What would we do without Twitter? How did we get such informed and brilliant leads before? I asked the Twitterati whether they knew of any books or must read blog posts or resources on UX in an Agile environment. Miles Rochford, my mentor at the IxDA put me in touch with Johanna Kollman who he described as his Agile UX guru. Johanna told me about Anders Ramsay and also the Ning group Agile Experience Design Organisation. Nick let me know about a Yahoo! Group called Agile Usability. Ian Fenn also mentioned Anders Ramsay was writing a book and Jeff Patton is releasing one on the subject next year.

Thanks to everyone who supplied me with resources, I now have lots to study and some upcoming books to look out for. My Agile UX bookmarks are tagged with ‘agileux’ in Delicious.

I can see how complimentary businesses can offer an overall better experience to customers and businesses alike. But, it would be interesting to explore and know how those companies in direct competition work together living in such proximity. Does it create a sense of community where knowledge share is ubiquitous? Or, does it make them work harder to establish themselves as the thought leaders in a big game of cat and mouse?

I have been getting excited about comic prototyping recently and how it has the ability to reflect the feelings and aspirations of the end user to the client. Rather than emphasis on the interface and placing it centre of attention based on analysis, comic prototyping is end user centric. This, in my opinion opens up new design avenues. And, because the fact that what is being created is a comic, an understanding of the values, aspirations and feelings from using the interface rather than the product itself, it encourages the notion of play making. The comic prototype will never feature in the final product, the end user will never see it. There is nothing precious around the prototype and it feeds into the further iterations around the design process. I believe this is a good place to start to get the iterative process working but we must try and continue this throughout the lifecycle of the design too. But when should we stop? Until the product is at a stage where it is suitable for production? Or time and budget restraints are exhausted?

“What are the buttons? How do they work? What displays when? Where is everything in relationship to everything else in the design? No doubt, these are important issues, but they are only one side of the story.

What’s often missing is the view from the user’s experience: What’s frustrating? What works well? What is their motivation? What do they do with the results of the interaction? How does it dovetail into other aspects of their life?”

Comic prototyping does reveal the experience and concept, revealing the reactions of the user and their emotions and feelings as a result of using the interface. This gives a more rounded picture of the user experience and in doing so helps us place the outcomes of the experience into the design of the interface.

For some of my clients, seeing an interface wireframe and bridging the gap between that and the final website interface is tough. They find it difficult to understand how it corresponds to the final product and their audience of users engaging with it. It could be argued that it is my job to break down these barriers and to make the information architecture design more understandable. Which I do. However, using comic prototyping to assist wireframes the communication of how the final product will work and assist users is far improved. In some cases comic prototypes could replace wireframes completely. The graphical method of a comic and its narrative is easily understandable whereas wireframes to the untrained eye need to be explained.

So let us take a look at the small things:

Skip to content

This is also sometimes called ‘skip navigation’ and is known throughout the web standards community as an item that should be applied for enabling users with disabilities to skip past the navigation menu to the main content of the page without having to hear the list of links when using a screen reader. Imagine listening to the possible pages you could visit every time you visit a new page on the website? Bored? Yes.

The skip content feature is usually hidden away from the visual website version, possibly deemed as inappropriate for able users or perhaps visually ugly.

However it is useful for able users viewing the website visually. Some websites may make use of horizontal advertising blocks underneath the menu or possibly some kind of Flash movie. This allows the user to navigate past this quickly and easily without having to manually scroll past advertisements and other guff (in the visitors’ eyes). This is one that isn’t always necessary but should be considered more by user interface designers.

Breadcrumb trails

Where you are and what section you are in with a quick glance at how deep into the website you have burrowed yourself. This is what the breadcrumb achieves. The highly effective feature allows visitors to be able to orientate themselves and navigate back through a section with ease. As mentioned before, unless the website has multiple sections with several pages deep within a folder directory a breadcrumb trail is pointless. For juggernaughts packed full of information, missing off a breadcrumb trail feature will leave many visitors bewildered.

Top of page

Website pages can be long and packed full of information. Take a privacy policy or legal page for instance. Plenty of meat there. Once a visitor has been brave enough to read right to the bottom of the page it is only polite to add a nice little button that allows them to jump right to the top of the page again, you know, where the navigation is?

There are also certain documents where there is lots of individual information. Let’s take a facts and questions page for instance. We are viewing lots of individual chunks of information on one page. With a layout like this it is beneficial to make sure there is a ‘top of page’ button after each content block as the visitor is highly unlikely to be sifting through the whole page. They will grab the information that they need, possibly from the middle of the document and then want to go elsewhere. Make it easy for them and allow quick transit to the navigation menu.

Anchor points

Again, we will be taking the previous example of the facts and questions page. Forcing the visitor to sift through all the individual content blocks in order to find the information they’re looking for will prove unfruitful. They just won’t. Provide a block of links towards the top of the page that link to anchor points within the document. This coupled with the ‘top of page’ links creates a usable system. Of course if the page is so gargantuan that you would need anchor points to get around the link block then you should look at bringing in a search query form. See below.

Search query form

Some visitors to a website may want something very niche to your service and something out of the ordinary. Such people will probably not be catered for in the main navigation structure. They may not be catered for at all. Let them search by keywords by providing a search query function. They can then get a list of results from pages that contain that particular keyword of phrase. Alternatively they will not find a result to their query. Clever search queries will supply alternatives or ask the visitor to complete a form suggesting an addition to the website content.

Back button

In addition to the breadcrumb trail, or in some case instead of to simply allow the visitor to navigate their way back to the section home page rather than having to jump through hoops within the navigational structure.

Dr. Pete had mentioned some barriers that were being thrown up by small companies in opposition of user feedback. With my view that negative can be constructive and spun to a positive, I decided to leave Dr. Pete a comment on my thoughts. We discussed on his blog site and through email and as this post is an offshoot of my previous post which used a dialogue script to open up, I thought this part would be quite fitting of a dialogue too rather than getting into an I said… Dr. Pete said… vocabulary.

Dr Pete (Within Post):
An offshoot of transparency: more and more customers expect to see product reviews and the opinions of other customers. I’ve encountered many small companies who were afraid to add these features and hear what their customers had to say. What if, to put it bluntly, your products suck?

DigiKev (Comment):
Pete, I have just written a post which picks up on some of the topics you have raised here, namely clients fears of embracing social media. In my opinion we need to talk clients around to the fact that all feedback is good even if customers are saying the product/service sucks. Conversing with customers and finding out the problems they have with the product/service and making corrections from this feedback is going to raise the clients profile, show that they care for their public and want to improve services. It may be a knock back in the short-term but put a good spin on it and the bigger picture looks brighter.

Dr Pete (Comment reply):
It’s a difficult balance; on the one hand, I think transparency is good for most companies, and listening to customers is essential. On the other hand, I think clients are right to be hesitant. Social media has taken on a certain mob mentality at times, especially for large brands. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates can’t sneeze without an army attacking or defending them online, and it’s understandable if that atmosphere creates some defensiveness among clients.

Dr Pete (Via Email):
Thanks for stopping by User Effect and commenting. I liked your post: I think you’re right about the hesitation of companies, especially those with established brands. If always felt companies were too concerned about competition, but I’ve definitely learned that that’s an area where we need to tread lightly.

DigiKev (Email reply):
I am pleased to hear you read my post and took something from it. You have got me thinking a lot more on the topic and perhaps I need to climb down from that ivory tower you mentioned as some of my thoughts are perhaps too idealistic of a perfect proponent for social internet in business use. I think it goes without saying that ignoring social media completely isn’t going to be detrimental; there are plenty of thriving businesses online making no use of this capacity. However I still believe that community based and comment enabled websites will have the edge over competitors that do not. Negative and constructive feedback I do believe can be given a positive twist and will develop brand awareness and loyalty. Now this is where I have added new thoughts off the back of what you have mentioned: Perhaps the user experience of business based communities and comment culture needs some rules set in place to protect businesses from, not the negative feedback, but the real black pr like seen written by the Microsoft/Apple haters. I am not entirely sure yet how this will be set in motion, we can’t suggest censoring comments as this will explode into further negative feedback; maybe it will be necessary for the user interfaces to be adapted to either discourage or disallow such activities. Something to ponder over further…

You’re right, this is definitely an area we need to tread lightly in and our clients need to be made aware of the graces and pitfalls user input can bring.

Dr Pete (Email reply):

I am not entirely sure yet how this will be set in motion, we can’t suggest censoring comments as this will explode into further negative feedback; maybe it will be necessary for the user interfaces to be adapted to either discourage or disallow such activities. Something to ponder over further…
I think this kind of thoughtful consideration is all we can really do. The online world is changing, and the impact of the internet in our lives and culture is just beginning to be felt, so we have to adapt as we go. I think you’re right in steering your clients toward social media and gradually more transparency, and that the trick is just to empathise with their concerns and keep your eyes open. Hiding our heads in the sand won’t help anyone.

So by having this discussion with Dr. Pete and thinking a bit more deeply about the very negative side that could possibly occur I have had a bit of a change of tact towards website visitor feedback. It is a tough one to judge as in my honest opinion the social internet really is a must for businesses. As the website is what it is, a social media environment, then the business running that milieu should be wholeheartedly involved in what is occurring in the website. Without fault. If not and the community is not getting answers or negative feedback is taking place then of course it will be to the downfall of the company. The whole point is to converse and engage with visitors. With all that said there may well be situations where a product or service just isn’t up to the job and negativity becomes rife. In most cases it will show that some serious rethinking needs to be done behind the scenes, in others it will most likely be to push clear of social internet or at the very least make it limited.