Boxes and Arrows: Comments by James Kelway

James Kelway — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 11:35:16 GMT

Hi Ben

This article is in the pipeline and will certainly feature invisible variables. It is those variables that can impose fragility to the Agile environment but by embracing UCD ethos and a number of other elements agile can still be a force for good in development culture. I will use a case study to illustrate this – which is due to launch in the next 2 weeks…

Cheers
James

James Kelway — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 16:20:37 GMT

Just to let you know that the article is finished – I’m just awaiting the go ahead from the Boxes and Arrows team…

James Kelway — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:14:36 GMT

Hi Andrew, I agree with your reservations about our industry’s use of personas and its great to read another angle about how we use them. I feel that in many environments, as Livia points out, they are the tools that you need to capture the imagination of stakeholders who will inevitably throw the project off the road on an ill-conceived whim. I have found that there are good and bad uses of personas and I guess this is what we are highlighting here.

I do feel that documentation, deliverables, are key to define how successful our work is. Design in general has always suffered from not documenting its reasons for making design decisions. The successes are often realised and celebrated but the methods behind these cases are not published, or lost in time, in the heads of the designers.

This is a strength of information architecture and user experience. We have the tools to establish why we can achieve an upturn in site revenue or why the user’s feel that the site is a better product. To deny personas would be a mistake, as 37 signals suggest, and to feel a persona more by role-play sounds interesting and I can see for some situations it is a necessity.

Dan Brown recently mentioned in a talk at IXD that if Apple had used personas – would the browse feature of an iPod have been more intuitively designed? Perhaps a great product could have been even better. I am of the opinion that they are part of a tool box that helps us create better designs, better products. As you say, if they make us honest or true to the delivery of a project, then a persona is a great thing. Let us keep hold of them, and make sure they are alive.

James Kelway — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:15:03 GMT

Cheers Andrew – I think collaboration, as you say, between team members is key.

I recently wrote a post you may be interested in here http://userpathways.com/2008/02/22/user-stories-or-person… though not as in-depth or well-researched!

I think the communication with stakeholders is separate like you say to the communications you have within the team and perhaps different deliverable is the way to go. A richer set for design and development maybe?

James Kelway — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 12:18:23 GMT

Thanks for a great series Joe. You mention in an earlier article about how this can be applied to other sites, not explicitly dashboards or portals. I think this way of looking at the IA that can be used for various online solutions will be really valuable. In terms of governance for access rights on sites where there are multiple web editors, this way of isolating page elements helps in defining the roles of users who administer sites.

Have you thought about widening the perspective to include all types of website? I am thinking particularly about CMS and how these software solutions affect what can be delivered and the controls content producers have over the visual representation of the pages they maintain. Obviously what they do with a page has a big effect on the user experience but these patterns that you outline here may help to control, or define, the ability to move elements around.

The company I work for are about to purchase a system that will give control over to the website producers, away from the UX team, so they can change the page in an instant. Have you any tips to look out for in terms of user engagement metrics or the monitoring of what they do with the aim to not disturb the user experience?

James Kelway — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:03:42 GMT

Mainly I think we have cultural issues to deal with on top of the technical implimentation and also the impact on our users. I have to remind myself that our users are the people who are on both sides of the website – the people managing the content and those who are viewing it. So I guess we do not want to constrict their creativity in producing killer content, but we don’t want to destroy user engagement because of a few minutes of madness with no guidelines or governance.

We are definately going to set up some metrics to easily see where choices on the interface have impacted on user experience. Thanks for the list here as that will provide the bluepint for our sequence of measurements. We have also worked on other engagement metrics such as frequencey of visits, bounce rate, page impressions per user, time on site etc.

We are also working on A/B testing which with the new CMS, should enable the producers to conduct their own testing. As there are so many different sites this seems the only way to ensure a level of test and measurement. Our IA department numbers 1 – and the UX team are too stretched to offer anything other than consultation.

So this leads me to governance. The navigation (and revenue drivers such as subscription sign-ups) I think should be locked down. At present all elements on the page can be moved around, a WYSIWYG approach for the site editors. These elements are so key to user’s interactions that the thought of them moving rings the usability alarm bells.

I’m thinking an adaptation of your model, the layers you mention, needs to be constructed and outlined to all the stakeholders. So often our discipline seems to come across as the killjoy to the party when new technologies are bought and developed. It would be nice to somehow come up with a workable solution where our producers can create without feeling their hands are tied but our user’s needs are not compromised through changes in the interface.

Dan Brown’s take on this is interesting as he rightly states CMS is not linear and in fact the whole process will become more iterative – perhaps that is what we are leaning towards, iterative content management. With the testing and live metrics this will be even more true. I will keep you posted on future developments – but thankyou again for the series, it really has allowed me to start framing the problem.

James Kelway — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 22:13:53 GMT

I guess there are are many ways to skin a cat. Keep voting and I will definately do it, wireframes are too complex to gloss over. I have found that from the paper to the html prototype they all have their place and particularly within the Agile environment

James Kelway — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 22:14:05 GMT

Keeping up is a good point. I will try to cover future aplications of prototyping. The monthly wireframe issue is a great idea by the way. Such a complex area that touches everybody in a project team