The fact is there is so much more information available now – that we need intelligent design of it – and advanced filtering to see for ourselves. Reading my daily blogs and info updates I have recently seen a couple of interesting articles on the history of the Graphical User Interface. Of course, there is a wikipedia entry, but also a nice collection of GUIs found here as well.

At Macworld 2007, Steve Jobs rolled out the much-anticipated iphone (naming rights still pending;-) with a very slick user interface that only requires our fingers. This type of touch-screen interface already has competition from Microsoft, GE Healthcare, Mitsubishi and brilliant engineer Jeff Han who made his debut last year at TED 2006 and then had his video downloaded a quarter of a million times from YouTube to become on of the most popular tech videos of all time according to Fast Company.

Last week Guy Kawasaki riffed on the The Art of Visualization where he pointed to some very cool third-party graphical representations of his book The Art of The Start. He also linked to the Periodic Table of Visualization about how data and abstract thoughts can be visualized. I recognized many of my thoughts (and way cooler diagrams) on how we can visually explain our client’s businesses.

This visualization clarity is related to our love of Tufte’s information design books. The poster he sells of Napoleon’s March on Moscow in the Russian campaign of 1812 may be the best example of complex data being visually displayed for laymen to understand. Tufte offers an excellent course if interested.

Boxes and Arrows (with a brand new web interface themselves) has an interview online with Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice “The problem used to be, ‘how do we get information out to people?’ That problem has now been solved in spades. Now the problem is, ‘how do we filter the information so that people can actually use it?’”

One answer: user-centered design with multiple avenues to find the information that solves their needs – when they need it. Information Architects and Web Designers should all start with a better understanding of their audiences. Those personas and user profiles are not steps to be skipped, but instead are steps toward visual design that works.

In User Interface Design for Programmers, software guru Joel Spolsky describes it as:

“When you’re thinking about user interfaces, it helps to keep imaginary users in mind. The more realistic the imaginary user is, the better you’ll do thinking about how they use your product.… Thinking about a “real” person gives you the empathy you need to make a feature that serves that person’s need.…”

So how do things really look to your users? In this recent post from Joining Dots they have an interesting quote from Larry Bassidy, former CEO of Honeywell:

“Ask a CEO what kind of culture they have and they will describe the kind of culture they want, as if it exists, instead of describing what is really going on.”

They go on to wonder aloud if companies really “want” a user-centered design or collaboration and knowledge sharing or whether companies really want to impose guidelines within which users can publish intranet material. A difference between what they say and what they do.

Actually creating useful pages is far harder. We have found in user tests of our own web development, users say one thing and actually do another (they also frequently overstate their web-savviness – but that’s another topic;-). So just how can a developer use audience information and user personas to improve the visual medium? We all must have a more thorough understanding of the way people will use our sites and web application pages. Too frequently client directives like marketing, advertising, corporate opinions, and most often “how they sell” stand in the way of creating truly useful interfaces to “why customers buy.” Solve that one and your web application has a far greater chance for success.

Start 2007 with a renewed push for the way things look. Make resolutions that make you look at things differently. Review the masters of visual display who have solved far greater problems with elegant solutions. Have your newsreader search the web for useful insight. And don’t settle for “because that’s how we have always done it.” It’s all new again.

You can’t find many businesses today who don’t claim to be ‘design driven.’ Who doesn’t want to be the next Apple? But making that quantum shift from repetitive process-driven business to a more intuitive project-based one geared to customers is daunting.

Go to Amazon and search for “Business Creativity” books and you will see almost 3000 results. Industries who have been investing in design far longer than the current crop of business books need to get religion about design again. Software and web developers need to refocus – especially if the business buyers believe design can help them differentiate.

Microsoft has arguably as many Design and User Interface employees as any major corporation, but they have a dismal record of creating user-preferred design. Apparently Vista has 9 different ways that users can shut off a laptop. Friday’s BusinessWeek article claims “that Vista, for all its capabilities, could end up being too complex for the average consumer.” Joel Spolsky covered the Vista shut-down this week and says that “the more choices you give people, the harder it is for them to choose, and the unhappier they’ll feel.”

We have recently needed to adjust a user interface in a Section 508 compliant design that can be read in software like JAWS. As a result we are looking at established conventions and lower browser standards. But it will make us ‘listen’ to the users as well as how they view our design. And it will make us rethink everything we design going forward.

Go back and read last year’s Fact Company article on The Business of Design. “Design-influenced companies also understand their customers at a profound level and mobilize around that insight.”

That is where we all should start.

Too many companies start their their online shopping experience with how the company is set up. Corporate organizational charts (focused on the inside view) take over the web solutions. Commerce stores are set up in the same silos that the company uses for financial reporting purposes. You can almost tell the organizational chart by their sales solutions.

Our experience with financial service companies finds that products and services are typically separate entities in the corporation. As a result customers need to self-select into the types of products that make sense for them. So depending on the level of knowledge a customer has, or the entry point to the site, or the targeted advertising banner rate quote, the customer quickly gets to a solution – just maybe not the best solution for them.

So how does a company understand that the potential site visitor needs to finance his daughters wedding? That ‘product’ doesn’t exist on a bank site. The solution may come from an “Any Day” loan, or an Equity product or a Card Product or some sort of unsecured borrowing that can only happen when the bank listens to the need. That kind of listening can only happen by improving customer relationships.

If you are trying to improve your site for the Holidays you have probably missed the window for a major redesign effort which could improve your online relationships. But what you do have time for is improving what you have right now.

This Holiday season more companies intend to improve their relationships with some old fashioned technology – and still the only ‘killer app’ – email. In a recent WebTrends survey 80% of retailers stated that regular customer email is their preferred method for building relationships.

There are tons of email marketing sites that can help improve yours, but this recent article shows 3 successful ways to improve response without using discounted prices as the driver. Make your emails relevant; Time them to the season’s buying habits; and take advantage of key repurchase behavior. Repurchase behavior is key since it means you know about your customers.

More companies improved customer relationships this year with the addition of live chat and personalized promotions. Look at Bank of America’s Mortgage. The minute you land on those pages, a liveperson pop-up asks if you need assistance now. Liveperson did small sample interviews that showed users spend an average of 20 hours online each week and that 17% of the time is dedicated to research and comparison of products. Those shoppers spend more than $1000 online each year.

Customer relationships are expensive to start and invaluable to improve on. Use the information you have right now to improve yours. Why do customers buy from you in the first place? What parts of your site are most popular? Are there repeat sales of similar items? Do your customers ask for items that you have but can’t be found on your site? Can you cross-promote similar items better by using existing customer data? How can you better solve the needs of site visitors?

Someone once said that web users can really only do 4 things on any web site: Research, Purchase, Entertain themselves or Flee.

Help your customers research and purchase from you. See if you can’t speed up their getting information from you. Conduct a series of conversations with them through email or personalized content on your site. Use your ears and listen to what they need. Do everything you can to avoid the last of the 4. Flight means no return.

Take the steps to make sure your customers enjoy their Holidays.

The dollars and cents part of the equation is maybe even harder to fathom. Costs are rising at rates 2-5 times the cost of living. Small business can’t afford to face 20+% increases each year for their health care. U.S. health care costs have risen from 4.4 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1950, to 9 percent in 1980, to 12.4 percent in 1990 and to 15.4 in 2005.

In this country we spend more money on health care than any other in the world and yet the result is many are forced into bankruptcy (Health Affairs article) We have a much higher obesity rate that any other of the 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and rank in the lowest third in life expectancy and per capita number of physicians (2006 OECD Health Data) in that group. Are we getting what we pay for?

Fortune 1000 companies are removing the lifetime health care benefits that our parents assumed because it is bankrupting them. The Ford Motor Company unbelievable announcement of early retirement packages for 75,000 employees is now being criticized as maybe not enough. In a Detroit Free Press editorial one of the concerns raised of the cuts is that unless the company gets major concessions from the unions largely on health care and retirement costs, Ford may need to make even deeper cuts in 3 years. (Free Press Editiorial article)

Demand is the third leg of the stool. With the first of the baby boomer generation turning 60, their tremendous numbers will stretch health care in the US for the next few decades. Even now the industry has become perhaps the most influential one in our economy. Michael Mandel quotes in a recent BusinessWeek article “Healthcare Economy” that 1.7 million jobs have been created in the health care industry since 2001. The rest of the private sector have created none in comparison (BusinessWeek article).

So its easy to agree that it is a big problem. What better way to make a big problem smaller than to make it easier to understand?

Many more Americans are opting to work on their own and will face the task of insuring themselves. Health care needs to become like retirement plans – something we all take charge of.

Enter – Consumer Driven health care and the chance to all of us to more firmly understand that each trip to the doctor’s office doesn’t just cost the $20 copay.

Consumer driven plans and tools are giving consumers more information and the chance to shop for services. Quality care, risk assessment, personalized health info like claims data and rx prescriptions gives average user the chance to save money by making intelligent health care choices. In a PricewaterhouseCoopers (press) release, the summary is that the “Current health plan trends to promote provider pay-for-performance, transparency, consumer engagement, and healthy lifestyles have the potential to mitigate future cost increases and address some root cost drivers.” In other words, if consumers treat health care like they treat every other major purchase they make maybe the costs can be managed to a more acceptable curve. And the only logical choice for making that “research” function really rich is online.

Consumers for health care information come from all walks of life. In user tests that we conducted for hospital systems, we found at least 11 different types of online user for health care information. They range from people nervous about delivering their first child to those who need nutritional information (ie diabetes) to folks worried about a loved one going into surgery. They have various levels of internet savvy. They all have a need to find the information that will lesson their anxiety.

A collection of links to third parties doesn’t do that. It is more confusing. An entry screen designed by the back-end data base team probably doesn’t get it either. An enterprise solution has far too little customization in most cases. What we have found it boils down to is design that is simple to use – for everyone – and easily understandable.

Consumers want choice in everything else they purchase. And the internet has been a boom to informational gathering on consumer products from books to music to automobiles to homes. It is about time we all think about health care the same way.

New York Times economics columnist, Virgina Postrel believes we are just at the beginning of a time when ‘design’ and form factor will prove beneficial. Her book The Substance of Style gives case after case of style influencing the purchase decision. In sexy technology toys like laptops and game cubes as well as everyday items like a toilet brush – design matters for sales.

Consumers are expecting smart design in their purchases. They are expecting to see it in products from vacuum cleaners Dyson to MP3 players iPod to automobiles “BMW:5.

Obviously this applies online. Web applications that make sense and are easy on the eyes have higher success metrics. Jakob Nielsen included one of our own case studies 3 years ago in his ROI for Usability Whitepaper. His metrics were for sales and conversion rates as well as user performance or productivity. Granted, gathering a true mathmatical measurement of design improvements is squishy, the underlying results of our examples are that online sales can improve dramatically if design is appreciated.

There are still only a handful of hugely successful online sales stories (Amazon, Cisco, Dell, Apple, GAP) but more and more evidence that the Internet is being used for research and comparison shopping.

As trust in online security increases that awareness and knowledge of a product or service will continue over the vintage advertising continuum toward prefernce, conviction and ultimately purchase. Those final purchase decisions will be guided by preferred “Design” that doesn’t stand in the way of commerce.

Content from 2003 Opinion – Last Mile is the Interface

During the telecom build out, many access-providers estimated the huge cost of building out fiber to the end user, commonly called the last mile. Specifically the last mile of fiber to our houses was estimated to be exponentially more costly than the corporate build out that was well underway. Today fiber is currently available in many downtown locations, but is generally less available to other customer locations because of this cost (as described here).

Many ‘last mile’ projects went unfinished with the collapse of the dot-com boom, but more of the general population has Internet access today than ever before. Internet usage is now approximately 59% of the American adult population and has not been severely hindered by the lack of fiber to our homes. (Pew Internet & American Life Project)

It is the rare consumer today who can imagine a world without Ebay or Amazon. Cisco and Dell have sold billions of dollars of their gear through their web sites and without the intervention of any salesperson. And the medium is truly still developing.

Entire markets have been changed and retail may never be the same again. Who hasn’t comparison shopped online this holiday season? Houses, automobiles, electronics, and many more luxury items can all be researched and purchased online. And as a result, corporations continue to spend on developing next generation Internet applications. Internet developers are still spending billions (or trying to save them using offshore development teams) to improve their features and functionality.

But, there is a tremendous disconnect as companies try to enhance their online offerings without real customer inputs. Internet technology cannot magically make these companies better. Customer inputs can. The ‘Last Mile’ of successful Internet development is not broadband or fiber access – it is applications that work the way customers expect them to.

User-focused development means connecting business goals and user needs into a cohesive easy-to-understand solution that simplifies transactions for online users. This process also happens to give the highest return on investment for corporate clients.

According to Jakob Nielsen, “on average across many test tasks, users fail 35% of the time when using web sites.” (Nielsen article) His data shows that users accessing web applications only succeeded 45% of the time. And the holy grail of online goals, shopping on e-commerce sites, was only 56% successful. These are failing grades for any business and those types of results are costing companies billions of dollars in lost online sales.

Forrester Research showed where positive online experience leads to loyalty in their June 2001 report. “Forrester’s Consumer Technographics® data shows that 42% of US Web buying consumers made their most recent online purchase because of a previous good experience with the retailer.”

It makes sense. Do you return to stores where you get poor service? The Internet is a medium capable of serving our needs immediately (with a slight lag for shipping). Successful e-commerce sites take customers completely across the advertising spectrum from awareness to preference to purchase in a seamless manner. The smoother that process, the more online sales result.

Research from various sources has shown that simply by providing sufficient product information at the right time, you can dramatically increase online sales. UI Enginerring did a study in 2001 that showed a 225% increase in online sales as a result of this tactic

As your company evolves your online applications, focus on the “Last Mile” and ask the hard questions. How can we make this easier for our customers to do business with us? Customer-focused answers will amaze even the most frugal technology planners as they watch their investments start to pay off.