I am writing this because I feel you would greatly benefit from this recount of my online experience when I first engaged with the Yellow Brick Road (YBR) – don’t worry it’s not all bad. From a business perspective, The Celebrity Apprentice provides some unique and powerful advertising for the YBR franchise. However, it seems you may not have considered the people at the receiving end of your marketing campaign – your customers. Your company’s website is the first point of contact with your customers and instrumental in shaping their YBR journey.

I apologise in advance if I seem overly harsh and critical. I work for a company (Objective Digital) who prides itself in making technology, particularly websites, more usable for customers and everyday users. Having worked with many financial institutions (including several of Australia’s top banks) we understand that amazing company’s can do amazing things, but are not so amazing at building websites – which is where we usually come in.

I personally admire your enthusiasm and passion for educating people, and your strong belief in delivering affordable financial advice to the everyday person. For this reason, I would like to personally share my Yellow Brick Road experience.

In the near future, I plan to invest in my first property and a home loan is something I will need. After watching an episode of The Celebrity Apprentice, I decided to investigate my options by looking on the YBR website. As a company that prides itself in giving Australians’ “access to quality financial advice”, my online experience was anything but that.

To begin with, I had difficulty accessing information. The homepage was busy and confusing with no clear calls to action, making it difficult to locate useful content – this did not provide a good first impression. There were so many elements competing for attention I didn’t know where to look or where to find information that related to my personal situation and me. After typing ‘first home’ into the search box, I finally arrived at my destination. However, the financial advice I needed was not presented in a simple or logical manner leaving me more confused about home loans than when I started.

My initial experience made me doubt the quality of the information you provide. In the high-tech world that we live in, a company’s website is usually the first point of contact for customers, and is seen as a reflection of that company. I am in no way saying your company lacks quality – after all, your company profile displays a collection of employees with a wealth of financial knowledge. Rather, my online experience resonated more with a company that is disorganised and mediocre rather than with a company that speaks quality and excellence.

My attempt to locate my nearest branch was even more disappointing, forcing me to question the possibility of actually receiving advice. Instead of scrolling down the long list of branches to determine which was my nearest branch (at this point, a map would have been sufficient), I resorted to typing in my suburb – Kingsford. My search resulted in a blank screen, which implied there were no branches in my area.  Although there is no Kingsford branch, it failed to tell me that Maroubra was, in fact, my nearest branch (I think!).

As a Psychologist who works as a User Experience Consultant, I have an annoying habit of critiquing every website I visit. Despite my online experience, it has not tarnished my opinion of YRB. In fact, your performance on The Celebrity Apprentice was inspirational. The old me would have endured this painful online experience and complained about it afterwards to friends or colleagues. I don’t think this is the effect you envisioned with your Celebrity Apprentice marketing campaign. So, I placed myself at the boardroom table at YBR HQ, face-to-face with yourself, Dane Bouris, and Deborah Thomas (admittedly, I would be terrified if I ever found myself in this position). I would think… ‘Would Mr. Bouris be happy if I just left it at that?’ ‘What else could I do for the cause?’ Taking on the advice you have given others in the past, I underestimated my pulling power and need to step it up and bring my A-game.

So here I am, voicing my opinion for you and others to read. You need to think about your customers, the people at the other end of your marketing campaign. Your website is the primary point of contact for your customers. As a potential customer I was sadly disappointed, confused, and none the wiser on home loans. I expected a lot more from you. For this reason, Mr. Bouris – You’re fired!

Kind regards,

Alexis M. Conomos

(A disgruntled yet inspired potential customer)

P.s. @DaneBouris “Stay off the hairy carbs”

Objective Digital received a great response from the crowd who enjoyed interacting and testing the T120 eye tracker. However, the highlight of our toy collection was new X2 mobile eye-tracker and our popular eye-tracking glasses, which are leading the way in mobile eye tracking.

Below are sample heat maps of the images we eye-tracked with the SkunkMonk crowd. These images provide a good example of how people tend to focus on human faces, to the detriment of other visual elements on the page.

I recently finished a usability testing project for a mobile website. It was a pretty awesome-looking site with lots of features from its desktop cousin. After the first 2-3 sessions, I started noticing a clear pattern: everyone was having trouble finding things on the mobile site. There were so many features on the site that users were getting lost trying to find things.

It was evident that the issue was with the information architecture of the site (i.e. how information was structured in the site). I felt like there was no point getting the participants to do the same tasks and uncovering the same issues over and over again. So, I decided to conduct a card-sorting activity during the remaining sessions. During a short break between sessions, I quickly printed out cards with labels from the existing site.

Before I showed the site to the participants and asked them to conduct the tasks, I gave them the pile of cards and asked them to group them into categories they deemed logical. After the grouping exercise, I then asked them to give a name to each of the groups that they came up with. The whole process just took 10 minutes and after asking a few participants to conduct the task I could see a clear pattern about how participants were sorting the cards. Not so surprisingly, the IA of the mobile site was very different to what the participants had come up with. No wonder they were having difficulty finding things, the site IA was totally different to what the participants had expected.

The clients were fascinated by the findings from the ad-hoc card sorting activity. It helped them get into the heads of their users and see the system from a users’ point of view. The clients were pleased to receive the extra deliverable: a new IA based on actual user input, and the good thing from a project management point of view is that the card-sorting activity did not cost us (or the client) any additional time or budget (10 minutes for the activity and a couple of hours to analyse the findings and restructure the IA).

So it got me thinking…what would I have done differently next time? Maybe I could have prepared cards before the first session just in case I needed them or perhaps utilising a digital card-sorting tool like OptimalSort. Online tools are useful as participants would be able to sort the cards on their computer screens and the clients would be able to watch the results live via screen sharing.

Moral of the story: Don’t be afraid to change your course if you’re heading in the wrong direction. Always keep asking yourself whether you’re getting rich insights to answer the research questions and also are these the most important questions to be asking? If not, what other methods can you use to find the answers? Planning and being adaptable is more important than a plan (that doesn’t work).

Had you had to change course in the middle of a usability testing project? What would you have done? Feel free to share your experiences and thoughts in the comments below.

Nirish walked us through the decision-making process by highlighting the steps we go through on a day-to-day basis without conscious awareness we are doing so.

So what is the G.R.A.D.E decision making model?

As a team, we were required to go through the evidence from a Cluedo-style crime scene and decide who was responsible for “Bob’s” demise. We followed the G.R.A.D.E model to gather all the information, review the evidence, analyse what we had gathered, decide on our perpetrator and evaluate if we had come to the right decision.

Some of the key take-aways from this exercise:

1. Digressing from the intended plan & jumping to conclusions is very easy.

When working together to gather evidence, we often found that we were already straying into the analysis phase by trying to string aspects together to come up with a theory. We had to remind ourselves to take a step back and gather ALL the evidence before trying to piece the puzzle together.

2. Emotions get in the way

It was hard not to let our emotions get in the way. We devised all sorts of conpsiracies and theories about who killed Bob (we did let our imaginations run a little wild). However by constantly referring to the G.R.A.D.E model we were able to reposition our investigations to consider information and evidence alone! While intuition plays an important role, it is very easy to let our past experiences, biases and judgements affect and shape our perceptions. This was a great exercise in “objective” decision making.

3. We are all susceptible to confirmation bias

A phenomenon known as confirmation bias refers to the tendency for people to focus on information that helps them confirm what they already believe to be the truth. We had to be careful that we didn’t exclude or undervalue the relevance of other bits of information that didn’t necessarily ‘fit’ into our theory. This is why the ‘gather’ phase was important. We were able to go back and re-review up all the bits and peices we had gathered at the start of the exercise to ensure we hadn’t overlooked or ignored information. Only then could we be certain that our decision was the most correct one.

3. Beware of over-analysing

We spent quite of bit of time in the “decide” and “evaluate” phases going around in circles. In fact we had uncovered the truth some 20 mins before we called case closed on the whole thing. While analysis is a key part of the process, if we over-analyse we run the risk of ‘analysis paralysis’ – that is so much time is being spent analysing that a decision actually never gets made (or takes too long to get made). Time being a luxury we can’t always afford.

Overall a great group activity! If you would like to learn more about this or get a copy of the crime scene investigation, get in contact with us!

As part of the Block they show comments from viewers made on the social network sites, Facebook and Twitter. This is great I thought, aggregating popular tweets to improve the viewing experience for the user and to provide a window into the minds of the everyday viewer. However, as I watched the episode I quickly realised that the tweets were all too ‘perfect’ and all too apt. Often a post would be shown exactly at the same time as the action appeared on screen, or the posts were always too positive and never overly critical.

The posts seemed too good to be true. There was never even a typo in sight! So next time a tweet appeared I quickly checked out some users. @GNugnug sent 13 tweets all about ‘The Block’ and hadn’t made a twitter, a squark or even a chirp before the show was aired. I wasn’t even able to find one user who went by the name of @mariefleur7. It all made me just a little disappointed, and also annoyed at the apparent low-tec methods the shows producers were using to implement social media into their shows. It makes me wonder what the point is of including comments, if they’re not real?

‘Second screen’ activities are hugely prevalent globally, and we know they are equally both in the UK and Australia (where OD staff have done projects identifying user behaviour and motivations for discussing television shows on social networks). With apps such as Zeebox and Fango they have tried to ensure that conversations happen in apps, thereby monetising these interactions with adverts, app purchases and sponsorship deals. Seems fair enough but the UX research conducted found these services to be pretty distracting and uninspiring for a viewer. 

So there is a challenge, how can you drive customer engagement and encourage a conversation around your shows, supporting free speech whilst at the same time upholding censorship and classification values, whilst making the conversation inclusive and real?

It’s definitely a difficult challenge, but not one that I think the Block All Stars has met. Perhaps I’m wrong and the viewers that send their messages are real and not a television fabrication, tweet me if you’re out there! So next time I watch the show I might just tweet like a songbird trying to get my message to appear. In the meantime, I’ll continue to keep researching the various ways to integrate social media into television shows and thinking about how the user experience of watching TV can be brought into the modern age, or perhaps more importantly if it even needs to be changed at all!!!!

DAVE HAYES Dave is a User Experience Consultant at Objective Digital. Originally from the UK, Dave loves the arts and is enthusiastic about music, films and design. He’s a creative person and enjoys photography and being active in the photographic community.

 My cousin has uploaded photos from the party we attended on Saturday night…..next is an article by Forbes Magazine explaining “What it takes to retain your top talent” (http://bit.ly/YpTWCw)….apparently, there’s a traffic jam on the M5. I know this because a friend has posted an image accompanied with a few swear words….I then read an article explaining the Personality of a Workaholic by Psychology Today….Catalina Butnaru (from UX Magazine) explains the importance of functional beauty when designing products – If an object is well made for its purpose, but doesn’t look good, its ‘fitness for function’ may be underestimated and it will not be deemed ‘good enough’”…..Disney  Land is giving away free tickets to celebrate its $56 billion profit in 2012….HBR offers tips on how to build trust with a virtual environment…..my colleague blogs about Lean Eye tracking (http://blog.objectivedigital.com/lean-eye-tracking)….finally, I get some tips from Commonwealth Bank on how ways to cut down on energy expenses (http:// livingspace.commbank.com.au/green-days)….

This is what 1 app has to offer in 1 bus ride.  Social networking sites, like Facebook, have provided a new environment for acquiring and distributing knowledge. You and your company have an opportunity to inform and connect with your customers.

What’s your company’s social media strategy? 

Regardless, finally we are proud to be unveiling our new website! 

Our website was created using UX tools and methods (#practice what you preach). We conducted an expert review, competitor review, created personas, did a design studio and self-reflection exercises with our internal stakeholders (us!). We even conducted user testing, asking our clients to provide us feedback during the OD Christmas BBQ. 

Check it out www.ObjectiveDigital.com – Let us know what you think! And stay tuned for our mobile website!

D

DANIELLE AZAR Danielle is a User Experience Consultant at Objective Digital.

I’ve been attending some of the classes offered by General Assembly Australia’s Online Summer School. One of the courses I took part in was the presentation on Viral Video Marketing by Barry Pousman. Here are some insights I learnt:

Content is king…once again

Barry explains how every viral video fits somewhere on the matrix below:

How people feel about your design is based on what content you put into it. And what content you put into your design depends on what effect you’re trying to have on your users. Here are the links to the videos mentioned either to enjoy (or not enjoy):

(keep scrolling down for my quality blog content)

Popular ads: Old Spice

Rebecca Black

Charlie Bit My Finger

Pepper-spraying cop

Even though a video could be perceived to be disingenuous and is generally disliked, it could fall into the category of being ‘so bad, it’s good’. It’s important to realise that the prompt to share a video can be for a combination of reasons.

The most successful viral video of all time ‘Gangnam Style‘ by PSY managed to cross cultural boundaries. It wasn’t just a catchy tune with a funny dance routine and a cheesy video. But most importantly, the dance routine looked easy enough to imitate and represented a universally known activity – horse riding.

Context-based packaging

A lot of good videos out there don’t get noticed because of the title of the video or the thumbnail fails to grab attention. On the other hand, a lot of bad videos get clicked on because of their titles and thumbnails. Barry mentions that one of the best ways to grab user attention is to package your content with something timely and relevant to the user. For example, during the Olympics, products with the Olympic logo tend to sell more than the same products without it.

Keep an eye out for trends

To make your design and content contextually relevant, keep a look out for what’s coming up in the calendar (holidays, world events, etc.) to predict the trends. Marketers always grab onto the next big holiday, even if it’s 6 months away!

Finally, what happens when UX meets a viral video? My colleague Dan Sorvik decided to find out. I’ll leave you with a potentially viral video that my colleague Dan Sorvik made yesterday. It’s Sweet Brown Meets UX: Ain’t Nobody Got Time for Bad UX!