User Experience and IA

An analysis of IA the importance of user experience...

"IA’s have always wondered how to define information architecture in relation to other fields. Starting with the early days of library science, through the "discovery" of other fields and the times when experienced IA’s called themselves Big IA’s, to modern days of business design and experience design, the borders have been fuzzy.

I hope to show that, despite the fact that most of us are proud to wear the label Information Architect, we are all User Experience practitioners who practice IA from time to time.

Finally, I would like to show the next steps for IA’s, which includes a call for international networks, and national events (such as this Italian IA Summit)."   continued ...   (Via Peter Boersma)

Classifying Experiences

Thoughts on the make up of the user experience...

"I’m excited to announce that I’ll be presenting at the 2006 IA Summit in Vancouver Canada. While it’s not a formal lecture style presentation (maybe next year?), I’m very grateful to have been asked to convert my proposal into a poster presentation (you can view the 2005 presentations here). In hindsight, my model is certainly more suited to this format. And, I’ll have a chance to get feedback from some of the really smart people in the IA community.

So, the topic?

“Sorting, Classifying, and Labeling Experiences”

First, some background that led to this…

From ‘user experiences’ to ‘The Experience Economy’ to ‘designing for experiences,” not to mention “brand experiences,” “customer experience management,” and “experiential marketing”— experiences are definitely the topic du jour. But with so many different perspectives, each with substantial merit, I found myself asking what creates a great experience…?"   continued ...   (Via poetpainter)

Examining the user experience

Communicating a Vision

The importance of organizational/team vision buy-in...

"Communication is vital to a successful design project. After all: the final designed product is only part of the challenge facing a company. To enjoy long-term and sustainable success, a company needs a healthy culture, which is dependent upon the people in the organization. If they do not feel like they are part of what is happening, personally feeling ownership and participation – no matter how far-removed they might be – they will not be productive, positive contributors to the good of the organization.

Strong communication can create a feeling of shared vision in an organization, even among people who are far-removed from the actual product or design process. One of my favourite stories – and it certainly may be apocryphal – is about JFK touring Cape Canaveral in the early 1960s. On the tour he came across a janitor scrubbing the floors:

JFK: Hello friend, what’s your name and what do you do here?

Janitor: My name is Ray, Mr. President, and I’m helping to put a man on the moon.

The point of the story being, that because of the shared goal and high organizational morale – the product of strong communication, starting with the President himself (“We will put a man on the moon by the end of the decade”) and running all the way down – everyone including the janitor saw their place not in terms of the specific role they did, but framed within this ambitious, even audacious, goal. And of course, they were actually successful, in no small part due to the shared vision."   continued ...   (Via Orbitstar)

Hiding in Plain Sight: An Interview with Adam Greenfield

Interview on the pervasiveness of computing...

"Boxes and Arrows caught up with Adam Greenfield on the heels of finishing his first book, Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, due out in March 2006. Greenfield talks to us about how computing has moved away from the desktop into every part of our lives—from soda cans to the family pet. In this interview, he allows us to imagine what our new normal might look like.

Boxes and Arrows: Congratulations on your book! What is “everyware?” Is it different from what we already know as “ubiquitous computing,” “pervasive computing,” or “invisible computing?”

Adam Greenfield: “Everyware” is computing that is everywhere around us, yet is relatively hard to see, both literally and figuratively. Broadly speaking, it is what you get when you take the information processing we associate with the personal computer and distribute it throughout the environment—embedding it in walls, floors, appliances, lampposts, even clothing. I also use the word to refer to the relatively novel interface conventions everyware requires: gestural, tangible and haptic interfaces, and to some extent, voice recognition.

The fact that it is so powerful—so insinuative and at the same time so hard to discern—makes it different in kind from the informatics we’ve grown so used to over the last twenty or twenty-five years of the PC era.

“Everyware” has a lot in common with the contemporary discourses of ubiquitous computing, so why coin an entirely new term? Each of the terms already in use—”ubicomp,” “pervasive computing,” “tangible media,” “physical computing,” and so on—is contentious. They’re associated with one or another viewpoint, institution, funding source, or dominant personality. I wanted people relatively new to these ideas to be able to have a rough container for them, so they could be discussed without anyone getting bogged down in internecine definitional struggles, like “such-and-such a system has a tangible interface, but isn’t really ubicomp.”"   continued ...   (Via Boxes and Arrows)

Not So Set In Our Ways After All

The Mini Toolbar in Office 2007 represents a break from the tradition of grouping like commands together...

"Back in the article "Set In Our Ways?" I talked about one of the design issues we were thinking about at the time--namely, whether or not it was OK sometimes to break commands out of a set.

In particular, we were thinking about the Mini Toolbar which comes up on selection and as part of context menus in Office 2007. As you may recall, in order to make the best use of the limited space available, we needed to cast a critical eye on the content included in this UI.

With many people clamoring for indent, outdent, highlighter, and styles, it seemed like a waste of space to include much less frequently-used features such as right justify and underline.

As it often does, an interesting discussion ensued, and many of you encouraged us to break with convention.

So, for Beta 2 we decided to take the plunge and really optimize around the most frequently-used commands, breaking the restriction that all of the commands of a "set" (such as Bold, Italic, Underline) have to be together.

Here's what we decided on as Beta 2 content for the Mini Toolbar in Word:"   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Context sensitive to the most frequently used commands

On Web Standards

A good discussion about UI and UX vs. web standards ...

"At this point in time, the best web applications aren’t built using web standards.

Web technologies, yes, but these sites certainly do not validate, which if you ask any standardista, is absolutely necessary. Joe Clark states the most extreme view: “It indicates not merely unprofessional Web-development practices but outright incompetence.”

However, I think this is the wrong message to send to fellow web designers. Designers should not dismiss sites simply because they don’t validate. They should judge sites on completely different criteria: usefulness. After all, the three sites I mentioned above are some of the most useful sites out there…are their designers unprofessional or incompetent?

The answer is not “no”. It’s “who cares?” Who cares whether or not the designers are incompetent if they consistently deliver their users a great user experience? Certainly not the folks who are happily using the sites…the fact that a site doesn’t validate says more about their priorities than it does about their competence."   continued ...   (Via Bokardo)

Interview with Larry Tesler, Yahoo!'s VP of user experience and design

A history of UI and UX from Xerox PARC to Apple to Yahoo ...

"The resume of Larry Tesler (Wikipedia article - personal site) reads like the history of interaction design.

He worked at Xerox PARC and Apple, created and managed the usability group at Amazon, and is now vice president of user experience and design at Yahoo!, managing the company’s interaction designers, visual designers and design researchers, and sharing responsibility for the company’s user experience, brand experience and product strategy.

While at Xerox PARC, he helped develop some of the language of interaction design including pop-up menus and cut-and-paste.

This interview by Dan Saffer starts with the question if there are any unbreakable laws for interaction designers, to which Tesler answers: "Just one. Design for the users."   continued ...   (Via Putting people first)

Seven Accessibility Mistakes (Part 2)

A great list of accessibility mistakes ...

"This two part-article discusses reasons why some projects fail to result in properly accessible products. Last week we discussed the first three of seven accessibility mistakes I’ve encountered in my work, namely:

Mistake #1: Believing in products without putting them to the test. It’s no fun realizing halfway through development that the CMS does not really help create clean markup, or the framework in use spits out controls that are only usable with a mouse.
Mistake #2: Taking too much responsibility. Sometimes we give the client the impression that all he has to do to create an accessible product is believe in us. We should help the client understand that when it comes to maintaining the product, accessibility is as much his responsibility as it is ours."   continued ...   (Via Digital Web Magazine)

Perception of Fonts: Perceived Personality Traits and Uses

A scholarly paper on personality and the use of fonts plus several other good articles ...

"This study sought to determine if certain personalities and uses are associated with various fonts. Using an online survey, participants rated the personality of 20 fonts using 15 adjective pairs. In addition, participants viewed the same 20 fonts and selected which uses were most appropriate. Results suggested that personality traits are indeed attributed to fonts based on their design family (Serif, Sans-Serif, Modern, Monospace, Script/Funny) and are associated with appropriate uses. Implications of these results to the design of online materials and websites are discussed."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

Fonts

Storytelling

Storytelling

(Via OK/Cancel)

UI Design And Understanding The User

An interesting discussion about UI philosophy ...

"Apparently Greg of the Greg's Head UI design blog had a little argument about Gnome usability with Linus Torvalds. Quotes of choice:

Greg: The majority of end-users want a simple printer dialog. In fact most people will just hit the Print button without changing any settings. These users are not 'idiots' they just have better things to do then futz around with printer settings.

Linus: It's a total logical fallacy to think that the intersection of two majorities would still be a majority. It is pretty damn rare, in fact, because these things are absolutely not correlated. And the technical term for somebody who claims to do user interface design and not understand this fact is a "F***ING IDIOT". And this has _nothing_ to do with "technical users". Even totally non-technical users care about something. In fact, it might be their printer, and having a way to set the paper type and resolution by hand.

I think this is interesting, not just because Linus shows how representative for the "majority" of the Linux community he actually is in matters of politeness, but because we rarely get to see the clash of those two extremes in UI design so close together."   continued ...   (Via Udo Schroeter's Blog)

To Dash or Not To Dash

Making password input more usable ...

"If you’re a TiVo owner, the company will occasionally notify you of a new service or software upgrade available for your recorder. The TiVo folks, knowing that you may be very excited to get the new features, gives you a chance to sign up for the priority upgrade list, allowing you to be one of the first in your neighborhood to get the newest and greatest.

Signing up is straight forward. The only information you need is your TiVo Service Number:"   continued ...   (Via UIE Brain Sparks)

TiVo Password Box

The Elements of Office Style

Using themes in Office 12 ...

"Last week I gave an overview of the new Office Themes capability. Thank you for all the great comments. This week I'd like to show you what's inside an Office Theme and how that is expressed in the user interface.

Driven to Abstraction. Each Office application has unique formatting capabilities tailored to the document type it creates. Word Text Styles, PowerPoint Slide Masters and Excel Cell Styles do similar things in very different ways. Office Themes are able to work across different applications by including design information abstract enough it can be applied to a variety of formatting situations. The Theme colors, fonts and graphic effects are like a list of formatting ingredients and each Quick Style like a recipe.

We didn't start off with an abstract approach. We tried, for example, to put specific text styles into Themes but quickly ran into roadblocks. PowerPoint uses large text, sometimes lightly colored on a dark background. Word uses smaller, dark text almost always on a white background. As we looked at each object to be styled we ran into similar issues. Ultimately we ended up with a model that was simpler and more compact than we expected. With Office Themes a small amount of XML goes a long way."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Quick Styles

Usability & accessibility market worth £115m in 2005

An expanding Usability market in the UK ...

"The combined UK Usability and Accessibility markets grew 28% in 2005 from £90m to £115m, according to E-consultancy’s 2006 Usability & Accessibility Buyer’s Guide published this week.

The fast growth of these markets reflects the buoyancy of the internet sector and, more specifically, an increased understanding of the commercial benefits of best practice and user-centric business models.

E-consultancy predicts that the combined usability and accessibility markets will grow by a further 25% in 2006, resulting in a market value of £144m by the end of the year. E-consultancy’s valuation is based on money spent on usability and accessibility resources both client-side (internally) and through agencies.

“These markets are growing very quickly because more and more companies are realising that an optimal online experience is directly linked to commercial success,” said E-consultancy analyst Linus Gregoriadis."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

Why Features Don't Matter Anymore

The more features the worse ...

"The iPod was never sold on the grounds of its technical merits: Apple hit a gold-mine by marketing a cool new way of integrating music in your life. Even when Apple announced the iPod with video, it presented it not as the best multi-media player in the universe, but as a cool new way of watching "Desperate Housewives" and other TV shows.

In the seemingly never-ending debate about Apple's successes, announcements, new products and predicted-but-unannounced über-gadgets, features and technical specifications often seem to dominate the debate. Yet if there's one lesson to be learned from the company's recent successes, it is a very simple one: features don't matter any more."   continued ...   (Via ACM Ubiquity)

Which Letter Is Better?

Using the keyboard with the ribbon in Office 12 ...

"I mentioned a few days ago that the team has been immersed lately in improving the Office 2007 keyboard model. We got a lot of constructive feedback around the model from Beta 1 and so we're hard at work addressing it for Beta 2.

Today, I want to just throw out a minor but important detail of the overall design for discussion to see what you think.

As I mentioned in my original post on the keyboard model, the first step of using the keyboard with the Ribbon is pressing a letter to navigate to the tab which contains the control you want to use. For instance, many apps have a Review tab, and pressing ALT+R puts you in a mode to access the commands on the Review tab with the keyboard by pressing subsequent letters.

One of the questions we're trying to answer is: What letter should we use for the first tab of each of the Office 2007 programs?"   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Keyboard Options

Avoid Within-Page Links

Usability of hypertext links ...

"On the Web, users have a clear mental model for a hypertext link: it should bring up a new page. Within-page links violate this model and thus cause confusion.

On websites, within-page links are bad for the same reason that PDF files are bad and that mailto links that fire off emails without warning made 2002's list of top-ten design mistakes.

Users have developed a strong mental model for link following, which has several elements:

1. Clicking a link navigates you to a new place.
2. After you click, the old page goes away.
3. A new page loads into the window, replacing the old page.
4. You first see the top of the new page.
5. The Back button returns you to the top of the old page.

Because almost all clicks work this way, users have very strong expectations that the Web will work this way. It's a simple model that makes sense."   continued ...   (Via Alertbox)

No More Black and White Music?

Associating color with music ...

"Existing music players have usability issues with the organisation of large music collections. An example of this is how we categorise music into genres. People tend to hold their own opinions about genres, and with the rise of internet downloaded music, more and more people have music on their computers which have been categorised with genres in a way that they don't agree with.

Research showed that people can instinctively associate colours with music. ColourMusic is a music player that is an attempt to increase the usability of music players on the market today by relying on the categorisation of music using colour. These associations are made by the user themselves, so will be personalised to that person. The music library is presented as a 2D "colour map". Users can create playlists by dragging boxes around the colours of music they wish to play."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

ColorMusic

Do Usability Expert Evaluation and Testing Provide Novel and Useful Data for Game Development?

A PDF format paper on usability in game design ...

A case study was done to study whether usability expert evaluation and testing are suitable for game development. In the study, a computer game under development was first evaluated and then tested. Game developers were then asked to rate the findings and give other feedback about the methods used and the results gained.

It was found that the usability expert evaluation and testing provided both novel and useful data for game development. Based on these and the other results it is argued that the usability expert evaluation and testing have considerable face validity in game development.

In addition to the usefulness and face validity of the methods it was studied whether the usability experts
participating in the game usability expert evaluation should be double experts. It was found that there was no significant difference in the number or the rated relevancy of the problem the gamer and non-gamer usability specialists found."   continued ...   (Via Journal of Usability Studies)

Empirical Evaluation of a Popular Cellular Phone's Menu System: Theory Meets Practice

A PDF format paper on cell phone usability ...

"A usability assessment entailing a paper prototype was conducted to examine menu selection theories on a small screen device by determining the effectiveness, efficiency, and user satisfaction of a popular cellular phone’s menu system. Outcomes of this study suggest that users prefer a less extensive menu structure on a small screen device. The investigation also covered factors of category classification and item labeling influencing user performance in menu selection. Research findings suggest that proper modifications in these areas could significantly enhance the system’s usability and demonstrate the validity of paperprototyping which is capable of detecting significant differences in usability measures among various model designs."   continued ...   (Via Journal of Usability Studies)

Media: Design Management Institute summarises User-Focussed Innovation

Good user-focused design articles ...

"The Design Management Review has published executive summaries of its edition on "User-Focused Innovation" (Vol. 16, No. 4). This amounts to several mini-articles of some interest on various aspects of user-centred design. 'Creatively interpreting and managing design to address consumer needs can be a source of great business success,' is the mantra here.

But individuals go further than this. "Teaching User-focused Innovation" by James Morley Read kicks off with a reflection on the challenges involved in getting design students signed up: 'Young designers ... are easily misled by an emphasis on trends. "Although trends (fashion, economic, technological, and so on) are relevant issues, they can distract and mislead from the understanding and implementation of goals central to the design process. This is not to suggest that issues of external influence are not central to the context of the design process, but they are not the sole generator of form. Rather, they serve as the climate in which design occurs."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

Practical Application of Human Factors in Defence

Conference: 14th to 15th June 2006, The Hatton, at etc. venues, London, United Kingdom.

Following last year’s success, SMi's 2nd Conference on Human Factors in Defence will continue to promote an understanding of the principles of human factors and explore their importance in the design and the implementation of defence systems. The conference will address the impact of Human Factors on international government policies and guidelines and will also offer an update on current research issues with respect to human capabilities, limitations and characteristics.

SMi's Human Factors in Defence event will offer a good mix of theoretical and practical papers analysing the role of human factors in tri-service capabilities, joint and coalition forces, and military capability solutions. It will also include case studies reflecting on lessons learned from recent operations, offering solutions for the future."   continued ...   (Via SMi Group)

How To Provide Instant Focus To Selected Information Items

Making information stand out ...

"One of the reasons why visualisation can be so powerful has its roots in the fact that there's a series of identification and recognition operations that our brain performs in an "automatic" way without the need to focus our attention or even be conscious of them.

Managing properly the elements that are "pre-attentively" processed can make a difference in a user interface. It sometimes happens that certain elements of a graphic representation, maybe a colour or an icon "pop out".

These phenomena, whose visual identification is performed in a very short time lapse (typically between 200 and 250 milliseconds or less) are called pre-attentive since they occur without the intervention of consciousness. There's no need to focus on the search task. Even when they are hidden among many other objects they are identified immediately."   continued ...   (Via Robin Good)

Pop-out Visualization

Testing the Testing Software: Morae 1.3 is put through its paces

A new version of Morae ...

"Morae is an indispensable tool for anyone who conducts PC-based usability studies. It's indispensable for two reasons. Firstly, it’s good. Secondly, it doesn't have any competitors. There just isn't anything out there that enables you to do live logging and easily generate picture-in-picture full resolution highlight videos from your user studies.

If you don't already have it, I recommend contacting techsmith and requesting a copy of the trial version. It's fully functional for 15 days so you'll have enough time to run at least one study. The interface is quite simple and doesn’t have an overwhelming set of features, almost anyone who has done a little video editing before should be able to just pick it up and start making highlight videos. However, it doesn’t really tell you how to structure and run a user study, so if you are a new-comer to user research, you will benefit from getting yourself a usability textbook like Kunivasky (2003), Rubin (1994), or one of the many others that are available."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

Improving Customer Experience: Usability Testing Is Not Enough

Usability testing is one thing; customer experience another ...

"With the right data in hand, both marketers and designers can do their jobs better and work together more effectively to design products and services their customers value and ensure satisfaction with the customer experience. Integrated customer experience research methods are a critical tool every business needs to win high-value customers and keep them coming back.

...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.

In many cases, the evaluation that sites receive is limited to functional issues. Although Interface Engineers sometimes conduct usability testing, the designers' main focus is on whether users can achieve goals with ease. Thus, the metrics that usability evaluators tend to focus on have to do with the mechanical aspects of the site design."   continued ...   (Via E-Commerce Times)

Usability Research: Key Findings 2005

Quick summary of key usability findings...

"The R&D team at HFI, also this year has gone out to summarize and report the key usability findings, news and research data that is then presented at their 2005's Putting Research into Practice seminar.

To put together this usability seminar the HFI R&D team surveys and studies a multitude of peer-reviewed papers and conference presentations from all those research and study sectors that provide strategically important information and news to human factors and usability specialists.

These research and study sectors include:
* Human Computer Interaction
* Ergonomics
* Cognitive Science
* Social Psychology
* Computer Science
* Marketing
* Economics

As in the past, such recap presents research findings and not guidelines.

I have taken permission to select and sort for you some of these extremely interesting information bits from Dr Eric Schaffer and list them here for you as key references you should be keeping in mind when approaching the next phase of design, upgrade or optimization of your online web properties."   continued ...   (Via Robin Good)

Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers

A successful UX/product doesn't need to be actively used by all users...

"As Yahoo! has been gobbling up many social media sites over the past year (Flickr, upcoming, del.icio.us) I often get asked about how (or whether) we believe these communities will scale.

The question led me to draw the following pyramid on a nearby whiteboard:

The levels in the pyramid represent phases of value creation. As an example take Yahoo! Groups.
1% of the user population might start a group (or a thread within a group)
10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress
100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups (lurkers)

There are a couple of interesting points worth noting. The first is that we don’t need to convert 100% of the audience into “active” participants to have a thriving product that benefits tens of millions of users. In fact, there are many reasons why you wouldn’t want to do this. The hurdles that users cross as they transition from lurkers to synthesizers to creators are also filters that can eliminate noise from signal. Another point is that the levels of the pyramid are containing - the creators are also consumers.

While not quite a “natural law” this order-of-magnitude relationship is found across many sites that solicit user contribution. Even for Wikipedia (the gold standard of the genre) half of all edits are made by just 2.5% of all users. And note that in this context user means “logged in user”, not accounting for the millions of lurkers directed to Wikipedia via search engine traffic for instance."   continued ...   (Via Elatable)

One creator can still provide value for all consumers

Developing a JavaScript Library for Yahoo!

The logic and development of the Yahoo! UI Library ...

"When we set out about a year ago to build the Yahoo! User Interface Library, we had a specific set of challenges to address. First and foremost, we wanted to enable our front-end engineers to spend more time working on advanced, product-specific features and less time doing cross-browser tuning of generic interactions like drag and drop. We have a deep, talented, and creative pool of developers across the company, but we hadn’t done enough to develop shared libraries that normalize differences across relevant browsers. As a community, we agreed that we needed better toolkits for those rich interactions that can enhance users’ experiences of Yahoo! products.

Creating the library represented a significant undertaking, and we spent a lot of time talking among the larger front-end engineering community here about how to go about doing this. Having now made the library publicly available as an open-source, open-use resource, we wanted to share with you some of the thought processes driving our engineering agenda."   continued ...   (Via Yahoo! User Interface Blog)

Primitives

Software Development's Evolution towards Product Design

Interesting story on the history of interaction/UX design...

"Occasionally, some poor fellow at a dinner party makes the unfortunate mistake of asking what I do for a living. My initial (and quite subdued) response is that I help design software for artists.

Then comes the inevitable question, “Oh, so you are a programmer?” A gleam appears in my eye and I no longer feel obligated to blather on about the rainy weather. With a great flourish, I whip out my gold nibbed pen and draw a little diagram on a napkin that explains concisely how modern software development works. In the grand finale, I circle one of the little scribbles buried deep in the entire convoluted process and proudly proclaim ‘And that is what I do!”. This admittedly selfish exercise usually keeps everyone involved merrily entertained until dessert arrives.

After dozens of napkin defiling lectures, I’ve put together an extended PDF of my sketch for download. In short, we have a one page infographic that explains:

The evolution of software development over four distinct eras.
The key goals of software development and our saddest failures
Where software development is moving in the future.
The diagram also contains a surprising amount of poo. But then, that is the bigger lesson lurking within the scrawls. Much of what software developers create fails to serve the full spectrum of their customer’s needs. The funny part is that the usually non-technical folks that I’m talking to laugh heartily at this point…they know exactly what I’m talking about...."   continued ...   (Via Lost Garden)

You're probably a green beret

Creating Online Application Power Users Using Graduated Usability

Keeping the Web simple and easy has driven Internet usage to more than a billion people worldwide. Anyone with a connection, a browser and the ability to enter a URL can use the Internet today. This simplicity is great for those looking to browse their favorite blog or search for a recipe for dinner, but it has many problems as an application development platform — usability being the primary issue. Of course, tools and HTML compatibility also pose problems, but these are development issues and are dealt with by a few well-paid, trained individuals. Usability affects a greater number of people over a longer period of time.

HTML and current browsers are built to deliver content-rich Web sites, making it easy to navigate between documents. In contrast, applications need complex workflows and usability features to allow users to take advantage of the functionality they deliver. In order to fit applications into the navigation-driven approach of the Web, developers and designers typically use the navigation of a link to perform an action, rather than navigating to a new document. This makes learning to use online applications easy by fitting into existing Web usage patterns, but not necessarily usable.

"Simplicity does not equal usability"
While the aforementioned statement may seem counter intuitive, "usability" encompasses the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which users achieve tasks in a given application. Because users differ in many facets — particularly in experience and skill level, they will judge the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction of the application differently.

Graduated Usability is a concept that, when applied to application design, allows a single application to provide the means for any user, no matter their particular skill set or experience level, to effectively and efficiently use that application. Additionally, an application designed with Graduated Usability will inherently provide the ability to transition users from one skill or experience level to the next. When novice users are transformed into power users, they can more efficiently complete tasks and perform more skilled tasks."   continued ...   (Via developer.com)

web-based email increases accessibility and reduces deployment effort

The Biggest Loser

Comparing the screen real estate of Office 2007 and Office 2003...

"As we continue to work on the visual design of the 2007 Office apps, we've been very conscious of looking for ways to slim down the overall UI of the apps.

Early on (especially before people learned more about how it worked) some people were saying things about the Ribbon like "it's just a fat toolbar and takes up all my space." We wanted to lose as much unnecessary weight as possible; you might remember how I feel about interface squalor.

In our current builds this week we finally got vertical spacing of the UI elements pretty much how we expect it to be when we ship Beta 2. So I thought it would be a good time to take some measurements to see where we were "out-of-the-box" vs. Word 2003 with the default Standard and Formatting toolbars up.

The question I wanted to answer was: "how much extra space does the 2007 UI take vertically vs. the 2003 UI."

So, I counted up all of the vertical pixels in Word starting directly below the title bar and extending to the last pixel of the status bar. From this, I subtracted any pixels devoted to displaying your document. This left me with the count of "pixels devoted to the UI." I did Word because it's the app in which vertical space is the most critical."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Why Features Don't Matter Any More

On focusing on the user experience over product features...

"Opinion: As Apple's iPod shows, success in technology has less and less to do with features, and more to do with ease of use. Welcome to the Age of User Experience.

As Apple's iPod shows, success in technology today has less and less to do with features, and more and more to do with ease of use. The iPod was never sold on the grounds of its technical merits: Apple hit a gold mine by marketing a cool new way of integrating music into your life.

Even when Apple announced the iPod with video, it presented it not as the best multimedia player in the universe, but as a cool new way of watching "Desperate Housewives" and other TV shows.

In the seemingly never-ending debate about Apple's successes, announcements, new products and predicted-but-unannounced über-gadgets, features and technical specifications often seem to dominate the debate."   continued ...   (Via eWeek)

Office Themes: Getting Documents To Sing One (Beautiful) Song

More on how the new Office 12 interface allows you use themes to quickly create nice looking documents...

"Today I present the first of what I hope are many guest articles on Office user interface issues written by other folks from the product team. This first series of articles describes the new themes capabilities of Office 12 and how they integrate with the user interface. Look for new articles every Wednesday.

Howard Cooperstein is a Lead Program Manager in the PowerPoint and OfficeArt group.

My name is Howard Cooperstein my work has been primarily on OfficeArt, the drawing and graphics features shared across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher and FrontPage. I was also the User Interface lead for PowerPoint 2002. For Office 12 I am the lead for the Office Themes team.

A big part of the Office 12 user interface story is how fast you can create a great looking document. This is the first in a series of articles explaining how we fill up Office 12s galleries with great looking choices.

Office 12 dramatically improves the aesthetic quality of formatting and this becomes really clear when you look at documents created with previous versions. In our research we looked at a lot of customer documents and for the most part they are professional looking but quite plain, relying on the default styles for text, tables and graphics. Obviously, PowerPoint with its Design Templates has the most colorful and graphically rich documents. But, even so, the tables, charts and diagrams on those slides usually arent as polished as background on which they sit."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Theme selection w/Ribbon

Technologist Manifesto..., or Things Everyone in IT Should Know

Great guidlines for building a good user experience...

"The best business solution is not always the best technology solution. The burden is on you, the technologist, to make the best system the business will use. There are two basic types of processes in business: physical and logical. Physical requires the proximity of two or more objects which must interact; like someone to load a crate onto a barge. Logical means it can be done anywhere with an acceptable network connection (like invoicing the loaded barge).

The only point of IT is to improve physical operations by providing efficiencies and reducing logical operations by providing automation. This is true in the Ingram Barge Company and for the Xbox 360.

Bad Technology is Your Fault

"Build it and they will come" is a great line for a movie, but a horrible way to make IT decisions.

Lex I: Corpus omne perseverare in statu suo quiescendi vel movendi uniformiter in directum, nisi quatenus a viribus impressis cogitur statum illum mutare. -- in other words, a user at rest would rather stay at rest than do extra work.

When (not if) a user asks "This sounds like a lot of extra work, how will it make my life easier?" you have an opportunity to evaluate your career progression.
If your answer is something akin to "It's policy, you have to do it or you'll get fired." then I hope you're drinking your Red Bull from a sippy cup, Junior.

If your answer is more like asking the question "Why is it so hard to use?" then you may be ready for big boy underwear.

This is the single most critical moment in your career, because this will show if you really understand Garbage In, Garbage Out or not. If you don't, keep surfing the web for the latest widget that you can show your peers and convince them that the whole project needs to be rewritten to use this widget, damn the deadlines. If you do understand GIGO, congratulations, move on to the next part.

Users aren't Born Stupid, You Train Them to be That Way

"Why do those idiots keep hitting that button?" is heard in IT shops much more frequently than "Why don't we get rid of that button?"

Why? Because we are smarter than they are. That's why we're in IT.

How many times have you been annoyed at a website for the number of *Required fields you had to fill out before you could proceed? Now imagine going to that website 200 times a day and having to fill out all those damned *Required fields. Now you start to get an idea of what users go thru when you roll out your flashy new system with all the ooh ahs everyone loved in the demos. There's a good reason "lakjdlaksdjlaskdjlaskdj" is found in so many databases: users have to type SOMETHING to move on."   continued ...   (Via ITtoolbox)

The Truth about Download Time

More from UIE on the differences between observing and listening when collecting data...

"As we study how people interact with web sites, we keep having to remind ourselves one important thing: we need to be very careful when we listen to our users. I don’t mean that we have to listen to them carefully. Instead, I mean we have to interpret what they are saying with caution and care.

When users say what they like or don’t like about a design, they mean well. I think they really intend to help us understand how to make things better.

Unfortunately, they are the wrong people to help us. Study after study shows us that users can’t attend to the details necessary to arrive at the right solution. Instead, they’ll often suggest changes that, when executed, fail to make any improvements at all and, all too often, make the experience worse.

In today’s UIEtips, we’ve dug into the archive and brought you an article to help us remember to be careful in our interpretations. In The Truth about Download Time, originally written in 2001 by Christine Perfetti and Lori Landesman, we revisit our discovery that just because users believe a site to be slow doesn’t mean speeding it up will make them happy."   continued ...   (Via UIE)

Online International Journal of Usability Studies

Abstract from a study in UPA's current issue of Journal of Usability Studies entitled: "Empirical Evaluation of a Popular Cellular Phone’s Menu System: Theory Meets Practice"...

"A usability assessment entailing a paper prototype was
conducted to examine menu selection theories on a
small screen device by determining the effectiveness,
efficiency, and user satisfaction of a popular cellular
phone’s menu system. Outcomes of this study suggest
that users prefer a less extensive menu structure on a
small screen device. The investigation also covered
factors of category classification and item labeling
influencing user performance in menu selection.
Research findings suggest that proper modifications in
these areas could significantly enhance the system’s
usability and demonstrate the validity of paperprototyping which is capable of detecting significant differences in usability measures among various model designs."   continued ...   (Via UPA)

Rich Web Interactions: Discoverability

How do you let your users know about your features?

"Many implementations of rich Web interaction designs encounter issues of discoverability. As I pointed out in Bringing Desktop Interactions Online, the awareness of actions like drag and drop and multi-select within Web applications is often low because people don’t expect these behaviors to be possible. As a result, designers often include messaging to educate users on what’s possible. Persistent messaging can be seen in these examples from Netflix & Basecamp (below).

Another common approach to addressing discoverability is “just in time messaging”. These messages reveal themselves only when a user performs an action that indicates they may be looking for specific functionality. A subtle but quite effective form of just in time messaging is a simple cursor change as shown in the example from My Yahoo! below. A stronger form of just in time messaging could be bubble help that lets users know what’s possible. Overuse of bubble help, however, can frustrate more than inform. Once someone learns the behavior (i.e. successfully drags and drops a window), the need for bubble help may be gone."   continued ...   (Via LukeW)

How to you promote discoverability?

Top Guidelines Violations

Common violations of the Microsoft Windows Vista UX...

"This article summarizes the most common violations of the Microsoft® Windows Vista ™ User Experience Guidelines, and offers guidelines for avoiding these violations. Most of these violations relate to changes in Windows Vista, resulting either from new features or new ways of considering existing features. Several of these violations aren ’t new to Windows Vista, but the guidelines were either missing, misunderstood, or not observed properly by Windows-based programs.

If you haven ’t done so already, start by reading the Top Rules for the Windows Vista User Experience. That article summarizes the rules that the Windows Vista Design team suggests you follow to create high-quality, consistent Windows Vista UIs. After that, use this list of top guidelines violations and subsequent recommendations as a “cheat sheet ” to get you up to speed on the UX Guide.

Controls
For all controls, select the safest (to prevent loss of data or system access), most secure value by default. If safety and security aren ’t factors, select the most likely or convenient value. For more information, see the specific control guidelines.
Command buttons
Use sentence-style capitalization. Doing so is more appropriate for Windows Vista tone and the use of short phrases for command buttons.
Exception: For legacy applications, you may use title-style capitalization if necessary to avoid mixing capitalization styles.
Indicate that additional information is needed by adding an ellipsis at the end of the button label. Don ’t use an ellipsis whenever an action displays another window —only when additional information is required to perform the action. Consequently, any command button whose implied verb is to show another window doesn ’t take an ellipsis, such as Advanced, Help, Options, Properties, or Settings.
For more information, see Command Buttons."   continued ...   (Via MSDN)

Incorrect placement of 'OK' button

The tag-cloud replaces the basic menu - Is this a good idea?

Are tag clouds a good replacement for traditional navigation?...

"I knew someone or the other was going to do this - its too obvious an idea. "Lets try replacing all site navigation with a tag cloud!". I just came across this on the FlockSucks website - its by a company called 83 degrees - you can tell from their name that they go in for all things hip and Web2.0.

I have my own opinion on the topic, but am going to wait till you express yours"   continued ...   (Via rashmi sinha)

tag cloud navigation

What Are We Agreeing To?

Do you skip the license agreement because it's hard to read? Or is it hard to read so you'll skip it?...

"As the IT Department of my father’s personal computer, I had the opportunity to sit next to him as he installed a new piece of software. As part of the installation, a checkbox appeared with the label “I’ve read and agree to the Terms and Conditions.”

As is common, he checked it off without even reading the terms and conditions. He’s been corporate counsel to some of the world’s largest corporations and spends his days reviewing legal documents. If anyone was going to read these things, I would’ve figured it would be him.

Practically everyone checks the little box without reading what they are agreeing to. Is that because we’re convinced there’s nothing in them that will disagree with us? Or is it because of the way they are designed?

In preparing for an upcoming class, I was exploring whether I could distribute an article I purchased from the Time Magazine site to my students. To find out what permission Time will grant me, I found my way to the terms and conditions box:"   continued ...   (Via UIE BrainSparks)

Small window to read license agreement

Crafting a Smarter, Gentler Cell Phone

On mobiles phones being aware of the user's "social context"...

"Larry Marturano doesn't want his cell phone to ring when he's sitting in church. Luckily, his phone has a built-in calendar, and he can program his phone so that it won't ring at certain times of the day. He's told it to always be respectfully silent on Sunday mornings, so it won't interrupt the sermon.

"But occasionally I'm not at church on Sunday morning," he says, "and my wife tries to get a hold of me or my son calls me, and lo and behold the cell phone doesn't ring, because I told it not to. I remember thinking 'Boy, that's really annoying, I wish it was smarter than that.' Then the next thought I had was, 'Oh yeah, that's my job.' "

Marturano is an engineer who runs a lab for Motorola near Chicago. He knows just how annoying it can be to hear a cell phone ring in a movie theater or a meeting and suddenly realize, to your horror, that it's your own phone. He and other engineers are working hard to make more polite phones -- ones that know when to be quiet and when to interrupt. The idea is that tomorrow's cell phones will be able to learn your routines and respond accordingly.

In the future, Marturano says, "as I use the phone, day after day, it learns what I like to do. It learns in what situations I answer calls. So, the vision is that over time, the cell phone gets easier to use because it only presents options to me that I'm likely to use."   continued ...   (Via NPR)

Practical Usability Testing

Getting the most from usability testing...

"When I started this column, part of my motivation was to write about tools to empower Web designers—techniques they could take away and apply immediately. I’ve written an article on how information architecture can be a natural progression from Web design and two articles containing short lessons to help new information architects be more effective on the job. My next several articles will focus on core information architecture practices and how Web designers and new information architects can use them effectively. I’ll focus on practical tips and keep the theory to a minimum.

The first article in this series is on one of my favorite practices: usability testing. The most critical aspect of user-centered design, usability testing breaks down the wall between the designer and user, and allows us to see how real users do real tasks in the real world. There are many benefits of usability testing, including uncovering pitfalls in a current system before a redesign and evaluating the usability of a system during and after design. Usability testing should be an iterative practice, completed several times during the design and development life-cycle. The end result is an improved product and a better understanding of the users that we’re designing for.
Planning a Test

Usability testing should be an iterative practice, completed several times during the design and development life-cycle. The end result is an improved product and a better understanding of the users that we’re designing for.

The first thing to know about planning a usability test is that every test is different in scope, and results will vary a lot depending on the purpose and context of the test. Testing a single new feature will look very different from testing several key scenarios in a new site."   continued ...   (Via Digital Web)

Interaction Modeling

User actions and cognitive modeling...

"Interaction modeling is a good way to identify and locate usability issues with the use of a tool. Several methods exist (see Olson & Olson 1990 for a review of techniques). Modeling techniques are prescriptive in that they aim to capture what users will likely do, and not descriptive of what users actually did.

Most methods—descriptive or prescriptive—fail to incorporate the relationship between user actions and cognitive processes. Models of cognitive processing, for example, might attempt to explain how or why a particular task is mentally difficult, yet the difficulty does not directly relate to observable user actions. Conversely, descriptive techniques such as path metrics, click stream analysis, and bread crumb tracking take little or no account of cognitive processes that lead to those user actions.

The relationship between actions and cognitive processes is important because it explains user behavior and translates to supportive arguments for good design solutions. Both prescriptive and descriptive techniques are necessary for characterizing the cognitive processing and user action (cog-action) relationship."   continued ...   (Via boxes and arrows)

Flow of the user actions

Yahoo! Design Pattern Library

Yahoo!'s thoughts on when and where to use design elements....

"Welcome to the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. We are very happy to be sharing our library with the design and development community. This is our first drop of what we hope to be a monthly release cycle for the publication of patterns. In many cases we have bundled the patterns with pointers to related code from the Yahoo! User Interface Code Library. We hope this is a useful resource and look forward to your feedback.

What's a Pattern?

A pattern describes an optimal solution to a common problem within a specific context."   continued ...   (Via Yahoo!)

Yahoo design how-to

Live by the Mockup, Die by the Mockup

The importance of early design communication and mockups...

"Mockup… The term itself brings to mind the duality inherent in this omnipresent design artifact. It’s both a direct representation of a product experience and a shallow portrayal of an interactive system at the same time. Perhaps the term originated with engineers or product managers intent on pointing out that the mockup was just that: a superficial representation that could never compare to the real product they had to build.

Regardless of what you call it, the mockup can either sell your design or plummet you into a cyclical tunnel of churn. That’s why, like it or not, interface designers often live and die by the mockup."   continued ...   (Via UXmatters)

Usability Isn't Expensive. It's Practical. Usability is Useful.

On the value of usability...

"456 Berea Street tackles “Usability Testing Without a Budget” is a prime example and explanation defending usability. It doesn’t have to be expensive. In fact, it’s practical. It’s the difference between a successful, and potentially money making website, and a dud. The truth is, Usability is useful. And worth it.

Even larger projects can often lack a dedicated budget for usability testing. Maybe the client doesn’t think it’s necessary, maybe the budget is really tight, or maybe there are other reasons. Whatever. The good news is that you can squeeze in a low budget, quick and basic test anyway, which is much better than not testing at all.

It doesn’t really matter how much you know about usability – after working on a project for a couple of weeks you’ve become blind to many of the problems. Sure, experience will help you avoid making many design mistakes in the first place, but something will slip through. Every time. That’s why doing even a very basic usability test will improve your site. And here’s one way of doing it.

Author Roger Johansson goes on to explain how you actually save money by doing effective website design testing. They key is to test how visitors will use your site."   continued ...   (Via Lorelle on WordPress)

The Digital Consumer's Next Big Thing

Some thoughts on future interfaces...

"User interfaces as big things in automated technologies have been with us since the teletype replaced the telegraph. I believe that the GUI (the user interface's "Last Big Thing") gained acceptance with consumers before it was generally adopted by business, and I think that is notable because it seems to indicate that the consumer, not business, has been driving the evolution of human computer interaction since the introduction of the personal computer. This is particularly evident when you examine game technology.

When I reflect on the user interface breakthroughs of the past, it is clear to me that we are overdue for the next real advance in user interfaces. With this in mind, a significant breakthrough in user interfaces could be The Next “Really” Big Thing. As to the question of whether it will it be a consumer movement or a business movement, I think that recent history would favor the consumer."   continued ...   (Via EDS' Next Big Thing)

Vendors need lessons in usability

Ergonomics and usability are two topics that should be very closely linked. Yet, when you look at much of the technology in a modern IT-rich office, you realise that although a lot of it might be plastered with the stickers that signify regulatory approval of one sort or another, in terms of ergonomics and usability the kit might as well have been designed for a 12-fingered, two-headed, seven-eyed inhabitant of some remote planet.

Let’s take the average flat-screen TFT monitor as an example. It continues a long heritage of poor usability that was honed to a fine art in its predecessor, the CRT."   continued ...   (Via IT Week)

Usability Sins 2.0

Sometimes the technologies of today fail to learn the lessons of the past..

"Many 2.0-ish websites manage to put up major usability barriers, like hiding their content. Here are some examples:

When you log-in to Flickr, and you then enter Flickr.com the next day to search for something, there’s no search box. Where’s the panic button? I want a search box! The easiest way to get back the box onto Flickr.com is to sign-out, and shrug your shoulders.
When you go to podcast directory Odeo, and you click on “Discover New Audio”, you’ll end up on a static help page without functionality. Yowza! A pink elephant lured me away. This reminds us of the importance of checking our sites with an “innocent” fresh mindset. What does the user know? What doesn’t she know? What does he want?"   continued ...   (Via Google Blogoscoped)

Multi-Touch

Interesting application of multi-user interactions ...

"Pretty cool video avail here: Bi-manual, multi-point, and multi-user interactions on a graphical interaction surface. “While touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations."   continued ...   (Via Signal vs. Noise)

Multi-user interaction.

The Future of Task Panes

Making the Task Pane in Office 12 more usabile ...

"As I've mentioned before, Task Panes made their first appearance on the scene in March 2001, in Office XP. If you want to get the background on Task Panes, why they were added, and their role in modern Office UI, read this article or, better yet, the entire "Why the UI" series.

Because of our oft-stated design mantra "everything's in the Ribbon" some people have speculated that Task Panes are not a part of Office 12. This is not precisely true, although the content of many Task Panes have moved to the Ribbon and the role of Task Panes in the product has become more focused. There are many fewer of them, and the few which are left are more consistent in their behavior and reason for existing. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

First, let's talk about the mechanics of the Task Pane as it existed in previous versions. The Office XP/2003 UI includes a single, full-height pane docked to the right side of the window. This single pane could show one Task Pane at a time, and you could switch between the available ones using a dropdown menu at the top of the pane."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Task Pane.

Stop being crazy: make proper use of colors

Using color in misleading ways ...

"Imagine if this article was written in red. You would hate it. In fact, you’d be so pissed off about it that you’d stop reading. Red means danger, in traffic lights and brake lights. Animals use red to issue warnings and announce their mating season. Red is used to provoke erotic feelings. Red is the color of your blood. Most of all, red means STOP or ERROR.

So, it is a shock to me when companies use red in their websites when displaying success messages (see Technorati screenshots) or in search boxes (see YouTube screenshots). Technorati should be using green, if any color, to show when I’ve just made something right (or when they have, rather), and why should YouTube be coloring my search term in red? Is that supposed to mean I won’t get any results?"   continued ...   (Via WeBreakStuff)

Technocrati Profile Editor.

Design Vision: Parts 5-8

A continuation of the Design Vision interviews ...

If you haven't read the first four parts yet, head over to Functioning Form and get up-to-date. Also, check out my intro to the series here. This week, the group explores the question, "What about an organization makes it ready for design vision?"

Dirk Knemeyer - In business, great design begins at the top. It requires an executive-level acknowledgement and understanding of the power and value of design, and experience in creating an environment conducive to design success. Only then can a strong design vision be realized.

Luke Wroblewski - As a designer that’s gone from pushing pixels for product managers to sitting at the corporate strategy table, I feel I’m obligated to present a less rosy vision of the process by which design vision is embraced by a company. Top-level decision makers will latch onto whatever “competitive advantage” or “innovation strategy” is the flavor of the month. They may pay lip service to strategic design without really knowing what it can do for them. They won’t know it until they see design vision in action. As a result, the impetus is on the designer(s) to push strategic value to the top of the organization."   continued ...   (Via knemeyer.com)

Marc Rettig on The History (and Future) of Interaction Design

An interview with Marc Rettig ...

"When does the history of interaction design begin?

I can think of an answer, but if you don’t mind I’ll sneak up on that answer by first offering some definitions.

If “design” means “applying the design process” — start by understanding the problem space, attempt to create a satisfactory solution, put an embodiment of that solution into the context of use, then iterate, refining your understanding by seeing each version of your imperfect solution in use…

If “interaction” means something like “conversation” —the back and forth of signals and symbols between people and an object capable of holding up its end of that conversation, or between people through such an object…

If “history” means someone wrote about it…

…Then here in this room without doing more research I’ll pick the work at Xerox PARC on the Star interface as a very early example of self-conscious interaction design, the publication of which influenced others to begin working in a similar way. As just one example, the idea of associating a program with a picture was born there. We call them icons, and forget what a breakthrough connection between interface element and underlying meaning that once was. That was the early-to-mid 1970s, and the Star papers are still great reading. There’s probably an argument to have about their process versus the one I just described, but given the range of “processes” in practice today I’d say that’s a nit."   continued ...   (Via Designing for Interaction)

Multi-Point Interactions

Nice update on current multi-point interaction products ...

"Two recent examples of multiple point interactions have been making the rounds online. The first is a video of Jeff Han’s Multi-Touch Interaction Research.

“multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations. Such sensing devices are inherently also able to accommodate multiple users simultaneously, which is especially useful for larger interaction scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops.” -Multi-Touch Interaction Research.

A few interactive walls and tables were on display at SIGGRPAH last year and Nicolas Nova list almost 60 such tables.

The second example is Apple’s virtual scroll wheel interface patent -rumored to be implemented in the new video iPod.

“Here two virtual touch wheels appear on the screen allowing independent action- the left hand has one finger on the volume and one on the smaller virtual scroll wheel allowing volume control and playlist selection, at the same time the right hand is scrolling through available songs in the iTunes right hand pane.” –Touch Sensitive iPod.

The second example is Apple's virtual scroll wheel interface patent -rumored to be implemented in the new video iPod.

"Here two virtual touch wheels appear on the screen allowing independent action- the left hand has one finger on the volume and one on the smaller virtual scroll wheel allowing volume control and playlist selection, at the same time the right hand is scrolling through available songs in the iTunes right hand pane - Touch Sensitive iPod."   continued ...   (Via Functioning Form)

Apple iPod Patent.

Less noise. Seriously.

Comparing the IE7 UI to Safari ...

"This fellow compares the new IE7 toolbar with Safari. Click the image to draw your own conclusions."   continued ...   (Via Signal vs. Noise)

IE7 vs. Safari.

Design 2.0: Minimalism, Transparency, and You

Interviews showing how people thing about design strategies ...

"Today happens to be the four month anniversary of eHub Interviews, a series of email questions and answers with the creators and companies behind many of the new web 2.0 services and applications that we’ve been witnessing and using online. According to many of you who write in, the interviews are “one of your favorite parts… it puts a human face to all of these projects. It really adds a valuable dimension to the web review sites.” I’m glad to hear it. Among many of the self-appointed roles that I have at/as eHub, the interviews are one of my favorite activities.

One of the questions asked in each interview is “What is your design philosophy?”

In reading the current sixty interview responses, there’s a clear trend towards several key words that continue to appear in people’s answers:
simple
fast
intuitive
social"   continued ...   (Via Emily Chang)

It's Gonna Be A Hot Summer

One click formatting in Excel 12 ...

"I spend a lot of time here writing about the new Office 12 UI. And why not--it's the project I work on and I'm proud of the work our team is doing.

But in reality, the purpose of any UI framework is to support the programs using it--and ultimately to enable them to provide awesome user experiences.

One of the things that blows me away in Excel 12 are the new data visualizations. This is an area in which the new UI technologies (the Ribbon, Galleries, Live Preview) and new capabilities in Excel (Conditional Formatting improvements, new graphics functionality) come together to make something great."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

One click formatting in Excel 12.

Design Vision: Part 4

Two moe good interviews ...

"Part four of Design Vision: a conversation about the role of design-driven leadership in the product development process (be sure to check out part three first).

Jim Leftwich - I think Bob made some very salient points regarding the potentially redundant nature of the term “design vision.” I think the reason it’s been used here has a lot to do with the wide range of what the term “design” has come to mean in the development world. In the overwhelming majority of cases, design is positioned fairly far down the development path, and in some situations is reduced to mere decoration. I’m reminded of the numerous calls I’ve had from prospective clients claiming that the product “was nearly finished, all except the user interface.” Such a statement sounds incredibly absurd, but it was once common, and there are more subtle forms of the same thinking still lurking in many development efforts today.

Bob Baxley - I can’t help but think you guys are getting pretty squishy with your definitions. Reading through the last few comments you all seem to be saying that what is really required is not necessarily a Designer so much as a senior leader with the passion, commitment, and determination to shepherd and defend a product throughout it’s complete development cycle. It appears to me that the need for such leadership is a given even if it’s also a rarity."   continued ...   (Via Functioning Form)

The mobile designer

Difference when designing for mobile devices ...

"Mobile designers are the bridge between the end user and the engineering community. Unlike the web or mainstream design world, mobile designers cannot be simply visually or brand-oriented. It is mandatory to keep up to date on the latest technologies and handsets, maintain client and company education, and articulate the importance of authoring for one platform or another. Mobile designers need to be highly conceptual, understand the importance of brand, and yet maintain a close eye on the usability and end users’ specific needs.

Although tools and standards information are available to the design and development community at large, it is important for individual designers to keep up with the latest updates through developer lists and proactive education. Much like those developers who mastered the quest for web standards, there are communities of mobile developers who have worked out the various tweaks and solutions to cross-platform authoring issues. Keeping up with published standards available through various developer sites and the W3C are a solid start, but even these sites are not as up to date as lists and forums."   continued ...   (Via gotomobile)

Set In Our Ways?

Sets of icons that always go together ...

"A minor design conundrum we face is as follows: based on the data we collect, we can see that within certain sets of related features, some of them are used much more frequently than others. Should we ever act on this data by showing only the most-used features in a set?

Let's take three of the most common "sets" of icons in Office: "Bold - Italic - Underline", "Left Justify - Center - Right Justify", and "Undo - Redo".

Conventional wisdom and common practice dictate that wherever one of these icons tread, all of them should appear. I don't think I've ever seen a user interface with just Bold and Italic and not Underline. (At least not one that actually has an underline feature...)"   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Icon Sets.

Eight Guidelines for Usability Testing

Practical tips for getting the most out of usability testing ...

"In professional web design circles, the usability testing session has become an essential component of any major project. Similar to focus groups in brand development and product launches, usability testing offers a rare opportunity to receive feedback from the very people the website is aimed at - before it's too late to do anything about it.

But how can you get the most from these usability testing sessions?

1. Choosing your subjects
2. Before the usability testing
3. Beginning the usability testing"   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

Design Vision: Part 3

Two more great interviews in the series ...

"Part three of Design Vision: a conversation about the role of design-driven leadership in the product development process (be sure to check out part two first).

Luke Wroblewski - Though I largely agree with Bob’s definition of design as a disciplined form of problem solving, I think it’s valuable to characterize design vision differently.

In most product development teams, no one is fully defining (much less solving) the problem across the multitude of considerations that make up today’s products: marketing, economics, engineering, packaging, etc. The complexity inherent in each discipline makes it next to impossible for any one person to have a complete depth of understanding for each consideration.

Dirk Knemeyer - I’m with you on this, Luke: the role of design visionary is essential, and markedly different from that of just design. You captured many of the generalist components of that very successfully. But I’m going to take the definition design visionary definition a little farther: I think that this person can actually come from one of three basic places (as opposed to only coming out of design or from the design organization):"   continued ...   (Via Functioning Form)

Design for emerging technologies

Keeping up with new technologies ...

"In a long story on the Design Council website, Peter Davies, chief executive of Pera International, reflects on the implications of emerging technologies and the pace of technological change for design and design professionals.

"By tracking and understanding today's emerging technologies we can predict what new design freedoms they will give us in the future. Informed anticipation is essential to leading-edge design."

"Designers need to be early on the scene to ensure that people-centred solutions are delivered rather than technological nightmares.""   continued ...   (Via Putting people first)

Emerging Technologies.

Usability testing on the cheap

How one experienced person conducts usability testing ...

"You've built a product. You think it's ready for real users. How do you find out? You do usability testing. This is a specialized discipline, and there are specialists out there who know what they are doing. You should hire one of them to do usability tests on your product. They will do a much better job than you can, and you will get much better results. But if you can't, here's how to do it yourself.

Disclaimer: I'm not a usability engineer, I'm a software engineer. But I've been through a fair amount of usability testing, on both sides of the one-way mirrors. I've learned from some real usability gurus, like Kara Coyne. So I know a little bit about how it is done. As I said, you should really hire an expert to do this stuff for you. There's lots of subtlety to doing it right."   continued ...   (Via Ned Batchelder)

Functionality and usability emerging as site essentials

Blending functionality with usability ...

"I remember when I was just getting into web design, when I was in 8th grade or so, I read a lot of articles stating that content was 90 percent of web design. I was definitely a believer, often I would sit there and say, "I should make a Web site," and the little voice in my head would respond, "About what?"

While this is certainly still true, that last 10 percent seems to be getting more and more important. I was amazed by an article I read about a study done by researchers at Carleton University in Canada that suggests web designers have as little as 50 milliseconds to make an impression on consumers. The general rule thumb had been about five to 10 seconds. Considering that some believe it takes 50 milliseconds to read a word, first glances are becoming first impressions.

This means the nitty gritty details of design - fonts, colors, and layout are becoming increasingly important."   continued ...   (Via Sci-Tech)

AJAX businesscase: Reduce development costs and increase usability

Reasons for choosing AJAX validations ...

"As a followup to my earlier post “AJAX performance stats, ROI, and business value“, I decided that I’d share with you some considerations on a recent project I was involved in. I can’t give you all the juicy details, and I might never be able to show you the final solution or tell, who the customer is.

Anyways, I want to give you some of the details on why we decided to implement AJAX validations in this particular web application. I worked on a project for a Danish company in the financial sector. We had a complex interface where the user had to enter a lot of information about a lot of users. This is illustrated here with user #1, #2, and so on.

In this particular solution, the typical usage scenario is that an employee has data about multiple users to enter: That could for example be name, age, social security numbers etc."   continued ...   (Via justaddwater)

Ajax Validation Model.

Top 8 Website Mistakes

A good list of mistakes / solutions ...

"Far too often people's primary focus is on what their websites look like and not enough on what their websites will do for them. This is like buying a car based on its colour and rims and forgetting about engine reliability and fuel efficiency...

Mistake #1: Allowing your site to be a secondary concern. Site neglect is rampant in the Caribbean. Solution: Make your website a top priority in your daily operations. Don't fall into the "brochure-syndrome" where you set up a website with a designer; it looks great, but then it is not updated and you forget about it for a year. This is a guaranteed way to make yourself irrelevant in the online marketplace.

Mistake #2: Allowing stale or (worse) outdated information to remain on the site. Solution: If your products, services, prices, location, hours, contact information, marketing messages — or anything else — have changed, make the updates immediately. Customers will notice, and your credibility will suffer if they do."   continued ...   (Via Breaking News)

Designing user experiences at Microsoft

Two good interviews - audio and vidio downloads ...

"Microsoft's chief blogger Robert Scoble interviews his colleague Jenny Lam, creative lead of the MSX (Microsoft User Experience) design team, to talk about the user experience work her team is doing for Windows Vista.

At CES 2006 Jenny Lam also talked with Chris Pirillo about the Aero desktop experience, and the design of the latest fonts and interface in Windows Vista."   continued ...   (Via Putting people first)

BayCHI Meeting

BayCHI Monthly Program Tuesday, February 14, 2006 ...

"Visual Interfaces for Databases
Jock Mackinlay, Tableau Software

Visual interfaces and databases are success stories in the computer revolution. But their synergy 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 Graphical User Interface (GUI), 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."   continued ...   (Via BayCHI)

BayCHI.

Design Vision: Part 2

A continuation of yesterdays discussion ...

Part two of Design Vision: a conversation about the role of design-driven leadership in the product development process (be sure to check out part one first).

Jim Leftwich - To me, design vision is a matter of, and directly correlated to, integration. By that I mean the integration of elegantly refined, interconnected, and equally successful solutions across the entire spectrum of problems and needs within a product or system.

...Bob Baxley - I want to go back to the original question for a minute because we need to have some common notion of what Design actually is before we can start talking about “Design Vision”. Now of course I realize that this is inviting a big giant hairball but let me offer up a definition and see if it doesn’t meet with some level of general agreement."   continued ...   (Via Functioning Form)

Live search explained

The benefits of Live Search ...

"Trend: Live search will gradually replace traditional search in web applications. As mainstream programs such as Windows Vista matures up to release, and live search is deeply integrated, we can expect more web pages implementing live search. Apple’s Spotlight and MSN Desktop Search uses the same Live search paradigm that we’ll probably see a lot more in the year to come.

My post from yesterday has more on different examples of live search usage. Let me just explain the difference between live search and traditional search.

...Live search: The search user interface is identical to traditional search. But results are fetched whenever the user “hesitates” — for instance stop typing for a brief moment. An example of this is Google Suggest where the most popular results are presented as-you-type."   continued ...   (Via justaddwater)

Google Suggest.

Interface Design, Web Portals, and Children

A scholarly paper on differences between user interface design for kids vs. adults ...

"Children seek information in order to complete school projects on a wide variety of topics, as well as to support their various leisure activities. Such information can be found in print documents, but increasingly young people are turning to the Web to meet their information needs. In order to exploit this resource, however, children must be able to search or browse digital information through the intermediation of an interface. In particular, they must use Web-based portals that in most cases have been designed for adult users. Guidelines for interface design are not hard to find, but typically they also postulate adult rather than juvenile users. The authors discuss their own research work that has focused upon what young people themselves have to say about the design of portal interfaces. They conclude that specific interface design guidelines are required for young users rather than simply relying upon general design guidelines, and that in order to formulate such guidelines it is necessary to actively include the young people themselves in this process."   continued ...   (Via RedOrbit)

The Expert Mode Misadventure

Getting rid of Expert Mode in Office 12 ...

"It may seem based on my writing that the ideas behind the Office 12 user interface kind of popped out of the sky and or that we went with the first things that came to mind.

...Sometimes, especially in the early stages, we bet on the wrong idea. Hopefully we catch many of them through the testing of early prototypes, but occasionally it's not until something is in the build and we use it for a while do we realize that it's totally wrong. It's our job to find and fix those mistakes.

One of the mistakes in Beta 1 of Office 12 is something called "Expert Mode." I haven't written about Expert Mode yet because I've known we were going to change the design for some time and I wanted to wait until we had settled on the replacement design so that I could relate the entire story. I know there are those on the team cringing right now even seeing the words "Expert Mode" on the screen."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Why AJAX & Web 2.0 now

The benefits of Web 2.0 ...

"Here are a few reasons why I feel AJAX is such a timely event and why it matters?

- No more Netscape 4.x - Now that the browsers are closer to on par with each other and older browsers are less of a concern. Without having to worry so much about degrading gracefully, programmers and designers have been able to think about more creatively what to do with the current level of browser capabilities.

- Flash - Flash as a technology has been doing for years x-browser what AJAX is doing now. Designers have been able to think about what to do in this medium for a few years, but with little traction due to developer’s resistance to the technology. So as soon as the browser technology fell down, the designers were ready to go. This is sad news for Flash, however."   continued ...   (Via Engage!)

Not all rapid iteration is design

Rapid prototyping may miss design ideas ...

"One of the great parts of a good design process is around rapid prototyping. People seem to have taken this spirit to heart lately with the Web 2.0 movement. But is that really what is meant by design?

I don’t think so. To me, rapid prototyping is nice, but if all you are doing is having everyone working on one prototype you miss the important piece of design exploration, which is breadth of ideas.

Yes, it is important to implement, get feedback and make changes, but that is not design. That is engineering. It is incredibly linear and bottlenecks your creative team around a slngle energy flow."   continued ...   (Via Synaptic Burn)

Alphabetized Links are Random Links

The problem with alphabetized links ...

" ...One option would be to completely randomize the links. You could put all the links into a hat and pull them out, one at a time. The first pulled link would go on the top, the second would go next, and so forth.

Of course, users would have to read every link to find what they want. There would be no way for them to eliminate entire groups at a time. If a user is looking for the link for registering a visitor to the building, they couldn’t easily eliminate all the links that have nothing at all to do with that function, such as the HR links.

Over time, users may remember that their favorite links are in certain positions. For example, they may remember a link that is near the bottom or towards the middle."   continued ...   (Via UIE Brain Sparks)

Alphabetized Links.

The Role and Evolution of Design in Software Products

Dirk Knemeyer discusses the way design evolves within a corporate structure ...

"Design professionals often decry the lack of importance and investment their companies place on design. After all, most software projects revolve around a product’s engineering, to the ongoing detriment of its design—not to mention the chagrin of so many designers, who wriggle uncomfortably toward the bottom of the food chain. But there is a good reason for this: products can be very profitable without investing a single penny in interface design—at least, beyond the user interfaces the engineers build. Indeed, at least in the early stages of a market or company, resources dedicated to intentional interface design are often a bonus rather than being viewed as a necessity. Sound crazy?"   continued ...   (Via UXmatters)

Live by the Mockup, Die by the Mockup

Luke Wroblewski discusses the danger of using a mockup to sell a design ...

"Mockup… The term itself brings to mind the duality inherent in this omnipresent design artifact. It’s both a direct representation of a product experience and a shallow portrayal of an interactive system at the same time. Perhaps the term originated with engineers or product managers intent on pointing out that the mockup was just that: a superficial representation that could never compare to the real product they had to build.

Regardless of what you call it, the mockup can either sell your design or plummet you into a cyclical tunnel of churn. That’s why, like it or not, interface designers often live and die by the mockup."   continued ...   (Via UXmatters)

Design Vision: Part 1

Two good discussions abut design vision ...

"Part one of Design Vision: a conversation about the role of design-driven leadership in the product development process.

Dirk Knemeyer - Great design requires a strong vision. Contrary to currently-accepted dogma, great design is often driven by one key individual who has the skill and experience to distill very complicated problems and contexts into elegant solutions that speak directly to the very essence of the challenge they are faced with...

Luke Wroblewski - Of all the disciplines involved in bringing a product to life, design is what speaks to consumers. Engineering is the construction of function: enabling products to work. Marketing is the understanding of context: who is this for and what are we telling them. Design is communication: the interfaces, posters, packaging, and ads that speak to potential customers."   continued ...   (Via Functioning Form)

Architecture and the Internet

Designing websites as a place rather than a space ...

"Cyberspace, as the information space is called, has become accessible in the past decade through the World Wide Web. And although it can only be experienced through the mediation of computers, it is quickly becoming an alternative stage for everyday economic, cultural, and other human activities. As such, there is a potential and a need to design it according to place–like principles.

By looking at physical architecture as a case study and metaphor for organizing space into meaningful places, this paper explores the possibility of organizing Cyberspace into spatial settings that not only afford social interaction, but, like physical places, also embody and express cultural values. At the same time, because Cyberspace lacks materiality, is free from physical constraints, and because it can only be ‘inhabited’ by proxy, these ‘places’ may not necessarily resemble their physical counterparts."   continued ...   (Via firstMonday)

Distinguishing place from space.

Defining the User Experience

A good atempt at a definition ...

"Back in December I mentioned that I have been writing a chapter for Andrew Sears and Julie Jacko's Human Computer Interaction Handbook. This is a pretty monumental volume and it's an honor to write for it. They gave me a pretty broad mandate for the chapter: they asked me to write about the relationship between HCI and the customer experience. Before I could write that, I decided to unpack what "the customer experience" meant, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that what I wanted to do was to more precisely define what "user experience" means. Now I know this is folly--as a term in wide use, user experience has about 1000 different definitions--but I wanted to have one of my own, at least for the duration of this chapter. The definition I came up with is that, in a nutshell, 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."   continued ...   (Via Orange Cone)

User-centred design becomes transformation design

Another discipline emerges ...

"A new design discipline is emerging from groups across the world. It applies traditional design skills in a new way to social and economic issues. It uses the design process as a means for a wide range of disciplines and stakeholders to collaborate. It develops solutions that are practical and desirable. It is an approach that places the individual at the heart of new solutions and builds the capacity to innovate within participating groups.

It could be key to solving many of society’s most complex problems. But the community of practice is small, and its emergence has already caused controversy among those who argue that it’s not design - because here’s the rub: it doesn’t look or feel much like design in the familiar sense of the word. The outputs aren’t always tangible and beautiful, and may be adapted and altered by people as they use them. It is far from the paradigm of the master-designer.

The UK Design Council is about to publish a paper on transformation design (draft excerpt currently downloadable)."   continued ...   (Via Putting people first)

Users Interleave Sites and Genres

Not a single site solution ...

"When working on business problems, users flitter among sites, alternating visits to different service genres. No single website defines the user experience on its own.

To get the big picture, you often must delve into the details. In several recent studies, I've observed an important shift in user behavior, but simply stating the conclusions upfront would obscure the true business impact. To really see what these changes mean for individual sites, we must look at users interacting with specific businesses.

As a case study, let's examine the detailed behavior of a user from our current B2B usability study. The user was researching the purchase of a portable computer projector for her boss to use during presentations. In the B2B sector, this is a somewhat low-end product, running about $1,500. However, this example's low cost and relative simplicity make the user session representative for much user behavior in the higher end of the B2C sector. (In most B2B study sessions, we observed highly specialized personnel researching advanced products or services costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. They're thus less instructive for non-B2B readers.)

The following pie chart shows the distribution of time the user spent across the fifteen visited sites:"   continued ...   (Via Alertbox)

Time spent on website.

Design Council publishes thirty "Design Cards"

There must be a lot of information on those little cards ...

"The Design Council knowledge cards summarise a unique resource of online in-depth information compiled by expert authors on design topics and issues that matter.

The 30 cards in a pack provide an overview of our knowledge experts resources introducing each topic by explaining what it is, why it is important and how you might apply the subject. This information is expanded further in the website 'about design' section.

Topics cover all design fields, including experience design, interaction design, service design and user-centred design, and related topics such as design research, innovation and sustainability."   continued ...   (Via Putting people first)

Design Cards.

A study of older web users

Some hints for accommodating older users ...

Webcredible have conducted a usability test comparing eight older and eight younger users complete the same tasks on the web.

Some interesting results:
- The older users were more likely to blame themselves for any difficulties they encountered
- A majority of the older users missed critical information that required scrolling
- The older users were less likely to understand technical language"   continued ...   (Via GUUUI)

Jakob Nielsen: good usability?

A little criticisim of the useit.com site ...

"Jakob Nielsen is always held up as the stalwart of usability and singly stands out more than anyone else I can think of in any other field. Yet in my opinion, his own site (useit.com), has some areas that are in need of improvement.

By far the most frustrating feature of his website is the lack of columns. On many of the article pages (here being an example), his text runs across the entire width of the window. While this may have been acceptable in the days when a resolution beyond 800x600 was almost unheard of, nowadays it makes for tiresome reading. And data suggests that over 75% of people have moved beyond 800x600s.

My laptop monitor is 1280 pixels wide, probably about average. Using the default Firefox font size and a full screen window, the first full line of text in the above article contains 142 characters. Most books contain around 60 characters per line, which allows the reader to pick up the next line without dropping a beat. I've always been aware that on my site, the left-hand column is quite wide, and I think I'm pushing the limit at around 110 characters per line using default settings. However, the jump from 110 to 142 makes a huge difference to readability."   continued ...   (Via Tangential Ramblings)

User interface for Apple Tablet

New UI opportunities with Apples new tablet ...

Apple has filled patents for a touch sensitive device and gestures for working with and manipulating the screen content.

Apple has filled a patent for Multipoint Touchscreen which allows up to 15 simulantous touches of the screen. This new hardware allows to recognise gestures for enabling a new kind of user interface. Some gestures are detailed in other patents.

Additionally Apple invented some interesting ideas to over come the big hands/small widgets problem and come up with the new Gestures for touch sensitive input devices patent. These new patents including methods for retrieving and interpreting the data from a multipoint enabled touchscreen to allow things like e.g. moving or zooming images."   continued ...   (Via User Interface Blog)

Apple Tablet.

AJAX Interface Design

Considerations for AJAX use...

"When any new technology undergoes fast and widespread adoption, there’s always an opportunity for unintended misuse. So it’s no surprise that the World Wide Web has seen its fair share of mishandled technologies:

Download-heavy Java applets for simple page navigation
Flash movies for superfluous intro animations
Frames that disable simple book-marking and URL-sharing
The overuse of images when simple HTML text would do
Some of these technologies have been permanently scarred by excessive misuse. Flash is synonymous with Skip Intro and Java applets within Web applications are often shunned.

“Many of us have been so bombarded with bad press on client-side Java that advising anything other than an HTML-based front end would be like digging your own grave.” - Alex Kalinovsky

Now as a flurry of interest in AJAX sweeps the Web, it’s worthwhile to consider the design implications of this technology lest we end up with “Skip AJAX” in the future."   continued ...   (Via LukeW)

AJAX can provide rapid feedback

The Scott Adams Meltdown: Anatomy of a Disaster

A great breakdown of many factors to take into account when designing the user experience...

"Scott Adams, father of the Dilbert comic strip, recently had the misfortune to spend a number of hours editing comments for his blog only to have them disappear without a trace, much to his surprise, shortly after he published them. Veky wants to know who was at fault. His question implies that it just might have been Scott himself.

Dear Tog:
Scott Adams moderated 500 comments to his blog and then deleted them permanently despite prominent warnings about permanent deletion. Whose fault was it?

~Veky

Not Scott
A chain of five errors led to Scott Adams losing his work. Not one of those errors was his. They had been made months and even years before Scott Adams ever started work on his blog. His was an accident waiting to happen, an accident that has almost certainly befallen a large number of other individuals who have had the misfortune to use the same software."   continued ...   (Via Ask Tog)

Going Gray

On hierarchy menus and usability/performance tradeoffs...

"One of the key design tenets of the Office 12 user interface is making sure that the set of features you need to look through is as small as possible. Communicating the relevant features makes the program feel smaller and simpler and saves you time in finding what you're looking for and discovering what's possible.

Contextual Tabs are the most crucial piece of this puzzle. By showing the Picture Tools only when they could possibly work (i.e. when you are working with a picture), and doing the same with all other objects, the core Word/Excel/PowerPoint experience is vastly simplified.

But there are other details to which we have attended in order to help work towards this design goal. A key advance is the work we've done to support top-level command disabling.

Here's an illustrative experiment. Launch Word, and then click Close on the File menu to close the empty Word document. Word is still running, but no documents are open--something we call the "fishbowl."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

San Francisco Reawakens the Need for a Smart Address Book

Interesting ideas on improving mobile communications...

"I am back home in Bethesda, Maryland from my trip to the San Francisco Bay Area this week, coming only a couple days after getting home from Seattle. Today I was wiped out, some from the travel itself (red-eye overnight flights and getting up at 4 am on the East Coast to catch planes), but mostly from 19 to 20 hour days this week. The brain begins to go a wee bit with this shift.

I met with many wonderful people and had great conversations and business meetings, as I always do in the San Francisco Bay Area. The downside it WiFi networks blocking secure connections. I have had more mail blocked or "reached my quota" notices to fill a year all in one short trip.

Need for Better Mobile/Portable Communication
I also realized we (those of us that are not always stuck at a desk or have friends or collaborators that are not stuck at some desk) need much better communication. We need an address book and multi-medium communication tools that are a hell of a lot better than the poorly thought through mess we currently deal with. I was needing to repoint a group of people from one location to meet-up to another at 4:30 for a 7:00 gathering. People may not be pulling e-mail (which I did not have access to the account I sent the initial e-mail from and that caused 6 of 15 sent to bounce back with spam challenges, which I did not get on my mobile device for some very odd unknown reason)."   continued ...   (Via Vanderwal)

Apple's Crimes Against Usability

On Apple's usability issues...

"I found myself on the receiving end of a brand new Apple 64-bit G5 computer today. I carefully unwrapped each of the components that were lovingly, individually wrapped, put the system together, started it up, faked the requisite demographic/marketing data when Mac OS X demanded that I enter it in order to get to log into the OS, and then I was all set, but not before insisting vociferously that I really did not want a trial account on .Mac. Looking at the computer itself I had a nagging feeling like maybe it was supposed to have an optical drive. It had a rectangular region on the front panel that looked like it might serve such a purpose but it did not seem to open up."   continued ...   (Via Breaking Eggs And Making Omelettes)

Apple UI problems

Design View : Google Redux

A look at improving on google's design...

"It seems that now and perhaps into the future, all your base are belong to Google. The company has done a good job becoming the search tool of choice for the vast majority of internet users and it’s quickly becoming the name behind many useful and popular online applications and marketing tools.

What Google does not do well is apply design appropriately to its search engine interface. Other online application interfaces from Google are often done rather well, or at least not too badly. The search engine page, however, leaves a lot to be desired. Mind you, we’re talking about the most successful search tool on the Web. But it is no stretch to observe that the design of this page is pretty bad"   continued ...   (Via Andy Rutledge)

How can google be improved?

The Secret Benefit Of Accessibility Part 1: Increased Usability

Benefits of accessibility extend into usability as well...

"Web accessibility has so many benefits that I really do wonder why such a large number of websites have such diabolically bad accessibility. One of the main benefits is increased usability, which according to usability guru, Jakob Nielson, can increase the sales/conversion rate of a website by 100% and traffic by 150%.

At which point you must surely be asking, ?So if I make my website accessible its usability will increase and I’ll make more money out of it??. Well, not quite. An accessible website is not automatically more usable but there are many areas of overlap:

1. Descriptive link text

Visually impaired web users can scan web pages by tabbing from link to link and listening to the content of the link text. As such, the link text in an accessible website must always be descriptive of its destination.

Equally, regularly sighted web users don’t read web pages word-for-word, but scan them looking for the information they’re after.

Link text such as ‘Click here’ has poor accessibility and usability as both regularly sighted and visually impaired web users scanning

the paragraph will take no meaning from this link text by itself. Link text that effectively describes its destination is far easier to scan and you can understand the destination of the link without having to read its surrounding words."   continued ...   (Via Webmaster Investments)

No More “Ready-Fire-Aim” User Experiences

On the importance of early usability prototyping..

"I'm sure there must be a big rule written somewhere, that I can't seem to locate, that states that all enterprise software must have a less-than-optimal user experience, especially the interface.

There are, of course, examples of where this is not true. Although my point may be a bit exaggerated, too many agree with my view, especially customers, whom I care about most.

In the consumer world, there is more of a tendency to find out just how a consumer will use a product, then focus engineering efforts to build and improve on that process. In the enterprise development world, we tend to build a service or application that serves a need, or more often, meets a spec. (I say we and I readily include Sun in this, though it's a widespread issue in the enterprise software industry.) Only after we build the foundation and frame the house do we ask the "interface" folks to slap on a GUI and maybe (maybe) look at how to improve the usability."   continued ...   (Via JohnnyL)

Seven Accessibility Mistakes

Considerations for accessibility...

"There are several reasons inaccessible Web products get published. One we discussed in my last article is that some clients just don’t care about accessibility. Their reasons make a lot of sense if you put yourself in their shoes. Another reason is developer mistakes. Making mistakes is natural, and suffering the consequences and learning from them is what makes us better developers and better people.

Here are some of the major mistakes I encountered during my years as a professional Web developer. If we keep an eye open for them in the future, we are a lot more likely to create accessible, beautiful Web products without much hassle—and make both clients and visitors happy.

I’ve offered tips on how to avoid these mistakes at the end of each description. Following them may not be possible within the limits of your budget, or they may require a more mature relationship with your clients, but it cannot harm keeping them in mind. No step toward designing for the end user with the client’s ideas in the back of your mind is a waste of effort."   continued ...   (Via Digital Web)

Less signs, less accidents

On trying to cover up design flaws with warnings and signs...

"Roads Gone Wild is a piece in Wired from December 2004 that a reader just brought to my attention. I love it. Here’s why:
Hans Monderman is a traffic engineer who hates traffic signs. Oh, he can put up with the well-placed speed limit placard or a dangerous curve warning on a major highway, but Monderman considers most signs to be not only annoying but downright dangerous. To him, they are an admission of failure, a sign - literally - that a road designer somewhere hasn’t done his job. “The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there’s a problem with a road, they always try to add something,” Monderman says. “To my mind, it’s much better to remove things.”

The piece goes on to talk about how roundabouts (a.k.a. traffic circles) are safer than intersections with carefully controlled signage and permission patterns."   continued ...   (Via Signal vs. Noise)