Branding Exercise Leaves Fish Dead, Owl Satisfied, Drupalers sad

Ezra — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 15:24:20 +0000

A routine branding exercise went awry early Friday in Brooklyn when Growing Venture Solutions performed a "mind map" exercise to aid in the creation of logos for two of their flagship products, the Scout hosted sercurity review service and COD, the Conference Organizing Distribution for Drupal.

"Connecting to the unintellectualized, visceral, gut responses we get from each logo helps us maximize branding potential so that we can produce marketing collateral that's sure to engage members of our target market segments, helping them to connect to each brand at an emotional level, which results in increased conversions" said social media expert Robert H. McJellyPants. He added, "Tachyon converter beam subspace electron resonance tuning."

Unfortunately, while exercise participants were discussing their friendly, communal associations with schools of smiling fish in the COD logo, as well as some of the more stern, defensive associations evoked by the Scout owl logo, the owl took flight and picked up the fish, instantly crushing the fish's vital internal organs with its beak.

Illustration by Carl Wiedemann.

Needless to say, participants were horrified at the sudden attack by the owl but impressed by its swift, decisive action in the face of what the owl saw as a potential security risk to its personal website, SupercuteCatsWearingWigsandSmallDressesTailoredEspciallyforCatsNoThisisnotajoke.com/website.

McJellypants expressed concern, saying "This is highly unusual for a branding exercise, and the attack could be a step in the wrong direction for both brands. It may cause people to construe the owl as reckless and aggressive, rather than defensive and wise." He pointed out that "[i]t makes the COD logo more similar to the previous one, which was also a dead fish," referring to the public domain image of an Atlantic cod that previously represented the Conference Organizing Distribution.

COD has been used to power many feature-rich conference websites for DrupalCamps, the recent DrupalCon Chicago conference, as well as non-Drupal events in the United States, India and Australia.

When asked to justify the attack, the owl provided participants with helpful information about the specific security vulnerability it claimed was presented by the fish. However, for more information, it directed them to its "Scout Automated Plus" and "Scout Enterprise" solutions, where Drupal security experts explain potential vulnerabilities on specific sites—and the steps to mediate them—in great detail.

Despite having clear expertise in Drupal security, it was reported in several tweets on Friday that the owl's personal site had the full HTML input format enabled for anonymous commenters early Friday morning. The issue appears to be resolved as of the publication of this article, though one comment on the site by "IttyBittyPrettyWittyKittyCommitteeinNewYorkCitySingingaDitty36" appeared to show a properly escaped cross-site scripting attack probe, and read, <script>alert('XSS Vulnerable Meeeeow');</script>

When reached for comment, the owl tried to bite off my face.

Two of the mind-map exercise attendees posted a re-enactment of the event to YouTube. Note: the mind map was done on a boat.

Usability Testing of Ubercart and Uc_signup

evelyn — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 01:08:30 +0000

Ezra Glidesgame has been writing a module to integrate the Signup module for managing event registration with the Ubercart e-commerce module: Signup integration for Ubercart (short name: uc_signup). The uc_signup registration process was designed to support a wide variety of use cases (one user potentially signing up multiple other users for different events, in different quantities) while still being easy to use. We wanted to see what users thought of the preliminary uc_signup registration process, so in June we ran a small usability test here at the Growing Venture Solutions office. The test revealed several subtle and interesting findings that applied to the uc_signup module, the Ubercart checkout process, and specific aspects of the client site's configuration.

First, some background on the project

AUSSIE provides professional development in the field of K-12 education. One of their services is to offer workshops around the country, with registration done through their website. Uc_signup is being written to give AUSSIE more control of the look and administration of their sign-up process, and internalize their events management, which is currently being hosted by Eventbrite. The improved Aussie site is scheduled to launch in August.

About our Usability Participants

We recruited 4 participants having the following profile characteristics:

Two men and two women between the ages of 29-36
All with general office experience and good computer proficiency
All use the internet daily, with a range of 3 to 40 hours per week
Internet purchasing comfort level: comfortable to strongly prefer
Three of the participants had previously signed up online for classes or workshops

Participants were recruited prior to testing with the assistance of requests to FFF (“Friends of Friend and Family”). Participants were compensated $50 for their time. (Read this article about tester compensation.)

Where/How
We hosted the tests in our office, running a scaled back development version of the AussiePD site. We used Camtasia Studio for screen and audio/video capture. Present at each session were the moderator (me) and 1 to 2 observers.

Collected data:

Participant background information, and their internet usage experience
Observation of tasks performed – errors, obstacles, comments
Participants’ impression of the sign-up process – in discussion and in writing

Test & Findings:
Participants were asked to sign up and purchase tickets for two fictional workshops. The overall task performance was successful; each participant was able to complete the tasks within the expected time frame. In post-test discussions and surveys, participants all agreed that the sign-up and checkout process were what they expected and typical of what they’ve used in other online purchasing experiences.

However, all participants made similar minor errors and/or encountered obstacles, with varying degrees of recovery.

Finding #1- Purchaser not entering atendee e-mail addresses

On the first registration screen users are asked to enter an e-mail address for each person attending the workshop. One user simply entered the attendees' names and because uc_signup was still in relatively early development, the submission went through unchallenged.

Suggested fixes:
1. Change the screen title from “Attendee Information” to “Attendee E-mail Addresses”.
2. Validate the information entered.
* FIXED: http://drupal.org/node/525542

Finding #2 - Entering full name in “First Name” profile field

For every email address entered that does not have a corresponding account on the Drupal site, uc_signup allows the purchaser to fill out the configured core Profile fields and create a new account. Without custom theming, the first and last name profile fields appeared on different lines.

Three of four participants entered full names in the “First name” field and had to correct themselves after they tabbed down and saw the “Last name” field. Two participants made this error more than once.

Suggested fix:
We recommended that this page be themed so that the first and last name fields are on the same line. Since these fields are configurable Profile module fields, they are specific to the AUSSIE project.

Finding #3 - "Previous" is the default submit button on the multi-step attendee information form

Next/Previous step buttons appear at the bottom of the 2-step attendee information form. Because the "previous" button was the first in the form, it became the default submit button. That meant that users would enter information, press enter expecting to go to the next step, and get sent to the previous one.

Suggested fix:
As a short term fix, we reversed the order of these two buttons. However, that results in an awkward button order for left-to-right readers.

A better long term solution exists as part of the issue mentioned below, which proposes making each step of the form appear at its own path.

Posted issue: http://drupal.org/node/540136

Finding #4 – Purchaser Confusing “Country” drop-down for “State” drop-down

On the Ubercart's “Delivery Information” pane, three participants mistook the “Country” drop-down box for a “State” drop-down box, inadvertently selecting “Canada” (presumably because they were looking for a word starting with the letter “C” for “Colorado”.)

Confusion can also be attributed to the fact that it is more typical to find the country selector, if there is one, to be the last line of an address sequence.

Suggested fixes:
1. Since “Country” needs to precede “State/Province” in order to populate states and provinces, we suggest moving the “Country” drop-down out of the address sequence – perhaps before the Attendee name, or
2. Replace pre-populated City and Country dropdowns with text fields, eliminating the state/province field's dependence on the country field.
* Posted issue: http://drupal.org/node/529108

Finding #5 – Purchaser Unintentionally clicking “Remove” checkbox

When viewing their workshop in the shopping cart page, two participants clicked the "Remove" box next to the item, as if to confirm the selection.

Suggested fixes:
1. Move the location of the “Remove” checkbox to the left of the “Qty.” so that it is more visually connected to the idea of quantity, and/or
2. Perhaps change the word “Remove” to something like: “Remove?” or “Delete?” to make it appear less like a confirmation selection, or
3. Replace the remove checkbox with a "remove" button, like on Amazon.com.
* Posted issue: http://drupal.org/node/529110

Finding #6 – Ubercart: Purchasers miss the “Saved Addresses” option

On the Checkout screen, in the “Delivery Information” pane, two participants repeatedly missed the "Saved Addresses" option and manually re-entered their billing name and address.

Suggested fixes:
1. Add more default styling to highlight the text “Saved addresses”, and/or
2. Add space underneath that line, thereby drawing attention to it, or
3. On the checkout page, show the most recently used address (if there is one) and provide a "Change" button that goes to a page showing all the saved addresses, as well as a new address field set, similar to Amazon.com
* Posted issue: http://drupal.org/node/529130

Usability testing results in surprises and best practices

Overall, the workflow for collecting attendee information proved to be successful. Still, no matter how much you think through a workflow when you're designing it, real-world users will are likely to surprise you by finding potential improvements that you may have missed. In the course of watching participants use the uc_signup module, we learned some other valuable lessons - “rules-of-thumb” that are important to improving the general work flow for all modules and design situations. One example from Greg is to pre-fill data whenever possible. Evelyn was reminded of the importance of label names.

This project is a collaboration working with Andy Hieb at Dtek Digital Media, and sponsored by client Australian United States Services in Education (AUSSIE). This is also an example of how community minded clients and companies can collaborate to get better results for their end-users while improving community software for everyone. All of us at GVS, Dtek and AUSSIE are excited to help make a useful new contributed module possible, and do usability testing to seek improvements for the software we share. Uc_signup currently has a stable beta release, and issues found in our usability test have either already been fixed, or are in the queue waiting to be fixed.

Growing Venture Solutions - GVS - event management