J!nx homepage

Users are more than just an order number; they are a community.

Users can comment on posts, participate in geek trivia quizzes, submit their own tee shirt designs, upload photos of themselves wearing Jinx clothing – even create their own profile page. This truly interactive approach builds relationship and encourages repeat visits.

All community-based actions and online orders reward the user.

All of the community interactions listed above reward the user with Experience Points (EXP). For example, users gain five EXP for submitting a comment, and 50 EXP for getting at least four answers correct on the weekly trivia challenge. When users amass enough EXP, real-world benefits are given.

Transparency: Product quantities, reward status are visible at a glance.

Jinx is transparent with any information the customer may need. When users log in, they immediately see their current rewards level. On a product page, users can see the current stock level of each product – even breaking down the stock level by size and color. Jinx is even transparent about which items they will be discontinuing (and has a sense of humor about it).

Experience Points reward chart for registered J!nx users

“Back in stock” notifications signal loyalty, encourage return visits.

J!nx cushions the blow when a product is out of stock. Users can request an email notification for when that specific item size and color is back in stock, increasing the likelihood that the user will return to the site (and possibly order products in addition to the now-in-stock item). Related product functionality (“complete the armor set”) increases that likelihood significantly.

Will this work with every e-commerce audience? Know your users
Not all users are as willing to create a personal profile on a shopping site; gamers are known for being smart, snarky, and community-aware, so profiles are a win with them. Be sure your users are likely to engage with a feature before investing time and money on any feature. J!nx is successful because it really understands its audience and its high expectations for the websites that try to cater to them. J!nx demonstrates that it understands gamer culture while offering best-of-breed functionality.

Industry-standard functionality required, regardless of audience
Gamers (and other technically proficient users, such as engineers) are unlikely to order from a poor website. For that matter, so are tech-averse grandmothers ordering knitting needles. All users expect and deserve a great user experience when handing over their dollars.

Discontinued stock message on J!nx: Feel free to rage quietly

There are very few online retailers that match the experience offered by Jinx. Would Apple enthusiasts customize a profile page on Apple.com? How many shoppers would like to see the stock level on a fast-selling product at Amazon.com? J!nx exemplifies many best practices that even the current best-of-breed e-commerce sites can adopt.

Publishers and iPad: From underestimation to magical thinking

At first, the iPad was severely underestimated. Then, it became the salvation of all publishers with its promise of lush visuals in a tablet format. The intuitive swiping action seeming to resemble the familiar action of turning pages in a print publication. Magazine publishers breathed a sigh of relief. No more designing for the web. Now all we have to do is put our magazine, as is, on iPad and call it our app. Wrong.

Evidence: our usability test of “replica” vs. native apps

We’ve been suspecting as much, but this month’s usability test of a magazine “replica” app versus a native iPad app, conducted with eight carefully screened users, proved our suspicion: the “replica” app gets initial positive comments, until the user actually has to interact with it.

Rahul (bottom right) is bemused by the "replica" app; conventional magazine layouts look dated on iPad

One of our favorite partners had the foresight to test both versions prior to making a strong commitment to either. The users – highly educated professionals of the greatest technical literacy – participated in our comparison test.

In our test, we chose an article of high interest to the audience, and presented to users in three contexts: the “replica” app (in other words, a glorified digital edition), the native app (designed to take advantage of the iPad platform), and on the magazine’s website. I asked each user to skim the article from beginning to end, and to comment on their experience. The interaction patterns were consistent throughout the usability test.

The replica app scored well on familiarity. Its assets ended there. Users struggled to reach the end of the article because of page jumps – a convention that presents little inconvenience in print, but becomes a real obstacle for tablet users. Reading text in print-based layouts was clearly onerous. Zooming in on text did not render sharp, crisp images, so readability was impacted as well.

From “replica” familiarity to native-app engagement

While users initially were confused by the layout of the second app, which was presented within the Adobe Content Viewer framework, they were able to orient themselves once they understood the context. The most important take-away: The same content, designed for a tablet experience, becomes far more compelling. The users were more immersed in the story because they didn’t have to figure out how to move the screen around in order to read print-based columns. Text sizes were specifically designed for reading on iPad. Images became more meaningful because they were able to load them into a primary viewing area, both enlarging the image and engaging the user. Finally, the presence of brief video and sound in the native app design added greatly to the relevance of the article.

Finally, we returned users to the same article on the web, asking them to skim it within the Safari browser on iPad. As I observed our first user launching the browser and looking at the article on iPad, I was struck by how messy the average website now looks when compared to an app. All those banner ads that we take for granted – or at least tolerate – on a laptop or desktop browser just look like clutter inside that same browser on a tablet.

Our usability test confirmed what many of us know already: Western users will instinctively swipe from right to left in the familiar page-turning metaphor. Bringing this simple design consideration into your app will ensure that users can begin to engage with your content immediately.

The beginning of research-based guidelines

We learned so much in this test that we will be examining and writing about findings for a good while, as we plan additional picture-in-picture usability tests of iPad apps. In the meantime, here are some very basic guidelines for iPad app publishers who started their lives in print-based media:

1 Ensure the table of contents is easy to find.

2 Assume that all users will expect to tap on items in the table of contents, with the expectation that they will go directly to content.

3 Layouts for print – especially two-page spreads that begin with a primary image on the left – may confuse users when using the tablet in portrait mode. We saw multiple users tap an article of interest in the table of contents, only to be met with an unlabeled, seemingly irrelevant full-screen image.

4 if you must proceed with a replica edition, test the experience of interacting with jumps. All of our users found this experience troublesome, and several resorted to workarounds to reach the rest of article content.

We’ll be delving more deeply into our findings shortly. In the meantime, try to conduct your research in advance of making a final selection for an app design vendor.

And for now, we’ll just reiterate what our users told us: native apps take advantage of the iPad platform in an engaging way.

Special thanks to Brian Peterson and Michelle Ayers of Interface Guru for solving the incredibly nerdy problem of creating compelling picture-in-picture usability testing footage of iPad apps.

Of course, Slashdot is the pioneer in involving its user base on a meaningful level, enhancing its credibility to a demanding audience. In that spirit, a video game company, Riot Games, recently took a novel approach to the users-as-moderators concept. The company’s primary game, League of Legends, unveiled a plan that looks to its player base to help resolve a particularly troublesome public-facing area: player disputes.

Riot Games is calling this plan ‘The Tribunal’ and will offer the highest-level players a chance to mediate player disputes. You can visit the League of Legends forum to read the specific details of the plan.

To summarize ‘The Tribunal’ specifics, League of Legends follows basic concepts for involving your user base with a public-facing aspect of your company:

• Offer contributing players a reward. (With The Tribunal, in-game currency is awarded to judging players).

• Be transparent (player judges are given all information related to a dispute: full chat transcript in the reported game, and other statistics on the reported player). Click on the image below to see the intuitive layout of the information judges receive when reviewing a case. (If only some US corporations were run this well!)

• Be unbiased (cases are assigned randomly, the reported player will not know who is judging the case, and one judge will not know the other judges of a case)

Riot Games has shown that recruiting your user base to help company operations can enhance your brand. We recommend looking to your brand ambassadors or more active members of your online presence community to help mediate public-facing areas.

Anyone who knows me knows I love Vanity Fair as much as I love cyberpunk. They also know I spend a lot of time evaluating user experience (UX) for magazine apps, and all sorts of other digital products. So what does it mean when someone like me, who can’t go without reading material for a day, AND owns an iPad, is unwilling to entrust my reading addiction to digital while on the road?

On this trip – to the renowned IXDA/Interaction conference, in Boulder this year – I decided to go paperless. Download the Lady Gaga issue of VF, which I’d missed, download Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash for an umpteenth read (appropriate, since IXD11′s closing speaker is cyberpunk icon Bruce Sterling). And in both cases, I wished I’d brought print.

Vanity Fair's web site: Don't go away - yet

Recently we saw a FOLIO: newsletter item: “The web is over,” stated with gravitas. While I have a lot of respect for FOLIO:, and was often a lone voice for digital in the dark days of the last decade, I have to say: Not so fast. Because the Perfect Storm of conflicting app user experience standards, revenue models, and plain old new technology growing pains continues to under-serve magazine readers.

So, to keep this short: The only advantage of buying VF’s Lady Gaga issue as an app was the availability of the content. Downsides: Excessive download time, and having no clue how far along the download actually was. Having to guess at where the Gaga article was located in the app, since the TOC wouldn’t take me me there. Having to choose between viewing photos and using a readable version of the article.

Now for the Kindle app: I had to go back to the Amazon store three times to make sure Snow Crash had downloaded. (My bank had no trouble tracking the charge, just so you know.)

Meantime, my business partner, digital media veteran Sean Fitzpatrick, sends me this email:

“An interesting observation in the comments on Ad Age (note the link to the NY Times article about iPad digital downloads):
“An interesting counterpoint to the Wired newsstand sales increase (via Nick Bilton): “This morning I decide to try a little experiment: I opened up my iPad, clicked on the little Wired icon and purchased the magazine’s latest digital issue… For the next phase of the experiment I drove about 12 blocks to a local magazine store in Brooklyn, where I also purchased the latest issue of Wired magazine, this time in print…when I returned home with the glossy paper product in hand, the digital iPad version still hadn’t finished downloading to

my iPad. Anybody who reads Wired would call this an Epic Fail. (http://nyti.ms/hh1g8Z) .”

So. I go to the Vanity Fair website and have a good experience. I am less happy with the app. Yet as a digital media analyst, I know that organizations need to think of their websites as a “container” of apps. And until the magazine publishers solve the user experience problems we readers are dealing with now, neither the web, nor print, will be dead. They will simply fail to meet their potential.

But when the event concluded with group presentations on Saturday evening, it was clear that every team had made a responsible effort to assist deserving nonprofits with digital media strategies that could extend their message, and their reach.

Instructions: No one has ever solved this... try.

Let me tell you a little bit about UX for Good/UXXU 2011. Forty user experience designers, ten visual designers, five nonprofit executives, “sparks” in the form of outside experts with something valuable to contribute – let’s take the internationally-respected Bruce Mau, designer of MASSIVE CHANGE as one example – gathered in Chicago for two days. Their purpose: to bring the discipline of user experience design to bear on problems that society has yet to solve through conventional means.

Bruce Mau in our Cross-Cultural Understanding session

The problems addressed by the design teams: unemployment, urban violence, cross-cultural understanding, public education, and community mental health. Note that none of these are moneymakers for companies in the for-profit sector. Maybe that’s why they haven’t been solved yet. And maybe that’s why it takes a volunteer effort such as UX for Good/UXXU 2011 to even begin a rethinking of how these problems could be addressed.

As a user experience professional and digital media strategist with over 10 years of direct experience working with for-profit, nonprofit, and governmental organizations, I would offer that user experience as a practice brings to our clients a perspective they may have lacked prior to engagement with this kind of exercise.

In our consultancy here at Interface Guru, we may not have “solved” our clients’ larger problems (such as the impact of the Internet on conventional publishing, the post-Internet challenge to associations, the funding crunch in education for the sciences). But our clients tell us that we change the way they think about process, and the opportunities it brings. That their perspective is profoundly altered, for the better, and that they now understand how they can use digital (and conventional) media to achieve their goals.

Early tactics for cross-cultural understanding at UXXU

In the past 10 years we at Interface Guru have produced a lot of useful work, including usability testing, information architecture, test sequence design, and user interface design. We have led scores of senior decision makers through intensive digital strategy facilitations that result in organizational consensus – a “drop the shields” approach that eases the path for any organization’s work projects. We are most proud of creating organizational change by changing individual perspectives.

I would offer that this change of perspective is exactly what the “idealists” at UX for Good were attempting to bring to the participating nonprofits. And I would also offer that they succeeded in doing so. As in any competition, the work products varied in quality; that’s what competition is about. But I am confident that every single participating nonprofit executive left the event with valuable perspectives they could not afford to have acquired by conventional means, i.e., engagement with professional user experience firms.

It is with this perspective that I followed UX for Good-related tweets today, and ran across the entertainingly titled “UX for Good is Bullshit or, the Pernicious Effects of ‘Doing Good’ without Understanding the Problem” by Gabby Hon, and its scathing assessment of the value of such an event. To ignore this commentary is a disservice to over 70 people who donated their time, effort, and in many cases, unreimbursed travel expenses to join the UX for Good conference, as well as to the Adler School of Psychology, who donated the excellent facilities.

Perhaps the author is privy to some nefarious agenda on the part of UX for Good of which we, the witless attendees, were unaware.

A few points I would like to rebut:

•  No one at UX for Good, including the organizers, were so unrealistic as to assume that any UX team could “solve” a social problem in two days. Rather, in the spirit of my comments above on how we effect change for our clients, the event was meant to assist nonprofit organizations in applying a new process to what will admittedly be an ongoing effort.

David Evan Harris: Watching the watchers at UXXU

• No one at UX for Good implied any parallels to the participants in the TED events, although someone like Bruce Mau would certainly belong onstage at TED. (My team’s client, globallives.org’s David Evan Harris, was featured at TEDxSOMA, but maybe that doesn’t count.)

•  To describe the summations of the challenges as “inane” seems unduly hostile. It’s a shame that idealism, a force that created real and substantive change in America two generations ago, is now only fit for mockery.  If the descriptions of the challenges were  “muddle-headed,”  perhaps the writer did not understand that the challenges were developed in concert with the nonprofits being assisted.

•  “What happens when these geniuses emerge and present their solutions?” Well, I can tell you what happened. Each problem was reframed. Approaches and perspectives that had not existed within those nonprofits were surfaced. The participating organizations and their representatives were fully engaged, and left the event with a new way of approaching their missions.  And yes, some teams committed to staying with their nonprofit client for a year.

•  “Or is this really about a bunch of elite liberals getting together to do good and feel better about themselves?” I can safely say that all of us were too busy producing work on behalf of our nonprofit clients to pat ourselves, or each other, on the back.

•  The author’s charge – that there is no attempt at accountability because the users were not present – is specious. User experience professionals know that clients frequently need to be interviewed carefully in order to identify users. You can only begin including users when you have defined who they are. And a substantial part of the exercise at UX for Good was to help our nonprofit clients identify those users.

Many attendees tweeted that UX for Good was a great experience. Given that the participants had nothing to gain for themselves, those tweets take on a whole new context. I’ve already committed to next year’s conference in New Orleans, with the deeply held belief that a gathering of people who specialize in process can make a difference to participating nonprofits.

Michael Dain, Jenn Berzansky, Ed Chen, David Evan Harris, Sami Nerenberg, Cia Romano, Luis.Andrade, Eldridge Doubleday, John Jarosz, Marnie Vosper, Phil Keiken

As for being called “elitist liberals,” I would offer that all of us who attended UX for good are in fact pragmatic idealists, and proud of it. And that we can, indeed, win through consensus, if we assume good intentions.

Failure to test = lost opportunity, false conclusions

I think we can reliably say that none of these apps have undergone usability testing. What concerns us greatly is the expenditure related to the development of apps, the failure to validate the designs, the inevitable failure or under-performance of these apps, and the likely conclusion at some publishing houses that the tablet is “not for us.”

Failure to plan for the medium = blaming the medium

Sounds reminiscent of the publishing industry’s take on the web in 2002, 2003, 2004. In late 2005, my colleague Sean Fitzpatrick and I had a surreal experience in the Manhattan offices of an international print publisher. We were discussing the rampant usability problems on the company’s website, when a senior executive confessed, “we seriously underestimated the impact of the Internet on our business.” It was a jaw-dropping moment. We are wondering whether the iPad has brought us yet another déjà-vu-all-over-again moment.

Signs of intelligent life: Magazine app winners

All is not lost. Some smart people are making smart choices. We got a back-stage view of a great iPad brand experience via Guitar World’s Lick of the Day app. Then, we had the great good fortune to bump into Nick Leggett, User Experience Researcher at ZAAZ – the developer of Entertainment Weekly’s snappy The MustList app. Nick introduced us to Anders Rosenquist, Director of Mobile Strategy, who gave us a look behind the scenes. And we discovered that both apps share some common approaches.

What great magazine apps have in common

After interviewing the people behind Lick of the Day and The MustList, we found that they had some common approaches that clearly support their success:

They identified a key, popular feature within the magazine, and chose to focus on that specific function;

They modified the feature to take advantage of the unique “touch” interaction users have with iPad;

They invested in excellent development firms who know how to design for the medium;

They gave rational consideration to monetization models, and are willing to evolve them within the current media landscape (instead of wishing the current media landscape would go away);

They know that user testing on the device itself – not on an emulator – is necessary if the apps are to be optimized.

Developing The MustList app

Let’s take a look at how the ZAAZ team approached the development of The MustList app for Entertainment Weekly. As preface to this post: read Anders Rosenquist’s interview with ZAAZ’s Jon McVey, Executive Creative Director, and Tim Klauda, Creative Director, on the design process. The ZAAZ team sees iPad as an opportunity for the magazine industry to save itself from the poor websites it created in the last technology upheaval. Also, they clearly understand the difference between an app designed for a handheld device, and one designed for a larger device such as iPad. “The experience needs to fits the device,” says Klauda.

Interaction cues from the moment of launch

Unlike many magazine apps that launch with a large logo and absolutely no interaction cues, The MustList launches a grid comprised of responsive tiles that flip when touched by the user. Strong, clean graphic design, use of “list” numbers, visible color icons in the navigation tray at the bottom of the screen, Last Week/Next Week controls at the top of the screen, and the Entertainment Weekly logo on the upper right all provide immediate affordance (self-evidence) for the user. In our initial walk-through of the app, we didn’t stumble once, and we were pleasantly surprised on many occasions.

Inviting touch and interaction

“Our approach was to create elements that invite the user to touch them,” says Rosenquist. “And users expect an instantaneous response. It took a lot of work to get that ‘flip’ interaction right, to make it look natural.” Rosenquist agrees that tablet and hand-held users are less tolerant of time lag between touch and response – a phenomenon we at Guru have observed in touch-screen usability testing. “Without the physical distance created by mouse and keyboard, the expectation of immediacy is greater.”

Adding to usability: simple page layouts that remain consistent throughout the app. The MustList’s simplicity allows users to experience content without having to parse different graphic layouts. Screens load quickly. multimedia plays seamlessly and in context.

A willingness to listen to a better idea

I asked Rosenquist how the design concept evolved. Initial discussions with the Entertainment Weekly team leaned in the direction of doing more with the app. ZAAZ proposed that they do less. “We wanted to work with something that already existed, that was already popular, that didn’t require creation of new content,” he says. I asked how this approach compares to the development of conventional magazine apps. He is clearly focused on the user experience.

“Just because you can squeeze all your content into a device doesn’t mean a user will engage with it,” Rosenquist says. “It makes it tough for the user and it’s not the greatest interaction.”

Understanding the device before you design for it

As soon as iPad became available, the ZAAZ team bought several of the tablets and began to explore the possibilities offered by the device. “We were excited by the possibilities,” says Rosenquist. That’s a refreshing approach that the publishing industry should emulate; it’s not unusual to see a publishing industry professional roll their eyes at a new device. Maybe it’s because publishing gained strength from a technology that rarely changed, and a business model that is literally hundreds of years old. Take a cue from these developers: if you are in the media business, and you haven’t spent time experimenting with a tablet, you need to start doing so. Right now. Because there’s a very good chance that your organization will be creating content for it.

“Magazines were restricted by their medium; they could present text and images, but you couldn’t listen to music, or watch video. We’ve designed this app so that we can extend the user’s interest in a subject into other media,” says Rosenquist. And indeed, most features on The MustList let users experience a topic in multiple media formats.

Testing the app: using what’s available

Since The MustList was developed early on, the team had to rely on usability testing via emulators. It also was on a short time-frame and had to rely on staff to test. Rosenquist acknowledges that the ability to conduct testing on the target device is important. “We’ve revamped our lab so that apps can be tested directly on the device for which they were designed.” We agreed to compare notes on the potential difference between test results obtained via emulator and test results obtained when the user is dreadfully interacting with the target device.

Our take: another winner, a few tweaks

Our outside perspective on The MustList: it immediately provides what many magazine apps do not: fresh design, ease of use, predictability (with a couple of notable exceptions which we will discuss in a moment), instant responsiveness, a sense of discovery in the right measure.

We were surprised in our initial review when clicking on a button in The MustList interface took us to a website outside of the app without warning. While EW content is clearly labeled, functions such as Find Showtimes take the user to the Moviefone website. ZAAZ mitigates this problem by providing consistent top navigation (which provides the user with a clearly labeled back button) and bottom navigation (the aforementioned tray of color icons, which immediately returns you to the app). The purists at Interface Guru would prefer some notification to the user that she is leaving the app; the more forgiving feel that the navigation bars are enough to keep the user oriented.

All in all, the approach taken by Entertainment Weekly and its ZAAZ are to be lauded. We’d love to see many more apps generated by magazine companies that really are apps, dedicated to a specific purpose, and fewer bloated digital editions masquerading as apps. Magazines have a great opportunity to re-brand and reinvent themselves on tablets – if they can identify their core brand value, and provide it to the audience.

Magazine apps: a confused state of practice

In an earlier blog post, I detailed my experience teaching Usability for the iPad at MPA in New York. MPA, an association serving some of the world’s best-known magazine titles, attracts brand-name audiences with strong backgrounds in digital media. Those credentials did not help our class attendees as they struggled with poorly designed user interfaces on magazine apps. And we place the blame directly on the apps, not on the users.

Exploding market for “media tablets”

It’s been three months since I first taught the class; last week I taught an updated version. In that brief time, sales of the Samsung Galaxy tablet have exceeded 1 million units. RIM, the people behind Blackberry, partnered with a cutting-edge interactive design firm (TAT) and are skillfully releasing tantalizing video of their PlayBook tablet. Does this mean these devices will overtake iPad? Not necessarily. What it means is that – as confirmed by a recent Gartner forecast – there is a tremendous amount of demand for tablet devices. Projections for growth in this space are going to surprise many people.

Magazine to tablet: a rough transition

So designing for the tablet, or “media tablet” as Gartner calls it, is going to be more than a nice-to-have. And tablets present an extremely difficult challenge for magazines, whose traditional strength has been to aggregate disparate forms of text and image content with a cover and Table of Contents as the unifying principles. Our early usability analyses of magazine apps clearly show that what was a strength may be a weakness for magazines that try to port the experience as-is to tablet devices.

The best magazine brand experiences on iPad

From a brand experience perspective, two of the most successful apps published by magazines are Guitar World’s Lick of the Day and Entertainment Weekly’s Must List. In this post, we’ll recap a recent interview with Anthony Danzi, Publishing Director for Guitar World. Our next post will cover a chat with Anders Rosenquist, Director of Mobile Strategy at ZAAZ – the firm that designed Entertainment Weekly’s app.

Guitar World: Lick of the Day

Guitar World, the 800-pound gorilla of all things rock guitar – classic and current – may be a surprising origin point for one of the smartest apps published by a magazine. Instead of attempting to mash its extensive content into an app, the magazine made a judicious choice. It evaluated the most popular features on its site, chose one (video guitar lessons featuring some of the biggest names in the guitar-god universe), and adapted it to take advantage of the touch experience offered by iPad. The app, Lick of the Day, is a free download with a handful of lessons teaching different styles (users who subscribe receive more lessons). Users select a lesson from the playlist, watch the pro guitarist demonstrating the lick, and see the music progressing across tablature or standard notation, as well as across a virtual guitar fretboard. Users may also slow the lesson to half-time so they can follow along. It’s simple, star-studded, and just plain brilliant. And I was lucky to stumble across it just before it launched in the iTunes Store when I paid a visit to Guitar World in New York last September.

Know thy audience, keep it simple

When I visited Anthony Danzi, Publishing Director for Guitar World, it was clear he was an excellent fit for the job. Rock swag, autographed tour passes, and most notably, a very nice guitar in his office spoke to the fact that he lives the subject matter for which Guitar World is justly famous. He opened his iPad, handed it to me across his desk, and asked me for my opinion of Lick of the Day. My response: how did you come up with such an elegant, useful app?

“It was a conscious decision,” says Danzi. “We have guitar video lessons on the magazine website, but frequently those performances are unattainable by the average guitarist. For Lick of the Day we took a different approach: Bet you *can* play this.”

“We decided to focus on one thing and do it really well. Plus, we knew [guitar apps] are something people were spending money on.”

Culture fit, shared vision = digital done well

Danzi’s team was able to concentrate on content instead of technology, because they selected a highly competent vendor with previous experience in the music-app space. “Finding Agile Partners was key. We never had to think for a moment about the technology. They already had developed best-selling guitar apps. We met them at NAMM [the legendary music industry trade show]. Great personal connection, and they liked the idea.”

It was a good culture fit, says Danzi. “We agreed on simplicity and user experience as priorities. The idea was to give people a bite-size experience, something to look forward to every day, instead of overwhelming them.”

Who led the concept development? “We gave them the concept and they came back with the design.  There was a lot of verbal back-and-forth, face-to-face meetings. The look and feel was spot-on from the start. The initial design didn’t change. They used their Agile engine for guitar apps to provide the functionality.”

Even with a great developer, the content development presented a significant challenge. “It was a lot of work on the tech side, making sure the tabs were written in the right manner, played back in the right manner, syncing video and audio. There were some perfectionists on our staff,” he laughs. “It’s a lot of work – and the work has just begun.”

What about usability testing?

“We could have approached it differently,” says Danzi. “We only did internal testing. I was the typical user – a casual guitar player. It’s true that the lessons we provide are not for beginners, but they’re certainly within the capability of a casual player like me. But it would have been smarter to test with users.”

Post-launch thoughts, business model considerations

What’s next for Guitar World and Lick of the Day? “Engaging the people who have downloaded the free version, and get them to see the value in playing for additional content,” says Danzi. “We get the typical questions. Why isn’t it free? Why can’t I just get guitar lessons in my favorite genre? The answer to the pricing question is obvious. The genre question is a matter of time in developing additional content.” Another consideration: users get different sample lessons depending on when they downloaded the app. “That’s another issue we’re contending with,” says Danzi. “How you leverage or provide access to ‘back issues,’ so to speak.”

The business model is also under review. “We were lucky to be featured as an Apple promotion [in the iTunes Store]. We’ve had 400,000 downloads of the free version to date. The conversion rate is less than what we hoped – there may be too many options in pricing.” Danzi says the magazine may reconsider pricing with simpler options.

Our take: One of the smartest magazine based brand experiences on iPad

Having visited Guitar World directly after evaluating many mainstream magazine apps, I was prepared for another underwhelming experience when Anthony handed me his iPad. Three months and many magazine apps later, LOTD remains one of the smartest choices we’ve seen from a brand experience perspective. The combination of deep subject matter expertise, competent development, ease of use, culture fit, star power (if you play guitar, you care about learning how to play Hendrix as taught by Joe Satriani) and most of all, a clear understanding of what matters to its audience has placed Guitar World in the forefront of magazines trying to extend the brand through the medium of tablet devices. We call this one a success. Rock on, guys.

In the December 2010 issue of Wired, Adam Rogers briefly describes the TRON ARG: “…[Disney] has run alternate-reality games that started as websites based on characters and companies from the movie.” This definition is an excellent description of the ARG as a whole. Each Web site is structured to give depth to an aspect of the fictional TRON universe, or to advance a game in the ARG (or both). The Web sites provide specific information for the user, but are not so overt as to give information away or force them down a path.

Even though all of the sites in the Alternate Reality Game are created by the same company (42 Entertainment is the corporate mastermind behind the ARG), the Web sites are designed to reflect the look, feel and overall user experience of a multitude of Web site styles, enhancing the realism of the ARG. Throughout the course of the game, 42E created sites for many fictional organizations in the TRON universe: from a dinky parachute design company (http://www.perfectparachutes.com) to a sleek corporate site (http://www.encominternational.com). The ARG players have to visit these Web sites to locate relevant information in order to advance the game. (Just think of the sheer amount of information architecture and user interface required!)

One of the Web sites encountered in the TRON Legacy ARG is a great example of an intricately planned user experience. Here is the trail that led to discovering that site:

1. Users who registered their real address on the main ARG in-game sites received a postcard. It advertised a fictional video game briefly mentioned in the original TRON movie. It has a suspicious black bar on the back. Using a blacklight, you could see a series of dots on the black strip.
2. Communicating with other users online (I used the Unfiction message boards), we discovered that different people were sent different postcards (each had a different set of blacklight dots).
3. Combining all the different sets of dots together spelled out a phrase: ENCOMGAMESDOTJP
   
4. Typing in encomgames.jp into a browser pulled up a new in-game web site, a Japanese company page for Encom’s games.
5. After letting Google Chrome translate the page from Japanese, I could read the page and see a few places to navigate.
6. Clicking on the circuit Cycles image on the right, players reached a page that hosted a new video game, Circuit Cycles.
   The game was a 32-level, single-player video game called Circuit Cycles. Players have to navigate different colored light cycles, one at a time, to touch different points without running into another cycle’s jet wall.
7. Users who registered on the Flynn Lives site (and used the login to play Circuit Cycles) would get a series of badges when they completed sets of Circuit Cycle levels.

Note how the Encomgames.jp Web site is focused on presenting the company information for Encom; it’s not just centered on pushing the user to Circuit Cycles. It does not force the user to content. Users explore the site and intuitively discover the content in logical areas. The user experience on any alternate reality game Web sites must be detailed enough that visitors can immerse themselves in the experience without shattering the 4th wall. These in-game sites must also assist players in locating information needed to advance the game. An alternate reality game Web site, just like a real Web site, must be intricately planned to provide an excellent experience for the user.

From my perspective as a gamer – and as a user experience professional – the TRON ARG campaign sets a high bar for early 21st-century marketing. This campaign required exquisite planning, hard work, and most of all, a deep understanding of the user. Whether you are a nerd like us at Interface Guru, or have no interest in SF at all, take a moment to look at everything this campaign did right.

The beginning numbers for Black Friday and Cyber Monday – fuel for America’s economic engine – are rolling in. And they’re looking marginally better than last year’s. But they could be even better. Why? Because e-commerce sites are rife with usability problems – the kind that make users go elsewhere, or order less than they might have. We’re sorry to say that Nordstrom – irony! – is a prime culprit. Their conversion rates must be a lot lower than they could be, based on our test-drive.

the click-surprise

One common user experience violation is the practice of click-surprise: you click on an item, the page reloads, and you cannot see the item you clicked on anywhere on that page. Is this a simple usability problem? Or is it a form of sabotage from the retailer, who hopes you forget what you clicked on, are entranced by another item, put it in your shopping cart, and then remember the original item, thus increasing the sale?

Nordstrom search return for gold UGGs assumes you know they are the leftmost pair shown in black

I want it, but I can’t find it

We saw a featured item on Nordstrom’s homepage: a pair of shiny gold UGG boots. When we clicked on the boots (you have to admit that gold sequined UGGs are unusual), the site displayed a page full of UGGs, but the boot we had clicked on was nowhere in sight. After conducting a search on the site for “gold UGG,” we got the page you see here. What you don’t know is that the first boot on the left, displayed in black, is also available in gold, which is what you saw on the home page. Routine annoyance on most retail websites. but annoying enough that I started to look elsewhere. Like Zappos.

what users say: you are your website

Here’s what users say: in over 10 years of usability testing, over 99% of users state that ease-of-use, and getting what you expected, speaks volumes about the company owning the website. If the ordering process is cumbersome, what happens when you want to return or exchange your product?

Um, it’s an online store, remember?

What about annoying Flash intros that won’t even take you to the product? Clicking on a cool black dress on the home page at Nordstrom takes you to a “cocktail party guide,” which is actually an online catalog that looks like a print catalog, which is what you see when you click on a link called “Read story.” The kicker: the dress is not featured in the catalog. But if you read the credits for the catalog, in tiny print you will see the name of the designer. Because the dress is a design element for the cover, not something you can buy.

poor usability = less profit

The failure to plan and test user experience is costing US marketers big money every day. Merchants who provide a great user experience (ebags comes to mind) make the process of finding your product simple and straightforward. While the site design is extremely utilitarian, it provides many user-friendly features that others should emulate: clear listings for users who want to navigate, clean search returns, high-quality detailed images of their products, a straight-forward ordering process and frank user. We especially like the fact that user reviews are placed in context. So you, the buyer, can assess how much weight you should place on a review based on your own patterns of usage. A road warrior uses a bag differently from a suburban commuter, and ebags knows that.

there is a right way

Digital strategy, and the objective tactics of usability testing and user experience design, seem to be missing from many major e-commerce websites. Conversion rates will absolutely move up when you meet and exceed user expectations.

Tell us about your experiences on Cyber Monday. Tell us about the great experiences. Tell us about the usability fails, and whether those oversights on the part of e-retailers changed your purchase intent.

The results? All workshop attendees – again, experienced media professionals – struggled to perform these very basic tasks. Implementations such as Zinio’s “glorified PDF” were easier to navigate, primarily because users were accustomed to the print-centric layout. Even though this layout is less than optimal for iPad swipe interaction, users were able to find their way through the Zinio app while expressing a vague disappointment at finding nothing more at the end of the iPad rainbow than a variant on the well-known usability problems of PDFs.

By now, you’ve probably run across the multitudinous citations of Jakob Nielsen’s usability study of iPad, so on principle alone I will not link to it here. It’s either the only study of apps as currently implemented on the breakthrough tablet device, or it’s the only one where findings have been made public. Nielsen is a pioneer, is historically the first on-base when it comes to usability evaluation of new Web-centric platforms, and makes valid points. That said, it appears that the industry has taken his word as gospel – as it often does – and iPad is either unusable (per Nielsen), or iPad has no usability problems (per the anti-Nielsen brigade, arguing that we must measure more than just usability). Nielsen’s PhD is counterbalanced by his tendency to throw bombs. I clearly remember being in the audience in San Francisco when he famously stated that “99 percent of all Flash sucks.” Show me that study. (He did land a consulting partnership with then-owner of Flash, Macromedia.)

PopSci iPad app ambitious, clunky

Here at Interface Guru, we are positioned somewhere between the two extremes. Derek Powazek brought his usual eloquence to an explanation of why Web-centric terminology cannot apply to a device such as iPad, stating “the design language still emerging.” His comments begin to provide a foundation for the way we must approach apps on iPad, as well as the new implementations on upcoming tablet devices.

Based on my MPA workshop, it’s safe to say there is plenty of room for more usability testing, more information architecture, and better UI design of iPad apps. Attendees evaluating implementations designed specifically for iPad (Wired and Popular Science) encountered delightful surprises, interspersed with user interaction land mines. The inherent unpredictability – at least today – of iPad information architecture and user interface design turned usability evaluation into a treasure hunt. Wired was the clear winner for user experience, simply because it was far more navigable then the extremely cumbersome Popular Science.

Other writers have commented extensively on Wired’s iPad app; the point we would like to make is that we observed users, who were assigned simple tasks, encountering problems performing those tasks on apps that were supposedly designed specifically for the device. Our workshop analysts noted that when they encountered a feature they enjoyed – such as Will Ferrell’s “future” videos – they had no idea how to find all videos featuring Will Ferrell within that specific issue of Wired. “If you had a bunch of videos of Will Ferrell made just for you, why would you hide them?” one attendee commented. Why indeed? Serendipity isn’t everything.

The Popular Science app, which got a lot of buzz for its “reinvented” design process, fared poorly as it was evaluated by a Director of User Experience at a major media company. He encountered all the same problems we did while designing the class here at Guru: inconsistent interaction, puzzling iconography, a hard-to-find table of contents, heavy graphics that slow down what should be an easy browsing experience. While all workshop attendees saw the value of innovation by Popular Science , the lack of attention to user experience outside the design team – in other words, the apparent lack of usability testing – is evident.

While we certainly commend media companies who have moved decisively into the app space, we must gently remind them that fundamentals of user experience must be established if these new implementations are to succeed. Back in the early 90s, there were no standards for Websites, and Website publishers often relied on novelty and the willingness of the user to experiment. Those days are gone, thanks to some very hard lessons learned by the industry. The lessons: Users come to websites for a reason. Users value their time. Users expect you to value their time. A competitor who does a better job of anticipating user expectations will trounce you, no matter how long you’ve been in business. It’s not a moment too soon for app developers to learn from this example. The publishers of content must demand the creation of truly effortless user experience, and they must be willing to plan it . The Web taught us that user experience must be designed deliberately. There are no shortcuts to best practice. The time to begin creating standards in the development and evaluation of iPad apps is right now.

A final thought: If digital media professionals can’t thrash their way through your app, what happens when the average human attempts it?