KonzeptioNerd

Bottle business - how user testing might have saved my shirt

If you’re familiar with German meeting rooms, you probably know the single serving Granini juice bottle that are often part of the catering: stubby little glass bottles with wide necks and nubbed bodies. There’s a typical gesture to drinking Granini from those small bottles. Grab the neck with your right hand. Place your thumb firmly on the vacuum cap. Shake vigorously (full arm movement) to stir the pulp into the juice. Grab the body with your left hand. Release the neck and use your right to unscrew the cap with a deep click.
Now, Granini introduced Schorle (typical German mix of juice and sparkling water) and the Schorle comes in the same bottles as the juice. This morning, we had to suspend a meeting for five minutes to clean up the mess …

Everyone who’s seen those bottles in use will immediately sense that its a bad idea to serve thick juice and gassed drinks in the same sort of bottle, especially if it’s a very characteristic bottle that’s been associated with still drinks (with lots of pulp that requires serious stirring) since the late 60s. Bad usability.

But design is a complex affair. The nubbed bottles are brand carrying for Granini. The Schorles are a line extension to the juices. The bottling machinery is already in place. And the bottles work well, they’re characteristic and haptically pleasing. It’s easy to overlook the full arm movement ritual. Which is exactly why field and user testing is so important even, no, especially, if you’re thinking you’re on safe grounds.

Webdesign, the design of hypertextual, interactive systems, is exponentially more complex than package design. A good design education and some experience will help prevent the biggest blunders. But once branding, departmental interests, technological restraints, visual design, tight deadlines, client ideas, client boss ideas and the pressure to create something that does not look like everything else have come together, things will happen that end up marring the experience.

Only today I tested a site with a beautiful, on-brand, emotional (non-clickable) key visual spread and fine, animated content-teasers superimposed on it, to the right. The key visual was still, the teasers should draw attention by virtue of movement in the peripheral field of vision. But we were suspecision and indeed, a bit of eye tracking proved that the key visual hogs all attention that finally moves to the main navigation. The teasers cause some irritation but not enough awareness to actually get clicked and draw the user into the deep content. What a waste. And how easily remedied by at least making the key visual clickable. If only they’d commissioned a test during the design phase instead of months after the release.

Web design is a complex affair. Implementing information architecture as a mandatory phase in the project workflow may dig away at the myth of the original genious designer. But it will structure the desin process, make it more controllable and results testable. Come testing time, a good information architecture will provide the target group specifications as well as all relevant use cases and will identify key pages and flows that require special attention because they’re business critical. A good information architecture will facilitate prototype testing, because it provides the prototypes and the flows that show which pages need to be available for reasonable testing, And it will facilitate redesign because it provides all of the design’s components in a structured manner.

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