Flea Market of Functionality

The "tools" menu is a UI's junk drawer...

"Last Monday, I set out a simple brain teaser for the Word gurus out there. I listed a number of seemingly unrelated features in Word 2003 and asked the question "what do these have in common?"

John Topley got the answer I was looking for in the very first comment to Monday's post: all of the features I listed are on the Tools menu. Many of you also sent me the correct answer via e-mail.

The point I was trying to make is simply this: don't over-romanticize how ideal the current menu structure of Office is. Although any organization of disparate features is going to have strengths and weaknesses, there's nothing "magical" about File Edit View Insert Format Tools Table Help. I don't want to belabor the subject any further—if you want to read more about the relationship between familiarity and the classic menus, read last Monday's post.

Instead, I wanted to get to an interesting comment Ben R. made last Monday: is it inevitable that there's always going to need to be a "junk drawer" of leftover commands in an application and how is that handled in Office 12?

It caught my eye because "junk drawer" is a term we use as well. I think of a junk drawer as being features piled together primarily for the convenience of the UI designer. The Tools menu is a great example of a formalized junk drawer—an entire menu envisioned as a kind of flea market of functionality."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Does your UI have a junk drawer?

Success by Indirection

The more tools you provide your users, the more they will use them...

"Last century, when designers at Amazon.com decided to include negative reviews alongside positive ones on their product pages, you could almost hear the book publishers, music distributors, and device manufacturers whose products were being sold by the online store pound their collective fists on the table. How the heck does Amazon expect to sell more products if they allow people who may not even be actual, paying customers to publicly trash them?

At first blush the Amazon decision is counter-intuitive. It would seem that allowing anybody to say anything about an item would cause it to sell poorly because someone, somewhere, would write one rotten apple review of it and spoil the bunch.

That didn’t happen, though, and the decision Amazon made is very similar to decisions other successful online companies have made recently that are starting to bear fruit. These decisions all have one thing in common: the more tools you provide customers to help them solve their own problems, the more they use them, and the better your site does as a result. Even if you allow for things like negative opinions."   continued ...   (Via UIE)

Home Page Goals

Design goals of homepages...

"When I set out to design a website, I do it backwards. I start with the design of the smallest, deepest element: the story page or search results. Then I work backwards to design their containers: section pages, indexes. Then, lastly, I work on the home page.

I do this because each container needs to adequately set expectations for what it contains. If the home page says one thing, but the internal pages say another, that’s going to lead to a user-experience failure.

This also means that, by the time work begins on the home page, there’s a lot of momentum going already. And any lingering anxiety is going to come to a head—on the home page.

Home pages are anxiety-inducing for companies. The home page is your first impression. And like the old saying goes, you only get one chance. So home pages themselves have a unique set of design goals."   continued ...   (Via A List Apart)

Design goals for creating a first impression.

Mashups for the Masses: When Mom Meets Gadget

Discussion on the conflicts of simplicity and convenience...

"Everywhere I look recently, I see possibilities for personalizing or customizing products and services. I’m not talking about choosing a nice skin for your media player or downloading ringtones for your Razr. I’m talking about a quantum leap that’s occurring as consumers morph into creators. But as our creative will to shape the world around us grows stronger with each new device we use, will the technology encourage or hinder our efforts?

We’re no longer content to passively use products and systems as they were designed for us; there’s now an inherent belief that we can and should have exactly what we want, when we want it, our way. We don’t watch live TV anymore, we TiVo our shows and watch them at our leisure, minus the annoying commercials. We don’t listen to the radio, we create our own stations on Pandora that only play music perfectly attuned to our specific tastes. We read ReadyMade magazine to learn how to MacGyver a solar tower in our backyard. And there’s a lifehack for just about every activity you can think of, from using your cell phone as a check register to getting down to one remote control."   continued ...   (Via Gizmodo)

Do we have too much control over information tailoring?

Rules for labelling Buttons

On button labels...

"It was one of those really conscientious discussions that seemed to have no end.

First UI designer: 'Right. Now here we have a tabbed dialogue box. When you press 'Cancel', it should remove all the changes the user has done since the box opened.'

Second UI designer: 'Hmm. Are you sure that's right? Doesn't 'Cancel' just remove changes on the current panel?'

Third UI designer: 'Hang on, we're supposed to aim for consistency. What does the style guide say?'

And then off they went... looking for evidence, trying to find out what best practice is, getting other opinions. Even planning some specific tests for their next round of usability testing.

Which is all very well but I thought; 'Are they trying to answer the right question?'

They had become fixated on the question of what the 'Cancel' button should do."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

A Separate Piece

On visual seperation of menu items...

"I'm not sure when menu separators were invented. They could well have been dreamed up at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, although I can't find any definitive evidence of it. Apple included them in the design of the Lisa user interface; below you can see an example of menu separators looking pretty much as they do today in the Edit menu of LisaDraw, circa 1982.

In common practice, a menu separator is used to break a menu into discrete chunks of related functionality. Usually drawn as a simple etched line, separators are thought to make menus easier to browse.

In Office 12, the Ribbon hosts controls which drop down menus. And many times we do still use plain old lines to separate sections in menus, just as designers did in 1982."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Visual break-up of menu items

Logo Claims about Website Accessibility bely Reality

The presence of an accessibility statement or logo on a website does not necessarily give an accurate picture of that website’s accessibility, according to research conducted by Helen Petrie, Director of Research at London-based user experience consultancy Designed for All.

The research found that out of 500 websites, 40 (8%) had an accessibility statement or logo. However, when 20 of these 40 'accessible' sites were inspected only 6 passed basic accessibility tests. Indeed, 6 other sites were found to be making claims about accessibility conformance beyond what they actually achieved. Only 30% of the 'accessible' sites examined in the research were making accurate claims about accessibility.

'A company’s accessibility statement is a reflection of its values towards disabled people. People’s trust will be affected if a company makes a public statement that is not reflected in how it actually behaves,' suggested Petrie."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

What Matters Most?

The most annoying usability problems ...

"Recently, I had to use an application that reminded me of a very basic usability question: What matters most? Based on my experiences, I found the answer quite revealing, especially with respect to the role of usability efforts in the development process. For this article, let me put the initial question slightly differently: Which usability problems annoy me most?

Number One: Waiting Times
Number Two: Crashes
Number Three: Missing Functionality
Number Four: The Rest"   continued ...   (Via SAP Design Guild)

Crash.

The Digital Revolution is about usability

The need for better UI's in the digital world ...

"Very regularily I find myself talking on the phone to friends and family trying to explain how to successfully complete a task using any of our favorite toys: PCs, VCRs, DVRs, mobile phones, PDAs, WLAN routers, DSL modems, etc. Just recently while attending DLD06 in Munich I was dining with friends when I got a call from my mother who needed to burn a CD. Or today my sister called because she needed to format a Word document in a certain way. It's not that I mind helping. But I am still waiting for my first phone support incident involving a fridge, or a microwave, a washing machine, or a cordless phone. Somehow those things just work. Plug and play. No questions asked.

So why then is burning files onto a CD-ROM so much more complicated than cooking vegetables in a microwave ofen? All I need to know when driving a car from A to B is what type of gasoline it needs. (Well, at least that's true as long as the car doesn't come with iDrive.) Why do I need to learn about ports, port forwarding, NAT, DMZ, UPnP and DHCP when all I want is using Wi-Fi at home? I want my parents to be able to simply "burn this file or directory onto a CD-ROM", no questions asked. (Because they really don't care about burn speeds, multisession, or ISO images. And, no, they don't need little animated helper icons either.)"   continued ...   (Via Hebig.com)

$250,000 award for human-centred computing

Do you know a worthy candidate? ...

The 2007 Bower Award and Prize will be presented to a distinguished scientist in the field of Human-Centered Computing.

The Bower Award for Achievements in Science is presented annually by The Franklin Institute to a researcher of any nationality for outstanding work in the applied or basic sciences, or engineering. A predetermined field of study is chosen each year as a theme. A gold medal and a cash prize of $250,000 are awarded to the individual selected to receive the Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science.

The theme for the 2007 Bower Award for Achievement in Science is Human-Centered Computing. The organisers are soliciting nominations of individuals who have significantly advanced Human-Centered Computing; who have clarified the relationship between human cognition and computing; or who have successfully translated some important aspect of basic research into significant, practical results. Areas of contribution can include issues of design, collaborative work, and assistive technology."   continued ...   (Via Putting people first)

2007 Bower Award.

Measuring Results

Selecting UI features based on results ...

"A couple of us on the UI team were having a conversation about the comments to yesterday's post. Someone pointed out that it appears we've discovered a community on the internet of people just as obsessed about UI as we are around here. :)

I wanted to build on yesterday's conversation by helping you to understand more about how we measure results.

When you boil it down, we have a pretty straightforward set of high-level goals for the Office 12 UI redesign. Help people use more of the functionality in Office. Help people create better-looking, richer documents. Save people time in doing the tasks they frequently do. Make sure people can be productive right away using the new version. Help normal people get results that only power users could get before. Give power users the a richer set of powerful tools to go beyond what was possible before. Stuff like that.

So, how do you know when a feature is right? There are so many tools at our disposal."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

The joy of interacting with your computer.

Windows Vista GUI Designer: Expression Interactive Designer as Beta available

Looks like a good tool for creating UI / UX screens ...

"Microsoft releasd the Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Expression Interactive Designer. (Only a .NET password is required for downloading the preview.) Expression Interactive Designer is used for creating the user interface and layout of Web or Windows applications

Design the applications of your dreams.

Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer helps you create streamlined, innovative and just plain beautiful applications. Users experience increased satisfaction, while you develop in a flexible, productive environment."   continued ...   (Via User Interface Blog)

Auto-completion in search interfaces

A nice addition to usability functionality by Google ...

"According to Jesper Rønn-Jensen from justaddwater.dk, live search will gradually replace traditional search on the web. In live search interfaces results are fetched whenever the user stops typing for a brief moment. An example of this is Google Suggest where the most popular results are presented as-you-type.

Jesper sees the following benefits:
- The search user interface is identical to traditional search
- Misspellings can be corrected immediately
- Relevant alternatives are presented as you type
- It's easy to refine your search: Just continue typing
- If the search is too narrow it's easy to press backspace and remove characters"   continued ...   (Via GUUUI)

Website Design Considerations for Older People

Usability study results and tips for older users...

"According to the 2001 UK census, the UK now has more people aged over 60 than under 16. It also revealed that there are now 1.1M people aged over 85.

Webcredible recently analysed and compared the results of 16 usability testing sessions – eight of these sessions conducted with older users (i.e. over the age of 65), and eight with younger users (i.e. under the age of 40).

The 40-minute ‘talk-aloud’ sessions involved asking participants to find information on a range of government websites. All participants reporting using the internet 'at least once a week' for 'over 1 year'.

Assigning blame
The main finding of our study was that older users were more likely to assign blame when using the internet. Of the eight older participants, three appeared to blame themselves for any difficulties which they encountered (sample quotes: 'I don‘t really know what I’m doing'; 'It’s probably my fault'; 'This always happens to me').

Four of the older users, however, seemed to blame the site(s) for any difficulties which they encountered (sample quotes: 'I hate it when websites do this'; 'Well, that’s stupid'; 'That doesn’t make any sense')."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

Mindless clicks at the iMac G5 Troubleshooting Assistant

Users don't mind clicking a lot if it gets them closer to their goal...

"Making people click a lot is a bad thing, right? Not always. As Steve Krug talks about in “Don’t Make Me Think,” it’s the quality of the clicks, not the quantity. If they’re easy and mindless and the scent gets stronger with each click, then people don’t mind clicking a lot.

I was reminded of this during my recent experience with the iMac G5 Troubleshooting Assistant"   continued ...   (Via Signal vs. Noise)

Goal oriented clicking

Icons, Usability and Computers

On conveying information to users by using icons...

"A classmate of mine tonight made an excellent point about the symbology that is inherent in computing. Think about it from an outsider's perspective, from someone who's never used a computer seriously, only rarely, casually. The representations that we use to represent things are really quite silly.

In the olden days of the Mac, I remember a specific icon that drove me crazy: the paint bucket. It didn't look like a paint bucket to me at all, rather some bizarre odd shape that didn't made any sense at all. Icons that are clear to some folks are far from intuitive to others.

Think about it. If you click on Firefox or Internet Explorer, what are you clicking on? A stylized E? A fox on a planet? What do those mean, really? Look at the icon for Safari. It's a compass. But how does that represent the web to a new user? I'm not sure it does."   continued ...   (Via O'Reilly)

AJAX Design Pattern: Login Panel

An interesting approach to handling new user registration and existing user login...

"I've noticed another new AJAX convention cropping up in a few places that I though I'd share. It solves a real problem in an elegant fashion: how to handle registration of new users.

Every site that requires a login needs to provide a way for new users to register. The tradeoff between supporting new users and existing users is always tricky: for example, most brokerage sites are oriented towards marketing to new users, and have a little link in the corner where existing clients can log in. Other sites orient towards existing users, and new users are shunted off to a registration page.

Ideally, we’d keep the user on the same page. With a little bit of Javascript trickery, this is possible. The best example of this I've seen so far is in ZohoCRM.

The login widget starts out oriented towards existing users."   continued ...   (Via Jonathan Boutelle)

New Registration is abstracted, but easily accessed

Obsession to Detail

On the importance of getting the details right...

"The success of a user interface depends on getting the details right. That's not to say that a little bit of fit-and-finish work can save a horrible design, but a good idea won't thrive either unless enough of the little details are right.
I know that I am sometimes frustrating to work for because I can be a bit of a perfectionist around the UI. Especially during the last part of the product cycle, I'm constantly prodding and poking (and asking those around me to prod and poke) to make sure that every decision we make is as good as it can be. (I mean, you only get one chance to do something like this, right?)

Our development team has gone out of their way to provide us the opportunities to get the details right. Unfortunately, sometimes getting the small stuff right costs way more time and energy than doing something "most of the way." Yet, the whole team has remained committed to going beyond the "good enough" mentality so that the user experience is seamless in ways you wouldn't even notice unless we got them wrong.

One of my favorite examples of this was a design change we made a number of months ago called "Eat Dismiss Clicks."

Here's the setup. Let's say that you drop down a menu in Windows. Now, instead of clicking a menu item, you click somewhere else on the screen. This has always dismissed the menu and sent a mouse click to wherever you clicked. Nothing surprising so far; this is just how the Windows focus model works."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Introduction to Great Design (First Draft)

Confession: I'm afraid to turn off my cell phone.

Not because I'm afraid of being out of touch, mind you. Heck, I could care less if people can reach me. If you have something to tell me that's so important it would be worth interrupting Will and Grace, well, I think I'd rather have another 45 minutes of ignorant bliss before I find out about it. That's my motto: Will and Grace First, Earthquakes and Floods Later.

Here's why I'm afraid to turn off my cell phone: because I can't always seem to muster the brain cells necessary to turn it back on.

It has two buttons on it, a happy green button and a scary red button. They have funny icons on them that don't mean very much to me.

You might think that the green button turns it on. Green means go, right?

Wrong."   continued ...   (Via Joel On Software)

Which button is the power on?

Windows Vista setting new standards for Find-as-You-Type searching

Easy access to search field in Windows Vista...

"Very interesting read from a user interface point-of-view. I stumbled upon a walkthrough of Windows Vista. An interesting perspective here is that the search field has gotten a prominent position on the Start menu itself.

The start menu has evolved in Vista. At any time one can type search words, resulting in Search-As-You-Type functionality. This search leverages the broader search functions built into Vista. It functions in a very similar fashion to the MSN Desktop Search deskbar - but is integrated directly into the Start Menu. It is actually quite useful, and newly created documents appear to get indexed almost immediately. For example, after copying some Word documents into the Documents folder, they were available for search immediately. Since the start menu can be activated with the start button, one can actually perform a search and select a search result, all without touching the mouse or opening any new windows. Quite slick. Pressing enter opens a full search results window."   continued ...   (Via justaddwater.dk)

Prominent position of search field

The Elements of a Design Pattern

Design teams are discovering that a well-built design pattern library makes the user interface development process substantially easier. A quality library means team members have the information they need at their fingertips. Choosing usable components that work smoothly for users becomes the developer's path of least resistance. Innovation, while not prohibited, is reserved for those times when it's really necessary, allowing the team to leverage the work already done by others.

Our research suggests one difficulty in building out the design pattern library is starting to catalog the current set of elements. It takes a push from the library creators, but once it's completed, the value seems to be immediate: teams can start to discuss what works and what doesn't in current designs, laying out a vision for future development.

What do teams put into their design pattern descriptions? Here's what our research has turned up:"   continued ...   (Via UIE)

Microsoft Releases Pilot of GUI Design Tool For Windows Vista Apps

Microsoft released previews of interface-design tools for developing on Vista...

"Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday launched a test version of its upcoming graphical user interface-design tool for applications built for the upcoming Windows Vista operating system.

Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer is available as a download. The Community Technology Preview is not a production tool, but is meant to give GUI designers the chance to try some of the new tool's "innovative features," such as 2D and 3D graphics, animation, dynamic layout, data binding, style and template editing and resource management, the Redmond, Wash., company said.

In addition, Microsoft released an update of Expression Graphic Designer, which is used to create graphics and export them to Interactive Designer for deployment within a user interface.

Both tools are meant for developing Windows applications that run on WinFX, which is the Vista presentation platform for displaying the user interfaces of Windows software. Vista is scheduled to ship later this year, but no timetable has been released for the production versions of the design tools.

The WinFX runtime components are also available for download to Windows XP computers, or they can be packaged with third-party software for XP. The components equal 40 megabytes."   continued ...   (Via InformationWeek)

10 Reasons Clients Don't Care About Accessibility

Thoughts about client views on web accessibility...

"Working as an accessibility consultant in an IT company is a very frustrating job right now. Highly publicized lawsuits and deep-rooted accessibility myths leave us with a lot to explain when the final product does not really help visitors. Our clients simply don’t care about accessibility as much as we’d like them to, and there are several reasons for that.

Reason 1: It’s the Law But There’s None to Follow
Since February 2002, it has been a legal requirement for organizations to make reasonable adjustments to ensure their sites are accessible. The Disability Rights Commission of Great Britain (DRC) issued a revised code of practice for Part 3 of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) of 1995, which covers goods, facilities and services. The code of practice explicitly included Web sites under Part 3 of the DDA and includes both those that provide services and goods for free and for payment."   continued ...   (Via Digital Web)

The Feature Bob Invented

How scrolling tabs in the Office 12 Ribbon came about...

"It was a cold winter afternoon early in 2004, and we were in the midst of doing some of the first usability tests with a working, clickable prototype of the Ribbon. (Prior to that, most of our prototypes had been paper-based.)

This particular prototype was put together in PowerPoint as a fairly inexpensive way to mock up a basic Ribbon and to see whether people got the concept. Basically, we put a picture of each tab of the Ribbon in a separate slide in the PowerPoint deck. We turned off the "click to advance" functionality for each slide, and then drew a nearly transparent square around each tab of the Ribbon. Each of these squares was hooked up to an action so that clicking on them advanced to the slide that revealed the picture of the tab you were clicking on.

In this way, we were able to simulate a tabbed user interface just by drawing 8 or 10 pictures. None of the commands within the Ribbon really worked in these early prototypes; we just would watch and listen to see where they clicked within the tab."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Using the scroll button to switch tabs

10 Best Intranets of 2006

Jakob Nielson discusses the trends in intranet best practices...

"This is the first year in which a majority of the winners hail from outside the United States, underlining the continued growth of good intranet design around the world. In fact, the globalization of good intranet design is actually greater than what this simple list implies; many of the winning companies are highly multinational, with team members operating in multiple countries. At Vodafone, for example, intranet technology is managed from Germany, with development efforts occurring in California, Spain, Italy, and Egypt.

This year's winners are all large companies, with an average size of 80,000 employees. In previous years, we've always had winners with only a few hundred employees, but this year the smallest company has 3,000 employees. It might be that large companies are finally making intranet quality a high priority, and thus their more substantial resources make it harder for smaller companies to compete. One year's results, however, are insufficient to confirm such a trend."   continued ...   (Via useit.com)

Designing User Experiences for Applications Versus Information Resources on the Web

The relatively recent adoption of user-focused design practices by the Web design and development community—including personas, participatory design, paper prototyping, and the like—highlights important distinctions between the user experiences of desktop applications and those of information spaces. With the growing desire for usable Web applications, these distinctions become more topical and important to understand. Though the process of designing and creating application and information space user experiences for the Web is virtually the same—even if the deliverable design documents may differ—their user experiences are fundamentally and profoundly different. For designers, business analysts, marketing consultants, and others who are sincerely interested in delivering the best user experiences online, understanding these distinctions can reduce the cost of design and improve the likelihood of user acceptance.

I am intrigued by how a designer’s background affects problem definition and, thus, the resulting design approach and its implications for the design and development of these new forms of user experience. Developers of desktop applications and Web sites have very different orientations to user experience. As application developers move into Web development and Web developers begin to take on the peculiarities of application design, each needs to recognize the wildly variant aesthetics of the other."   continued ...   (Via UXMatters)

Evaluating the Usability of Search Forms Using Eyetracking: A Practical Approach

A look at eye tracking applied to search forms...

"In this article, I’ll present findings from eyetracking tests we did to evaluate the best solutions for label placement in Web forms. Today, forms are the primary—often the only—way users have of sending data to Web sites. Web 2.0 makes extensive use of forms. For example, on Flickr™, Del.icio.us, and Writeboard™—which, by the way, I used when writing this article—users provide all of their tags, comments, and other information using forms. Users submit queries to search engines using forms. E-commerce sites also rely heavily on forms that let visitors find and purchase products. (I’ve never browsed for books on Amazon®. I always search for them.)

So, the usability of forms is often massively important to the overall usability of a Web site. That’s why we decided to subject some of these forms to a quick round of eyetracking tests and have analyzed the resulting data to better understand what makes Web forms usable—or unusable."   continued ...   (Via UXMatters)

Eye tracking on search forms

Child Computer Interaction - Taking bigger steps!

On children and technology interaction...

"Child Computer Interaction (CCI) is that branch of HCI that considers interactions between children and technologies. Not surprisingly, CCI borrows many thories and methods from HCI but also has close ties to education and gaming.

As a genre, CCI has been steadily developing over the last few years; much of the momentum has come from the Interaction Design and Children (IDC) Conference Series and from the establishment of research groups across the globe including specialised groups in the USA, the UK, and the Netherlands.

Following a successful workshop at INTERACT 2005, a special edition of the journal "Computers Technology and Work" is planned for 2006. The editors are looking for contributions that address methodological issues in Child Computer Interaction Research. The deadline for contributions is the 24th February 2006 and further details can be found at www.chici.org.""   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

Child Computer Interaction

Above the Fold is obsolete

Interesting thoughts on front page design the keeping users on the right track...

"We’ve been working on a major overhaul of our new website for about a year now. One of the big issues with this redesign has been trying to figure out our audience. As a branch of government, we finally came to the conclusion that we simply have a gigantic audience to deal with. As such, attempting to come up with specific personas wasn’t necessarily going to help us as much as it does in other projects. The issue was simply that we had dozens of personas to address and, short of designing separate sites for these folks, we had to deal with the fact that a lot of content had to be presented to a lot of different users.

In addition, our first stab at doing this last year led us to at least attempt to define some personas and we found that it just didn’t work. Too many folks fell outside of our common personas and people were simply getting frustrated with having to define who they were before they could get to the content.

Long story short, with the new site, we decided that more links was better than not enough and decided to go with a rather long, but organized, navigation bar for the site. Of course, this created some backlash mainly from internal people. And, even to me, it seemed a bit counter intuitive. We’ve always been taught the truism that we should never give people more than 7 options at once and it’s better to funnel them through smaller sets of options rather than give them too many at once."   continued ...   (Via MNteractive)

Design pages to keep users on the track to completing their task.

The End of Personalized Menus

Office 12 has officially migrated away from personalized menus on by default...

"As faithful readers of this blog, you no doubt know that not every program shipping with the Office 12 "wave" of products has the new user interface.

This means that, at least for the time being, menus and toolbars are still alive as a part of many important programs, such as Publisher, Project, Visio, and several others.

The good news for fans of usability worldwide is that an historical moment is upon us. As of Tuesday, we have officially flipped the switch to turn off Personalized Menus by default for all apps in all future builds of Office 12. (New UI programs based on the Ribbon, of course, were designed without Personalized Menus from the beginning.)

Don't know what Personalized Menus are? You can read all about them in Part 3 of the "Why The UI?" series, including my take about why they weren't a good idea.

The option isn't going away, so if you do love this feature for some reason, you can still manually turn it on in Office 12. But the default setting for "Always show full menus" will be set to on, reversing the default first introduced in Office 2000.

A small but significant victory for humankind."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Personal menus will be off by default

One of four web users are disabled users

A new look at what makes up accessibility...

"Did you know that up to 25% of all visitors on your website have some kind of accessibility problem. Some of your users may be blind, deaf, dyslectic, has learning disabilities or motoric disabilities such as schlerosis, parkinson’s disease, etc. A so-called functional disability.

But how about users with a technical disability: Wireless devices, slow internet connections, old browsers, feed readers, etc. These should be considered as well, as there are probably more people with technological disability than functional disability.

25% of all web users have some kind of accessibility problem. That is a claim from the Danish Center for Accesibility. Here is my translation:"   continued ...   (Via justaddwater)

Consider technology accessibility problems

Google Asked to Make Its Visual Word Verification Accessible

Word verification limits accesibility...

"An online petition is being circulated to all Internet users for the purpose of collecting signatures showing support for Google to make its word verification scheme accessible to the blind and visually impaired.
Tempe, AZ (PRWEB) January 17, 2006 -- We at the Blind Access Journal call upon all Internet users to sign the Google Word Verification Accessibility Petition found at http://www.petitiononline.com/captcha asking Google to provide an accessible alternative to the visual verification scheme that currently locks the blind and visually impaired out of participation in all the company's services. Google's implementation of word verification currently denies us access to such important features as the ability to create accounts and blogs, change our passwords, and post comments to most blogs that use the Blogger service. Accessible solutions to visual verification have already been put in place by such companies as America Online, Microsoft, PayPal and SpamArrest. We ask Google to follow this lead with an audio playback implementation now, followed by the creation of new innovative approaches that meet the needs of all users, including the deaf-blind population.

After allowing sufficient time to collect a significant number of signatures, the signed petition will be sent, via certified mail, to Dr. Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO. Visual verification without accessibility represents a growing, immediate clear and present danger to the continued ability of the blind and visually impaired to participate in all the Internet has to offer on terms of equality with our sighted peers. Let's all sign this petition and do all we can to urge Google to make the situation right by following the company's own mission statement to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" by allowing participation for everyone."   continued ...   (Via PRWeb)

Word verification hinders accessibility

Five Experience Fundamentals

Key ways to invest in your user experience...

"Let's face it - we're all sweating a little: Product and service commoditization are forcing strong price competition - squeezing margins and motivating us to tighten our belts. In the midst of "the squeeze", it's harder than ever before to deliver increased value to customers and build differentiating customer experiences. We often have fewer resources to draw upon, and we want to be wise about how we invest them.

Even so, in times like this, most successful business leaders understand the importance of investing back into the business. The most successful customer experience leaders follow this principle, as well: investing in ways to iteratively innovate and improve customer experience across online and offline channels.

It's easy to forget, in a world of incredible possibility and infinite creativity, the power of simplicity and the importance of a solid customer experience foundation. This is especially true related to online user experience, where the dust around Web 2.0 hasn't quite settled. As we look forward in anticipation of what's to come, it's important not to lose sight of managing the founding elements of customer experience.

To do this, user experience practitioners should follow the lead of the successful leaders in customer experience. These leaders never favor "flash over substance" approaches to experience innovation. Instead, Experience Leaders understand the critical need to deliver innovation from a foundation of "experience fundamentals," which can be applied in a channel-agnostic fashion to any experience."   continued ...   (Via gotomedia)

Customer Experience.

Improving Customer Experience: Usability Testing Is Not Enough

The need for good data to design good websites ...

"Many Web businesses do not provide a compelling customer experience; some sites are simply unusable, while others fail to provide content, goods and services that match their customers' needs and expectations. To make matters worse, most e-tailers do a poor job of effectively assessing their customers' experiences. They fail to learn why their customers behave as they do, a step vital to mapping any strategy for improvement.

To truly understand customers and gather the information necessary to make strategic business decisions, Web companies need to employ methods that yield richer customer insights.

User Interface designers are often buried in technical departments and have backgrounds in software development and graphic design. Unlike their marketing counterparts, they are not trained in product, pricing, placement and promotion. They often report directly to a product manager and are left out of strategic discussions altogether."   continued ...   (Via E-Commerce News)

Customer Behavior.

A Better Box Of Crayons

Adding some (more) color to Office 12...

"Perhaps because I was never the kid who had the super sized 128-pack of crayons, I never developed much of an artistic eye, especially for colors. Having only the 16-pack, with nary even the free crayon sharpener is something I obviously rue to this day. (Made worse by the fact that, only a few years later, my younger brother got a 64-pack of crayons complete with built-in crayon sharpener. Sigh.)

Anyway, the point is, if anyone needs help with colors, it's me. That's why I love that Office 12 helps me make better looking documents by improving the selection of colors throughout the product.

Now, it is true that many of the core Office 12 products (including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) support a new model for document themes, which let you change the color scheme, font scheme, and special effects scheme on a per-document basis. Much can and should be written about how all of this works in the future.

But putting that aside for the time being, every document comes with a "default" theme which contains a color scheme full of well-matched colors. The result is that, even if you don't mess with the new theme or color scheme features at all, your documents look modern and well-matched. (Of course, it doesn't hurt that all of the default object styles in the contextual tab galleries will be based on these colors as well--so when you put a chart or table in, all of the styles you can choose between will match by default.)"   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Increased color options in Office 12

Graphical Passwords Enhance Computer Security

A new approach on system passwords and security...

"How safe is your online information? Not nearly enough, due largely to the secrecy of personal passwords being easily compromised by hackers and “shoulder surfers.”

A research team at Rutgers University—Camden has developed a unique solution to this growing problem: forget about words and numbers when crafting passwords for your computer and online accounts, and use images instead.

This next wave of computer password security could very well result in greatly enhanced security for online retailers and sensitive information stored on computer hard drives.

According to Jean-Camille Birget, a professor of computer science at Rutgers University-Camden, violations of personal information and access to both networks and individual computers is due largely to the relative ease for a criminal to co-opt a private password. “In order to make your password secure enough, you have to make it harder to remember, which means that you’re more apt to forget it” says Birget, who also notes that people rarely pick random passwords and instead choose something familiar that might not be hard for someone else to guess."   continued ...   (Via Rutgers)

Using graphics for passwords

INTERACT2005 Special: Keep Designs open for Human Ingenuity

The importance of human intervention to prevent over automation...

"Trust and Incidental Interaction: Would you let a Talking Paper Clip run YOUR Home?" at the INTERACT 2005 conference, held in Rome towards the end of last year, featured - among others - Albrecht Schmidt of the University of Munich's Embedded Interaction Research Group explaining his answer to the panel question. It may be helpful to refer back to the first article in this series When Interactions happen without You for background.

Yes, said Schmidt, presenting "I think I let the paper clip run my home... but first I need to know how to cheat on it". His argument was it is fine for software to go on in the background as long as people know what it is capable of and how to override it.

He pointed out that the system acquires implicit inputs from the user and may then present implicit output to the user. Implicit input are actions and behaviour of humans, done to achieve a goal and are not primarily regarded as interaction with a computer, but are captured, recognized and interpret by a computer system as input. Implicit output is that which is not directly related to an explicit input and which is seamlessly integrated with the environment and the task of the user."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

How much automation would you allow him?

The 50ms Myth

More on visual appeal, and the balance of function and form...

"A study by Gitte Lindgaard in Behavior and Information Technology found that a mere 50msec glimpse of a web page is sufficient for readers to form a judgment of whether the page is visually appealing. Writing in the pop section of Nature, Michael Hopkin asserts that this means that you'd better make a favorable impression right away if you want Web surfers to buy from you.

"Of course, says Caudron, the other golden rule is to make sure that your web pages load quickly, otherwise your customers might not stick around long enough to make that coveted first impression. 'That can be the difference between big business and no business,' he says."

Well, no. The study described here does not demonstrate the claimed effect, and there's excellent reason to doubt the claimed effect exists."   continued ...   (Via Mark Bernstein)

In the blink of an eye

Visual Strategy

Research on the differences in how users track elements visually...

"Have you ever wondered whether the way we move our eyes and head when looking at our environment is the same for everybody or everyone has his/her own way to see, his/her own visual strategy?

This was the question that the R&D dept. of the lens division of Industrias de Optica S.A. (INDO), a Spanish company devoted to ophthalmic optics that actively does research on Progressive Addition Lenses* (PALs), when they began to perform eye and head tracking tests trying to find mobility patterns in the coordination of eye and head of PAL users. The goal was to find clues that led to the personalisation of PALs.

The users performed visual tasks with targets placed at different distances, from infinity up to reading distance. A Polhemus Fastrak electromagnetic system registered the head and chest while an ASL 504 infrared camera followed the line of sight of their eyes. From the analysis of the data consisting of coordinates and rotation angles of head and eyes that the system produces you can derive a lot of information, such as velocities, accelerations fixation points and many others."   continued ...   (Via InfoVis)

Visual map

Outlook and the Ribbon

Some hints on where the next Outlook version is going and how it might integrate with Office 12...

"On Tuesday, I wrote about some of the new features in Outlook 12 and, in passing, I mentioned that Outlook was the single biggest consumer of the Ribbon.

Not surprisingly, since I didn't explain the remark any further and because it seems to contradict my post about what apps get the new Office UI, I got a lot of feedback questioning my remark. "Surely you're mistaken... or crazy?" one reader wrote in.

While it is true that I have been quite sick this week and woke up with a > 100 degree fever again yesterday morning, I assure you that I am not, in fact, any crazier than usual.

(That's 37.8 C for you non-United Statesians...)

Anyway, while it is true that part of Outlook has the new UI and part of it does not, the half which does required the design of more Ribbon tabs than the rest of Office combined.

Start with the fact that in Office 12, the Outlook editing and reading canvas is based on Word. This means that the feature set of an e-mail message starts with "everything you can do in Word", subtracts "things that don't make sense in an e-mail, such as page orientation" and adds "all of the features Outlook supports."

And now, you've successfully designed the Ribbon for one scenario: sending an e-mail message."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Outlook 12 gets ribbon too?

iTunes, Netflix, and the Paradox of Recommendations

The Catch-22 of suggesting new music while trying to maintain customer privacy...

"The developers of Apple’s iTunes music system caused an uproar recently when it was discovered that one of the music player’s new features, the MiniStore, sends personal information back to the Music Store itself.

If you use iTunes and have upgraded since January 10th, you may have noticed the new feature yourself located at the bottom of your application. The MiniStore feature provides a small version of the Music Store that shows up when you’re browsing music from your own library. If you click on a Van Morrison ditty, the MiniStore feature (below: in light blue) will show links to the latest Van Morrison albums as well as recommendations from the iTunes Music Store."   continued ...   (Via UIE Brain Sparks)

Paradox of recommendations

Contextual buttons

Confusion with context buttons ...

"I have noticed a trend in virtual interfaces that exploits their ephemeral nature, where a single button is used today where two buttons used to be used in the past. The button label is used to both clear a state of the system and the action the button can do. Who else finds they pause slightly in these contexts even after becoming “experts” in these systems?

Of course I’m going to use the covetted champ of design, the iPod, and critique it. I mean it is so easy to nitpick “perfection” b/c it gives us clear lines, with the distractions of too many interrelated mistakes.

So here is the mini view of iTunes while playing a song:"   continued ...   (Via Synaptic Burn)

iTunes Pause.

Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye

The importance of a strong first impression to lead into your user experience...

"Potential readers can make snap decisions in just 50 milliseconds.

Quickly now: like what you see?
Like the look of our website? Whatever the answer (and hopefully it was yes), the chances are you made your mind up within the first twentieth of a second. A study by researchers in Canada has shown that the snap decisions Internet users make about the quality of a web page have a lasting impact on their opinions.

We all know that first impressions count, but this study shows that the brain can make flash judgements almost as fast as the eye can take in the information. The discovery came as a surprise to some experts. "My colleagues believed it would be impossible to really see anything in less than 500 milliseconds," says Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa, who has published the research in the journal Behaviour and Information Technology1. Instead they found that impressions were made in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing."   continued ...   (Via Nature.com)

First impression in 50 milliseconds.

Quality is Usability

The importance of early usabilty/beta testing in Office 12 ...

"We have a number of ongoing, long-term projects designed to help us test the overall usability and learning curve of the new Office 12 user interface.

One of the most important tasks has been a full deployment of Office 12 Beta 1 within a local company. We chose a dozen people with all different job types (but none of them computer or software related) and replaced their Office 2003 with Office 12 Beta 1.

On the surface, this doesn't sound that novel. Obviously, if you want to find out how well a product works, you need to get it in front of people. What is unusual is how early we started this study."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris )

Office 12 Interface.

Managing User Experience Performance

A good first post on a new blog by a strategy director at Frog Design ...

"Part One: Understanding the Experience/Expectation Gap
Why smart near term choices on improving user experience can be liabilities later.

Developing complex products today - cellphones, digital music, cars - is challenging because there are many ingredients that must go into providing a satisfying user experience for customers. Everyone one wants to make a compelling, coherent experience, as customers are becoming more sophisticated about expecting them, but few companies have the resources, expertise, budget or time to develop every element themselves - interfaces, controls, web applications, operating systems, retail integration, etc. So you have to make decisions about what you're going to do custom, and what you're going to get off-the-shelf.

These decisions have major impacts on not just how customers will perceive you, but also your future flexibility and growth path as a company. They also have a dramatic effect on profit margins."   continued ...   (Via Adam Richardson)

Experience-expectatino gap.

Opportunities 2006 Usability

Focusing on usability from the start ...

"2006 is going to be a year where the creators of web technology have the opportunity to make their services better in terms of integration, usability, and usefulness.

Usability - Web products and services must be dead simple to use.

Have you ever tried to show a non-blogosphere, non-techy person how to subscribe to an RSS feed? It's quite a challenge, especially if they are still struggling with their e-mail inbox. And of course, it requires a preliminary conversation about what RSS is and why they should use it. Despite its name, RSS is not simple."   continued ...   (Via WebProNews)

New RSS Subsciber.

Image Links vs. Text Links

No difference in clickstreams between text vs. image links ...

"Years back, we compared successful clickstreams (clickstreams that resulted in users accomplishing their goals, as observed in tons of usability tests) with unsuccessful clickstreams (clickstreams where users abandoned their goals before completing), looking for any clues that would help us predict behaviors in one that we didn’t see in the other.

One factor we looked for was whether the clickstreams contained image links versus text links — does one type of link show up more often in successful clickstreams than the other.

Our finding was when users clicked in image links they were just as likely to succeed or fail as when the clicked on text links. There was no statistically-meaningful difference."   continued ...   (Via UIE Brain Sparks)

Sun Clickstream.

AJAX performance stats, ROI, and business value

A review of Ajax articles to demonstrate the cost / benefit ratio ...

"Is Ajax a smart move? (Source: JustAddWater.dk, Author: Jesper Rønn-Jensen) — “The benefits listed here are very similar to benefits when we’re arguing for web-standards: Reduced bandwith, training costs, cost of ownership, and increased return on investment. But for the time being I still believe that AJAX has increased learning costs for developers."   continued ...   (Via WebWord)

Ajax Bandwith Cost Benefit.

New Theoretical Approaches for HCI

New theories of HCI ...

"Author: Yvonne Rogers — “A core lesson that was learned, however, is that you cannot simply lift theories out of an established field (i.e. cognitive psychology), that have been developed to explain specific phenomena about cognition, and then reapply them to explain other kinds of seemingly related phenomena in a different domain (i.e. interacting with computers). This is because the kinds of cognitive processes that are studied in basic research are quite different from what happens in the ‘real’ world of human-computer interactions (Landauer, 1991).”

The quote above is wonderful. In effect, it states that you can’t necesarily use lab research to answer practical questions. Sure, you might be able to gain some insight but you won’t get great answers without getting your hands dirty.

Great article full of important insights."   continued ...   (Via WebWord)

Applying the principle of cognitive tracing.

When Interactions happen without You

"Trust and Incidental Interaction: Would you let a Talking Paper Clip run YOUR Home?" was the name of the most challenging panel at the INTERACT 2005 conference, held in Rome towards the end of last year. All four speakers' presentations had interesting aspects and made a unique contribution to discussions about the future of user-centred design. To do justice to the ideas, each is being given its own story. Today, UN features Alan Dix of Lancaster University's Computing Department explaining his answer to the panel question.

Dix began by asking how many computers we thought we had at home. More than five? Most of us put up our hand and laughed. Then he knew he was talking to the initiated. This panel was not about desktops or laptops; it was all about the little computers inside things and what they are increasingly going to be able to do for us, with us and in spite of us.

Dix introduced the 'intentional spectrum':
* intentional is when you press the light switch to make the light come on;
* expected is when automatic doors open, or an automatic light switch functions because it has sensed your presence;
* incidental is when, unbeknownst to you, the air conditioning increases because you have come into a room."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

Incidental.

Visual Interfaces for Databases

New approaches to designing a Pivot Table interface ...

"Although visual interfaces and databases are two of the success stories of the computer revolution, their synergy to date has been modest, probably because visual interfaces have focused on human capabilities while databases have focused on efficient query processing. The success of visual interfaces started with the GUI (Graphical User Interface), which supplanted the command line interface by exploiting the power of the human visual motor system. Given advances in graphics hardware in the mid 1980s, research started on Visualization, the use of interactive, visual representations of data to amplify cognition. We will briefly describe Mackinlay’s dissertation, which formalized Jacques Bertin’s design theory, adding psychophysical data, resulting in a system that could automatically design graphical presentations.

In This talk we describe an interface for exploring large multi-dimensional databases that extends the well-known Pivot Table interface. The novel features include an interface for constructing visual specifications of table-based graphical displays and the ability to generate a precise set of relational queries from the visual specifications. The visual specifications can be rapidly and incrementally developed, giving the analyst visual feedback as they construct complex queries and visualizations."   continued ...   (Via Stanford HCI)

Pivot Table.

Designing for the Web

Website design within the constraints of HCI ...

"Now it is time to turn our attention to the Web. Within any given medium there are unique constraints that can affect the way designers make use of the principles and elements of design. These constraints can be based on a variety of different things including materials, technology, processes and standards in the industry. The Web is no different. Designing for a Web-based environment enacts a set of unique issues that need to be considered before implementation can be successful.

In my opinion, the vast majority of constraints in a Web-based environment are brought about because of the limits of human interaction with technology. The Web, by its very nature, is a virtual medium accessible only via peripheral devices (computers, monitors, mice, etc.). We are constrained by what technology allows us to do, and are confined by the rules of these systems. One of the most interesting (and frustrating) aspects of the Web is that it is such a new environment that the rules are constantly changing. Designers need to adapt as necessary."   continued ...   (Via Digital Web Magazine)

Dominant Screen Resolutions.

Bringing Desktop Interactions Online

Clarifying actions when bringing applications to the web ...

"As the gap between desktop and Web applications continues to close, interaction designs previously reserved for the OS are making their way online. Unfortunately, the transition is not always a smooth one.

Interactions that reveal themselves in context are likely to have the easiest time making the move from desktop to Web. For example, auto completion of user input doesn’t require different upfront behavior on the part of users. Simply start typing in a text field as you always do and suggestions reveal themselves below. Based on the presentation of these suggestions (within a vertical list of options), you are likely to assume you can select one with your mouse or arrow keys and (when the component is designed right) you can.

Other forms of desktop interaction don’t have the luxury of being visible when they are needed. In fact, actions like double-click, right-click, and drag & drop are not visible at all. You need to know that these options exist in order to make use of them. This problem is magnified in the single-click world of the Web browser where few people imagine that single-click selection, double-click launching, right-click menu access, or drag and drop are possible. To address this issue, designers often opt for direct communication by including messages that describe drag and drop behaviors and making actions explicit through links or images."   continued ...   (Via Functioning Form)

Web Application Actions.

Change It Up!

Methods of designing for an existing UI ...

Organizations now recognize the value of spending time and money on user experience design. Many have spent considerable time and money to develop just the right user interface (UI). So when it comes to adding or changing functionality, they may not want or have the option to do a full re-design because of budget, time, or technological constraints. That leaves designers working under less than ideal conditions.

Specific practices and concepts can assist you when designing for an existing UI. The following projects demonstrate these approaches."   continued ...   (Via Boxes and Arrows)

Existing UI Sketch.

We all want to take the easy option

Increasing sales with usability ...

"After suffering user fatigue from early experience of mobile applications, it is great to see companies realising that usability is the best way to create a mass market

Webcams have come a long way since 1991 when Cambridge University geeks linked their computers to a camera near the coffee machine. This enabled people in far parts of the building - and the rest of the world once it was linked to the internet- to check out the coffee. Webcams have since slowly become better and cheaper, and may now be poised for liftoff.

Last week, I tested a service that would have seemed implausible 10 years ago: video phone calls to anywhere in the world for nothing - yes for nothing, assuming only a broadband link. Skype 2.0 (beta) has good quality video - as webcams go (ie moody). Used with a Creative webcam (£27.99), it can shrink the video image or make it full screen and can mail you automatically if it detects movement where the camera is monitoring. You can also take photos or videos."   continued ...   (Via The Guardian)

Skype

Apple is getting sloppy.

Apple's OSX interface dropping the ball? ...

"Graphic designers and web developers have always had a place in their heart for Apple computers. In general, they’ve always been prettier to use. But since OSX has come along, something at Apple seems to be amiss. Somewhere in the bowels of the corporate beast, they’ve become quite sloppy with their presentation layer. Apple, once known as the epitome of human interface standards adherence has slowly become a random mis-mash of interface ideas and implementations.

For starters, it’s next to impossible to identify Apple’s standard interface anymore. This is perhaps the most common gripe expressed on Daring Fireball. To be fair, OSX has been very much a work in progress, and a lot of interesting desktop UI things have come out of it, but we’re getting a tad tired of them redecorating in a seemingly randomly fashion from application to application.

Then there’s the ease of use (or namely, increasingly lack thereof) of their applications. I love iTunes, but there are so many illogical UI issues with it. I can’t browse more than one page at a time. I have to jump through hoops to add podcasts one at a time. I tried playing with Garage Band the other night and it appears that the days of being able to open a Mac app and intuitively get the hang of it in 5 minutes are slowly fading away."   continued ...   (Via MNteractive)

Apple OSX.

Managing Editor Wanted

Usability In The News is looking for a volunteer managing editor to serve the usability community.

If you are working in UI or a related area, and want to contribute to the UI community, this might be a perfect activity for you. Also, if you are a UI student, this might be a good learning opportunity for you to get imersed in the latest UI and UX information available.

This activity will take an hour or two each day and can be done in your own time and from your location.

If you are interested, please contact editor@usernomics.com.

Selecting With the Magic Box

Adding some functionality to the interface ...

"Here's a handy trick to kick off your weekend.

You've got a few columns of text in a Word document, separated by tabs. They're not in a table.

Now, you want to format just one of the columns without impacting the text in any of the other ones. Think you have to manually select and format every word in the column manually? Not so!

Simply hold down the Alt key and drag a box around the text you want to format. Let go of the Alt key and all of the text within the box is selected! Apply formatting until your heart is content. Or, perhaps click Copy to put the selected text on the clipboard."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Magic Box.

Best 2005: Navigation

Providing more than one method of navigation ...

"Don't tell your neighborhood librarian, but sometimes there just isn't a single perfect way to organize things.

Something we've noticed over the years on Sun.com is that our customers often have different strategies for finding the same information: Some people start browsing the site right away, others use the search box. Some people look for support on our general support areas, others go first to the support areas of product pages, and still others first look in communities like BigAdmin.

And, when looking for products, some people search, some look by name, while others are more interested in looking by categories or by the function a product solves."   continued ...   (Via Sun.com Design)

Sun Storage Gateway.

Clear For Whom?

How clear can it be?

Via OK/Cancel)

Tools for the Transition

Transitioning to a new interface ...

"A lot of people are involved with helping to produce documentation and tools to help ensure a smooth transition to Office 12 and the new user experience. Although the data indicate that people will be able to be productive even as they first sit down in front of the new product, we want to make sure that every "T" is crossed and every "i" dotted.

With that in mind, we're trying out a number of different ways of presenting migration information to see what people find useful. One thing we wanted to try was to generate a tool that would help people interactively map commands between the menus-based UI of Office 2003 and the Ribbon-based UI in Office 12.

The idea wouldn't be that this was a primary reference, because we really believe people will be able to find the features they're looking for very quickly in the Ribbon. It's more like a security blanket--so that you absolutely know that if you somehow get stuck, you have a friendly way out."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Office 12 Security Blanket.

AJAX Design Pattern: Read/Write Div

Keeping the display clean until more is needed ...

"A new AJAX convention cropping up in a few places, one that is easy to implement and has real benefit to end users. I haven’t found a description of it anywhere, so I thought I’d write it up here.

The basic idea is that user controls (typically for editing the displayed data) should be hidden from the user until needed. At "rest", an area of the screen displays information in read-only fashion. On clicking an "edit" button, the div expands to display the widgets for changing the data."   continued ...   (Via Jonathan Boutelle)

Display Closed.

Display Open.

The Swivel Socket power strip

A new way to handle power bricks ...

"Many have tried to create power strip that performs allows you to use more than the inevitable two of the plugs at once, and many have failed. One notable exception is the PowerSquid, but this Swivel Socket concept seems like it might give that thing a run for its money. Each socket rotates 180 degrees, and each has a swiveling label so you can remember what you plugged into what. Sounds like a plan, no?"   continued ...   (Via Engadget)

PowerSquid Power Strip.

Symbolism (Office 12 Coolness, Part 5)

Word 12 access to symbols ...

"In every phase of my life in which I've been required to create documents, a different set of symbols has been important to me.

For instance, in high school, I studied Spanish, which meant figuring out how to type ñ and ¿. In college, as I repeatedly flirted with flunking German, I inserted a lot more of ä, ß, and ö. And now that I work at Microsoft, my symbols of choice are © and ®.

That's one of the reasons I appreciate the Symbol gallery on the Insert tab of Word 12. When I want a symbol, I just pop open the gallery and choose the one I want."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Word 12 Symbol Gallery.

Philips design magazine provides vision for simplicity

Philips magazine discusses simplicity in user interface design ...

"Philips released today the January issue of new value by One Design, its online quarterly design magazine.

The current issue starts with an introductory article by Stefano Marzano, CEO and chief creative director, and then continues with an overview of the Philips internal design awards, a report on the exploratory design project Next Simplicity and an interview with Rob Timmer of Philips Consumer Electronics who explains the importance of creating simple yet sophisticated user interfaces for the Connected Planet range of home entertainment products and the role design played in this."   continued ...   (Via Putting people first)

Simplicity in Design.

Forrester slams Hard to Use Consumer Electronics

Manufacturers loose money due to poor usability ...

"Consumer electronics companies will miss out on up to $3.8bn in revenue by 2010 because buyers are not able to use their devices properly, according to a Forrester Research report.

Apart from the obvious newsworthiness of this sales message, it is worth noting for the usability industry, that the very fact of a report like this from Forrester Research, one of the most respected authorities on such trends, is news in itself.

In essence, the research giant has woken up to the implications of poor usability. The report says that while digital products are selling at a record rate, they are not being adequately supported. It suggests there is major loss of revenue in failing to sell the additional products, services and content that bring the devices to life. We might see it in terms of the damage to customer experience and that less tangible loss to the bottom line."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

Forester Research.

The Myth of the Orange Dot

The Office 12 orange dot ...

"One thing you might have noticed in Office 12 demos and screenshots is that certain commands in the Ribbon have an orange dot as their icon. People have speculated on what the orange dot represents; guesses have ranged from highlighting features you've used recently to indicating "hot" features in the new version.

The real answer is simpler: the orange dot icon is used to represent places in which we don't have the final artwork. Long ago it was discovered that if you put in too much "temporary" artwork, sometimes people didn't notice until it was too late and it never got replaced with final art. With literally thousands of pieces of artwork being managed, it's a humongous task to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. So, the orange dot is used as the universally understood symbol within our team that an icon is missing.

When the final version of Office 12 comes out, it won't have any orange dots. (Knock on wood.)

The reason you've never seen the orange dot before (even if you've participated in past Office betas) is that this is the first release in which we've used it. In the last few releases, we used the "Magic 8 Ball" icon included in the Office command bar icon editor to have this same meaning. (I think the joke was "look in the 8 ball, who knows what icon will appear?")"   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

The Orange Dot.

The user experience of a product is everything that's not human-computer interaction

A chapter about defining the user experience ...

"The user experience of a product is everything that's not human-computer interaction. It's everything that affects how someone interacts with a tool--whether it's software, hardware, a service, or whatever. To me, this meant that I had to deal with all of the squishy, abstract things that good cognitive psychology and computer science-trained designers like me try not to deal with: business goals, emotions, relationships, branding, etc."

This was Mike Kuniavsky's realisation when he was asked to write on the relationship between HCI and customer experience in Andrew Sears and Julie Jacko's Human Computer Interaction Handbook."   continued ...   (Via Putting people first)

Intel Play Movie Digital Creator.

Screens around town: Dates at Netflix, BoA, and Amazon

Confusing UI for popular bill pay screens ...

"Try to time your bill paying so that bills are paid right before due dates and you usually have to deal with business day math or clicking on calendars. It’s weird that sites can figure out this info yet still make you do the math. I wish Bank of America would let me choose the date the money is delivered on instead of making me submit which date the money is sent. BoA, let me enter the “Deliver by” date and then go ahead and figure out when to send the cash on your end."   continued ...   (Via Signal vs. Noise)

BofA Billpay.

The Road to Recommendation

Taking the time to determine what works for users ...

"The user moved their mouse all over the page and finally clicked on Search declaring, "I wish there was a link that had what I wanted." And there was. Exactly what the user wanted. However, the user would have to scroll to see it and they never did.

During the debriefing meeting, a team member said what everyone was thinking: "Our users don't like to scroll. We need to make all of our pages fit on one screen." Everyone but me, that is.

Common Problem: Jumping to Inferences Too Quickly"   continued ...   (Via UIE)

Too many rectangles.

Effective Websites - the Responsibility of the whole Organisation

How a website UX is influenced by various team members ...

"Building an effective website is often seen exclusively as the job of the web team, and viewed as a design or technical issue. However, having worked with many different organisations, we would argue that often what stops them improving their website is the organisation itself. Developing an effective website often requires organisational change: it requires a culture where people at all levels in the organisation adopt behaviours that make a ‘good user experience’ an important goal. If the organisation is not focused on providing a good user experience, then the web team will be unable to build an effective website.

Understanding the user experience, through research methods like usability testing, can be a powerful tool in driving the organisational change needed to develop effective websites.

How do Organisational issues affect web site effectiveness?"   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

A team approach to usability.

Designing User Experiences for Applications Versus Information Resources on the Web

A different UX between Web applications and informational websites...

"The relatively recent adoption of user-focused design practices by the Web design and development community—including personas, participatory design, paper prototyping, and the like—highlights important distinctions between the user experiences of desktop applications and those of information spaces. With the growing desire for usable Web applications, these distinctions become more topical and important to understand. Though the process of designing and creating application and information space user experiences for the Web is virtually the same—even if the deliverable design documents may differ—their user experiences are fundamentally and profoundly different. For designers, business analysts, marketing consultants, and others who are sincerely interested in delivering the best user experiences online, understanding these distinctions can reduce the cost of design and improve the likelihood of user acceptance."   continued ...   (Via UXmatters)

Difference between applications and informational websites.

The 50/50 Rule

Designing a UI for all the viewers? ...

"Much is made in the business world about the 80/20 rule. Also known as the Pareto principle, the basic idea is that in many phenomena 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes. Wikipedia has a good discussion of the principle, its myriad applications, and its common misuse and abuse. (I should have called this post "The Principle of Factor Sparsity"; that would definitely have merited an honorary doctorate down the road...)

80/20 and its variants play an almost mythical role in all facets of mainstream software design. You'll hear that 80% of users only use 20% of the features. Or that 20% of bugs account for 80% of the problems people find in released software. Of course, none of the numbers are exact, and people are quick to point out that the principle is in effect even when the numbers aren't exactly close.

The hardest problem in user interface design is when you come face to face with the 50/50 rule. Although rare, occasionally you will discover a a situation in which the needs and wants of half of your customers are diametrically at odds with that of the other half."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Pareto's Principle - The 80/20 Rule.

Best 2005: The New Sun.com Design

A nice overview of Sun's website UI changes ...

"The biggest visible change to our external web presence last year was the new design we posted in May. We've made continual improvements since the launch of that new design, but fundamentally the new design was born May 3rd. Changes included:

- Pulldown navigation on every page, allowing visitors to jump right to the most important areas of the site.
- A stunning new visual approach, particularly on the home page and high level 'gateway' pages. Not only does this look nice, but we built some navigational elements into the graphics to enable previews and navigational next steps and to help orient visitors about where they are.
- Keener focus on products, both in design and navigation, and also...
- A design structure that supports "big ideas" such as eco responsibility or new technology overviews
- Design integration of gateways and key sections so that things just work better together."   continued ...   (Via Sun.com)

New Sun Website.

Web applications: Mind your audience

Starting by asking if the UI is adequate to my visitors ...

"One of the most important characteristics of a user-centered web application is the target audience - who the application speaks to and who it serves. It is then strange, or illogical, that some companies still look at web-applications as one-size-fits-all when it comes to the site’s presentation and language.

Like you wouldn’t dress as a clown on a board meeting, your web app shouldn’t talk business when it means fun either. This is, even if a logical thing if you think about it, a big problem for most web-applications out there. This is mostly explained by the fact that many of the companies putting out web apps have a business layer attached to them that doesn’t dictate but inspires the global “stance” of the application.

It’s easier when you start out well."   continued ...   (Via WeBreakStuff)

Audience Analysis.

MIT's Homepage: Preposterous or Ingenious?

A unique approach to homepage design ...

"Our friends at MIT have an unusual approach to their homepage. They change it every day, so much so that it looks completely different from the day before. One day it is teal. The next day, red. Then yellow. They do this to “call attention to each new spotlight”, a term given to the prominent message or information they choose to highlight that day. For fun, they also have an archive of all past homepages.

What MIT doesn’t change is the primary navigation. They have a set of top-level and 2nd-level links that stay the same no matter what day you visit. Only the background image and spotlight change. When I visited recently, the homepage featured a large image of what looks to be the handles and digital interface of a treadmill. This was used to spotlight a program called the Getfit Challenge, a three-month team-oriented fitness challenge for the MIT community. Ordinarily this content wouldn’t be featured on the homepage. But it happened to be the spotlight on the day I visited the site."   continued ...   (Via Brain Sparks)

MIT Homepage.

Many users confused by multiplicity of functions on modern gadgets

On complexity of cell phones - only select the functions you need ...

"Stuttgart - Many of us, and not only the nostalgic, think back to the days when a telephone was just a telephone.

These days a mobile phone seems to be able to do just about anything - take photographs, play games, play back music and act as personal assistant.

But these small technological miracles also have their drawbacks. As they become more advanced they do not necessarily become more user-friendly."   continued ...   (Via M&C Tech)

Sanyo TV Phone.

Help Gallery update

A great set of onscreen help examples ...

"The Gallery of Onscreen Help has received a long overdue update. I've just finished adding over 125 new screens, bringing the gallery to 333 sample onscreen help implementations. Drop by and take a peek at what your colleagues, and competitors, are up to.

Thanks to everyone who submitted screen shots (keep 'em coming) and especially for your patience while I updated the collection."   continued ...   (Via Usable Help)

Apple Directory Help.

Failed redesigns: Use web standards or don't bother redesigning

A review of several failed website redesigns ...

Joe Clark has definitely taken his gloves off in the article Failed Redesigns, a call for people in the web industry to expose the incompetence that is so widespread within it:

A failed redesign is a Web page created from scratch, or substantially updated, during the era of Web standards that nonetheless ignores or misuses those standards. A failed redesign pretends that valid code and accessibility guidelines do not exist; it pretends that the 21st century is frozen in the amber of the year 1999. It indicates not merely unprofessional Web-development practices but outright incompetence. For if you are producing tag-soup code and using tables for layout in the 21st century, that’s what you are: Incompetent.

I agree fully, as most people who have been following this site for a while will be well aware of. The incompetent people need upgrade their skills or get kicked out of the industry."   continued ...   (Via 456 Berea Street)

Salon Example.

Computers that feel our mood

New UI considerations will be required ...

"It certainly happened to you to be so frustrated by the 'reactions' of your computer that you wanted to break it. And the computer industry has noticed, trying to build hardware and software as user-friendly as possible. Still, it would be a good idea for your computer to guess when you're about to become mad at it. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany are working on computers that estimate our emotions. Their solution involves cameras and image analysis, but also special gloves equipped with sensors to record your heartbeat and breathing rate, your blood pressure or your skin temperature. And even if it's difficult to train a computer to interpret emotions, they have enough confidence in their system to demonstrate it at the next CeBIT in March 2006.

Here is a short introduction to this serious problem.

Several recent studies have found that computer users not only love and cherish their machines, but very often maltreat them. Experts have identified aggression towards the PC as a genuine problem that deserves greater attention in the academic field. The kicks and blows of frustrated users cause computer damage that cannot be dismissed as negligible, neither in terms of personal property nor on a commercial and economic level. If only for this reason, it would be good for computers to assess their users’ emotions correctly and respond accordingly."   continued ...   (Via Roland Piquepaille)

Computer Estimating Emotions.

Graphic language for touch

Visual link with icons ...

"This work explores the visual link between information and physical things, specifically around the emerging use of the mobile phone to interact with RFID or NFC.

As mobile phones are increasingly able to read and write to RFID tags embedded in the physical world, I am wondering how we will appropriate this for personal and social uses."   continued ...   (Via elastic space)

Graphic Language for Touch.

Little Innovation in the Vista UI

Web style interactions in Vista ...

"Bill Gates recently walked the 2006 CES audience through a number of interface design features in Windows Vista. As I noted way back in 2003 Vista (then Longhorn) had an uncanny affinity to many OS X user interface enhancements. Tauquil Atkinson noticed the same thing this time around and overlaid Gates’ keynote address over a video highlighting OS X features. Believe it or not, it’s a perfect fit.

“We live in a digital world that is filled with more information, more things to do, and more ways to communicate with others.” –Microsoft Vista

Many of the applications bundled with Vista also strongly resemble Apple’s suite of iLife products. For example Windows Photo Gallery – “you can organize your digital photo collection in logical ways in its default Gallery view, adding titles, rating, captions, and custom meta data tags to your photos”- compares directly to iPhoto. Windows Calendar’s UI is just like iCal and the key distinction between Windows Media Player 11 and iTunes is that the default view of your media files is visual: “instead of a long, monotonous list of song titles, you get rich album art."   continued ...   (Via Functioning Form)

Vista Web-style Interactions.

Usability in China: Coming Soon?

Usability is needed regardless of development location ...

“About 70 to 80% of internet users use broadband. One reason is that broadband access is quite cheap in China - it only costs about $10-15 a month for unlimited internet access.” (Chinese revolution turns hi-tech …)

Like many other people, I’m interested in the growth of China. I’m particularly interested in how technology is taking off. It is inevitable that there will be a huge demand for usability in the coming years.

A few years ago I interviewed my friend Daniel Szuc of Apogee Usability Asia Ltd. We focused on usability in Hong Kong in 2002, but the usability movement is growing on the mainland as well. Here are some clues to the growth:

UPA China
UPA Hong Kong
China HCI (Chinese)
User Friendly 2005 - Shanghai, China"   continued ...   (Via WebWord)

UPA China.

Nine Tips for Designing Rich Internet Applications

Guidelines for designing rich applications ...

"Recently I was asked to provide input into a presentation. The question was asked, if you were going to provide some quick basic guidelines for designing rich applications what would they be.

Here were the nine thoughts as they originally came to my head.

1) Make it directly interactive
2) Make it inviting
3) Use lightweight, in-context popups instead of page transitions where possible"   continued ...   (Via Looks Good Works Well)

Flashzilla.

Archy Alpha build 124 is released

Progress on the Archy usability test bed ...

"Archy Alpha, build 124 is released. Archy is a computing environment built from ground up, based on scientific knowledge about how the human mind works. Archy is a usability testbed for research in new approaches to UI design.

Imagine a system where your work can never be lost, where you can do what you want -- send email, write a book, make calculations, manipulate pictures -- at all times, without having to switch applications. Imagine never having to search for a file buried in a maze of folders. Imagine a system that allows you to be twenty percent faster and twenty percent more productive than any other system. That's what Archy will be."   continued ...   (Via Raskin Center)

Archy

HCI 2005 Feature: Making a Drama out of User Requirements

Using art and drama to assist in the design process ...

"Catriona Macaulay of the University of Dundee led the "Design and Performance" workshop at HCI 2005. It promised to bring together a diverse range of participants to exchange experiences of performance in design activity, and to develop an agenda for future research in this emerging field.

And it certainly achieved the former of these goals. After a few words from Catriona, the day was opened by a presentation from Carlo Jacucci (see the picture on the left which gives an idea of his costume), Further presentations followed on how drama, and performance more generally, had been used in specific settings. Then the afternoon was turned over to Maggie Morgan of Foxtrot Theatre to lead a participative session where simple dramatic techniques were tried out. The workshop closed with a brief review of uses of performance but fell short of setting the agenda it had hoped for. There was just too little time left to begin the process of considering how research might continue."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

Carlo Jacucci in Costume.

Paper Prototypes

Using paper prototypes when you can ...

"Often people ask us "how did you come up with the ideas for the Office 12 user interface?"

That's a big question. And the answer isn't simple.

What is easier to describe is the process by which we work to validate the design choices that we make as we go along. The very first ideas we have are seldom right; instead we continually iterate and improve based on our usability feedback loop.

One of the conundrums of an iterative design process is how to get feedback early enough to impact the development process. If we waited until the development team was finished coding the product and then put the fully-working software in the usability lab for the first time, we'd be in a world of hurt. There would be no time left to actually make the changes we would learn about."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Office12 MiniBar.

The displayless S-Series from iCare targets elderly, drivers, kids

Talk about simplicity ...

"There's a new phone on the street from iCare mobile, maker of the iCare Baby Bear, called the S-Series, and it's targeted at the elderly and at businesses with staff members on the run, such as drivers. There's no display, which iCare claims lessens complication and helps "avoid unsolicited messages," and the phone can send emergency messages to three people at once, so it seems like it might be a hit for handing to younger kids as well that just can't handle those crazy "complicated" displays. You can also communicate one way with the phone in case of an emergency and nobody is picking up."   continued ...   (Via Engadget)

iCare Phone.

Monthly Program (BayCHI)

Monthly Program: Tuesday, January 10, 7:30, PARC ...

"You Own Your Attention, Steve Gillmor, AttentionTrust.org.

AttentionTrust and its members believe that you have the following rights:

- Property: You own your attention and can store it wherever you wish. You have Control.
- Mobility: You can securely move your attention wherever you want whenever you want to. You have the ability to Transfer your attention.
- Economy: You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value in return. Your attention has Worth.
- Transparency: You can see exactly how your attention is being used. You can Decide who you trust.
When you give your attention to any AttentionTrust member entity, these rights are guaranteed"   continued ...   (Via BayCHI)

BayCHI

From Information Design to Expereince Design: Smart Artefacts and the Disappearing Computer

The future will see experience rather than computer design ...

"It seems like a paradox but it will soon become reality: The rate at which computers disappear will be matched by the rate at which information technology will increasingly permeate our environment and determine our lives. This notion of the “disappearing computer” [5] is one of the starting points that determines our work. Another one is the shift from information worlds to experience worlds. This was a consequence of our work on innovative office environments where we explored the range of social processes that should be supported with information technology and the shift to a new application domain, i.e. games and entertainment in the context of home environments.

The Disappearing Computer - The increasing ubiquity of computers and related devices (e.g., sensors) and their diffusion into our environment requires a rethinking of the complex interplay between technology and humans. The often quoted observation by Mark Weiser, “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it,” [9] set the stage for the vision of an unobtrusive, calm technology. Since then, the effort to make technologies disappear into the background has been an ongoing endeavour involving a series of international initiatives and innovative program. One prominent example is the proactive initiative “The Disappearing Computer” (DC) launched and funded by the “Future and Emerging Technologies” strand of the IST programme of the European Commission (www.disappearing-computer.net)."   continued ...   (Via uiGarden.net)

Second Generation Roomware.

Design by Groups

Usability testing site navigation with family members ...

"The NextStage CRO explains how to lean on your friends and family to create a highly useful navigation aid for your site.

This is the last column in a Visitor Designed Navigation tetralogy. We started by defining Visitor Designed Navigation and implementing it with a "Next" menu item in "What Comes Next?" The second column in the series used the concepts developed in "What Comes Next?" to implement a similar -- but less visually demanding -- visitor navigation aide in "MIPs are Next." The third column, "Making Cookies," demonstrated how to implement a Visitor Specific Navigation aide.

Let's finish this series by creating a visitor designed site search tool."   continued ...   (Via Usability Studies 101)

Family, Fools, and Friends.

Trends to Watch in 2006 - Part 2

A continuation of predictions for 2006 ...

"The following is part 2 in a series of Trends to Watch in 2006 right here on your neighborhood Bokardo.com.

- Synchronization and Local Store
- Is the Primary Store Local or Network?
- Synchronization Formats?"   continued ...   (Via Bokardo)

Synchronization.

Status Bar Update

Looking at "usable density" when designing the Office 12 status bar ...

"Yesterday, I walked you through some of the history of the status bar. Today, I'm going to write about what we've done in Office 12. It's not a radical departure from previous versions, but there are some nice improvements.

I mentioned yesterday than in thinking about the status bar for Office 12, the first conversation we had was "do we need it at all?" We looked at the various scenarios that required the status bar, those that used it but didn't need to, and features that could be made better through using that space.

We came to the conclusion that it did make sense for the Office 12 frame to contain a status bar. There were many "status-like" items that needed a place in the UI--document load information, printing status, long recalculation in Excel, and other background tasks."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Office 12 Status Bar.

Myths and measurements: Evaluating the ROI of design

A justification for design costs when you look at usability ...

"There's a dirty little secret that nobody in the design community wants you to know: it's actually possible to build and ship a software product…without designing it first! There. I said it. Now my time is short; even as I type, assassins with square-toed shoes and goatees are stalking my whereabouts.

But just because you can construct software products without designing them first, why on earth would anybody want to?

The analogies are endless: you wouldn't point a construction crew to an open lot and tell them to build a structure without giving them blueprints, would you? You wouldn't ask a doctor to re-set a broken bone without looking at an x-ray; you wouldn't storm the beaches of Normandy without a battle strategy and a good map; you wouldn't even don your shoes before putting on your socks."   continued ...   (Via Cooper)

Myths about design.

A Brief History of the Status Bar

A history about the status bar interface ...

The status bar. A ubiquitous piece of the modern user interface, hardly anyone seems to pay it mind. That attitude often extends to interaction designers as well.

The status bar, if you are new to the world of computers, is the (usually) gray strip commonly found at the bottom of application windows. First introduced as a standard OS control as part of the Windows 95 common control library, the status bar has its roots in character mode programs, in which the bottom row of text was reserved space to show information about the program, document, or selection. Commonly, the status bar in character mode programs would tell you which keys to press to perform certain actions. For example, here's a rather advanced version of the MS-DOS Shell application complete with menus and its own status bar."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

DOS Status Bar.

Trends to Watch in 2006

Looking at trends from 2005 to 2006 ...

"Here’s part 1 of a list of trends I saw gaining momentum in 2005 that I see growing even more important in 2006.

This started out as a list of technological trends, with RSS, Ajax, and Ruby on Rails being the headlines, as all three had huge years in terms of implementation and being squacked about. But these things, while interesting, aren’t really trends in the way that people are using the Web. Instead, they’re trends in building. Nothing illustrates the disparity between technology and usage more than the what Yahoo had to say in their October whitepaper: RSS-Crossing into the Mainstream. They claim that while over 1/4 of all Web users consume RSS in one way or another, only 4% know it.

- The Subscription Model
- Attention and Gestures
- Identity"   continued ...   (Via Bokardo)

Ruby On Rails.

Usability and accessibility in 2006

Some interesting predictions for 2006 ...

"Having recently set up the new Accessibility Practice at Bloor it seems only right that I should stick my neck out and make some predictions for 2006.

- WCAG 2.0 and ATAG 2.0 will become W3C recommendations by the end of the year.
- At least one household name will drive a marketing campaign around accessibility and usability.
- At least one household name will be sued for failing to comply.
- User testing for usability and accessibility will grow rapidly.
- One vendor will deliver a development environment that produces conformant sites by default.
- PDF documents will become a major bug bear in 2006."   continued ...   (Via IT-Analysis)

W3C

Crash course in learning theory

A good discussion about learning theory and how it applies to application development ...

"This is not a comprehensive look at the state of learning theory today, but it does include almost everything we think about in creating our books. And although it's geared toward blogs/writing virtually everything in here applies regardless of how you deliver the learning--you can easily adapt it to prentations, user documentation, or classroom learning. And remember, this is a BLOG, so don't expect academic rigor ; ) but I do have references, so leave a comment if there's something in particular you want.

- Talk to the brain first, mind second.

Even if a learner is personally motivated to learn a topic, if the learning content itself isn't motivating, the learner's brain will do everything possible to look for something more interesting. This applies to both getting and keeping attention, as well as memory. Remember, you can't do anything until you get past the brain's crap filter! And to the brain, a dry, dull, academic explanation is definitely CRAP (regardless of how much your mind cares about the topic)."   continued ...   (Via Creating Passionate Users)

Push vs. co-creation Learning Model.

Lexar JumpDrive Mercury

Making a useful product more useful via the interface ...

"Lexar’s newest addition to its USB flash drives at CES is the JumpDrive Mercury. If you’ve ever had a problem with knowing how much storage space you have left on your drive, this Mercury takes care of that with an integrated capacity meter. In fact, this meter gives you the info you want without ever having to be plugged into your PC. The display, created by E Ink Corp, is paper-thin and unbreakable (for klutzes like me). The drive will come in 1GB and 2GB capacities. Also look for the JumpDrive Firefly, which is smaller and comes in 256MB, 512MB, and 1GB capacities."   continued ...   (Via Gizmodo)

Lexar Flash Drive.

Google to launch its own PC

Customer experience does not mean more bells and whistles ...

"According to the Register, Google is planning to provide an own-brand Windows-less PC and sell the low-cost system through a partnership with retail giant Wal-Mart. The machine and/or the sales deal could be announced as early as this coming Friday.

Crucially, the rig is said to be based on Google's own operating system - most likely Linux in Google clothing - rather than Windows.

Although this has been tried before, writes Karl Long in Customer Experience Strategy, "the difference is Customer Experience… Google has proven it can develop world class, easy to use software, search, email, maps, shopping, oh and it’s figured out how to provide the software free and supported through unobtrusive, profitable, advertising."

"Everyone may role there eyes when I say google is successful because they provide the best Customer Experience, and that’s because many people think Customer Experience means bells and whistles, or features etc. No Customer Experience is the balance between business goals and customer needs. It is understanding that customer needs is not a static point in time, but a gradient, a relationship curve with increasing trust, engagement, promise and reward. Google with it’s perpetual beta software and “invite only” strategies, where not thinly veiled attempts at “viral” marketing, they were genuine attempts to test and refine they’re software, which probably cost them a tonne of money initially, and would have been a tough sell at other companies."   continued ...   (Via Putting people first)

Google PC.

2006 hopes/predictions EQ

Some good hopes for the Internet and Interface Design ...

"It's that time... so here are some unscientific thoughts for '06: what we hope will happen, and what we think will happen. We represented these as EQ's (thanks to livingcode's interactive sliders), and this is only about our little corner of the tech world, not the WHOLE world.

What we HOPE for:"   continued ...   (Via Creating Passionate Users)

2006 Slider Goals (check the slider titles).

Blog Interface Design 2.1

User Interface Design corrections and suggestions based on feedback ...

"Following the publication of our Blog Interface Design 2.0 article, a number of folks have chimed in with some additional suggestions for making the most of your blog’s content.

In the article, we highlighted Boxes & Arrows’ practice of bringing valuable comments (as rated by readers) to the front of a list of comments. In response, Tom Chi suggested an interesting alternative. Rather than changing the order of the list based on quality –change the opacity. With this approach comments rated poorly are reduced in opacity so that really poor comments become almost unreadable. If readers find something of interest in a comment with low opacity, they have a strong incentive for rating it well –it becomes more visible."   continued ...   (Via Functioning Form)

Comments Forward.

What the heck is this button for?

Another discussion about the need for simplicity vs. more features ...

"In the olden days, we turned a knob to tune the TV, dialed a phone to make a call and pressed the big button on top of a camera to take a picture.

But now gadgets meant to make our lives simpler come with so many features, the first hour or two is spent trying to get them to work. TVs, phones and cameras come with thick manuals and, with any luck, you'll figure out how to turn them on by Page 20.

Design experts say manufacturers' zeal to out-wow the competition has led to a generation of doodads known more for features than function. While a select few consumers appreciate and can quickly master a scanner that also makes copies and sends faxes, the rest of us are thinking, "What the heck is this button for?" Three problems have converged to result in a perfect storm of confusion: baffling manuals, confounding design and a tendency to pack too many components into each device (akin to selling a Swiss Army knife to a person in need of a bottle opener)."   continued ...   (Via delawareonline)

The Swiss Army Knife Approach.

Simplicity Is Golden

Practical need for usability and flexibility ...

"It's not all fun and games in the amusement-park business.

Just ask Gary Neveras. As senior director of financial planning analysis at Universal Orlando, Neveras is responsible for tracking and forecasting the numbers on more than 1,000 different ventures and projects at the theme park. "We have tons of information," he says. "But being able to mine that information and make business decisions — that's a challenge."

Like financial managers at a lot of other businesses, Neveras uses software to foretell an array of financial trends. And like financial managers at a lot of other businesses, he cringes at the effort needed to use the software. "Many modeling products just don't offer a good mix of usability and flexibility," he says."   continued ...   (Via CFO Magazine)

Quantrix Modeler.

What Is Wrong With The IPod

A critical look at the iPod design ...

"A blog post on the topic of design problems with the IPod has been a long time in coming, and what better time than the new year to air out that dirty laundry! I’ve owned an IPod Photo for 6 months and I’m really starting to get sick of hearing people rave about the “excellence of the click wheel” or the “perfect design” and such nonsense.

Before I start into all the problems I should say that the IPod isn’t that bad. If you want a basic music player with a big hard drive in a slim package, go buy one. However, we are designers, not the common consumer, and I’d like to think that we analyze our products a bit more thoroughly than that. And the IPod really could be designed a lot better.

You also might be wondering what this has to do with mobile communities. Well it is a stretch… but it is about mobile device design, and I will argue that the IPod should be much more social than it currently is. I should warn readers that this is a detailed article about specific design and interaction issues, and it will help to have HCI experience to avoid getting excruciatingly bored."   continued ...   (Via Mobile Community Design)

iPod

Folksonomy recapitulates Ontology

Tagging will not get widespread use ...

"One doesn’t have to stray far to come across the neologisms “Folksonomy” and “Tagging” on the web these days.

Companies are developing business models on it, hundreds have taken to it with great passion, and it has been hailed as an integral part of web 2.0. Mildly piqued, I tried the services “del.icio.us” which is definitely a fantastic service, in making sense of the burgeoning content on the web.One does not have to spend much time on the service to discover new content or see pages on content you never knew existed.

Here in the following paragraphs I shall try and put forth an argument why the concept of “tagging” will remain the bastion of the early adopters.Though very interesting, it will remain just that and not help us break new ground in bringing order to the web or analyze its content in a more efficient manner."   continued ...   (Via WordWorks)

del.icio.us tags.

Gerry McGovern's clear lack of understanding

A challange to the idea that graphics design plays little role in website design ...

"As much as I'd like to let this one go, I just can't.

Gerry McGovern is apparently: widely regarded as the number one worldwide authority on managing web content as a business asset. Ok. Shame that someone with this amount of apparent industry clout embarrasses himself with a truly naive observation. I honestly don't know where to start.

Most of Gerry's post sems to be slagging off the Communication Arts Magazine awards, which has to be said, don't really feature a lot of good graphic design for the web. They feature a lot of good graphic design, which doesn't work well on the web, which is what I think Gerry is trying to say."   continued ...   (Via Mark Boulton)

Design Matters.