Why you can’t ask people to compare things

My clients hear this from me all the time — they want to show designs around and get opinions or put something up online and ask end-users to compare or rate things — and I don’t think this is generally a good idea.

In the first case — getting opinions from other people — you are often asking someone for their out of the blue / cold opinion. Without the benefit of the reasoning, back story, why things are like they are.

In this article though, I want to point out the second case — asking end users to compare or rate things. This often doesn’t work because of all the other factors that go into a decision. This is a great example:

Rose Vs. Kat: Who Wore It Better???

Your goal might be to judge wearability of the dress. However, there are several other factors at play:

• Which photograph is taken with better lighting / a better angle?
• Which pose do you like better?
• Which person do you like better and are therefore likely to vote for?
• Do you like fair skinned girls or darker skinned girls?
• Who picked better shoes?
• Who is in a background that tells a better story, does this outfit make sense in a garden? how about at a fashion show?

Your end users will often think they are answering your goal questions (dress wearability) but have been heavily influenced by another factor that you cannot control. We generally refer to these as demographic or personal biases.

We recently helped conduct interviews on a new project to internal coworkers of our client. After enough of them we could tell how people were going to react to a certain question based on their age, sex, position in the company, length of working with the company, etc — once we saw these demographic biases coming we learned to ask a few more questions to see if we could separate them.

The moral of the story:

If you are tempted to ask people to compare things in your User Experience design, can you consider the demographic or personal biases that are at play? Can you eliminate them and still reach your goal? Can you present your choices in a more similar way to test smaller hypothesis? Or… even better… can you put both options out in the world and let split A/B testing lead you to the right conclusion instead?

Design Critique: Fill Kit List

This is part of our Design Critique series.

The Original

This is a list our client was using. They send this out with one of their packages so you know what goes in each bag.

Design Critique

Design Critique Principals that were applied are in bold:

1. Keeping sizes and spacing the same makes your design feel polished.
2. Aligning everything to a grid adds structure and support.
3. The elements of Focus, Line and FIll round out a design.
4. Follow known behavior—your user should not have to be reeducated to complete simple tasks.
5. Put content and structure in a logical hierarchy, adding more weight to the more important items.
6. Line breaks are thought breaks.
7. Choose larger increments for shading and size so people can see the difference easily.
8. Make items in a series either more similar or more different.
9. Limit the number of typefaces you use.
10. Create and stay true to a color story.
11. Use awesome images in your design.
12. Create depth in your design.

New Design

Additional Design Critique Notes

• Before these were printed in-house, now we print them on heavy, coated card stock. It really isn’t that much more money, we go through OvernightPrints.com
• These designs are almost totally different, so it’s harder to apply an exact critique, but we:
• Aligned to a grid (#2)
• Used Focus, Line and Fill (#3) – with a larger color bar and logo the piece now feels like it goes with the packs it comes with (instead of an errant Excel sheet).

Words I Can Never Remember

There is a set of words that always tickle at my conscious but I can never seem to grab them when I want them. The other day my friend Karen, copywriter and idea-girl extraordinaire, helped me find them so I could make a record.

Nervio

Nervio is the feeling of loving something so much you want to cause it harm, often accompanied by gritted teeth or tight muscles. Sounds totally weird until you put it in this context: You are so cute I could just squeeze you to death!

Here is an awesome picture of Picasso expressing Nervio towards his child. And hey, it’s even on Urban Dictionary!

I could give you more examples from my own life, but unless you experience this yourself it just makes me sound weird.

Perceptual Vigilance

Perceptual Vigilance is when you notice something, then you start to see it everywhere. Like a new car you way, or the number 23. We found this here.

Idiom Collocation

Word Collocaiton is when you see words going together or in a certain order. Thunder and lightening. Shoes and socks. When I was little shoes and socks never made sense to me, why say shoes first since you put them on last?  Check out this word matcher to see it in action. 

This work includes the photo “Itty Bitty Lot,” available under a Creative Commons Attribution license, © Jeremy Vandel.

Design Critique: Food Packaging

This is part of our Design Critique series.

The Original

This is a package of Danish Dessert, it’s great to make pie fillings. I’m not a great cook though and the first one I made I completely ruined (and ruining this stuff is like nuclear meltdown in the kitchen, it stains, it burns, it will make you say naughty words). I was thinking that if the instructions were more clear then perhaps it would be easier to put together.

Design Critique

Design Critique Principals that were applied are in bold:

1. Keeping sizes and spacing the same makes your design feel polished.
2. Aligning everything to a grid adds structure and support.
3. The elements of Focus, Line and FIll round out a design.
4. Follow known behavior—your user should not have to be reeducated to complete simple tasks.
5. Put content and structure in a logical hierarchy, adding more weight to the more important items.
6. Line breaks are thought breaks.
7. Choose larger increments for shading and size so people can see the difference easily.
8. Make items in a series either more similar or more different.
9. Limit the number of typefaces you use.
10. Create and stay true to a color story.
11. Use awesome images in your design.
12. Create depth in your design.

New Design

Design Critique Notes

I have only made changes to the back (far left) and side (second from left).

• In this project we are dealing with a lack of space, so I opted to move some information to their website (with the QR code). Yes, this is a luxury that may not be available, but sometimes to maintain a good hierarchy you also need to be able to cut out non-essential information (#5).
• The biggest change is making line breaks thought (or step) breaks—I’m convinced this is what messed up my first batch (#6).
• I limited the typefaces on the box (#9).

Why Web Design is like a Good Flower Arrangement

While I was in college I worked at a dried floral and gift shop in Gardner Village. I was fortunate to work with awesome people that wanted to share their knowledge with a young designer. One of the most important lessons in floral design is to make sure you get the three elements accounted for:

Focus • Line • Fill

• Focus is the main flower in the arrangement, these are usually big and colorful.
• Line is grass or sticks or something else that has strong lines to keep the eye moving around the design.
• Fill is the smaller grass or fern or small flowers used to fill in the rest of the design.

Sometimes you build the focus first, tucking other elements around where they will fit, other times you start with fill to build structure then position focus at the end.

This is very similar to web design — where focus is generally large photos, line is the structure of the page and fill is the type.

This work includes the photo “Floral Art – Leo Mendes” available under a Creative Commons Attribution license, © marcusrg.
This work includes the photo “24621 Church Door Floral Decorations Mothers’ Day 2011” available under a Creative Commons Attribution license, © bsabarnowl.
This work includes the photo “traditional arrangement” available under a Creative Commons Attribution license, © ijokhio.