I presented at this webinar on January 11, 2012, along with Sucharita Mulpuru of Forrester Research and Nathan Richter of Monetate. My portion discussed the process that my company uses to identify, prioritize and implement tablet optimization initiatives.

The webinar is available onDemand for 90 days.

I recently appeared as a guest speaker at Rutgers University in their MLIS 512 Interface Design class. I spoke about heuristic evaluations and how they are used in the “real” world (versus the academic world).

I gave a presentation at the 2010 IA Summit entitled “Better Faceted Navigation: Advanced Design Techniques”. Description and slides after the jump.

Faceted navigation has become the standard search/browse interface for any website presenting a large catalog of items, but technology has improved drastically since the introduction of this concept, and the original interaction designs for this feature are becoming outdated. Using newer technologies such as (but not limited to) AJAX, we can now offer the user much more powerful tools to narrow the focus of their search. Advanced techniques in this area include multiple-value selections, visual navigation, range sliders and partial page refreshes, among others.

As with many innovations, however, when we expand beyond known best practices, many new questions emerge. What value does the ability to select multiple values for a given facet bring? Should all or part of the page reload? Which new UI widgets help the customer make a better decision, and which simply add noise and confusion? And what impact does each of these decisions have on the overall experience?

In this session aimed at IAs of all levels, we will answer these and other questions by reviewing emerging trends in faceted navigation and by sharing the learnings from Q V C’s design process, test results and implementation of an updated navigation. We’ll also take a look at some of the other sites attempting to innovate in this area and review how they performed in usability testing. Lastly, we’ll begin to build a new set of best practices for advanced faceted navigation interfaces.

ESPN recently redesigned their website (not sure exactly when) and has launched a new TV campaign to promote the site. If you haven’t seen the ads, watch below, then read:

In general, I find it interesting that they have chosen to promote the subdirectory URL (i.e. espn.com/somethingyouareinterestedin) aspect of the site, since, in my experience, novice users don’t always fully understand how to use those URLs (and clearly ESPN has to appeal to the entire population). Though I’ve found that people tend to find “domain.com/subdomain” clearer than the other method — “subdomain.domain.com”, in general they are far less likely to use a subdomain than to just go to the main site and look for the content they seek.

In spite of that larger issue, I noticed some other minor issues that could create big problems for the worldwide leader:

The voiceover states (verbatim), “espn dot com, slash… Bill Simmons, The Celtics, The Fighting Irish, Mike Golic, Serbian Table Tennis Sensation Biba Golic…” However, typing in espn.com/THEceltics does not work (caps for emphasis only). Nor does espn.com/THEfightingirish or espn.com/serbiantabletennissensationbibagolic! Ok, so maybe that last one is a bit of a stretch, and when they quickly run through the URLs at the end of the commercial, the “the” is gone (as is the “serbian…”), but still, shouldn’t the voiceover state the URL correctly?

I suspected another flaw was that they showed spaces in the names of multi-word items (i.e. Bill (space) Simmons), but typing the space into the URL actually works! Clearly somebody was thinking of these types of issues, so how did they miss the announcer stating “The Celtics”???

Another issue I noted is that when you go to espn.com, it automatically redirects you to espn.go.com, a relic of Disney’s failed “Go” network of the late 90s. From the homepage, however, if I type “slash” billsimmons on the end of the espn.go.com URL, it does not work. Only when I type the full URL from scratch (i.e. espn.com/billsimmons) does it point me to the right place. It took me a minute to figure this out — and I’m quite good at this stuff. Would a normal user try more than once, or figure it out if they did? Doubtful.

Even if users are ready for the whole “slash” concept, these minor inconsistencies will surely create problems for some people and force them to have a negative impact on the overall campaign. It would certainly be enlightening to see how these commercials do in terms of audience response and traffic to the website, though I guess the only way to find out would be if some ESPN employee (you know who you are) would tell me.

Sure, we lost a point in Foresee’s annual customer satisfaction rankings, but 2008 was a tough year. A strong number 3 behind Amazon and Netflix shows we’ve still got it.

See the rankings.

I presented at the 2008 Forrester Marketing Summit on how we used personas to prioritize features and functions during a recent site redesign. Read the report on our panel here (pdf).

I co-authored a paper on the effectiveness of distance communication that was presented at the 2008 STC Annual Conference.

It can be viewed here (pdf).

I led the team responsible for developing the mobile website UI as well as the text messaging scripts and prompts.

Read more here and here.

For the 2nd year in a row, I was asked to participate in a panel at eTail’s East Coast conference; I spoke on “Increasing the Quality of the User Experience”.

My comments about video are noted in this email marketing blog.

A year later, my comments are noted again in this article about video in email.

I was recently featured on Online Market World radio. Description of the interview:

QVC Chief Information Architect Mike Madaio shares QVC’s unified view of TV and online customers and what the company is doing to help deliver consistently great customer experiences across the board.

You can listen to the segment here.