815–1866 – image credit: Ziegelbrenner – own drawing/Source of Information: Putzger – Historischer Weltatlas, 89. Auflage, 1965, CC BY 2.5 (Wikimedia Commons)

German nationalism

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Global Survey Reveals How Biases Influence National Pride and User Research

Global Survey Reveals How Biases Influence National Pride and User Research

by | Apr 7, 2021 | Blog, main, Product Design, UX Research

Yesterday I read an article in the Washington Post saying that the United States is a nation of narcissists. People from the US collectively rate their states to have played a larger role in the history of the country than they did.

Then the researchers repeated the study on a global scale. They asked 6,000 university students in 35 countries how much they thought their nation had contributed to world history. Russia came out on top with a whopping 61%. Russian students believe that Russia shaped the course of world history by 61%. ✨Wowzers✨

In second place came the UK with a nice 54,6% followed by India, 53,9%. At the low end of the spectrum, Switzerland was the most humble at 11,3% followed by Norway, 12,3% and New Zealand at 17,7%.

When the researchers added up the percentages from all countries they came to a total of 1156%. It is clear to see that these students have an overblown view of their country’s contribution.

Researchers point at two psychological effects to explain these exaggerated results:

➡ The availability bias. This is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person’s mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision.

➡ The Confirmation bias. This bias suggests that people don’t perceive circumstances objectively. They pick out those bits of data that make them feel good because they confirm their prejudices. This way, they may become prisoners of their assumptions.

User research

These phenomena also plague UX researchers. I have seen it in others and may have succumbed to it myself. After two or three interviews you ‘already know’ what the outcome will be, unconsciously. It goes beautifully. According to plan. Any feedback that suggests that your ideas may be incorrect is silently ignored. Filtered out of the report. Or the person who ‘knows’ what the results should be like cherry-pick only that which supports their theory. I have had owners of companies ignore the conclusions of my research, and 5 out of 8 candidates, entirely because “they did not know what they were talking about”. For a follow-up session, this person requested to speak to just one person from the previous who gave “the right type” of feedback.

This is why UX research is best done by people who are not dependent on the results of the research for their job or and who are not ‘friendly’ with the person who requests the research. This person should also present and explain the results to all people involved in the project.

You as a designer can take this information into account any time you see someone who has a stake in a positive outcome of the research lead it.

Design Evolution Lessons from Search Images and Skeuomorphism

Design Evolution Lessons from Search Images and Skeuomorphism

by | Mar 8, 2021 | Blog, Product Design

I’m not going to lie. I like David Attenborough.

And so when I saw that one of his documentaries was on the BBC yesterday I snuggled into my sofa to watch it. The series is called “Attenborough’s Life in Colour” and this episode’s name was ‘Hiding in Colour’. In it, Attenborough covered animals who tricked other animals into thinking they were something they are not by making use of colour. Butterflies, fish, snails, zebras, birds all make use of colour to trick a member of their own species or to trick a member of another species.

And then he said something that hit home. The definition that I had been looking for for a while now: ‘Search Image’. Attenborough explained it as something that an animal looks for and that matches the picture that they have in their minds.

An example could be of a totally harmless frog that copies the colours of a poisonous frog so that predators are less likely to eat it. The other way around a predator may copy the looks of a friendly animal to trick another animal in thinking that there is no danger.

Humans

The search image is also true for humans. We too look for an image that we recognise by the template image that we have in our minds. When we shop for oranges we’ll look for orange coloured balls and if we want bananas we’ll look for something that matches the image of a yellow tube-like ‘thing’.

That is why when something radically new is introduced, it will first resemble something that resembles the thing that we are already familiar with before it ends up as its final manifestation.
The first cars really did look like horseless carriages. The first websites often resembled brick-and-mortar stores. The first mobile phone looked like a landline phone and the first digital books that you downloaded to your phone were placed neatly on your virtual bookshelf made out of wood.

This is called skeuomorphism. It is when the user interface contains ‘objects’ that resemble their real-world counterparts in how they appear and/or how the user can interact with them. It helps people understand and adapt to new technology. It is not new. When electricity was rolled out in New York in the late 19th century, people needed a search image that matched the image that they had in their minds. So what they simply replaced their wax candles with electrified candles. It is easier to wrap one’s heads around: these were new and improved candles that shone brighter and emitted no black smoke instead of talking about new technology.

a victorian candle holder with electric candles – image credit: David Castor (dcastor)

That is why best practices or heuristics are so valuable. We know that people have a certain image in mind when they look for something and they expect a certain type of behaviour when they interact with it.

The User Experience Honeycomb

One of these best practices for usability is presented by Peter Morville in his books where he presents his User Experience Honeycomb:

Morville is an information architect and in his book, he notes that in order for there to be a meaningful and valuable user experience, information must be:
1. Useful: As practitioners, we are often expected to do what managers want. And even though we often know better we also have to choose our battles wisely. Even so, as professionals, we are required to challenge the status quo and should always ask is if the things that managers cook up are useful for the customer and if so, how? The more useful the information is, the better the experience.
2. Usable: Ease of use is vital for a satisfying user experience. The easier it is to do something the more inclined people are to do it (again). We can make something more usable by getting rid of all friction points first.
3. Desirable: To desire is emotional. Too often our tendency is to look at our product through the eyes of a mathematician. We don’t always appreciate the power of something that is designed emotionally. but in fact, that is where we should start. In our high paced society, we aim for lean, clean efficient processes and are surprised that the end result has little to no appeal to the end-user. Applying the rules of Emotional design to your product is akin to breathing life into it.
4. Findable: Strongly linked to our first rule —useful. The easier something is to find the less effort it requires from someone and the more appealing it is to that person. This is what Fitts’s law of least effort teaches us: An action that requires less effort always wins from the action that requires more effort.
5. Accessible: Our website should be accessible to more than 10% of the population that struggles with some form of disability. To design for accessibility from the first day of production is not only keeps development costs at a minimum but is plain ol’ good practice.
6. Credible: The Stanford Web Credibility Project researches design elements that influence to what extent users trusts us and believe what we tell them. The project takes a look at the following questions:

1. What causes people to believe (or not believe) what they find on the Web?
2. What strategies do users employ in evaluating the credibility of online sources?
3. What contextual and design factors influence these assessments and strategies?
4. How and why are credibility evaluation processes on the Web different from those made in face-to-face human interaction, or in other offline contexts?

7. Valuable: Our sites must deliver value to our sponsors. For non-profits, the user experience must advance the mission. With for-profits, it must contribute to the bottom line and improve customer satisfaction.

What it means

There is a base layer to your app or website on which everything else runs. This base layer is made out of user tasks and journeys. For you as a designer, this means that if you follow the rules above you will ensure that your design meets the requirement for findability, accessibility, and delight.

It really doesn’t take much more.

Lessons from Ignoring Warnings: Titanic and Corporate UX Failures

Lessons from Ignoring Warnings: Titanic and Corporate UX Failures

by | Feb 8, 2021 | Blog, Product Design

If people would have known about the Titanic hitting an iceberg and sinking to the bottom of the ocean on her maiden voyage what would they have done differently? Would they have gotten on board? Would the captain have many more men on the lookout for those icy mountains while they were trying to extinguish the fires below deck?

Of course, they would have. That ship hitting an iceberg, even if they were passing through the iceberg-heavy waters of the North Atlantic ocean, is a sheer coincidence. A million to one chance. On her maiden voyage…

But what if someone would have warned them beforehand?

What would you tell the people who built the Titanic? Would you convince them not to sail-out? Because of the danger of icebergs? Would you yell it out on that promenade in Southampton? Chances are you’d be dragged away by the police. Not too dissimilar from what happens in compnies.

***

Three times in companies I have played the UX sage. I have championed UX logic to stakeholders who told me they knew better. Better than user feedback, better than me.

I yelled “research over gut feeling” through the halls of buildings only for it to fall on deaf ears, and for me to get frustrated or dragged out ‘tarred and feathered‘.

This is what Cervantes’ Don Quijote must have looked like to the people of his day as he chased his windmills.

But truth be told, nobody knows the future. Not you, not me, not even the ‘user’. Nobody knows what will happen when it will happen and how it will play out. We are all just combining different sources of information that offer just enough certainty for us to make a decision.

In his farewell speech, Jeff Bezos said that he believes in the power of wandering.

“All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts… not analysis. If you can make a decision with analysis, you should do so. But it turns out in life that your most important decisions are always made with instinct and intuition, taste, heart.

Maybe the best thing is to let it happen. Have the high-hats at the White Star Line draw their own conclusions when the ‘unsinkable’ sinks? And you will have your plan ready.

Because that is what I think is your best strategy.

If you really believe that something bad will happen if they don’t listen to you then let it happen and be prepared for when that proverbial sh*t hits the fan. Have your plan ready and offer it to the people in charge at the appropriate time.
That may work.

And until then… however difficult, let them figure it out for themselves.

With special thanks to Matthew Syed for writing the book ‘Black Box Thinking’.

The ultimate guide to UX interviews DRAFT

The ultimate guide to UX interviews DRAFT

by | Dec 24, 2020 | Blog, Product Design, UX Research

It took me many years to gathered the knowledge you see here. I speak from my own experience. I did not copy this from someone else. I did read other people’s recommendations to see if it matched mine or to see if I had left some crucial piece of information out. I noticed that on some occasions I had and I added it to the blog post you are reading now.

When a recruiter (or someone who learned to ask questions like a recruiter) needs to assess if you are a good candidate they normally ask a standard set of questions. Now it matters whether you are on the long list or on the shortlist. The questions a recruiter asks to get you on the shortlist are just there to separate the boys from the men or rather, the girls from the women since most UXRs I know are indeed women.

When you are on the shortlist then this is the list of ten things they could ask you. Don’t worry.. after one or two questions the recruiter knows if you’re a good fit or not so you will rarely come as far as to question 10, although I have had that happen to me once or twice. In this day of algorithms and measurability, a recruiter will generally stick to this list of questions. Finally, an outcome of the STEM effect that is in our favor: people stop being creative and simply follow the guide (cynic tone intended).

The questions:

1. Tell me about yourself

2. how would you build trust between you and your manager?

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I was dumbstruck to the point that I didn’t know what to do next.

Why would a company allow such a terrible experience to exist on their website?
My heart sank in my shoes as I assumed that this could have been the bright idea of a marketing manager to lighten the load on the customer service staff and save costs. Without considering the customer’s needs of course. I have seen it done before.

So I tried ALL the other possibilities to see which one would answer first. The winner was someone who answered me via Messenger. After an hour or so. Not good, but not terrible either.

I decided to look what the current state of chatbots was. I typed in ‘best chatbot 2020 for users’ in Google and viewed the results.

As I scrolled down the page, I only saw results that promoted bots. Mostly from a sales point of view.

Where oh where was an article that looked at chatbots from a user’s p.o.v.?

As I came to the end of page one I couldn’t find anything that satisfied me, so for the first time in a long time, I clicked on page 2 of the search results. And finally, halfway the page was an article on the website of the Nielsen Norman Group called ‘The User Experience of Chatbots’. The article was from 2018. Fine.

The first sentence of that article is: The chatbot is the poor relative of the intelligent assistant. which looked promising enough for me to continue reading. The article goes on to say that chatbot growth and popularity is motivated by at least three different factors:

1. The hope to reduce customer-service costs by replacing human agents with bots
2. The success of conversational-based systems put forward the idea of chatbots as an interaction channel with businesses and services
3. The popularity of voice-based intelligent assistants such as Alexa and Google Home has pushed many businesses to emulate them at a smaller scale.

I leave it to you to read the article yourself. My key takeaway is that there is still a long way to go before a chatbot or digital assistant is able to help you as a real person can. However, there are situations where bots are useful. When users deal with simple and linear tasks for example. Speed was seen as the most important advantage of a bot over a human in that case.

All in all, I feel a bit bad that I took this company as an example for this post. But I also feel that they could have made more of an effort to get it right.

Just follow the advice that the NN group gives you:

NN/g’s UX Guidelines for Designing Chatbots:

  • Be upfront about using a bot and not a human.
  • Clearly tell people what tasks the bot can do.
  • Make sure you don’t create false expectations.
  • Don’t be overly ambitious: create bots for simple tasks. Complexity is not well handled in the limited bot interface.
  • Tolerate typos and ambiguity.
  • Allow people to interact with the bot both through free-text input and selection of links.
  • Allow sorting and filtering to let people narrow down through results.
  • Save information from one task to the next.
  • Program some flexibility into the bot: infer context and allow people to jump forward and backward in the linear flow.
  • Be honest about not understanding. Offer an escape hatch in the form of a real human, a phone number, or a link to a different interaction channel.
The ultimate guide to UX interviews DRAFT

When customer service feels like a heist: a UX critique of chatbots and corporate missteps

by | Dec 7, 2020 | Blog, Product Design

I consider it a personal weakness of mine that I shame a company for something they spent too little attention to, without them being able to defend themselves.

I was going to complain about the fact that I have been checked three times this week and every time I got checked I felt like a thief. Or rather I felt that they thought I was a thief.

But I’m going to do it anyway 🙂 Just because it is uniquely bad and I want to share this with you. To learn from.

This morning I decided to work on my administration. I thought it could come in handy one day that I have it organised. So that I can find things.

So when it came to my car insurance I went to the website of the company that my insurance is at and went to my personal environment. I expected to be able to find my invoices there.

long story short: I couldn’t find it there. So I decided to contact the company to see if they knew where I could find it. They offered several contact options like email, telephone, whatsapp and chat.

I was working on it now and was waiting for those documents. So I decided to go with chat first because I didn’t feel like being guided through multiple menus on the telephone.

I pressed ‘Chat with us’ and this popped up:

I was so shocked that I didn’t know what to do next.

Why would a company allow such a terrible experience on their website?
My heart sank as I assumed that this could have been the bright idea of a marketing manager to lighten the load on the customer service staff and save costs—without considering the customer’s needs, of course. I have seen it done before.

So I tried ALL the other possibilities to see which one would answer first. The winner was someone who answered me via Messenger after an hour or so. It’s not good, but it’s not terrible either.

I decided to examine the current state of chatbots. I typed ‘best chatbot 2020 for users’ in Google and viewed the results.

Scrolling down the page, I only saw results promoting bots, mainly from a sales point of view.

Where oh where was an article that looked at chatbots from a user’s p.o.v.?

As I came to the end of page one I couldn’t find anything that satisfied me, so for the first time in a long time, I clicked on page 2 of the search results. And finally, halfway the page was an article on the website of the Nielsen Norman Group called ‘The User Experience of Chatbots’. The article was from 2018. Fine.

The first sentence of that article is: The chatbot is the poor relative of the intelligent assistant. which looked promising enough for me to continue reading. The article goes on to say that chatbot growth and popularity is motivated by at least three different factors:

1. The hope to reduce customer-service costs by replacing human agents with bots
2. The success of conversational-based systems put forward the idea of chatbots as an interaction channel with businesses and services
3. The popularity of voice-based intelligent assistants such as Alexa and Google Home has pushed many businesses to emulate them at a smaller scale.

I leave it to you to read the article yourself. My key takeaway is that there is still a long way to go before a chatbot or digital assistant is able to help you as a real person can. However, there are situations where bots are useful. When users deal with simple and linear tasks for example. Speed was seen as the most important advantage of a bot over a human in that case.

All in all, I feel a bit bad that I took this company as an example for this post. But I also feel that they could have made more of an effort to get it right.

Just follow the advice that the NN group gives you:

NN/g’s UX Guidelines for Designing Chatbots:

  • Be upfront about using a bot and not a human.
  • Clearly tell people what tasks the bot can do.
  • Make sure you don’t create false expectations.
  • Don’t be overly ambitious: create bots for simple tasks. Complexity is not well handled in the limited bot interface.
  • Tolerate typos and ambiguity.
  • Allow people to interact with the bot both through free-text input and selection of links.
  • Allow sorting and filtering to let people narrow down through results.
  • Save information from one task to the next.
  • Program some flexibility into the bot: infer context and allow people to jump forward and backward in the linear flow.
  • Be honest about not understanding. Offer an escape hatch in the form of a real human, a phone number, or a link to a different interaction channel.