Motivating others: why "it's good for you" doesn't work

Motivating users to perform the desired outcome ...

"What matters is what they do when the clicking stops." That was the central theme in the New Media Interaction Design courses I taught at UCLA Extension (Entertainment Studies dept). We all want to motivate our users (customers, learners, kids, employees, members, etc.), but motivate them for what? What do we hope they'll do when they stop clicking/listening/reading? More importantly, how do we make it happen?

Question 1: What do we want our users to do?

And no, we don't get to say, "know more." That's not an action. "Like us more" is not an action. Even my favorite, "kick ass" is not an action. How many people take a course in Design Patterns and then go right back to work and write the same clunky code, reinventing the flat tire? How many customers interact with a web app and then... just leave? How many people say they care deeply about a cause, but do nothing beyond bumper-sticker activism? How many people listen to a lecture on the dangers of smoking, but keep smoking?

There is nearly always an action (or set of actions) you're hoping users will take, and most of you already know what that is. But we also know that this sometimes involves a change in behavior, something that's extremely hard to do. So it's really the next question that matters more:

Question 2: How do we motivate them to do it?

That's where broccoli and optimism come in (I promise I'll get there in a moment).

We all know we can't simply slap motivation on another person. All we can do is design an experience to help them motivate themselves. If we get them to spend time on our web site, and they have a good experience, but then leave without doing anything--and never come back--does it really matter that they had a Good User Experience? Is a good experience an end in itself, or is it a means to something else? For much of what we design, what matters is what happens when the clicking stops (or for many web apps, just before the clicking stops).

So, we really have two levels of motivation... motivation to interact and motivation to do something as a result of that interaction. Motivation to interact is something we've talked about quite a bit here... things like the flow state, levels/superpowers, spiral experience design, painting a compelling picture with clear steps to getting there, blah blah blah. This post is about inspiring post-interaction action."    (Continued via Creating Passionate Users)    [Usability Resources]

Motivating Users

Jitterbug and the Cellphone Simplicity Derby

Achieving cell phone simplicity ...

“The movement for simpler electronics is still alive and well; after all, life is complex enough already,” according to David Pogue’s Simplicity Derby for cellphones.

Software Simplicity Score

To judge each phone’s UI, he created a Software Simplicity Score which counts the number of taps needed to 1) turn off the ringer 2) open the phone book 3) open the recent calls list and 4) see your own phone number.

(Is this is the best way to test a phone’s simplicity and/or usability? As Steve Krug explains, it’s not necessarily the number of clicks that matters, it’s how much thought each click requires that matters. Still, it’s nice to have some metric for comparing relative simplicity.)

The winner of the tap test was the LG Electronics VX3400 (Verizon). Ringer off: 1 step. Phone book: 1. Recent Calls: 1. See your own number: 4. Speakerphone: 1. The Motorola C139 (Cingular), on the other hand, requires 7 (!) steps to turn off the ringer.

... The Jitterbug

Most interesting though is the Jitterbug phone (pictured below), available from greatcall.com. It’s billed as “a totally new cellphone experience.” (I refuse to include the exclamation point. I’m opposed to exclamation point inflation.) “Jitterbug is designed to be the best telephone a cell phone can be. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

Interesting backstory at the company too: Its first product was an SOS phone for seniors. It was an oversized, three-button phone powered by a AAA battery that could connect a customer with 911, a towing service, or an SOS operator who would place calls for customers. “We gained 25,000 wonderful and loyal customers and we learned a lot about what they liked and didn’t like about wireless service,” says Arlene Harris, now CEO of GreatCall. (Btw, don’t miss this adorable photo of the company founders. Wilford Brimley has gotta be just off camera cooking up some soup.)

The Jitterbug is also made for an older crowd. Or, as they put it, “the ever-growing baby boomer/mature market, those who want a simplified cellphone experience.” Old people aren’t the only ones who want a simple phone but, hey, gotta start somewhere.

What’s different about it? It’s big — “so big that when you’re on a call, the earpiece and mouthpiece are right next to the proper orifices of your head."    (Continued via Signal vs. Noise)    [Usability Resources]

The Jitterbug

Douglas Engelbart's HyperScope 1.0 Launched

New application using "Hyperscope" ...

"Neuberg has announced the release of HyperScope 1.0, a Web app based on tech legend Douglas Engelbart's 1968 NLS/Augment (oNLine System). Engelbart and team have been working on Hyperscope since March this year, in a project funded by the National Science Foundation. Its aim is to rebuild portions of Douglas Engelbart's NLS system on the web, using current Web technologies such as AJAX and DHTML.

The project team members are Doug Engelbart (visionary), Brad Neuberg (software architect and implementor), Jonathan Cheyer (who knows more about Augment than anyone else under 35), Christina Engelbart (the bridge between the old and the new) and Eugene Eric Kim (project liaison and collaboration guru).

Those familiar with their Web history will know that Douglas Engelbart invented the computer mouse and was a pioneer in the development of hypertext, networked computers and precursors to GUIs. Indeed NLS was the system demonstrated by Engelbart in his famous 1968 Mother of All Demos.

What is it?
HyperScope is described as "a high-performance thought processor that enables you to navigate, view, and link to documents in sophisticated ways." This is seen as the first (renewed) step towards Doug Engelbart's larger vision for an Open Hyperdocument System - only this time round it'll be based on Web technologies."    (Continued via Read/Write Web)    [Usability Resources]

Hyperscope

SHiFT: Stop Designing Products

Designing systems vs. individual products ...

"Peter Merholz's Stop Designing Products presentation at SHiFT 2006 made the case for designing systems instead of just the point solutions within (in most cases individual products). Merholz described how Adaptive Path's research when working on the redesign of a financial services Web site led them to discover that the Web site they were working on was only a single part of a much broader set of customer touch points for their client.

Merholz then walked through several examples of integrated systems in action. In addition to George Eastman's original Kodak "box camera", he described how iTunes, the iPod, and the iTunes Music Store all work together to create a cohesive experience. In particular, the iTunes software absorbs a lot of the functionality that other MP3 player companies try to cram into their player. Flickr, on the other is an example of a very open system (as opposed to Apple's tightly closed system) that allows others to expand the site's functionality.

Insight into these examples and more led Merholz to embrace Frog Design's mantra of "the system is the product" and to evolve Adaptive Path's work and principles to account for a broader set of customer experiences and increasing expectations. As a result, his firm and other designers have needed to address bigger problems.

Why the shift? Looking at the history of economic theory, Merholz explained how most approaches to date have focused on enabling optimization of efficiency and quality. Now these factors have run their course (Dell Computer differentiating by price alone is a notable example) and companies need creativity and innovation to move forward. As a result, the importance of design has begun to increase.

According to Merholz, the path forward is developing coherent "experience startegies" that establish a vision that defines how users engage with your entire organization (system). Not just your product."    (Continued via Functioning Form)    [Usability Resources]

My Customer, My Co-Innovator

Customers or users contributiing to the design process ...

"What portion of your cell phone’s myriad features do you use? Market research shows that most mobile phone owners use less than 20 percent. The innovation that matters isn’t what the innovator offers; it’s what the customer adopts. And as organizations recognize this, they’re starting to use their customers as a source of innovative introspection.

In industry after industry, a shared model for innovation adoption is emerging. The most valuable “platforms” — the tools and technologies used internally to discover, design, and test new products and services — can be creatively and cost-effectively sold or lent to customers, clients, and prospects. Customers get a chance to “try before they buy.” They can adopt and test new ideas and technologies before investing in them. And the purveyors of new technologies rapidly gain insights into the potential value of their wares — insights that might otherwise take years to gather.

One company that understands this is the networking giant Cisco Systems Inc. Over the years, Cisco’s architects and engineers have developed scads of internal tools that allow them to design, configure, optimize, and compare alternative network infrastructures. They often run sophisticated simulations, for example, to determine the number of routers and switches to recommend to customers, or to show prospects how a proposed implementation might work.

How did Cisco come to share this inside information? In the past, Cisco’s engineers and architects felt, often correctly, that most customers and prospects simply wouldn’t understand their internal, informally assembled aids. However, Cisco had several highly sophisticated customers who weren’t satisfied with “solutions”; they wanted to see and understand the thought process behind the company’s proposals. Were these architectures really the best or most cost-effective that Cisco had to offer? So Cisco began showing these customers its in-house simulations. And the customers, in turn, expressed a desire to adapt these design, configuration, and optimization models for their own use."    (Continued via Strategy+Business)    [Usability Resources]

Strategy+Business

Birth of a New Specialty: Social Networking Design

The ins and outs of social networking ...

"Around the office, we’ve been talking about the increasing amount of social networking functionality that is permeating into the products and services we’re dealing with. Tagging, for example, allows people who use a resource to help define a living category structure for the content. But it also gives insight into what the other people are thinking. By looking at how other people tag certain items, you get new information about that item. The bookmarking service, Del.icio.us is a great example of that.

In another aspect of social networking applications, Netflix has the capability to invite “friends” into your experience. When your friend accepts you invitation, you can see how they recommend a movie you might be interested in. This now gives users two perspectives on a film: what the general Netflix user base thinks about a given film and what your specific friends think about it. Like using tagging, looking at the differences in the recommendations tells you something about the film you didn’t know before.

While rarely talked about, the grand-daddies of social networking functionality is, of course, Amazon and eBay. Amazon, with it’s “Customers who bought this book also bought…” functionality changed the way we shop. eBay, with it’s reputation system that allows both buyers and sellers to decide if a transaction is worth the risk, changed the way we interact with what is otherwise complete strangers.

My colleague, Josh Porter, had an interesting take on all this over at his Bokardo blog:" (next article)    (Continued via UIE Brain Sparks)    [Usability Resources]

Social Web Design - Are Social Web Apps Here to Stay?

The value and future of social Web applications ...

"In Why I Don’t Use Social Software, Ryan Carson of Vitamin magazine (where I published The MySpace Problem), asks some tough questions about the rise of social web apps. The biggest question is: Are social web apps here to stay?

Using his own tendency to shy away from them as evidence, Ryan wonders if the excitement of social networking apps is a bit over the top. He asks: “is the market already saturated with products that no-one yet uses?”. His reason for not using social networking apps is a good one: he doesn’t have time because he’s busy getting work done. But even if he were to use them there are still too many services out there competing for our limited attention. So how would we find out about them in the first place?

You Don’t Find Social Software, It Finds You
The answer, I think, is that we would rarely find them out by actively seeking them. Ryan is right, most folks outside the teenage demographic don’t have time to spend actively seeking out new social networking tools. Instead, if we did hear about it we would probably find out by someone else telling us or by somehow inviting us to participate. As I’ve heard it described, social software can be defined as software that is better when our friends are using it."    (Continued via Bokardo)    [Usability Resources]

Reasons for not submitting to a conference

Not Submitting to Conferences

(Continued via OK/Cancel)    [Usability Resources]

The Bull's-Eye: A Framework for Web Application User Interface Design Guidelines

Creating guidelines for website design ...

"We have laid out the challenges, as well as the framework and its multi-tiered approach, which is similar to other efforts to document UI patterns in web application flows and structures [e.g., 14, 15] A more detailed discussion of the structure and composition of the guidelines follows.

Components
Component guidelines, the first level of guidelines, outline specific UI widgets that have multiple interaction possibilities and options, depending on the content or functionality required by an application. Components can be simple UI elements, i.e., buttons, standard Web widgets, instruction text. They can also be more complex UI elements, i.e., tab navigation structures, table configurations and behaviors, and tree components, similar to the notion of idioms [13]). Figure 3 provides examples of several components covered in the guidelines, including Branding, Action/Navigation Buttons, Global buttons, Tabs and Navigation, and Tables. There are currently over 37 component guidelines, ranging from simple to complex.

Examples of additional Components include Advertising, Locator Elements (e.g., Train, Breadcrumbs), Headers/Subheaders, Links, Content Containers, Hide/Show widgets, and a Page Footer."    (Continued via uiGarden)    [Usability Resources]

Guidelines Components

What is Emotion Design? (A practical definition)

Definitions and discussion about emotion design ...

"Two years ago, after returning from the Design and Emotion conference, I shared an extensive post on Emotion Design, a topic that has a lot of potential to open up new conversations about user experience and usability. This week, the fifth conference, Design and Emotion 2006 takes place in Göteborg, Sweden. Since I wanted to attend the conference this year but couldn't, here is a practical definition of design and emotion that I hope you will enjoy.

So, what is emotion design?

1. The recognition that a sterile focus on function is not enough anymore in usability (emotion needs to be addressed as well). Here's more on Graphic Design vs. Usability...

2. The advances in neuro-science that keep showing us how emotion plays a crucial role in decision making. This research paper shows "proof" that emotion influences all things cognitive: Integration of emotion and cognition in the lateral prefrontal cortex [technical PDF]

3. The usability community waking up to emotion as something we can use to design better products, not just an "interesting" data point. We are finally developing a framework to channel emotion based data into the construction and definition of new *user experiences"    (Continued via Demystifying Usability)    [Usability Resources]

Jon Kolko on Design

A few good definitions ...

"In a recent interview on Digit, Jon Kolko had some great things to say about Interaction Design and the existing perceptions of designer’s roles. Many of his comments echoed recent discussions on Functioning Form:

On Interaction Design & Language:

“Interaction Design is the creation of a dialogue between a person and a product, service or system. This dialogue is usually found in the world of behavior, and deals with issues such as experience, time, complexity and emotion.

Simply, interaction designers manage complexity. They make things that are difficult seem easy, and things that are overwhelming seem fluid, and they create structures for cohesive, enjoyable, and even poetic experiences of use.”

On Generalists:

“… the modern day definition of Designer is changing, and changing rapidly. While Designers have always considered themselves Renaissance types, I see a very obvious convergence between the Graphic Designer, Industrial Designer, and the aforementioned Interaction Designer. Part of this adaptation is a shift towards Designer as generalist, or one who can provide value regardless of the medium in which they are required to work.”"    (Continued via Functioning Form)    [Usability Resources]

Ease-of-use should not mean neuter-the-software

Problems when designing UI's for new users ...

"Is our heart in the right place but our execution flawed when we neuter a product in the name of newbie-friendliness? In the push to make programs "so simple even your [mom/kid/dog] could use it", there are a lot of dumb products out there. Or rather, dumbed-down products. It's like we're throwing the power baby out with the poor UI bathwater. But if we want passionate users, ease-of-use should NOT be the Big Design Goal. Good usability is the enabler for what we (users) really want--more superpowers.

Ease of Use

We want to do things. Cooler things. Advanced things. More creative things. We don't want to be better at using the tool, we want to be better at doing whatever it is the tool supports! Usually when we talk about this it's-not-about-being-better-at-the-tool thing, we're coming from the perspective of what and how we teach our users. This post, however, is about the software, product, web site, service, itself.

Take a look at this chart, and ask yourself how you'd describe the two boxes with question marks. We know the bottom right quadrant is awesome, and in the top left, there be dragons. But what of the top right? What of the bottom left? Think about it for a moment before you continue (or before you, as most of you will do, skip to the next graphic;)"    (Continued via Creating Passionate Users)    [Usability Resources]

Power vs. Ease of Use

From GUI to E(motional) UI

The future of user interface design ...

"In 1988, Apple Computer produced some video scenarios showing how future computers would be able to understand hand gestures, read text, and respond to voice commands. Almost 20 years later, the world is still waiting for a natural way of using computers—though we are beginning to see some of our wildest dreams slowly emerge from the chaos of high technology and become real. In 2006, it is easy to believe that the masses will soon be able to use a computer without any keyboard or mouse. Beyond the constrained space of our personal computer’s monitor, keyboard, and mouse, I’m looking for the sort of revolution that would overtake the wild dream of Blade Runner. I can envision huge 3D virtual worlds and systems that are smart enough to feel a user’s mood and respond intelligently. Now, where do you want to go today?

The Evolution of an Idea

For three years, from 2003 to 2006, my work focused on eyetracking studies. During that time, my team and I discovered a really important innovation in interaction design. We created user interfaces based on eyetracking that could radically transform people’s everyday use of personal computers. The computer seems magical, because it can understand what you really want to do. Personal computers that have eye-driven user interfaces can predict what you want to do next, because your attention and the focus of your vision shift so quickly—almost before you are aware of it. These computers don’t use AI or smart algorithms. They just provide a way for people to communicate with them directly."    (Continued via UXmatters)    [Usability Resources]

Applied Empathy: A Design Framework for Meeting Human Needs and Desires

Usability testing is not the only way to achieve good usability ...

"The design community keeps making a lot of noise about designing for people/users/customers. However, while this notion is well-intentioned and even conceptually correct, I find much of it boils down to empty rhetoric. What exactly are we doing? More user research? More usability testing? Certainly these are valid approaches to finding out about people’s needs, but they’re only a small part of an optimal solution. Are we using hollow tasks and tools like personas and scenarios? Those approaches typically take design farther away from the people for whom we are designing products rather than closer. How about focusing on usability and the user experience? That gets at only part of the issue and tends to come from the perspective of the product—as opposed to the more universal needs and desires of actual people.

No. The methods most UX professionals typically use today are, at best, incomplete and, at worst, without any meaningful focus. There is not a successful, established approach and framework for closely linking the real-world needs and desires of our potential customers into the DNA of product strategy and development. Sure, there are various examples of the integration of users’ needs and product strategy being successfully accomplished in some cases, but they are more the outcome of clear vision and talented design than an intentional, strategic product architecture that really accommodates people’s needs."    (Continued via UXmatters)    [Usability Resources]

The Bull's-Eye: A Framework for Web Application User Interface Design Guidelines

Creating a framework for user interface guidelines ...

"A multi-leveled framework for user interface design guidelines of Web applications is presented. User interface design guidelines tend to provide information that is either too general, so that it is difficult to apply to a specific case, or too specific, so that a wide range of products is not supported. The framework presented is unique in that it provides a bridge between the two extremes. It has been dubbed the ‘Bull’s-Eye’ due to its five layers, represented as concentric circles. The center of the Bull’s-Eye is the Component layer, followed by Page Templates, Page Flows, Interface Models and Patterns, and Overarching Features and Principles. To support this approach,requirements were gathered from user interface designers,product managers, UI developers, and product developers.

Also, usability testing of the guidelines occurred on several levels, from broad guideline tests to more specific product tests. The guidelines and lessons learned are intended to serve as examples for others seeking to design families of Web applications or Web sites.

The Challenges

We faced challenges common to many companies attempting to create user interface design guidelines for a family of Web applications. We were attempting to design for multiple, Web-based software products across a variety of user profiles – with only desktop application guidelines as our reference point. We knew technological limitations would also impact our guidelines as we attempted to make them accessible, cross-browser compatible, and localizable.

This paper will discuss the problems we faced, often shared by other companies, and how we overcame them.

Our first challenge was the state of Oracle’s existing UI guidelines. They were focused on Java, not HTML, and were at the widget level, and so did not provide use-cases,multiple options, higher level component combinations (i.e., templates or flows), nor contextual examples to illustrate usage. Our attempts to use other guidelines as exemplars left our guidelines too broad to implement specifically and consistently across products."    (Continued via uiGarden)    [Usability Resources]

Designers Responsibility in the Tyranny of Choice

Reducing the number of choices is a good thing ...

"I’m very excited we’ll have Barry Schwartz as the UI 11 Spotlight Plenary speaker this year. He wrote a wonderful book, The Paradox of Choice, which describes the problems we incur when we’re offered too many choices.

Not everyone agrees this is a problem. Scott Anderson, in a 2004 essay, feels Schwartz’s approach will cause us to limit choices, removing what he suggests is an erosion of our freedoms. He quotes a University of Rochester psychology professor, Dr. Edward Deci, who says,

“I am very wary about anyone who wants to take away options from others or limit other people’s opportunities for choice. It amazes me that some psychologists are arguing that we should limit human freedom.”

I guess the questions are this: Is limiting the choice of jams or digital cameras removing our freedoms? Doesn’t the person offering the choice earn some of the burden of the problem?

The average electronics ecommerce retailer offers 135 digital cameras online, with virtually no way for the purchaser to distinguish between the cameras. Doesn’t the design team of the site (including the information architects who lay out the choice mechanism, merchandisers who choose the products to sell, and content providers who describe the individual products) need to bear some of the responsibility for solving this problem?"    (Continued via UIE Brain Sparks)    [Usability Resources]

Logic Versus Usage: The Case for Activity-Centered Design

Ordering things by taxonomies or taskonomies ...

"In my consulting activities, I often have to explain to companies that they are too logical, too rational. Human behavior seldom follows mathematical logic and reasoning. By the standards of engineers, human behavior can be illogical and irrational. From the standpoint of people, however, their behavior is quite sensible, dictated by the activity being performed, the environment and context, and their higher-level goals. To support real behavior we need activity-centered design.

Years ago, anthropologists Janet Dougherty and Charles Keller studied how blacksmiths organize their tools. Blacksmiths, they discovered, don't put all the hammers neatly away on the shelves, all together. No, when blacksmiths clean up at night, the hammer goes on the ground, right next to the anvil, and next to the tongs: all the tools are organized so that they are ready for the job, ready for use. In similar fashion, good carpenters, while working, keep nails near their hammers. In other words, good behavioral organization reflects human activity structure, not dictionary classification. Dougherty and Keller called this form of organization taskonomy.

Many of the design tools used by the Human-Centered Design community lead to well-structured, carefully organized designs, often using powerful card-sorting and hierarchical clustering algorithms to make similar things be located near one another. Call this the "Hardware store" organization. Hammers are in the hammer section where they are all logically arranged. Nails are in the nail section.

The hardware store organization is based upon a taxonomy: appropriate for libraries and for stores where the major problem is locating the desired item out of context. But note that some stores have learned to provide activity-centered organization in addition to their normal classification. Thus, smart food stores put potato chips and pretzels next to the beer. And some even put beer next to the diapers, so that when a shopper makes a late night, emergency trip to get more diapers, why there is the beer, temptingly convenient. Sensible, well-organized logical design would not support this real behavior."    (Continued via jnd.org)    [Usability Resources]

6 Ways to Fix a Confused Information Architecture

Detecting and fixing website usability problems ...

"When your website's users consistently go to the wrong sections, you have many options for getting users back on track, from better labels to clearer structure.
We recently user tested a website devoted to one particular product. Single-product sites often have good usability because of their clear focus, but they can still have issues, as our study showed.

One of the bigger problems the test revealed was that users were quite confused about two sections of the site's information architecture (IA): Foo Basics and Using Foo. ("Foo" isn't the product’s real name; because this was a client project, I have to keep details confidential.)

We tested 8 users on many tasks. In 7 of those tasks, users needed to go to either "Foo Basics" or "Using Foo."

The following table shows the sections users visited first. The cells representing a task's correct choice are color-coded according to the users' initial click:

- green indicates that at least two-thirds of participants immediately used the correct link;
- yellow indicates that between one-third and two-thirds of users immediately used the correct link; and
- red indicates that less than one-third of users clicked correctly the first time.

Out of 56 task attempts, users immediately went to the correct site section in only 25 cases -- a mere 45% of the time. (The ultimate success rate was higher because users sometimes realized their mistakes and then found the correct area.)

In this case, we discovered the IA problem through user testing. If you know in advance that you have an IA problem and want to focus on it exclusively in your testing, you can conduct a card sorting study. For most projects, however, I prefer to keep an open mind and do standard user testing, which addresses all design aspects. In this case, for example, we found problems beyond the IA, including those with the site's writing, visual design, forms, error messages, and a service that was difficult to understand."    (Continued via Alertbox)    [Usability Resources]

Sections users visited first.

Sequoia Misleads New York

The continuing saga of voting machine usability ...

"On Wednesday, Sequoia voting systems issued a press release claiming that their AVC edge received a "top usability rating of any voting machine" in our usability study. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Sequoia makes at least three misstatement of facts:


1) "Sequoia Voting Systems' AVC Edge receives best rating in new Brennan Center report on usability."

2) "Sequoia Voting Systems' AVC Edge, a touch screen Direct Record Electronic (DRE) voting system, received the top usability rating of any voting machine in the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law's recent report."

3) "Sequoia's AVC Edge, which was used statewide in Nevada for the 2004 presidential election, produced a residual vote rate of 0.3% - significantly lower than all other comparable systems."

All of these statemenst are untrue. First, and most simply, the Report does not rate any voting systems. The first two statements are therefore patently false.

Second, as explained on page 16 of our usability report, because no states other than Nevada include a "none of the above option", which reduces the residual (or lost) vote rate, and because no states other than Nevada used the DRE system with VVPT, the Report states that the data for the DRE system with VVPT "are too limited to draw any conclusions regarding residual vote rates," and that the .3% residual voter rate "is not directly comparable to that produced by other jurisdictions with different ballot options." Therefore, Sequoia's statements that suggest a comparison of the Sequoia Voting System with other voting machines are false and misleading.

Finally, Sequoia uses these misstatements to suggest that New Yorkers should purchase their full face DREs. But one thing is quite clear from our study: full face DREs have significantly higher residual vote (or lost vote) rates than other electronic voting systems. So the Brennan Center study most certainly does not make this suggestion."    (Continued via Amherst Times)    [Usability Resources]

Google wants to pay you to improve Google usability

How Google arrived at it's UI design ...

"The Science and Art of User Experience at Google" was the topic of a presentation at Google's Kirkland, Washington, operations last June by Jen Fitzpatrick, Google Engineering Director.

She began by recounting the origins of Google’s “rather empty home page.”

Fitzpatrick noted the “utter simplicity of our homepage” has changed remarkedly little from its beginnings in 1999 when Sergey Brin had the task of building a homepage for the new service he and Larry Page were building out. According to Fitzpatrick, Brin at the time did not know html and was not interested in learning it. What Brin was really passionate about, according to Fitzpatrick, was building a search engine; Putting together a home page was simply a way to get the service up and running as quickly as possible. Fitzpatrick indicated that in some respects the Google home page of today is a “happy byproduct of laziness on his part.” After all, she noted, why bother learning html to create some fancy polished homepage when all it needed to do was get people going on the way to searching for the information they were looking for.

Google conducted its first “official” usability testing in 2000 when, according to Fitzpatrick, the Google team embarked “in typical Google fashion” on a “cheap and scrappy” effort to recruit Stanford computer science students for an hour long focus group with the lure of tee shirts and twenty dollar bills.

Seven years later, Google is formally calling for paid participants in “User Experience Research” studies and hiring User Experience Researchers."    (Continued via ZDNet)    [Usability Resources]

Google Collecting Data

Dieter Rams: "Less, but better"

From the master of design simplicity ...

"Could the lines of this speaker Dieter Rams designed in 1960 (left) have influenced the iMac?

Rams was a key figure in German design and worked as head of Braun’s design staff in the 60s. His clean and simple style has been cited as an influence by many designers, including Apple’s Jonathan Ive.

In this Icon magazine profile or Rams, he discusses how design has to be a priority that comes from the top.

"At Braun they were always willing to take a risk - nobody could tell you if a product would become successful. We as designers cannot work in a vacuum. The entrepreneur has to want it; the people at the top of the company have to want it…What’s missing today is that these kind of entrepreneurs are no longer there. Today there is only Apple and to a lesser extent Sony, but not to the same degree as was the case with Olivetti and Braun, or Peter Behrens at AEG, or Herman Miller and Charles Eames, Florence Knoll with Saarinen and so on. These kinds of connections are missing today."

In this Icon magazine profile or Rams, he discusses how design has to be a priority that comes from the top.

"At Braun they were always willing to take a risk - nobody could tell you if a product would become successful. We as designers cannot work in a vacuum. The entrepreneur has to want it; the people at the top of the company have to want it…What’s missing today is that these kind of entrepreneurs are no longer there. Today there is only Apple and to a lesser extent Sony, but not to the same degree as was the case with Olivetti and Braun, or Peter Behrens at AEG, or Herman Miller and Charles Eames, Florence Knoll with Saarinen and so on. These kinds of connections are missing today."    (Continued via Signal vs. Noise)    [Usability Resources]

Dieter vs. Apple Design

Cautions Cars & Cantankerous Kitchens

A preview of Don Normans new book ...

DRAFT: Chapter 1 of The Design of Future Things
Copyright © 2006 Donald A. Norman. All rights reserved.
Cautious Cars and Cantankerous Kitchens: How Machines Take Control

I’m driving my car through the winding mountain roads between my home and the Pacific Ocean. Sharp curves with steep drop-offs amidst the towering redwood trees and vistas of the San Francisco Bay on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other. A wonderful drive, the car responding effortlessly to the challenge, negotiating sharp turns with grace. At least, that’s how I am feeling. But then, I notice that my wife is tense: she’s scared. Her feet are braced against the floor, her shoulders hunched, her arms against the dashboard. “What’s the matter?” I ask, “calm down, I know what I’m doing.”

But now imagine another scenario. I’m driving my car through the same winding, mountain road. But then, I notice that my car is tense: it’s scared. The seats straighten, the seat belts tighten, and then the dashboard starts beeping at me. I notice the brakes are being applied, automatically. “Oops,” I think, “I’d better slow down.”

Do you think example of a frightened automobile fanciful? Let me assure you it isn’t. The behavior described in the story already exists on some high-end, luxury automobiles. And even more control over driving exists in some cars and is being planned. Stray out of your lane and some cars balk: beeping at you, perhaps vibrating the wheel or the seat, or flashing lights in the side mirrors. One car company is experimenting with partial correction, partially steering the car back into its own lane. Turn signals were designed to tell other drivers that you were going to turn or switch lanes. Today, they are the means for telling your own car that you really do wish to turn or change lanes: “Hey, don’t try to stop me,” the turn signal signals to your car, “I’m doing this on purpose.”

I once was a member of a panel of consultants, advising a major automobile manufacturer. Each panel member started with short talk, explaining his or her point of view. I told the stories above, about how I would respond differently to my wife and to my automobile. “How come,” asked fellow panel member Sherry Turkle, an MIT Professor who is both an authority on the relationship of people to technology and a friend, “how come you listen to your car more than your wife?”

“How come?” indeed. Sure, I can defend myself and make up rational explanations, but those all miss the point. As we start giving the objects around us more initiative, more intelligence, and more emotions and personality, what does this do to the way we relate with one another? What has happened to our society when we listen to our machines more than people? This question is the driving force behind this book.

The answer is complex, but in the end, it comes down to communication. When my wife complains, I can ask her why and then either agree with her or try to reassure her, but also through understanding her concerns, modify my driving so that she is not so bothered. When my car complains, what can I do? There is no way to communicate with my car: all the communication is one way.

This is the way with machines. Machines have less power than humans, so they have more power. Contradictory? Yup, but oh so true."    (Continued via jnd.org)    [Usability Resources]

Horse and Rider

Why they don't upgrade (and what to do about it)

How people feel about products they use and why they don't upgrade ...

"Why is it that--after we bust our ass to produce a shiny new version of our product--users are so slow to upgrade? WE know it's better. WE know it'll help them kick ass in new ways. WE know that if they stick with their current version, they'll never truly become passionate...because they'll never touch that high level of expertise where things get really really interesting. But there our users sit, apparently content to hang out in the "competent" zone, happy they no longer suck, but unmotivated to push forward. That's a problem.

And I'm not talking about the financial side. Even if we make no money off our upgrades, we still want our users learning and growing and improving and reaching for new challenges and doing more complex, cool things. (Assuming you ultimately want passionate users, which if you're reading this blog...)

So why are users dragging their feet? Why aren't they desperate to get the latest and greatest spanky new release? Conventional wisdom says it's because of the expense, or that users fear change, or that users are simply too lazy. But there's a simpler explanation:

People don't upgrade because they don't want to move back into the "Suck Zone."
They worked too damn hard to reach a level of competence and the thought of sinking back down--however briefly--into that awful state they clawed their way out of--is too unpleasant. We've trained users to fear upgrades. Raise your hand if you've ever installed an upgrade only to find yourself back in that confused I-have-no-frickin'-clue-where-they-put-that-dialog-box state? Raise your hand if you felt the upgrade just wasn't worth it, even though you knew that the way you did things in the current version was pretty much an inefficient hack. Raise your hand if you felt intimidated and maybe even a bit humiliated that after upgrading you could no longer do some of the simplest things.

It's not usually the upgrade that sucks. It's that the upgrade makes the users suck. Or at least makes them feel that it's their fault for not instantly getting it."    (Continued via Creating Passionate Users)    [Usability Resources]

Featuritis Curve

Weaving Usability and Cultures: Evolving, User Interface standards

Need for UI standards over lifecycle ...

"User Interface, one of the widely discussed subject these days after search engines. Every software development team either hires a UI specialist or consults an expert to design the next best killer application. As more and more users log onto the net, user base tends to grow and new technologies evolve, web developers and designers are left with very little time to cope up with new techniques in user interface. Thus a new wave of User Interface issues has occurred in the software development life cycle.

User Interface puzzle – Last winter I was puzzled with a situation wherein I was asked to determine the user guidelines and standards for the company that I was consulting, had to dig deep into the problem to find out which user interface best suited them. I guess as a developer, analyst or UI specialist one would commonly come across in one’s project life cycle, here is how I kept myself abreast with new technology and UI standards.

Analyze current market trends in Usability – The first step before you can start in order to determine the technique and standards to adapt, look around in the market for latest trends and here is what I found from Microsoft to Apple it was all about usability, every new application that is designed are “user centric” or “user friendly”.

Apple’s huge success of iPod could be determined as part of its user friendly mp3 music player, while rest of the competitors are still tweaking their units to gain market share.
Apple’s new OS (Operating system) Tiger, is another good example to understand users and developing the user interface with right technology which changed the new look and feel of the most awaited version of Microsoft, Longhorn."    (Continued via uiGarden)    [Usability Resources]

OSX

The Importance of User Experience- the Poster!

Displaying user experience principals in a poster ...

"Here's a poster that reflects some thoughts about user experience...all of the bottom row items (outcomes of positive user experiences) in the poster are based on empirical research. Let's review some of that research, a brief glimpse at the science behind what the poster is communicating...

About the poster project and translations into many languages below all these quotes (bottom of the post)...

Elements that contribute to a positive user experience: (the bottom row of the poster)

Loyalty > Trust > Perceived Credibility > Profitability > Intent to Return > Intent to Purchase > User Satisfaction > Word of Mouth

A few quotes that I think summarize the research nicely:

Loyalty
Trust
Perceived Credibility"    (Continued via Demystifying Usability)    [Usability Resources]

UX Poster

The Lifecycle of Design: Part 4

Part 4 of the series on design lifecycles.

Joshua Porter (me)
Luke, you’re right to ask: “Why not have something that functions well and has great usability?”. We should, of course. I’m talking priorities here, and if we had to put one ahead of the other, that’s where I would put them. There is a parallel in furniture making…the Shakers, who build amazing furniture, center their philosophy around this same idea:

If it is not useful or necessary, free yourself from imagining that you need to make it.
If it is useful and necessary, free yourself from imagining that you need to enhance it by adding what is not an integral part of its usefulness or necessity.
If it is both useful and necessary and you can recognize and eliminate what is not essential, then go ahead and make it as beautifully as you can.
(more on Ward Cunningham’s site - creator of Wiki)

But back to the definition problem, I think we’re getting to the crux of our differences. I’m definitely taking a broader view of design than you are. Let me explain why.

I don’t buy that the practice of design is only the addition of context and hierarchy to content (though that is definitely part of design). I think that content is more important to design than that, just like wood is to furniture. The choice of content, choice of language, choice of wording, are all design decisions. I say this because they all affect how well the design works for people. They are part of the designed artifact.

Imagine for a moment that the Challenger information was in Russian. Wouldn’t changing it to English be a design decision? I think so. This is changing the context of use. So the very content exists in context, so to speak. Taking away content is a very valid way to improve a design. What Tufte did is that he improved the design dramatically by taking away content and clarifying what was left. It was poorly designed before, failing to communicate what was necessary. It became much easier to digest, and is better design."    (Continued via Bokardo)    [Usability Resources]

How Indexes Support Good Information Scent

Using indexes to enhance information scent ...

"Information foraging is a theory which describes adaptive strategies users employ to find information. Information “scent” is the idea of using environmental cues to reinforce information the user is seeking (Pirolli, 2003). This idea is what helps the user know if they are going in the direction towards their information goals, or if they need to back up or begin their search over. Think of it as the game of “hot and cold” applied to information seeking behavior.

The strength of information scent could be described as the level of confidence the user has regarding if they are on the right path to their information goal. The length of the path is less important than if the user thinks they are going in the right direction and will eventually find what they are looking for (Porter, 2003). This debunks the “three-click-rule” which is popular in many web design circles as a design philosophy. The fear is that the user would become frustrated and give up looking for something after 3 clicks, and so many information architectures and navigation schemes are developed around this rule. In reality, as Porter shows in his study, the user is more frustrated by unsuccessful searching than the actual number of clicks it took them.

As a design pattern, content indexes on the home page are a useful way to reinforce scent before a user has to make a decision to click. Indexes are the first level of reinforcing information scent during information foraging. Labels activate the user’s memory about a concept and retrieve information necessary for decision making. The additional information provided by indexes reinforce a concept by spreading activation (Anderson, 2000) to related terms, broadening the association of a concept within a specific context. This is very useful for information which may be ambiguous in meaning, specialized and technical, or very broad in many senses but specific to this context. In usability testing, I have often heard users describe indexes as “previews” to section content because they provide them with enough information to help them decide if that is the direction they want to go."    (Continued via obso1337.org)    [Usability Resources]

The Lifecycle of Design: Part 3

This is part 3 of a series on design lifecycles ...

"Joshua Porter
First off, I think that Craigslist and MySpace exposing their full content is a design decision…maybe one made without much thought but a design decision nonetheless. If *all* sites simply exposed their content to the world like these two sites, we would probably be better off. So many successful things have come from happy accidents that it doesn’t bother me to think that MySpace might be a happy accident…until you read how relentless they are about updating the site with useful things. Kathy Sierra’s talks more to this.

Del.icio.us and Craigslist are well designed because they solve a problem for users. Del.icio.us is great for bookmarking and Craigslist is great for personals. Although it seems obvious after the fact that bookmarks and personals are compelling…it didn’t happen in a vacuum. Someone made the decisions to expose this content, and designed a system in which people could add such value. The sheer simplicity of the idea is obscuring the sophistication of it. That’s a recurring theme: the best ideas are the most obvious ones (in hindsight).

You’ve made a distinction between compelling content and good design. I would argue that you’re taking compelling content for granted. Most people would kill for the compelling content on those two sites! As content is king, if you have compelling content you’re well on your way to the big time. Much of the energy in the design world is now about user-generated content…actually getting people to use a system over time and add their content to it.

If design is how something works, it is impossible to separate content from design. Design is not simply the presentation of the content, it is how the content works to solve the problem of users. That means that content isn’t this black box…choosing the right content makes or breaks the design in many cases.

We’re highlighting a common problem here. Web designers are often tasked with the presentation of content without having any role in what content they’re presenting. But if design is how something works, then it’s all design. Both the selection of the content and the presentation of it."    (Continued via Bokardo)    [Usability Resources]

Picking the Brains of the Institute of Design

A good set of papers on context-sensitive design ...

"The Institute of Design (ID) is a rich source of papers on user-centred design. ID's research goal is to 'develop methods that will help organizations gain a more detailed and relevant understanding of users' increasingly complex lives, and drive the development of innovative and humane products and business concepts'.

Their work is set in the context of embedding computing into physical products, and the ability to create value by connecting products and services via networks to increase exponentially the variety of offerings a company can create.

'At the same time, organizations have a decreased ability to predict how consumers will use these new offerings. Twenty years ago it was possible to predict the general patterns of how people worked, learned, played, managed family life, and kept healthy. Today people have many more lifestyle options, making the old methods of market segmentation and demographic studies less reliable.'

In particular, one of the research programmes is Context-Sensitive Design."    (Continued via Usability News)    [