Ever sat on a project and heard someone give their account as to why the user base won’t like xyz feature or UI change? Ever sat in a cubicle and listen to someone rail against the idea of change for fear it would upset the user base to the point where the helpdesk would be flooded with “Please Explain” calls.

Surrogate User – people used as a substitute or representative for users, in order to provide information in design meetings, user testing, and so forth.

The reality is this, end users are surprising beasts and often will surprise you in what they can and can’t do. The end user especially in enterprise is so used to crap-tac-ula software day in day out that anything really that you do as of today onwards is highly likely to be much simpler to what they are used to (especially given the consumerism within Enterprise these days). Furthermore should they dislike the software they aren’t likely to all abandon their jobs simply because of a bad UX decision – as 9/10 they are under duress around crappy software decisions made by other teams anyway.

Instead, the end user is probably thirsty as ever for software that feels simpler to use and actually looks like someone took the time to think about them and their needs instead of how it solves one finite problem only. Software’s job is to react to the end user, not make the user react to it!

End users are also making use of a variety of software so whilst one particular UI pattern that has been adopted is “the way they are used to today” doesn’t necessarily mean they are ignorant of all other UI patterns out there on the market.

The key is to leverage existing muscle memory as much as you can today and less showing off on what you can and can’t do with some of the UX Platforms at your disposal. Be creative but don’t be overly creative, you get no points for showing off.

Layer-in complexity is what I always tell people, as it’s much harder to reduce complexity later than it is to bring it in slowly. It’s also the best discussions to have, as if the business or end users are complaining that the software is too simple – which let’s be clear, I dream of these discussions – then you have more of a baseline to draw from going forward around feature weighting and selection (which plays into UX + Agile in a way).

The surrogate user is someone you should fear in all software projects as they often bring pre-existing bad habits forward and lastly suffer from the “I’m in touch with my audience” arrogance (sometimes without realizing. I’m told that a Surrogate User when done right works, i’m yet to see one of these unicorn beasts, but i’m told just the same.

Whenever I hear someone say “Users don’t like..” my first instinct is to respond “Oh? Did 1 in 5 housewives tell you that or is this something you’re just making assumptions on?” – Meaning is this “I think” or is it “I know”.

Surrogate Users are dangerous unless they are moderated by someone who has the “UX” somewhere buried in their resume, as they can often decode the “personal bias” from the science of what these entities represent.

Related Posts:

• Your own Mulit-touch Surface Prototypeboard-thingy.
• Silverlight Installation / Preloader Experience – BarnesStyle.
• UX Tip: Just because you can count change, doesn’t make you a mathematician

Situation is simple, you’re someone who has been brought into a project at its last witching hour, there are not a lot of project management fundamentals in the room and everyone is constantly emphasizing the “we have to get this done, no time” analogies and metaphors at you. What do you do? How do you navigate this and salvage what’s left of the project to turn this around into a productive and usable solution.

Answer is Microsprinting.

The past 6 months now, I’ve been constantly brought into projects that have gone off the rails for one reason or another and it typically comes back to scope creep and lack of discipline in terms of leadership or more to the point communication.

This is why SCRUM is a concept that every developer should borrow ideas at the very least from, it’s not so much a rule book but a communication protocol that all can agree to and figure out ways not to bump into one another.

That being said, setting up sprints that go for week(s) are great but when you’re faced with a deadline that is measured in hours whilst having to also work back from an unmovable deadline you simply need to calibrate your effort to a micro format.

The List.

The way forward is this. You first analyze all the features that were expected to be in the release for the project, don’t worry about who did what wrong or where it went pair shape. Sit down, take a deep breath and focus on getting a list together that outlines all the features needed to be done. Take this list and break it down to a point where it’s not to finite but at the same time granular enough that all can accurately see what the effort ahead looks like.

The wireframes aren’t the spec.

A lot of times I see wireframes and folks are looking at these and going “Ok, I need that wireframe to be designed” which is a perfectly valid request, in reality though as an interactive designer your job is to not just paint pixels here but also decide on how the moving parts become interactive. More to the point, you’re also analyzing each of the boxes that say “news” and thinking about how the data template will look per item in the ListBox and so on, you really need to map this out per screen and come up with a fairly comprehensive list of both the interactive specification as well as a list of visual states that need to be designed end to end.

I say this as a box on a wireframe can turn quite dramatically into 2-6hrs worth a work depending on which direction the interactive designer decides – “Ok this box when clicked now will go to this screen and the transition needs to be fade along with a loading of individual boxes to lead the user as to what’s change in an elegant fashion etc”

Break the wireframes into detail as again the project is off the rails you don’t have time to sit back and create high fidelity prototypes for each wireframe around its interactivity. You simply need to outline what’s likely to be the effort and do the best you can to not screw up given the constant variables of time/budget is much shorter than you’d ideally like to work towards.

8 is the number, not 7 or 6 or 2…

Break your day into 8hr segments and these are effectively the Microsprints. Every 8hrs regroup and triage what needs to be done and what has been done, agree and move onto the next microsprint. It’s also important that you work with a stack ranked list, keep it simple, rank it from 1 to whatever and attack the list one by one until you get to the finish.

Chances are you may have 100 items but in reality given the timeframes are short whilst the budgets are tight; you’re effectively likely to end up with 70 items done at the end of the deadline.

It’s time to start sacrificing and yeah it sucks but if the project had of been mapped out properly from the start you’d have the full 100. The reality is its off the rails, you got to start triaging in a cold but fair way sort through the items that are going to have a chance of life and simply send flowers/apologies to those who want the items that aren’t likely to have a chance at life in this project.

Tough decisions but necessary ones.

Stakeholders are likely to be suffering from denial. “I wanted that box. Can’t we just..” the moment I hear “can’t we just..” is the part where I stop and think to myself “ok, is this a new idea or is this simply a creative way of trying to get agreement on something that just can’t be done”.

It’s now a point in time where you have 6 things on the table and you can only have 3. Choose as if you fail to make these tough decisions now, you will end up having less – it’s a reality and fact.

Don’t shoot the project manager.

At some point the project is off the rails, someone steps up and says “ok, I’m now leading this band of misfits”. It’s important that someone lead, but it’s also equally important that all understand that this is probably one of the worst positions to be in now. Projects off the rails remember, someone just stood up and said “I’ll now assume responsibility for this delivery from here on out” – give them the benefit of the doubt as they just did something you weren’t willing to do yourself.

They may say no more than yes, they may ask you to sacrifice your core beliefs on how things should be done in order for a Band-Aid or two. It sucks, but deadline is looming and having a 115 lines of code to do something that can be done in two may piss you off, but ship it. Ship it is the goal, refactor later.

Learn from your mistake.

Typically after I leave everyone has that exhausted look on their face, chances are some of the folks in the team will vow never to work with one another again. Emotions were high, we got it done, it wasn’t great but we got success.

Put your pettiness aside, understand this, it was a group failure that later turned into a group success. You just accomplished something that not a lot of teams can do, you made the deadline.

The thing is also, that whilst you know there is around 30 items off the list, and chances are the end users have no clue as to what those 30 items were. You’re just beating yourself up over a quality issue vs. an actual specific requirement.

Should that requirement manifest into a missing feature, you have the next round now ahead of you only this time, PLAN it.

Get the interactive designer into the planning meetings early; don’t leave the design to last. The interactive designer is responsible for the look, feel and way this user interface is going to interact. The UI designer is the person who will paint the pixels per state and lastly your user experience / usability rock star is the one who will navigate the cognitive science associated to the UI.

If you find a person who can do all three, lock them in and don’t let them leave. If you can’t find a person to do any of the above, start hitting Amazon and start researching as one of you needs to assume that position and take responsibility early for it.

Developers need leadership, someone needs to be the Program Manager, make them accountable for features getting to developers hands early. Project / Release managers are there to co-ordinate what should come first and lastly when.

You can have SCRUM approach, but democracies are only as good as its people. If the people aren’t clued into its virtues, see the above.

Learn from what you did wrong, don’t nail people to the cross for it..just learn from it.

Embrace MVVM.

If you’re doing Silverlight/WPF no excuses use it now. Don’t screw around, get onto it now. A friend said to me yesterday “..Dude, saying MVVM is half the understanding, once they’ve said it then they now know it..i mean Model..View…ViewModel whats the mystery?”

It’s a basic foundation for all to work towards and it’s just easy to set things in order in a solution.

Related Posts:

• RIAGENIC is a UX/UI Business.
• Can you mix UX with Agile?

One of the main focal areas I wanted to fix, was the overall Installation and Preloading Experiences for Silverlight. In that, i think it’s essentially the like the IRAQ war of software (i.e. meaning, its so far embedded now that fixing it is going to take generations of change).

Here is how I’d love to see it change course.

Change the way Silverlight Boostraps.

If you new-up a project within VisualStudio or Expression Blend, you will effectively get an automated boostrapped solution, meaning inside your main Silverlight project via App.xaml.cs for example, you should see something like this:

        private void Application_Startup(object sender, StartupEventArgs e)
        {
            this.RootVisual = new MainPage();
        }

What effectively is happening here is that Application Class is the default root for Silverlight and when you inject “MainPage()” into the RootVisual its pretty much the same as if you went:

	UserControl MyUserControl = new UserControl();
	MyUserControl.Content = new MainPage();

What I would love to see firstly is a separate Project called “BootStrapper” created as part of the new-up Project template – that or it prompts you to create one much like it does at the moment with ASP.NET Website (More on that below)

The point is, it draws the developers around the worlds attention to the fact that the Spinning Balls are really bad idea to hand out to public facing websites.

Why are they bad you may ask?

It has to do with the way end users approach your experience and assuming they have Silverlight in place, it’s important that you give the end users some clues as to what they are loading and what is the likely time or more to the point is this going to take forever?

Impatience is a virtue all users have so its going to be very hit or miss depending on what the context of your application expected usage is and lastly the end users broadband connection and tolerance for plug-in experiences in general (I counted like 5 variables of failure that can occur per user when I did some research on this back at Microsoft).

The rotating balls don’t offer much value, there’s nothing to keep you entertained or interested in the experience other than balls rotating and some % of where I’m at.

Soliciting the end users.

Just like a hooker, your job is to entice the person before you to take faith in the hopeful reality that this will be an experience to remember (ok that analogy just took a nose dive in very bad way). Your job is to firstly convince the end user to install Silverlight should it not be in place and secondly and just as importantly your job is to convince the end user that sticking around is also equally important SHOULD they have the installation in place of Silverlight.

You first need to have inside your webpage “You don’t have Silverlight, go get it and here’s what you will get in return” vs the dreaded “Get Silverlight” medallion.

To illustrate this importance; when I was at Microsoft we noticed on Microsoft properties an increase in installation of Silverlight when we actively went out of our way to solicit end users to Install vs the default “Get Silverlight” medallion – information is power, users want power just as much as the next person, power of choice.

Once they jump through that hurdle, you need to again keep their attention on you and try and convince them to avoid the temptation of alt-tabing and twittering etc while they wait – think of all end users as a 3 year old child’s attention span and you will be better positioned for success here.

You need to create a preloading experience that is as helpful and joyful as the intended experience you’ve just spent $thousands of dollars creating (why drop the ball at the last yard! – for you NFL fans)

In this you create something that is part of the theme or take a page out of MAXIS Games where you insert random crap that’s quite funny – example:

“…Initializing launch codes for anti-nuclear attack”

”…Growing Llamas feet so it can walk…”

”…Handing a Monkey a nail gun for entertainment value..”

Keep them informed but not too informed as you want to balance out keeping them informed whilst not making them aware of “time” as that is the enemy, “time”. I’ve even lied once due to a latency hit that I couldn’t avoid, so I put in the initializing splash screen “Checking Security Credentials”  (Given I found end users were more likely to wait for a serious thing like Security to validate vs.. staring at rotating balls of stupidity).

That all aside, this is the “Why” both Preloading/Splash Screens and Install Templates are critical for SIlverlight’s future success as this in turn is what end users judge the technology on (Do i need to bring up the “Skip Intro” debacle of the early 2000’s where Flash Intros were all the rage and bad bad experiences with Flash occurred as a result).

First: Install Templates.

Imagine if you will, you new-up a Silverlight Project. You’re asked obviously what type of project you require and then in the next step it prompts you with the below:

You then choose your Install Template and it can be both an Online or Local template (more on Silverlight Marketplace potential later). Once you select the template, this then will take a vanilla themed experience and injects in into your MySilverlightProject.BooStrapper project. You as a developer and/or designer can then focus on swapping out these assets and messaging to suite your intended experience context for your brand etc (much like the larger brands have done with Silverlight today – e.g. MSNBC etc).

Second: Preloaders/Splash Screens.

Same approach as the Install Templates, except it automatically attaches the intended original Silverlight project you wanted as being the “First” to load (but with enough breadcrumbs in code that you can also swap this out should you choose to).

Once you have gone through these three templates, your solution should have 3 projects in place.

• Project1 – MyProject.Silverlight.BootStrapper

  This project’s job is to handle the preloading of Project2, as in order to preload you first have to have a project that is very small in size for Silverlight to load, then once it’s loaded, Silverlight can then automatically bring down the .XAP file (secondary but main project) in a more controlled and aesthetically pleasing manner.

• Project2 – MyProject.Silverlight

  This is the project you originally intended to use, exact same structure(s) as you have today in Silverlight.

• Project3 – MyProject.Silverlight.WebThis is the project which is in place today in terms of automatically generating the said ASP.NET / HTML project code you need to test with. Except, it also injects a bunch of files/scripts which handle the “Does the end user have Silverlight?” which then based on a Boolean result reacts and produces a prompt that goes beyond the “Get Silverlight” medallion.

The Marketplace.

Ok, you can technically write a VS Template or WPF/WinForms app today do the above without having to bug Microsoft (i’ve started and stopped 3 times – stopping only due to boredom or busy). Why this needs to come from Microsoft is simply put – Marketplace.

We should have a concept where we can buy/sell Themes, Behaviors, Preloaders and Install Templates etc from one another whether it be by cash, XBOX Live Points or whatever currency you want to barter with. Point is, we should foster more of an exchange based community that is more consolidated and branded under a single point of entry for both Silverlight and Expression (say NO to Expression and Silverlight/WPF segregation– designer / developers need to cross-pollinate).

I’d love to see a similar concept as preloaders.net and scalenine.com for the Silverlight community only less fragmented and one that has a much smoother tooling integration experience (I’ll come back and work at Microsoft if need be to make this happen).

Summary.

I’d like to see us as a community leap frog the Flash community in terms of handling these two experiences. As the below illustration highlights the fatigue gates associated with any plug-in experience.

Why leap frog Flash? it’s nothing to do with their community it has to do with “learning from their mistakes” as at the moment Flash folks have figured this out and have a bunch of strategies (whilst fragmented) in place to fix this broken situation. We on the other hand are like the retarded step-child twice removed when it comes to picking up on this, and it erks…ERKS..me (for I am ERKED) to see the rotating splash balls and Get Silverlight Medallion – which incidentally were just a placeholder animations and images that someone forgot to come back and replace.

We fix this we drive Silverlight installation experiences up by minimum 20% per month, I guarantee you that much. As it will lesson majority friction associated with Silverlight and drive a much more deeper awareness of the product amongst consumers who aren’t reading the blogsphere for “What is Silverlight?”

The “What Is Silverlight” is still a question being asked a lot today. It’s one thing to answer that, but it’s another to attach friction to and users experience of the said product once they’ve found a satisfactory answer to that question with bad preloading/installation experiences – OUTSIDE – of Silverlight today.

This is both a Microsoft and Community problem that needs immediate resolution.

Call to Action: Contact Microsoft and hammer away at this issue, get more of a community groundswell behind it so that we can all move forward. I remember inside the team, community reaction was one thing we often would use to trigger emails with one another on why change is important.

Vote here so this can be escalated to the Silverlight Feature planning team! – : http://dotnet.uservoice.com/forums/4325-silverlight-feature-suggestions/suggestions/632735-silverlight-installation-and-preloader-experience-

Related Posts:

• Microsoft: Stop the shiny object syndrome.
• RIAGENIC is a UX/UI Business.
• Adobe, you lose.
• Lifting the Apple vs. Adobe compete veil
• UX Tip: Just because you can count change, doesn’t make you a mathematician

What has got me all hot and bothered in the right way about Adobe, is the Adobe.TV site, as for me it just brought something to life in which I was often quite vocal internally in Microsoft about – contextual synchronization.

In fact, you can see the very deck I used a few years ago on the said subject and it was mainly focused at how stupid and silly Microsoft is with its constant “File->New” website approach. I not only was vocal internally but external as well – recently as last year being picked up by other sites such as Slashdot.org, Tim Andersons Blog  and InfoQ on the very subject.

(Note: Download the deck for full effect here)

Adobe have designed the concept where it appears folks who sign in are able to have the content react to their needs vs the end user reacting to Adobe’s needs. As a result, I think this will provide more signal vs noise to consumers of the content (hopefully) but the main thing for future planning around content is that I think it will put Adobe in a better position to see what areas they need to focus on the most. I say this as every time you the end user narrows your selection down,  you are essentially voting with your fingers on the said selection.

I like this as they have broken the self-selection down into not just categories but also have managed to involve other filtering mechanisms such as “what others say” (ie Most Viewed, Highest Rated etc)

I have dreamt about this concept for quite some time and I hope that the Microsoft various website owners are paying close attention to it.

Why is this a good idea?

Firstly, when you onboard to any technology you face a multitude of challenges most of which is confidence. You need to have this sense of “easiness” associated to a new technology you are about to adopt, so it’s important that you’re not in hunt mode but more browse mode as fast as possible.

Once you are able to overcome confidence issues relating to the technology, you also need to keep focused on advancing along the adoption curve, as you want to build a better tomorrow as fast as you humanly can, but deep down you still want to keep cheating, by skipping over things you probably should pay attention to.

Skipping is important but at some point you will need to go back and and absorb the parts you just skipped, so you kind of need a way point mechanism in the way content is presented to you. In Adobe.TV case you can filter out the irrelevant areas that don’t appeal to you – YET. Tomorrow though you can pick this back up and run with it should you choose to, keyword being choice.

I call this contextual synchronization as the content is synchronized to your contextual needs.

Microsoft has a terrible footprint regarding content of this type, as if you were to look at Silverlight for example there are 4 sites all competition for your attention and that’s just for Silverlight. If You’re a .NET developer your world increasingly gets more and more complex and its hard to parse the information from each individual site, given it’s mostly narrative content and less about serving a contextual need. The ones that don’t focus on narrative are more along the lines of projecting information at you and less working with you and more to the point, there’s no instant reward/recognition approach to learning.

This is important with regards to confidence as if you get a sense of accomplishment for taking the time to adopt or learn something there in turn needs to be a mechanism in place that provides that visual feedback “Good job, keep going” mentality.

Adobe.TV doesn’t have this, but you could easily build on from here? you could add badges or rewards to the context above by outlining that the person is moving along nicely and here’s a T-shirt or something cheap and meaningful to show recognition to the end user for doing a great job at sticking it out.

One day I hope that my vision would come to life, but inside Microsoft there is such a de-centralized approach to the site ownership problem that it would take an act of Executive order to change this – even then it would likely take a few years to filter out externally.

Tim Anderson, a well known IT Journalist who gets paid to navigate the web soup such as Microsoft.com, stated this:

I use “web sites” in the plural because there are many Microsoft web sites. Perhaps there should be one; but as the referenced study observes, there are numerous different designs. There are different domains too, such as Silverlight.net, ASP.Netand so on.

Take my experience this morning for example. My question: how many processors are supported by Windows Small Business Server 2008? My Google search got me to here, an overview showing the two editions, Standard and Premium. I clicked Compare Features and got to here, which says I have to visit the Server 2008 web site to find out more about the “Server 2008 product technologies”. I click the link, and now I am looking at info on Server 2008 R2 – only I know already that SBS is based on the original Server 2008, not the R2 version. It’s not clear where to go next, other than back to Google.

The prosecution rests your honour.

Related Posts:

• RIAGENIC is a UX/UI Business.
• Lifting the Apple vs. Adobe compete veil
• My Slides: Microsoft UX: What Just Happened
• iPad is still missing iPlugin due to Compete wars
• Adobe Open Screen Project – reality check.

The reality however, no matter what plug-in you choose is that in actual fact ubiquity isn’t the sign of displeasure, it typically starts with how the entire package is presented to the end user.

Fatigue Point 1 – Do I want the full Experience?

If you build a Silverlight experience for example, and all you put in place of the viewer whom doesn’t have Silverlight is the typical generic “Get Silverlight” medallion. This will basically be your first failure point  (depending on the power of word-of-mouth).

As put yourself in the end users shoes. I’ve arrived at a site, and it has nothing but a “Get Silverlight” button.

Well, what does that mean? and more to the point do I really want to go beyond the button? why..why should I get Silverlight!

Irrespective of what plug-in you choose to build with, this initial hurdle is not just solely related to the plug-in but more to the point around what it is you’re trying to entice the end user to actually experience.

Have you explained what it is you have to offer clearly? is there a sense of reward for them should they agree that getting Silverlight is worth it.

Fatigue Point 2-  Do I want to install?

It’s easy to push away and declare ubiquity as being the sole reason as to why any plug-in fails or succeeds. It’s only 1/3 of the battle ahead, as there is more beyond the “Get Plug-in XYZ”.

For instance, Installing plug-in have become a tax we willingly pay each day online, often enough in your lifespan online you’ve most likely downloaded plug-in like Flash, QuickTime etc approx 8-9 times a year. All users online do it, so the old myth around folks being plug-in fatigued is actually not a reality at all.

Fatigue Point 3 – Do I want to stick around.

The final but crucial point of fatigue is, well, do I actually want to stick around?

If you have a 5mb+ payload (ie .XAP file) the end user has to download and all they want is the first 100k, think about the tax you’re imposing on the end user.

Splash Screens are effective here, you want to keep the end user locked on the job at hand and re-assure them the experience is highly worth the wait.

It’s also important to note your mileage in terms of broadband access online will vary and despite the fact I’m sitting on a 30mbps cable link at home others aren’t on high speed broadband.

Have a read of this great article:

• Five Do’s and Don’ts for Managing UI Time Perception
• http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1219607&seqNum=1

Summary.

Think about your end users pain, understand that ubiquity is definitely a hard psychological barrier to overcome, at times people put to much stock in the idea of what success here looks like. They also don’t pay attention to their abandonment rates as they should, and watching people drop off can mean many things (i.e. is your intended experience built for the right audience? I’d argue a RIA based blog isn’t appropriate, given HTML is simply just better suited – unless, you’re doing something more compelling than the HTML iteration has to offer).

We’ll explore more of this going forward soon, as we’ve got an upcoming announcement around this space. I just wanted to highlight early the notion that having a Silverlight experience for an external site has many fatigue points associated to it, and it’s something we should all take responsibility to ensure is enticing beyond the off the shelf default experience.

It’s not just solely about “do they have plug-in yes/no”.

We’ll continue to partner with OEM providers and grow Silverlight installs to reduce the ubiquity barrier of entry, however it’s still up to you to handle the rest, no matter what plug-in you adopt.

Related Posts:

• Microsoft: Stop the shiny object syndrome.
• RIAGENIC is a UX/UI Business.
• Adobe, you lose.
• Lifting the Apple vs. Adobe compete veil
• Silverlight Installation / Preloader Experience – BarnesStyle.