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Today I received an email about a friend of mine who will be doing the 2009 IRONMAN in Louisville, KY. So  I went to the City of Louisville’s website and was welcomed by the image above. Not a great first impression. I can see how this can happen given the two competing audiences of residences vs visitors, but did it need to? Granted it’s a city managed site that has limited resources etc etc, but there is probably a better way to communicate the junk pick up info effectively for the residence without the negatively impacting any potential tourist/visitor.

In general, it made me think about how important it is to always remember the audiences of your website when adding content…the “s” is important. Website’s usually have multiple audiences (primary, secondary and tertiary audiences) so the content authors/editors of each need to consider the positive AND potentially negative impact a piece of content (and or it’s format) may have on one of the other “non-related” audiences - especially on high-traffic pages such as the home page. It’s a no-brainer in some regards but probably one of the harder things to manage once a site is live and content is added by a variety of people.

But besides all that, it just cracked me up.

One of the clients I’ve been doing a lot of work with over the past year is Starkey Laboratories, and last Monday we launched a new consumer site. Here is their official announcement:

We’re very excited to officially unveil the all new Starkey.com website for the U.S. It has been completely redesigned to make it easy for site visitors to learn about the effects of hearing loss and the benefits of hearing aids.

The Starkey.com site was created with current as well as prospective hearing aid users in mind. In addition to clear, intuitive navigation, the site features a rich media video experience where a number of people share personal stories about hearing loss. Many of the faces are celebrities you may recognize such as Marlee Matlin, Arnold Palmer, Norm Crosby, Leslie Nielsen and Peter Marshall. The site also provides a very fast and easy dealer locator to drive inquires to the hearing health professionals who are authorized to fit Starkey products.

I worked as part of a collaborative team of independent consultants and internal resources. I was involved in defining the ux strategy and lead the information architecture, design, and metrics for the site (as well as implementing a flash based video player with closed captioning). Earlier this year we also launched Starkeypro.com which is a site for hearing professionals which includes very detailed technical product data and account management.

So have a look and tell me what you think! (Feel free to ask me any hearing aid questions as well)

I’m really looking forward to the MIMA event tomorrow night (11/14) where Jamie Roche, President of Offermatica, will be speaking on Web Analytics, Testing and Optimization. » Event Info

I spoke with him last week to finalize things and it sounds like he will be sharing a lot of “what we’ve learned to be good tests and bad ones” and focusing on the methodologies of how to make tests meaningful.

I’m in Mpls today and tomorrow for meetings and will be attending the Mima Salon tonight featuring Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path.

His talk is titled “DESIGNING FOR AN UNCERTAIN WORLD” and promises to be an interesting look into “the historical perspective, the evolution of product categories, the competitive advantage that experience provides and the importance of thinking about products in a system fashion.”

I always enjoy his thoughts, observations and rants, hope to see you there.

More event info »

I just returned home from my first business trip to Minneapolis now that I live in Iowa City. The drive is 5 hrs long each way, so before I left I loaded up my iPod with some podcasts hoping I could use that “downtime” as inspiration time. And it worked thanks to Gerry Gaffney and UXpod.com

I listened to 20 of his podcast interviews and enjoyed just about everyone of them. Gerry does an excellent job interviewing a range of UX practioners from around the world, which helps me think beyond the US bubble I live in.

I really enjoyed the following:

Web Teams - an Interview with Jesse James Garrett

Customer Support - an Interview with Joel Spolsky

Intel Outside - an Interview with Genevieve Bell

Personas and Outrageous Software - an Interview with Alan Cooper

Market Research - an Interview with John Berenyi

Card Sorting with Donna Maurer

Voice User Interfaces - an Interview with Erin Smith

Web Accessibility Guidelines - an Interview with Gian Sampson-Wild

Like I said, I enjoyed a lot of them.

The only complaint I have is that the audio quality (compression) and volume vary greatly between files making the listening experience a bit challenging. I would encourage Gerry to standardize his format and error on the side of good audio quality, since if it’s not enjoyable then people won’t listen.

I will be posting some comments on his site as well for each podcast and would encourage anyone and everyone to do the same. Keep up the good work Gerry, I will be traveling again in a month so if you could get another 20 or so done by then — that would be greeeaaat.

Planning for success is important, foreseeing it’s effects is critical. Making improvements to a site design should result in, well results. But if we are not thoughtful and consider the effects of success we could end up like the beaver above.

So you must ask yourself, “if this change is successful, what will it impact directly and indirectly?” Will fulfillment be able to keep up? Does the sales force know about the change and it’s potential effects their customers inquiries? Does the Customer Service staff know about the change so they can answer questions and offer a good customer experience? Does IT know about the change and the traffic it may direct to particular services?

Obviously, not all changes will have dramatic results but how do you know? When demand is pent up because of a bad label or layout and an effective change is made, you can see results immediately and many times dramatically…because it’s been pent up. This is especially true when you add a new feature that you think customers desire. I know of new features that have been added and needed to be quickly “shut off” because they created demand that was unforeseen and were resulting in bad customer experiences. So the feature’s strategy and design was “successful”, but not successful for the customer or the business.

So how can you predict? By measuring successes and failures over time…creating quantifiable history to learn from. The more history you have to learn from the better you are looking forward and predicting orders of magnitude, which may impact how you release a new feature or test a change on a smaller subset of users.

Either way having a web metrics tool implemented is critical to predicting cause and effect accurately over time. The web is unique in how measurable and wide reaching it is…but you have to be proactive to harness it’s power. You need well implemented tools with metric plans to measure activity and most importantly qualified people to analyze the results and communicate them in a way that’s meaningful to the business.

So the next time your planning a change, ask yourself “how can I measure success and what will it impact if it’s successful?”

Last fall I worked closely with Sun Microsystem’s UX team to redesign their home page (www.sun.com). I helped with the research, conceptual thinking, IA work, interaction design and the measurement plan. The new homepage launched in Dec and we are now tracking the usage. Which is the thing I am most excited about! Every link on the homepage can now be tracked.

So by combining this new usage data with the usability studies (that sun does a lot of), we can learn and evolve the design in a whole new way. We will begin to see which ideas work and which ones struggle (or flat out fail). But that’s the point, we will build on our successes and learn from our failures. I think this is a new way of thinking that designers and clients alike need to embrace. We can’t expect perfection, but we can learn from our mistakes — but we need to be able to see them first.

I will be presenting a case study on the project with Jennifer Bohmbach (Sun Microsystems) at MiMA’s February salon. I will post my presentation after that talk.