Emotional Engagement

For several months now I've been irritated by a pair of annoying pop-ups (modal dialog boxes to be precise) that appear, one after the other, every time I start iTunes.

This is the SRS iWOW plug-in telling me that my trial period has expired and asking whether I want to buy a license. I do not.

Showing a modal dialog box is bad, showing 2 of them is really bad and presenting no way to remove the software makes the problem inescapable.

These two pop-ups are really annoying:

• they interrupt me
• they require my input
• they interrupt the importing of songs - so that I have to initiate the opening of files twice, and they're ugly.

I resolved never to buy anything from this company!

In desperation I emailed their customer support not expecting either to be ignored or, at best, a dismissive, reluctant response containing complicated instructions. I couldn't have been more wrong - what I got in response was a prompt, apologetic and helpful email written by a real person (someone called Michael Gonzales).

As it turns out, this would completely changed my opinion of their whole brand.

Some time after this email exchange, I came across the TunePro iPod Speaker Charger Alarm Clock (nice name) which bore the SRS logo and, to my surprise, I found myself wanting the thing. Because it had the SRS logo on it. Baring in mind that I'm the sort of person who couldn't care less about having an alarm clock, this is pretty amazing.

It just goes to show how wide and complex the area of user experience is. Who'd could have predicted that I'd reverse my decision to never buy their stuff based on one email?

Emotional Engagement - A Lesson from Darth Vader
Bad experiences engage you as deeply as good ones.

And then, If a bad brand redeems itself, it stays with you but now it's switched and quickly becomes your friend - like Darth Vader at the end of Jedi.

Avoid 'Demographics' in Personas

In 'Bring Your Personas to Life!' Zef Fugaz suggests ways for us to get into our personas heads but I think there's something wrong with the language he uses in one part:

"…may include information about the persona’s demographics, attitude, goals, environment, and how he or she will interact with your software … More advanced personas will also include detailed descriptions of activities or scenarios"

Instead of 'demographics, attitude, goals' a persona should focus on particular things the person does, how they feel about specific things, what they wear etc.

The point is that words like demographics and attitude suggest something other than personality.

Personas are for everyone involved in a project - the developer and the client, so they've got to be highly descriptive and easy to relate to - any hint of graphs or charts is to be avoided.

Do You Really Need Search on your Website?

Gerry McGovern :
Gerry McGovern (a content management expert) asks 'Do you really need search on your website?' saying:

You need to be doing ongoing analysis and refinement to ensure that your customers get the best possible results. If you don’t have the time to do that work, why have a search engine?

The thing is that, if you remove search, you remove the ability for users to easily create a custom page that matches their interests. Why does this matter? Well, it might not right now, but once RSS aggregators become usable (ala iTunes), users will expect to be able to create custom feeds to receive notification of new, relevant, content is posted to your site, for example when a product becomes available.

As it goes, I do agree that you must always weigh-up all aspects of your user experience and refine your interface, as Alan Cooper's Axiom goes, 'No matter how cool your interface is, less of it would be better'. But what if search does help people, should you not make an effort to improve it?