As an aside, we had difficulty entering the conference room where the talk was on. This is so because the organizer(s) didn't mention a contact person name/venue details. You can't pick faults with free & interesting talks, but this would greatly improve the UX of any further talks :-)
To the talk now. The central point of the talk(s) were the cultural differences between European & Asian audiences & therefore the impact of these subtleties on UX design. UX is User eXperience, for the uninitiated.
What I picked from the talk -
- Details of how designers design. HINT: They create Personas.
- Details on how large companies, e.g. Vodafone address cultural subtleties so their Product people, sitting in one geography can design products & services for everyone.
Personas
Dr. Anxo Cereijo Roibás described how designers go about designing. They create Personas. They collect a great deal of information about people using their product. Then they gradually group all of this into a Persona, name that Persona & use a limited collection of Personas to design. This helps focusing the design to the needs to specific people rather than specific spreadsheets.
Ethnographic Research for UX
Vodafone picked three countries - Egypt, India & South Africa to gauge user behavior w.r.t to new services.
They had two sets of people in mind. One, the top & middle of the pyramid. English speaking users with smartphones. The objective was to test user expectations for the use of social networking applications using mobile phones.
They had two types of tasks. One, where they had SMS's sent to the users with requests to respond immediately with information - Where are you? What do you see? How do you feel about that?
The test users sent back responses either through SMS or through MMS (if the answer required a photo/video).
The other type of tasks were more deliberate & needed planning.
One interesting thing they came up with, with this research is the concept of a map in the mind of the Indian user. It's more to do with a general lay of the land & a bunch of landmarks, rather than precise directions like you see in Google Maps.
Surprise, surprise. Google Maps this week released an update to Google Maps for India, based on this very concept! http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/go-thataway-google-maps-india-learns-to.html
The bottom-of-the-pyramid users were administered the tasks by local researchers, since many had not even heard of a mobile phone.
Some interesting findings:
- When asked how they would create a profile for themselves, that other people could see, most came up with a design that looked like a Facebook profile! Complete with a photo at the top corner.
- A lot of people wanted a 'service' through which they could list the skills they had, so others could find them and give them work to do. There seems to be a gaping hole in the Rural Job Classifieds market!
- A lot of people indicated they would like some way to maintain bank accounts using mobile phones, given that it would be hard/impossible to do so in any other way.
So, all in all, this was a nice session with some key learning. Looking forward to more. Bravo! Yahoo! for doing this!
1 comment:
Interesting - especially about the updated google maps with landmarks based information. Would google monitize this charging a fee for landmarks to be listed on maps results ;-) ?
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