Contextual Help

Some interesting examples of contextual help ...

"The membership creation screen on the BBC web site is an interesting example of providing contextual help. There are links such as "What is a secret question" beneath the field labels. And additional explanatory text appears to the right of a field when it is in focus. Lastly, audio help is available."   continued ...   (Via paper & pencil)

Contextual Help.

How to come up with Breakthrough Ideas

Coming up with the right number of features ...

"Brilliant, wildly creative people can pull breakaway ideas from thin air. The rest of us need tools. EQing is the tool we used to design the Head First series, and we've been using it ever since.

Bert, Eric, and I are all audio freaks -- we lust after the giant mixing boards at live shows, confident (and delusional) that we could do it so much better, if only we could get our hands on those sliders. So, an audio equalizer was a natural metaphor for us, and this is my first attempt to explain how we use the concept of EQing to brainstorm new designs.

37signals, the folks behind the wildly popular Basecamp and Backpack, did that when they tuned the features slider way, way, way down. Their art is in knowing which features to leave out, of course. But turning down the features slider wasn't really their goal. The goal (I think) was User Bliss, an entirely new slider, and one that was partially tied (inversely) to the Num Of Features slider. Turning down the features turned out to be one of the most important ways to achieve User Bliss."   continued ...   (Via Creating Passionate Users)

Featuritis.

Galleries: The Hardest Working Page on Your Site

Making galleries work well ...

"Sony Ericsson wants you to choose one of their mobile phones. They've got 17 lovely models to choose from. Perhaps you want the T237? That one seems nice. Or the T630? Or maybe, the K700i?

What's the difference, you ask? Unfortunately, they won't tell you until after you've chosen the one you want. Only then will Sony Ericsson inform you about your chosen model's features are.

Seriously, just pick a model from this list, then we can move along with our exercise. Do you want a W600, a W520a, a W800, a J300a, a T290a, a S710a, a S700i, a K500i, a K700i, a Z500a, a P910a, a T237, a T637, a P900, a T630, a T226, a T616, or that perennial favorite, the T610?"   continued ...   (Via UIE)

Gallery.

Usability v. Human Factors in Complex Mobile Systems

Usability is important but a systems approach is needed for many products ...

"There's been much discussion lately about how important design has become for mobile solutions, applications and devices. Nearly the first eight years of my career were devoted to questions of usability, suitability, design and even survivability of complex systems developed and deployed by the U.S. military. I've come to enjoy the equally mistrustful expressions from the military towards preceived academic nature of studying human performance and systems design which considered the human as part of the system; and the mistrustful expressions from those in technology about any phrase that includes the word military. There's an assumption that military products are somehow low quality which is astonishing when you consider that the Internet which enables email, the web and other services was designed and built by contractors serving the military much in the same way that my work did.

Market responses to solutions and devices like the iPod, the Razr and the Treo demonstrate that consumers value design and the advantages to a systems approach to the user experience."   continued ...   (Via mobile jones)

Systems Approach.

Top 5 killer intranet mistakes

The top 5 mistakes and recommendations ...

"There are mistakes, and there are killer mistakes. A successful intranet needs a lot of work and careful thought; some mistakes will limit success, others will kill the intranet.

In his recent column Lessons Learned: How to Avoid the Top 10 Intranet Mistakes my colleague Carm Porco, VP, Prescient Digital Media, provides some advice to avoid 10 of the most common intranet mistakes. To build on his list of favorites I thought I’d publish a slightly different list, one that concentrates on the ‘killer’ mistakes.

Note: a killer mistake doesn’t mean that the intranet dies, and shuts down – that simply doesn’t (commonly) happen. A killer mistake is strategic in nature; a strategic error that prevents the intranet from moving forward, halted by inertia or a state of purgatory. This purgatorical state is a broken state where the intranet can no longer progress in its current form without a complete restructuring – which often includes a new governance, technology, information architecture and design."   continued ...   (Via Intranet Blog)

Ouch!

Help Is For Experts

Help is used by advaced users rather than novices in Office 12 ...

"One of the most interesting epiphanies I've had over the last few years seems on the surface like a paradox: "help" in Office is mostly used by experts and enthusiasts.

How can this be? I think my biased assumption was that experts know how to use the software already and eager novices would be poring over the documentation trying to learn how to be more effective using it.

Yet, in usability tests we see it again and again: novices and intermediates click around and experiment, experts try to reason things out and look them up in help.

Why is that? I don't know the answer, but I can speculate."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Have a question?

On "Web 2.0"

Concerns about Web 2.0 ...

"There’s a lot of talk about the so-called Web 2.0 at the moment, and I’m in two minds about what I think.

On the one hand, as a geek who used to be involved in publishing, “new” almost de facto equates to “exciting”. It could genuinely be the Web is metamorphosing from rather dull dumb-terminals sending and receiving screenfulls of data - just like the IBM MVS terminals I used to use in 1988 - to a rich, asynchronous, application-like environment.

On the other hand, I have two worries. The first is my natural scepticism (some might say “cynicism”) about the hype. It seems to me like a new venture capital orgy is being prepared. The bubble is being inflated by pompous and largely empty buzzworks like “folksonomy”, “social networking”, “tag clouds” and others brilliantly satirised on the Go Flock Yourself blog. And where are the business models?"   continued ...   (Via Bruce Lawson)

Empty Buzz Words.

Building for Usability

Making usability the focus when designing a website ...

"The usability of an organization's Web site has a major impact on the organization's success or failure. If your site is difficult to use, an online payment process is confusing, or users can't find the information they need, visitors will go elsewhere and will associate their bad experience with your company's brand. How can you make your site easy to use? Make usability testing an ongoing part of the site planning and development processes.

Typically, usability testing is conducted at the end of the development process by a team of specialists. Test subjects are observed, results are analyzed, and site features are adjusted accordingly. Testing close to the end of the project lifecycle carries some limitations, however. For one, there may not be enough time left to make changes. Second, usability begins with the architecture, not with the interface. By the time the interface is tested, some things aren't easily fixed. Usability issues may arise not from page layout, but from technologies used to build the site or from the underlying front-end or back-end architecture of the site. These issues can't be fixed by moving a graphic element around a page, and may require a costly rebuild of at least part of the system.

To achieve maximum usability in the initial site prototype, it's necessary to design for usability throughout the site lifecycle, with all functional team members contributing to the usability of the project."   continued ...   (Via Advisor)

Usability Lifecycle.

Enticing Users with Content

Using content to attract users ...

"Our researchers have been spending a lot of time looking at how designs can best entice users with their content. Specifically, how can design teams get users to pay attention to their site’s valuable information when that content isn’t necessarily what the users are seeking?

As we’ve tested sites to see what strategies designs use to entice users with content, we weren’t surprised that the sites frequently feature advertisements and promotions for important content on the home page. The rationale for this design choice is clear. For users, the home page is the entry point for the site, so it makes sense to include content to entice them right away.

Users encounter featured content on the home page all the time. For example, users who visit the Citizens Bank site, see an advertisement for home equity credit prominently on their home page. This one advertisement alone takes up approximately 50% of the real estate on the page."   continued ...   (Via UIE Brain Sparks)

Citizens Bank Website.

The 8 Types of Navigation Pages

An interesting distinction between the type of page and user behavior ...

"When users are searching for content on a site, each page they encounter must do one of two things. Either the page provides the content they are seeking or it delivers them closer to the page that does.

As we’ve watched users search for their desired content, we’ve realized there are patterns to the pages we see. We’ve started to catalogue these patterns and have concluded there are essentially 8 types of pages a user can run into, when searching content-rich sites.

These different page types turned out to be important as we discovered users behave differently as they encounter each one. If the design of a given type doesn’t support the user’s behavior, then the user is less likely to succeed in finding their target content. Often, pages fail because designers don’t realize they were designing for the wrong type."   continued ...   (Via UIE Brain Sparks)

Scent of Information.

Human-Centered Intranet Design

Tips for making HCI user friendly ...

Have you ever tried discussing Tolstoy with a vacuum cleaner? This is precisely how many users feel when trying to interact with their systems in a technologically driven work environment. And I do mean interact. Although the word is usually associated with social activity, interacting with technology is exactly what we're doing every time we sit in front of our computers.

There's an unfortunate disconnect between how humans naturally function and what a lot of technology delivers. Technology needs to function as an extension of our own abilities, but users are often left scratching their heads or pounding their keyboards in frustration. It's ironic that while intranets aim to bring workers together in collaborative effort they can also alienate individual users who struggle to decipher poorly developed or overly complicated systems. This makes about a much sense as creating more bureaucracy to eliminate red tape.

The human-computer relationship can be an uneasy one. But it doesn't, and shouldn't, have to be that way. Just as physical ergonomics is important to the health of the body, cognitive ergonomics is important to the health of the mind. Developers need to have a deeper understanding that regardless of what technology allows them to do, the end product must conform to the natural way in which humans work.

Human-System Disconnect - Users have always tried to reconcile the way in which they naturally work with how technology makes them work (or in some cases changes the way they work). For those not in a technology-driven field, or not used to working with computers beyond a word processor, this is not an easy task — especially when software is getting bigger; more elaborate; and consequently, more complicated."   continued ...   (Via Intranet Journal)

Talking to a vacuum cleaner.

Convergence catch-22

Simplicity vs. convergence - a catch 22 ...

"Donald Norman in his “ask Don” postings:

Today simplicity, tomorrow convenience. Tomorrow convenience, the next day simplicity.
Jack of all trades, master of none. Certainly this is no new topic- combining gadgets and gizmos into one ubiquitous swiss army device that will allow us to always have the right tool at our finger tips. But when it comes to designing an interface, is this a catch-22 that will always swing like (as Donald implies) a pendulum?"   continued ...   (Via MNteractive)

Swiss Army Knife.

Customer Experience Management vs. User Experence (Part III)

The distinction between Customer Experience Management and User Experience ...

"Continuing the posts on defining Customer Experience Management (CEM)… A number of consultancies and agencies equate CEM with User Experience. In our previous article, we outlined the five disciplines of CEM.

User Experience, or “Usability” is focused on the interface discipline of CEM. It is used primarily in reference to the analysis, design and/or development of human-to-technology interfaces. Some examples of this include:

- Visual, navigation & informational web design
- Interactive apps. w/ decision trees (e.g. register, search)
- Easy-to-use interfaces for complex technical systems
- Product designs for devices (wireless, PDA, IPOD)
- Information & visual design within devices (game, DVR, computer)

User Experience is an importantpart of CEM, but like Experiential Marketing, it’s a part of a much larger whole. User Experience architects center their focus creating functional, intuitive interfaces (online or systems applications and technological devices) that enable customer interaction and transaction. CEM practitioners focus on the comprehensive interaction of customers in both online and offline channels."   continued ...   (Via Live Path)

Customer Experience Management.

I Guess No One Cares About Fonts

The real Segoe UI font as used in Office 12 ...

"Last week, I wrote about Segoe UI, the new font used to render the user interface of Office 12 and Windows Vista.

I intended it to be a little fluffy "FYI" piece. Little did I anticipate the flurry of comments and feedback and e-mail and blog entries. Font this, font that! Font font font font font!!!

So today, a little more about Segoe UI, starting with a mea culpa. To save time, I pulled the picture of Segoe UI I published last week from the beta version of the Windows Vista UX Guidelines in MSDN.

That was a mistake. It turns out that whomever made the picture used Segoe (Microsoft's corporate branding font) and not Segoe UI (which is the font we are using in the Office 12 interface.)"   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Segoe UI font as used in Office 12.

Don't Forget: User Interfaces for Physical Spaces

Looks like a great event and a very nice case study is available now ...

"MAYA Design, in preparation for the User Interfaces for Physical Spaces event, has just published a fabulously detailed case study, annotated with copious illustrations.

It makes even clearer just how cool the workshop will be. The case study outlines their process, which we'll get to walkthrough in detail -- literally, as we make trips to the libraries before and after renovation.

I mean, where else have you seen people create information blueprints as companions to architectural blueprints?

The workshop takes place December 12, in Pittsburgh, PA. And, let's face it -- you're not getting any work done that close to the holidays! So use up that training budget before the end of the year and come join us!"   continued ...   (Via peterme)

Physical Space.

Media: Connected Home is Confusing

New consumer technology must be usable to be widely accepted ...

"Networked Home 'too confusing' for consumers" develops the theme in UN story: Connecting up the Home with the Needs of Users by reviewing other conference speakers' contributions and the fundamental hurdles that haven't been jumped in moving to connected-up consumer products.

'Even Microsoft’s Branet admitted there was a need to "focus on educating consumers".

'But until the key players stop operating in silos, this isn’t going to happen,' is media consultant Jemima Gibbons' view, as she returns from the Connected Home conference."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

Connected Home.

Designing in Hostile Territory

Getting designs approved through management ...

"A friend who works for a large wireless provider complained to me recently about the impossibility of taking a design approach in his "design-unfriendly organization." He had put forward a new approach to customer service designed to dramatically enhance retention and was shot down by, of all things, the "Corporate Customer Innovation Committee."

"Roger," he bemoaned, "You write all this stuff about business design, innovation, and creativity, but unless managers have a CEO that aggressively promotes design, they will be squelched." I can feel his pain. I empathize -- but do I sympathize? Not really, because my friend is thinking about the question from a design-free perspective and expecting a design-friendly outcome that just isn't going to happen.

The bottom line: You don't need anyone's permission to think like a designer. But there are five things you need to do if you want to be effective in a "design-unfriendly organization."   continued ...   (Via BusinessWeek)

Design Approval.

Example design process for elderly

A scholarly paper on the design process for increasing usability for disabled users ...

"A “research paper” from Fujitsu describing the design process for creating a phone for elderly or disabled people. Clearly shows design considerations.

“Fujitsu’s Raku Raku PHONE is an easy-to-use mobile phone for elderly persons, persons unfamiliar with mobile-phone operation, and persons with physical disabilities, for example, persons with visual disabilities. This highly accessible, userfriendly mobile phone makes full use of speech synthesis and voice recognition technologies and achieves good universal design through an ingenious combination of hardware, software, and user interface. In the development phase, we adopted a special process to aggressively research and evaluate product usability from users’ viewpoints, clarify existing problems, and improve the design and user interface of mobile phones. This paper describes the steps taken to achieve universal design in the Raku Raku PHONE and the universal design features of its hardware, software, and audio functions."   continued ...   (Via Small Surfaces)

Raku Phone.

We have the technology, now tell us how to use it

The need for usability in a high tech world ...

"Office workers waste up to a month a year trying to figure out how to use their computers properly because modern technology is so complicated, a new study warns.

Trying to get their heads round difficult programmes on the PC is costing firms both time and money, often because no-one has taught employees what to do.

The survey of 500 workers and 300 bosses by the training body City & Guilds found that workers spent 10 per cent of their time battling against computer programmes or getting to grips with phones, handheld devices and other gadgets, equating to a month a year.

Thirty-seven per cent say they are frustrated by not being able to handle the technology. About a third (32 per cent) of workers say they have failed to receive training from their company to teach them to use the technology in the office."   continued ...   (Via Scotsman)

Computer Overload.

The Beauty of Simplicity

A good review about the merrits of simplicity ...

"It is innovation's biggest paradox: We demand more and more from the stuff in our lives--more features, more function, more power--and yet we also increasingly demand that it be easy to use. And, in an Escher-like twist, the technology that's simplest to use is also, often, the most difficult to create.

Marissa Mayer lives with that conundrum every day. As Google's director of consumer Web products, she's responsible for the search site's look and feel. Mayer is a tall, blond 30-year-old with two Stanford degrees in computer science and an infectious laugh. She's also Google's high priestess of simplicity, defending the home page against all who would clutter it up. "I'm the gatekeeper," she says cheerfully. "I have to say no to a lot of people."

The technology that powers Google's search engine is, of course, anything but simple. In a fraction of a second, the software solves an equation of more than 500 million variables to rank 8 billion Web pages by importance. But the actual experience of those fancy algorithms is something that would satisfy a Shaker: a clean, white home page, typically featuring no more than 30 lean words; a cheery, six-character, primary-colored logo; and a capacious search box. It couldn't be friendlier or easier to use."   continued ...   (Via Fast Company)

Google Simplicity.

Nokia Usability Forum

A good usability resource from Nokia ...

"Resources from Nokia about design. Some interesting stuff in there, a lot of it pitched to developers.

“Usability articles. Usability articles illustrate concrete perspectives on usability in mobile application creation. They describe in brief the most interesting issues in wireless development with end user in mind. There are success cases as well as general guidance on how to handle usability issues in a cost-efficient manner in product development."   continued ...   (Via Small Surfaces)

Nokia Mobile.

Minimizing the annoyance of the mobile phone

Societal problems with using mobile phones ...

"Nearly one in three (30%) adults say the cell phone is the invention they most hate but cannot live without, according to the eighth annual Lemelson-MIT Invention Index study.

It is easy and fun to think of the great advances in telecommunications, computation, and entertainment that will mark the next few years. But while we may relish the thought of all those wonderful technologies and opportunities, let us also remember that these come at a cost. The cost is partially monetary, but more and more it is in human-measures: annoyance, irritation, and frustration. It is what makes us wish to throw away the technology even as we embrace it.

We are in real danger of a consumer backlash against annoying technologies. We already have seen the growth of mobile-phone free zones, of prohibition against phone use, camera use, camera phones, in all sort of public and private places. The mobile phone has been shown to be a dangerous distraction to the driver of an automobile, whether hands-free or not. If we do nothing to overcome these problems, then the benefits these technologies bring may very well be denied us because the social costs are simply too great."   continued ...   (Via jnd.org)

Mobile Phone.

Linux gets Usability Support

Linux focusing on usability ...

"The Better Desktop initiative from Novell is a new component of the openSUSE project that provides open source developers with usability testing data and resources they can use to improve the quality of the Linux desktop.

Novell has released primary desktop research, including video footage and analysis of usability tests (see link below). Instructions for constructing and operating a low-cost usability lab will also be provided.

This initiative means that open source developers will be able to see for themselves the types of desktop software designs that are succeeding with end users. As a result, open source developers will have the resources to build applications that better meet the needs and expectations of users, which may see a rise in the adoption of Linux on the desktop."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

Linux Logo.

Crap Circles

A challenge to using circular diagrams ...

"Gardiner Morse has written an article challenging the over-use of circular diagrams by vendors and consulting firms. To quote:

"The circle below, from a global accounting firm's Web site, is used to illustrate the company's consulting services for owner-managed businesses. It shows the business life cycle "maturity phase" leading, inexplicably, into the "conception/ start-up phase." This company's clients should ask whether they really want to be guided in circles. (To be fair, the shortcomings of this example and those that follow are exaggerated by lack of narration; someone with a laser pointer could probably explain what the diagrams should show, even if they don’t.)"   continued ...   (Via Column Two)

Circular Diagram.

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone

Happy Thanksgiving 2005.

Why Do We Love Rounded Corners?

Rounded corners work because they leave visual hints ...

"As interface and graphic designers, we border on obsessed with rounded corners. Web developers have gone to great lengths, through the creative use of CSS (and sometimes Javascript) to make the creation of rounded corners as painless as possible. The proposed CSS3 specification even includes properties for rounded corners (Firefox already supports it).

So why is there such a fascination with rounded corners? I would venture that our attraction to rounded corners goes beyond the aesthetic and speaks to something more.

On one level, I think we're attracted to things that appear to be organic in nature. Take the iPod for instance. While the industrial design of similar products clearly hints towards how the device came to be, Apple put a lot of effort into creating a device that feels more like it grew on a tree than assembled in a factory. They went to great pains to conceal the machine-like characteristics that would typically hold a device together (screws, etc.). The result is a smoother feel with very few edges or hard angles to be found. This "smoothness" not only speaks to usability but also fosters an emotional connection with the device. Some of our earliest memories are tied to objects and things that are far less than perfect and rife with right angles. Corners say "go away." At the risk of sounding hoaky: smoother, rounder surfaces say "hold me.""   continued ...   (Via basement.org)

Rounded Corners.

The Web is hot again

The popularization of Web 2.0 UI ...

"Five years after the dot-com bust we now find ourselves on the cusp of a second revolution: Web 2.0 (or so it's been dubbed) — the first version upgrade of the World Wide Web. Richer Web software is popping up daily and amazing us with an entirely new experience.

Interactive Web applications are being launched with such robust functionality that they're threatening the future of the common desktop application. Technologies like AJAX have gained widespread buzz in a short period of time, proving that the market is now ready for what was promised years ago.

This shift is towards a more fluid, helpful and innovative Internet. Take Zimbra, a new contender in webmail. It's like Microsoft Outlook on steroids. You can hover over an address in your e-mail message and a mini map instantly appears. Couple that kind of functionality with a Web-based drag-and-drop interface, and it's hard to tell if it's running on your desktop or through a browser."   continued ...   (Via Globetechnology)

Kayak.com.

Towards the Design of Effective Formative Test Reports

Developing a best practices guide for formative test reports (PDF) ...

"Many usability practitioners conduct most of their usability evaluations to improve a product during its design and development. We call these "formative" evaluations to distinguish them from "summative" (validation) usability tests at the end of development.

A standard for reporting summative usability test results has been adopted by international standards organizations. But that standard is not intended for the broader range of techniques and business contexts in formative work. This paper reports on a new industry
project to identify best practices in reports of formative usability evaluations.

The initial work focused on gathering examples of reports used in a variety of business contexts. We define elements in these reports and present some early guidelines on making design decisions for a formative report. These guidelines are based on considerations of the business context, the relationship between author and audience, the questions that the evaluation is trying to answer, and the techniques used in the evaluation."   continued ...   (Via JUS)

Sample Reports.

The Enterprise User Experience - Bridging the IT/Marketing Divide

GUI vs. UX ...

"At one time, the concept of the Graphic User Interface (GUI) held great promise in connecting marketing to technology, and there was much talk of the importance of user friendliness. Yet over time, the term GUI lost its meaning, devolving to technological window dressing—just an aesthetic veneer without much substance. Somehow, the user at the center of this concept began to vanish from the picture, in favor the graphics and the interface.

Thankfully, the ideas and practices of enterprise UX design are gaining mindshare, succeeding where the GUI paradigm failed, and creating a shared tech-marketing domain. Companies are beginning to realize that UX professionals bring positive solutions to the table. Today, we see savvy technologists and marketers starting to embrace the enterprise UX concept because both camps stand to gain much in doing so.

User experience is a deliberately broader concept than GUI. It may take some time for it to fully penetrate the product design and development world. But it’s the right term to help create an approach to product design and development that incorporates the way people really perceive design, use products, and make decisions."   continued ...   (Via UXmatters)

It's the UX not the GUI.

Online International Journal of Usability Studies

A new online journal with excellent articles ...

"Welcome to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Usability Studies.

This journal was born in response to a growing need in the community of usability practitioners and researchers. Have you ever you looked for the most recent findings of usability studies that you can learn from or wondered where to publish interesting results from your own usability studies? Until now, there was no available forum for usability practitioners and applied researchers to share and disseminate many of their findings and experiences that are of general interest to this community. To meet this need and to fill the gap between academic research and business case studies, the Journal of Usability Studies was born. This publication will be a peer-reviewed, on-line journal dedicated to promoting and enhancing the practice, research, and education of usability engineering."   continued ...   (Via JUS)

Journal of Usability Studies.

Usability Testing of Mobile Applications

Field testing for mobile devices may not be worthwile ...

"Usability testing a mobile application in the laboratory seems to be sufficient when studying user interface and navigation issues. The usability of a consumer application was tested in two environments: in a laboratory and in a field with a total of 40 test users. The same problems were found in both environments, differences occurred in the frequency of findings between the contexts. Results indicate that conducting a time-consuming field test may not be worthwhile when searching user interface flaws to improve user interaction. In spite of this, it is possible that field testing is worthwhile when combining usability tests with a field pilot or contextual study where user behavior is investigated in a natural context."   continued ...   (Via JUS / Anne Kaikkonen, et al)

Field Testing.

Usability for the Masses

The need for all designers to learn usability ...

"The biggest problem facing the usability field is how to scale up massively so that we can impact all the user interface designs in the world. How big is this challenge? As of November 2005, there are about 75 million websites on the Internet. There are also about 30 million intranets inside corporate firewalls. Thus, there are more than 100 million user interface designs, just in the online space.

Add several hundred thousand software applications, dozens of cell phone manufacturers, and thousands of assorted consumer electronics products, and we have even more UI design to cover, many with quite esoteric and unique requirements.

Granted, many of the websites are personal sites that are only intended for the owner's closest friends. These designs may be seen purely as a personal expression and not as user experiences in the traditional sense of third-party users trying to understand a design. Still, there are probably about 70 million professional user interface designs in the world that are intended to serve the customers of a business, government agency, or a non-profit organization. If these UIs do not have good usability, much money will be lost."   continued ...   (Via JUS / Jakob Nielsen)

Usability for the Masses.

Check User ID Button

A simple and good idea for checking to see if an ID is available ...

"We’ve all been there. You find a new cool site. You decide to register for their service. You enter your favorite user id, the password, your pet’s birth date, the name of your third grade teacher (the cute one that you had a crush on), and your favorite Easter egg color. You finally press Submit. Then you find out the user id is already taken. Arrgghh!

Digg.com bypasses the ugly post-submit depression by putting a “Check” button next to the user id. Enter the name. Press Check. Find out immediately if your favorite Id is available."   continued ...   (Via UIE Brain Sparks)

ID Check Button.

A myriad of ways to make users sign-in

How sign-in strategies work on various sites ...

"It’s amazing how many different ways web sites handle sign-in pages. The messaging of the interface, whether or not to sign up for an account, and the HTML elements used are just some of the details that change drastically from site to site. Just recently I was doing an interface review to see what the state of the art was, and I was simply boggled by the different approaches I saw.

I’m interested in how this plays with users. Do they want to sign up for a new business service, or do they want to simply check out this one time? While we haven’t tested this Yahoo feature specifically, our experience testing checkouts has suggested that people often shy away from “fringe benefits” like this, especially if those benefits are not explained fully. (and much moreso if they have a choice not to)"   continued ...   (Via UIE Brain Sparks)

Amazon Sign-In.

Weaving Usability and Cultures: Benefits of an accessible website - part 2: The business case

More on the business case for making a website accessible ...

"The DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) states that service providers must not discriminate against disabled people. A website is regarded as a service and therefore falls under this law, and as such must be made accessible to everyone.

Some organisations are making accessibility improvements to their websites, but many are seemingly not making the accessibility adjustments. Disabled people don’t access their website, they say, so why should they care?

There are, however, two very good reasons as to why businesses should start taking these issues seriously:

- An accessible website will make you more money
- An accessible website will save you money"   continued ...   (Via uiGarden)

Web Accessibility.

The blooming of information architecture at Google: A close look at facets, tags & categories in Google Base

A good review of the new Google Base UI ...

"I just spent some time with GoogleBase and was amazed at just how deeply Google has embraced standard information architecture concepts and trends. We have categories, facets, tags. I kid you not. Google of the simple search box with a go button has come a long way indeed.

A rich browse experience: Search and browse is integrated. I like this. I searched for "prius". It gave me a flat list of results, and options to refine by several facets (or attributes as it refers to them) "price" "condition", "make", "vehicles", "color" etc. You can go back and forth between search and browsing. It also shows query previews (how many results are available for each attribute). In this case, these are not very useful. Since its different views of the same set of results, it shows "114" for all the facets. This defeats the purpose of query previews - whose goal is to help you decide what path to take depending on the number of results. (A better use would be to show previews for choosing paths within the facet)."   continued ...   (Via Rashmi Sinha)

Google Base Attribuites.

You'll Know It When You See It

An interesting new feature in the Office 12 UI ...

"An important element of the new user interface in Office 12 is a feature we call "Live Preview."

The basic idea behind Live Preview is simple: whenever you hover over a formatting option with your mouse cursor, Office shows you what your document would look like if you chose to apply that formatting. For example, say that you drop down the font picker in Word. As you hover over each choice in the font picker, your document updates to show you what it would look like if you chose that font. Traditionally, formatting can be a very repetitive process.

Live Preview works for more than just fonts, of course. Most objects in Office are hooked up to Live Preview so that you can "pick before you click." This includes borders, fills, rotation, bullets and numbering, outline styles, picture fine-tuning, textures, styles, slide designs, 3D effects, animations, transitions, and a bunch of other stuff. (Sounds too!) Even features that change an entire object, such as table or shape styles, are Live Preview-enabled. Beta 1 includes a lot of Live Preview, and we are continuing to work to hook more objects up for the final release."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Live Preview.

Data—The Essence of a Digital Lifestyle

A good article about how systems are changing toward user participation ...

"I’ve been thinking a lot about metadata recently, but not from the standpoint of XML or programming or helping to organize and index data. My interest is in the future of content ownership, delivery, and value. I see a future for media that looks very different from the media of today. The germ of this idea actually came from my experiences with online movie rentals.

“Netflix has essentially got me. Why? … They’ve got my personal data, my history, my preferences, and my viewing plans for the future. … The value and differentiation is in the ownership of my personal data.”

“The killer digital applications of the future will gather, use, and leverage people’s data to satisfy needs that they don’t even realize they have."   continued ...   (Via UXmatters)

Netflix.

Why People Matter

A detailed article about the need for Universal Usability ...

"Saying that people are the focus of user experience is stating the obvious, but when we are deeply engaged in our own work as user experience designers, it can be difficult to constantly remember to keep people at the center of design. For most of us, it’s hard not to get caught up in the skills and techniques that the technologies we work with require and even harder not to want to use technology to solve problems. But as user experience designers, we need to keep our eye on people. Unless you are working on a participatory design project, your users are at least one step away and out of sight can easily become out of mind.

In this column, I’ll explore how people and technology fit together and how this intersection succeeds or fails. When the fit is bad, it is often because products—and their designers—have failed either to

- anticipate and design for the complexity of users’ tasks
- understand the range of differences in people who will use a product"   continued ...   (Via UXmatters)

Designing for Real People.

So the Necessary May Speak

Reducing visual design to the necessary minimum ...

"Though carefully structured organizational systems and well architected interactions are key components of effective interface designs, it is ultimately the presentation of an interface—layout, look and feel—that tells users what a product has to offer and how they can make use of it. As a result, creating usable and engaging interactive products is dependent on our ability, as designers, to communicate with our audience. The better at communicating we are, the easier it is for our audience to understand our messages and intentions and the easier it is for them to use and appreciate the products we design.

Interactive products, by their very nature, tend to be complicated. They allow us to create and control large amounts of information and enable many unique interactions. As a result, there’s a natural tendency for interface designs to over-communicate, or establish multiple forms of dialogue and vocabularies within a single application or interaction. Complicated concepts require more explanation, right? Not always."   continued ...   (Via UXmatters)

Minimum Necessary Visuals.

Personas, Goals, and Emotional Design

A nice expansion on Don Norman's "Emotional Design" ...

"When Don Norman’s most recent book, Emotional Design, hit the shelves in early 2004, it sent a ripple through the user experience world. Norman introduced the idea that product design should address three different levels of cognitive and emotional processing: visceral, behavioral, and reflective. This idea seemed like old news to some and a revelation to others in the UX community. In either case, Norman’s ideas, based on years of cognitive research, provide an articulated structure for modeling user responses to product and brand and a rational context for many intuitions long held by professional designers.

Using personas, goals, and scenarios provides one potential key to unlocking the power of visceral, behavioral, and reflective design, and bringing them together into a harmonious whole. While some of our best designers seem to understand and act upon the interrelationships between these aspects of design almost intuitively, consciously designing for all levels of human cognition and emotion offers tremendous potential for creating more satisfying and delightful user experiences."   continued ...   (Via UXmatters)

Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things



Check-out more books at Usernomics.

Accessibility Is Not Enough

Accessibility must be viewed in the context of making a site easier to use ...

"A strict focus on accessibility as a scorecard item doesn't help users with disabilities. To help these users accomplish critical tasks, you must adopt a usability perspective.

We did find that most portal products have poor out-of-the-box usability, so one can certainly fear the worst. And it's never wise to trust a vendor's sales staff in matters of user experience -- the only good advice here is to check for yourself.

Such a check is easy: Simply ask four or five of your disabled employees to spend an hour testing the product on whatever sample tasks are realistically represented in the available version. It's important that these employees use their own screen readers, screen magnifiers, keyguards, or mouse replacements, and any other assistive technology they might use during their daily work."   continued ...   (Via Alertbox)

Practical Accessibility.

Zen is not for value judgments

Simplicity may not be as obvious as first thought ...

"A blog called "Presentation Zen" has generated a lot of buzz for a couple of posts that smugly satisfy what an audience wants to believe: Bill Gates and Visual Complexity and Gates, Jobs, and the Zen Aesthetic. Readers feel righteous in the easy digs at Microsoft's busy PowerPoint slides, particularly when compared to Jobs' spare presentations.

And when I first saw those posts, I thought, "Yeah! Spareness! Simplicity! Whoo!" Bet then I wondered, "Um, isn't Bill Gates worth a gajillion dollars? Isn't Microsoft an exceedingly successful company? Should we maybe look at this a little differently?"

And I wonder: Maybe Microsoft is giving people what they want. Obviously, it's all about context. And Microsoft's contexts are very different from Apple's. Steve Jobs never really explains anything. He simply shows products. He pretty much just gives demos. Bill Gates, in the presentations critiqued by those posts, is trying to explain something... And explain something that contains a fair bit of complexity. And Bill's audience is likely quite different... Bill is trying to communicate to developers, who are wondering about the ramifications of Microsoft's decisions on their livelihood."   continued ...   (Via peterme)

Zen Simplicity.

Design for servicability and manufacturability

The need for servicability of computer hardware ...

"In a perfect world, a machine should be easy to maintain and service, even to a novice. This will never happen of course, but there are a few guidelines and case studies that will help you.

We'll use the original series of iMac (the fruit-colored ones) as an example of a machine that could have been built differently. While most people agree that it's a good machine when it works, it has a few quirks that make it frustrating when it fails.

A lot of the first machines produced had an unforeseen problem of the monitor's transformer overheating and failing. While this is the kind of thing that can happen to anyone, other aspects of the design made this a bit of a disaster for the owner.

The general design of the iMac is relatively difficult to service. Access to most of the electronics means disassembling a good portion of the chassis, not just the removal of one panel. Many parts are hidden under other parts, or connected in such a way that access is not obvious. This creates problems even for servicepeople who will otherwise willingly crack open a computer."   continued ...   (Via IDFuel)

Computer Parts.

Computers with a 'human' face

A human user interface design for computers ...

"For many years now, researchers have tried to make computers more user-friendly, sometimes with the use of avatars on screen trying to educate us. Results have never been really successful. But now, a researcher at Florida State University (FSU) is working to give computers a human 'face' and her computer-generated characters can be tailored to a specific audience. For example, she is using such agents to challenge young women's stereotypes about the engineering profession by employing non-stereotypical engineering 'mentors' like pseudo-women.

Here are some details about this FSU project.

"Up until now, the personal computer's potential to be a valuable teaching and learning tool has been stymied by its 'soulless' nature," said Amy L. Baylor, [an associate professor of instructional systems and director of FSU's Center for Research of Innovative Technologies for Learning (RITL).] "At RITL, we're using computers to simulate human beings in a controlled manner so we can investigate how they affect and persuade people."

Every day at RITL, researchers in the areas of instructional technology, human-computer interaction, communication, computer science and psychology work to develop innovative uses of technologies to support learning and performance."   continued ...   (Via ZDNet)

Animated Computer Instructor.

Find out what your customer really needs from your website

You need to know what the user needs to have good usability ...

"If there is one reason—more than any other—why a website fails, it is because it doesn’t understand its customers.

Thanks to everyone who recently completed the survey of web manager headings. Out of 50 headings, the number-one heading, with 17 percent of people voting for it, was:

“Find out what your customer really needs from your website”

Stating the obvious? If the obvious was obvious, everyone would be doing it. We live in a world of mirrors and opposites. What is clear is not clear, what is obvious is not obvious."   continued ...   (Via Gerry McGovern)

Department of Energy.

Creating Simple Software in a Geek-driven Culture

An online talk about moving from a technology to user orieneted model for Firefox ...

"Two years ago, the Mozilla Foundation resembled most other open-source organizations: it was slow, technology-oriented, and allergic to consumers. Today, the Mozilla Corporation develops, distributes and promotes the first open-source product ever to penetrate the mainstream: Firefox was downloaded over 100 million times in less than one year. We will look at how Mozilla transformed its development practices, economic models—basically its entire culture—to change from a technology-focused to a people-focused organization in such a short time."   continued ...   (Via Stanford HCI)

Firefox.

The state of the Art in Australian web development

A detailed article about "Current practices in Web Development in Major Australian Sites - a survey." ...

"How are major companies and government departments in Australia developing their sites today? Are they adhering to best practices in development and accessibility? This presentation looks at major Australian sites, to determine whether they are using best practices, and where they are falling down. We'll see what patterns emerge, where things are going well, or otherwise. And we'll conclude with some recommendations based on this cold hard evidence.

Methodology - My aim with this survey was first to develop an objective, if a little unsophisticated, measure of a site's adherence to current best practices in web development and accessibility. This could then be used to gauge sites against one another, and over time.

Now, if you are going to investigate best practices, of course we'll first need to define what these are. The main areas which standards based developers are concerned with, and which perhaps differentiates the standards based approach to development from more "traditional" approaches are

1. Validity of XHTML
2. Use of and validity of CSS
3. Use of semantic, structural HTML, and separation of content structure from presentation
4. Accessibility"   continued ...   (Via westciv / John Allsopp)

State of Austrailian Websites.

Volusion - User Unfriendly

Usability of OS Commerce solutions ...

"A couple of months ago, I was consulted by an online outfit to analyze their ecommerce strategies given the long term vision of the company (that was the reason I looked into Yahoo Merchant Solutions, the client’s current online store front service provider). After doing a thorough market research, I went back to them with three alternative alternative solutions to Yahoo:

MonsterCommerce
Volusion
OS Commerce

Given the requirements and budget, these three solutions were most fitting for the client. Unfortunately, due to concerns with support on open source, OS Commerce had to be dropped. Out of the other two companies, the client picked Volusion as the ecommerce solution of choice to migrate their online store front to."   continued ...   (Via WiredAtom)

MonsterCommerce.

Getting Your Design Past the 36th Chamber of Engineers

Getting UI design approved during the development process ...

"A couple of weeks ago, Jared Spool talked about screening for the right participants. One of the responses to the article mentioned that for some of us, the difficulty came even earlier in the process: convincing internal teams that it was beneficial to get any user testing at all. I don’t imagine Robby Slaughter is the only person in this situation, though I hope that by now, it’s become less and less of an issue. I thought it would be interesting to touch on one area of that which is getting your design to remain as intact as possible through the development process.

In software and web development I’ve found the best way to interact with both product managers and engineers has been to speak in their language. That is, integrate the UI process in such a way that the stakeholders can relate it to their own existing processes and documents.

I separate these into three primary deliverables/phases: the requirements, the specifications and the code review. I’m sure others can think of additional ways to effectively communicate their design and ensure its execution. These are the ones I’ve found have worked most consistently across almost any project."   continued ...   (Via OK/Cancel)

Getting a design accepted.

IBM's Evaluation of Different Technology Implementation Methods

Achieving user acceptance of a new technology.

"A new paper from IBM's Ease of Use looks at the introduction of new technology and the challenges this poses to organisations.

'One of the biggest challenges is to gain user acceptance and adoption of the new technology while maintaining an acceptable level of productivity and performance.'

It goes on to argue that while a number of factors influence an individual’s attitude toward new technology, including gender, age, and peers’ perceptions and attitudes, different implementation methods have different strengths and weaknesses and affect acceptance. Taking a close look at the growing use of portal technology and describing the experiences of organisations who have implemented the technology using the different methods, it offers insights into their relative merits in human terms."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

Achieving User Acceptance.

Andrew's Usability in the Real World: Who are our Users?

Determining a products real-world users ...

"While the usability profession often discusses the 'how' and 'why' of studying users, we too rarely discuss the 'who'. Who should you include in a usability study?

It's an important question. So much user-centred research relies on small samples, making it especially important to choose the sample wisely. More and more, usability people are asked to comment on whether a product is likely to be used (see my earlier column: Predictive Usability), and poorly chosen samples can lead to circular reasoning.

For example, imagine a company developing a new gadget asks you to study its usability. They tell you that their marketing department has decided on two key market segments: Young Funs and Old Grumpies. You recruit according to this profile, and find that Young Funs like the gadget, while Old Grumpies wouldn't use it in a million years. In many companies, this would be taken to mean young people will use the product, and older people won't, and so only the results from the younger people will be taken into account."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

Who are our users?

Beta 1-derful: The "Top 30" List

Several articles about the Office 12 user interface design ...

I've been blogging long enough now that many of the questions I receive through e-mail are covered in posts from the past. With more people reading every week, it's only natural that not everyone will have read everything I've written.

So, in honor of Beta 1, here are the top 30 articles you should read if you want to familiarize yourself with the user interface changes in Office 12. If you read these 30 articles, you'll have a good start at understanding what we're doing, why we're doing it, and how we're validating it.

- Posts about the Ribbon and how it works
- Posts about Galleries, Formatting, and Results-Oriented Design
- Why did we make a new UI for Office 12?
- The philosophies, ideas, and design tenets behind the new UI
- Usability techniques and validation of the new UI"   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Office 12.

Value Centered Design

Looking for the sweet spot between business and user needs ...

"What’s the point of design thinking? We use design thinking as a shorthand for a certain mindset, approach, and methods. But many conversations about design thinking (including many of my own comments) seem to be at a theoretical level, where the end goal of design thinking is fairly vague - something like ‘enlighten those poor ignorant business folk’. In many other conversations, innovation seems to be the goal of design thinking - the creation of novel products and services. But design thinking theory and even innovation both need to focus on what really matters: creating value.

Value-centered design recognizes that the point of our work is to generate value. And not just bottom line cost savings, or top line sales through new products. True value comes at the intersection of business goals and human needs. Most design thinking descriptions include a human-centered approach - but really what we need is a balanced approach that uses human-centered design to frame business problems in terms of human needs, wants, hopes, dreams and desires.

By providing Return on Investment for business and Return on Experience for users we can create long term sustainable value. We realize that value through the offering we create and the delivery of that offering to the individual. Of course, this is simply good design. But reframing the conversation so that shared value is the key means that design thinking isn’t just a philosophical meme out of touch with business realities."   continued ...   (Via bplusd)

Value Centered Design.

Making the Letters Better

A fresh type font look for Office 12 ...

"We're not just introducing a new UI in Office 12--we're also introducing a new UI font.

Windows 95 used "MS Sans Serif" as the UI font in Western locales. It was a straightforward font which looked fairly good, if plain, at small sizes. Office 95, as well as previous versions running on Windows 95, used this font for menus and dialog boxes.

With the UI changes happening in Windows Vista and Office 12, we felt like it was time to commission a more modern UI font, designed specifically to take advantage of ClearType. In addition, we wanted a more humanistic, friendly font that would seem less "computer-y" than Tahoma. Most importantly, we wanted the font to take advantage of the research done in Microsoft Typography over the last decade in specifically creating fonts that are easy to scan and read on-screen. These guys know their stuff, and we knew it would make a positive difference in the user interface."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Segoe UI Type Font.

Is Beauty the new usability attribute?

The role of "beauty" in user interface design ...

"If you're a human factors/usability practitioner like me, you were probably "raised" on the core attributes of usability:

- effectiveness
- efficiency
- ease of learning
- memorability
- error handling
- aesthetic satisfaction

And if you're like me, you may have treated that last one – aesthetics – as somewhat of an afterthought, covered quickly with a few preference-oriented, rating-scale questions, or dismissed with a comment like, "We'll get to the visual design later. First let’s focus on how it works."

There is a lot of talk about beauty in the HCI community (e.g., Norman 2004). However, research tying aesthetics to design is still rather new. (e.g., Kurosu and Kashimura, 1995; Lavie and Tractinsky, 1997; Tractinsky, Katz and Ikar, 2000; Wilson, 2002). These studies demonstrate the "what is beautiful is good" stereotype. That is, they show that the beauty of a product can influence the users' overall impression or general user satisfaction of the product. Think iPod. But how do you measure that?"   continued ...   (Via HFI)

Representing an abstract emotional response.

Clackmannanshire Council Website wins top Prize for Acessibility

An accessible government website ...

"Clackmannanshire Council’s website has won the Accessibility Award in the e-government UK Good Communication Awards 2005 (GCA). After a rigorous judging process, the award was presented by Trenton Moss of Webcredible to the Scottish Council.

Clackmannanshire Council’s award winning website was re-launched in March 2005. A panel of site users was established in August 2004 and throughout the site development their views were sought on a range of topics. The panel included one blind user and one partially sighted user.

Although web accessibility is about making a website accessible to all users, it’s particularly concerned with those with visual impairments or disabilities. Accessibility also involves making sure the website is suitable for people with hearing, motor, and cognitive impairments. It can even refer to people who are accessing the site from particular environments (e.g. a public library with a slow internet connection), or with particular technologies (e.g. a mobile device)."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

Clackmannanshire Website.

The Principles of Universal Design

An excellent article describing universal design principles and their application ...

"The authors, a working group of architects, product designers, engineers and environmental design researchers, collaborated to establish the following Principles of Universal Design to guide a wide range of design disciplines including environments, products, and communications. These seven principles may be applied to evaluate existing designs, guide the design process and educate both designers and consumers about the characteristics of more usable products and environments.

The design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design.

- PRINCIPLE ONE: Equitable Use - The design is useful and marketable to people with diverse abilities.
- PRINCIPLE TWO: Flexibility in Use - The design accommodates a wide range of individual preferences and abilities."   continued ...   (Via uiGarden)

Principle of Error Tolorance.

Google Base Item Types

Looks like an interesting Google addition but the start page is a little busy ...

"So Google Base launched today. If you haven’t heard about it, it’s been called an eBay and Craigslist killer among other things.

Whether or not you believe that Google Base will have that effect, the anxiety it produces comes from the “item type” feature, which I find fascinating. Item types are simply content genres, or types of content. Here is the complete list of prepopulated item types on Google Base so far:

- Course Schedules
- Events and Activities
- Jobs"   continued ...   (Via Bokardo)

Google Base.

Measuring a Site's "Blink" Response

Testing users' blink response to a website ...

"I just recently finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Malcolm’s main premise is that people frequently develop important impressions in the first seconds of an experience. He asserts that the human brain works at lightning speed to come to snap judgments about information.

Malcolm’s argument is consistent with what we’ve often believed may be a weakness of traditional usability tests: we may not be accurately uncovering the users’ first impressions of the content. In most tests, users give us their feedback only after completing a task on the site, once they’ve had some time to consciously process their impressions. But is this really how users make their first judgment of a web site in a real-life setting? According to Blink’s argument, probably not.

To more accurately assess users’ first impressions of designs, we’ve developed what we call the 5-Second Test. The main purpose of this variant of traditional usability testing is to assess a user’s Blink response to a site’s design and content."   continued ...   (Via UIE Brain Sparks)

Blink.

Nine In Ten Online Shoppers Frustrated

The user experience and UI is not working for online shopping ...

"Around 90% of online users have problems completing Internet transactions, according to a survey conducted by Harris Interactive.

About 90 percent of online users have problems completing Internet business transactions, according to a survey released Monday by TeaLeaf Technology.

TeaLeaf commissioned a study of online shopping, banking, travel and insurance Web site transactions. The study, by Harris Interactive, found that one in three consumers would go to a competitor if they experienced a problem. Eighty-two percent said they were unwilling to accept lower levels of customer service online than they would offline."   continued ...   (Via InformationWeek)

Online Shopping.

The web 2.0 experience continuum

The impact of Web 2.0 on user experiences ...

"My five-year-old recently sent me her first instant message. It was one of the few words she can spell: “No.” (Surprise.) Ten years from now, when she’s 15, I can easily imagine receiving the same message, but how will it be created, sent, and delivered? By typing on a computer via a desktop chat client? My guess is, probably not.

There’s been a lot of talk about the technology of Web 2.0, but only a little about the impact these technologies will have on user experience. Everyone wants to tell you what Web 2.0 means, but how will it feel? What will it be like for users?

The Continuum - Over the next ten years, we’ll see a wide range of experiences online, from highly structured to nearly formless."   continued ...   (Via adaptive path)

The Experience Continuum of Web 2.0.

Airtime

How the interface changes with mobile search ...

"Mobile search has been quietly chugging along, with all the usual suspects and a big group of startups releasing their furtive efforts without too much fanfare. Things heated up last week with with separate announcements from giants Yahoo! and Google — with Yahoo saying it was working with SBC on a branded phone built around easy access to its mobile content, while Google released Google Local Mobile, a J2ME application for accessing its local and map services.

Searching on a mobile phone is a very different animal than web search, with most searches based around some task: I’m looking for the nearest Wi-Fi hotspot, what time does the movie start, what’s the weather forecast, and so on. Given the limitations of mobile devices and their user interfaces, search has to be approached very differently. Giving links to pages that might contain the information a user’s looking for doesn’t really work too well; returning the information directly instead is much more useful. Simply put, mobile search is a search for mobile information."   continued ...   (Via Gizmodo)

Yahoo Mobile.

Flash: what is it good for? (absolutely something!)

When to use flash vs. AJAX ...

"Flash gets a bad rep among programmers. The programming model is very different from typical programming languages, and the uses of the technology have typically been annoying (banner adds, skip-intro splash pages). More recently, AJAX has emerged as an extremely popular way of introducing dynamic behavior into web pages. So why do we even need Flash?

I just finished a HUGE Flash application (MindCanvas) that started out as an AJAX prototype, was developed in Flash, and then had part of the application converted back to AJAX. Whew! At this point, I feel like I can write with some authority on when to use Flash, and when to avoid using it. Flash has specific limitations, but so does AJAX, and it’s important above all to use the right tool for the job."   continued ...   (Via Jonathan Boutelle)

Flash vs. AJAX.

Morality and User Interface Design

An interesting article about the relationship of morality and user interface design ...

"Morality and User Interface Design are two topics that do not seem too closely related at first glance. After all, interface design is about “nice” and usable interfaces, but we as Usability Engineers and User Interface Designers don’t have to make decisions that have any severe impact on the morality side, right? – Well, how you design a user interface for a mobile phone may not be something Immanuel Kant would have bothered himself with, were he alive today. But what about such things as, e.g., user interfaces for weapon control?

M.L. Cummings at MIT wrote an interesting article on “Creating Moral Buffers in Weapon Control Interface Design” [PDF] in which she takes a look at military and also medical settings and describes the moral implications that decisions in those areas of interface design inevitably have.
The basic argument she makes is, that a user interface can create a “gap” between a person’s actions and their consequences which results in psychological/emotional (and in some cases also physical) distancing from those consequences and therefore in a diminished sense of accountability and responsibility: the moral buffer.
In addition, users have a tendency to anthropomorphise computers. (Those of you who ever yelled at their computer when it didn’t do what it was intended to do will know what she is talking about.) This, together with the cognitive limitations a stressful situation can produce and the moral buffer described above, can even lead to users assigning moral authority to computers in certain situations. This may seem rather theoretical – as long as you are not a patient in a hospital where staff relies on a system like APACHE, which determines “at what stage of a terminal illness treatment would be futile."   continued ...   (Via Another Useful Blog)

Morality.

Clean, Cutting-edge UI Design Cuts McAfee's Support Calls by 90%

Lessons learned with McAfee's User Interface Design ...

"When McAfee launched it’s new ProtectionPilot software in the summer of 2004, the number of support calls they received was drastically less than expected and what is typical of a software launch. According to development manager David Ries, “Focusing on the design of the product had a significant impact on the cost of supporting the product.”

The article on softwareceo.com presents 23 tips attributed to McAfee’s success with the ProtectionPilot launch:

- Start the UI design before you build the product.
- Understand your software from a user’s standpoint.
- Get feedback through task"   continued ...   (Via IxDA)

McAfee ProtectionPilot.

Accessibility - who does it REALLY help?

Data about who benefits from accessibility ...

"Whenever the topic of accessibility comes up amongst web designers, there’s always a few who insist on seeing some numbers. The argument usually consists of ‘why should I do X to accomodate the small insignificant group Y’. Of course, this fails to take into consideration the fact that accessibility isn’t specifically about accomodating some minority groups, but, rather, accomodating a large range of users.

Yet, people like numbers. And it’s something I honestly haven’t ever gotten around to digging up. I recently came across a few websites that do offer some numerical insights.

The first is the US Census Bureau’s web site, and, specifically, an article on the Anniversary of The ADA act."   continued ...   (Via MNteractive)

Americans with Disabilities Act.

Solid Vision: A Critical Element to UX Design

The importance of a vision in UX design ...

"As we continue our research into what separates those organizations successful at user experience design from those that struggle, we’ve found that a critical element lacking in the struggling organizations is vision.

A vision is a unified understanding of the direction the organization is going with their design efforts. It can manifest itself in many ways, from stories to vision documents to videos. (The most famous of which is Apple’s 1987 Knowledge Navigator, which came out in the days before portable and network computing was a reality. See Jon Udell’s nice writeup of it.) These manifestations are important, but not as important as the vision itself. It doesn’t matter what’s in the video if it’s not a coherent direction for the group.

A vision is basically a stick in the sand, a long ways away. Some visions we’ve seen only go out 6 months. Others go out 10 years. It seems it doesn’t matter. (Shorter time frames just mean you spend a lot more time updating the vision, but that could be necessary if you’re in a very reactive marketplace.)"   continued ...   (Via UIE Brain Sparks)

Apple's Knowledge Navigator.

Grading On the Curve (Why the UI, Part 8)

A continuation of the Office 12 UI development ...

"Over the last two weeks, I've discussed the Customer Experience Improvement Program and some of the data we've collected from the program. How do we use that data to influence the design and organization of the Office 12 user interface?

If you plot the command usage of the Office applications on a graph, you get a curve. A few commands account for a lot of clicks, and then slowly the number of clicks per command tapers off. We use the data represented by the curve to inform us about how often people use certain commands. The curve itself helps us visualize the usage pattern of the overall program and the average "depth" to which most people use the product.

Many people suggest that "you guys should optimize the UI to match the feature usage data." On the surface, this sounds like a solid idea; you could have a computer determine the organization and prominence of different features depending on what part of the curve they are in. It would be very scientific. The only problem? We've already designed that product, and it's called Office 2003."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

The Office Data Center.

Ryanair success has strong web lessons

If people get what they want, even poor design brings in visitors ...

"Despite record fuel prices, Ryanair makes record profits. Its no-frills website has helped this no-frills airline achieve such phenomenal success.

It’s good to know that, all over the world, human beings have something special in common in relation to their web behavior. Having traveled to 35 countries in the last five years, I was heartened by the common traits that we share. Whether in Asia, Europe or America, there is much that binds us together.

In fact, there is one web behavior attribute that I have found to be universal. It is that when people are on the Web they are cheap. Why, even the Swiss are cheap."   continued ...   (Via Gerry McGovern)

Ryanair Website.

No Distaste for Paste (Why the UI, Part 7)

Without data, the guesses are usually wrong ...

"Last Monday I issued a challenge: for readers to pick the most-used command in Microsoft Word 2003 and also the top 5 most-used commands (bonus points for having them in order.)

For me, the most interesting part was reading the justifications around the guesses. I'll reproduce a few of them here:

- "Ctrl-Z Undo has *got* to be one of the top 5. I'm sure that bold/italic are in there too."

- "...Save is very rarely used. Most end-users I've known are very hostile to the idea of saving frequently."

- "I disagree with everyone. My mother can't cut and copy and paste, and she's probably much more of a typical user than any of us."

- "normal ppl don't use Print Preview."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Word 2003 Commands.

HCI2005: Ted Nelson's Big Picture is a Sour One

A negative view of computers and technology ...

"'In HCI, you see yourselves in a helping role, but you don't have the ability to go back as far as you need to: to 1945.'

Ted Nelson's keynote at HCI2005 was grumpy. Casting himself as the little boy who saw the reality of the "Emperor's New Clothes", he took a very big picture and started with a litany of computer metaphors that failed their users: 'Have you ever seen a vertical desktop? Clipboards that wipe what was there before? That are the same in all aspects but not in any other aspects?'

Computers are what we make them, he told the conference audience, at Napier University in Edinburgh. 'Just as the hamburger is not the true nature of cows, today's computers are a result of misunderstandings of human life and human thought – not the nature of computers but the nature of computer makers' minds, who see the world as hierarchical.'

Nelson is best known as the father of 'hypertext', coining the term in the 60s for a non-hierarchical way of organising materials and ideas. He has continued his work into structures that offer an alternative to the prevalent interfaces of our day. Whether or not he relishes his position as outside the mainstream, he used it to good effect in his talk, punctuating his descriptions of his own progress with lacerating comments on the industry."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

Not the true nature of a cow.

Design sites and web standards

Examples of design sites that lack Web standards ...

"Over a year ago, Joe Clark checked how well Design sites do Web standards. They generally don’t, which doesn’t come as a huge surprise. After having some problems when posting comments at design site Speak Up, Joe checked the current status of web standards usage on design sites. More on that in Design sites do Web standards II."   continued ...   (Via 456 Berea Street)

k10k Design Site.

Musings on Mouse Hover

An excellent article about the use of hover ...

"I've been thinking a lot lately about mouse hovers. Yeh, I know I really should get out more often ;-)

A mouse hover is a really simple event. When you get a mouseover event you do someting. When you get a mouseout event you usually restore things to the original state.

Mouse hovers were virtually unheard of in the desktop user interface world. I remember writing some very sophisticated applications (games, graphical drawing packages, etc.) and only using mouse hover for some very basic operations. Tooltips & mouse coordinate feedback are two that come to mind.

Ajax, DHTML and the Lowly Hover - Now that interactions are even more dense, the hover has become our friend to discoverability. We are introducing new idioms to the web space. Things like drag and drop and inline editability are not immediately expected. The hover can provide vital clues to the behavior of an application at the moment the user is curious about it. Hovers are also the lightest event for the user (they just move the mouse.)"   continued ...   (Via Looks Good Works Well)

Flickr Hover.

Design Choices Can Cripple a Website

Design factors that can make a difference ...

"I admit, it’s a provocative headline. But it’s true.

However compelling the message, however great the copy, however strong the sales argument… the way a page is designed will have a dramatic impact on conversion rates, for better or for worse.

Here’s how design choice can make a difference
Here are just a few of the design elements we have found can make a significant difference to the performance of a web page:

- The position and color of the primary call to action
- Position on the page of testimonials, if used
- Whether linked elements are in text or as images
- The amount of “white space” on a page, giving the content space to “breathe”
- The position and prominence of the main heading
- The number of columns used on the page
- The number of visual elements competing for attention
- The age, sex and appearance of someone in a photo"   continued ...   (Via A List Apart)

Results from three webpage versions.

Maintaining Concentration to Achieve Task Completion

Designing the UI to achieve user concentration (PDF Format) ...

"When faced with a challenging goal, knowledge workers need to concentrate on their tasks so that they move forward toward completion. Since frustrations, distractions, and interruptions can interfere with their smooth progress, design strategies should enable users to maintain concentration. This paper promotes awareness of this issue, reviews related work, and suggests three initial strategies: Reduce short-term and working memory load, provide information abundant interfaces, and increase automaticity.

The varying rhythms of life include times of solitary reflection in natural settings, relaxation while listening to music with friends, and casual conversation with family. Sometimes the rhythms shift to purposeful action to achieve meaningful personal or professional goals within strict time limits. In these times, modern information and communication technologies can be remarkable amplifiers of human capabilities. Users who maintain their concentration can move smoothly along the path to goal attainment. When they do so, they can feel mastery of the interface, satisfaction in completion of their tasks, and responsibility for the outcomes.

Unfortunately some interface experiences produce annoying frustrations that distract users’ attention. These frustrations can lead to poorer workplace performance, lower self-esteem, and stressful relationships with colleagues [2, 10]."   continued ...   (Via Ben Shneiderman and Benjamin B. Bederson)

Notification Balloon.

Apple's Mail is the worst user experience

A problem with the Apple Mail UI and alternate mail suggestions ...

"I can’t take it any more, Apple Mail is the worst user experience. It’s not a usefulness problem, it’s not because of errors, it’s because the performance is so poor that the Mail is absolutely unuseable. It has been a long time since I’ve felt like my 1.25GHz G4 processor and 1Gb of RAM were in adequate. But these feelings often come when I am running something more complex than Mail. If I was running Maya, Shake, even compiling a large code base, I could understand. But Pine runs just fine on my command line, it doesn’t seem to crash. Arrrggggghhhhh!"   continued ...   (Via David Crow)

Apple Mail.

The scariest interface part II

You have to see some of these Web pages ...

"Wow, we got some great entries for this contest. A quick recap is in order. The task was to submit the scariest interface you’ve every used. We saw complicated weather pages including one that threatens to freeze your machine if you right click. We saw a variety of apps that buried us in a landslide of menus toolbars buttons palettes and tabs. We found out what happens when you hire 12 designers and take just one design element from each, as well as what happens when you hire 400 advertisers and take every ad from each.

There were creations of colossal clutter from companies big and small. There were curiosities of unclear utility. There was even a scary site that let you listen to the star-spangled banner whilst shopping for assault weapons.

My personal favorite was band in a box, which offers all the headache and confusion of a sloppy band practice without any of the fun. Its combination of familiar elements with terrible UI gives it a glimmer of understandability right before confusion and panic set in."   continued ...   (Via OK/Cancel)

Band In A Box.

Planning for User Research Success

An article about the need for planning to ensure a successful user research project ...

"Planning is crucial if you want your user research efforts to be effective. You need to think about what information you need to gather, and why, before embarking on any research. Good planning, well communicated to the client or project, and followed by careful implementation will ensure your research is effective.

When conducting user research activities such as Usability Testing, Interviews and Site Visits, it's important to think about the information you want to gather and why. Sometimes we see organizations undertaking research activities – with the best of intentions – that yield data that is insufficiently detailed, mis-focused, or not timely. For example, they may rush into conducting usability testing of an interface with readily identifiable flaws (such as inconsistent navigation or terminology) that could have been addressed prior to testing.

A useful way to begin planning is to answer a set of questions. Not only do they help you choose the appropriate research activities, but they also help you to actually produce a Research Plan that can then be agreed and signed off with your client or project."   continued ...   (Via Apogee)

Planning for Research.

Design Leads & Wireframes

"By popular request and with permission, Functioning Form is publishing some of Jim Leftwich’s writings on design. Part one of this series follows:

I have always believed in the speed, breadth of integrative power, and just sheer purity that a single strong design lead can bring to a problem. I'd qualify that further in saying that similarly strong leads in all the necessary aspects of product or system development (that understand the value of the others - i.e.: engineering, business, etc.) is even more powerful, but in my long career, fairly rare. What separates truly extraordinary and transcendent products or systems from the merely adequate (I won't even talk about poor efforts) is vision. Until such time that the communication and coordination between “separate minds” can reach the speed and integration of neurons within a single mind with vision and experience, the latter will always be capable of creating and “inspired” solution.

The higher up the food chain this capability and leadership resides (or is consulting into), the greater the likelihood of an inspired and elegant solution. Now this doesn't by any means insure larger business success, because there are many extenuating and complex forces at play in the product world. It also doesn't imply that such a leader is always “right”, but in the long term, and especially when it comes to significant or revolutionary “innovation” (as opposed to the overwhelming majority of development that is merely "me too" or evolutionary feature creep), a design leader with vision will very often drive a product or system to greater and more successful heights."   continued ...   (Via Functioning Form)

Wireframe Example.

Designing usable rich internet applications

A good example of usable rich internet but a mystery meat navigation setup ...

"I spoke at the inaugural Canberra web standards group this afternoon, on the topic of "Designing usable rich internet applications".

You can read my presentation: Designing usable rich internet applications but it may not make sense by itself. I'll let you know when the podcast is available (I'm looking forward to listening to it myself - Peter said I used del.icio.us as a verb - as in 'you can delicious it').

When you look at the presentation, it may not be clear what is happening. It is in the S5 format - click on the screen (or use arrows or page up/page down) to go through it, or use the controls in the bottom right-hand corner to jump to a slide. View the outline (the little icon that looks like a 0 with a line through it) to see notes and references."   continued ...   (Via DonnaM)

Usable Rich Internet Application.

People-Centred Innovation climbs the Agenda

Discussion of the People-Inspired Innovation conference ...

"The recent "People-Inspired Innovation" conference organised by Chimera at Adastral Park, Ipswich, prompted me to reflect on the findings of last year’s DTI Mission to the west coast of the US and gave me the opportunity to find out if there were any advances or changes in the area.

My question for the mission last year focussed on the integration of user research in the innovation and design process. I saw two examples on the mission. BMW DesignWorks innovation group have integrated experience frameworks as their user knowledge into their innovation process. Intel had been prompted to carry out research in China and as a result developed an “educational PC” that has educational software and a physical lock on the machine that switches between educational packages, and access to games and the Internet.

At the "People-Inspired Inovation" conference, Alex Mack from Pitney Bowes gave another example. Alex showed how user research had been used to develop a smart mailer for SMEs and talked about how they engaged other parts of the business in the process. One of the issues that arose was how filtered or worked up ideas should be before they are evaluated by others. She also talked about keeping a “shelf of ideas” for the right time. Interestingly, the project has led to the development of a product but was criticised within the innovation group as not being innovative enough. This begs the question whether it is a compromise."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

People Inspired Innovation Conference 2005.

Introduction to Web Accessibility

A good introduction to website accessibility ...

"Most people today can hardly conceive of life without the Internet. It provides access to information, news, email, shopping, and entertainment. The Internet, with its ability to serve out information at any hour of the day or night about practically any topic conceivable, has become a way of life for an impatient, information-hungry generation. Some have argued that no other single invention has been more revolutionary since that of Gutenberg’s original printing press in the mid 1400s. Now, at the click of a mouse, the world can be “at your fingertips” – that is, if you can use a mouse… and if you can see the screen… and if you can hear the audio – in other words, if you don’t have a disability of any kind.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before focusing on the challenges that people with disabilities face when trying to access Web content, it makes more sense to discuss the ways in which the Internet offers incredible opportunities to people with disabilities that were never before possible. The Web’s potential for people with disabilities is truly remarkable."   continued ...   (Via uiGarden)

Accessibility for all.

Yahoo and TiVo – The Names May Be Silly, But Their Partnership Is Not

An article about the Yahoo / TiVo User Interface Design and navigation ...

"Yahoo and TiVo announced a deal whereby internet portal Yahoo and video recorder manufacturer TiVo will connect their services together, enabling TiVo users to access Yahoo's vast online resources through their set-top boxes. The New York Times reported that under the deal, and starting this month, TiVo users will be able to use Yahoo's services to find television programs and send instructions to record the programs to their TiVo set top boxes.

And then there is the user experience. It makes a lot of sense for Yahoo to offer content such as weather and traffic reports via TiVo boxes, as the human interface required is not complicated. One of the reasons why WebTV, and other “through-the-TV” web browsing products have not been successful is that the idea of watching TV with a keyboard and mouse in your lap is appealing to absolutely no one. Edward Lichty, TiVo's Vice President of Corporate Strategy, commented “It's not about having a Web browser on your TV and having a keyboard on your lap. It'll still be focused on the TV experience and navigating with the remote control”. Lichty is right, but like those late night TV sales pitches, “for a limited time”. The biggest problem associated with TV based internet access is the user interface. Navigating through TV content with a remote is consistent with my AFCDI (any fool can do it) paradigm for user interface design. Browsing the web, on the other hand, is more complicated. You have to type – it requires two hands, or use some kind of natural language processing (NLP)/voice interface. Therefore, in order to really shake things up and bring the Internet into the living room, a number of things are required."   continued ...   (Via EURWEB)

Yahoo / TiVo.

1000 Card Pick-Up

Continuing the Office 12 interface design process with a card sort exercise ...

"Today, we got back a pile of data from a recent card sort exercise.

We brought in 17 Word users and 9 Excel users and gave them a huge stack of virtual "cards" containing the name of a command and a short description of what the command does. They were also given the proposed names of Ribbon tabs (both core tabs and contextual tabs). The subjects were asked to stack the commands where they think they belong solely based on the names of the tabs and the commands.

Beyond that, the subjects weren't given any other instructions and they weren't allowed to see Office 12 or the new UI at all."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Card Sort.

Colour blindness on the Web

A good discussion about color blindness by a color blind user ...

"Colour blindness has crept back on to the agenda recently. Joe Clark recently pointed to SmartColor: Disambiguation Framework for the Colorblind, a proposed algorithm for converting colours in a document (or more likely an image) into colours that a colour blind person can distinguish. Also doing the rounds is Etre’s Colour Blindness Simulator which enables you upload images to see how they look to some colour blind users.

The thing is, colour blindness on the Web isn’t a big deal. You do have to bear it mind (as I will show later on), but there is no need to let it dominate any design decisions. I can say that confidently as someone who has been ‘diagnosed’ with strong protanomaly, a form of red-green colour blindness. In over ten years of using the Web I can list the problematic websites I have encountered on one hand.

And it’s not just me. My brother is a long-time Web user and through the miracle of genetics, he has the same form a colour blindness as I do. My brother couldn’t think of an occasion where a website caused him problems because of his colour blindness. And neither could a well known web designer with deuteranopia, another form of red-green colour blindness."   continued ...   (Via clagnut)

Color Blind Navigation.

Insights and inspiration for the user experience community

A follow-on article from the new online magazine UXmatters ...

"It is ultimately the presentation of an interface—layout, look and feel—that tells users what a product has to offer and how they can make use of it.

Though carefully structured organizational systems and well architected interactions are key components of effective interface designs, it is ultimately the presentation of an interface - layout, look and feel - that tells users what a product has to offer and how they can make use of it. As a result, creating usable and engaging interactive products is dependent on our ability, as designers, to communicate with our audience. The better at communicating we are, the easier it is for our audience to understand our messages and intentions and the easier it is for them to use and appreciate the products we design.

Interactive products, by their very nature, tend to be complicated. They allow us to create and control large amounts of information and enable many unique interactions. As a result, there’s a natural tendency for interface designs to over-communicate, or establish multiple forms of dialogue and vocabularies within a single application or interaction. Complicated concepts require more explanation, right? Not always."   continued ...   (Via UXmatters)

A redesigned table.

Great Yahoo Maps Example

New applications coming with the advent of Yahoo Maps ...

"Many interface elements have a watershed moment, when someone implements them in such a cool or useful way that nobody questions their worth anymore. Amazon did this with tabs, and now we have tabs everywhere on the Web. Before Amazon, the tabbed interface was mainly relegated to desktop applications.

A watershed moment is happening with online maps as we speak. First is was Housingmaps, created by Paul Rademacher, an application so obviously cool and useful that is started a revolution in mapping. Housingmaps was built using Ajax, the technology du jour, and after one look at Housingmaps you no longer needed to know why the Google Maps service is useful. The only problem is determining if it is useful in your projects.

Though the new Yahoo Maps is nice, and serves to bolster Flash’s reputation, the real watershed moment comes from a developer, Justin Everett-Church, who has manipulated the Yahoo Maps API to produce something pretty amazing: a map that looks any way you want it to. In his post on the topic, Justin shows off two very different maps, both using the same underlying technology. (note that you’ll need Flash 8 to view it correctly)"   continued ...   (Via UIE Brain Sparks)

Yahoo Maps Radar.

Zoom, Zoom, Zoom

More on Office 12 UI decisions ...

"Yesterday, I wrote about our fight against interface squalor. The most dangerous features from this perspective are the ones that appear to need to be available "all the time." Each one of these occupies a space in the window that can never be given back to the document canvas or to other features. Needless to say, we've taken a very conservative approach to allocating space for "always available" features. One needs to be skeptical about what "always available" really means.

That said, we are aware that some features do need to be available efficiently nearly always. One class of functionality that we felt fell into this category was "view switching." In this category, I put three kinds of features:

- Actually changing the view of the document (from Page Layout to Outline for instance).

- Turning on and off user interface components, such as the Ruler or the Formula Bar.

- Changing the zoom level of the document."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

View, windowing, and zoom control.

An idea for phones, voice mail systems, and touch-tone mazes

A UI suggestion for voice mail and touch-tones ...

"Forgetting how technically difficult this may be, here’s an idea…

There should be a standard to display voice mail and touch tone options on a cell phone screen. So, for example, if I call a company, and they say “Press 1 for this, Press 2 for that, Press 3 for this thing, Press 4 for that thing” it would be great if the options would appear on my phone screen like:

1. This
2. That
3. This thing
4. That thing

Then, when I press a number, the next series of menus immediately appears on the screen:

1. This
2. That
3. This thing, Etc."   continued ...   (Via Signal vs. Noise)

Voice Mail Usability.

Findability is ambient: Interview with Peter Morville

An interview with the author of Ambient Findability

"Intelligence is moving to the edges, flowing through wireless devices, empowering individuals and distributed teams. Ideas spread like wildfire, and information is in the air, literally. And yet with this wealth of instantly accessible information, we still experience disorientation. We still wander off the map.

How do we make decisions in the information age? How do we know enough to ask the right questions? How do we find the best product, the right person, the data that makes a difference?

In Ambient Findability, Morville searches for the answers in the strange connections among social software, semantic webs, evolutionary psychology and interaction design. And, he explains how the journey from push to pull is changing not only the rules of marketing and design, but also the nature of authority and the destination of our culture."   continued ...   (Via AIGA)

Ambient Findability



Check-out more books at Usernomics.

Usability of tabbed browsing in Firefox

An evaluation of Firefox tabbed browsing ...

"The usability studies were done at Google, using a special build of Firefox 1.5b1 that was configured to open targeted links in new tabs instead of in new Windows.

The testing revealed some things that caused problems for many users:

Back button: When a new tab is created, it gets a blank session history, so you can’t use the back button to get back to the page that launched the tab.

Closing tabs: Many did not see the close button, and instead used the contextual menu to close tabs. Some tried closing the entire browser window instead of just the tab.

Stacking order of tabs: When closing a tab that was opened by a targeted link from another tab, the adjacent tab is made active instead of the tab containing the opening link."   continued ...   (Via 456 Berea Street)

Firefox 1.5b1.

Edification and Commutation: Canons for Experience Design

Experience design defined as requiring edification ...

"I observed last week that brand focus limits the effectiveness and to some extent denigrates the potential power of experience design. Experience design isn’t just about making things work better or more memorable, for the purpose of making sales. The design of “user experience” and “customer experience” may be the Next Big Things in marketing, but like the design of milk cartons or tennis shoes, they’re more about engineering than experience.

Jim Hendrix had it right. We aren’t users or buyers of experience (though we can impose a price for the opportunity to have an experience, the exchange of cash being its own petty experience). We are, as Dictionary.com puts it, “experiencers.” We personally participate in creating experience. To be human we must experience the world within collective and personal frameworks: our cultural traditions and our individual intellects, emotions, and spiritual selves.

Canons are rules that define a profession's ethics and by extension, the practice of the profession itself. I propose two canons for experience designers, motivations more profound than moving goods, selling politicians, or hyping destination resorts: experience design must edify and it must commutate."   continued ...   (Via Total Experience)

Edification.

Bloug: The Memetic Web

A practical suggestion for the Memetic Web ...

"Peter Morville already beat me to it, so I won't re-hash Bob Doyle's concept of the Memetic Web here. I do think there's promise in tagging a document with metadata that's both unique and meaningful, especially in closed sites like intranets, where abuses are likely to be minimized, and using vocabularies made up of unique IDs, like zip codes and ISBNs (more descriptive metadata will be a hassle).

I'm not sure that users will be comfortable or, for that matter, able to express their queries in a syntax ((here's one for zip codes: "MEMOZIP-02138-6707") that is intended to be more computer-readable than human-readable. There may be exceptions of course; if, for example, I'm looking for information on a specific book, it'd be pretty handy to learn how to plug a ISBN into Bob's memetic syntax. But all in all, it'll be difficult to achieve a critical mass of memetically-motivated users to justify content producers' investments in tagging their content using Bob's scheme.

Where I think this would be more useful, as I've suggested to Bob, is to introduce to concept to search engine vendors. They can teach their systems to recognize memetic tags ("oh, the user searched on the zip code '02138-6707'; let's add meme tag 'MEMOZIP-02138-6707' to their query before we execute it"). If a few vendors support the Memetic Web as Bob is proposing, there might be enough incentive for content producers to start tagging their content this way. And motivated users will follow."   continued ...   (Via Bloug)

The Memetic Web.

Disabled web users rank their usability priorities

New accessibility results for disabled users ...

"Effective in-site search, good navigation, and clear, well-constructed content are the most important usability issues for disabled internet users, according to new research which also found many visually impaired users rejecting the importance of ALT tags.

User experience consultancy User Vision surveyed a cross section of 208 internet users throughout the UK with impairments which affect the way they use the internet, comprising the visually impaired/blind, hearing impaired/deaf, physically disabled, and those with dyslexia/learning difficulties.

The users were asked to rank, in terms of importance, the factors which aid their ease of use when online. Clarity of content – using straightforward language and a clear, simple layout – was regarded by 88% as ‘very important’. Good navigation – the ability to know where you are within a site – was regarded as very important by 65%, followed by the use of meaningful and clear hyperlinks (63%).

Two of the three factors traditionally perceived as the fundamental accessibility issues have become comparatively less significant. Good use of ALT tags – which provide text alternatives for images – was only regarded as ‘very important’ by a third of respondents Surprisingly, among the visually impaired users, 25% found ALT tags not important at all."   continued ...   (Via OUT-LAW.COM)

ALT TAG.

Gates, Jobs, & the Zen aesthetic

The relationship between Zen and presentations. But think of it as applied to user interface design ...

"As a follow up to yesterday's post on Bill Gates' presentation style, I thought it would be useful to examine briefly the two contrasting visual approaches employed by Gates and Jobs in their presentations while keeping key aesthetic concepts found in Zen in mind. I believe we can use many of the concepts in Zen and Zen aesthetics to help us compare their presentation visuals as well as help us improve our own visuals. My point in comparing Jobs and Gates is not to poke fun but to learn.

A key tenet of the Zen aesthetic is kanso or simplicity. In the kanso concept beauty, grace, and visual elegance are achieved by elimination and omission. Says artist, designer and architect, Dr. Koichi Kawana, "Simplicity means the achievement of maximum effect with minimum means." When you examine your visuals, then, can you say that you are getting the maximum impact with a minimum of graphic elements, for example? When you take a look at Jobs' slides and Gates' slides, how do they compare for kanso?

"Simplicity means the achievement of maximum effect with minimum means." — Dr. Koichi Kawana"   continued ...   (Via Presentation Zen)

Jobs vs. Gates Presentation.

No Distaste for Paste (Why the UI, Part 7)

Part 6 of the Office 12 UI development ...

"Last Monday I issued a challenge: for readers to pick the most-used command in Microsoft Word 2003 and also the top 5 most-used commands (bonus points for having them in order.)

For me, the most interesting part was reading the justifications around the guesses. I'll reproduce a few of them here:

"Ctrl-Z Undo has *got* to be one of the top 5. I'm sure that bold/italic are in there too."

"...Save is very rarely used. Most end-users I've known are very hostile to the idea of saving frequently."

"I disagree with everyone. My mother can't cut and copy and paste, and she's probably much more of a typical user than any of us."

"normal ppl don't use Print Preview."

Now you have a pretty good idea what designing software at Microsoft was like before we collected data through the Customer Experience Improvement Program. Our internal discussions would have been peppered with the same wild guesses, justifications, and personal "anecdotes" served up as fact."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Office 2003 Development.

frog Design Mind

User interface design in the context of complex systems ...

“Complex mechanical devices can go wrong in many ways,” writes Don Norman in his book Emotional Design. “And many a person has fallen in love—or become outraged—over the transgressions of automobiles, shop equipment, or other complex machinery.”

Norman is speaking about individual devices. The automobile is a great example. People love their cars when they perform well, but hate them when they end up in the shop once a month. However, there is a much bigger picture to consider. Your car must interact in a multi-faceted and varied context. You parallel park in between two cars that haven’t left you enough room. You drive to work and merge onto a highway with hundreds of other cars, and that darn truck just won’t let you merge. Traffic is horrendous and gas is expensive. You may love your car, but the other parts of this system piss you off.

This is because cars, complicated mechanical devices in and of themselves, operate within an enormously sophisticated system. When advanced devices must interact on this level, they become increasingly more complicated and the user experience usually suffers."   continued ...   (Via Gizmodo)

TV Puzzle.

Feedback

Can you take a moment and give us a little feedback? Following are seven questions of interest. We would appreciate hearing your thoughts:

1. Do you find Usability In The News useful?
2. Do you find the article selection relevant?
3. What type of articles might be eliminated or added?
4. Do you find the photos with each article beneficial?
5. Would dropping the photos diminish the experience?
6. Do you find the amount of text per article about right?
7. Any suggestions for improving the site?

Thanks so much for taking the time to answer these questions. Use the Comments or send an email to Usernomics.

Booming UI Design Market in Bay Area

UI design jobs plentiful in San Francisco Bay Area ...

"As I mentioned the other day, I've noticed anecdotally noticed that companies are having a difficult time filling their UI and UER positions. So I decided to see if there was any quantifiable evidence which would confirm what I already suspect (if the barrage of recruiting VMs I get is any clue).

I realized that the weekly BayCHI Job Bank email that I've received the past few years would be a great place to start. In graphing the jobs located in the Bay Area, you'll notice an interesting trend (see graph below)."   continued ...   (Via Preston Smalley)

Bay Area UI Job Market.

First UK UPA Awards commend Firefox, Flickr, Google, Apple, John Lewis and BA

Winners of UKUPA Usability Awards 2005 ...

"For the first annual World Usability Day, the UK Usability Professionals' Association held the UKUPA Awards 2005. On 3rd November, the great and good of the usability community met to 'honour some of the most usable products and websites'.

A panel of 10 usability experts had chosen the shortlist of nominees to be voted upon by UK UPA members. The culminating event of handing over the awards was held last Thursday at the Prudential headquarters in central London – an excellent venue for the mix of networking and formal presentation that the awards demanded.

'We need stuff that takes you along the curve,' said the evening's compère, broadcaster-author Bill Thompson. ...Stuff that's designed to be learnable and doesn't keep 'reminding you how elegant and smart it is' by getting in the way. 'What's great about tonight is that is that we are rewarding the people who get it right: who put their soul into making systems rewarding – and it's nice to reward them.'"   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

iPod wins usability award.

DUX 2005 & Design Vision

Impressions of DUX 2005 ...

"I walked away from the Designing for User Experience Conference (DUX 05) in San Francisco November 4-5th with the sense that User Experience Design, its methodologies, and terminology are now well established within many companies. There was a large amount of consistency across a wide range of speakers: they did ethnographic studies, they made wireframes, they ran usability tests, they had interaction designers in house, and so on down the line.

It was also pretty clear which terms emerged as winners from the digital design nomenclature debates of years past: information architecture, interaction design, usability, and user experience. (I personally still adhere to interface design and luckily am not alone).

Unfortunately, the consistency between speakers, practices, and outcomes, amounted to a lot of repetition. Many speakers would describe a familiar process that netted them an incremental efficiency improvement. “We raised customer satisfaction scores by 10%.” “We reduced a complicated registration process from 8 screens to 6.”"   continued ...   (Via Functioning Form)

DUX 2005.

Enterprise Usability

Designing usability for individuals, groups, and enterprise ...

"Usability goes beyond the level of individual users interacting with screens. It's also a question of how easy or cumbersome it is for the entire organization to use a system.

We can consider usability at three different levels:

Individual users. At this level, we examine what happens as a person tries to operate a user interface. Is it easy or difficult to find things and make desired actions happen? We tend to focus on this level because it has the most direct impact on screen design. Also, most websites, software applications, and consumer devices are single-user designs. Finally, this level is crucial because if individuals can't figure out how to work with your design, the larger levels are irrelevant.

Groups of users. Many designs aim to coordinate multiple users; the design's usability therefore depends on more than an individual user's ability to click buttons. At this level, it also matters whether the UI helps or hinders group efforts. Examples here range from chat systems and wikis to applications that support multi-user workflows, such as a company's hiring process.

The enterprise. At this level, the focus is on how the system impacts the company over time, including issues in administration, installation, and maintenance. Total cost of ownership (TCO) is often one of the most important usability metrics at the enterprise level."   continued ...   (Via Alertbox)

Enterprise Usability ROI.

eMoto emotional messages

Conveying emotion thrugh narrow channels ...

"eMoto - a joint project between The Swedish Insitute of Computer Science and Stockolm University - is a mobile messaging service for sending and receiving affective messages. The application extends on both the input and output channels when sending text messages between mobile phones.

The aim is to convey more of the emotional content through the very narrow channel that a text message otherwise provides. In eMoto users therefore use affective gestures to convey the emotional content of their messages which are then translated and communicated in colors, shapes and animations."   continued ...   (Via textually.org)

eMoto.

Usability doesn't have to be ugly

Making a website visually appealing and usable ...

"There is a balance that needs to be struck between a website that is truly functional and one that is elegant and stylish.

In an ideal world, the function and usefulness of a particular website or product should be married to its sense of style and beauty. This is not easy to achieve.

I’ve just bought a Dell X1 laptop. The reason I bought it is because it’s small and light. It does all the things I want from a laptop, and it’s stylish. It feels good to use. Previously, I had bought two IBM X31s, which I also very much liked. However, when I went back to the ThinkPad website, I found it so confusing I left in frustration."   continued ...   (Via Gerry McGovern)

DEll X1.

Tagging tags to make synonyms

Permitting people to add synonymous tags to existing tags ...

"I've had this post in draft for about two months, but it never seemed significant enough to finish up. And then Tagtagger came around. And then someone said Tagtagger could actually be useful. And then I thought, "oh I've done something like that."

Over the past six months we've been working on an internal tagging application for a client. One of the features of the application is a simple authority file of tags. This means that tags can be made synonymous, and that one tag is identified as the preferred term and others as alternate terms.

As you've probably guessed, we implemented this by... tagging tags."   continued ...   (Via Atomiq)

Tagging Tags.

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.