Raitis Linde

You probably have experienced brand new changes in user interface of Youtube. If not, you can opt-in there. In case, if you dislike it just opt-out.

First thing that i noticed – they have removed 5 star rating system and replaced it with a 2 rating system – like / dislike. Is the 2 rate system better? Well, generally it depends, but Youtube data shows that the 5 star rating system is not as effective as it could be, as most of people use marginal ratings – either 1 (dislike) or 5 (like).

For those, who are facing a decision of what kind of feedback solution use into web interfaces, Yahoo has a good library of those. But I am sure there is always a room for innovative user interface solutions solving a particular dilemma

Youtube angagement with users

It is possible to gather an interesting information by researching what happened in the past (looking back). However, many interesting things (innovation, improvements) happen by going forward into the unknown. It is interesting how Youtube engages with users online (and I am sure – offline as well). That includes posting on blog and listening at feedback (that includes republished articles at other places), providing platform for users to express their product ideas, roundtable discussions, one-on-one conversations with the community. Data from a support forum could be used as well.

I am thrilled to discover more and more channels in receiving user feedback both online and offline. However, such corporations as Google (and Youtube), Microsoft etc. has advantages in data available leading towards better data-driven decisions and innovations. For companies with limited resources offline qualitative research techniques (including provoking discussions with provotypes, engaging users in workshops, testing prototypes) could help better.

feedback, hci, ui, user interface, user research, users, voting system, web, youtube

As the last course of our first master’s semester, we were allowed to choose our own project that reflects our interests. Even though I am coming from computer science background, I felt that I lacked enough chances to do a user research . That’s why I decided to design a User Experience (UX), because this involves large spectrum of work related to users and visual design. As a bases we (me and my teammate Jia) used a structure created by Jesse James Garrett.

In a 3 week period that we had, we wanted to plan a collaborative creative writing website and felt that this UX structure can help us to structure our way forward.

1. User needs and requirements

We started by brainstorming sessions with people in Latvia and China who are interested (and have experience) in creative writing. There we were able to determine general attitude towards idea, and we got a lot of useful ideas as well which we categorized in form of mind map diagrams with a FreeMind software which is quite easy to use (even though we were making mind maps for the first time). It was quite useful to put these on a wall for making decision of features and form of website. In my case I conducted a brainstorming session in Skype (because I was in Denmark at that time). In the beginning I was afraid if textual environment (Skype chat) will be enough to understand each other and if this space will be encouraging to share thoughts. However, it appeared to be a nice brainstorming, definetly longer than 30 minutes I planned in the beginning. And people were actually able to understand each other, argue for idea, and provide valuable inputs on idea.

We conducted also a competitor research which contributed a lot to our idea. Even more, there actually were some experiments going on about collaborative writing like A million penguins project. Comments of participators gave us also a good insight on collaborative writing and user needs.

2. Video scenarious

In a first step we have got general ideas for our website. By many user inputs we have got, we were actually able to create 4 main user groups, that resulted in different personas. As I noticed later, these personas did a great job in helping to make decisions like “Would these people use a story commenting feature?”. In the same time we created wireframes of most important webpages like frontpage, user account page, read a story page etc.

After that we wanted to do a more detailed user inquiry. In order to do that, we needed to show them what we have got until this time. So we decided to make these personas alive – make a video of different use cases (relevant for each persona) using wireframes that we have created. As an inspiration for videos we took a Paper Prototype scenario for Restaurant Tablet menu available on Youtube.

3. Detailed user inquiry

As we still learned throught this project, we searched an internet for inspiration in user research field. We have found a great resource of User Experience Research method comparison by Jakob Nielsen. By taking account our time limit and possible outcome, we chose to show video scenarious to the same people we had on brainstorming and ask them to fill out more detailed inquiry. For creating a detailed inquire we also have found a source of inspiration.

Results gave us impression on which features would be most important on our collaborative writing website. We also got some fresh understanding on how people would use it.

4. Final thoughts

Even though we didn’t manage to go through all User Experience stages, I felt that we have got a good insight on the User Experience field. It is a fun and pleasure to work with people, as there are unexpected and surprising output. However, it requires some work to open people’s mind and get non-trivial responses.

mind maps, personas, user experience, ux, ux elements, video scenarios, web design, wireframes