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