Fitzgerald Steele

ICWSM Paper Titles – Wordle

Originally uploaded by fitzgeraldsteele

This tag cloud was generated from all the paper titles that were presented at the ICWSM ‘09 conference (http://www.icwsm.org). I don’t think anyone is surprised that ’social’ is the major term.

ICWSM Liveblog – Wordle

Originally uploaded by fitzgeraldsteele

This tag cloud was generated from my liveblog of the ICWSM conference (http://fitzgeraldsteele.wordpress.com/tag/icwsm). I think it is interesting that people shows up as the biggest term here, where it hardly registers in the paper titles.

Tagcloud generated by www.wordle.net

Today we launched a new version of our National Career Readiness Certificate website (I think it looks great, even though I didn’t work on it so I can’t take any credit for it).

In the final minutes before launch, we received a request to remove one of the main links from the front page — I’m guessing there was a desire to remove words from the page, reduce clutter, etc. The problem was, our design team thought the link was important…it provided key information we thought the users would find helpful.  This type of discussion is difficult to resolve because you’ve got paying clients saying, “we want this,” and you need to find some way to say, “no, I don’t think you really do” without offending anyone’s sense of ownership.

It helps to have some objective metrics or measures that helps move people from an opinion-based discussion to data-driven decision making.  We happened to have one. About a month ago, I used CrazyEgg to generate a clickmap of the page. Of the 1000 clicks we recorded, 23% were on the link in question — twice the number of clicks as the second most popular link.  That makes a strong case for the fact that the link is something the users are looking for and attracted to when they visit the site, and that it should probably survive the redesign.  The client agreed, and the link survived.  (We’re planning another set of clickmap measurements to confirm that its still important to have on the new site).

We were able to back up our UX design intuition with some hard numbers and some effective visualizations (clickmaps make pretty pictures that make an immediate impact on clients and stakeholders), to help the team make data-driven decisions about the site user experience.   This is something I hope to continue to do in our organization.

This blog post provides an interesting visualization of ‘User Experience.’  The author indicates that UX is about combining lots of different disciplines.

I’ve made a copy of the diagram for my cubie wall (modified to add a reference to his post).

The Disciplines of User Experience

It’s about the joining of the different disciplines, and not particularly a discipline in and of itself.