ioannidis, anthony salzburg 2015

User Experience

What is it?

Why should I care?

How does it affect us?

- Why user experience matters

In the next hour or so…

- How you can make $300 million in 1 year…

- Good (and bad) practice examples

…and help a few people in the process

My job

Help my clients improve

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their customers’ user experience

Why does it matter?

Do you use Facebook?(let me see hands, please!)

Have you looked at the privacy settings?(hands again, please!)

Have you changed any of the privacy settings?(Really?)

What the **** can go wrong with that?

(Remember this question, we’ll come back to it later)

Manipulating opinions

The obvious way

The less obvious way

U.S. Marines help an

Iraqi soldier with

water from a canteen

in Iraq

March 21, 2003

AP

Reportedly… (I found no evidence)

The not-at-all obvious way

For 1 week, in 2012, Facebook hid certain

elements from 689,003 people’s news feed

The aim was to see whether this manipulation

would affect users’ emotions

No informed consent was requested from or

given by the participants

The not-at-all obvious way

The experiment showed that emotions

expressed by others on Facebook do

influence our own emotions

In other words:

Yes, Facebook can manipulate people’s

emotions by cherry-picking what it shows

on their news feed

And no, it doesn’t have to tell you

The ‘innocent’ way

Extra gentle for the

most sensitive skin.Start with ultra sensitive skin, add the chemicals

and moisture and you have diaper rash.

Baby diaper’s unique high-absorbency natural

blend cotton padding provides extra thick,

gel-free protection for your baby.

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Which one can sell more diapers?

1 2

3 4

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Images can influence us

Composites from actual eye-tracking data

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Celebrities can influence us

27Post made: September 19, 2014

Joan Rivers passed away on September 4, 2014

What others do can influence us

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!

The world according to Google

Actual Google UK suggestions

July 20th 2014

The world according to Google

But, I hear you say…

…how do we know these things affect us?

Tools of the trade

Eye-tracking

User testing

A/B testing

Analytics

Eye-tracking…

What it used

to be like

What it is like

these days

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…what we learn from it…

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…and how it translates to $

And, of course, don’t forget our diaper ad…35

More expensive

Less

expensive

Tools of the trade

Eye-tracking

User testing

A/B testing

Analytics

User testing

A friendly chat

with users about a

product or website

What they don’t

realise…

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Does user testing work?

Air France flight 447 disappeared over the

Atlantic Ocean in July 2009

228 dead38


Old-style cockpit:

If pilot is pushing forward and co-pilot is

pulling back, their forces are averaged and

the stronger ‘wins’ 39


New-style cockpit uses joysticks – no need to

apply any significant force to fly the plane40

Now consider this:

• Pilot is pushing joystick forward

• Co-pilot is pulling joystick back

Should the plane...

• Go down (obey pilot – he knows best)

• Go up (obey co-pilot – pilot is drunk!)

• Average the two, as in the old design?

Airbus decided it makes sense to average

the two, just as the old design worked.

What the **** can go wrong with that?

It makes sense, right?

No need to test it, right?

228 dead

It was never tested with pilots…

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02:13:40 (Pilot) “Climb… climb… climb…”

02:13:40 (Co-pilot) “But I’ve had the stick back the whole time!”

02:13:42 (Engineer) “No, no, no… Don’t climb… no, no.”

02:13:43 (Pilot) “Descend… Give me the controls… Give me the controls!”

To gain speed, the plane should have been in a descend.

The pilot had no idea the co-pilot was pulling it up...

It was never tested with pilots, because ‘it made sense’.

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Let’s lighten up a bit

What’s an easy way to make $200 million in 1 year?

Tools of the trade

Eye-tracking

User testing

A/B testing

Analytics

Google’s ‘50 shades of blue’

In Google UK's former MD Dan Cobley’s

own words:

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Seven years ago, Google launched ads on Gmail. In our search we have ads

on the side, little blue links that go to other websites: we had the same thing

on gmail. But we recognised that the shades of blue in those two products

were slightly different.

We ran ‘1% experiments’, showing 1% of users one blue, and another

experiment showing 1% another blue. And actually, to make sure we covered

all our bases, we ran forty other experiments showing all the shades of blue

you could possibly imagine.

“

Google’s ‘50 shades of blue’

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And we saw which shades of blue people liked the most, demonstrated by

how much they clicked on them. As a result we learned that a slightly purpler

shade of blue was more conducive to clicking than a slightly greener shade

of blue.

But the implications of that for us, given the scale of our business, was that

we made an extra $200m a year in ad revenue.

“

OKCupid’s ‘50 shades of gray’

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OKCupid run some experiments on their users:

• removed text from users' profiles

• removed photos

• told some users they were an excellent

match, when they were only a 30% match

and vice-versa

OKCupid’s ‘50 shades of gray’

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‘Conversation’ = Exchanging ≥ 4 messages

70% increase!

It all started years ago

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First large-scale A/B experiments run by

direct marketing (junk mail) companies

A mailshot can go to 10 million people with

5 million different permutations

• Stuffing an envelope with gifts or physical items makes

people more likely to open it

• Thicker paper can make a letter feel more important, so

recipients are likely to give it better attention

• Delivering garden furniture mailshots during sunny spells

resulted in 34% higher sales of outdoor products (IKEA)

P.S: Did you know?

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• Even the use of a “P.S.”, in which the recipient is prompted to

get in touch with the company and make a purchase has been

tested, and is now considered best practice

But,

What’s an easy way to make $200 million in 1 year?

I promised to show you

how to make $300 million…

Tools of the trade

Eye-tracking

User testing

A/B testing

Analytics

Analytics

Every time you visit a website, we know

• How much time you spend on it

• Where you came from

• Where you’re off to

• What you are interested in

• How old you are

• Where you’re from

• What you did last summer

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Analytics

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Analytics

The old form: massive drop-out rates

Analytics

45% of customers had multiple accounts in

the system, some as many as

160,000 forgotten password requests / day

75% of these never tried to complete

the purchase once requested

10

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Analytics

The new form: no registration required58

Analytics

After the change:

45% increase in purchases

An extra $15 million in the first month

$300,000,000 in the first year

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Three tips to improve user experience

(which you can actually use)

1. Less is more

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By the way…

Did you notice this section had no text?

You still got it, right?

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2. Signposting

Good.

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Not.

so.

good.

Solving life’s little problems

A problem for busy airports:

- men’s aiming is very poor when using urinals

Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam found a solution:

- signposting

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Erm…

Spillage reduced by 80%(true story!)

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SEGA took it a step further

“Toylet”

A game that rewards… good aiming70

3. Progressive

disclosure

Progressive disclosure

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“ An interaction design technique that sequences

information across several sections, in order to help

maintain the focus of a user's attention by reducing

clutter, confusion, and cognitive workload. By disclosing

information progressively, you reveal only the essentials

and help the user manage the complexity of feature-rich

sites or applications.

Wikipedia (again)

Progressive disclosure

A design technique that simplifies and

sequences information across several sections

Helps maintain a user's attention by reducing

• clutter

• confusion

• cognitive workload

Reveals only the essentials and helps manage

complexity

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Manipulating behaviour

Manipulating opinions

Online vs offline

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Interfaces that mimic the physical world

But what about human behaviour?

Do we behave the same way online?

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vs

Real life

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Why the different behaviour?

Social media has taught us that it’s OK to do

‘creepy’ things online (follow, like, poke...)

‘Everybody’ does it, so it’s socially acceptable

We are influenced by what our peers do

‘Social’ sites take advantage of this

A good example

Showing this message

on Facebook drove

about 60,000 extra

votes in the 2010 US

Congressional

elections

Showing this one

drove a further

282,000 votes

A bad example

Facebook unlawfully used the names and profile

pictures of its users, including minors, to

advertise without obtaining their consent

1 class action lawsuit settled ($20 million)

1 more in Canada, recently ruled to be

outside the local Courts’ jurisdiction

In a student survey…

1. How happy are you?

2. How often do you go on a date?

If asked in this order

- correlation is only 0.11

If asked in the reverse order

- correlation jumps to 0.62!

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Choice Architecture

We have the power to frame questions in a

way that manipulates answers

We have the power to nudge people to the

right (or wrong) direction

A force for good or evil? (Discuss)

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Choice Architecture

How much would you like to donate?

- $10

- $25

- $100

- $500

- Other amount

- $50

- $100

- $500

- $1,000

- Other amount

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Choice Architecture

Simply by rearranging food in a school

cafeteria, researchers were able to increase or

decrease consumption of particular foods by

25%

(We do that every day, when you visit your favourite websites

– we just don’t tell you)

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Can you

change the world?

Getting people to exercise

Getting people to donate

Research in South Korea showed that about

89% of people wanted to donate

In reality only 0.9% actually did

How can we get more people to donate?

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Minewater has two barcodes:

• Scan one, and you'll be charged $1

• Scan the other, you'll donate 10 cents

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51% of customers donated in the first 2 weeks

Sales rose by 244%

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Last video for todayBut possibly the most important

How can you change the world?

Some ideas on how to tackle your projects(before you end up like this guy)

Over to you…

Please sign up for 2 x consultationsQuestions?

[email protected]

www.twitter.com/iasquare

Thank you

Sources• http://usableworld.com.au/2009/03/16/you-look-where-they-look/

• http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/

• http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.2420180505/abstract

• http://www.smartinsights.com/conversion-optimisation/checkout-optimisation

• http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669720/how-lousy-cockpit-design-crashed-an-airbus-killing-228-people

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19571053

• http://soulpancake.com/

• Design Thinking video (edited), by Brettnewman, Wikimedia Commons

• Ogilvy & Mather Dubai, for the RSF campaign

• Crisis Relief, for the ‘Liking isn’t helping’ campaign

• UNwomen.org, for the Google search posters

• Thaler & Sunstein, Nudge, Penguin books, 2009

• Animated gifs from giphy.com

All photos and videos © of their respective owners

ioannidis, anthony salzburg 2015

Presentations & Public Speaking