Here’s a quick user flow gone wrong:

So here’s my Reader homepage. Gee, I sure do have a lot of automobile related feeds hanging around at the bottom, where should I create a folder for these guys?

Probably one of these places right? FOR SURE in “folder settings”… If not, definitely the menu next to my subscriptions list. I shudder to think I might have to head to “manage subscriptions”, but I suppose its possible.

It’s not folder settings, or the subscriptions menu…. Manage subscriptions it is!

I immediately see “Folders and Tags”. It has to be in there right? Nope. Ok, to be fair I can delete folders here, but not create them. Fascinating.

Finally! Under subscriptions and the ever elusive “Change folders…” menu

If I’ve missed something, some completely obvious alternative, don’t hesitate to let me know!

It’s 7:00 a.m. and I am crammed into a bus packed with commuters.  As I try gingerly to prevent my face from rubbing against the armpit of an adjacent passenger, I awkwardly suspend my clipboard over my head and try to take notes on every aspect of the experience.  You see, while other passengers are traveling to their offices on this bus, for today the bus IS my office.

So why might you ask am I here? It’s March 2008, and I’m working on one of my first projects as a newly hired User Experience Researcher/Designer at EchoUser, and I am meeting my 3rd transportation study participant for BART and AC Transit.

The purpose of this study was to gain insight, through a series of “ride-along” user experience sessions, into the transit experience issues that are most important to BART and AC Transit customers. Ultimately, we were not only hoping to collect issues and experiences that we observed during participants’ ride-along sessions, but also to prioritize them using our User Experience Magnitude Estimation Technique. Our method would help BART stakeholders to learn about customers’ expectations, as well as compare against perceptions of other transportation services (such as Muni and Caltrain). Finally, we would propose (and discuss) potential service design solutions based on the outcomes of our analysis.

At the start of this particular day, my participant happened to be about 10 minutes late to meet me at her bus stop. Luckily the AC Transit bus was equally late, allowing me to conduct my usual introduction after she arrived:

• Introduce myself, thank the participant for participating, and provide a brief overview of the ride-along study she is about to participate in
• Give a 30 second training exercise which introduces her to how we measure User Experience using Magnitude Estimation ratings
• Expose her to a written example of a poor transportation experience as a reference point for her ratings

When the bus finally pulled up, I could immediately sense that this particular session would be a challenging and interesting one. The bus was now 15 minutes late and packed to the brim with commuters. As my participant and I crammed in, the bus driver yelled at an uncomfortable volume “Move to the back”, and I was promptly shoved into the armpit of a fellow traveler. Un-phased, I focused on my participant and her surroundings, and began taking notes. As we continued the journey, I tried my best to discreetly ask her questions, a combination of user experience ratings and survey style questions about her transit habits and experiences.

While this was a new adventure for me, it was a significant step for my company as well. Our methodology had already proven successful in the realm of software product design, but now we were expanding further into general experiences in other industries. This without question, turned out to be a valuable experience for me, as well as a great success for our business.

While publishing all of the results of this project would be beyond the scope of this article, I would like to share a few charts from our data analysis to give a sense of how we measure experiences.

The most important thing to consider when glancing at these charts is that the numbers are comparable and proportional to each other (in other words an experience of 20 is twice as good as an experience of 10). They are not necessarily meaningful on their own (such as an individual “event” with an average experience of 20). The reason we can compare these ratings (even to other transit products), is because of the reference experience we expose our participants to (which is purposely poor and has a rating of 10, indicated on the charts below as a red horizontal line).

The following chart shows a comparison of average user experience for customers that took BART, AC Transit, and combined BART and AC Transit rides:

Here we can see that AC Transit is on average a 36% better experience than BART and 63% over combined BART / AC rides from our study. As it turns out the reason for this trend is quite simple. AC Transit rides that are not connecting to BART tended to be much less crowded (and therefore a better experience) than bus routes that connected to BART stations.

To further illustrate this scenario we can look at the following chart, which shows an example of average user experience (percent better than expectations on the y-axis and percent better than average usability for this study on the x-axis) for a series of events that are components of a combined BART and AC Transit ride:

• Waiting for the AC bus
• The bus ride itself
• Transferring (or navigating) to BART
• Entering the BART station, passing through the turnstiles (and buying a ticket if needed)
• Riding the BART train
• Exiting the BART station

Here we can clearly see that the lowest scoring experiences (indicated by the above chart as items to the left of the vertical 0% average usability line) tend to be related to the AC Transit portion of the ride, while the BART portion tends to be higher. This could be explained by the extra congestion AC buses end up experiencing that are connecting to a BART station. The BART ride tends to score higher because its trains have a much higher capacity, and can more easily handle the crowd of commuters that end up coming from (or connecting to) AC Transit. Specifically, we can tell that the lowest performing experiences (or events) are waiting for the bus and riding the bus itself. Conversely, transferring to the BART connection and entering the BART station seem to score the highest (over twice the usability of the low reference experience).   When we focus on participants’ expectations (indicated on the above chart as the 0% horizontal line), we see that most experiences are quite close or exactly meeting expectations (plus or minus 10% of the 0% horizontal) with the exception of exiting the BART station which seems to beat user experience expectations by almost 15%. It is important to note that a users generally notice a 10% difference in experience.

A final chart I’d like to share with you is the perceptual comparison of the BART and AC Transit service against other transportation companies of the Bay Area:

Muni seems to be rated at the lowest perceptual user experience of the group (less than half of AC Transit solo rides), but more interestingly BART is nearly equivalent to Caltrain (in fact beating it slightly).

Although I haven’t shared all of the data and findings from our study in this article, we can certainly see the value in measuring experiences, and how they might influence and direct product (or service) designs. There are many different approaches one can take in evaluating and researching a product or service, but I believe conducting “in the field” user experience research can produce very compelling observational and metric data, that can eventually lead to the highly effective design solutions for a product or service.

My initial thought was to set-up a second sub-domain (lets call it www2.myapp.com) pointing to our rails application and add a “before_filter” to the ApplicationController that could detect which request.host was being used, and connect to the appropriate database for the remainder of the http request.

My goal here was to leave as much code untouched as I could, and avoid installing any heavy duty plugins or gems that might erupt into a support headache in the future.

While my strategy above was not far from the final solution, I did encounter some roadblocks.

My initial crack at it went something like this:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  before_filter :choose_db

  def choose_db
    if request.host == 'www2.myapp.com'
       ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection( ... credentials go here ...)
    else
       ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection :production
    end
  end

end

At first this appeared to work, until I noticed that when accessing www.myapp.com sessions were getting invalidated on www2.myapp.com (this could happen in both directions). With a bit of help from StackOverflow I learned that calling establish_connection at the “Class” level was actually going to interrupt all connections, and instead this needed to be called at the model level. Because I wanted to avoid touching too much code, the easiest solution was to extend ActiveRecord and have all my models extend that abstract class. Calling “establish_connection” from that abstract class would then let models choose to use that connection as needed.

Put simply I created:

class Varydatabase < ActiveRecord::Base
self.abstract_class = true
end

Then for every model in my app I extended Varydatabase instead of activerecord:

class Account < Varydatabase

….end

Now in the application controller, I simply call Varydatabase.establish_connection instead of from ActiveRecord::Base.

While this did end up working, I discovered that performance was sometimes lacking. It seems a slow or very heavy operation running on one database can often cause requests to the other to wait before connecting. I’m not sure if this is rails responding slowly at the webserver layer, or the database connection pool doesn’t switch contexts unless an operation has finished on the alternate database. Your mileage may vary.

I can’t help but comment on the Tom McCoy article on Interaction Design being a dead-end job.

Interaction Design is certainly no more weak a profession than Graphic Design, Industrial Design, Photography, or any other creative profession. Any single individual could take it upon him or herself to circumvent using a professional and do the work on his or her own using off-the-shelf tools, hacks or just *winging it*.

Frankly I think his blog post is shameless FUD used to gain “link” attention… and Cooper should know better.

I believe all professions evolve over time as technology and business models change. Look at how architects used to work 100 or even 50 years ago now and you’ll probably find that the current breed has a totally different skill set.

Even old sciences like Chemistry and Physics are completely different now than the old 19th century profs toiling about in their primordial labs.

Interaction designers who are really talented treat the profession more like a research effort than a “photoshop” effort. The reason is because the tools and techniques change on the delivery side, but the
desire to capture user or customer needs is always there. Even if the iphone SDK hands beautiful, simple ui components to you on a silver platter… I guarantee if you are writing a mobile banking application, you need to do some user research.

This little gem of his is a great example of flawed and almost bizarre commentary:

really?? REALLY???
So I just drop in some widgets, checkboxes, and fade-in fade-out doohickeys and people will be able to use my personal accounting or banking application? I am not sure of his point here, at all.

I do however agree with his assessment that Interaction Design is transitioning into User Experience design, but I do not think this is because new technologies are pushing designers out of that space. It is simply more economical for design firms or freelancers to bring their skills to a general audience.

At EchoUser we are continuously trying to improve our research and design methods, as well as expand our client base into the general customer experience realm. This is NOT because we are getting less work in the tech space, but because we want to grow beyond it.

Beyond tracking things via google analytics, I wanted to establish some custom log files (beyond spitting everything out into production.log). My first goal: track users that are logging in, and from where.

As I do with most things, I first scour the net for advice so I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Sure I could probably figure it out on my own, but given how aggressively “best practices” seem to change with rails, I tend to do a lot of homework before trying something new.

This lead to frustration. I found a lot of material on the standard logging, and even a few posts on using log4, but very little on just using the standard logger to spit out a formatted message to a new file.

Finally I found this helpful post which seems to be about two years old, and a little sparse on details. Frankly, I was a little shocked.. even modern posts on custom logging were referencing this old article.

Anyhow, here was my final solution (which worked better than what was outlined in the article above):

create /config/auditlogger.rb

add this to it:

class AuditLogger < Logger
def format_message(severity, timestamp, progname, msg)
“#{timestamp.to_formatted_s(:db)} #{severity} #{msg}\n”
end
end

edit config/environment.rb

add this near the top: require File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), ‘auditlogger’)

add this inside the Rails::Initializer.run do |config|

audit_logfile = File.open(”#{RAILS_ROOT}/log/audit.log”, ‘a’)
audit_logfile.sync = true
AUDIT_LOG = AuditLogger.new(audit_logfile)

(note: you actually need the all caps AUDIT_LOG)

Add this to track a user login inside your login_controller action:

AUDIT_LOG.info(request.remote_ip + ” Logged in: ” + @user.login )

Restart your rails application, watch all the goodies show up in log/audit.log

Regardless of whether or not you have enjoyed his books, it is clear his life exploration has always been at the limits of science and imagination through his writing.

What would he ask in this case?

If I were him I’d ask: What progress has medical science made in the fight against cancer?

I can’t help but sound ignorant and pessimistic here, (and I encourage you to comment), but as far as I can tell all we have done is marginally increased the effectiveness of our only tool: “chemo”.

I recall a conversation I had with an ex-oncologist at a wedding a few months ago. When he talked about his departure from the field (mostly because it was hard and depressing), I asked “but what about all the new drugs and technology”. His answer depressed me severely: “Just a bit of life extension, no significant stuff happening”.

WTF? This is the information age, that simply won’t do.

While petri dish wins are much appreciated, it would seem nothing is happening. Is this true? Is it that drug companies aren’t providing incentive to research effective (instead of profitable) cures? Is it that universities are only interested in small battles?

This is a disease that has been understood and studied frivolously for decades now… what gives? When is the nanotechnology, stem cell therapy, gene therapy, telomere therapy, star trek therapy supposed to kick in?

Soon I hope.

Now before you pummel me with examples, I do indeed inspect some of the latest news in research, and I do recognize that sometimes the small findings can lead to bigger successes later on… but I have been subjected to so many false hopes, so many clinical trials that lead to disappointment, I suppose I have become jaded.

Forgive the rant, but I want answers… use the form below

I was at the birthday party of a colleague of mine, who proclaimed that his “birthday resolution” was to quit smoking. All of us within earshot of this statement, instantly rolled our eyes. Countless times have we witnessed our friend’s quitting attempts, and countless times have we heard the excuses for his eventual relapse.

Almost daring him to quit, I blurted out my challenge: If you are serious about quitting, write me a check right now for $1000. I promise to hold onto the check indefinitely, and will only cash it if you smoke. I could instantly see his eyes light up. He ran into his room, and within moments produced his checkbook. Everyone was shocked… he actually wrote me the check.

Granted this little scheme has a few holes in it, but it did provoke some thought. Firstly, that many people are so desperate to quit smoking, they’d be willing to throw large sums of money at the problem, and most importantly that this might actually work if planned correctly.

Getting people to put a dollar value on something as intangible as quitting smoking, might actually encourage them to truely calculate how important it is to them. If they can put a dollar amount, I’d double that value, write the amount out to a friend (that you trust!), and if you do have the willpower… no cost to you. If you don’t have the willpower, beg your friend to pay for some rehab with his or her new found wealth

There is a certain blaze-ness when it comes to big companies and how they approach user feedback, it’s time to shake things up a little! Why not sneak your coffee cup design into starbucks all over the city? Or drop your improved mouse design on shelves at best buy (for free !).  Sure it isn’t the most legal of methods, but you’re bored, and you don’t care.

We’ve been dedicating a few evenings to this little project of hours,
and it is finally ready for public consumption!

It’s a pretty simple concept, we hope you like it.