archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Proving that a well-developed sense of humor is required for success in product design — especially for Lotus Notes — Mary Beth Raven, who leads the design team for the next version of Lotus Notes, recently posted a rather funny comment in reply to my suggestion that the Notes Design team offer customers a choice of unpleasant but related user experience themes. She used this as the occasion to invite all members of the community of Notes to users to register as volunteers for usability testing.
I’ve made three postings to date specifically discussing the Notes user experience: Lotus Notes User Experience = Disease, Mental Models, Resilience, and Lotus Notes, and Better UI Tops Notes Users’ Wish Lists. I’m not sure which of these prompted Mary Beth to reach out, but I’m glad she did, because doing so is smart business on two levels. At the first level, Mary Beth plainly understands that while vocal critics may seem daunting to user experience designers, product managers, and business owners, engaging these critics in fact presents design teams with opportunities to build strong connections to users and gather valuable feedback at the same time. What better way is there to show the strategic value of user research?
I learned this at first hand while working on a redesign of the flagship web presence of a large software firm several years ago. Some of the most insightful and useful feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of the user experiences I was responsible for came from ‘disgruntled’ customers. The user research I was doing on site structures, navigation paths, and user goals established a channel that allowed unhappy (and happy) customers to communicate about a broad range of their experiences with PTC products and services in a more complete way than by simply buying a competing product, or renewing an existing software license.
Based on these and other experiences building user research programs, I suggest that product managers, user research leads, and user experience designers first collaborate to define a user research strategy, and then define and create a simple but effective user research infrastructure (like registration gateways to volunteer databases, community / program identifiers and incentives, contact management tools, specific personas that technical and customer support teams can learn to recognize and recruit at all stages of the customer lifecycle, etc.) that will support the creation of channels to users throughout the design cycle.
At the second level, it allows the Notes team to directly explore collaboration methods, products, and technologies related to the very competitive collaboration suite / integrated electronic workspace / office productivity markets in which IBM, Microsoft, and several other giant firms are looking to secure dominant positions in the new culture of collaboration. [Note: I’ve posted a few times on Microsoft products as well – Backwards Goals: MS Office Results Oriented UI, and Microsoft’s Philosophy On Information Architecture.]
Members of the community of Lotus Notes users can register as volunteers for usability tests during the design of the next version of Notes at this URL: https://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/usentry.nsf/register?openform.

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In the overview of the new “results oriented” UI planned for MS Office 12, our friends in Redmond offer:
“The overriding design goal for the new UI is to deliver a user interface that enables users to be more successful finding and using the advanced features of Microsoft Office. An additional important design goal was to preserve an uncluttered workspace that reduces distraction for users so that they can spend more time and energy focused on their work.”
Let me get that straight. Your first goal is to make it easier for me to find and use advanced features that the vast majority of people employ rarely if ever, and didn’t need in the first place?
And something else that was also important – but not as important as access to all those shiny advanced features – was to make the workspace uncluttered and allow me to focus on my work?
Isn’t that… backwards?

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Usability issues pop up in the strangest places. For example, Monday night, while I was sitting in the Lisbon Tourist Police office, filling out a report on how I’d just been robbed. The officer handling my report took a moment to apologize for how long it took him to complete the process. He said, “We have a new internet based system to fill out all the forms, and its very confusing.” Seems that Accenture created a .net based environment for the Portugese police to record assaults on travellers, but they didn’t pay proper attention to user experience and usability concerns. The officers use all the classic workarounds: composing text in a word-processor before pasting it into input fields, post-it notes for shortcuts and passwords all over the workstations; and they live in fear of hitting the wrong navigation button and losing all their in-progress work.
It’s not as good as getting my wallet back, but it might make a good anecdote at the next IA cocktail hour.

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Several very unpleasant experiences I’ve had with the Lotus Notes webmail client during the past few weeks have brought up some questions about mental models; specifically how users respond to challenges to their mental models, and how resilience plays a part in how changes to mental models occur.
The IAWiki defines a mental model as, “a mental model is how the user thinks the product works.” This is a simplified definition, but it’s adequate for the moment. For a deeper exploration, try Martina Angela Sasse’s thesis
Eliciting and Describing Users’ Models of Computer Systems.
In this case, the model and the challenge are straightforward. My mental model of the Notes webmail client includes the understanding that it can send email messages. The challenge: the Lotus webmail client cannot send email messages – at least not as I experience it.
Here’s what happens my mental model and my reality don’t match:

1. I log in to my email client via Firefox – the only browser on the Mac that renders the Notes webmail client vaguely correctly – (I’m using webmail because the full Notes client requires VPN, meaning I’m unable to access anything on my local network, or the internet, which, incidentally, makes it difficult to seem like a credible internet consultant.) again, because it’s frozen and crashed my browser in the past ten minutes.
2. I realize I need to respond to an email
3. I do not remember that the Notes webmail client is incapable of sending out email messages
4. I open a new message window, and compose a chunk of semi-grammatical techno-corporate non-speak to communicate a few simple points in blame-retardant consultantese
5. I attempt to send this email
6. I am confronted with a cryptic error message via javascript prompt, saying something like “We’re really sorry, but Domino sucks, so you can’t send out any messages using your email client.”
7. Over the span of .376 seconds, I move through successive states of surprise, confusion, comprehension, frustration, anger, resentment, resignation, and malaise (actually, mailaise is more accurate.)
8. I swear: silently if clients are within earshot, out loud if not
9. I switch to gmail, create a new message, copy the text of my message from the Notes webmail window to Gmail, and send the message to some eagerly waiting recipient
10. I close the Notes webmail client, and return to business as usual.
11. I forget that the Notes webmail client cannot send email messages.

Despite following this same path three times per day, five days each week, for the past five weeks, (for a total of ~75 clear examples), I am always surprised when I can’t send a message. I’m no expert on Learning theory but neither lack of attention nor stubbornness explain why seventy-five examples aren’t enough to change my model of how Notes works.
Disciplines including systems theory, biology, and sociology use a concept called resilience. In any stable system, “Resilience generally means the ability to recover from some shock, insult, or disturbance.” From an ecological perspective, resilience “is a measure of the amount of change or disruption that is required to transform a system.” The psychological view emphasizes “the ability of people to cope with stress and catastrophe.”
Apparently, the resilience of my model for email clients is high enough to withstand considerable stress, since – in addition to the initial catastrophe of using Notes itself – seventy-five consecutive examples of failure to work as expected do not equal enough shock, insult, and disturbance to my model to lead to a change my in understanding.
Notice that I’m using a work-around – switching to Gmail – to achieve my goal and send email. In
Resilience Management in Social-ecological Systems: a Working Hypothesis for a Participatory Approach , Brian Walker and several others refine the meaning of resilience to include, “The degree to which the system expresses capacity for learning and adaptation.” This accounts nicely for the Gmail work-around.
I also noticed that I’m relying on a series of assumptions – email clients can send messages; Notes is an email client; therefore, Notes can send messages – that make it logical to use a well established model for email clients in general to anticipate the workings of Notes webmail in particular. In new contexts, it’s easier to borrow an existing model than develop a new one. In short order, I expect I’ll change one of the assumptions, or build a model for Notes webmail.
Here’s a few questions that come to mind:

1. What factors determine the resilience of a mental model?
2. How to measure resiliency in mental models?
3. What’s the threshold of recovery for a mental model?
4. Put another way, what’s required to change a mental model?

Based on a quick review of the concept of resilience from several perspectives, I’m comfortable saying it’s a valuable way of looking at mental models, with practical implications for information architects.
Some of those implications are:

1. Understand the relevance of existing mental models when designing new systems
2. Anticipate and plan the ways that users will form a mental model of the system
3. Use design at multiple levels to further the formation of mental models
4. Understand thresholds and resilience factors when challenging existing mental models

From a broader view, I think it’s safe to say the application of systems theory to information architecture constitutes an important area for exploration, one containing challenges and opportunities for user experience practitioners in general, and information architects in particular.
Time to close this post before it gets too long.
Further reading:
Bio of Ludwig Bertalanffy, important contributor to General System Theory.
Doug Cocks Resilience Alliance
Garry Peterson’s blog Resilience Science

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Below is an excerpt from an email sent to all employees – a ‘global broadcast’, very Max Headroom… – of a larger company (name removed), in response to repeated plees to improve the nightmarish user experience of the time and expense system that all employees must use.
<begin transmission>
There have been a few issues with the submitting and/or processing of Expense Reports resulting from individuals using data fields which have no value to [company], but may have processing impacts within the system. At this time, there is no way to remove or ‘grey-out’ these unused fields. If you have not been trained on the use of a field and/or do not know what the field may/may not do, don’t enter any data within that field – ask your branch admin or contact the help desk.
</end transmission>
What a fantastic example of a user experience directly impacting business: useless but open entry fields = garbage data = inaccurate financials!
Let’s peak into the inner chambers, to see how this might play out:
CEO> “How are we doing this week for revenue?”
CFO> “No idea. I don’t have any numbers to work with.”
CEO> “Why not? That’s ten weeks in a row!”
COO> “Another financials system crash.”
CTO> “Some junior tech in nowheresville accidentally hit the drop select of death again, and now we can’t get reports done for that half of the country.”
CEO> “The analysts and the board are going to kill me – someone take care of this right now.”
COO> “Fix it, or get rid of it!”
CTO> “We can’t fix it – we didn’t buy the configuration module. And we cut the deployment services contract from 24 weeks to 6 weeks, so there was no time to figure out which fields we needed from the generic installation…”

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