UX Takes a Holiday

By Dave Rogers

There are no vacations when you're a user advocate.

Sure, business is great this year, but I'm not talking about taking time off for a little R&R. I mean that when you're a user advocate, you're always a user advocate—24 hours a day, seven days a week. Even when traveling.

I'm not a globetrotter like Kelly (very few are), but I do manage to get out of town from time to time. And when I do, my user experience (UX) sensitivity spikes. It's like Spider-Man. Even when he's Peter Parker, his "spidey sense" is on duty, alerting him to possible danger. For me, I'm particularly aware of my experiences as a user when traveling and can't help but think about ways to apply my insights.

Here's one of my most common observations. After a day of travel, you arrive at your hotel. You're pretty beat, but hey! You're in a new city, you're hungry and you'd like to stretch your legs.

So try to find a reasonable street map in your room.

I know, I know. There's often a glossy, overweight tome ("The Kansas City Good Life") full of flawless photos of pricey restaurants, glitzy galleries and high-end furniture stores. Yeah, they look good, but they're all from the perspective of merchants, restaurateurs and hoteliers—not guests. If they contain maps, they're usually artsy-fartsy, incomplete and inaccurate. Do I sound bitter?

Contrast this with what I found in historic Pinos Altos, New Mexico. At Bear Creek Cabins, I was given an 11x17 single-sheet visitor's guide produced by the Silver City-Grant County Chamber of Commerce. One side boasted a map of the surrounding area with suggestions for day trips and excursions; the other, maps of Silver City and Pinos Altos with points of interest clearly indicated and described.

I marveled. That plain-Jane visitor's guide was far more useful than those glossies in big city hotels. Why? Because it placed the visitor's perspective first and sweated the details. No, you won't find it in any design annuals, but in the category of in-room publications, that chamber of commerce piece takes my top prize for user-centered design.

Lesson: A great visual design isn't necessary for a great user experience. With a thorough understanding of user needs as its bedrock, a site or application with a simple visual design can win the world. (Just look at Google.) The B-side is a different tune; an uninformed but gorgeous visual design is nothing more than a pretty face.

Insight Number Two: Whenever possible, I take my I bicycle when I travel. If I can't, I'll rent a bike at my destination. It's not just about the exercise; riding provides an unparalleled experience of your surroundings. And it's how I discovered a terrific travel secret: Bike shops are premier sources for local information.

Why? Most bike shops are locally owned by independent business people. They hire diehard riders with intimate knowledge of the area. They know all of the local bikers. They know the roads and sights, the destinations and directions. They know the best restaurants in town (because cyclists love to eat). Finally, they offer pure, unvarnished insider information unsullied by possible incentives or chamber-of-commerce-speak.

In short, bike shops have street cred. Their guidance has always enhanced my travel experiences. I'd like my Web sites and applications to similarly enhance the experience for my end-users.

Lesson: Design clear-cut credibility into your Web sites. Do it from the beginning, not as an afterthought. There's no better place to begin than with Stanford's Web Credibility Project. Feast your eyes on their ten design guidelines—and get to work.

For my last insight, a few vignettes:

• Before we were given that Silver City visitor's guide, a local took colored highlighters and sketched the best routes in and out of town, made suggestions for local adventures and marked the locations of Wal-Mart, Albertsons grocery store and the best restaurants. It took him all of five minutes to make an already effective tool even more valuable to its end users.
• With its four-diamond rating, the Carriage House Inn in Carmel, California could rest on its laurels and still enjoy success. Yet it adds an extra dimension by employing retired local residents as on-site hosts. They are accomplished, talented individuals with outstanding interpersonal skills. We enjoyed our visit so much that we stayed an extra night.
• Along with bodyboards, umbrellas and snorkeling gear, a beachside rental shack in Maui offered waterproof cards illustrating the creatures just offshore. By looping its attached elastic over your wrist, you could take your "fish glossary" to sea for quick identifications. Brilliant.

Lesson: Design the ultimate user experience and then make it even better. Walt Disney called this "plussing." It means taking what is already excellent and moving it closer to the edge of perfection with constant tweaks and adjustments. John Lasseter (trained at Disney-sponsored Cal Arts) brought plussing to Pixar. Look at the results.

Call me crazy, but I dream of building sites and applications with world class UXs—and then plussing them to the spectacular by somehow overlaying personal touches unique to each user's needs and preferences.

We experience this every day in our personal interactions. Human communication provides innumerable clues that our brains have evolved to perceive. We're able to instantly read those clues and adjust our own communication and behavior to optimize our relationship with others. I want this same capability for my Web sites and applications.

I'm not dreaming about personalization based upon user-provided information. Nor e-commerce-style data crunching based on one's behavior at a single Web site.

No, I imagine somehow capturing the sum of a user's interaction on the Web as a whole—their tags on Flickr, purchases at Amazon, music choices at last.fm, bookmarks at Digg, feeds at Bloglines—and then using it to plus a one-size-fits-all UX from ground level to the stratosphere by making it exquisitely personal.

This isn't pie-in-the-sky thinking. Right now, whether we like it or not, an intricately detailed portrait of our preferences, interests, purchases, work and friendships already exists on the servers of the Web. The truth is out there. All we need is a way to gather it in—with the user's explicit permission and control—and put it to UX work.

It may sound creepy now, but I have otherwise rational friends who still think Web cookies are evil. The biggest challenge will be to safeguard our already-buffeted privacy, civil liberties and human rights. I don't know how to do it, but we'll figure out a way.

Just think about it during your next trip. That's all I ask.