Basil: So, this is Basil, with TechSparks. I have Janice Fraser the founder
and CEO of LUXr. Janice, welcome.
Janice: Thank you so much for having me.
Basil: So let's start by asking you this question. So Time magazine once
called you a grizzled and cynical veteran. How have you been since the UX
field change in the past couple of years?
Janice: The grizzled and cynical veteran part is really funny, because
everyone who knows me thinks that I'm a little bit overly optimistic about
the future. So I don't know how that means cynical, and it was a long time
ago. Right now, with the way that entrepreneurship and the user experience
fields are progressing, I'm incredibly excited. I think that there are
tremendous opportunities to build products that we couldn't even imagine
building just a few years ago. Lean start up has changed everything about
how we invent products. For me, it's probably the most exciting moment,
since I started using the Netscape browser, back in 1995.
Basil: So how do we track user behavior and how important is this to UX?
Janice: Understanding user behavior is incredibly important to user
experience. When we create a product and put it out into the world, the
most important thing that we can do is see whether it's having the effect
that we want it to have, whether people are gaining benefit from it. And
the way that we do that is in two different techniques. One is
quantitative. We want to measure, like Google Analytics, we want to measure
what people are actually doing. That can help us identify some of the
places where perhaps people are having trouble or not gaining the benefit.
We also want to use qualitative methods, like usability testing. To
observe, in a relatively unstructured way, why people are doing what
they're doing and what kind of benefits they're gaining from it, perhaps
whether things are hard or easy, that sort of thing. So qualitative and
quantitative work together, to give us a rich picture of how people are
perceiving our products and what they can do with it.
Basil: So usability testing, how should start ups do that?
Janice: Start ups should do usability testing often, and in a very
lightweight way. I prefer to have two or three usability tests every couple
of weeks. So that there's a habit in a company of asking these questions,
of including many people from the company so that everyone can kind of see
what response the product is getting. And when you have a program with a
routine like that, where every few weeks you're testing things, it gets
very easy to test everything. You can test old parts of the product. You
can test new releases that you want to put out into the market soon. You
can even test competitors' products, to see how consumers respond to those
products. So, the most important thing about usability testing is to do it
frequently and to keep it relatively small. You only want to do two or
three at a time, maybe five at most, never twenty. So often and small-
scale.
Basil: How can start ups create user-addictive products for stickiness?
Janice: Making a product that is really meaningful for the customer is the
most important characteristic of a sticky product. What we want to do is,
really using those research techniques, we want to observe whether or not
we're meeting their needs. The more we can meet their needs, the more
sticky or addictive a product can become.
In terms of kind of more tactically, there are two components that form
habits, and really that's what were talking about with stickiness. The
first is a call to action, something to initiate an interaction. The second
is a gesture of commitment. So, you might have a call to action that's a
search box, right? That's the call to action, and then on the other end you
might have a, "Was this valuable for you? Yes/no" kind of button. That's
asking for their opinion and that is a gesture of commitment to the site.
So these two things together start to form habits, and this is an area of
research that is really interesting. I think you're going to see some great
writing coming out on the blogs in the next year or so about habit-forming.
Basil: So what's a good UX practice in a lean environment as, probably they
say, the improve per cycle?
Janice: Yeah. So in a lean start up environment, what we want to do as
designers, is view our work as an idea, a hypothesis I'm working with
right now. So rather than presenting our designs as a deliverable, "Here's
the design for this part of the product," what we want to do is create two
or three different versions. And see which one we think has the most
likelihood, and then test that using quantitative and qualitative methods.
So the change, the big change that lean start-up brings is this idea that
we're creating hypotheses, and then we're testing them. So it's an
experimentation approach rather than persuading people that this is the
right thing to do. So were proving it, and then we can improve it. So
that's where this prove/improve idea comes together.
Basil: So designing and thinking with grids, how crucial is using grid
system for a good design?
Janice: Using a grid system is a fine practice. I am not a visual designer,
so take my answer as just one person's opinion. But when a site or service
or product really needs to have a level of refinement or a level of
sophistication, a grid system can help to provide that sense of rigor, and
attention to detail. On the other hand, sites that don't use a grid system
can also be beautiful, and subtle, and well-designed. I'm ambivalent on
this but I often think that the gridded sites are more beautiful. Whether
they're more effective is a different matter.
Basil: So, Janice, what do you think is the difference between a product
strategy and a design strategy?
Janice: Well, in an ideal world there isn't a lot of difference between a
product strategy and a design strategy. A good user experience designer
will consider the requirements of the business, as well as the requirements
of the end user. And, in that way, many user experience designers are
beginning to make the shift over to be product managers. Now those are very
different jobs, but the way of thinking about the strategy really has
similar origins. Both seek to envision how best to serve the customer, and
how best to deliver on the goals of the business. So, I believe a product
strategy, in most cases, will end up being a little more in-depth on
subjects that are not customer-facing, so the more business and marketing
aspects.
Basil: So as we all know, mobile is the future. Can you give us some tips
for mobile websites using, designing UX?
Janice: Absolutely. Mobile websites have as their distinguishing, or mobile
services, all mobile applications, have as their distinguishing feature
that a person is not sitting at a table with a computer. The person is out
in the world, in a context that you may not know about. So the first and
most important principle for mobile design is that you put yourself into
that context. So if I'm creating an application that is supposed to help
people find a restaurant when they're walking around a city they don't
know, it would be a good idea for me to go to a city I don't know, and
think about how I would want to find that information. So good design
practice always has you experience and experiment with with the actual
context in which a product is being used. And in mobile, context it matters
far more than it does in any other kind of design.
Basil: One of your many specialties is interaction design. Can you please
tell us how to design interactive products?
Janice: So my best days as an interaction designer were probably 10 years
ago. So I cannot claim that I'm the best interaction designer of the day.
But I can tell you that there are four principles that were true when I was
teaching interaction design at San Francisco State in 1990, and they remain
true today. The first is that the parts of your service must be
discoverable. A person needs to be able to look at the interface and
imagine what they can do, and they need to be able to experiment with it
and learn from that, so discoverable.
When they take an action, if they taken the wrong action, they need to be
able to recover from that. So recoverable is my second principal. So by
recovery I mean they can undo it, or they can get back to where they
wanted, or they can create the previous state. So discoverable,
recoverable. The next one is context. I always want to be able to
understand where I am in the application, and how I can get back to the
previous place or what else I can do. So understanding context in place and
even in some cases in time. Discoverable, recoverable, context and the last
one is feedback.
So an example of feedback is that when I pressed the controller on my Apple
TV, it gives me a little puck sound, "puck". And there's one place where
they forgot to put that feedback in and it's when I take a thing off of
mine personalized list. So now it's driving me nuts. When I push the
button, I don't hear that puck and so I don't know that the action actually
happened the way that I wanted to. So I have to look up and I have to look
at the screen and find that little spot and see whether the action happened
as I wanted it to. So feedback is really subtle, and it's often the thing
that is forgotten. So discoverable, recoverable, context, feedback. If you
can get those right then what I consider to be the bones of your product
will be effective.
Basil: Do you see any trends emerging in UX and UI?
Janice: Yes. That trend that is emerging in UX and UI is that we're at a
time of great experimentation. Things like lean start up and reduced cost
of creating products and new devices like the iPad and the Android phones.
All of this means that we are in a time of rapid experimentation so the
trend is that there is no trend. Anything that you see that is a pattern
this year will probably be different next year, because someone will have
leapfrogged it. Because of that, we need to constantly be trying new
products that come out, and evaluating for ourselves whether we think that
the interfaces and the gestures and the design decisions are ones that we
want to bring into our own design practice.
Basil: So this is a micro-level question, but it's kind of interesting. Are
there any certain colors you like to avoid in designing?
Janice: I love all the colors. Every color is a good color for me.
Basil: So looking at your latest adventure as an avid entrepreneur, you've
got a lot of entrepreneurial ventures behind you. Can you tell us about
LUXr?
Janice: LUXr is, by far, the most exciting thing that I've done. We started
LUXr to help entrepreneurs make their companies and their products more
successful. Entrepreneurship is rapidly growing. Last year more than 380
million people started companies around the world. That's more people than
live in the United States. So what we want is to take the knowledge and
experience and coaching environment that exists in Silicon Valley, and put
it into a box and put it on the web so that we can distribute it at a
reasonable price around the world. So what we are doing is putting, think
of it as a coaching workshop into a box and sending it to every country,
and every continent.
So this is one of our products. This is the second unit. It's about acting
on customer needs. So the first [inaudible 00:12:10] we call this a
workshop-in-a-box. The first thing is understanding the customer, and this
one is about taking that insight and translating that into product
features, that you can then start to build. So each one of the boxes
connects to online video, that will walk you through a workshop to help you
make your product. So that's what we're doing. We work with entrepreneurs
around the world, and we're really excited about the opportunity that this
represents for us.
Basil: So in closing we have one more last question. What general kinds of
advice would you like to give out to the audience of entrepreneurs in the
Middle East?
Janice: Oh, for entrepreneurs in the Middle East, I want to say, have a lot
of courage, belief in your product and be open to being wrong many times."
So we have a saying. We say, "strong decisions lightly held." What that
means is that we act with confidence, and then we look for evidence of
whether we're on the right track. And if were not on the right track, we
throw that out and we find a new one. So strong decisions lightly held.
Basil: Can we have the honor of having you again to highlight those units
in a series of interviews?
Janice: I would love to come back and talk to you some more.
Basil: Janice, thank you so much for being with us today. It was a great
pleasure.
Janice: It's my pleasure, as well. Thank you so much.
Basil: Thank you.
About the Guest:
Janice Fraser is an entrepreneur, designer, and a coach/advisor to early stage companies.
Janice founded both successful and failed startups and she is as proud of her success as her failure.
Janice is the founder and CEO of LUXr, a design coaching and mentorship program for lean startups. Prior to LUXr, Janice founded and served as the CEO of Adaptive Path, an experience design firm.
Janice is a guest lecturer at various universities and management schools, such as Stanford,Haas, and Northwestern.
Janice specializes in interaction design for web and mobile products and she enjoys being around entrepreneurs.
Janice Fraser is an entrepreneur, designer, and a coach/advisor to early stage companies. Janice specializes in interaction design for web and mobile products and she enjoys being around entrepreneurs.
