New Usability Resource

Usernomics is pleased to announce a new section on our main website for Usability Resouces. We hope you find these links to topics in usability useful.

We will be adding resources to the list over time. Please let us know if we missed any informative sites.

B2B Sites + User Hostile Design

B2B sites lag behind in usability ...

Jakob Nielson draws attention to the fact that most B2B sites are woefully behind when compared to their B2C counterparts in just about every measure. He’s right. But there are exceptions. My team spent nearly five years evolving Grainger’s uber-commerce Web site from an internally focused marketing site, to a user-centered and usable B2B transactional experience.

Fast, easy, get in and get out—it’s everything that Grainger customers want and expect. We averaged doing intense usability testing along with prototyping almost quarterly—and personas helped us avoid the "segmentation trap". The results helped us to architect an experience that blends B2C simplicity with B2B sensibilities.

From the report: "User-Hostile Design"
B2B sites often prevent users from getting the information they need to research solutions. Sometimes this is deliberate, as when sites hide the good stuff behind registration barriers. Other times it's inadvertent, as when confusing navigation prevents users from finding information, or when the information they do find is so voluminous and convoluted that they can't understand it."   continued ...   (Via Logic+Emotion)

Granger Website

What a graphic can tell you

Using graphics to communicate a complex idea ...

"I love looking at things in a new way. More to the point, I love it when I see things about the world that I thought I knew... but then realize there's more to the story.

And for the past few years I've been doing various pieces of research into information visualization--the science and art of making complex information visually perceivable. It's cool, it's fun, and every so often you learn something really, really interesting.

I was just sort of doodling the other day in Powerpoint. (If you must know, I was trying to prepare a talk to give at some university, and I started wondering how many dots you could usefully squeeze onto a Powerpoint slide.)

Now that sounds crazy: doodling in Powerpoint? Yeah, I know. But come to think of it, why not? It's got a bunch of okay tools for drawing and while you probably won't make great art, it's fine for quick sketching. You won't confuse the output with a masterwork in oil or water color, but it's really great for a quick sketch. And it IS the tool I spend a lot of time using, so I've grown pretty accustomed to its idiosyncracies.

So I drew a bunch of dots. Then it hit me--if a dot stood for a day, what would my life look like as a set of dots on the screen?"   continued ...   (Via Creating Passionate Users)

Dots

Dogmas Are Meant to be Broken: An Interview with Eric Reiss

on web dogma...

"At a university where robots were celebrated and MBAs were heroes, I studied technical writing and communication design, using the combination as a way to understand how to write and design for different audiences. At that time, these studies—called mostly “technical writing”—took the form of the reticent user manual. Sometimes it took form as an instruction booklet on how to operate a washing machine. Other times, it took form of a help system on golf course irrigation. You see, the content always differed somewhat fiercely. What remained remarkably the same, however, was the need for clear ways to communicate instructions. Jargon-free text, clarity, and concision were the dogma of our days as technical writing students. Tech writing, as humdrum as it may be reputed, is rich with wildly helpful principles and guidelines.

And writing is still where we find many well-known guidelines. William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White, perhaps best known for the staple The Elements of Style (or, in some circles, the latter for Charlotte’s Web), are the most prominent household name on word slashing and clarity. “Omit needless words,” they caution. “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences. ...”

Since those days, I’ve been interested in finding the same kind of principles written specifically for web design. There are, no doubt, Jakob Nielsen’s heuristics. But I’ve been searching for something that allows for a bit more autonomy—guidelines that provide structure without confining. That’s why, when I saw Eric Reiss’ Web Dogma quietly hanging on the wall at the Information Architecture Summit in Vancouver, I was intrigued. This simple, typewritten list of 10 said the following:"   continued ...   (Via boxes and arrows)

The Experience Vision

Vision applies to the user experience as well...

"In our current research on experience design techniques, we’ve seen the most successful organizations share something: a solid vision of where the experience of their design is going.

I’ve defined a vision as a collective perception of the difference between what today’s experience is and what tomorrow’s experience should be.

You can think of a vision as a stake in the sand on the horizon. You can’t get their today, but you can clearly see it in the distance. You can then see how every step you take is either bringing you towards the vision or taking you away."   continued ...   (Via UIE)

Welcome to the New User Interface

Philosophy on Office 2007 interface...

"One of the questions people ask about the new user interface is "how much training is required to get up to speed?"

Well, our design goal was to require no training at all. From the earliest prototypes, we were trying to design an experience so that people could sit down in front of Office 2007 and be effective right away at getting their work done. One of the reasons we didn't go more radical on the overall design was that we wanted to make the product comfortable to use--after all, at the end of the day, it's still Microsoft Office.

The design of the Home tab of each app, which contains many of the familiar features from the old Standard and Formatting toolbars, is a nod to trying to ensure a level of comfort. This is something we were watching carefully in each of the long-term deployments of Office 12 Beta 1 and again as part of the process of rolling out many companies around the world on Beta 2. Based on what we've seen so far, I'm optimistic that we have achieved that level of "first-hour comfort" across the basic feature set. The few things that did cause roadblocks with early users (such as the placement of a View menu down on the status bar) we repaired in later designs (in this case, by including a View tab in the Ribbon.)"   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

What I learned from eye tracking

Very lengthy video showing several eye tracking sessions...

"The folks at etre were kind enough to do some eye tracking analysis of Squidoo. You can see the entire tape, unedited (but at slightly lower youtube resolution) here:

This is fascinating stuff. The blue dot shows you where the user is focusing her eyesite... it doesn't measure peripheral vision, which is crucial. It reminds me of watching some bugs approaching food--or perhaps it's a trap... The path is very jumpy, impatient, experimenting hither and yon.

You can see that some of the participants are slower, more linear readers, while others are jumping like mad, taking it all in."   continued ...   (Via Seth Godin)

Eye tracking squidoo.com

Americans lack patience, survey shows

Poll to keep in mind when designing your interface...

"An Associated Press poll has found an impatient United States. To get to the point without further ado, it's a nation that gets antsy after five minutes on hold on the phone and 15 minutes maximum in a line. So say people in the survey.

The Department of Motor Vehicles is among the top spots where Americans hate to wait. But grocery stores are the worst.

Almost one in four in the AP-Ipsos poll picked the grocery checkout as the line where their patience is most likely to melt like ice cream.

And it seems people don't mellow with age. The survey found older people to be more impatient than younger people.

Nor does getting away from the urban pressure cooker make much difference. People in the country and the suburbs can bear a few more minutes in a line before losing it than city inhabitants can, but that's it.

In short, Americans want it all NOW. Or awfully close to now."   continued ...   (Via PsycPORT)

B2B Usability

Nielson on B2B usability...

"Summary:
User testing shows that business-to-business websites have substantially lower usability than mainstream consumer sites. If they want to convert more prospects into leads, B2B sites should follow more guidelines and make it easier for prospects to research their offerings.

Many business-to-business (B2B) sites are stuck in the 1990s in their attitude toward the user experience. Most B2B sites emphasize internally focused design, fail to answer customers' main questions or concerns, and block prospects' paths as they search for companies to place on their shortlists.

These sites haven't realized that the Web has reversed the company-customer relationship. Most online interactions are demand-driven: you either give people what they want or watch as they abandon your site for the competition's.

The result of poor design on B2B sites? In our user testing, B2B sites earned a mere 58% success rate (measured as the percentage of time users accomplished their tasks on a site). In contrast, mainstream websites have a substantially higher success rate of 66%.

Considering that there's immensely more money at stake for B2B than for business-to-consumer (B2C), it's astounding that B2B sites offer a much worse user experience."   continued ...   (Via useit)

Getting someone to decide

Giving your users a direction...

"While Kathy’s away having way too much fun in one of the lands down-under, I thought I’d drop in and tell a quick story about a bit of research that should make a difference to you…

Decades ago people used to do deep and interesting social psych research. They’d set up strange and complex situations, then watch how people reacted. Some of these were scary-scary, but some were actually insightful in the day-to-day world as well.

What does this have to do with Creating Passionate Users? Let me tell you…

In 1965, back when the Beatles were singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” a few social psych folks did a compelling study about what makes people decide to do something.

First they showed a bunch of college students a film about the horrors of tetanus (Lockjaw! Seizures! Death!) that ended with the strong recommendation that everyone get a booster shot. They even told them where the student health center was. Careful testing showed that the students actually learned something AND that their long term attitudes about tetanus and the need to get a booster shot had really changed. This was great!

Then they watched to see how many went to the college health service to get the booster.

It was a total flop. Less than 3% actually went for the booster."   continued ...   (Via Creating Passionate Users)

Designing for Change

On adaptability...

"Designing for change is one of the new hurdles of designing for the network.

Back when print designers made up the majority of web designers, designs didn’t change after they were delivered. That’s because the practices of print design were carried over to the Web. Print designers are set on a project, they work through it, and deliver what becomes a final printed design. At this point, their work is done and they can go work for another client or on another project.

So some web sites created by print designers were set in stone, so to speak, and never touched again.

Time has shown, however, that the most successful web sites are the ones that constantly adapt to the needs of their audience. Today’s site is different than tomorrow’s. Chances are that the sites you use the most are ones that change on a regular basis. MySpace, Amazon, CNN, blogs, Boing Boing, etc. All of these sites are different every single day…or even every single hour!"   continued ...   (Via Bokardo)

Study of breadcrumb navigation

When and how breadcrumb navigation is used ...

"Angela Colter and colleagues have surveyed 4,775 catalog web sites to find out how many implement breadcrumbs and what connector character is used. They then conducted a study with 14 test participants solving tasks at four web-sites that use breadcrumbs.

Some highlights:
- 17% of the web-sites used breadcrumbs
- 47% of those sites used the greater than symbol
- All but one of the participants used the breadcrumbs
- Four used breadcrumbs as a consistent strategy"   continued ...   (Via GUUUI)

Where should "User Experience" be positioned in your company?

Where user experience should reside in a company ...

"... Earlier this year, I co-taught a Managing User Experience Groups course via University of California Extension in the Silicon Valley. And one of the many issues we addressed during this course was "where should User Experience groups be positioned?" The positioning of User Experience was considered to be very important to those who took course, many of whom were User Experience group managers. It has certainly been of importance to me when I've managed User Experience groups. And it was considered very important to the many User Experience Managers, Directors, and VPs we interviewed when we were preparing the course.

So, where should "User Experience" be positioned in a company?

The best answer to that question might depend on what "user experience" means in the company. Thus far in this blog entry, "User Experience" has largely been a reference to a group of people that in some way attends to "user experience." But, what is the scope of what the User Experience group attends to?

Without question, the term "user experience" means different things to different people."   continued ...   (Via Riander Blog)

Just Give Me a Simple Phone

Yet another argument for simplicity in phones ...

"Nathan Bales represents a troubling trend for cellular phone carriers. The Kansas City-area countertop installer recently traded in a number of feature-laden phones for a stripped-down model. He said he didn't like using them to surf the internet, rarely took pictures with them and couldn't stand scrolling through seemingly endless menus to get the functions to work.

"I want a phone that is tough and easy to use," said Bales, 30. "I don't want to listen to music with it. I'm not a cyber-savvy guy."

But the wireless industry needs him to be comfortable with advanced features and actively use them. As the universe of people who want a cell phone and don't already have one gets smaller, wireless carriers are counting on advanced services to generate the bulk of new revenue in coming years.

... "If you bring somebody in and they have problems, it's not because they're dumb, but we were dumb with the design," Moritz said, adding that the lab typically tests devices and programs with up to 50 users over three to nine months. The company also uses focus groups to determine what people want from their phones and what they say needs fixing."   continued ...   (Via Wired News)

Design Patterns: Part 4

A continuation of the Design Pattern series ...

"I really like Bill’s discussion of the power of naming, both within the community of designers and when communicating with other stakeholders. Give a pattern a name – and the hard part is coming up with a name that evokes the spirit of the solution, rather than the details of the implementation – and then attach that name to one or more representative examples, and you can communicate a whole lot. I think it gets to the heart of design patterns – they’re a designer’s way of talking about design. We use words and pictures in combination to cut to the heart of a problem, and to illuminate a solution.

I’m intrigued by Luke’s question about using patterns versus trying something new, and I’d like to hear other folks’ take on it. My bias as a designer is almost always to borrow from existing patterns when available—both because it saves time, and because I feel the reuse of design patterns across products tends to help users orient themselves. Granted, sometimes the borrowed patterns end up in such different contexts they’re almost unrecognizable … but I don’t have an answer for how you know it’s the right time to go completely back to the drawing board. What are your thoughts?"   continued ...   (Via Functioning Form)

Bloat is a function of time, people, and money

Keeping software trim and efficient ...

"Why does most software get bloated? Time, people and money.

TIME. Time is an especially effective bloat catalyst. Just as evolution generally produces more complex organisms over time, the same thing happens to software. More features, more features, more features. Sometimes more features are the right features. And that’s good. But often software doesn’t stop at a little more and it ends up with a lot more. And that’s where time isn’t on your side.

PEOPLE. The more people a company has working on a product the more opportunity there is for bloat to take hold. People need to stay busy. Even when there’s nothing to do there’s something to do. And that something often ends up being extra stuff that isn’t really needed. Extra features, new science projects, more complexity. More people + more time can be a dangerous combination in the wrong hands. This is one of the advantages of having less people on your team: you simply can’t do more than you should. There’s a physical limit, a constraint, that helps you stay simple. Forcing simple is better than forcing complexity. One is better bedrock."   continued ...   (Via Signal vs. Noise )

Jumbled Letters hold important Message for Usability Evangelisers finds HFI

It's easy to read jumbled letters ...

"The current Human Factors International newsletter is a particularly compelling one, so it may have taken a while to get round to reviewing it, but its message will hang around.

It looks at the theory that jumbled letters are quite easy to read. It takes the scientific approach that just because they aren't impossible to read, doesn't mean that they are as easy to read as letters in the right order.

And then Kath Straub looks at the difficulty scientists had in making this point to the general public, who believed that: "If yuo can raed this yuor brian wroks". She shows that sometimes too much learning is a dangerous thing.

'Perhaps psycholinguists would have enjoyed more traction if, instead of offering a mini-lecture on lexical access, they offered the following one counter example with a relative baseline to compare against:

No, really... Which is easier?"   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

Usability Wisdom from Slashdot

Webword has a nice summary on the slashdot.org discussion on software usability....

“Software usability is one of the hardest things to get right. Writing good, usable software is the holy grail of software development, yet few developers give it more than an afterthought. As a professional developer, I delight in writing software for other developers but shy away from writing an interface that the end users will see. What resources/books are recommended for improving your Human Computer Interaction (HCI) / software usability skills?”

If you want the perspective of the Slashdot community (i.e., hardcore geeks) on the topic of usability, this is a must read.

Check out the responses…

“Don’t Make Me Think and The Design of Everyday Things … two of my very favorite books.”

“…don’t confuse usability with user responsibility.”

“Photoshop and Illustrator are classic examples of what I consider bad user interfaces, because things that should be simple and obvious, aren’t.”

“In my mind, the entire point of a GUI is that you shouldn’t have to RTFM to do the basic functions of the application.”

“…it must be known that those that create the software should NOT be responsible for designing the interface."   continued ...   (Via Webword)

Just a cell phone

More on feature creep- this time just looking a the cellphone...

"Nathan Bales represents a troubling trend for cellular phone carriers.

The Kansas City-area countertop installer recently traded in a number of feature-laden phones for a stripped-down model. He said he didn't like using them to surf the Internet, rarely took pictures with them and couldn't stand scrolling through seemingly endless menus to get the functions to work.

"I want a phone that is tough and easy to use," said Bales, 30. "I don't want to listen to music with it. I'm not a cyber-savvy guy."

But the wireless industry needs him to be comfortable with advanced features and actively use them. As the universe of people who want a cell phone and don't already have one gets smaller, wireless carriers are counting on advanced services to generate the bulk of new revenue in coming years.

Consumers last year paid $8.6 billion for so-called data applications on their phones, up 86 percent from the year before, according to wireless trade group CTIA.

But they've also shown a growing frustration with how confusing those added features can be. A J.D. Power & Associates survey last year found consumer satisfaction with their mobile devices has declined since 2003, with some of the largest drops linked to user interface for Internet and e-mail services."   continued ...   (Via Courier News)

Feature creep really bites

On feature creep (on a toothbrush?)...

"The origin of this species of rant was a toothbrush. A new toothbrush. A new toothbrush that came with an instructional DVD.

The owner of this advanced piece of dental equipment had been brushing his teeth lo these many years without any educational aid at all. But now he was the proud owner of an "IntelliClean System" equipped with packets of paste to be downloaded into the toothbrush's hard drive.

The good news is that his toothbrush — excuse, me, his cleaning system — does not connect his fillings directly to the Internet or allow instant messaging with other people's bicuspids. But a toothbrush with a DVD and a "quad pacer" was the last straw, the final reminder of the ongoing "complexification" of everyday life — a word that can now actually be found in Wikipedia.

How did every simple piece of earthly equipment become stratospherically high-tech? How did more become more and progress become associated with the precise number of features whose main feature is frustration?

Have you seen my new cellphone that can take pictures, do e-mail, tell time, wake me up, get me the news, beat me in video games and generally make me feel incompetent? It reminds me of a New Yorker cartoon of a man going into a store asking, "Do you have any phones that make phone calls?"   continued ...   (Via Seattle Times)

Architecture and interaction design, via adaptation and hackability

Can products me made hackable? How do you design for that...

"Dan Saffer recently asked me to contribute some thoughts on adaptation, hackability and architecture to his forthcoming book Designing for Interaction (New Riders, 2006), alongside 10 other 'interviewees' such as Marc Rettig, Larry Tesler, Hugh Dubberly, Brenda Laurel etc. Dan's been posting their various responses up at the official book site (see also UXMatters) yet he kindly agreed to let me post my full answers below (the book will feature an excerpt).

The questions he posed were: Can products be made hackable, or are all products hackable? What types of things can be designed into products to make them more hackable? What are the qualities of adaptive designs? You've spoken on putting "creative power in the hands of non-designers." How do interaction designers go about doing that? What can interaction designers learn about adaptability from architecture?

Given this, Dan had inadvertently provided me with the impetus to get down a decent summary to a few years' worth of thinking around this subject. So what follows directly addresses one of the stated purposes behind this blog: to see what we can draw from the culture and practice of architecture and design into this new arena of interaction design - and some of the issues in doing so. (An unstated purpose of the blog - of providing me with an indexed notebook - is also fulfilled!) Here goes:"   continued ...   (Via City of Sound)

User-centered innovation at Intel

Putting people first points to reports on UC innovation...

"In a three-part special report of Electronic Business, Herman D’Hooge, innovation strategist in the User-Centered Platform Solutions Division at Intel, explains how a company can use a user-centered innovation process to engineer and develop innovative products.

D’Hooge also gives an example of a product—China Home Learning PC—that Intel developed for the Chinese consumer market with this strategy."   continued ...   (Via putting people first)

Design Patterns: Part 3

Part 3 on desing patterns from LukeW...

“You're pirates. Hang the code, and hang the rules. They're more like guidelines anyway.” – Pirates of the Caribbean

Terminology can be tricky stuff. At eBay, we had a long history of talking about design guidelines, design principles, reusable design components, frameworks, templates – and probably about a half dozen other terms, all related, all with a slightly different emphasis or connotation. While this semantic messiness probably reflects the reality of the field pretty well, in practice it actually caused a great deal of confusion with harried designers, e.g.: “Is it a guideline we can make exceptions to, or is it a principle?”

Finally, we decided to cut through the confusion and use a single, general term: design patterns. We chose it because it seemed to convey what we wanted to build: solutions that were specific enough to be practical, but general enough to be useful in multiple situations. It seems to have worked pretty well.

So what is a design pattern? We’ve used one definition: “A design pattern is a repeatable design solution, that’s been tested, reviewed, and verified.” I think the essential part of that definition is the “repeatable design solution” part – we’ll talk about some of the challenges with testing, reviewing, and verifying later in the conversation. But repeatable solutions give a pragmatic answer to the question: if it’s a solution that’s been useful in more than a few situations, it’s worth writing up as a pattern. If it’s been documented well enough that another designer can use it for a different problem, it is a design pattern."   continued ...   (Via LukeW)

Free Choice and The Usability of Links

Usability of links....

"Yesterday I was conducting a website evaluation for a site that contains a right side column of information intended to express the credibility of the site owner. Each section of this long column began with a few words that are underlined. However, none of them were links. As a conditioned creature of the Internet, I can't tell you how many times I tried to click them anyway - even when I knew that none of them were going to take me anywhere.

Why does underlining words that don't link anywhere matter?

The first reason is convention. Or, another way to say it - conditioned behavior. We know that since the beginning of Internet time, a procedure was invented to signal a way to get from point A to point B. Most probably that direction is an underlined word that when clicked, changes color and even if not clicked, often is a different color from the rest of the content. It may even be a different font face and size. And, it's underlined. It takes the visitor somewhere else.

In today's web design, color as a link indicator is no longer a valid, confident clue. For starters, screen readers don't note color changes. In addition, web designers have wanted creative freedom, and this has meant color changes that occur only when a word is moused over. It has meant any color, not just the standard blue and purple. The right column I was presented with had underlined words presented in the same color font and same font size as the rest of the content inside the column. The underline decoration just screamed to be clicked by its plain old innocent self."   continued ...   (Via cre8PC)

Design Patterns: Part 2

Continuation from the last article on design patterns...

"Bill and Martijn both did a great job articulating the differences between general design patterns (principles) and prescriptive design solutions (guidelines). So I won’t chime in with yet another set of definitions. Besides, what’s interesting to me is the context and implications of the origins and usage of both types of patterns.

As an interface design consultant, I’ve spent over ten years researching the business goals and user needs of different domains so I could provide the right design solutions for my clients. From hospital operations to professional educator training to radar traffic monitoring, the only constant across my work has been my medium: Web-based applications. As I put together interface design solutions for these different industries, underlying patterns began to emerge at many levels -all the way from application frameworks down to icon semiotics. It turned out that despite different contexts, users, and businesses, many basic requirements for Web applications were the same.

When I began to recognize this consistency between requirements, I naturally migrated to some degree of consistency in my solutions. After all, what was thought through, tested, and worked in a similar context had a higher likelihood of success than something unproven and unique. Though I never formally defined these solutions as patterns they did become my “design vocabulary” (as defined by Martijn)."   continued ...   (Via LukeW)

Design Patterns: Part 1

On user interface design languages...

"What do we mean by "design patterns"?

Martijn van Welie
Design patterns describe solutions. Solutions that we know can work ‘positively’ for specific problems in specific contexts. The solutions are documented as a ‘pattern’ where all aspects can be described, even implementation issues if that is helpful and relevant.

The nice thing about explicitly relating a solution to a specific problem and context is that patterns are nearly always in ‘the grey area’; they are never totally good or totally bad. When I first started writing patterns I was more thinking black-n-white about solutions and didn’t document certain solutions. Even pop-ups are good under certain circumstances. One of the most difficult things to nail down when writing patterns is finding out when the pattern actually works well. Take the pop-up example, under which conditions does it work? When you want users to be able to take a side-rout while still keeping their current task at the back? Or for provide help? Or...? Not easy to nail down well....

Besides being grey-area-stuff, patterns are (or should I say, ‘should be’) very practical. That means that the solution should be so clear to the reader that she can apply the solution without the need of further (relevant) clarification. Therefore, patterns that have solutions that feel like ‘homework’, such as “Make sure X is clear to the user”, and to which anyone who has to apply the pattern will ask ‘yeah, but how do I do that?’, are not a very good patterns. At least, that is my view.

One thing that has kept me thinking for already a while is how patterns related to guidelines or principles. Regarding guidelines it feels to me that if patterns are in the grey-area, guidelines are usually more clearly black or white. Guidelines generally do not list any context nor specific problem and seem to be a ‘general truth’. So if you’d try you could write guidelines disguised as patterns, for example “Direct Feedback”. I definately made this mistake myself. I’ll leave it to the reader to find the patterns I wrote which are not really patterns but more like guidelines....they are still online!"   continued ...   (Via LukeW)

Strategy Analytics says Nokia 9300 best new converged device in USA

Convergent devices evaluated for "ease of use"...

"Strategy Analytics, the global research and consulting company, today released, "Nokia 9300 Best New Converged Device in USA Beating Blackberry 8700c, Palm Treo 700w and Cingular 8125," its latest converged device benchmark report. These results come from over 70 hours of hands-on consumer testing by the Strategy Analytics Advanced Wireless (AWL) Panel.

Strong user ratings for the feature applications, menu/user interface and input of the Nokia 9300 gave it the edge over its competitors, including a 7 point advantage over the Windows Mobile based devices for application usability. However the 9300 was the lowest rated device for perceived style appeal. As found in previous AWL testing, participants who were unfamiliar with a Blackberry struggled with the steep out-of-the-box learning curve of the 8700c."   continued ...   (Via MobileTechNews)

Is Don Norman right about Google?

Lots of information and links discussing google's lightweight design...

"Don Norman is sick and tired of hearing people praise Google’s clean, elegant look. He argues Yahoo! and MSN are complex-looking places because their systems are easier to use.
Is Google simple? No. Google is deceptive. It hides all the complexity by simply showing one search box on the main page. The main difference, is that if you want to do anything else, the other search engines let you do it from their home pages, whereas Google makes you search through other, much more complex pages. Why aren’t many of these just linked together? Why isn’t Google a unified application? Why are there so many odd, apparently free-standing services?

It’s weird to see a company chastised for hiding complexity. Isn’t that usually a good thing? Doesn’t complexity lead to confusion and poor decision making? I’ve gotta think a lot of people love Google’s “deception” of simplicity (thus the popular notion of the site as clean and elegant).

Still, Norman does have some valid points. Google is disjointed. Some services do feel buried. There is a lack of obvious organizational structure. So why is that?"   continued ...   (Via Signal vs. Noise)

Smaller, smarter, and still usable?

Simplicity, size, and usabiltiy ...

"We all see how technology advances, but sometimes it's not very easy to use. Especially for early adopters. Even worse for mobile devices where everything is limited and tiny in comparison to the larger product counterparts.

So if consumers can't even set the clock on their VCR, how are they going to come into the new age of portable computing?

Robert Kaplan looks at these issues in an article from Portable Design. He introduces it this way, "We live in a time when technological advances have permitted developers to create devices that were unheard of just a few years ago. Forget the Dick Tracy watch of a few decades back and think Star Wars. Advances in electronics, wireless communications, and software have given us those mobile devices we only dreamed about. But are these devices really usable? Can typical users operate these devices easily, and are they willing to learn how to operate them?"

And, unfortunately, there is "a natural conflict between business/developer goals and end-user goals. Business goals occur during the design phase of a product. Developers think in terms of what can be done rather than what should be done... This leads to feature-creep where the team wants to add just another little feature. Feature accumulation can easily lead to a bad case of “featureitis” during product design and development."

It's a great article well worth a look. The author, Robert Kaplan "is founder and principal at Usernomics (San Mateo, CA; www.usernomics.com)."   continued ...   (Via Portable Design and mobileread.com)

Loading-up On Features

Get Your Office 2007 Beta 2 Today!

We've posted quite a few articles illustrating the design and thought process behind new Office UI. Now you can try it out yourself...

"Today’s the big day--I'm so pleased to announce that as of right now, you can download Office 2007 Beta 2 from the Office preview site at http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/.

Click the button marked “Try it!” and enter a few pieces of information, and you’re on your way. I tried it out and was downloading in about 3 minutes from the time I clicked the button. (Whoops, I hope I didn’t take someone’s spot…)

The best way to experience the new user interface is simply to try it. No matter what you think of the screenshots you’ve seen or what I’ve written here, consider giving it a test drive for a few weeks. I hope you won’t want to go back to your current version of Office."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

A Forgiving Web Browser

A browser feature that doesn't harm your data...

"Jef Raskin proposed the First Law of Interface Design, paralleling Asimov's First Law of Robotics:

A computer should not harm a user's work, or (through inaction) allow a user's work to come to harm.

Web browsers break this law regularly. When was the last time you lost all the data you entered on a form because your browser/computer crashed or something went wrong? And how many times have you spent 10 minutes relocating a crucial (or hilarious) web page because you closed the wrong window? Entering data into a form is work. Navigating through the petabytes of information on the internet is work. One wrong move, one brownout, and poof! There goes your data, your history, and that web page.

Enter Session Manager, a plug-in for Mozilla Firefox. Since I installed it, I've lost my fear of closing windows and tabs. Although Session Manager offers a lot of features, I find I only use two: "session saving", and "undo close window/tab".

Session Manager periodically saves your browser "session". Your "session" is the complete state of your Firefox browser: every tab and every window, with all of their browsing history. If your computer or browser crashes, you can open up Firefox, select "Current Session" from the recovery window, and bam! Your browser looks exactly like it did the last time you used it. Even better, Session Manager can do this all the time, so that whenever you open Firefox, it will look exactly the same as it did when you quit."   continued ...   (Via Humanized)

The Voices of Experience Project

An effort to create a community of people interesting user experience...

"Remember how I said that I had some big plans in the works? Well, I'm so excited about them that I can't hold it all back any longer. I'm officially announcing the "Voices of Experience" project. My goal is to put together a plethora of resources related to customer experience and its related disciplines. I want to help to create a community of experience practitioners. I want to surface the web-less-travelled to a larger audience.

Ambitious? To say the least.

Audacious? Probably a little.

Possible? Yes, entirely...with your help.

I'm still working on a lot of this project. I'm doing the research by hand. I'm not just throwing out some algorithm to return all sites with a set of keywords attached. No, I want to create a directory and community with a human touch.

Unlike a lot of human-edited directories that have launched of late, it will be completely free to submit and be listed...as long as your site meets a minimum level of quality. "Quality" in this sense is a relative term. "Quality" doesn't necessarily mean "expertise." It can just as easily mean "passion."

I'm not quite ready for submissions but I'll let you know when I am. Who knows? I may have already found your site by the time I'm ready to launch.

I'll also be launching a discussion forum which will probably be ready before the directory is completed. I think this is actually a good thing because I'd like the community's help in setting the tone and direction of the project. It's sort of an experiment. But I've had the pleasure of corresponding to a number of individuals in what I am calling the "Experience Community." I was a bit surprised by the lack of connectedness. There are a number of places where the like-minded can congregate on the web, but nothing quite like what I have in mind."   continued ...   (Via ICE)

Community of UX voices

Attract & Motivate Through Customer Experience

Co creating the customer experience...

"This is an idea that kept me awake last night. I’ve been struggling for a while to try and bring together a couple of seemingly disparate concepts. Namely search engine marketing, micromarketing, and customer experience. Why would I try and do such a thing? (that’s what my dad asked as well). Well I write about customer experience at experiencecurve, and micromarketing here, and my business is currently positioned around search engine marketing, so needless to say i feel somewhat torn when writing about topics, and feel like I should be offering my clients a wider set of my skills and experience.

Anyway, my starting point for this unified theory is “Attract & Motivate”. Companies have been trying to attract customers for years, and micromarketing is another way of building that attraction over time, by leveraging conversational marketing, customer made aspects of the marketing and business, citizen media. In many ways, many people “get” the attraction side of the equation, the part that’s glossed over is the “motivation”, ie. motivating customers to interact with your company in deeper more meaningful ways by participating in the conversation, by creating citizen media, by helping make things."   continued ...   (Via Customer Experience Strategy)

Online relationship illustrates the customers needs

Good usability is like "water flowing downhill"

Designing it like water flowing downhill ...

"I prefer reactions in which the fabric of the organization is changed so that it's easier for people to do the "right" thing. Like water flowing downhill." Silkandspinach's Kevin Rutherford said that in a comment to David HH's post don't scar on the first cut, and I loved it on the spot.

I've talked about this many times before; my horse trainer's mantra is, "Make the right things easy and the wrong things hard"--but the opposite is everywhere. It's ridiculously easy for me to screw up the settings on my digital devices. The API methods that intuivitely feel right turn out to be dead wrong. I click the button I think will do X, and instead I get... WTF?

And sometimes, many times, those screw-ups are hard to undo. Sometimes, they're unrecoverable (or might as well be, since the documentation never seems to cover the most likely bad thing you'll do).

But while my earlier comments on this were mostly about usability, I hadn't thought of it as a management principle. (Works great with kids, too) Think about how many procedures we see in companies that feel like hacks... workarounds for a system that makes it too easy to make mistakes. And you see it from the highest levels of business right down to the duct tape someone put over the switch that you must NEVER EVER TURN OFF."   continued ...   (Via Creating Passionate Users)

Making it easy