How To Inform Design

This morning's panel entitled "How To Inform Design: How to Set Your Pants on Fire" was excellent. Nick Finck, Jeffrey Veen and Kit Seeborg examined qualitative data gathering and analysis vs. quanititative data analysis. I got about a million ideas out of this panel for how to improve some things on our corporate site. Here are my complete notes:

nick finck - designs by nick finck
kit seeborg - Design for ROI, WebTrends
Jeffrey Veen - Adaptive Path

Quantitative vs. Qualitative
Information Overload

Lies, Damn Lies
The argument over metrics vs. methodology

Veen
went from quantitative to qualitative
who are your users? from numbers to ethnography
USDA, Farm Service Agency - Hay Net
knowing your client, understanding your users at a very up close level
talk to people, see what they say, highlight the important parts and put it on paper, design work plan
mental models, task analysis, scenario development, focus groups, directed interviews, use cases, surveys, usability tests, competitive analysis

Seeborg
where the money trail is? how does the revenue stream work? how do you get paid?

look at patterns, trends, macro action over time
find patterns of behavior, spikes can tell you a lot

Baseline the site

consider research as a very important part of the process
surveymonkey.com

are the user needs & business needs the same?
What are the questions I need to ask users?
What are my real world goals?

What are the things I need to know?
Is the content compelling, informative and usable?

Task Analysis

find out where user needs and the revenuw stream works

Assign a value to the metric
value is not limited to commerce, other actions hold value as well
for us support, bill pay, product knowledge and retention efforts certainly hold value
are we reaching our users there?

information must be processed and synthesized by a human
be more intuitive

try ethnographic  techniques:
find customers and users
talk to them (surveys, calls, interviews, emails)
write down their responses and make changes

The full presentation

Comments

[oscar]

That's a really cool presentation!