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It's great to know that usability has its own Day. This Thursday, November 13, is World Usability Day and that means that a lot of events and activities will be held around the world to draw attention to making technology more usable.

Here's an excerpt from the World Usability Day web site:

Technology today is too hard to use. A cell phone should be as easy to access as a doorknob. In order to humanize a world that uses technology as an infrastructure for education, healthcare, transportation, government, communication, entertainment, work and other areas, we must develop these technologies in a way that serves people first…

Love it. It’s a mantra worth repeating every day of the year.

I've been invited by the good people at Macadamian Software Engineering and OCRI to participate on a WUD panel that focuses on “Software Usability: Listening to the voice of the user”.

Here's the summary:

Software usability is about more than an attractive design. Usability can make the difference between users liking your application or getting frustrated whenever they have to use it - affecting your company’s bottom line. To develop software that users like, developers must collaborate with users to find out what they really need. Companies that know the right way to listen to the voice of the user will have a better chance of success in the competitive market. On World Usability Day, a panel of experts in the user experience field will discuss how software companies can find out the right way to incorporate research into the development process.

I'm looking forward to exchanging some ideas on this with fellow panel members Scott Plewes of Madadamian and Scott McEwen of IBM/Cognos as well as the folks in the audience.

For more info on that event go here.

While the blood is still drying under my fingernails, I want to take a moment to talk about why scaling the ramparts of Drupal's administrative user interface was such a difficult task for me as a new user.

I am a big fan of Drupal which is an open source content management system used to create dynamic web sites. It has a considerable amount of power and flexibility that, owing to a brilliant architecture, allows its central core to be enhanced by countless task specific modules.

As an open source system, the core and peripheral modules are all created and maintained by a veritable army of dedicated volunteers around the world. In addition to its highly flexible 'theming' system that allows web sites to take on virtually any aesthetic design, Drupal has a well entrenched system of semi-automatically generating user interfaces for administrative tasks.

Most end users don't see this administrative interface unless they happen to have the role of managing a web site's content. But it is here that we know that many usability issues arise.

While the system of creating administrative user interfaces presents attractive advantages to the module developer, it appears to fall far short of the needs of actual administrative users.

It's worth analysing this system and asking some blunt, usability engineering questions. What is the nature of the methodology used to generate administrative UIs? Is the developer convenience justified, given the impact on end users? What, if any, alternative is there that might alleviate the usability obstacles?

These are important questions but not easy to answer. As part of my deepening involvement with Drupal I've written an article that launches an investigation into these questions. More will follow.

This initial article is called "The Importance of Intentionally Designed User Interfaces" and you can find it here.
 

To paraphrase Groucho Marx – I don't like to speak ill of the dead but in the case of our old Wordpress blog site, I'll make an exception.

Merely four postings ago I declared that I was quite unhappy with our blog web site and that we'd be moving away from Wordpress and towards a Drupal platform. Well, four months later I'm happy to say that this has (finally) all come true.

I could say a few things about why it took so long but I'm not going to do that here. Instead I'm going to use that as the basis for a number of future posts about the power, and usability weaknesses, of Drupal.

Drupal is a very well established, open source content management system. I came to know it in a sort of 'back-to-front' way because my first experience with it was by tracing through the bowels of its engine and finding out what made it tick. Compared to Wordpress innards (very scary in its haphazardness) Drupal's core looked like the work of a genius (which perhaps it is).

Shedding a Tear for Our Wordpress Blog

I never even peeked at the Drupal administrative user interface for quite a while and when I did I was, frankly, horrified. Hence my enthusiasm for future bloggings on that topic.

But there was another critical factor in taking a few extra months to turn this site around. I really wanted to address the things that I was hearing from the developer and designer community and sharpen the business focus of the site in general.

So that's why the blog is now on the back page and the business aims and objectives of the User Advocate Group (TUAG) are now on the front page.

I've also sharpened the slogan to indicate more precisely what we are trying to do here at TUAG. Our old slogan was 'bridging the gap between end users and engineers' which I sincerely believed was a good focus but now see as just too vague.

The new slogan is 'profitability through usability'. And I like the no-nonsense, out-with-it tenor of that phrase. Why? Because really that is the bottom line. Bad usability costs money! In fact, it wastes money – the difference being that no one really benefits from it!

So that will be another aspect of things I, and other group members, will be talking about in this shiny new 'TUAG 2.0' blog.

Lastly, I've decide to launch this site in a far from perfect state, with uglinesses here and there and features missing throughout. Why? Partly because 'perfect' is always further down the road and also because I want to have a bit of fun publicly critiquing my own work and then going about improving it. If you follow that thread you'll get a bit of a sense of how we at TUAG do our stuff as usability specialists.

Personally, I'm very excited to be at this stage. I'm looking forward to having a lot of fun with this shiny new 'Web 2.0' venture.

I've just canceled my Spam Arrest account. At least I think I have. Why would I be unsure? I'll get back to that.

I signed up with Spam Arrest about a year ago after a trusted friend had strongly recommended it. I wasn't too worried about spam because I use Gmail and it already has uncannily good filtering. But I signed up with Spam Arrest because I thought it might be a good safety net for my publicly exposed email addresses. Just in case.

Rigging it up to my various email accounts to Spam Arrest was one of those low priority tasks that I didn't get around to for a long time. In fact I'd even forgotten that I'd signed up until I noticed the monthly billings appear on my credit card statement.

Eventually I set up my main Gmail account with Spam Arrest. Like their web site says, the concept is simple: the first time someone sends an email to that address, Spam Arrest sends out a verification request asking the person to do a one-time registration by clicking on a link.

As you can imagine, this should effectively weed out the bots and auto-morons who send junk mail to any address they can scrape. Basic human intervention is presumably the critical factor in this equation.

But the truth is that the rate of spam finding its way into my Gmail account didn't change. Of course Gmail caught all of it anyway so it wasn't a real problem. But it did bother me that I seemed to be paying for something that didn't work. I expected I would have almost zero spam getting into my Gmail server. It was not a big issue so I put it on the back burner for a few months.

Yesterday, even Gmail dropped the ball and a bit of junk mail hit my inbox. This got me thinking about the whole thing again so I sent an email off to Spam Arrest's customer support.

They responded promptly and courteously but the content of the reply was enough to end my relationship with Spam Arrest. I'll include it here for you to quickly scan:

Michael, you are looking at the wrong place for your filtered emails. Since you protected your Gmail account with Spam Arrest, the emails coming to your Gmail account will be taken to your Spam Arrest account and will be filtered. Once done, your clean emails will be placed under your Spam Arrest Inbox and all the junk emails will be in your Spam Arrest Unverified folder. So if you look in your Gmail account, you will still see the junk emails.

You have a couple of options to read your emails:

1. Use Spam Arrest Webmail (http://www.spamarrest.com/members/)
2. Configure an email program such as Outlook in your computer.

If you want to configure your email program to collect the filtered emails, you can certainly do that. But you need to configure it according to our instructions. Its very easy once you follow the instructions from our online Client Configuration guide.

http://www.spamarrest.com/support/client/

Once you setup your email program as mentioned in the guide, all the filtered emails from Spam Arrest will get downloaded to your computer, leaving the junk in our server.

I won't deny that I obviously didn't configure something 'correctly'. But how complex should the process be? Here's what bothers me about the response I got:

While courteous and well intentioned, the response seems to be written with the assumption that I actually care to learn about the idiosyncrasies of Spam Arrest's system. Strike One.

The language is ambiguous. The word 'filter' is one of the most problematic words to use in any user interface context. I simply do not know the meaning of 'you are looking at the wrong place for your filtered emails'. Does 'filtered emails' refer to spam or the mail I want? Strike Two.

There is talk of another inbox, an 'unverified folder' and worst of all two entirely unwanted 'options' for reading my emails. I use Gmail to read my emails. It is far from perfect but it is my email client of choice. Strike Three, you're out Spam Arrest!

As a customer and user, the entire perceived value of Spam Arrest was that the system would be non-intrusive and based on the very easy to understand concept of having email senders verify that they are human beings and not algorithms.

And getting back to my uncertainty about my cancellation: since I terminated my account, my contacts have evidently each been sent an email from Spam Arrest's registration-bot requesting them to verify that they are real people and not spam-bots. 180 degrees wrong I'd say.

Here's my main point. It is very easy for software vendors to stray away from the core value of their products - that is if they are out of touch with their user base.

Looking at it from the user side, I would say that Spam Arrest completely missed the point of my basic interest in them. Was it in their interface? Was it in their customer support strategy? Was it in the apparently bloated complexity of the system? Was it in not properly streaming their customers into appropriate market categories based on complexity of need?

These deal breaker issues can only be avoided by knowing the users' needs.

It's a sad truth that many software vendors simply do not understand this basic fact: usability requirements for an application need to be as clearly defined and understood as its functional requirements. Or their customers will go elsewhere.

Likewise we, as users, should not settle for less than what we need. The alternatives are only one Google search away.

As a user I chose to terminate my relationship with Spam Arrest to stop wasting time and money. As a user advocate I chose to write this post to send a message to Spam Arrest that their system of design, engineering and customer support is not working. At least not up to what I would call reasonable standards.

Software vendors, especially producers of such utilities as spam filters, need to be very careful about the learning curves they expect their users to tackle. Don't make users go hunting around for functionality. Bring it to their door.

Last week I attended the MESH conference for the second consecutive year and once again the issue arose around evaluating the use of social media technology by a commercial enterprise. To varying degrees it came up in three consecutive sessions, the most electric of which was a mosh pit with a panel of representatives from three corporations: Chris Reid from Yamaha Motor Canada, Natalie Johnson from General Motors and Jenny Bullough from Harlequin Enterprises. The session was skilfully moderated by Michael O'Connor Clarke.

These corporate representatives described the ways in which they had used social media to engage with customers and therefore redefine, influence and transform the perception of their respective companies and brands.

Not an easy task to be on that stage - it's a tricky thing to even describe let alone discuss in an energized room full of hundreds of highly intelligent people who are paying very strict attention to the slightest implications of whatever word or phrase a panelist might choose to use. There were some sparks.

It appeared that many of us in the mosh pit wanted to understand exactly where these panellists were coming from and perhaps had some doubt about the ability of large corporations to ever use social media in a genuine, authentic manner.

The question underlying all this is who speaks for the company? In the traditional world it's the executive level that controls everything uttered officially about the corporate entity. But in the emerging social media world a variety of people within and outside of the company can greatly influence the meaning of the brand by engaging as real people in dialogs through blogs and other social media tools.

So how far are the old school bosses willing to go into this new social media world? I had an opportunity to put this question to the panellists, asking them to speak of it in terms of three words that had popped into my head: Authenticity, Authorship, and Authority.

I knew that these words had something to do with it but I couldn't yet work out the relationship. I had hoped that their answers might have provided more clues. But my impression of their responses (confirmed by my neighbours) was that they didn't really answer the question. I won't fault them for this because these matters are hard to pin down without a meaningful metric. We need such a metric.

If there were such a scale then, based on the buzz around my section of the audience, I would say that Harlequin easily scored the highest mark. Jenny Bullough said some pretty amazing things about how her company from different levels had been engaged directly and meaningfully with their customer base for over 10 years. She summarized it for me in a subsequent conversation:

In other words Harlequin`s customer engagement through social media seemed to be the real thing, based on a substantial corporate policy and long history of interaction with customers and writers that has contributed much to their repertoire of published works.

On the contrary Chris Reid from Yamaha Motor got a low score in my books when he spoke about how he controls everything that is written in a social media context on behalf of the company. That did not seem to achieve the level of authenticity that I think many of us were hoping to hear. Did I hear it wrong?

During the session Natalie Johnson from GM seemed to be in the same camp as Chris and she took some heat from the floor (see first video above). But I caught up with her after the session and after listening to more details about GM`s practices and goals for social media I came away thinking that they did have a grasp of how to use social media in a genuine and meaningful manner. Based on that I would rate GM as pretty high in terms of its objectives and practice even though they don't have the years of experience with it that Harlequin has.

(Keep in mind that I haven't directly experienced any of the social media initiatives carried out by these companies. I'm just using my impressions of what I heard during the MESH sessions* to explore notions of metrics for use of social media in the enterprise. This is far from an 'objective' analysis of any of their practices. Just brainstorming.)

After emerging from the last of the three sessions on this topic, I breezed by a book promo display in the meetup area. I did an about-face. The word 'authenticity' had caught my attention so I checked out the book more closely.

It was called "Personality not included : Why Companies Lose Their Authenticity - And How Great Brands Get it Back". It was written by Rohit Bhargava who had been on the panel in the final session of the day. Out of all the many things that were said in that session I remembered him saying "Don't give up control. Share it." Those words had stuck in my mind.

So I bought the book** and as I did so, Rohit happened to come by. We discussed the authenticity, authorship and authority thing some more:

After this discussion with Rohit I thought more about the fuzzy definition of 'Authority' and wondered if that might be the cause of confusion when trying to resolve how social media applies in the enterprise context. In my chats with people at MESH the word seemed to be taken to mean 'subject authority' - i.e. the direct and meaningful knowledge on a given subject. But I imagine there is another meaning at play as the enterprise attempts to embrace (or just utilize) social media -i.e. the central power that has control over the enterprise and that might feel threatened by any attempts to disrupt the status quo.

With this in mind I formed an image of an 'authenticity metric device' in the form of a balanced interaction with the social media goal of optimum engagement placed appropriately in the middle. At one end is the old style, top-down control approach and at the other extreme is some form of PR nightmare.

I like this image because it visually identifies a point where an exciting balance might be reached between the two extremes. It allows a way for an organization to state their intended use of social media in a simple, graphical way. They could pick a point on the spectrum and identify it as a target or comfort zone.

It would be very interesting to do a survey of enterprises to see where they are in fact trying to place themselves on this scale. And it would be even more interesting to weigh that against a poll of where their customers actually perceive them on the scale. Of course you'd have to replace the numbers with descriptions that make sense to the participants and that could be cast in a variety of ways.

Call it a sort of social media barometer.

Footnotes

*Other speakers and attendees at MESH also had things to say about this topic. E.g. see Zoe Siskos' posts at Social Media Group.
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** If you're interested in how social media can be used in marketing today, I highly recommend Rohit's book for an enjoyable read with many valuable insights.
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