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.