Congratulations are in order for the providers of some of the year’s best digital user experiences.
The list of yesterday’s Webby Award winners and nominees is full of examples of companies and individuals responding to user needs with elegant and engaging web, mobile and tablet solutions. We’re proud to have worked with several of this year’s winners and nominees.
Skype won three Awards including an Award and People’s Voice Award for Best Social (Tablets & All Other Devices) Mobile & Apps and People’s Voice Award for Best Use of Device Camera Mobile & Apps
Established in 1996, the Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the internet, including Websites, interactive advertising & media, and mobile & apps. Here is a link to the full list of 2012 Webby award winners. The 16th Annual Webby Awards will be broadcast live at webbyawards.com starting at 4:30PM EDT on May 21.
At AnswerLab, the management team works hard to create and promote a culture of innovation. That love of innovation starts with employees, who share a passion for all things digital. Our passion for technology is encouraged by way of a handsome technology benefit. Every year, we are alloted a specified amount of money to purchase hardware and software. As a result of this tech benefit, I’ve been able to purchase an original iPad when it first came out, lots of fun and interesting software, and most recently, a new thermostat. Now, I know what you are thinking… who in their right mind would use their tech benefit to purchase a thermostat? Allow me to explain my decision and why this thermostat is turning the user experience of home temperature control upside down.
The Nest Learning Thermostat
The Nest Learning Thermostat is no ordinary thermostat. It is billed as a learning thermostat. This means that it monitors your usage and attempts to learn from it, adjusting its schedule accordingly. The benefits of a thermostat that learns from your behavior are two-fold.
It frees you up from having to learn how to program your thermostat. Anyone with a programmable thermostat can fully appreciate how horrible the interface is on a typical thermostat.
It can help you save money. By learning from your behavior, Nest can become more efficient and auto-program your comfort zone accordingly.
That’s the theory, anyway. In reality, I’ve decided to turn off the learning function. Why? Because I am somewhat of a control freak. I actually like being in charge of the schedule. Fortunately, Nest is aware of my personality type and allows for one to simply switch off learning mode, turning the Nest from a learning thermostat into a programmable thermostat.
Wait, I just mentioned that Nest’s ability to learn was a primary benefit. By turning that functionality off, what’s left? Plenty!
Energy Savings
Even for those like me who have turned off the learning behavior, Nest has many ways to help save energy. Here are just a few…
Programmable Thermostat
Nest Leaf indicator
Energy History
Programmable Thermostat
Nest claims that ‘only 10% of programmable thermostats are programmed to save energy.’ Why? Because they are hard to program. Thermostat interface design has remained stagnant for years and the emphasis on the user experience is far from top priority. In my case, simply being able to easily program, monitor, and adjust the schedule helps save energy. Nest’s scheduler is extremely simple to update and unlike most typical thermostats’ antiquated interfaces.
Nest Leaf indicator
According to Nest, ‘changing the temperature just one degree can cut your energy use up to 5%.’ The leaf is a simple, yet effective interface element that helps guide you in the right direction. As you spin the dial on the Nest, a green leaf will appear once you’ve hit a temperature that’s energy efficient. As I dial down the temperature, I often find myself taking it down a notch or two further than I might have simply because I know that the green leaf will appear at some point. It’s a brilliant cue that really works.
Energy History
Nest shows you exactly when your system was on, making it easy to look back and figure out your usage patterns. The Energy History shows you when heating or cooling was on in the last 10 days and if the weather, your adjustments or Away (Nest can detect when you are away from your home and set the temperature to a pre-selected setting) significantly affected your energy use.
Access
Controlling Nest is simple and there are multiple ways to do it. Of course, I can walk right up to the Nest and control it directly. Or, I can login from my iPhone, iPad, or any computer with a net connection. That’s right. Nest connects to the WiFi network in our home and is reachable from afar.
There are multiple reasons to access our home thermostat from anywhere. Here are a few examples…
Suppose we leave the house to go away for the weekend. If we forget to turn the thermostat down, we can just login and adjust the temperature.
Likewise, we want to be sure the house is warmed up before we arrive. About ten minutes away from our house, we can just login to the nest iPhone app and set our preferred temperature.
I’m in bed, reading on my iPad and starting to fall asleep. I want our room to be a bit warmer, but I don’t want to have to get out of my warm bed, put slippers on, head downstairs in the dark and press a few buttons on the thermostat. So, I just open the iPad app, login to the Nest app and turn up the heat.
Once you start to realize how easy it is to access your thermostat from a distance, it’s addictive and powerful. Honestly, it’s the main reason I bought a Nest.
At AnswerLab, we test mobile apps and websites all the time. Some are better than others. I’ve seen plenty of users struggle to discover and use apps, resulting in a frustrating experience. From my own perspective, the Nest iOS apps are well conceived, and easy to use. The initial screen simply shows an image of a home and a circle, which represents your Nest. Inside the circle, the current temperature. To change the temperature, I simply tap on the Nest and hit the up or down arrows. Minimal interface, intuitive, easy to tap.
If I want to dig deeper into the schedule or settings, all I need to do is turn the device to landscape orientation and a multitude of well layed out options are at my disposal. I’m honestly amazed at how well Nest has executed their mobile and desktop experience.
As a new homeowner, Nest is helping me keep our family’s energy costs in check. It’s also a beautiful appliance that sparks conversation. Nest has set the bar for the modern appliance by focusing on the user with minimal design, learning from the owner’s behavior, and implementing easy to use mobile apps and browser based interfaces.
AnswerLab’s New York office is up and running in Manhattan’s Flatiron neighborhood. Only blocks away from Madison Square Park and the historical Flatiron Building, the new office space has come a long way in the past few months. Now we can work more closely (literally!) with our East Coast clients, as well as build relationships with new partners and clients.
In case you can’t picture an AnswerLab office outside of the Bay Area, we prefer to show, not tell, what it’s like to spend a day here at AnswerLab New York. Take a peek at our new home…
Welcome! At first our entry area wasn’t so welcoming… but adding some mirrors, shelves for storage, and a cover for the eye-sore that holds our internet and phone connections, ensures anyone who enters will feel right at home.
At first, this office was a place for empty furniture and equipment packaging . We cleared the mess to reveal a workspace and the final product is our fully functioning qualitative interview space! With a quick set up of appropriate monitors and laptops this becomes a remote user testing space.
A week in we finally had desks, chairs, monitors, a printer… and a ladder. We made some further progress by adding tackboards for each desk station.
Finally, through the sweat and tears, we have our complete New York office space! Come visit!
“How did you get into the field of user experience?” is a question we get all the time.
While the AnswerLab team members all share a passion for improving the digital world, we each have a different tale of what led us here. We’re sharing our stories in a new series of user experience expertise blog posts where the AnswerLab team reveals what feeds our curiosity and what led us to UX research.
In my case, I drew maps as a professional cartographer for over 10 years. My maps could show you the best places to get a drink in the Florida Keys, how to get around in St Petersburg, or where to catch a boat ferry in Bangkok. I traced coastlines from satellite images and tracked down 40-year-old government maps of small cities in Argentina. I once drew a map based on a sketch on a bar napkin still stained with beer – and it was a good map. My head is full of maps of places that I’ve never visited.
But as time went by, I began to get uneasy about how little attention we cartographers were paying towards the people who were using and reading our maps. When a map reader was confused by one of our maps, that person was often dismissed with “well, he just doesn’t understand maps”. One cartographer commented: “The map makes sense to me and if someone just bothered to spend a few minutes thinking about it, they’d figure it out too.”
We cartographers were trained professionals, so how could it be our fault if someone didn’t understand our maps?
I became more interested in how people were using maps and what parts they found confusing. I collected the funny stories that people would tell me about the mistakes that they had made when using a map to get around unfamiliar places – like when someone thought that a conference center was a mile away from where he was (rather than just around the corner) because he thought that a generic symbol represented the size of his hotel complex.
At that point I had never heard of user research, but I started wondering why we didn’t talk to our map readers when we were designing new map specs. We spent hours debating the details that we all passionately cared about – for example, icon design or the extent of a map’s coverage – but if you asked, we wouldn’t have been sure if it mattered to anyone else but us.
I can’t recall when I first heard about user research, but when I did I remember thinking: This is right. Why haven’t I heard about this before? Why aren’t we doing things like this?
So I went back to school and got a masters degree from the School of Information at UC Berkeley, where I focused on UX design and research. And now I’m at AnswerLab, where I work as a UX Researcher.
I don’t spend my day drawing maps anymore, but I still carry maps in my head of the paths that people take when navigating a website. I still collect stories, but they’re about technology and what works and what could be better. And now when someone asks, I can tell them whether or not those tiny little details matter to the actual users.
We recently conducted a field-based eye tracking study to understand what people find most compelling when viewing online dating profiles (study results). With a time constraint of one day to complete the sessions, we collected data from almost 40 people by intercepting café patrons and passersby in downtown San Francisco. Here’s how we were able to make the live intercept happen…
Quick and Painless Approach –
When testing and recruiting in a public space, minimizing objections from the venue and potential participants saves a lot of headache and makes for a smoother study.
While intercepting people, we would mention that the process was “quick and painless”. We let potential participants know it was a 10-minute market research study and that they would be compensated immediately upon completion with a gift certificate to the café. They were already at the café to eat, so why not take a quick 10 minutes and have breakfast or lunch paid for? Providing gift certificates to the testing location as an incentive not only helped us sign up participants quickly, it also helped us easily secure a venue. When contacting possible venues, the additional revenue for them from gift certificate sales eliminated most initial objections and concerns.
Be Flexible –
Pay attention to how things are working early in the day and adjust as needed. We noticed early on that we had greater success rates when women approached men and men approached women. We adjusted our intercept strategy accordingly.
Café traffic didn’t behave the way we anticipated throughout the day. We assumed high traffic times – morning coffee and lunchtime – would be prime recruiting times. Not so. In the morning people were rushing to get to work and at lunch it was grab and go.
Be Creative Getting the Word Out –
Our biggest draw was our simplest: a large poster board sign we put in the window of the café. A large sign in a bright color with short text can easily be seen by passersby across the street. “Market Research $25 for 10 minutes of your time” brought many of our participants to the café asking if they could participate.
Posting signs near the café cash register and handing out flyers allowed potential participants to learn what we were doing and ‘opt in’ to talking to a screener. This helped us efficiently screen out any participants who weren’t willing to have their image or data recorded because we included this information on our flyers. Nearby university annexes also proved to be good locations. We handed out flyers in those areas for 15 minutes the afternoon prior to our sessions.
Social media channels like Facebook and Twitter were also a great way to quickly and cheaply reach a large number of potential participants. Word of mouth in general was very effective. Many of our participants went back to their offices and sent co-workers down to the café.
What Didn’t Work –
We got little engagement from being on the street with a clip board. Having a clipboard in downtown San Francisco typically signals you’re asking for money. Red Cross and Greenpeace frequent corners with heavy foot traffic and most downtown pedestrians are practiced at ignoring those types of solicitations. We abandoned this strategy early in the day.
Why Take A Live Intercept Approach?
Live intercepts are ideal when you are studying the environment in which participants are being intercepted. For example, one of AnswerLab’s lead researchers intercepted people in San Jose airport to ask how the airport could be improved. In the case of our cafe-based study, we chose a live intercept approach because it was extremely efficient. While it also was closer to a real-world environment than being in a lab, the key benefit was being able to complete such a high number of sessions in a short period of time at such a low cost. If you’d like to see us in action, watch the video about the day’s events.
