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

V1.2

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

Mike AtyeoJ Boye TutorialTuesday May 3, 2011

www.neoinsight.com Copyright © Customer Carewords Ltd. www.customercarewords.com

Contacts

Phone (613) 271-3001Email [email protected] Web www.neoinsight.com Mail Suite 374

300 Earl Grey DriveOttawa, OntarioCanada K2T 1C1

Gord Hopkins

Mike Atyeo

Scott Smith

Strategic design(613) 271-3001 [email protected]

User Experience Specialist (613) 271-3001 [email protected]

Competitive strategy (613) 271-3001 [email protected]

Lisa FastExperience Designer (613) 271-3001 [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.neoinsight.com/





J Boye presentation 3© Copyright 2011 Neo Insight Inc.

J Boye Tutorial: Hands-On Task Management: From Interaction Design to Web Strategy

Introduction(s)

The Top Task Law

1. Round in Circles: Sweat the small task-oriented stuff

2. Top Tasks on the Home Page

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

4. Create a culture of testing

5. 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

1. Manage tasks Not websites Get the focus off technology and silos

2. Prioritise resources around top tasks Use the ‘long neck’ to focus

3. Measure task performance As a key, continuous organizational performance indicator Data on behaviour (not opinion)


Challenges


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


Problem Statement

Category Category

Cause

Cause

Cause

Cause

Cause

Cause

Cause

Cause

Cause

Cause

Cause

Cause

Cause

Cause

Cause

Cause

Cause

Cause

Category

CauseCause

Cause

Cause

Cause

Cause

Category

CauseCause

Cause

Cause

Cause

Cause

Category


279%


The Top Task Law



Amdahl’s LawPerformance 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 Person2. Procedures, Policies...

3. Corporate News

4. Training, Learning

30,000 Intranet users... 4 Countries...


0

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

800

900

1000

1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 25 28 31 34 37 40 43 46 49 52 55 58 61 64 67 70 73 76 79 82 85 88 91

Carewords

Vo

te

Tasks

The Long Neck

15

Target audiences’ votes on their top tasks


Not Quite

there

yetThe Top Task Law

Performance improvement is proportional to how much your users use the thing you improved.


The Top Task Law

Tasks supported by your website

Priority tasks users want to do on 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

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


Round in Circles: Sweat the small

task-oriented stuff


Top paths on top library pages

HOME

E-Library E-Reserves Departments

Netdoc/Subject

E-Journals(alpha)

Netdoc/Title

HOME DepartmentsE-Library HOMEE-Journals

(alpha)E-Library

EXIT:

61%

CIRCULAR: 17%

CIRCULAR: 15% CIRCULAR: 12%CIRCULAR: 5%

21% 5% 5%

23% 22% 18% 11% 9% 18% 11% 5% 3%

ENTER: 76%

EXIT:

9% EXIT:

62%

EXIT:

49%

ENTER: 14%

ENTER: 15%

ENTER: 8%

17%

5% 5%15%


Challenges



Challenges


Top Tasks on the Home Page

1. Top tasks should be very easy to do quickly, without errors2. Users should be able to start a top task on the Home page


http://www.aerlingus.com/cgi-bin/obel01im1/bookonline/goHome.do

http://www.aerlingus.com/cgi-bin/obel01im1/bookonline/flightInput.do

http://www.aerlingus.com/cgi-bin/obel01im1/bookonline/retrievePNRSelectOption.do

http://www.aerlingus.com/cgi-bin/obel01im1/Services/GC_menu.jsp?P_OID=-8072&Category=3

http://www.aerlingus.com/cgi-bin/obel01im1/Support/helpMenu.jsp?P_OID=-536880753&Category=2

http://www.aerlingus.com/cgi-bin/obel01im1/Corporate/mission.jsp?P_OID=-8048&Category=0

https://www.aerlingus.com/cgi-bin/obel01im1/bookonline/userProfileLogin.do

http://www.aerlingus.com/cgi-bin/obel01im1/Services/travelXtra.jsp?P_OID=-536882593&Category=3

http://www.aerlingushotels.com/site/travel/hotels/homepage.html?partnerId=8001&intcmp=AERhp_tab_IE

http://www.hertzflydrive.com/selectcountry.aspx?Link=HP_TopNav&CDP=706409

http://www.aerlingus.com/cgi-bin/obel01im1/bookonline/flightInputMulti.do

http://www.aerlingus.com/cgi-bin/obel01im1/bookonline/flightInputGroups.do

http://www.aerlingus.com/cgi-bin/obel01im1/Services/ie_us_209_160310.jsp?P_OID=0&Category=3

http://www.aerlingus.com/cgi-bin/obel01im1/Services/bookBagsRedirect.jsp?P_OID=0&Category=3

http://www.aerlingus.com/cgi-bin/obel01im1/bookonline/webdealDetail.do?objId=536918974












http://www.hertzflydrive.com/?Link=HP_Right&lang=en&POS=IE&CDP=706409

http://www.aerlingushotels.com/site/travel/hotels/homepage.html?partnerId=8001&intcmp=AERhp_pod_IE

https://www.magroup-online.com/als/ie?restart=

http://www.aerlingus.com/cgi-bin/obel01im1/Services/ie_uk_160310.jsp?P_OID=0&Category=3

http://www.aerlingus.com/cgi-bin/obel01im1/Services/faro_1503.jsp?P_OID=0&Category=3

http://www.aerlingus.com/cgi-bin/obel01im1/Services/buyVouchers.jsp?P_OID=0&Category=3



Challenges


http://redesignland.blogspot.com/

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

1.One or two top tasks can be started on home page

2.Categorized links on home page lead to high priority tasks

3.Medium priority tasks accessible from level 2 landing pages or ‘hub’ pages

4.Low priority tasks start three levels down architecture

5.Maybe some of these shouldn’t even be done on the website

1

2

3

45

Tasks

Vo

tes


Challenges


“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

J Boye presentation 38© Copyright 2011 Neo Insight Inc.Mary Meeker, 2010


Faces, images, banners and

attention: Task-oriented R&D


About faces


Faces Are Engaging but Still Worth Testing

Each participant started at the same page with one of these 4 conditionsQuantitative: 800 employee participants & qualitative: 40 Eyetracking Participants

Tullis, T., Siegel, M & Sun, E. (2009) Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Boston, MA.

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1520641





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

• Quantitative task study showed what happened.

•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.


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?


Heatmaps from eyetracking studies: The areas where users looked the most are colored red; 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

almost no fixations within advertisements

users don't fixate within design elements that resemble ads

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

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/fancy-formatting.html


‘Banner blindness’ video example

49

Video example


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


Manage Tasks, Not Website(s)

From... To...

“Let’s fix the website...” “Let’s fix the Top Tasks...”

Let’s get a new Search Engine...

Ensure the top 50 internal searches return excellent results.

Revising our taxonomy and Information Architecture...

Bringing Top Task links and functionality up the hierarchy.

Let’s buy the (Silver Bullet/ Magic Wand) CMS...

Make sure content for Top Tasks is excellent.

Let’s customize our weblog metrics...

Measuring Top Task performance.


Allocate scarce resources to the ‘long neck’

How much relative resource to apply

Which 5% of tasks to focus on.

“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

Tasks


Manage users’ tasks5% 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:•Site architecture•Benchmarking•Allocation of resources•Prioritization of projects•Performance measurement

Tasks


Matrix organization - responsibilities

Software downloads

Find the right product

Solve a technical problem

etc...

Search Navigation Content Targets & Measures

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


www.neoinsight.com Copyright © Customer Carewords Ltd. www.customercarewords.com

Contacts

Phone (613) 271-3001Email [email protected] Web www.neoinsight.com Mail Suite 374

300 Earl Grey DriveOttawa, OntarioCanada K2T 1C1

Gord Hopkins

Mike Atyeo

Scott Smith

Strategic design(613) 271-3001 [email protected]

User Experience Specialist (613) 271-3001 [email protected]

Competitive strategy (613) 271-3001 [email protected]

Lisa FastExperience Designer (613) 271-3001 [email protected]


http://www.neoinsight.com/






Outputs from tutorial

• Thanks, attendees!

• You may have to download the PPT version to see details of the post-its

• If you have problems: Mike Atyeo (613) 599-7470 [email protected]



Challenges


Budgeting, Project Planning


Targets and measures




Reward and Responsibility


Skills and Training


Technology



Business

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