Learn about the UX of Photography from optimisation legend Craig Sullivan

As a keen photographer I’ve always been keen to work out how I can crowbar my hobby into my day job.

An ideal opportunity arose many years ago when I noticed major usability issues resulting from the choice of photography on all of my design projects.

I realised just how hugely important photos were to how people made buying decisions and how they responded emotionally to what they were seeing and how that then influenced what they thought and how they behaved.

It felt like photos were the unsung heroes of experience design.

At this point I realised I was onto something and set about trying to improve the effectiveness of online photography and ‘photo UX’ was born.

This mission resulted in many articles, talks and even a book to provide help and guidance to improve the situation given that there was a surprising lack of information on the topic available online.

One person who has always done some really pioneering work in this area is optimisation guru Craig Sullivan.

I loved reading his work on measuring the impact that using different photos had on conversion rates and it was a joy to see someone else (who actually had some data!) was also highlighting the impact that photos can have.

I was delighted to see recently that Craig has shared one of his excellent talks on optimising photography during which he shares some great advice from years of experience and what he’s learned from having run over 20 million tests!

@optimiseordie insights from split testing with different images of people

In his talk you’ll learn more about :

What the “Rule of 3” for images is
Why stock photography performs badly
How to shoot photos of people
Why you should experiment with photography
How to challenge bad thinking or photos
How to make your own photography guidelines
About the only book on this topic
Why iconography generally doesn’t work

Craig’s talk on the UX of Photography is available on YouTube

Optimise your ‘key service moments’

Within any service there are critically important ‘key service moments’ (for both the service user and provider) that result in significant problems if they are broken in some way.

I recently worked on a project investigating why the physical health check service for people with severe mental illness was underperforming.

This is a really complex service that consists of many individual touch points, interactions and activities on the part of the service user and provider and what became clear was that some were much more important than others.

One example of a key service moment was when patients had a doctors appointments.

Appointments made people feel really anxious.

Will I be feeling well enough to attend?

What if I bump into someone I know in the surgery and have to explain why I’m there?

How will I get to the appointment?

What if I get that unsympathetic doctor again?

What if I have to discuss my recent breakdown?

The experience that service users had at these key moments had a huge impact on their experience of it as a whole.

Their anxieties around them often resulted in them not attending appointment which had a huge impact upon the medical professionals ability to deliver a successful physical health check service.

It became very clear that in order to design a successful service you have to ensure that these moments work really well.

I recently bought a second hand car.

This process was unbelievably complicated and had a few key moments that stick in my mind.

Trying to negotiate a good price for something I know very little about was really difficult and not at all enjoyable. Sorting out the money for it was tricky and something I haven’t done before.

There were also ‘key moments’ from the perspective of the dealer too. It became clear that it was really important for them to sell me add on products such as gap insurance, alloy wheel protection, paint protection, service plans etc in order to maximise their revenue.

In this instance my ‘key moments’ and theirs did not match but in some services this might be the case, presenting an obvious sweet spot to optimise, resulting in benefits for everyone.

When designing services it’s critical to identify and focus on optimising these ‘key moments’.

By focussing on them you benefit from ‘gearing’ in terms of the impact from optimising these things over others.

There are always too many problems to address at once so this approach also gives you a pragmatic method to prioritise where you spend your time and money in order to maximise your returns.

‘Every Mind Matters’ is live!

Last year during lockdown I had the pleasure of working with a great team at Public Health England to redesign the information architecture for their flagship mental health site, ‘Every Mind Matters‘.

The new site redesign went live recently to coincide with Mental Health Awareness Week, 2021.

The objective of the redesign work was to make it easier to help people find information that would encourage them to take action to help improve their own mental health.

It was a real privilege to work on such an important site that is receiving such huge volumes of traffic during the pandemic.

Find out more about the approach I took to the redesign over at the cxpartners blog.

UXBristol 2021 is go!

I’m over the moon to announce the wonderful line up of speakers that have kindly agreed to speak at UXBristol 2021.

The event this year will consist of 6 short talks on Friday 16th July that will all be streamed live and for free via YouTube.

Thanks so much to Mace & Menter and ADLIB for sponsoring the event.

You can register for the event, get more information on our website and follow us on Twitter for more announcements.

The livestream from the UXBristol 2020 is also available should you wish to get a feel for the event.

Try this simple trick to help you design better things

It can feel almost impossible sometimes to come up with creative ideas to create great product and service experiences on demand.

One trick I’ve taken to is to simply flip it and consider what qualities a terrible experience would have.

Imagine you were planning on giving a talk and wanted to make it enjoyable and educational for the audience.

That feels like a challenging brief.

Now consider what you’d need to deliver a really awful talk.

I reckon to do it really badly you’d need to:

Not start on time
Don’t tell people what you’re going to cover
Talk REALLY quickly
Use language that no one understands
Don’t let anyone else speak
Fill it with acronyms
Make sure all the tech fails
Make it REALLY long
Cram your slides full of tiny text
Take a few phone calls during the talk
Talk on a topic with no relevance to any of the attendees
Don’t have any breaks
Be really arrogant and condescending to everyone
Make anyone who asks a question feel stupid
Have some slides so ugly only your mother could love them

Coming to think of it I think I went to a meeting like this last week! ; )

It’s SO much easier (and more fun) to come up with what would make something awful than what would make something great.

So all you need to do is create the ‘awful experience’, flip it and do the opposite.

It works nicely too when you are faced with a situation when you can’t articulate what you want (let’s imagine from a new job).

I bet you’ll find it so much easier to articulate what you don’t want.

Simple!

The transformative benefits of an ‘experimental mindset’

One of the most useful mindset hacks I use regularly is to adopt an experimental mindset to so many things in my life.

At work, I use this to frame the investigation of ideas as experiments consisting of assumptions and hypotheses to be investigated by trying them out and seeing what happens.

By framing things as experiments, it gives you permission to try something out and more importantly to fail, learn and to progress.

So many people, organisations, products and services never improve because people are terrified of ‘failure’.

Designers are particularly susceptible to this, often feeling they are expected to know the answers and for their work to be perfect.

An experimental mindset gives you permission to just try something out and feels hugely liberating.

Benefits outside of work

It works in so many aspects of you life too.

Imagine you wanted to pack in your day job and become a writer.

That’s a bold, high risk move that requires a massive decision.

Cue procrastination and paralysis.

An experimental mindset gives you a way of progressing by asking yourself ;

“What would be the smallest/ fastest/ cheapest/ lowest risk experiment I could do that would let me try it out?”

You could ‘prototype’ the idea by setting up a free blog, by writing an article for a magazine or by setting yourself a brief with a tight deadline or just start writing something to see how it feels.

You may quickly realise that you like the idea of being a writer much more than the reality.

That’s a great result because you’ve learnt something really important, really quickly, with minimal investment, and you’ve still got your day job!

Fake it before you make it

Prototyping is absolutely critical to this because it flips you from daydreaming to doing.

It is also really enjoyable because it is playful, experimental and a hugely creative exercise.

Prototypes help you to learn quickly, try things out, communicate your ideas to others and highlight aspects of your idea that don’t work.

Prototypes can take many forms and allow you to fake it before you make it.

A pop up restaurant is simply a prototype restaurant. They’ve wisely invested the smallest amount of money possible to see if their idea is any good or not.

A ‘draft’ document is simply a prototype of a document.

A tweet might be a prototype for a book idea, representing minimal effort to explore reaction to an idea before any additional effort is invested.

Prototyping is critical because it helps you to make progress with something that previously felt like it was going nowhere because it felt too big, scary and complex to make a start on.

So the next time you’re faced with a decision or have an idea you want to explore, just think ‘what’s the smallest experiment I could do here to try this out’ and I guarantee it will help you to progress.