An Interview with derek gulbranson
HubPages' User Experience Director shares his background and HubPages plans
Could you explain to us what a User Experience Director does?
That's a great question. In the past decade, the term "user experience" (UX) has evolved into somewhat of an umbrella term encompassing a number of more specialized and overlapping areas of focus: visual and interaction design, user interface design, human-computer interaction, human factors, brand and communications, information architecture, and content strategy.
The term UX was initially embraced out of the realization that creating lovable products was really about the entire experience, not just how it looks but also how it works and behaves and talks to you and thinks about itself. When designing technology products there are usually three sets of competing goals; what the user wants to do, what the business needs the user to do, and how the engineering team would like to make them both do it. Since the user is the only one of those not actually in the discussions where decisions are made, it's the role of the UX team to help inform decisions that touch the user's experience and advocate for the user and their goals, abilities and motivations.
The Holy Grail is to bridge the gap between all these goals and find the solution that satisfies the user, business and technology goals simultaneously in a beautiful, simple, streamlined experience that is a pleasure to use, and hopefully even a little bit fun.
What are some user experience changes you have made on HubPages since you joined?
It's hard to design a great user experience without actually talking to users about their experiences, so a lot of my work so far has been in investigating the best ways to connect with users and developing a true and unbiased understanding of their goals, abilities and motivations. Some of that initial research highlighted a pain point in the Hub-naming step of creating a Hub, so I created a design that adjusts the interface for editing the Hub URL and the error messages is returns. I believe this will help reduce errors and frustration during that step, especially for new users. The change should be live the beginning of next week. I have a lot more in store though, that's is just one small change that could be done pretty quickly and easily.
What changes, in terms of user experience and design, would you most like to see on HubPages.com?
I would very much like to see the process of creating and editing beautiful Hubs be more intuitive, streamlined, and fun. But I think the change I'd like to see most is increased brand awareness, because traffic is the most important number for us and increased brand awareness would increase traffic. Some of the research we've done indicates brand is a fairly significant factor when people are deciding which link to choose on the search engine results pages.
I think some simple changes to the visual design and brand messaging on the Hub can help make people remember HubPages and give them a reason to actively choose us the next time they see us on the search engine results pages.
As a user experience designer (and generally awesome person), you identify and collect incongruities in human behavior, such as the fact that questions addressed to larger groups of people are less likely to get a response than those addressed to small groups. Do you have a favorite incongruity that you've discovered over the years?
My favorites are always the things that have the exact opposite effect as the intention. My all time favorite is probably that establishing a reward for doing something makes people not want to do it anymore unless they get a reward. It's everywhere, starting at childhood, and the majority of the time it has the opposite effect as intended, yet we continue to create if/then rewards and feel justified in doing so.
Human behavior is fascinating! Everyone should read "Drive" by Daniel Pink. It does a great job of explaining why we do the things we do, and applicable to everything from motivating your child to do their homework to being happy with your career.
You share on our about page that you're a sci-fi fan. What is your favorite sci-fi movie or television show?
I grew up on Star Trek Next Generation but these days I'd have to say the Stargate series is my all-time favorite. I love sci-fi because it removes the frustrating limitations of reality and sets the mind free to imagine things that aren't actually possible (yet).
The Stargate SG-1 series starts out with them understanding very little about a world were you can travel to other planets instantly through a wormhole, and by the end they are building their own space ships and flying around blowing up the bad guys. It's really interesting to see the progression over the almost 15 years worth of episodes. (Yes, I've seen them all. At least once.)
The Hubs you've published so far are super useful tech guides. Do you plan on publishing more Hubs like this in the future?
I will probably publish more Hubs that are the helpful answers to computer questions that I personally find and use so often. I think of my Mom as the audience, because she's always asking me how to do stuff and I always tell her to type the question she asked me into Google. When I have a question and Google doesn't have a good answer for, I will frequently start a draft Hub with my search as the title as a reminder to write a Hub about it later. I have yet to find out how many of those will become published Hubs. Two, so far.
What other sorts of Hubs do you have in the works?
I'd also like to write about some of the user research techniques that we're using at HubPages to better understand people's experiences with HubPages. We're using some fairly novel remote research methodologies that use video chat and screen sharing to gather qualitative input from participants around the world. I did some searches on Google and didn't really find a great summary of how to integrate these new technologies into existing research methodologies, so when we're done I may write a Hub or two on how we did it.
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