I remember in GCSE Business Studies being taught about how to write a memo. Though I never got the chance to right a real memo as by the time I had finished college and university the business world was using email.  I wonder if pupils are taught how to write emails in school today. I hope so. If I were teaching them how to write a good email I’d ask them to think more about the recipient of the message, or the user if you will. Here are my five tips to make it easier for the recipient of your email to read, understand and action your message.

1. Include your phone number

Many people include the option to ‘phone me if you have any questions’ in their message. Yet, it is surprising how many emails don’t include a phone number. Make it easy, even if you’re not offering an option to call you back, leave your number and save the reader the hassle of trying to dig out your number from somewhere else when they want to call you.

2. Provide a response deadline

You need a response quick smart. The person you sent the email to scan reads the email and prioritises a few other things over it. The deadline comes and goes, you get frustrated. Explain that you need a response by a specific time in your email so your recipient can respond accordingly, or at least let you know that the deadline is too tight! Either way, the risk is mitigated.

3. Don’t Cc anyone

Over my years as a project manager, I often received emails just to keep me ‘in the loop’. But when everyone does this it becomes a chaotic mass of noise making it difficult and time consuming to know where to focus. How many emails in your inbox are actually for you? How many people do you Cc, just in case? When sending an email ask yourself, who really needs to receive this? If the recipient doesn’t warrant being in the ‘To’ field, why are they receiving this email? Remove them, save them time, and if you need to communicate with them email them directly.

4. Keep it short

Long emails are laborious to read, and often most of the information isn’t needed. Use emails to stick to the point. If a deeper level of discussion is needed, pick up the phone (see #5), or if you have a lot to say to lots of people, don’t write a long email and send it to everyone (see #3), write a few short emails and send it only to those that need it. If you have lots of discussion points and activity to go through, use collaboration tools like Basecamp, Evernote, and Pinterest.

5. Pick up the phone

When you have quite a bit to say, or the subject matter is quite difficult to word in an email, just pick up the phone. The amount of lost  time mulling over the content of your email, combined with the time for the recipient has to decipher it is rarely worth it, especially when the thread can get quite long. Often the whole point can be resolved in a five minute phone call. So ask yourself, will this be easier to talk through? Will the back and forth emails take too long? If yes, don’t be afraid to pick up the phone!

 
This may not be what they teach in GSCE business studies, but if we all apply these tips we’ll all be much happier receivers of email, and our inboxes might be a little more manageable.

If you’d like to chat about how we can help you communicate better with your users, get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.

About Ali Carmichael

Ali (or Alasdair) is an experienced project manager who loves his Gantt charts and milestones! He has over 12 years' experience managing successful online experiences for world class brands. Ali is responsible for ensuring our clients love what we do for them. Follow Ali on twitter @AliJCarmichael

As with any topic in the field of interactive media, it’s tough to know where to start if you want to learn more about user experience (UX). Many of our clients find our newsletter and blog useful, they might read other blogs and read the occasional book but rarely get the time or budget to attend formal training (either with us or elsewhere). Many of the organisations and charities we work with are finding less training budget available each year and are struggling to find viable learning opportunities.

We’re often asked for recommendations for ways to learn more about UX. Although we have plenty of books and blogs we can suggest, we’ve struggled to recommend courses people can do in their own time for little budget. So we’ve been doing some research to put together this list of short courses you can do in your own time for free or without breaking the bank. In this guide you should find plenty of inspiration for courses specifically about UX or in a related field.

We have grouped the courses into three categories: free, pay per course, and paid subscriptions. Under each of those categories, we’ve grouped the courses by source website. Each course gives a summary outline of what’s covered and who delivers the course material so it shouldn’t be too hard to assess credibility.

Free short courses

Coursera.org

Human-Computer Interaction

Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative

Gamification

Udemy.com

Introduction to Web and eCommerce User eXperience Design

Pay per course

Udemy.com

Practical Statistics for The User Experience I ($199)

How To Develop & Document Personas & Scenarios ($89) 

Secrets of Intuitive & Usable Design: The Conceptual Model ($179)

Web Usability Made Simple ($199)

Design Your User Experience in 7 Simple Steps ($197)

How To Develop & Document A Task Analysis ($129)

Optimizing The Early Phases of Innovation ($20)

UXDesignEdge.com

UX Design Basics ($295)

Uie.com Virtual Seminars

A range of future and past virtual seminars offered from $129 per seminar

Paid subscription

Lydia.com (Subscription from $25/month or $250/year)

Interaction Design Fundamentals

Fireworks CS5: Rapid Prototyping

Interaction Design: Process and Inspiration

Dale Herigstad & Schematic, Interactive Design Agency

Web Form Design Best Practices

Hot Studio, Experience Design

Web Accessibility Principles

Pluralsight.com (subscription from $29/month or $299/year)

Creating User Experiences: Fundamental Design Principles

We hope you find this a useful learning resource for UX. If you have any other suggestions for short courses you can complete online, in your own time let us know so we can keep this list up to date. If you give one of the courses a try, we’d love to hear how you get on with it.

If you’d like to talk to us about bespoke UX training please get in touch, alternatively you can keep on top of what’s new in the field of user experience with our monthly newsletter (sign-up below).

About Damian Rees

Damian has worked as a usability and user experience consultant for over 13 years. He has worked in senior roles within companies like the BBC and National Air Traffic Services where he has researched and designed for users in a variety of different contexts including web applications, voice recognition, and air traffic control interfaces. Follow Damian on twitter @damianrees

When usability testing charity websites we see the same user need being unfulfilled time and again. Before making a decision to donate, volunteer, or fundraise for you, users need to know where the money goes.

They’ve heard about charities eating up all the money themselves and only a small amount getting to the people who need it. They want to know your charity isn’t like that. But you also know that users aren’t going to read your AGM notes and won’t invest time reading about your financial structure. So what do you do? In this article we’ll show you some of the sites doing it well and give you some inspiration on how to fix your site to generate more online donations.

Offer a simple ‘where the money goes’ graphic

The simplest way to show users their money is going to the right place is to show them where the money goes using a basic graphical representation of the income you receive and what happens to the money. Users just need a simple understanding to tick the box in their mind which either adds you to the credible list, or puts you in the reject pile. Here are some examples of how some charities have done this well:

Unicef provide a page summarising where the money goes with a simple pie chart and a summary of their spending in 2010. A little out of date and wordy, but still a useful overview.

Plan UK is one of our clients and testing showed that users struggled to understand where the money was going. We recommended they create content for this and then in subsequent usability tests we found it worked well.

Oxfam provide a very simple overview using a pie chart. Like Unicef they also provide a useful understanding to show what happens to the money from every £1 donated. This is a great example of how to cover this off for users in a very small piece of real estate with a link to find out more.

Action Aid take more of an infographic approach which incorporates a summary of what happens with the money donated as well as a good overview of how users can help.

Centrepoint show that a pie chart isn’t the only way to show this information with a very simple breakdown of where their money is spent.

Key takeaways

• Show simple overview of where the money goes, a simple pie chart is enough (Unicef, Oxfam, Plan UK)
• Infographics can be a useful way to demonstrate lots of information easily (ActionAid)
• A breakdown of how the money has been spent is useful (Centrepoint)
• Simplifying the spend in terms of pence in a pound is useful (Oxfam, Unicef)

Provide evidence of what impact the money has had

For some users seeing a basic overview of where the money goes is enough to move them on to donations. However, for other users in our research, we’ve seen them look more into what the charity has actually achieved. They get an overall sense of what causes it supports, but often we observed users seeking direct evidence and tangible examples of what impact the charity has had. Users want to see the good their money can do.

Ideally they want to see brief case studies and news stories showing some of the recent success stories you’ve had. Giving them a basic overview of some recent projects with some engaging content such as video and photos would be a fantastic start, however we struggled to uncover many good examples of easy to find summaries of the impact voluntary support and donations have had. Our recommendation is to stop hiding this content deep in the site in impact reports, newsletters, and PDFs and bring it right to the front of the website. Show the proof of what successes big or small you’ve had in the last year. Here are some of the better examples we found, but we did struggle to generate many great examples:

Oxfam provide an area titled ‘The impact of our work’ which provides compelling video and imagery. The layout of the content also allows users to scan the content and get a good overview of what Oxfam are doing.

Shelter provide an excellent visual slideshow which takes users through a summary of their recent achievements. The content is visual, doesn’t take too long to go through, and easy to digest.

War Child offer a video highlighting the impact of their work last year. Users get an excellent visual overview of what the charity has been doing.

Comic Relief offer an excellent statistical view of the difference they have made. This is an excellent way to deliver a lot of information in an easy to glance manner.

Key takeaways

• Not many charities do this well
• A well presented statistical summary is a useful option if you want to avoid detailing recent projects (Comic Relief)
• Simple and easily digestible chunks of information showing this year versus last year is useful (Shelter)
• Videos and images offer compelling ways to show impact (Oxfam, War Child)
• Using inclusive language such as ‘see for yourself’, ‘we did this’ helps users engage (Oxfam)
• A section called ‘2011 highlights’ is a useful home for this content (War Child)

Helping users understand where the money goes and what impact their support will have in tangible, easy to understand ways is critical to receiving more support through your website. With these examples you have some inspiration to take action on your website. If you’d like to talk to us about how we can help you generate more revenue and support online, please get in touch.

About Damian Rees

Damian has worked as a usability and user experience consultant for over 13 years. He has worked in senior roles within companies like the BBC and National Air Traffic Services where he has researched and designed for users in a variety of different contexts including web applications, voice recognition, and air traffic control interfaces. Follow Damian on twitter @damianrees

We have a fairly simple theory here at Experience Solutions; if a design doesn’t work, it’s usually because the designer’s motivation and passion was lacking. We use the term ‘designer’ fairly loosely here. It may be an individual designer working on a website, a small team of architects working on a building, or a whole project team working on a completely new product or service for a company.

Whatever the definition the role of designer is critical to the success of the project. The difference between a passionate, highly motivated design team can be enormous compared to a jaded, restless, and unmotivated team. To help identify what type of designers you’re working with we’ve identified 3 types of designer motivation;

Motivation 1 – Maintaining security – If a designer is motivated because of job security alone you are likely to have problems. He or she will work competently for fear of losing their job, that next promotion or their next big pay cheque. This is a common motivation for design work, and more often than not, designers will create solutions because they are told to and paid to, and not because they want to.

Motivation 2 – Social acceptance & recognition – Some designers are motivated more by social acceptance. If they design something which is funky, cool or cutting edge, they’ll gain the respect of their peers. They may win awards or get a nice feature in an industry magazine. Sadly, the way design school works tends to encourage this behaviour. The constant sought after approval from tutors and peers through peer reviews and critiques means that student designers become accustomed to designing for designers. It’s the way the industry works too, it’s full of self-appreciative back slapping with awards, magazines and websites where other people gush about the latest and greatest.

Motivation 3 – Passion to stimulate change – Then there are those who design because of their passion for change. They see something wrong with the world and they believe it should be better. They dream of a better website, product or service, one that really works for the people using it, one that really solves the problem. These people really believe in what they do and their solutions come from the heart.

Passion is the key to successful design

It’s clear who you would want to design your project. So, how can you find someone who’s a passionate designer?

Spotting someone among the designer crowd should be fairly easy. When you’re looking through designer’s portfolios and discussing the job with them it’s a good idea to look at how they present previous jobs. Do they outline the problem they were solving, or do they just focus on the design they came up with? Do they talk about why they worked on the project, or do they prefer to quickly move on to the next job in their portfolio? Ask them about their biggest challenges and achievements and if you get the feeling that it’s all about awards, or a lack of real passion for what they were doing, you’ll know. Passion is hard to fake and you’ll know when you see it. It’s in the eyes, the tone of voice, and in the little details offered to you that you didn’t ask for.

But, what if you’re not in a position to select a new designer? Or you’ve found a designer who was passionate on different kinds of projects to this one. Well, the honest truth is that you might not be able to get them passionate about something that doesn’t flick their switch. Some people just won’t get excited by the project and they won’t be able to get fully behind it. Let’s face it, designing some services are much more exciting than others. They may well still be professional, but you might not get the added boost of passion that will make the difference behind an OK project and a great one. However, there are some things you can do to stimulate the passion in your designers:

1) Clearly define the problem

It sounds obvious, but you may not have set out clearly the purpose for the project. If you have to, write out a clear mission statement and clearly explain the reason why the problem exists. It can be really useful to get people to engage using a powerful story. For a really good read on how to use stories to influence this book ‘The Story Factor’ is excellent

2) Show them the bigger picture

Broaden the scope and show them how this project is connected to the wider picture. What else is reliant on this project working? What is reliant on that? Where do their efforts fit into it all? Although the project may not inspire them, the bigger picture might connect with them more.

3) Show them why it matters

Use real people wherever you can to show them why the problem exists. Get the end users of the system to demonstrate the issues or to talk to them in person about what they need and why it doesn’t work for them now. Help them see the people who will benefit and the real end result of their efforts.

4) Inspire them

Show them great examples of other solutions already in existence. Talk about why these work, give them details of how the solution works and what impact it has had. If you can’t find any directly relevant that’s ok, you can choose some from a different industry. The key here is to show your passion for good design to stimulate theirs too.

5) Talk about the future

Talk to them about what will happen when the project is a success. Vividly describe what a successful project looks like and talk to them about where they might get involved later down the line. If this project doesn’t excite them, but working on the bigger issue does, then they should be able to connect and see past the short term.

Don’t wait for them to ‘get passionate’, help them find it

Designers who really believe in the problem they are trying to solve are motivated to make a positive difference. It’s clear that your project needs as many of these people as you can get. Designers who are focused on security or peer recognition are driven to produce work which will not fully deliver for the people who need to use the solution. There are some clear ways to spot designers who are truly passionate, but there are also ways to stimulate the passion in those that don’t yet have it. Primarily, they need to fully understand the problem before they’ll properly engage in the solution. So don’t rely on others to find their own passion, help them understand the bigger picture to stimulate their passion.

About Damian Rees

Damian has worked as a usability and user experience consultant for over 13 years. He has worked in senior roles within companies like the BBC and National Air Traffic Services where he has researched and designed for users in a variety of different contexts including web applications, voice recognition, and air traffic control interfaces. Follow Damian on twitter @damianrees

If you live in the UK, you’ll be hard pressed to avoid The Olympics at the moment. One of the main talking points, certainly for Londoners is the traffic nightmare expected to jam the roads, underground, buses and trains. In anticipation, the powers that be have set up a website which is advertised to help people avoid traffic chaos: www.getaheadofthegames.com.

Unfortunately, we feel the website doesn’t live up to the hype and we’re surprised the user experience was so poor. Instead of moaning about it, we thought we’d use it as an example to help you avoid similar user experience issues cropping up on your website.

1. Your homepage should focus on building credibility and leading users to the main reason for their visit

Your homepage should deliver a clear, coherent message about who you are and what you offer. Any confusion or mixed messages lead to high bounce rates as users click the back button to return to the search results.

The first impressions of the getaheadofthegames.com website are that it looks like some kind of affiliate website. The use of clipart and the cheap looking logo don’t foster immediate credibility. In addition, the huge map of the UK and live twitter feed capture attention but offer very little value to the first time user who is most likely looking to plan a journey in a specific area. Although the dropdown is placed high up on the homepage to allow users to filter by their location, this could be missed by users as the pink headings, blue buttons and large green and pink map dominate attention.

The ‘plan your journey’ which we anticipate to be the biggest user requirement for the site is given much less priority in the design by being placed in the bottom right corner. Even less prioritised are the official logos behind the site, which are placed at the bottom of the page.

Its so important to establish credibility quickly. If we were working with getaheadofthegames.com we would recommend that they reorganise the layout of their homepage to de-prioritise the map and twitter feed, and instead boost the journey planner and spectator user journeys.

2. Check that any advertising and call to action buttons deliver what users expect

When setting expectations in advertising or even in the labelling on a call to action button, be sure to deliver on that expectation. If you offer a ‘book now’ button make sure users can actually start booking straight away after clicking that button.

We would expect most people coming to the getaheadofthegames.com website to be focused on solving a travel related problem. They are likely to be either looking for the best way to travel to the Olympics as a spectator, or as far away as possible so they can travel freely to their destination. Although the site offers links to ‘plan a journey’ and ‘are you a spectator’ clicking on those links takes users to a page full of text and links to other websites.

If you set an expectation in an advert or other marketing material which promises to solve a problem for your customer, make sure you can easily deliver the solution. The getaheadofthegames.com website offers help but then passes the buck and links off to several different sources. This is likely to frustrate and overwhelm users looking for a simple answer to their travel problem. We would recommend that the getaheadofthegames.com website worked more closely with other content providers to embed journey planning tools into the site rather than linking off to a variety of different locations.

3. Don’t blow your budget on ‘cool functionality’ which doesn’t offer a great deal to users

Although you and your team may be excited by some funky new gadget, widget or tool, be very clear with yourselves on the reasons why you are including it in your site. If the honest answer is that you think its cool and you want to learn more about it, you probably shouldn’t do it. Focus on whether it will really solve a problem that users need solving. When we conduct user experience research, we often speak to clients confused why their site isn’t delivering on their business objectives. When we delve a little deeper, we find that users don’t use the features they spent most of their budget and attention on developing because they don’t see the value.

Sadly, getaheadofthegames.com have clearly spent a lot of resources in developing a nicely designed, very visual, interactive travel disruption tool. Sure, it looks good and works seamlessly, but do users really need it? If you’re trying to get from Waterloo station to Russell Square, do you really need this tool to tell you that stations on the District Line from Wimbledon to Earls Court are likely to be much busier than normal? Showing the whole underground map with a date slider at the top looks interesting, but the amount of information displayed is overkill for the average user.  Is this a case of designing a cool tool, but not thinking about how much it actually solves the problem users face?

Perhaps we’re being a little harsh but we believe that simply focusing on core user needs will lead to innovative features and functionality which are exciting and really useful. If we had been involved in the getaheadofthegames.com project we would have made sure we fully understood user requirements at the outset to ensure all features and functionality were clearly mapped to priority user needs.

How to take action on your website

1) Take a look at your website right now. Ask yourself, does your homepage demonstrate how credible you are? This is particularly important for the lesser known brands. Do you make a case for why users should stay on your site? Now take a critical look at whether you’re offering a simple next step for users to start their journey. If there are more than 3 things shouting for their attention you probably want to remove the less important ones.

2) The next thing on your to do list is to take a look at whether your promises in adverts are actually realistic. Take a look at your print adverts, your banner ads, paid search ads, email marketing, and any other marketing material. Are you setting realistic expectations for users? Does your site really deliver? Now take a look at the journey from the ad through to your website. Is the journey simple? Does each step make sense? Do call to action buttons deliver on expectations? Can you remove unnecessary distractions?

3) The final thing you can do is less immediate. Next time you’re in a strategy meeting discussing planned changes for your site. Look out for any suggestions of cool content or functionality and ask if users really need it. If in doubt, ask for some budget to do some user research to clarify whether users really need it.

Running a website that really helps users is tough, and websites like getaheadofthegames.com are a good example of what to avoid.

About Damian Rees

Damian has worked as a usability and user experience consultant for over 13 years. He has worked in senior roles within companies like the BBC and National Air Traffic Services where he has researched and designed for users in a variety of different contexts including web applications, voice recognition, and air traffic control interfaces. Follow Damian on twitter @damianrees