2006 IDEA Awards

Several great award winning products ...

"IDSA and BusinessWeek article on products awarded for design. I guess any designs that come out in the second half of 2006 are just out of luck.

There's 108 of 'em, so saddle up and enjoy.

Shown is the "Talking Tactile Tablet" with a quote from Donald Norman (from BusinessWeek)."   continued ...   (Via User Centered)

Talking Tactile Tablet

It's the User, Stupid

The value of usability testing ...

"Okay, so it's time to overhaul your e-commerce site or design a new one, and you've finally wrangled into the conference room everyone whose input you'll need: marketing people, the information technology guys, some ops folks, and of course, the CEO.

But the most important person in deciding which features and functions should be on the site and how they should be presented is absent. Who is that? The user. Or for those who find the term “user” off-putting, the customer.

Usability testing — observing how people interact with a site — is one of the most important things an e-commerce site operator can do to make a site design or overhaul project run more smoothly and yield better results. “Usability is really specific to each individual site,” says Ken Burke, founder/CEO of MarketLive, an e-commerce technology firm based in Petaluma, CA. “There are a lot of general themes, but there are nuances to every site that you wouldn't realize customers would have a reaction to. It's amazing how you'll discover things [in a usability test] that you otherwise would never have seen.”

It's also amazing, some might say, that so many online merchants fail to conduct usability studies.

“One of the reasons there are so many problems with usability is that there are so many stakeholders in any one of these projects,” says Nate Bolt, cofounder/CEO of San Francisco-based Website usability agency Bolt Peters User Experience. “The designer has one opinion, the engineer has another opinion, the business stakeholders have another opinion, the project manager has another opinion, and everybody has to agree. But the person who is not in the room is the user — every time.”"   continued ...   (Via Multichannel Merchant)

Tips for Design Reviews

A good set of design review tips ...

"To follow-up on one of the recurring discussions at this year’s Art of Yahoo! conference, I’ve compiled several of my thoughts on effective design reviews with product stakeholders (clients, business units, etc.).

Chris Conley (professor at the Institute of Design) recently pointed out that the design critique training designers get in school better prepares them for the open discussions and feedback they will encounter in the business world. He rightly notes that the key is to “learn to listen to make your ideas better, not learn to defend your ideas.” But there’s still a need to “sell” stakeholders on the thinking behind a specific design solution. How does this design address business goals and user needs they care about?

In my experience, the following three tips have helped me make the pitch.

* Frame the solution within an appropriate context.
What problem are you trying to solve; what goals you are trying to achieve; what are the limitations you needed to accommodate? Outlining these items up front helps establish criteria for evaluating the design."   continued ...   (Via Functioning Form)

Discoverability

Solving usability testing issues for Windows vs. Mac - "a Macintosh girl in a Microsoft world" - cute ...

"Any user experience researcher who has been on the job for more than five nanoseconds is an expert in discoverability. You have to be. One of the problems that any large application (and most small ones, for that matter) have is that they've built in some really cool and useful functions, but they're buried somewhere. All of the work that we've put into a cool new feature doesn't do anything for our users if most of them can't find it. In a Windows environment, it's all too common to find functions that are only accessible by the contextual menu (the menu that pops up when you right-click). Thankfully, Mac developers are generally (although not always!) in the habit of assuming that a user only has a one-button mouse and doesn't know how to control-click, so they tend to stay away from contextual-only features.

When I'm in a usability lab with a user, it's easy to figure out discoverability issues. If I can't determine what the problem is just by watching them, I can ask them questions. They might not be able to put their finger on the problem, but it's my job to be able to identify it anyway.

My usability lab isn't the only way that we get feedback about our products, of course. There's the newsgroups and the product feedback page, there's meeting someone on a plane, there's informal conversations at the upcoming WWDC. Sometimes, when I see this feedback, it's hard for me to discover the issue. You see, discoverability is a two-way street: if I can't discover what the problem is, I can't do anything to fix it. Anyone on our test team can tell you how frustrating it is to get a bug report that doesn't include all of the relevant details and reproduction steps. This is true for what I do as well. It's frustrating to know that you have a problem, but that I don't have sufficient information about it to figure out what to do about it."   continued ...   (Via go ahead, mac my day)

The Return on Investment (ROI) for Personas

Using personas...

"The complete persona lifecycle positions your persona team as the “first in/last-out” members of the product development team. You will be first in as you collect and express data about target user populations to your executive team to support their strategic work. You will be last out as you help manage the transition from the end of one project to the beginning of the next. In this sense, this last phase of the persona lifecycle is both critical and, at present, too often ignored.

For a variety of reasons, persona efforts tend to peter out rather than end in a managed, measured, and organized manner. Consultants are usually not paid to stick around long enough to manage the personas at the end of a project and in-house teams are usually more concerned with ramping up for the next project than they are with tidying up loose ends from the previous one. Being first-in/last-out on projects means that you will probably end up with responsibilities that straddle two projects. You will be completing your work on project A even after you have begun your work on project B. That is no simple task. It is certainly easier to simply move on to project B. However, we argue that an organized approach to measuring and managing the end of a project can yield significant benefits.

The final persona lifecycle phase is about measurement, regaining control of the persona effort as a whole, and preparing for the future. As the leader of your persona core team, you have two primary tasks at the end of your persona effort:
* Measure the lifetime achievement of your personas (their value), including the return on investment (ROI) of the persona effort
* Manage the organization’s transition to a new project with regard to UCD and target audiences, which will involve reusing, retiring, or in some way reincarnating your personas."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

Find the Edge of Attention

Determining what we pay attention to...

"Perhaps you’ve heard of Attention with a capital A? It’s the notion that in an increasingly content-packed world made up of TV, radio, newspapers, web sites, podcasts, RSS feeds, and email that we could, in theory, record everything we pay attention to and then it would be worth something or provide us value in some way. Following this idea we should be in control of it instead of advertisers who pay ever more money to learn as much as they can about us, even without our knowledge. Attention is flipping that model on its head. We know about us, pay us for that information and you can advertise to us.

But it’s not just about advertising. It’s also about what I’m really interested in: recommendation systems. Basically, recommendation systems are systems that record what we pay attention to in order to provide recommendations to us. Think Amazon.com recommending books to us based on our past purchases and Last.fm recommending music to us based on our listening habits. Those are great examples of specialized attention recorders that record only a sliver of what we pay attention to. (an important sliver, but a small one nonetheless)

Contrary to the previous two examples, the basic message of the AttentionTrust gang is that we should own our own attention data. (just try getting your attention data from Amazon) To that end, they’ve built an Attention Recorder that tracks clickstreams while you browse. You don’t have to do anything, it just sends data silently to a growing database of attention data. The problem is the same problem that us web designers have. You can’t tell much from clickstreams: no motivation, no intention. You can’t figure out why someone does something by looking at their clickstreams."   continued ...   (Via Bokardo)

Second Annual Global Event Launches Website and Event Registration at International Conference

Get ready for this event ...

"WORLD USABILITY DAY NOVEMBER 14, 2006

The Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) is launching its official Website www.worldusabilityday.org and event registration for the second annual World Usability Day at the UPA International Conference in Broomfield Colorado. World Usability Day 2006, a global series of events will be held on November 14, 2006 and promote awareness of the benefits of usability engineering and user-centered design. Activities will be held at the local level worldwide, and will include events hosted by corporations, organizations, universities and individuals. This year’s focus is accessibility and inclusion. The theme is “Making life Easy.”

In its first year, World Usability Day 2005 was a tremendous success. UPA, along with its allied organizations coordinated 115 events in 35 countries lasting 36 hours that attracted over 10,000 attendees at site locations, and thousands of online participants."   continued ...   (Via UPA)

User Experience Software

A good list of software products ...

"The list of software tools available for user experience professionals continues to grow. From card-sorting applications for Information Architects to prototyping applications for Interface Designers, here are a few tools I’ve been exposed to recently. Drop me a note if you have any interesting additions.

Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer
Deliver exciting next generation user experiences that leverage the full capabilities of the Windows platform to provide greater overall performance, improved usability, and increased customer satisfaction.

xSort
xSort is a card sorting application for Mac OS X developed to streamline the workflow of user experience professionals and social scientists."   continued ...   (Via Functioning Form)

Cockpit upgrade on back burner

Shuttle cockpit lacks usability ...

"One thing Discovery won't carry is a cockpit upgrade Commander Steve Lindsey helped develop, but its ideas will be employed in the shuttle's successor.

The shuttle cockpits were designed in the 1970s, before designers thought much about how people would use them and how computers might help, Johnson Space Center's Bruce Hilty said.

"A bunch of engineers designed the way the shuttle operates," said Hilty, who worked with Lindsey on the avionics upgrade project.

The current cockpits don't employ safety lessons that have been learned over the years from aviation. "A tremendous percentage of aviation accidents are related to crew error," he said.

A typical problem with the shuttle's current system is that it will sound alarms for an avalanche of glitches, even if they stem from one root cause.

"Today's caution and warning system is not very smart, and it's going to enunciate to the crew every one of these problems," said human factors researcher Robert McCann of NASA's Ames Research Center. "Every single one is going to have its own alarm and its own fault message that shows up."

A crucial message might be obscured by a stream of trivial ones."   continued ...   (Via Space)

Growing in vs. growing out

When your customers outgrow your product, what do you do?

"Now that Basecamp is 2.5 years old, we’ve been getting some heat from a few folks who’ve been with us since the beginning. They are saying they are starting to grow out of the app. Their businesses are becoming more complex and their requirements are changing. They want us to change Basecamp to mirror their new-found complexity and requirements.

We’re saying no. And here’s why: We’d rather our customers grow out of our products eventually than never be able to grow into them in the first place.

The problem with following the complexity curve of your customer’s own businesses and requirements is that eventually your product becomes so complex that the barrier to entry is too high for new customers. And then eventually you die with your current customers. You may keep your current customers in the short term, but if no one new can fit through the door then eventually you’re in trouble.

It’s ok for software to be “temporary.” Everything else is temporary, why not software? You probably don’t use the same computer you did 5 years ago. You probably don’t live in the same apartment or have the same car either. And you may be in a different relationship too. Why are software companies afraid if people grow out of things after awhile?"   continued ...   (Via 37Signals)

How Customers Can Help You Develop Concepts via Comics

Ideas on getting customer feedback during the design process...

".. At the Usability Professionals Association annual meeting earlier this month, Mark Wehner from YAHOO! presented more best practices for using comic book panels in the design process. YAHOO! has begun to use comic-based storyboards in the user centered design process for selected products. As the centerpiece of a participatory design process with customers, YAHOO! uses storyboards in a comic book form, and walks users through the comic panels to research concepts and reveal user needs.

Here are some tips from Mark:

Walk through the comic with users and ask them to "tell your own story." Instead of showing them a finished design with design screens, start with a formative comic. Create a simple flow with characters and panels, print out the sheets on big paper, and assemble them in a suggested flow. Let users move things around, add notes, comment, tell you what they need at various steps.

Have user mark up aspects of the story with notes in different colors. Choose a different color for items that are:"   continued ...   (Via Sun-Usability, Design & Other Stuff)

Where Visual Design Meets Usability - An Interview with Luke Wroblewski, Part II

Part II of the LukeW interview...

"As you have written, web pages make more sense to people if they have a strong page hierarchy, or an easily understandable and logical flow. What techniques do you recommend to designers who are interested in strengthening page hierarchy? Are there times when a strong hierarchy is not desirable?

An effective page hierarchy should be tied to prioritized user needs. The first step I always take when developing a page design is listing out what people want to do and see on that page, which depends on its purpose and context, and then prioritizing it. From that prioritized list, I start at the top and give each element on the list less or equal visual weight as the previous element. This helps ensure there is enough contrast between the way elements are presented on the page.

Too often, everything on a Web page looks the same and users don’t know where to start. Conversely, everything looks very different and users end up bouncing between elements that are competing for their attention. An effective hierarchy employs just enough meaningful differentiation to walk users through the unique content and actions on a page in a purposeful order.

The only time I’d advise not having a clearly delineated visual hierarchy is when a site’s primary focus is unstructured exploration. In this case, presenting all the content and actions with relatively equal importance encourages continuous exploration. This works great for sites with a web organization (where everything is connected) vs. a more rigid content hierarchy.

You mentioned sites like Craigslist and MySpace [in Part I] and I think you’ll see a lot less visual hierarchy there because the predominate user action is continuous exploration. Little visual hierarchy however would be a very bad thing for a task-specific site. In that case, using hierarchy to communicate how to accomplish a task clearly is indispensable. The fluid, flattened, exploratory nature of MySpace would quickly become aggravating when you are trying to book a flight."   continued ...   (Via UIE)

Mobile Web Best Practices

60 "best practices" for mobile design...

"Practices 1.0“. With this document W3C is offering a set of guidelines to help web developers deliver a better user experience to mobile users.

The deadline for providing feedback to W3C is the 27th of August 2006 and all developers are encouraged to try it out.

At the core of the recommendation are 60 statements that every web developer should follow:"   continued ...   (Via justaddwater)

Press and wait

On user friendly design (or lack thereof)...

"Although I fully understand the reasons why, it bothers me that every button I now press needs to be held down for four seconds (or so it seems). All my audio and video equipment, and elements of my car, seem to require an inordinately loooong depression of keys and buttons in order to function correctly.

For those new to this world, four seconds may not seem strange but I can remember when pressing a button resulted in instant action. But, then again, during my life it is also been possible to lapse into double clicking elevator buttons too!

This four seconds thing is just a single manifestation of a wider problem. I now very often find the position, action and viewing angle of screens, displays and characters, plus tactile feedback of keys and buttons, less than satisfactory. This is especially the case in elevators, trains, cabs, kiosks, ATMs, telephone handsets, PDAs, laptops and PCs. In addition, the brightness and contrast ratios give me problems when trying to read even relatively large characters."   continued ...   (Via Peter Cochrane)

Let's Talk About Customization

How many people customize their UI?

"One topic that has come up frequently in our private beta newsgroups as well as here in blog comments from time to time is the issue of customization.

As with every component of the Office 2007 user interface redesign, we put a lot of thought into how much customization to provide; today I'm going to try to walk you through our thought process.

Many of you have been passionate in conveying feedback that you wish the UI had absolute customizability. As in my article on the size of the Ribbon, I'm going to lay the facts out on the table and hopefully it will help you to at least understand the rationale behind the decisions we made (even if you wish we had made different ones.)

What is Customization?

There are many aspects to customization in a software user interface. The ability to change the visual appearance, to change preferences, and to turn pieces of the UI on or off are all aspects of customization.

Most frequently among power users, the term "customization" is used to represent the ability certain programs have to add, remove, and relocate commands within the UI.

The History of Customization in Office

Command Bars, introduced in Office 97, were kind of a nirvana of customization capabilities. With Command Bars, you could change virtually anything imaginable within the organization of the menus and toolbars: create new ones, move buttons from toolbars to menus and back, use a built-in icon editor to directly edit the pixels of the icons, etc.

Unfortunately, this flexibility came at a price in terms of the complexity of Command Bars and the kinds of layouts and controls it could support. One of the reasons that many of the prior attempts to simplify the UI were unsuccessful was that any feature had to work within this ultra-customizable framework where you could never predict where a control might live or how it might be presented to the user.

There were downsides for normal users as well. When we go on site visits to watch people use Office 97-2003 in their place of business, we often find that Office has been ravaged by the effects of accidental customization.

In fact, one of the most frequent questions we are asked by people during on-site usability research is: "How can I get the menus back to the top of the window?"

Because of the ultimate flexibility of Command Bars, you can make one small misplaced click and suddenly the menu bar is docked to the left side of the screen or floating in space. Of course, this could have been improved somewhat by some sensible measures such as locking the UI by default, but it does illustrate the different ways a power user and a more typical user think about the same feature."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Very few people customize the toolbars

The Chanel No. 5 Lesson

On brand/logo association...

"Do we all love the Nike logo because it’s inherently a great logo or do we love it because we’ve had good experiences with Nike shoes? How about the FedEx logo? The Apple logo? Chanel No. 5?

Michael Bierut tackles this question in his great piece The Mysterious Power of Context over at Design Observer. He uses the example of how the word CHANEL is written in a very plain, sans-serif font that is quite boring on its own. But placed within the context of a Chanel bottle and our experiences with the perfume, the logo becomes powerful.

Bierut suggests that we love the logos only after we’ve become accustomed to them, saying that it is the context in which we engage the logos that matter. I think Bierut is exactly right, and so in the tradition of the Del.icio.us Lesson,, I’m going to have some fun and call this the Chanel No. 5 Lesson. The Chanel No. 5 Lesson is that we have to experience something before we have strong feelings about it: that experience precedes branding.

Our first contact with a logo, if for a brand we aren’t familiar with, has little associated context. Therefore, we have no associated feelings with the logo and we won’t react strongly. We might react a little bit, but whatever our feelings about it will soon be overwhelmed by any direct experience. As our context changes over time, as we use the products and associate our experiences with the brand, then our feelings about it change as well. Bierut says:"   continued ...   (Via Bokardo)

The Battle Between Usability and User-Experience

Usability vs. user experience...

The main reasons why it is so hard to create usable products is that there is a conflict between a high-usability level and great user-experience. You might think this as strange, but there is a important difference between the two.

Usability is about the "ability to use" something. The aim for a usable product is to make it easy to use.

A product has a high level of usability when:

It requires less mental effort to use
the frequency of mistakes using it is less, or when the mistakes are less disastrous
it is more powerful, where "more powerful" means that it can be used to do more or do it faster
it is more learnable, that is, when a person can figure it out quicker
(source: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)

Making usable products is thus fairly simple. You have clear metrics you need to achieve, and you can analyze how to get a good result.

User-experience is not like usability - it is about feelings. The aim here is to create happiness. You want people to feel happy before, during and after they have used your product. To do that you need to take all kinds of things into consideration. Things like:"   continued ...   (Via Baekdal)

Good UX, not so good usability.

Definition of User Experience Revisited

On the user experience...

"Since last time I wrote on the various definitions of user experience, Bryce Glass, Mike Kuniavsky and Thomas Baekdal have made excellent points on the subject of providing a single, clear understandable definition of user experience.

Also, I attended Jesse James Garrett’s seminar (”defining the user experience” - my notes) last month, and got a better understanding of how Jesse’s original thoughts on user experience were defined.

Thomas Baekdal on The Battle Between Usability and User-Experience:

User-experience is not like usability - it is about feelings. The aim here is to create happiness. You want people to feel happy before, during and after they have used your product. To do that you need to take all kinds of things into consideration. Things like: Environment,Colors moods, Smell, Touch, […], Show-off effect, Usefulness, etc.
This is much much much harder to achieve. None of these things can be accurately analyzed. It is a touchy feeling kind of thing.

Why, for instance, does a Audi S6 give you a much better user-experience than a Ford Focus? I mean, in terms of usability they are pretty much the same.

UXP for the development team
Jesse’s conference was about “defining the user experience”. User experience, the way he defined it that day, was focused on how teams organize to provide web applications with high user experience."   continued ...   (Via justaddwater)

Layers of UX

How Many Users to Test?

Number of users in a usability test ...

"When collecting usability metrics, testing 20 users typically offers a reasonably tight confidence interval.

We can define usability in terms of quality metrics, such as learning time, efficiency of use, memorability, user errors, and subjective satisfaction. Sadly, few projects collect such metrics because doing so is expensive: it requires four times as many users as simple user testing.

Many users are required because of the substantial individual differences in user performance. When you measure people, you'll always get some who are really fast and some who are really slow. Given this, you need to average these measures across a fairly large number of observations to smooth over the variability.

Standard Deviation for Web Usability Data
We know from previous analysis that user performance on websites follows a normal distribution. This is happy, because normal distributions are fairly easy to deal with statistically. By knowing just two numbers -- the mean and the standard deviation -- you can draw the bell curve that represents your data."   continued ...   (Via Alertbox)

The Return on Investment (ROI) for Personas

The role of personas in design ...

"Extract from "The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind throughout Product Design" by John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin. Printed with permission from Morgan Kaufmann, a division of Elsevier. Copyright 2006. (Certain boxes and other material and references to these have been removed for ease of presentation in the UN format.)

The complete persona lifecycle positions your persona team as the “first in/last-out” members of the product development team. You will be first in as you collect and express data about target user populations to your executive team to support their strategic work. You will be last out as you help manage the transition from the end of one project to the beginning of the next. In this sense, this last phase of the persona lifecycle is both critical and, at present, too often ignored.

For a variety of reasons, persona efforts tend to peter out rather than end in a managed, measured, and organized manner. Consultants are usually not paid to stick around long enough to manage the personas at the end of a project and in-house teams are usually more concerned with ramping up for the next project than they are with tidying up loose ends from the previous one. Being first-in/last-out on projects means that you will probably end up with responsibilities that straddle two projects. You will be completing your work on project A even after you have begun your work on project B. That is no simple task. It is certainly easier to simply move on to project B. However, we argue that an organized approach to measuring and managing the end of a project can yield significant benefits.

For a variety of reasons, persona efforts tend to peter out rather than end in a managed, measured, and organized manner. Consultants are usually not paid to stick around long enough to manage the personas at the end of a project and in-house teams are usually more concerned with ramping up for the next project than they are with tidying up loose ends from the previous one. Being first-in/last-out on projects means that you will probably end up with responsibilities that straddle two projects. You will be completing your work on project A even after you have begun your work on project B. That is no simple task. It is certainly easier to simply move on to project B. However, we argue that an organized approach to measuring and managing the end of a project can yield significant benefits."

The final persona lifecycle phase is about measurement, regaining control of the persona effort as a whole, and preparing for the future. As the leader of your persona core team, you have two primary tasks at the end of your persona effort:

* Measure the lifetime achievement of your personas (their value), including the return on investment (ROI) of the persona effort
* Manage the organization’s transition to a new project with regard to UCD and target audiences, which will involve reusing, retiring, or in some way reincarnating your personas."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

Creativity 2.E

On creativity in UI, UX, IA ...

"Are you a Planner who thinks about design? Maybe you are a designer who obsesses about the business impact of your designs. Or you might be an Information Architect who thinks about motion, transitions, multimedia, and uses tools like storyboarding and visual scenarios. Or how about a Developer who comes up with the “big idea”?

If you haven’t noticed, creativity is evolving.

The perception of creativity itself is slowly but surely transitioning into a mutated and adapted life form. In the traditional world, a “creative” person usually meant someone with savant-like talents excelling in a specific creative discipline defined by fairly concrete parameters. Copywriters wrote copy. Art Directors directed art. There are still talented visual designers who can make anything look good. Brilliant copywriters who can come up with that magnificent tagline which stops you in your tracks. And don’t forget about smart, methodical Information Architects who devote their existence to usability and being an advocate for the end user.

These skills, talents and abilities are needed—no doubt about it. But what’s also needed is the evolution of them—the next iteration. But what does this look like? An Information Architect who completely grasps Human Computer Interaction but can also think fluidly—can do things like rapidly create prototypes, facilitate user testing, understand visual design and occasionaly write copy. This kind of individual possesses a multi-dimensional creative brain that has evolved over time.

This type of mind is capable of creating customer experiences which provide competitive advantage in a fast moving world where customers are increasingly calling the shots. "   continued ...   (Via Logic+Emotion)

Collaborative Creativity

Borrowing from Yahoo!'s New Home Page Tour To Annotate Design

A new UI for Yahoo's home page ...

"Lately, one question people keep asking me is, “When designing AJAX or rich internet applications, how do wireframe or document the designs for other team members?”

Last night, in a phone conversation between David Malouf (the interaction designer formerly known as Heller), Bill Scott and myself, David shared he took a page out of Yahoo’s book and has been using something similar to Yahoo’s new home page tour.

Yahoo! just launched their new home page and with it created a tour.

The tour shows the new home page with various new elements annotated with callout bubbles. Mousing over one of the bubbles provides a larger callout with more information."   continued ...   (Via UIE Brain Sparks)

Yahoo! Page Options

Where do the Smiles go?

Using the Send a Smile tool for the Office 2007 UI team ...

"Over the last month, you've sent us thousands and thousands of comments about Office 2007 Beta 2 using the Send a Smile tool. For taking the time to install our beta and writing down your thoughts (positive and negative) I am very grateful.

A few bloggers have posited that "it's not worth sending feedback because Microsoft doesn't read it anyway." Even among a few people who aren't quite so cynical, I've seen it insinuated that the comments don't end up being read by the product team but instead go to some ineffectual "feedback team" or some database somewhere that no one looks at.

To try to set the record straight, I thought I'd take a few minutes today to explain exactly how the Send a Smile comments are handled, all the way from downloading the tool to a comment landing in my Inbox.

The first step, of course, is you taking the time to install the Send a Smile tool and clicking the Smile or Frown icon in the taskbar to give us a comment."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Send a Smile

Where Visual Design Meets Usability - An Interview with Luke Wroblewski, Part I

An interview with "functioning form" advocate- LukeW...

"Our first introduction to Luke Wroblewski was when we read his book, Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability. We were impressed by Luke’s clarity in describing how visual design can improve a site’s usability. We then started following his blog, Functioning Form, where he offers cogent discussions on all aspects of design. We’re thrilled he’s speaking at the upcoming User Interface 11 Conference.

Recently, UIE’s Joshua Porter managed to get a little of Luke’s time to answer some questions about the role of design, which we’re publishing in two parts. Here’s Part I:

UIE: Some people might consider the subtitle of your book, “A Visual Approach to Web Usability,” to be an oxymoron. What do you say when people ask: Isn’t usability mostly about actual usage and visuals mostly about looking good?

Luke Wroblewski: Well, let’s take a look at “actual usage.” When you’re interacting with a web site, you’re reading text, navigating menus, examining images, scanning lists, and filling in forms. The whole time you are using your eyes to make sense of what’s on the screen because all the elements that enable these interactions are presented to you visually (unless, of course, you are using a screen reader).

The way each element is presented tells you a lot about it: is it more or less important than other elements; is it similar or different from other elements; can you take action on it? This type of information helps you ascribe meaning to what you see on the screen.

As a result, you can use visual design to communicate key concepts to your users. By addressing the question “What is this?” we communicate usefulness. By addressing “How do I use it?” we communicate usability. By addressing “Why should I care?” we communicate desirability. Clearly this communication goes beyond mere styling and “looking good”.

When properly applied, visual design is all about communication. The better at communicating we are, the easier it is for our users to use and appreciate the web sites we design."   continued ...   (Via UIE)

Virtual Humans - the Next Generation of HCI?

Human to virtual human interaction...

"Virtual humans are often touted as one of the primary ways in which we will interact with computers in the future and numerous research groups around the world are working hard to make this a reality. Advocates of virtual humans tend to believe that they will make an interaction more natural and engaging and thus enhance cognitive functions such as learning and problem solving.

Opponents of virtual humans argue that humanisation of an interface might have derogatory impact as it may produce false mental models of the virtual human’s capabilities. For example, agents which exhibit human-like behaviour may be perceived as more intelligent than they actually are, which could lead to incorrect expectations about the system’s abilities."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

The future of HCI?

Research Conference Addresses Web Usability

Results from Usability Week Conference ...

"If a graphic is online but nobody sees it, does it make any noise? That is one of the existential questions that was addressed at the Nielsen Norman Group's Usability Week conference in San Francisco this week.

Usability Week is a three-day session focused on Web design. The event was in New York in March, London in May, and will be in Sydney in July.

Nielsen Norman researchers presented findings from their eye-tracking studies, the latest way to tell what users see and how they react to various designs when searching the Internet.

"People really learn quickly and evolve when they're using the Web," said Kara Pernice Coyne, director of research for Neilsen Norman. "You're able to screen things out and choose what you want to look at when it comes to the Web. So we never really know which things people have purposefully recognized and decided to screen out versus not even knowing it's there."

Figuring that out a bit more precisely is the goal of the eye-tracking research. Pernice Coyne and her colleague Dr. Jakob Nielsen, principal of Nielsen Norman, led a research project in which they used a Tobii 1750 eye-tracking device to observe 255 people searching the Web. The device is able to observe retinal action and create heat maps that indicated how long users looked at various portions of the sites.

"What experts agree to is that if a user is thinking about a particular task, then they are indeed at least fixating and thinking about it," Pernice Coyne said. "That doesn't mean that they understood it."   continued ...   (Via PC Magazine)

Breakfast With Forrester

A good summary of ROI of website design ...

"I'm doing a little bit of moblogging this morning at Forrester's breakfast series titled "The ROI Of Web Redesigns Made Simple". Here are some high level take-aways hot off the press: (Note, as with everything on L+E, this is my personal perspective)

Speaker:
Moira G. Dorsey, Senior Analyst.

Slide: Its hard not to get a return on investment with a competent website re-design.

“Companies don't think enough about designing for their users.”

Some quick first impressions of the event. Forrester knows what they are talking about in this area, they interview scores of professionals and companies to gather data and they use metrics, charts and graphs to make the case for the value of human-centered design as it applies to the business world.

... Moira is talking about Design Personas now and there is a simple visual which represents three re-design options/approaches.

1. Rip out and replace entire site.
2. Roll through site one section at a time.
3. Optimize individual applications and pages.

That's a fairly pragmatic way to Summarize a variety of approaches. Each of these seems well suited for large, complex websites. And interestingly enough, I did a presentation last year with similar points illustrated with a “home improvement” theme. You can download that deck here: Re-decorating, Renovating, and Re-building Web Sites."   continued ...   (Via Logic+Emotion)

UI Amazingness

An interesting new UI concept for Windows ...

"I ran across the BumpTop project today. Jaw-dropping implementation of “physical objects” desktop. There’s a nice video showing off all of the different ways you can interact, go watch now. It bears a lot of similarity to MacSlow’s LowFat desktop interface in concept, however it appears to be further along in development; very polished and functional. I wonder how long this has been in development? Clearly this was somebody’s baby for a while, I can feel the love applied to smoothness of interaction.

Highlights:

- Pen selection and interaction is very smooth. All of the motions feel very natural. Lasso a group of objects then cross the centerpoint of the lasso, and all of the objects clump together into a neat pile.
- Radial menus when you complete a circle with the lasso
- Radial menus when you draw a “curly-q” tail on your lasso (hard to explain, see the video)
- About 5-6 usefully different ways to temporarily view the contents of a pile: explode to a neat grid, MacOS-Dock-Like “zooming,” flipping sideways like a stack of CD’s, progressively “smooshing aside” top layers of a stack, --revealing lower items one by one.
- freeform “dog-ears” on documents/windows

I know that not everybody is a fan of XGL, but this gives me the same feeling I had when I first moved something around with XGL: realness. I am moving a thing. It obeys similar laws of the things I have been interacting with since I can remember interaction. This stuff is seriously cool."   continued ...   (Via Pixane.net)

BumpTop Interface

China embraces User-Centred Designers

The state of UI in China ...

"A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to be part of a user-centred design (UCD) workshop tour of China as part of the SESUN project. The aim of the project is for China and the EU to collaborate in the design of usable IT. For China, an objective of the workshops was to contribute to the development of usability practices in the Chinese IT industry. For Europe, an objective was to provide a window through which to showcase European expertise.

We gave workshops in Beijing, Dalian and Shanghai and on each occasion, we asked participants their background discipline and application area. Most participants were from the software industry or had an industrial design background. In fact, there are very few UCD courses offered by Chinese universities. As a result of this lack of formal training, many of the questions asked in the workshops reflected on the different roles in UCD, how the roles worked together, the skills required, and how to recruit and gauge UCD expertise.

... For example, common issues that were raised in workshops included:
- knowing how to shift users to a radically new interface when they are familiar with the old one
- gaining time to do user research and iterative development
- how to use different types of prototyping at different stages in the process
- how to test for the affective
- how to understand usefulness when a device does not yet exist
- the relationship between data mining and usability."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

Satisfying The Need for Search Without Adding It

Search vs. links for navigation strategy ...

"This morning, after my keynote presentation at the Endeca Discover 2006 conference, my friend, Pete Bell, co-founder of Endeca, told me about their recent redesign of the Endeca home page.

On the old page, Pete said, people would regularly ask them about the site’s search. People, coming to the site, would become frustrated with the page because it wasn’t clear how to find Search.

This year, Endeca redesigned the page. Endeca’s Chief Strategist, Paul Sonderegger, who was formerly Forrester Research’s expert in user experience methods, convinced Pete and the design team to use those methods Paul found worked the best. They conducted field research and interviews, created personas, and designed the page iteratively.

As a result, the new page happens to have more links on it. (Not a complete surprise to us. Sites developed with a lot of user research regularly end up with more links.)"   continued ...   (Via UIE Brain Sparks)

New Endeca Page

Usability: Art and Science

On usability testing and determining the results...

"Yesterday morning we were sitting in the office of one of our usability researchers watching some DVCAM tapes from tests conducted a few weeks ago.

We had a discussion that got me thinking about a set of tests we ran several years ago to determine the discoverability characteristics of contextual tabs.

At the time, contextual tabs were struggling in the usability lab. The visuals and triggers were not obvious enough, and even when people noticed them, the tabs looked so different from normal tabs in the UI that participants thought they were decorative or unactionable.

We kept iterating and iterating on the design, and one of the desperate ideas we had was to pop up a little yellow balloon the first time a contextual tab set appeared saying something like "Hey you, contextual tabs have appeared, you better click here get to the tools for working with your table."

(I'm sure the real wording was a lot more Microsoft-esque.)

Anyway, we wrote a little app to enable us to pop up the balloon at the right time--but it was a totally manual process. We had two keyboards hooked up to the usability computer, and when the contextual tabs appeared, one of us in the back room would press F10 on our keyboard to make the balloon appear. So the timing was a little weird, but it was cheaper than building the feature directly into the product itself."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Findability of features need to balance with the rest of the UI

For Web-Design Expert, Ease of Use

Interview with Jakob Nielson...

"Jakob Nielsen is a Web-design guru who has spent years advising companies about how to create attractive and easy-to-use Web sites. Lately, he has been thinking about other ways that companies reach out to customers, like blogs, RSS news feeds, newsletters and more.

You hear a lot these days about RSS news feeds, which is the software technology behind blogs. What do you think of them?

People who are in the field often use the term 'RSS' [Really Simple Syndication] to refer to 'news feeds' because that's the name of the technology. But in one of our studies, 82% of those we surveyed did not know what RSS meant. It's not something that the general public knows about. So if you are targeting business executives, or even if you are doing something for the general public, they are not likely to understand that particular term. Even if they are actually using the technology. So one of the real strong recommendations is to stop calling it 'RSS' and start calling it 'news feeds,' because that explains what it does.

You say you like traditional newsletters emailed to customers instead of news feeds. Why so? Don't they contribute just as much to information overload?

The best ones don't. With the best ones, it's like a service you are waiting for and expecting. The email newsletter comes to you; it arrives in your in box, and becomes part of the one place you go to get information. That's the great strength."   continued ...   (Via Wall Street Journal)

The Usability of AJAX

PDF on AJAX usability
continued ...   (Via Human Factors International)

AJAX usability