Forgotten Art? Usability round table

Is usability in a state of détente in the UK? Clients want an effective web presence but usability testing is still often overlooked in the development process. So why is it still difficult to achieve buy-in for usability? Where do creative agencies fit into the process? And what are the challenges posed by multiple platforms and social media? NMA brought together usability consultants and clients to debate the issues and reveal what they would like to see change.

How difficult is it still to secure budget and backing for sound usability testing?

Amanda Quek: When I was at Opodo we had a head of user experience who pitched to the board. That channel was open to her because the chief technical officer really believed in what she was doing. Feeding the board regularly with the results of our latest usability project and why they would make a difference to the business really helped to get us there. Even if it's just to get a foot in the door, to get our name on the meeting proposal so that we actually got invited to the right meeting, that was absolutely key.

Robin Brattel, TSO: At The Stationery Office, the challenge was to convince the board that investing in usability is different to investing in design. That was a little tricky because first I had to say, "We're going to pay this much for the design and then we're going to rip that design to shreds and prove it doesn't work. Then we'll piece the two things together and make it work."

You need a convincing argument from the outset. It helped that I knew that AKQA had used Bunnyfoot to do this for Sainsbury's. Showing that one of the biggest digital agencies in the country had turned to a usability consultancy to analyse how shoppers use or interact with a big commercial site helped me demonstrate that there would be benefits to the 2.5m users of the legislation website. Numbers have gone up, content is more findable, it's everything you would want as a result of the experience.

Shailen Joshi, BT Vision: I guess it depends on the organisation and how much autonomy you have. I've worked in different parts of BT and in core consumer, for example, where we have 18m or so relationships with customers, things move a little bit more slowly than in other parts of BT. I'd been here almost three years by the time BT Vision came along, so I'd seen it grow from the germ of an idea to launch. You have more autonomy there because it has to move with more agility, as it's a challenger brand in terms of working in the TV industry.

What's odd is that digital sometimes has this mystique about it, where you talk about it and people just glaze over and go, "I don't understand what that means." Actually, it's just a channel that happens to talk to the whole world. With BT Vision we have a small number of customers at the moment but the website can be seen by the whole world, so how much do we care about our user interface? Loads. How much have we tested that? Absolutely loads.

Chris Averill, CADinteractive: For us it's a completely different scenario. It's all about the data. The likes of BT are commercial enterprises, so if they convert more people then they're seen as doing a good job.

Rob Stevens, Bunnyfoot: It's about understanding your customer, your competitors and the market. No finance director can argue with that. Say you've done a complete redesign of the whole website and it coincided with an above-the-line launch. The worst that can happen is we won't get sales on that site. Now to an FD with a business gains target of x amount of sales online, that's quite a compelling point.


Who should own usability?

Quek: Perhaps some manager or one of the technical managers has seen a website and gone, "Oh, I think this would be really good." So he sets his team off without consulting us. If you don't keep those communication lines open at the senior management level and don't know what we're doing, then we can each go off on our own.

Stevens, Bunnyfoot: Designers don't like it because in a way you're insulting what they've done. You're actually saying, "No it's not good enough. You haven't delivered a product that's usable." It's the same with developers. You sit a developer down and say, "Fix this problem," and if you have no control in the process then they're just going to develop something that they think works perfectly, but any new uses of the concept will fail instantly.

Brattel, TSO: On a project we're doing at the moment, the specification lays out exactly how it's supposed to work, but the developers have changed it because their interpretation of the brief is different. Sometimes you might have development teams that are based in India, for example, because of the capacity issue, so there's going to be breakdowns and things are going to be done differently.

Joshi, BT Vision: We had an initiative to drive customers online and a team was set up to handle that, but my thinking was why have a team that does that? It's the priority of the whole business. I think it's the same with usability. It needs to be at the core, not on the side as a luxury.

Brattel, TSO: For me it's a little bit different because the sites I'm looking after don't make money directly. Conversion for me comes when someone finds what they're looking for quickly. We've done work with Google and a company called APR to launch a proof-of-concept search function on the site and we'll be testing that this summer. When you launch these proofs of concept, you want to get them tested and make sure that they're going to be used properly.

Quek: The culture at Opodo was really focused on the user. Business analysts would come to us saying, "Have you seen this?" Product managers would come to my team and say, "This isn't converting the way we want it to. Can you help us fix it?" So it was always inherent in the culture.

Joshi, BT Vision: I'd argue that the travel industry is a very emotional product. BT Vision is very different to what BT normally does, it's a very emotional product as well. It's almost easier when trying to engage with an emotional product to think there's no room for error. If we get TV wrong, that will be a big problem for our customers.

Averill, CADinteractive: It just seems to me that there still isn't, for most companies, the level of importance and excitement placed on usability as there is on every other part of a project.


So are enlightened clients still in the minority?

Quek: Opodo and its major competitors had their own in-house teams dedicated to user experience. They had information architects and creative designers. In a way you can really tell the difference between the projects that my team were spearheading and those that people from the technical department had been working on. We did user research, analysis and testing, whereas the technical team would just sit there and design something to work technically. Two very different approaches.

Stevens, Bunnyfoot: Some interesting things are happening. Costs per click are going up and conversion rates have gone from an average of 3.4% to 2.5% over the last four years. What I expect to happen is that things will reach a trade-off point where the CPC won't substantiate what it actually costs to get people onto the site. At this point FDs will ask, "What's going on? Where's the year-on-year growth that I've seen for the last five years? I want it now." That's when user experience tests will become a must have for everyone.

Joshi, BT Vision: I think it helps when you have the luxury of trying to launch something, because you can look at it afresh. BT Vision is different to what's happened before at BT because we're taking a new approach and a new product to a new industry. Other parts of the company don't have that luxury. Changing something that already exists is a bigger challenge because it's battling against that attitude of 'well, we've always done it that way'.

Averill, CADinteractive: It's a confusing market that no one owns. So we'll be engaged by a client to do some work on usability or appraise a third party's work, but because no one really owns the overall end-to-end projects, quite often our work never gets implemented. That's really frightening when people are spending quite a lot of money and they know they want it but, because the deadlines are so tight, things have gone wrong and timescales slip. We've seen clients spend more than £30,000 on research without really taking any heed of the results.

Quek: That was my experience just before I left Opodo. What it has done very recently is to get rid of its in-house creative team. During my last month or so there the head of user experience left, which meant we lost our board presence and projects were going on without it. If you don't have the opportunities to prove that business case to people, if you're not at the right meetings to provide the right input to the right people, you can just be lost from the process. We weren't part of the process because we didn't fit in the traditional mindset of new managers who had come in.

What is creative agencies' role?

Averill, CADinteractive: I work with agencies a lot and sometimes I feel like I'm really stating the obvious to clients. I ask if they did information architecture and commercial architecture, and if not why not? The focus is on brand design, or clients say they do usability internally but there wasn't time to show us it.

So the first problem I have with some agencies is that they profess to do usability but don't, which leads to a real concern in the industry from buyers because the customers I talk to say, "They say they do it and then don't so I don't trust anyone who's a usability person." They can see design and branding changes, and that's actually the sexy stuff to most clients because it's something they can show their friends.

Stevens, Bunnyfoot: We tend not to work with any particular agencies. We don't have any aversion to working with say AKQA, but we wouldn't want to be aligned to one single agency. That would put us in an awkward position. We prefer to work directly with the client.

Brattel, TSO: I believe designers should understand usability and accessibility, but because we're in a new industry it's not established enough yet. There will come a point when there's an established set of principles and your agency will follow them. At the moment usability experts are on the sidelines saying, "That's crap, that's crap." You can't keep doing that because eventually you have to put your money where your mouth is and say, "We know what it is because we've tested 3,000 sites."


What are the usability challenges of mobile?



Quek: I think travel is going to be a bit of a hard one to get onto mobile because of the sheer amount of content, the different things that you need or want to see at the same time. Because when people are browsing for travel, they're browsing three windows at a time. How does that translate onto the mobile?

Stevens, Bunnyfoot: It's about one of the most unusable products in the world. Any new mobile that comes onto the market is a disaster. Motorola Razr - the most unusable product on the face of this earth - was, until about two months ago, the world's bestselling mobile phone because of its design. That raises the question of what's better: good design or good usability?

Averill, CADinteractive: Mobile is a usability minefield. I've been looking cross-platform for seven years now. When Sky brought out WAP TV, which took over from interactive TV initially, we just happened to be doing some work with Sky and did a cross-platform product that was really simple because it wasn't doing browsing on a phone or anything like that.

We've done work for Vodafone and Orange. The problem is you tend to be brought in at the end of the process. But there's just a lack of knowledge in the marketplace. We would expect that as these are the very first mobile sites.


What is the rise of social media doing to consumers' expectations?


Quek: I think users' expectations change all the time. For example, with Web 2.0 you suddenly have all these different travel sites that are really dynamic. The speed of interacting, the way of interacting is changing all the time.

Stevens, Bunnyfoot: The whole social computing revolution has arisen really quickly. And they're young sites, created probably by twenty-somethings who were having a laugh, like the YouTube chaps. There they are in their garage sharing movies and 18 months later they have 72m users a month. They're miles ahead of most people just because they created something that everyone wants to engage with.

Quek: There's a huge amount of competition in travel and while it largely comes down to price - people are going to fly with easyJet even though it's absolutely horrible - usability does make a difference. For example, people look on Expedia more than Opodo because it has hotel pictures.

Stevens, Bunnyfoot: Actually that's an incredibly perceptive thing that slips by most people. It's the simplest things that give the biggest drive or the biggest change to a business.


How necessary is it to have tightly integrated analytics and usability?


Brattel, TSO: When The London Gazette's website [for the Crown's official newspaper] goes live, I'll have something I can really benchmark against the existing analytics. So if the number of visitors grows I'll know it's because we've made content more findable and the site more usable.

Quek: We were quite keyed into this at Opodo. Each of us on the creative team had our own access to Omniture. We'd periodically check the pages that we had recommendations for to see if the conversion had dropped. Other people in the business would use it and come to us saying, "This landing page is having a 96% drop-off, can you do something about it?" So it was really a key part of backing up our work.

Joshi, BT Vision: What's really important is to frame the analytics so they fit the original objective. If the aim of the website is to deliver sales, then keep that as your main metric.


If you had one usability wish for the next 12 months, what would it be?


Averill, CADinteractive: Better industry understanding of what we do. Simple as that, because that's all I've ever come up against. People just don't understand what exactly usability is. It seems like a black art and that's why it's very often dropped at the first hurdle.

Stevens, Bunnyfoot: Conversion rates from browsers to buyers have been dropping consistently over the last five years. I'd like to see that levelling out, if not increasing. My goal is to have 10% as the industry standard for converting browsers to buyers.

Brattel, TSO: For me, it would be that there were no more arguments about whether or not to have usability as part of the process. The fact that it has worked well in one development lifecycle should put it in the standard development lifecycle for the next 12 months. There's always budget set aside for the lifecycle to be running that way.

Joshi, BT Vision: Maybe the problem is with the term usability. You wouldn't call it that in the offline world, you'd call it product testing. Maybe we should just call it product testing.

Quek: In relation to the nature of sales, I'd like to see usability seen as a part of the process. I want to find a way to work usability into every single project lifecycle and project process. Opodo had an agency come in and design a whole new lifecycle for its processes. Did they work usability into that? Not really, at least not in any form that I could recognise. So it's all about how usability, how the whole usability lifecycle, becomes the industry standard.



Taking part

Chris Averill MD, CADinteractive Robin Brattel Programme manager, The Stationery Office (TSO) Shailen Joshi Senior marketing manager, BT Vision Amanda Quek Usability consultant; formerly senior usability manager, Opodo Rob Stevens Co-founder, Bunnyfoot


Moderated by Nic Howell; Photography by Alex Segre