Does President Obama Know Where His User Experience (UX) Team Is?

Five Lessons in User Experience All Brands Can Learn From.

CBS News reported that the White House recently hired Jeffrey Zients to head up a team to “fix” Healthcare.gov. They also stated they were reaching out to experts and companies in Silicon Valley, trying to tap their expertise for the rescue of the site. 

Ok. Everyone knows that Healthcare.gov site has problems. The largest ones being functionality that that doesn’t work and accurate data collection and storage. This piece focuses on one other aspect, User Experience. Simple tweaks that can make the experience a bit easier for the user to navigate the site.

When a website launches, issues are inevitable but there are many lessons that brands can learn from the government’s (aka your tax dollars’) misfortune.

Let’s put all politics aside for a moment and take a look at some simple UX tactics that could have been applied to minimize risk. I’ve read a lot about the issues but the best knowledge is always first hand and I had to do a test drive myself.

What did I find, you ask?

Oh, many issues but most can all be consolidated into the following five points:

1.     You Need A Captain

2.     Estimate Initial Usage But Be Prepared for 10x the Volume of Users

3.     Streamline Content – Don’t Distract The User With Irrelevant Content

4.     Don’t Scare Them with Commitment Language Off the Bat

5.     Test Early and Rapidly

1.     You Need A Captain

October 2011. That’s when the government began subcontracting out development work for the website. Guess how many organizations this project was subcontracted to? 47. Yes 47.

So with 47 different subcontractors, how could the government know at any given point who was working on the site and who was responsible for the most critical piece that would deem this successful – ie a successful user experience?

It’s a given, when you are building a large site, that you will have multiple departments, people and potentially companies working on it.  That’s why it’s essential to have a UX captain that is all along ensuring the testing and usability of the site. If you don’t, you will fail. No blurred lines there. Your UX captain can serve as the connective tissue from concept through development and launch. Use them, that’s what they are there for.

2.     Estimate Initial Usage But Be Prepared for 10x the Volume of Users

The U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park stated the government had expected to draw 50,000-60,000 simultaneous users at any given time and they were prepared for that.  What happened? On average over 250,000 users have been trying to log in since it launched on October 1^st. 250,000!!!! Remember if you are building a site where you have stated your goal is “7 million users”, then scalability and capacity is critical. If they can’t get in, you potentially just lost a number of users.

3.     Streamline Content for the User – Don’t Distract Them With Irrelevant Content

I have to say one of my biggest pet peeves is when I’m in an experience and I get presented information that is completely irrelevant to me at that point in the process. Don’t do it, just don’t do it. Keep the experience clean and guide the user down a path, don’t distract them.

Here’s a prime example on the site. I get to the homepage, I decide I want more information on Individuals and Families. Here are the series of pages I am now taken through until I can finally take an action that I wanted to take initially.

Great – I’m interested in individual and family – so I click on that in the tabs

Ok I guess I’ll apply online so I click on that.

Hmm… ok I guess I’ll click on the big green button to get started.

Ok – I guess I’ll pick the one starting in January.

Hmm.. Wait what? Why am I seeing Small Business and Brokers here…

I thought I already told you I was an Individual. There doesn’t seem to be a big call to action – I guess I’ll click the individual tab again?

FINALLY A GET STARTED BUTTON THAT WILL LAUNCH A FORM

TO BEGIN FILLING OUT.

So five clicks before I can even begin to fill out a form. Five clicks and that’s because I was able to figure it out and not lose hope along the way. The average user will not get past those first two clicks. “Healthcare.gov”, why are you making me click so many times? Why can’t you just take me to this page immediately?

4.     Don’t Scare Them with Commitment Language Off the Bat

These words are on the homepage and the largest calls to action.  My guess is users want a little more information before committing to an application. Something as simple as Learn More and Apply may ease the experience for the user coming here for the first time and keep them moving through the process.

5.     Test Early and Rapidly

I can’t mention this enough. Even if you only have sketches, testing makes a difference. The smallest tweaks and enhancements can make or break your site. You don’t have to test a gazillion people either. You will begin to see trends after 5-7 users. Do it. Do it often. You won’t be sorry.

“Sources tell CBS News the underlying software was riddled with junk computer code, which means, one expert said, "No way it was properly tested before it went live.”

I rest my case.

In summary, launching a site at this scale is no simple feat. There are bound to be hiccups along the way. However simple UX guardrails can be applied to minimize risk at launch. Now go find your UX team ASAP! Or call me if you don't have one! :)

Check out my coverage in Ad Age.

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Visit my site www.utopia46.com for more UX info!

Native Ads 101 - Native What?!!!!

I came across this article today and fell in love with the title...

People Are More Likely to Survive a Plane Crash Than Click on a Banner Ad.....

Oli Gardner gave a lot of great pointers and stats in this post and I thought it was worth reposting.

Most importantly he begins to explain the difference between a banner ad and a native ad. What's a native ad you ask? Basically, it's an ad placed within a content piece BUT the ad is very relevant to the topic you are reading on (hopefully).

Many brands are moving towards Native Ads as they have a higher click through rate than banner ads (52% more), shared more (32% vs. 19%), Native Ads registered a 9% higher lift for brand affinity and 18% for purchase intent and native ads are consumed the same way people view editorial content.

Ok here's the whole article:

People Are More Likely to Survive a Plane Crash Than Click on a Banner Ad.....
Oli Gardner

Best. Statistic. Ever. Makes me feel better about flying, but sorry for those designing banner ads.

They say that a kitten dies every time someone uses a bullet point in a presentation, so I shudder to think what’s going to happen the next time someone clicks on a banner.

Banner ads. The ugly stepchild of online marketing. Just trying to hang out in the top-right corner, minding their own business. They never asked to be overused. They never asked to be animated GIFs. But they certainly didn’t want to be ignored.

Yet, here we are, about to discuss how little action they get, and how they’re being usurped by another form of advertising. Poor little rectangular bastards. 75,000 wasted pixels in an otherwise useful area of your page. Destined to be thrown on the marketing scrap heap, never to be seen again…

Scratch that. Banners aren’t going anywhere. Yes they’re annoying. Yes they are essentially useless. But they’re here to stay, in all their 300x250px glory. They just have to compete with what’re known as ‘Native Ads’, which, as we’ll learn, have some significant advantages.

What’s a native ad? In 197 characters or less.

Native ads are contextual paid ads that appear in your content stream, designed to augment the user experience by providing semantically relevant supporting content, without breaking the flow of information.

But placing ads in content is bad, right?

It certainly is. The typical method for injecting ads is to use interruption marketing tactics to plant banners and text ads directly into the middle of a piece of content, forcing you to look at them in order to experience the whole article. People – me included – despise these ads. They provide no contextual benefit and diminish the value of the content they appear in. You can probably blame Google for this, as most of the bad behavior seems to have been built around the mass adoption of AdSense as an advertising platform.

There’s a reason for the epidemic known as banner blindness. People never liked banners and decided unconsciously to tune them out, focusing instead on the real content on the page. If you infer the same reaction to ads placed inside your content, you can imagine how unpleasant and interrupted the content consumption experience would be.

However, done correctly, ads inside content can be effective. This is where native ads come in.

So how are native ads different?

To extend the definition of native ads a bit. You can think of them as sponsored content designed to “blur the distinction between editorial and advertising in the eyes of the consumer”, according to Pilgrim Advertising. What this means, is that despite the ads being paid for, they are placed more carefully, with a heightened level of knowledge about where and how they are being used. The result is that they appear more like ‘useful supporting content that just happens to be paid for’.Read more about native ads.

The benefits of native ads

The infographic below was created based on a study to compare differences in behavior and perception between native ads and banner ads. Using eye tracking tools and surveys, the following insights were uncovered:

• Native ads are more visually engaging: Native ads in the study were looked at 52% more frequently than banner ads.
• Native ads drive higher brand lift: They registered a 9% lift for brand affinity and an 18% lift for purchase intent, compared to banner ads.
• Native ads are more likely to be shared: 32% of respondents said they would share the ad content with a friend, compared to 19% for banner ads.
• Native ads are consumed in the same way as the content they appear in: Consumers actually registered that they looked at the native ads slightly more than the content itself.

Enjoy the rest of the data in the infographic, and be sure to tweet the facts at the end of the post.

(Infographic by Sharethrough )

Tweetables

Share these rad stats with your followers to show how ad-savvy you are. And don’t worry, you can change the final tweet text before it goes out. Just leave the stats intact.

• Consumers looked at native ads 52% more frequently than banner ads
  » Tweet This «
• 32% would share native ad content with a friend, compared to 19% for banner ads
  » Tweet This «
• Native ads registered 9% higher lift for brand affinity & 18% higher for purchase intent than banner ads
  » Tweet This «
• People are more likely to survive a plane crash than click a banner ad
  » Tweet This «
• Native ads are consumed the same way people view editorial content
  » Tweet This «

And in case you’re wondering. The stat about the plane crash came from here.

– Oli Gardner

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Credit: http://unbounce.com/online-marketing/native-ads-vs-banner-ads/?utm_content=buffer1bb3d&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer

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Visit my site www.utopia46.com for more UX info!