Yahoo creates the first decent road trip mapping program

The interface gets better and better ...

"Yahoo has released a beta of their new super swanky mapping program, clearly a salvo fired in the direction of Google Maps. It uses Flash (instead of Ajax), and it by-and-large feels like Google Maps, except for one key exception: the ease of creating road trip itineraries.

Playing around with the beta Yahoo Maps, I saw that you can just keep adding destinations, and they keep stringing them together. In no time, I was able to recreate the road trip I took this past spring.

Some drawbacks: It's not clear that you can save an itinerary. I think you might be able to through "email this," but that's a bit of a hack. The rendering of the map information is still ugly. Anti-aliasing, people! Love it!"   continued ...   (Via peterme)

Yahoo Maps.

The Impact of Cultural Diversity on Web Site Design

An excellent paper on the need to consider cultural diversity in website design ...

"Close your eyes. Envision a succulent two-inch slab of dripping- rare prime rib. Is your stomach rumbling, your appetite peaked, or are you offended since your fundamental belief system precludes harming animals? A single image or idea can create many different feelings or interpretations. Consider the diversity within your own organization, campus, or community. Does everyone agree on what is appropriate, acceptable, appetizing, or attractive? An image pleasing to one group of people may alienate or even seriously offend many others. Something as simple as color may elicit dramatically different mental images. For example, in the U.S., white is generally associated with purity, but in Japan it represents death (Chau et al, 2002).

Herein lays the danger inherent in crosscultural Web site design: the audience must be considered. Good designers know that ascertaining the needs and preferences of people who are or will be the users of a Web site, database, or fishing pole, is critical to success. The apparent simplicity of this task belies its daunting nature. The complexity of defining user preferences can be appreciated by considering the vast number of sub-groups composing the global community, each with its unique array of tastes, preferences, and mores. Failure at this rudimentary level will nullify even the boldest and brightest design ideas."   continued ...   (Via RedOrbit)

Cultural Diversity.

Book Review: Access by Design

A review of a new book that gets excellent reviews ...

"For some Web designers, accessibility and usability are considered dirty words. To them, these two words create the idea of extra hours of intensive work. For the most part, this is a misconception. While extra work may be required (by law) in some cases, the end result can be worth the extra effort. Still, the idea that these requirements are for a small group of people is just not true. There is more to accessibility and usability than just changing some colors and adding text.

One of the major problems with this subject is it seems to have acquired a lot of bad press. In reality, it's not that hard to make a Web site accessible. To prove it, Sarah Horton has written a book about the subject, "Access by Design: A Guide to Universal Usability for Web Designers," published by New Riders. Sarah is co-author of the Web Style Guide and is the Web developer with Academic Computing at Dartmouth College. When it comes to accessibility and usability, Sarah seems to know her stuff."   continued ...   (Via webreference.com)

Access by Design : A Guide to Universal Usability for Web Designers



Check-out more books at Usernomics.

If your software was on a date

Tips for designing desireable software ...

"How would your software (or product, service, book, cause, etc.) behave on a date? Perhaps the best model for software developers is the singles scene, so let's see how this time-tested dating advice for men might be applied to software:

Dating Rules For Software

- Look your best.
- Be fun. Don't be negative. Be the one others want to be around.
- Be trustworthy and consistent.
- Don't be fake."   continued ...   (Via Creating Passionate Users)

Nice Guy Interface.

Putting Perfect Participants in Every Session

How to place participants in a usability study ...

"When putting together a design study, whether it is usability testing, field research, or focus group activity, it turns out that the most critical activity is recruiting the right participants.

Over the past few years, we’ve interviewed several dozen user experience professionals, looking at the practices they use to conduct their research. As we dissected every activity involved in producing a successful study, we came to the conclusion that recruiting participants is the lynchpin that holds the study together.

If you recruit an inappropriate participant, there is very little you can do with task design, session facilitating, or data analysis that will turn the results into something useful. Yet, if you get an ideal participant, you can compensate for practically any amount of poor task design, facilitation, or analysis and still see valuable findings that will improve your design."   continued ...   (Via OK/Cancel)

Usability Participants.

Everything You Know About UI Design Is Wrong

A good article about new user interface design guidelines for Windows Vista applications ...

"Well, maybe not everything. But if you've spent the past decade (roughly, the time since the release of Windows 95) honing your Windows user interface design skills, it's time for you to pay attention. With the release of Windows Vista next year, Microsoft is changing an awful lot of the rules again. This is not just another minor user interface change like the upgrade from Windows 98 to Windows XP. It's more along the lines of the massive overhaul we all saw going from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. If you're shipping applications for the Windows desktop, it's definitely time to sit up and pay attention again - or risk being one of those people putting out software that looks clunky and dated before its time.

Fortunately, Microsoft isn't making you figure out the new rules by installing the betas and running things (although that's a good idea too). Rather, if you're a developer with an interest in building things for Vista you should hop on over to your Internet connection and download the Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines, known as the "UX Guide" for short. Execute the downloaded file and you'll get a Web-based look at what's coming in Vista and what you should do about it (start your browsing at index.htm, a fact that the Microsoft download instructions neglect to include). As of mid-October the download is version 0.8 of the UX Guide, which means that there are various loose ends and pages that say simply "This content hasn't been written yet" (which leads one to wonder how Microsoft designed their own Vista applications, but let it pass for now). Still, there's plenty of content to get you started in the right direction."   continued ...   (Via Developer.com)

Windows Vista Guidelines.

Accessibility Begets Usability

Accessibility and usability for Office 12 ...

"I saw the following post as a comment below a news article on Office 12: "with its fancy skin, it appears Office has abandoned low-vision users forever."

Nothing could be further from the truth. We have accessibility experts within every team in Office, including in the user experience team. As the microsoft.com page on Section 508 says, "Section 508 reinforces the best practices that our organization already performs." That's absolutely true. However, our focus on accessibility goes beyond making the software available to more people. It is my opinion that most work done to support accessibility concerns results in better overall usability for everyone using the product.

The most obvious example is keyboard navigation. Because some people cannot use a mouse, everything in Office must be accessible with the keyboard. But a good design here also benefits expert users who choose not to use the mouse for efficiency reasons. Accessibility begets usability."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Office 12 Interface.

Glimpse: a Novel Input Model for Multi-level Devices

A scholarly paper about a new input model for multi-level devices ...

"While working on this paper, the authors commonly scrolled to the end of this document in order to glance at the paper’s references. Similarly, when editing code, a programmer often uses a scroll bar to take a quick look at the details of another method or the definition of a variable. Our technique would enable a user to scroll to and view another portion of a long document before returning to the exact location they were previously editing. While various applications employ a wide array of methods for jumping around within a document, we are not aware of any that provide the accuracy and ease of use of our technique. Users would be able to glimpse at other portions of a document before returning to their previous location using only the scroll bar, never needing to find or traverse to another tool."   continued ...   (Via Bill Buxton, Usability Views)

Buxton's Three Stage Model.

Take off the training wheels

Some great examples of solutions getting in the way of problems ...

"Like dull knives in the kitchen and training wheels on bicycles, many so-called safety features just lead to trouble. The cranky user suggests an alternative approach.

A friend once needed to run a process where, for reasons unknown, the program required him to confirm each task in a series of hundreds. He balanced a pocket knife on the Return key and went to lunch. In his particular case there were no horrific surprises; it was just a huge waste of time and he worked around it. For many users faced with this type of "safety" feature, however, the workaround isn't so simple.

Confirming, clarifying, and checking every operation, as most applications these days do, is intended to protect users from accidents. The result is similar to what many people find after putting training wheels on a child's bicycle: the vehicle is more cumbersome and the child never learns to ride it properly. This month I'll count the ways excessive protections make computers harder to use and more accident prone."   continued ...   (Via IBM, The cranky user)

Training Wheels.

Meeting your intranet users

Considering the uniqueness of users on an intranet ...

"Intranets serve a diverse range of users in organisations, from staff in head office to those in regional offices, or on the front line.

These users are not all the same, and do not have the same needs, issues or environment. A key principle for intranet teams is therefore: you can’t usefully deliver information to users that you haven’t personally met.

This article discusses the challenges in delivering information to all staff within an organisation, and outlining practical approaches that ensure efforts spent publishing intranet content are not wasted.

There is no such thing as ‘intranet users’, as this presupposes that all staff within an organisation have the same information needs."   continued ...   (Via CM Briefing)

Intranet.

Information Architecture 2.0

From a new Web Magazine - UXmatters

"The typical information architect thinks about structure—how one item in a group relates to all the other items in the group and how that group relates to all other groups. In the early days of information architecture (IA), groups and their related items tended to be well defined. For example, in the heyday of e-commerce, an information architect translated a product catalog into a storefront on the Web. Today, these problems seem old hat.

Modern Web technologies permit greater flexibility in navigation, search, retrieval, and display. At the same time, the quantity of information is growing exponentially, and users expect greater control over content. Today’s Web offers

- more sophisticated interactions between browser and server—through the XMLHttpRequest object
- more dynamic interfaces—through JavaScript and CSS
- more flexible formats for distributing content—through XML and RSS"   continued ...   (Via UXmatters)

UXmatters

Usability Study Indicates Internet Users Prefer to Book Travel with Full-Service Travel Site Rather than Auction Site or Airline Web Site

Full service travel sites prefered over travel auction sites ...

"In conjunction with World Usability Day, Human Factors International (HFI), TechSmith Corp., and Michigan State University today announced the findings of their usability study of online travel sites, which indicates that Internet users prefer to book travel on Orbitz.com rather than auction site Priceline.com or airline site Southwest.com.

The theme of World Usability Day 2005 is "Making it easy!" Based on the results of this study, Orbitz was best able to achieve that goal. Sixty-three percent of study participants ranked Orbitz as the easiest to use -- that figure was consistent across both novice and experienced users. Sixty-seven percent of participants, regardless of their Internet skill level, ranked Southwest as the hardest to use. Ninety-five percent of participants would recommend Orbitz, while Priceline would be recommended by 79 percent of participants, and Southwest would receive the recommendation of nearly 38 percent of participants."   continued ...   (Via Yahoo! Finance)

India short of 60,000 usability professionals

Need a usability job? Check out India ...

"With a shortfall of almost 60,000 usability professionals, Indian IT and ITES companies presently face a real threat of missing the current boom in this sector.

Infosys Communication Design Group Associate Vice President and Head Sridhar Marri said, "We have around 100 usability professionals at this junction and have decided to hire 100 more people in the next two years."

There are around 3,000 projects happening right now and only 150 usability professionals produced in a year. Despite that there are no professional institute to train such students right now, he added."   continued ...   (Via HindustanTimes)

Indian Technology.

Usability and ROI: The Great Debate

Trying to determine if usability results in positive ROI ...

"Consider this true story. As product manager flew overseas to demonstrate his ground-breaking software application to an executive team in a multi-billion dollar company. Halfway into his demonstration, he got lost in the application’s interface and could not navigate his way out. The executives dismissed him, with an admonition to go back and fix his problems.

For years, interface gurus have hotly debated the value of an application interface in term of return on investment. How much influence does usability have on an application’s ROI? Can a great interface possibly justify its expense? The answer is yes. Forward-thinking companies are finally realizing the importance of usability. “Usability is one of our secret weapons,” says a representative from Schwab.com. The fact that usability consistently produces positive results will not be a secret much longer.

A case in point: American Eagle Outfitters launched a redesigned, more user-centered Web site in March, 2001, and showed a 53.6% increase in sales the next month. Can that increase be directly attributed to usability? Usability research is limited in its ability to predict ROI simply because there are too many variables, leaving decision-makers skeptical of usability expenses.

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen argues that starting with usability is key to increasing ROI. He estimates that gathering usability data early in the development process is ten times more effective than late usability data. “It's 100 times cheaper to make a change before any code has been written than it is to wait until after the implementation is complete,” he states, but admits that such estimates do not equate to a standard ROI. “The two parameters are measured in different units,” he argues, “Project cost is measured in money, and usability is measured in increased use, more efficient use, or high user satisfaction."   continued ...   (Via PRWeb)

Return On Investment.

World Usability Day Events girdle the Earth

Worldwide participation for Usability Day ...

"The first World Usability Day takes place tomorrow, 3rd November. It was created by Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) 'to help everyone know more about the ways to help create a better user experience of our world'.

There is a rolling series of events for the 36 hours of the day as it stretches from Australasia, China and the Philippines to a session at the DUX 2005 (Designing for User Experiences) conference in San Francisco. The World Usability Day webpages include three ways to find out what is going on:

* On an interactive map
* In the hour-by-hour guide to all 36 hours
* Alphabetically by country (linked below)"   continued ...   (Via )

DUX 2005.

Yahoo! Maps, Flash, AJAX, & APIs

A comment on Yahoo Maps with emphasis on the Application Gallery ...

"Yahoo! launched a Flash-based beta of their maps product today along with an AJAX version for API developers. TechCrunch describes some of the UI enhancements:

"A simple drag and drop module on the top left lets users move around easily (even easier than the great Google drag method). There are multiple ways to zoom into and out of a map, including using the scroll wheel on the mouse, or the page up/down buttons on the keyboard. The arrow keyboard keys also allow for scrolling off-screen to new areas. There is excellent integration wth Yahoo Local businesses. A click shows more information, and options to add it to the driving directions itinerary."

Perhaps even more compelling, however, is one of the sample applications in Yahoo's Maps Application Gallery: a Local Events Browser that: "blends multiple Yahoo! APIs (5 to be exact) to put events on an interactive map with useful features like a calendar, tag cloud and built-in image search.""   continued ...   (Via Functioning Form)

Yahoo Local Events.

New Yahoo Maps Shows Power of Flash

A detailed review of the new Yahoo Maps ...

"An all new Yahoo Maps launches tonight at 9 pm PST.

I spoke with Paul Levine, the General Manager of Local, Jeremy Kreitler, a Senior Product Manager of Maps and Local, and Diana Vincent, a PR Manager, earlier today about Yahoo Maps.

Unlike Google and Microsoft maps, Yahoo has chosen to use Flash over AJAX in building its new service, and they’ve added new features that are not found anywhere else. They’ve also done some things to reduce the hassle of creating, sharing and printing maps online.

It’s built with on the new MacroMedia Flex platform for flash, something we’ve been hearing a lot about lately."   continued ...   (Via TechCrunch)

Yahoo Maps.

Folksonomy Definition and Wikipedia

A discussion about the definition of Folksonomy by the creator of the term ...

"Today, having seen an new academic endeavor related to folksonomy quoting the Wikipedia entry on folksonomy and I realize the definition of Folksonomy has become completely unglued from anything I recognize (yes, I did create the word to define something that was undefined prior). It is not collaborative, it is not putting things in to categories, it is not related to taxonomy (more like the antithesis of a taxonomy), etc. The Wikipedia definition seems to have morphed into something that the people with Web 2.0 tagging tools can claim as something that can describe their tool (everybody wanted to be in the cool crowd). I hope folksonomy still has value as a word to point something different in the world of tagging than the mess that went before it. It is difficult to lose the pointer to something distinct makes understanding what works well. Using folksonomy and defining it to include the mess that was all of tagging and is still prevalent in many new tools dilutes the value.

Folksonomy is the result of personal free tagging of information and objects (anything with a URL) for one's own retrival. The tagging is done in a social environment (shared and open to others). The act of tagging is done by the person consuming the information.

The value in this external tagging is derived from people using their own vocabulary and adding explicit meaning, which may come from inferred understanding of the information/object as well as. The people are not so much categorizing as providing a means to connect items and to provide their meaning in their own understanding."   continued ...   (Via vanderwal.net)

Wikipedia.

90% of all usability testing is useless

Usability testing with in-house staff ...

"Ninety percent of all usability testing performed on Web sites is useless. This is not to say that it doesn’t have a significant role to play in user experience design. When done right, usability testing will improve your Web site and your development process, but the current culture surrounding Web site usability testing is such that it rarely benefits the design. Worse, this misapplication can undermine the acceptance of this important technique throughout an organization.

Usability testing has its background in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), whose practitioners remain its most ardent supporters. This approach—a researcher, a participant, a list of tasks, and sometimes even a stopwatch—was developed for mainframe and then shrink-wrapped software as an evolution from even earlier task-based analysis techniques. It involves rigorous procedures that result in statistically oriented, graduate-degree-guaranteed results. When used to analyze Web-based user behavior, however, this approach suffers because the Web is not just software. User research on the Web needs to reflect this."   continued ...   (Via adaptive path)

Useless Sign.

Why are tech gizmos so hard to figure out?

Dealing with the complexity of technical products ...

"You've just brought home a hot new high-definition TV or digital camcorder. You can't wait to enjoy it. Just one little problem: You're going nuts trying to set up and use the darn thing.

Today's tech toys throw in goodies we scarcely used to imagine, from cellphones with tiny TV screens to computers that stream video wirelessly through your house. But lots of those features you probably don't want, can't use or don't know exist.

Don't expect to be saved by the instruction manual — if there is one. If it hasn't been written by geeks, it's been translated, verbatim, from Korean or Japanese. Too many gadgets pay scant attention to ease of use.

Now, an army of "usability" advocates are vowing to do something about it. They're determined to exert a stronger hand in the design of tech products. If they get their way, simple-to-use will be the new normal five years from now."   continued ...   (Via USATODAY)

Simplicity of the iPod.

Guidelines to Improve Usability

Guidlines for improving link usability ...

"How you write and design your links is crucial to your visitors clicking them or not. Write them badly and they leave, write them well and they stay.

Who knows, they might even do exactly what you created your site for. Following are 7 guidelines how links should be written to improve the usability of your site.

Do it consistently
Don't mislead the visitor
Show used links
Match the destination with the link
Embedded links used to their full advantage
How to link to files
Mark the external links"   continued ...   (Via WebProNews)

Hot Link.

Sony Rootkit - Worst.DRM.Ever

New Sony Rootkit creates a backlash from users ...

"I was on the fence about talking about Sony’s DRM mess but things are cropping up that make it sound a little creepier than it originally sounded, which means it’s really, really creepy. Basically, this is a “media player” that ensures that you’re only using Sony’s system to view content on their DRM protected CDs. The player, written by First 4 Internet, hides itself by forcing Windows to hide everything with the “$sys$” prefix.

Once the driver is installed, there’s no security mechanism in place to ensure that only the XCP2 software can use it. That means any application can make itself virtually invisible to standard Windows administration tools just by renaming its files so that they begin with the string “$sys$”. In some circumstances, real malicious software could leverage this functionality to conceal its own existence.

Not only does it potentially cloak malware, it also ups processor usage by quite a bit and also makes fun of your grandma. Man, it’s one step forward/one step back for Sony today."   continued ...   (Via Gizmodo)

Sony Rootkit.

Battling Internet ADD: Ten Tips for Writing for the Web

Tips for writing for the Web ...

"Writing for the Web requires both creativity and discipline. Follow these tips to create more engaging, compelling copy.

Today, people all over the world are talking about one thing: improving usability on the Web. Why should you care? Because your Web site’s ROI depends on it. Diminished attention spans and plummeting patience levels force Web professionals to examine every possible way to retain users. But they often neglect the most important factor, content.

Compelling, engaging content captures your audience. According to Jakob Nielsen and John Morkes research, better writing can enhance your Web site’s usability by 159%. But how do you write well for the Web? Follow these ten commandments.

1. Write for a reason
2. Write for “scanners”
3. Get engaged"   continued ...   (Via eMediaWire)

Writing for the Web.

The secret of making things work

A practical article about the usability of everyday things ...

"Consumers forever grumble about products and services making their life difficult, but there are some shining examples leading the way. As World Usability Day approaches, what are the best doing right?

Fumbling haplessly while trying to open a compact disc or a packet of ham has become a daily headache of modern life.

And anyone buying electronic goods for Christmas could still be mulling over the instructions long into the New Year.

World Usability Day on Thursday hopes to draw attention to an often overlooked part of modern industry and one that is responsible for changing the way products are created."   continued ...   (Via BBC NEWS)

Opening a jewel case.

Landmark Research Evaluates Active Users of Biometrics Technology

An article on how familiarity with biometrics technology impacts user acceptance and adoption ...

"Acuity Market Intelligence of Boulder, Colorado, today announced that a landmark biometrics end-user research project evaluating the societal and psychological perceptions of biometrics by active users of the technology is nearing completion.

This groundbreaking end-user research is part of a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded collaborative project designed to assess the performance, security characteristics and societal impact of biometrics.

Acuity is supporting Dr. Lisa Nelson of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, the project lead, in collaboration with Dr. Jack Carroll of the American Institutes for Research (AIR), a renowned expert in psychology-based end-user analysis, to complete the research. The project includes a web-based survey and targeted end-user focus groups. Acuity is providing operational support and acting as an industry and end-user liaison for the University of Pittsburgh and AIR."   continued ...   (Via HNS)

Biometrics.

World Usability Day Events girdle the Earth

World Usability Day today ...

"The first World Usability Day takes place tomorrow, 3rd November. It was created by Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) 'to help everyone know more about the ways to help create a better user experience of our world'.

There is a rolling series of events for the 36 hours of the day as it stretches from Australasia, China and the Phillipines to a session at the DUX 2005 (Designing for User Experiences) conference in San Francisco. The World Usability Day webpages include three ways to find out what is going on:

* On an interactive map
* In the hour-by-hour guide to all 36 hours
* Alphabetically by country (linked below)"   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

World Usability Day Today.

Why People Don't Read Online and What to do About It

Why people don't read online and what to do about it ...

"We really mean it. People don't read online. Unless you lead them to do so.

Here at Interactive Media Associates, we find ourselves repeating this fact many times during early planning and design sessions with our Web site clients. The reality of the situation hasn't changed much since the dawn of the online medium, when early research suggested that people were uncomfortable reading online. The fact that you can't curl up with screen device has something to do with it. The flicker of the monitor (improved since the early days, but still taxing on the eyes) is also a factor. (Usability guru Jakob Nielson recently updated one of his columns on why people scan rather than read on screen by reporting that Microsoft's Cleartype technology improves screen legibility by 5%, which, Nielson says, is still not as good as reading on paper.)"   continued ...   (Via ACM Ubiquity)

Assisting reading with Cleartype.

Hate dialogs, love user interaction?

Dialog boxes are needed for user input but they should be made to reduce the cognitive load ...

"If you’re like me, you probably dislike dialog boxes as a necessary evil. I know that they are ubiquitous and appear in almost every application, but still I find myself considering new ways to implement what they do. Here, I propose a different way to implement dialogs for applications that doesn’t use awkward boxes.

Let’s start with a definition of what a dialog box is. A dialog box is a GUI element separate from the main window of an application that provides information to the user, and may (but not always) require information in turn. The need behind them is important: programs will occasionally need to interact with a user before an action can be continued, for example, changing the font of a word in a word processor. However, these bits of information are not required often and presenting the communicative components (the bits that actually interact with the user) on-screen all the time wastes screen space."   continued ...   (Via Milui HCI/Usability)

Dialog box with content obscured.

Incompetent Email Marketing = Lost Future Opportunities

The need for personalization with email newsletters ...

"Lack of personalization made an email newsletter completely useless to the recipient, damaging long-term customer relationship efforts. United Airlines deserves to go out of business. That's my conclusion after reading the incredibly incompetent email newsletter the company sent me.

At first look, the message wasn't that bad. It complied with 70% of the usability guidelines for the content and formatting of email newsletters. That's a decent score, considering that many other respectable newsletters score in the 60s. Most organizations don't take email usability seriously. They probably think: "How much can go wrong in the design of a simple email?"

Well, user testing shows that there are 127 guidelines for newsletters and another 73 for confirmation email. Clearly, there are more than a few opportunities to go wrong."   continued ...   (Via Alertbox)

United Airlines.

Drag 'n Drop is Invisible To Users

An added enhancement to the usability of drag and drop ...

"In the world of cognitive psychology, there’s something known as an affordance. Affordances are clues that communicate to a user how they should use an object.

For example, assuming you’re familiar with the convention, a type-in box communicates to the user that they should click within the box and start typing if they want to enter data.

With the advent of AJAX-style interactions, it has become easier to add drag-and-drop elements to web pages. These allow the user to grab an item and move it to another part of the screen, to allow activities such as reorganizing data.

The problem with drag-and-drop is that it doesn’t have any affordances. You can’t tell when you’ve encountered an element that is dragable. The result is that this powerful capability is often only known by developers.

Netflix is clever. They’ve figured this out and acted appropriately."   continued ...   (Via UIE Brain Sparks)

Netflix Queue Listing.

Ambient Findability: Talking with Peter Morville

An interesting interview with Peter Morville about Findability ...

"Peter’s latest book, Ambient Findability, was published in 2005. He takes a moment to chat with Boxes and Arrows about what he’s been thinking on findability since the book was published.

Boxes & Arrows: When did you start thinking about “findability” as a concept? How is it different from the concepts you learned and applied in library science?

Peter Morville: I first used the word in a presentation at the 2002 Information Architecture Summit in Baltimore. Soon after, I wrote “The Age of Findability.” For me, findability is about crossing boundaries of discipline and medium."   continued ...   (Via Boxes and Arrows)

Ambient Findability



Check-out more books at Usernomics.

The Importance Of Labels

Word labels plus icons incorporated into the Office 12 ribbon ...

"My first experience in Office was working as an intern program manager on Outlook 98. During that summer I learned one of the key usability lessons that carried over into the DNA of the Ribbon: the importance of labels.

Part of the user experience effort around Outlook 98 was improving the menu and toolbar structure. One of the problems noticed again and again among non-expert users was that people didn't use the toolbar at all! With the exception of the "Delete" icon (which was perhaps familiar from the Windows 95 shell), people used the menus to reply, forward, and to create new messages.

Different fixes were tried: new icons, rearrangement of the icons, positioning icons under the menus from which the commands came from. In the end, one change caused a total turnaround: labeling the important toolbar buttons. Almost immediately, the toolbars were a big hit and everyone at all skill levels starting using them."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Outlook 97 vs. Outlook 2003 Toolbars.

The Theory Behind User Interface Design, Part One

A detailed article about the why and how of user interface design ...

"Designing professional user interfaces is not only a matter of a good graphic artist and some good ideas. Unfortunately, people creating user interfaces just go for a product, without even being aware of the basics or the theoretical principles behind it. Tight schedules, misconceptions (something like "usability is a plus that we cannot afford now"), and inadequate professionalism are responsible for the poor products that surround us. This article may seem a bit too abstract at first, but its main purpose is to popularize some topics too often limited to academia and few professionals. Here we won't get into the details of some of the many approaches to UI design, because from my personal experience I discovered that people often get absorbed by the "things to do" for building effective user interfaces, rather than catching some simple concepts that will inspire them in the very process of UI design.

This and the next article are mainly addressed to developers or graphic designers who mean to (or are called to) create high-quality user interfaces (UI). Designing a user interface may seem a simple and side aspect of the whole application; in fact it is, perhaps, the most important part of the whole system. Despite our focus on software systems, many of the considerations exposed here can be applied to any human artifact intended to interact with other human beings. This is an important aspect often overlooked. Positive, smooth human-machine interaction is just a matter of good design, as any other product created by people to be used by other people. It is a complex problem, quite different from typical engineering challenges, in that, people (with their own characteristics, emotions, and so forth) are involved throughout the whole process (from designers and developers to end-users, indirect user, and so on)."   continued ...   (Via Developer.com)

Seven Stages of Interaction.

Words + pictures > words alone

The value of pictures as a memory aid to words ...

"How many appliances are visible in your kitchen? Don't read on until you have your answer.

If you're like most people, you took a mental visual walk through your kitchen, "looking for" appliances. "OK, next to the refrigerator on the right side there's the toaster... next to the coffee maker... the microwave is up there..."

We’re visual creatures. According to memory expert Kenneth Higbee, “The saying that a picture is worth a thousand words is usually applied to the effectiveness of a picture in understanding what was communicated; it may also apply to the effectiveness of a picture in remembering what was communicated.”

Tech/education publishers--pay attention here--the one thing that could make a huge difference is to switch from captions-under-pictures to captions-within-pictures. Yes, I've heard all the arguments for why this is difficult for production. But the potential gain is HUGE."   continued ...   (Via Creating Passionate Users)

Words Plus Pictures.

Hearing Is Believing: Make It Sound As Good As It Feels

The value of "sound" when designing products ...

"Today, our products are digital, portable, and pervasive. We live with them and around them, absorbing information and filtering noise at the periphery of our aural focus. We continually communicate with the devices in our lives, processing direct and ambient sounds in order to glean important information about the world. My mouse and I communicate, for example. Containing a Piezo speaker, Apple’s Mighty Mouse emits subtle ticks and clicks when it is squeezed or pressed; these sounds augment the tactility of the mouse itself, and my interaction with it. They also integrate with and further define the product identity.

Music, for instance, has long been important in defining product identity. Microsoft wisely retained Brian Eno to create the 3 1/4 second long Windows startup piece, a composition Eno later referred to as “a tiny little jewel.” And in his recent book Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, Donald Norman cites the implementation of sound in Richard Sapper’s kettle with singing whistle by Alessi— it creates a chord of e and b when the water boils. Our history of musical literacy has conditioned us to an appreciation of musicality in sound. Its sophisticated integration into the design of products infuses the user experience with dimensionality and pleasure, and amplifies the product’s emotional resonance."   continued ...   (Via Gizmodo)

Mouse Sounds.

10 principles of effective information management

An extensive article about the principles for successful Information Management ...

"Improving information management practices is a key focus for many organisations, across both the public and private sectors. This is being driven by a range of factors, including a need to improve the efficiency of business processes, the demands of compliance regulations and the desire to deliver new services.

In many cases, 'information management' has meant deploying new technology solutions, such as content or document management systems, data warehousing or portal applications. These projects have a poor track record of success, and most organisations are still struggling to deliver an integrated information management environment.

Effective information management is not easy. There are many systems to integrate, a huge range of business needs to meet, and complex organisational (and cultural) issues to address.

This article draws together a number of 'critical success factors' for information management projects. These do not provide an exhaustive list, but do offer a series of principles that can be used to guide the planning and implementation of information management activities."   continued ...   (Via KM Column)

Success Factors.

What Is Ajax And What Is It Good For

The role of Ajax in user interface design ...

"Ajax is not a technology in itself, but a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies together.

Traditional web applications essentially submit forms, completed by a user, to a web server. The web server responds by sending a new web page back. Because the server must submit a new page each time, applications run more slowly and awkwardly than their native counterparts.

Ajax applications, on the other hand, can send requests to the web server to retrieve only the data that is needed, usually using SOAP or some other XML-based web services dialect. On the client, JavaScript processes the web server response.

The result is a more responsive interface, since the amount of data interchanged between the web browser and web server is vastly reduced. Web server processing time is also saved, since much of it is done on the client. (Source: Wikipedia)"   continued ...   (Via Robin Good)

Completing a form.

If you get 1 thing right in your application, make it the User Interface

The importance of user interface design to repeat business ...

"Here's a train of thought that further proves to me that a good User Interface can make or break an application.

The thinking goes like this... To be really successful, a great strategy is to do a smaller number of things, but do them noticeably better than the next guy. In other words, don't spread yourself too thin. Nobody ever became fabulously successful by doing a long list of things in a mediocre way. If you want to get noticed, you've got to do something worthy of notice, something that most other people stop short of doing (because it's too hard, or takes too much investment for them to do). You need to take something to the next level. That's what gets you noticed and gets people talking. That buzz creates momentum and can bring all sorts of good things (reputation included) your way.

If you want to do something really well, a good place to start is figuring out what "well" means. By what factors will your task be measured? And exactly who will do the measuring? Knowing what buttons you need to push, and who owns those buttons is a tremendous advantage. It helps you plan your game - how you're going to go get that high score in the right people's eyes. It's worth a few minutes, days even, to make these things explicit. Think about them. Write them down. Once you've got a handle on those things, choices about how you're going to spend your time, what pieces of the overall puzzle you're going to invest your energy in become a lot easier to make. You can make wiser decisions. For example, the Dot-com bust taught a bunch of people that there's no point in investing heavily in getting "clicks" or "eyeballs" if you're ultimately going to be measured only by actual sales. Oops, a bunch of people were measuring themselves on the wrong scale."   continued ...   (Via Uncommon Sense)

Make it easy for the user.

Wabi-Sabi's simplicity

A great article about "simplicity" as it relates to user interface design ...

"Wabi-sabi is the Japanese philosophy that embraces a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. “Pare down to the essence, but don’t remove the poetry. Keep things clean and unencumbered but don’t sterilize,” says Leonard Koren, author of Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers. For a good summary, check out A Culture of Simplicity, a brief article by Koren.

It’s interesting to see how much this ancient Japanese philosphy relates to the world of interface design and programming. “Things wabi-sabi are unstudied and inevitable looking…unpretentious…Their craftsmanship may be impossible to discern.” Inevitable looking…that’s a great way to describe smart interfaces.

Other tenets of Wabi-Sabi that resonate: The emphasis on subtle details, even if noticed only by vigilant viewers. The importance of looking closely. The effectiveness of small doses. Having quiet authority without having to be the center of attention. Simplicity. Working with a limited palette and keeping features to a minimum. Realizing something’s “interestingness” has nothing to do with how complex it is."   continued ...   (Via 37signals)

Wabi-Sabi.

Inside Deep Thought (Why the UI, Part 6)

Collecting data for Office 12 user interface design ...

"Microsoft is tracking your every move!

Soon after you install Office 2003 on your computer, a balloon pops up asking if you would like to "Help Make Office Better." If you click on it, you are given the opportunity to enroll in something called the Microsoft Office Customer Experience Improvement Program. If you opt-in, anonymous data about how you use Office are uploaded to Microsoft occasionally in the background.

If you're the curious type, you might have wondered where your data goes. Well, today I'm here to answer the question: it goes into an Excel spreadsheet I have sitting on my desktop.

OK, back up. Back in the olden days of designing software at Microsoft (say, pre-2003), design decisions were mostly supported by guesswork. There's a classic Microsoft interview question (that I've never heard of anyone actually using) "How many gas stations are there in the United States?" Many have criticized that type of question as being feckless; personally, I agree and it's not representative of how I choose to spend my interview time with a candidate. But the rough "estimate an answer and defend it" style required to answer the gas station question was at the heart of how many design decisions used to be made at Microsoft."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Number gas stations in U.S. example.

Pushing the right buttons requires a human touch

World Usability Day brought some interesting usability solutions to light ...

"Things work better when designers make the effort to factor in how people actually behave, writes Steve Meacham.

The managers of Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport faced a difficult problem a few years ago. They were having to spend a fortune cleaning the men's toilets because the aim of Dutch men was so poor.

"They hired some guys who sat in the urinals for several weeks, just observing," says Ash Donaldson. "They noticed that if there was a cigarette butt or a fly in the urinal men would aim at it. So they etched the shape of a fly into each urinal - and that reduced the cleaning bill by 80 per cent."

The moral of the story, says Donaldson, the Sydney co-ordinator of the inaugural World Usability Day on Thursday, is that things work better when designers take notice of how human beings actually behave."   continued ...   (Via smh.com)

Usability Day Cartoon.