Ask Eric: Questions & Answers

February 8, 2010 – submitted by Ganesan T S S of Chennai, India

Question: Is User Experience different from Usability? Would like you to substaitate with an example either way - yes or no.

Eric's response: Our field as been called many things.

• Engineering Psychology
• Personnel Subsystem Design
• Human Factors Engineering
• Ergonomics
• Usability
• User Experience

Sorry. It was not my idea.

The switch from Usability to User Experience flagged a wider viewpoint. We are not just concerned that it is possible for people to use software. We are concerned about the whole user experience. We care about the experience the customer has in walking into the bank. We care about the integration of mobile and net channels. We care about how our designs fit into complex ecosystems with many users all interacting. We are also concerned beyond performance. We care about the emotional reaction to design. We care about persuasion engineering. We care about conversion. We are also moving beyond just design and getting involved in strategy and innovation.

But basically yes. It is the same stuff. :)

October 15, 2009 – submitted by Diane Thijm of Coral Gables, FL

Question: I work on a web application where we have an "Action Toolbar" (located above a list) to perform actions/functions.

Example: On a list of categories there's an action to add a category. There are business rules why a category cannot be added.

The debate is:
1. Still show the "Add Category" action and when the user clicks on it there's a message stating why the user cannot add the category.
2. Disable the "Add Category" action. The user may then wonder why they cannot add a category (Should we then add a tooltip?)

What are the best practices for disabling an action/button versus showing the action/button with a message after the user clicks it? Thanks for your help!

Eric's response: The problem with disabling the button is that the user can see it, and may want to select it. But the user can't select it. Which is pretty frustrating. It is indeed a much better practice to leave the button active and then provide an explanatory error message.

September 15, 2009 – submitted by Wasim Hasan of Santa Clara, CA

Question: I have been trying to find best practices around data entry in a cross-tab fashion but to no avail.

Here's an example:
- Products are represented as rows. Users can add/update/delete newer products.
- Countries are represented as columns. Users can add/update/delete countries.
- At the intersection of a product and a country, users enter the sales amount.

What is the best way to design the UI that allows users to add/update/delete Products, Countries and sales data?

Eric's response: Well I can't really tell how to design it because you have told me nothing about who is using it (their skills and knowledge) and the nature of their usage (for example, do they add countries often?). But as an example...

If I assume that countries and products are changed infrequently I would have [Edit County List] and [Edit product List] buttons. Each would launch a dialog to allow modification of the list (including sequence modifications). Then the sales amounts (which I assume are changed frequently) would be directly editable in a manner similar to a spreadsheet.

Hope that helps :)

August 27, 2009 – submitted by Abhijeet Patankar of Pune, India

Question: Our company publishes a Newsletter every quarter. The purpose behind starting the newsletter was to use it as a bridge to communication between management and employees.

We have published three issues of the newsletter so far. Each newsletter has 10-12 pages which includes a message from CEO's desk, 1 or 2 technical articles, 1-2 non-techie articles, crosswords, joke corner, cartoons, movie reviews, photographs/sketches, updates on HR policies, client updates etc. As we published ONLY the employee's own creation, or articles written by themselves in the newsletter, we request them for their contribution via a company-wide email well in advance. (Almost 2 months before publishing date.) But unfortunately we receive very low response from the employees. Then the editor team has to follow up one to one for their contributions. In some cases the managers forcefully ask their team members to write on any particular topic. After publishing the newsletter, feedback/response is also very poor. Employees are not passing either good or bad comments about the issue.

Now there is a challenge to the editors team to make people interactive and more responsive. So we have decided to find out the reason why people are not responding to the contribution request mails or not sending any feedback after publishing it?

We editors had a brain storming session & decided to conduct a one on one interview-based survey by choosing some employees randomly.

My question to you is what would be the appropriate data gathering method to find out the reasons for above mentioned problem? If it is an interview method then what kind of questionnaire should we design?

Eric's response: Well you have a significant challenge. Especially since you are in India, it will be hard to get staff to tell you what they really feel. Our persuasion interviewers are trained to create a sense of trust and get people to open up about their feelings. But this takes serious expertise to say the least.

You might try asking people about someone ELSE. So you can ask them to imagine they were on the editorial staff and needed to get other staff involved. See if they give you clues to the problem in that way.

You can also use the 'Bollywood Method'. You can ask them to imagine they are in a dramatic scene where they just HAVE TO get people involved in the magazine in order to "keep the evil boss from embarrassing the hardworking editor who has climbed up from poverty and is just now able to pay for her Grandmother's eye surgery" (Ya Kutch Aur Dil Se) (Or something else from the heart).

Last thing you can do is to apply methods of persuasion, emotion, and trust (PET Tools) directly. For example, if you provide unexpected information to make people curious, it will get them involved.