BlobFisk.com

Wireframe of the new programme video page (Click to enlarge)

I’ve been really enjoying the last couple of months at work! I enjoying working in general, but lately I’ve been engrossed in a really meaty and fun project – sculpting the user experience of our new video proposition, which I mentioned in my previous post, The Problem with Online Video.

I talked about the issue we had with pop-up players not sitting well with our advertising policies. We’ve refined the solution a little more to make it more usable. Now, users will be able to launch the pop-out directly from the video list. We can’t get around the fact that the user needs to make that decision before watching, but it’s a click less to get to playing video now.

With the introduction of archive video, rather than just the last 30 days catch-up video, we have been working hard on the findability of video. More

Wow! It’s been a while since I’ve penned a blog post; but this isn’t down to laziness or lethargy! I’ve been really busy here at Channel 4 working on our video propisition. A week ago we launched our  online 30 day catch-up service, but that isn’t where it ends. Ever since Project Kangaroo, the video on demand collaboration between the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, was canned by the Competition Commission we have been working on our own solution for getting of our archive content online; and I’ve been doing all the IA/UX work on it!

It’s been a really interesting and exciting project to work on, making a user-friendly video proposal that will fit into the current Channel 4 site without too much impact, while making sure video is simple to find and watch. I think that the solution we’re implementing meets those goals. One challenge was making sure that Video home page did not get too catch-up centric and promoted archive material adequately. While the main user goal is catch-up, our current 4oD service shows us that archive material is becoming more and more popular.

But there’s a problem when you come to design a particular aspect of the online video user experience: advertising.

More

Fitt's Law - size and position!

Hick's Law - 7 plus/minus 2!

Ok, so I’m not saying that we need to know the maths, but the underlying principles are important! Fitts’ Law tells us that the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target, so the size of a link area and it’s position on the page (and relative to other elements) is important.  Hick’s Law says that the time it takes for a person to make a decision is a result of the possible choices he or she has. More choices mean a longer decision process – which gives us the 7 plus/minus 2 rule.

These are two of the fundamental rules that I use in user experience architecture. I’d recommend Tog’s (Bruce Tognazzini’s) First Principles of Interaction Design for some more.

Be Kaler Blake from Aquent Recruitment sent a link to the UK UPA to her slides from her presentation on UX in times of recession. I found them interesting and thought I share them with you!

I recently had a “conversation” on Facebook with a colleague here at Channel4 and a friend from Ireland. They had responded to a status update (courtesy of twitter) which said that I was having an interesting conversation about Agile UX with a couple of people over a beer.

How User Experience fits within an Agile process is something that I’ve been really interested in and, indeed, in a former role I was part of the PIG (Process Improvement Group) where we came up with our flavour of Agile which ingrained UX into the methodology.

User stories:

All stories need to be user centric in my opinion, “As a user I want to…”. The means that your development process is completely user centric and end to end. I’ve seen this done as an Epic being the user centric component and the Stories and Tasks being more system focussed . Agile is flexible, the methodology can be tailored to suit your needs… As long as the user is at the center!

Iteration Zero:

The all important one. This needs to be a few weeks at the very least, depending on the size of the project. This is where the IA and UX work gets done and the design work. Here’s where I may get some criticism, but I don’t think that estimates and actuals from Iteration/Integration Zero should be used to calculate your multiplier. This is the thinking, experimenting, prototyping, brainstorming and researching phase. It’s different to the build phase.

But, it should be iterative in itself (which is why I prefer the term Integration Zero). Try ideas, discard, try something new… cycle and iterate.

More