Marrying Web Analytics and User Experience

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Marrying Web Analytics and User Experience

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What's in a NAME

Name fields are often considered the most obvious and simple fields in a form. After all you have a first name a second name and you may have a middle name. So what can be so complicating about that? Consider designing a form which will be used by people across countries and cultures and complexity of names becomes evident.

I was recently designing a form which was to work well across all South-East Asian countries and cultures. As the information collected would be used for financial purpose, little (unintentional) discrepancy would mean problem for the bank in validating the user's identity. It could also mean bad user experience, if the bank had to ask user for verification of identity after user had filled in the form honestly. In Personal Names Around the World Richard Ishida lists down how the basic structure of a name changes across different cultures.

The Name Riddle defines the problem and suggest a two solutions.

The first solution proposes one single field for the entire name, followed by a field asking for user for the name to be used to address him/ her. I however strongly feel that second field label which reads 'Address', can be very misleading. I would prefer to go with 'short name' for the label and add instruction explaining what it means purpose of the short name. There is also the question of if both the fields should be made mandatory? Making the short name mandatory will mean users with single name will have to enter the same name twice. However if it is not mandatory, most people are likely to skip this field leaving the system with only the long name to address the user. My recommendation is to make the field mandatory only a shorter name is needed to address the user.

The second solution is more in line with the widely prevalent web forms, having two fields, for 'Given Names(s)' and 'Family Name'. This gives user the option to enter more than one name as 'Given Name'.

One field for the full name, as proposed in the first solution appeared a good solution. This however is a deviation from the predominant convention practised in web. The second solution is best suited for cultures and countries where English is the dominant language, but I am certain that this will not work very well in non-English cultures.

Advertising user experience

A couple of recent adverts in TV caught my attention. These adverts choose to speak of their services not mentioning the products. They championed user experience and promote it, almost deliberately ignoring the product range. The adverts I am talking about are of

Aviva and confused.com.

Aviva
The new TV commercial of Aviva is strikingly different from the run of the mill insurance adverts. In the full length of the advert, there is no mention of any insurance products, options, plans or schemes. In simple words like "remember me", "just recognise me", "don't clutter your language with corporate jargon", the advertisement claims placing customer experience over the main products. The message "a company being built around you" sums it up very nicely. Evidently this is one company where services take priority over products, or at least they claim to be doing so in the commercial.

Confused.com

This commercial revolves around functionality and usability of the web site - confused.com a financial products comparison site. The somewhat unimpressive video shows users using the site and recounting their positive experience. They also mention that the site helped them save money by helping them find financial products of their choice at a lower cost. The gist of the commercial is that the site, by being more usable, helps people find cheaper options. Again the user experience takes priority over the range of products to compare from.

This kept me wondering if we were witnessing the shaping up of 'Experience economy'. What has to be evaluated is how 'Real Real' these companies are in reality.

Journal of Information Architecture

Good news for all Information architects. We have a much needed and long awaited international journal dedicated to information architecture.

The inaugural issue of JofIA was published recently. This issue has some very interesting papers covering a range of topics from user experience to architectural document analysis.

Many thanks to REG-iA for taking the initiative. I am sure this journal will be very helpful for everybody attached IA.

to make the complex clear

The first post in this blog has to be dedicated to Richard Saul Wurman who coined the term Information Architecture.

Information Architecture is a reasonably common term these days and if you are someone working with web sites, web design or web development, you are sure to know someone with the job title of IA (Information Architect). In fact it is associated so much with the web the general perception is Information architecture deals with structuring web sites. It is natural to think Information architecture or IA, came after the web, when in reality, it was coined in 1976 by Richard Saul Wurman, way before the 'world wide web' of Sir Tim Berners-Lee was conceived.

Wurman created the phrase Information Architecture in reaction to the massive amounts of disorganised information being created by the society. "I thought the explosion of data needed an architecture, needed a series of systems, needed systemic design, a series of performance criteria to measure it." He created the popular ACCESS travel guide books which used colored text for mapping content by neighborhood. The design concept was based on 'how we seek information'. This remains the governing principle of information architecture of the web as well.

The best definition of my job title has come from the legend himself - 'information architects are people who make the complex clear'