HHS and GSA Announce Updated Web Design and Usability Guidelines

New usability guidelines published ...

"HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt today announced the publication of the 2006 edition of the popular Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines. Based on the latest research, the Guidelines now include over 40 new or updated guidelines and have become a primary resource for government and other Web communicators. The updated guide is being published by HHS in partnership with the General Services Administration (GSA).

... Since their introduction in 2003, the Guidelines book has been widely used by government agencies and the private sector, implemented in academic curriculum, and translated into several foreign languages. By updating this resource, the federal government reinforces its commitment to making U.S. Government Web sites the best in the world.

"GSA is pleased to be an active partner in identifying and delivering government solutions that improve how citizens interact with government," GSA Administrator Lurita Doan said. "This guide contributes to the growing need to establish and use standards of excellence for Web design and usability."

This resource now contains 209 guidelines for effective Web design and usability and covers a wide range of Web site design issues, including home page design, page and site navigation, graphics and images, Web content organization, and effective Web content writing. Each guideline includes a "Strength of Evidence" rating that indicates how much research there is to support that guideline. It also includes a "Relative Importance" rating that shows how important that guideline is to the overall success of a Web site."    (Continued via News Blaze)    [Usability Resources]

The Future Was Staring Us in the Face

The process of creating the iPod. How did Steve Jobs do that? ...

"The iPod turned five yesterday and much ink has been spilled in the last week about the product’s success, its ubiquity and impact on Apple. The state of the digital music market at the time of the iPod’s introduction has been relatively ignored though. It’s hard to imagine its embryonic state in 2001 from the perspective of 2006 and five years of hindsight. At the time, everything in the space, from devices to software to services, was up for grabs as various industries grappled with the problem of creating a new model for the music business. Several products already existed, but no one had quite nailed it before Apple came along.

One of the most remarkable things about the iPod’s introduction was the clearly articulated argument that Steve Jobs made when it was introduced. It’s preserved on YouTube and truly worth a look. Jobs’ argument is carefully constructed and compelling on many levels. However, aside from his famed “reality distortion field,” the argument adheres to basic business principles and provides an extremely useful template for the introduction of new products and services into emerging or underdeveloped markets.

Describe the Target Market:

On deciding where to innovate next, Apple chose music. Why?

“We love music, and it’s always good to do something that you love. More importantly, music is a part of everyone’s life. Music has been around forever; it will always be around. It is not a speculative market. Because it is a part of everyone’s life, it’s a very large target market all around the world. It knows no boundaries.”

Although I’m sure he (and his team) examined it in great detail, Jobs stays away from hard numbers such as demographics, market size, dollars spent and average music library size. During the pitch, he keeps the focus on where music fits in people’s lives, not where it fits into Apple’s bottom line.

Know What You Are Not Going to Do:

It’s a given that the digital music player market wasn’t exactly saturated in 2001, but Jobs’ back of the napkin analysis of the opportunity space was clever in its adherence to simplicity. He compared traditional CD players, Flash-based units, Mp3 CD units and hard drive jukeboxes on a simple price per song basis. Again, a basic analysis but one that illuminates the choices available to Apple. More importantly, Jobs was clear about what Apple wasn’t going to do. “We studied all of these and that’s where we want to be.”

State Clearly What You Are Going to Do, Part 1:

Jobs described where the iPod fits into Apple’s product portfolio in one simple sentence:
“iMac, iBook, iPod.” Having established it as part of Apple’s consumer-focused offering, he offered why Apple could go there:

“No one has found the recipe for digital music. Not only do we think we can find the recipe, but we think the Apple brand is going to be fantastic because people trust the Apple brand to get their great digital electronics from."    (Continued via adaptive path)    [Usability Resources]

At 30, crypto still lacks usability, experts say

Usabiltiy now the barrier to employing cryptography for comuters ...

"Government controls held back cryptography in the past, but today, it's usability that blocks adoption, a panel of experts said Thursday.

At an event here celebrating 30 years of public key cryptography, several top minds in the field gathered for a trip down memory lane. Over the years, public key cryptography has grown from an idea in a paper published by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, both present at the event, to technology used in everyday transactions on the Web.

... "There has been a complete flip recognizing that encryption is here to help us," Boneh said.

Yet cryptography hasn't become as commonly used as some might have hoped, the panel noted. Web transactions might be encrypted, but a lot of data and communications still are not.

The issue, Snow said, is products. "The remaining issue that is big today on the plate is lack of quality in the products," he said, adding that security products are poorly designed and often not in a secure way.

... "In the early years, we as an industry could blame the system for controlling the pace of innovation because the government was throwing up roadblocks," Ozzie said. "At this moment in time, it's laziness on the part of the industry in terms of not embracing architecture and the importance of human interface in design of secure systems."    (Continued via CNET News)    [Usability Resources]

Tactile passwords could stop ATM 'shoulder-surfing'

Using tactile passwords as a UI for security ...

"Entering passwords using a Braille-like device could prevent snoopers from stealing sensitive computer codes, such as ATM numbers, researchers say.

Computer engineers at Queen's University Belfast, UK, developed the tactile security system – a mouse with a grid of 16 mechanically-controlled pins that sit beneath the first and second finger of a user's hand.

The system was originally developed for visually impaired computer users. Its designers claim the system is more secure than a conventional keyboard as it is impossible for anyone to spy on a user's keystrokes.

To use the system a user moves the mouse over a grid of nine blank squares displayed on a computer screen. Rolling over each square causes a different pattern to appear under their fingertips.

A user is given a sequence of tactons to remember and simply clicks on the squares that match their pass-pattern. The sequence of tactons and squares is randomised each time, making it impossible for anyone to spy on a user as they click."    (Continued via New Scientist Tech)    [Usability Resources]

Ease-of-use dogs Moto

Dealing with usability problems after product release ...

"Three quarters of RAZR users would not buy another Motorola handset because they are difficult to use, according to a poll by Mobile. A survey of consumers who had bought Motorola products found many are still struggling with usability.

Motorola has responded by saying that its recently released KRZR handsets feature five improvements to the user interface, made in light of feedback from the RAZR. Mobile carried out a snapshot survey of Motorola users, and the results suggest the manufacturer faces an uphill challenge to convince its existing customers to stick with it for future purchases.

In the survey of 55 Motorola customers, 78% said they wouldn't buy a Motorola handset again, with the majority citing problems with usability. The figure was slightly higher among first-time Motorola users. As many as 85% of the 48 first-time Motorola users in the poll want to switch to another manufacturer.

A spokesman for Motorola said: 'It's not a case of anyone hiding behind that [usability problems]. It has been a very strong perception. That is changing. The challenge [for us is to convince consumers] to try the KRZR and RIZR and see the improvements that have been made and see how much easier they are to use.'

Five improvements have been put in place on the new KRZR handset based on feedback from the RAZR, with fewer clicks to important functions, easier messaging, faster access to contacts and voice calling.

The improvements in usability come as new marketing director Simon Thompson launches a campaign emphasising that the new devices are 'easy to use'.

The sample survey was dominated by RAZR owners, who made up almost half of all those asked. The survey revealed that 80% of RAZR users wanted to jump ship to another manufacturer with their next purchase.

The spokesman added: 'Give it ten minutes – that's as much as it needs. There's definitely a perception out there. It may have been true in the past but we've gone a long way in changing that reality.'

Motorola has streamlined the process of accessing messages and taking photos on its new handsets. Among those who said they would buy Motorola again, four respondents independently volunteered that it took some time to get used to the Motorola system, adding that the usability was difficult initially, but they were comfortable after an initial period."    (Continued via Mobile)    [Usability Resources]

Book Review: Prioritizing Web Usability

Review of Jakob Nielsen's new book ...

"Prioritizing Web Usability is the solemn title of web usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s latest book, which he wrote with Hoa Loranger. It is a useful book, but its style is as po-faced as the title.

The fundamental idea is to highlight and prioritise the most important elements so that a website can achieve its objectives. Since Nielsen’s earlier book, Designing Web Usability, the internet world has changed. Users have become more familiar with it and the technology in use has improved. So his new book also acts as an update to his earlier guidelines.

An early admonishment to website designers is: “If people can’t or won’t use a feature, it might as well not exist.” Like many of the exhortations in the book, this is a common-sense observation, but how many of us think that way? The book is more than mere exhortations though, and provides plenty of practical guidance.

... This book is a good replacement for its predecessor and, for Nielsen fans, an essential update."    (Continued via Information World Review)    [Usability Resources]

Prioritizing Web Usability



Check-out more books at Usernomics.

Prototyping beyond the sunshine scenario

The use of prototypes to see if deviations work ...

"Prototypes often model one flow of interaction – the path that users are most likely to take. But when we create interaction designs with dynamic and complex flows, we often need to include deviations from the sunshine scenarios to see whether they work. In this article, we'll look at how to do this Visio and Axure.

The days are long over where the hardest decision designers of web solutions had to make was whether the navigation should go in the top or to the left. Today, we are being tasked with more and more complex design challenges, such as checkouts at online shops, reservations systems, product comparisons, self-service systems, product configurators, and so on.

The flow of interaction in such designs is more dynamic and complex than the page-to-page flow of traditional websites. And the more dynamic and complex, the more likely it is that people can't find their way through the maze. Therefore, dynamic flows require close attention from designers.

Exceptions and variations
There are two reasons why a user might experience a deviation from the sunshine scenario: exceptions and variations.

Exceptions are scenarios where people do things that the backend system can't process. We might for example mistype our password when we try to sign in at Amazon.com."    (Continued via GUUUI)    [Usability Resources]

Error message at Amazon.com

A petition to bring back buttons on phones?

The need for haptic feedback in button pushing ...

"Sometime about 2-3 years ago, the saturated consumer electronics industry, hungry for new but matured technology, has been exploring what we designers call “static” buttons. These “static” buttons are essentially non-mechanical (ie non-moving) and use electronic circuitry as a means to detect triggering contact.

Function or yet another fad?

I must admit when I first learnt about it, I was a big fan and jump on the band wagon in a big way. A design that I submitted to the 2006 Red-Dot Concept award had also used “static” buttons. At that time, I sat back and laughed at my cleverness…

However these days I’m not so sure, especially going through hindsight 30/30. I am starting to feel such non-mechanical buttons actually reduce the user experience rather than enhance it. Often because these static buttons are not used in a correct context and it lacks the most important thing a tactile and haptic feedback.

Before we go on lets take a quick look at the way these technology work. Currently from what I know there are 3 technologies that drive non-mechanical buttons they are Electrostatic, Pressure sensitive and Touch Screen buttons.

Electrostatic buttons are similar to the ones found in lifts. The way it works is the human finger closes the circuit thus triggering the button. Thus if you wear gloves it wont work. On of the big problems is when you have housings place in front of the buttons. If the housing is “charge” in any way it will trigger it.

Pressure sensitive buttons and dials operate like the iPod jog dial or the B&O BeoCenter 2. The circuitry senses very slight pressure on a sensitive plate and thus triggers the button. This would also mean putting it in your pocket could trigger it. This is a much more reliable technology but slightly more expensive than electrostatic buttons."    (Continued via Design Sojourn)    [Usability Resources]

BenQ Black Box

Bill Moggridge on Prototyping

New prototyping book available in PDF ...

"Yesterday, I had the pleasure of hearing Bill Moggridge outline some of the key themes in his new book Designing Interactions. The book features interviews with 40 people that have helped shape our interactions with technology.

When asked to provide the key themes that underlined the success of each of these stories, Moggridge pointed to the fact that each team almost naturally followed an iterative prototyping approach to bringing their ideas into the world. For example:

“Larry describes a process of prototyping and user testing on a twenty-four hour cycle, by working fourteen-hour shifts with a partner. When he was working with Bill Atkinson at Apple to define the interaction design for Lisa.” –Video interview with Larry Tesler

According to Moggridge, it wasn’t an autocratic leader (Steve Jobs, Walt Disney), or any specific methodology that enabled good design. Rather, the most common factor was a “culture of excellence” that permeated the entire organization.

Another point of interest was Moggridge’s interview with Terry Winograd where Winograd explained the three main ways we interact with the world: conversation, manipulation, and locomotion. The initial explosion of the World Wide Web promised great advances in conversation and manipulation but ended up delivering mostly on locomotion (people went from site to site). The next generation (call it Web 2.0 if you must) does a much better job of enabling conversation (blogs, social networking) and manipulation (Web applications).

Moggridge releasing is a PDF of his book each week for the next 12 weeks on the companion Website. If you can’t wait, you can pick up a copy of the full book & DVD today."    (Continued via Functioning Form)    [Usability Resources]

Best practices for the Mobile Web

Best practices for building mobile Web designs ...

"As I have occasionally mentioned (in The freedom of mobile Internet access, for instance), I frequently use my mobile phone to browse the Web. It works really well on modern sites that are accessible, use semantic markup, and separate semantic and presentational markup. It works reasonably well on many other sites, and is a real hassle on most sites.

There are differing opinions on what is the best way of catering to people using mobile phones and other handheld devices to access the Web. I believe the One Web principle is worth working towards, while others think handhelds and desktop computers should get different content. I personally much prefer getting the same content whether I am using my phone, my iBook, or my desktop Mac.

Anyway, for anybody interested in reading up on current best practices for building websites that will work well on mobile devices, the W3C document Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 (currently in Candidate Recommendation status) contains plenty of good advice.

There is a free-standing Summary of Statements that outlines the advice given in the Best Practices document. If you take a look at that document you will notice that lots of the advice will also improve accessibility in other contexts. A few examples (there are many more):

• Link target ID: Clearly identify the target of each link.
• Pop ups: Do not cause pop-ups or other windows to appear and do not change the current window without informing the user.
• Scrolling: Limit scrolling to one direction, unless secondary scrolling cannot be avoided."    (Continued via 456 Berea Street)    [Usability Resources]

We Got Sick of Hearing About Design & China, So we Got on a Plane and Went There

Design and usability in China ...

"There has certainly been a great deal of speculation lately regarding the real or perceived rise of Chinese industrial design. We say “perceived rise” to emphasize that their impending world domination in this field is not a foregone conclusion, despite the frequent flurries of listserve chatter and design-conference panel discussions supporting such a notion.

We would agree that China’s entrée into the global design community demands careful attention as the stakes are high—remember when US factories weren’t filled with yuppies and their Sub-Zero refrigerators (made in China)? But so much of what we have been hearing smacks of alarmism and over-reaching conjecture. We were dogged by the question of what is really going on with Chinese industrial design—education and practice—so we decided to go there and get a glimpse for ourselves.

Spanning May and June, 2005, we spent three weeks traveling in China—starting in Shanghai, then 1,000 miles west to Chengdu (Szechuan province), and back east to Beijing. In addition to meeting with Chinese industrial designers and even western entrepreneurs probing the mainland design market, we had the good fortune of being invited to lecture at one of the most established industrial design departments in the country—Southern Yangtze University, School of Design, located 80 miles east of Shanghai. (They were extremely gracious hosts, and we are grateful for all of their efforts.)

So we thought we would share some of our impressions with Core77 fans."    (Continued via uiGarden)    [Usability Resources]

Companies That Make Hard-To-Use Products Incur Higher Support Costs, Spend More on Rework, and Have Less Satisfied Customers

Usability as a means of reducing costs ...

"Research and Markets has announced the addition of Usability Success Stories to their offering.

People spend increasing amounts of time and effort interacting with complex hardware and software products. Some of the products we interact with are easy to learn and easy to remember. Some are even a pleasure to use. Others are hard to learn, hard to use, and frustrate us at every turn. But it is not just the user that pays the cost in such cases.

Poor usability also imposes significant costs on product producers. Companies that make hard-to-use products incur higher support costs, spend more on rework, and have less satisfied customers.

These outcomes can be avoided by applying the techniques of usability engineering and user-centred design (UCD) during product development. This book shows how usability and UCD practitioners do this by studying users needs and abilities, designing the product accordingly, and verifying the design through additional testing with users.

Despite the positive return on investment for usability engineering activities, many organizations view usability engineering as a non-critical part of the product development process. This book seeks to change this by relating a number of cases where usability engineering contributed significantly to the solution of a business problem. Evidence is drawn from experiences within a range of private and public sector organizations showing how usability work can best be organized and executed within a business environment. The organizational factors that facilitate or impede the application of usability engineering are also discussed. The book clearly explains the barriers to be overcome as well as highlighting the factors promoting success.

A wide range of applications are covered, including web-based e-commerce, medical devices and software, process control management systems, financial services applications, consumer desktop applications and interactive voice response systems.

Usability Success Stories provides a valuable guide for business managers and technical staff as well as for practitioners within the field itself."    (Continued via Media Workstation)    [Usability Resources]

Making computing a people science

Intel pushing the boundries of human-centric products ...

"Intel’s ethnographers (also referred to as social scientists) believe that technology has to cater to human values of emotion and family more than just computing requirements. “Human beings fundamentally do not care about technology. What they care about are the emotions they feel when they use a product to achieve an objective at work or family life. As a technology company, Intel wants to push the boundaries and think about how we can make our products deliver on this aspect,” said Herman D’Hooge, Innovation Strategist, Platform Architecture and Solutions Division.

Ethnography, the branch of anthropology that provides scientific description of individual human societies will therefore help the Intel team of scientists study human relationships and come up with ways in which technology become a part of enhancing human interaction. “You have to look high up on the scale by looking at human interaction. So Intel is taking a top down approach and understanding the customer first, instead of the technology,” D’Hooge added.

For the company, this also means that fresh ideas can spring up from almost anywhere, which explains why Intel has derived a value chain of research activities that helps the staffers get from stage one to product design and launch. The company also supports a core team of globally dispersed ethnographers, social scientists, interaction designers, architects, engineers and technologists, who focus on studying human interaction and the role of technology.

“We have formulated a model where we have the human values right at the top and cascading down to human needs, user experiences, solutions, systems, platforms, subsystems and the core technology ingredients. All projects need to be evaluated at all levels,” he said."    (Continued via CPILive.net)    [Usability Resources]

Are we going to take the tide?

The push toward user interface design in India ...

"This is a very important phase in the world of User Interface (UI) design.
More and more software product companies have begun to realize that they no longer have the luxury of designing just a functional differentiator and remaining ahead of their competitors, since almost all competitors today have similar products. This simple and plain rationale is now becoming a reason for companies to push for UI design. (Personally, I am surprised how little we learn from our environment since this reasoning had been valid for products like cars, washing machines, TVs and other products since a long time ago 'it just took such a long time for the software product guys to understand this from their hardware counterparts' better late than never though.)

While the above should mean good news for UI designers, there is a lot that UI designers need to figure out before they can take up the opportunity. The traditional waterfall model of 'sequential' user-centered design is a dead process. With faster release-to-market cycles and agile programming methods, the rather long and sequential design process needs to be re-modeled.

There are two ways to look at it:

Route 1: If you want to align the user-centered design process with the software process, then, it becomes necessary that you improvise on the user-centered process you work with. You might want to keep the user at the center of your mind (figuratively speaking) while designing, but you will probably not get time to keep the user right at the beginning of the process, since the engineering team will just not wait for the one month while you do this and then bring them your wireframes a weekend before the company wants to release the product to the market. Practicality calls you to be 'agile'enough to realize that you need to spend more time in using your scattered user-experiences from other assignments and start designing upfront while conducting your user studies in parallel to refine these iteratively. It's difficult (it might involve an 18-hour job while getting paid for just 8) and it requires very careful execution."    (Continued via HCI Vistas)    [Usability Resources]

Over the wall 2-stage design: What?

Objection to the 2-stage design concept ...

"So last night Dan Saffer of Adaptive Path gave a solid talk for the NYC IxDA monthly event and even demonstrated through exercise about the need for us to change the ways we communicate our designs. At the end of the talk someone asked about how the methods he was describing, namely using animations may be stepping on the toes of their visual designer counterparts.

Personally, I was stunned to hear such a comment. But first let me fess up. I’m an innie working on software and not web sites. i work on hosted applications (at the moment). It has been a long time since I’ve been in any environment where there were different resources for visual design and interaction design or IA. (For me it is IxD). I haven’t worked in an agency/consultancy environment for a long time where graphic design took precedence over interaction design or IA.

But that being said, after 7+ years of solid UX understanding why was such a comment not only made, but also followed up on by so many nodding heads. Am I that out of it?

For me, it has been about collaboration. When I have had separate roles for visual and Ix design available to me, it was never about handing over the wall. It was always about 2 (or more people) working in unison towards a common goal of making a holistic design work. We work together and each takes over driving the craft as their roles allow for that technical expertise. Each though shares a vision or tries to create a shared vision."    (Continued via Engage!)    [Usability Resources]

Conference Report: The Web and Beyond

A summary of several keynote addresses from the Dutch chapter of SIGCHI ...

"In the beautiful surroundings of the Pathé Tuschinski Theatre in Amsterdam, the Dutch chapter of SIGCHI—SIGCHI.nl, now rebranded as CHINederland.nl—on June 8th, 2006, held its 10th annual conference, which was entitled The Web and Beyond, as shown in Figure 1. The conference focused on the challenges and opportunities Web 2.0 presents to the field of user experience design.

... Keynote Address: The Brave New World: Usability Challenges of Web 2.0
Speaker: Jared Spool

characteristically humorous and entertaining way, Jared Spool spoke about the usability challenges of Web 2.0 applications.

According to Jared, shown in Figure 2, many RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) suffer greatly from usability issues, but “we do not know how to design for this!” he said. For example, lots of people still have a hard time understanding the concept and usage of RSS feeds. And what about the usability of APIs? Ultimately, the user experience determines the success of Web 2.0 applications, not the technologies themselves.

Experience design has now become a boardroom conversation, but is the community ready to deliver? Jared posed this rhetorical question regarding whether the design community is ready to participate at the C-level management table."    (Continued via UXmatters)    [Usability Resources]

Web 2.0 Usability

Communicating Patterns

If you missed the five-part series on design patterns ...

"The second Design Patterns conversation between James Reffell, Bill Scott, Jenifer Tidwell, Martijn van Welie, and myself has wrapped up on the Yahoo! User Interface Blog. Here's a set of links to the complete dialog:

What’s the Best Way to Communicate Patterns?

Part one: Jenifer Tidwell
Part two: Luke Wroblewski
Part three: Bill Scott
Part four: Martijn van Welie
Part five: James Reffell"    (Continued via Functioning Form)    [Usability Resources]

Interfaces for People, Not Products

The need to draw from different disciplines such as information design and user interface design ...

"Without cooperation among designers of digital products, the proliferation of complex information systems can lead to unintended consequences—chiefly user fatigue, frustration, and the confusion that results from dealing with a host of variant user interfaces.

We can describe nearly every aspect of human life as a system—from the biology of our bodies to the houses in which we live, the documents we read, and the maps we navigate. Our lives comprise many systems, and information technology is making our interactions with these systems increasingly complex. Until recently, most people knew little about many of the systems they encountered and relied on specialists to help them navigate them. We have relied on doctors to understand how our bodies work, accountants to understand how our finances work, and contractors to understand how our homes work.

The Double-Edged Sword: The Informed Amateur As Expert Partner

The digitizing of information, the rapid rise of digital information systems, and increased access to those systems by a broad range of people have challenged the way in which we look at specialists and the roles they play. In many industries, specialists are no longer information gatekeepers, but rather system negotiators. For example, in the travel industry, agents provide value not by finding the best deals—which you can do yourself online—but by ensuring your trip goes smoothly. If you’re stuck at an airport after missing a connecting flight, you have someone to call."    (Continued via UXmatters)    [Usability Resources]

Current State of Web Design and Working on a Project - Shirley Kaiser Interview

The changing world of behind the scene Web design ...

"Digital Web: Last time we interviewed you was four years ago. What’s your opinion on the current climate of web standards and browsers?

Shirley Kaiser: From my vantage point, I see continued improvements and positive growth. For example, I see a much more open attitude toward web designers and developers at Microsoft via their IEBlog and related employee blogs. Web designers and developers can finally communicate directly with Microsoft browser developers; we can see for ourselves now that browser developers are paying attention, working hard at eliminating CSS bugs, and supporting more W3C CSS recommendations.

It matters that we can actually make a positive difference in improving the IE browser. As we all know, IE6 was stagnant for around five years or so, even though other browsers such as Firefox, Opera, and Safari kept on moving forward and improving. Now that IE7 is just released, I’m curious to see the impact. IE still has catching up to do, as the other main browsers are still ahead of them in terms of supporting W3C recommendations and browser features, but the gap is getting smaller.

DW: How has web design changed in the last five years in terms of what designers are doing better and what needs improving?

SK: I’ve seen tremendous growth in awareness of the benefits of CSS, and the importance of W3C recommendations, web standards, and accessibility.

On the other hand, I continue to see far too many professional sites that don’t allow for a browser’s fluidity and flexibility, that are confusing and tough to navigate, and that don’t provide sufficient, if any, helpful accessibility features. I also still see so many sites with incredibly bloated tables for layout and all those spacer gifs and font tags. Many are old designs—even some of my own clients still have old designs online that I created for them years ago like that. What bothers me more, though, are new designs like that."    (Continued via Digital Web Magazine)    [Usability Resources]

Why Design is on the HCI Agenda

The role of design in HCI will be theme for OZCHI 2006 ...

"It was not so long ago that designers of information technology just assumed, quite reasonably, that the technology we built would be used within some workplace to support, enable and/or mediate the work of those who would be using it. But these days, we no longer assume that the technology we design will be used within specific workplaces by a known and relatively unchanging group of users.

The development and increasing availability of mobile, wireless and sensing technologies have all enabled the growing private use of information and communication technologies and the rapid spread of interactive technologies to all kinds of use domains. This shift away from the constraints of technology design for traditional work environments is an exciting and at times confusing development for those of us committed to the various practices of HCI; we find ourselves building very different kinds of technology within very different kinds of design environments from those that initially defined HCI and its development. At the same time, practitioners and researchers within other long established design traditions such as architecture, graphic and product design are increasingly designing interactive technologies as part of their routine practices within these design domains.

So, the theme of OZCHI 2006 to be held in Sydney in November is "Design: activities, artefacts and environments". This is the first OZCHI to focus on design as its theme. OZCHI 2006 is about how we do human-centred technology design and we sought contributions from those design approaches and traditions that have not always been central to Human-Computer Interaction in the past including: product design, built environments, new media and other areas where the design of interactive technology is practised."    (Continued via Usability News)    [Usability Resources]

Productivity and Screen Size

Productivity from using large monitors ...

"A study of the benefits of big monitors fails on two accounts: it didn't test realistic tasks, and it didn't test realistic use. Productivity is a key argument for workplace usability, but you must measure it carefully.

In my column on how to design websites for ever-bigger screens, I mentioned that Apple had published a study of the productivity impact of big monitors. I didn't believe in Apple's methodology, so I didn't discuss the study further, but -- since it has now gotten significant press coverage -- I'll remedy this deficiency.

A prominent article about Apple's study reports, for example, that "cutting and pasting cells from Excel spreadsheets resulted in a 51.31% productivity gain -- a task that took 20.7 seconds on the larger monitor versus 42.6 seconds on the smaller screen."

First, let me note that reducing task time from 42.6 seconds to 20.7 seconds is actually a productivity gain of 105%, not 51%. Productivity is measured by how much value a worker produces per hour. With a small-screen task-time of 42.6 seconds, users can cut-paste 85 times in an hour, whereas with a large-screen task time of 20.7 seconds, they can cut-paste 174 times in an hour. In other words, the user's output increases from 85 to 174, meaning that big-screen users paste 105% more cells into their spreadsheet for each hour worked.

(As an analogy, assume that General Motors improved a factory so that 174 cars -- rather than their standard 82 -- rolled off assembly lines every hour. In that case, we'd say that productivity had improved by 105%, because the company would be getting more than twice as much output from the same number of workers.)

However, it doesn't matter what the exact number is, because it's irrelevant. Measurement studies are tricky to get right, and this study was wrong in so many ways that its numbers are meaningless."    (Continued via Alertbox)    [Usability Resources]

Design Pattern Conversation: What’s the Best Way to Communicate Patterns? Part Five

Part 5 on design patterns ...

"I’m constantly amazed at the power of design patterns to communicate. I’ve found that a well-described pattern can both convey both a specific solution (which can help me solve a difficult design problem) and the core interaction principles that underly all good patterns (which can help make me a better designer).

While designers will probably always be the primary authors of and audience for design patterns, I’m finding more and more that they’re useful in communicating with all sorts of folks. These include not only the developers who are responsible for building our designs but also the business folks, product managers, and other non-designers. There’s also a big difference between talking to other designers inside an organization (as with eBay or Yahoo’s internal pattern libraries) and talking to a more general design audience (as with books or the public libraries).

The core pieces of information – What, Use When, Why, How, and Examples – are necessary to tell the story of each pattern for all audiences, and Who becomes a big deal in an internal library. Users of an internal library might also find links to internal design standards and specifications useful, as well as a list of places where the pattern appears. Additionally, as Bill points out, if the pattern will be used by a specific developer audience, the How and Examples might add sample code and implementation details. Since patterns aren’t exactly built in stone, it’s also helpful to add things like ratings, discussions, links to similar patterns, and the like.

Once you’ve added all these additional pieces of information you have something that’s grown well beyond just a design library – and that’s OK as long as it works for the intended audience, and as long as those first core pieces are in place!"    (Continued via Yahoo! User Interface Blog)    [Usability Resources]

BBC talks to Apple's Wozniak about Computers for Real People

An interesting MP3 podcast interview with Steve Wozniak ...

"BBC Radio FiveLive's Simon Mayo spoke to Steve Wozniak, the designer of the first Apple PC, last week. The interview is still avaiable at the moment on the website (linked below). Caught at London's Science Museum (the programme also looks at the new "Game On" exhibition there), Wozniak is on fine, user-centred, form.

He touches on interface design: he was aware that calculators had a more human-understandable interface than computers. 'I said: why don't I make the computer the same way as we make our calculators...?' Every computer since the Apple I has been built with a keyboard.'

He looks at organisations and innovation. And then he moves on to the rate of technological change. 'OK, right now the number of gadget-type projects, everything that has a computer in, is so huge, so huge. But which are the major, major steps? The computer and how we use it in our lives doesn't change that much in just one, two, three... even five years. We pretty much have our computer life figured out. We pretty much know even what we are going to be doing with it five years from now.

'Whereas there was a time when things were changing so drastically that every time you saw a new programme you said: "Oh my God, here is a new category of things we are going to do in our life!". It was shocking: revolution after revolution in the early days of personal computers. Nowadays Word is Word is Word, it's just improved a little.'"    (Continued via Usability News)    [Usability Resources]

Style, function and the imperfect cellphone

Needing a UI overhaul for cell phones ...

"It's changed the way we talk to each other. It's turned us into multi-taskers. It's taught us how to text. It's revolutionized our jobs by allowing us to work on the move. It's democratized the news media by enabling passers-by to photograph extraordinary events. It's given us access to the Internet, e-mail, music, social networks, a camera, clock, diary and phone - all in one tiny box.

No object has had as dramatic an impact on our lives in the past decade as the cellphone. Only the computer comes close. But more of us use a cellphone, and our relationship with it is more intimate. The cellphone is one of the handful of personal objects - like a watch - that we take with us almost everywhere.

So why are they so badly designed? And we're not talking about dodgy network service here, but the phones themselves.

Perhaps you don't think there's a problem. If you're gazing lovingly at your cellphone, marveling at how simple it is to use, how pleasing to look at and to touch, then, of course, you'll consider it to be well designed. Though I've yet to meet anyone who agrees with you. Few questions are more likely to elicit groans and complaints than asking people what they think of their cellphones.

When I put that question to friends last week, their responses - the repeatable ones - went roughly like this: "I bought it as the best of a bad bunch." "Why do phones with good software look awful, and vice versa?" "The software's impossible. It'd take hours to figure out how to use this phone." "Why do they break so many basic design rules?"

Sadly, I agree. After a glum trawl around various stores, I bought my latest cellphone, like all of its predecessors, not because I liked it, but because it was the only one of the over-styled, over- complicated devices that I didn't dislike.

... All this could change if a dynamic new player entered the market, and the likeliest contender to do so is Apple. It's an open secret that Apple has been considering plans to launch a cellphone. Let's call it the iPhone. Ever protective of its brand, Apple is unlikely to introduce the iPhone until it is convinced that it has the best possible product, which would involve rethinking everything about the cellphone and how it works, including the role of the networks."    (Continued via International Herald Tribune)    [Usability Resources]

Ms. Dewey: Taking cute too far

Making a search UI too self absorbed ...

"If you haven't seen Ms. Dewey, you will probably be hearing about her. She's trying to kill the memory of Jeeves, who you formerly asked. She's also a disaster as far as UI goes.

Built in Flash, Ms. Dewey is an antropomorphized search page that features an actressMs. Dewey is only slightly more pleasant than Scuzz the Rat in Microsoft Bob who apparently spent about 20 minutes in front of a green screen making chit-chat that loops as you contemplate your search and the results. She gets impatient, calls "Type something here," taps the screen and asks if anyone is out there, pouts (she's hot, so she can get away with it like Jeeves never could, a conceit that is sexist on innumerable levels), but mostly proves, as Google Blogoscoped put it, that she—the search interface—is "inhumanly dumb."

She takes a long time to load and forces you to endure a joke before searching.

Ms. Dewey also takes her sweet time getting results and displays them in a window smaller than the actress, which is fundamentally missing the point of search. The delay seems to be due to the system examining the result to contextualize the performance, as there are reportedly some Easter Egg responses to the most obvious juvenile searches, like "boobs." It's the worst kind of abuse of user interface design and user time.

Who wants a search engine that pouts? Who wants a search engine that, as you browse the results repeats imprecations for attention?

Didn't the developer realize that the Mute button included on the home page was a clear sign they'd made something annoying?

Ms. Dewey is the wrong way to go about building a better search engine. From a business standpoint, who seriously thinks that the brand can scale beyond idle curiousity—can they chain this woman to her green screen for all eternity? I don't think so, and I hate to imagine the results."    (Continued via ZDNet.com)    [Usability Resources]

Ms Dewey

Design Pattern Conversation: What’s the Best Way to Communicate Patterns? Part Four

Fourth in a series about design patterns ...

"Patterns communicate design solutions. Jenifer states that they communicate from “one designer to another”. Although this may be true, it may also be from designer to software developer or even to a client. As in any design problem you need to know your audience! What I have learned is that for all audiences the illustrations and examples are the most important element. They support the task of browsing through the collection for ideas and to understand in one glance what the pattern is about.

In the past people in the “pattern-enthusiasts-community” have long debated the structure and form of patterns. Jenifer and I have both taken a ‘liberal’ path and changed our formats several times over time when it seemed appropriate. What most patterns nowadays share is that they all try to answer the questions of “What?”, “Why?”, “When?” and “How?. And that is the most important thing of all.

Recently I have experimented with building a bridge to technical aspects of the patterns. This work has done with Eelke Folmer who was doing his Ph.D. on Software Architecture at the time. See the Multi-level Undo and Wizard patterns for some examples. The main idea was that we tried to add software architecture information to a pattern rather than actual code. Adding code always leads to the issue that you have to choose some particular language and assume a certain technical environment. At Yahoo!, Bill is handing out code examples and I can see the difficulty there on how to do this in a handy way.

What is of course also tricky is that not every pattern will have a technical solution with it. For example, a pattern like Alternating Row Colours will not have a technical solution to go with it. Neither does the Tabs or the Product Page pattern.

From my experience writing patterns is really difficult. The difficulty is in deciding what the problem really is and why/when the solution works. Like Jenifer says, “it is difficult avoiding tautologies.” Even in my own patterns the problem statements should be improved.

Once a collection of patterns starts to contain more than, say 50 patterns, it becomes more and more relevant to link them all together. The reasons for linking can vary: some patterns solve similar problems, or they often are used together or one pattern is actually part of another pattern, and so on. In my collection the links are gradually being added so that a network of patterns is starting to appear. But what then happens is that you discover than you need to tweak your patterns again and refine the problem statement and the use when sections so that it makes full sense again."    (Continued via Yahoo! User Interface Blog)    [Usability Resources]

Innovative user interface design

Some interesting new UI's ...

"Increasing numbers of websites are developing new types of user interface design, taking advantage of users’ increasing levels of Internet-sophistication and faster connections. These new interfaces often allow users to view and manipulate large quantities of data.

This article will have a look at some of the more interesting user interface design ideas we’ve come across recently:

• Slider-based filtering
• Fisheye menus
• Treemaps
• Drag-and-drop

The point of this article is not to promote any of these user interface designs, but rather to offer them for the purposes of interest and inspiration. Although we have yet to run any large-scale usability testing on them, we consider each to have the potential (if used in the appropriate circumstances) to offer interesting possibilities for supporting users in the performance of their tasks.

Slider-based filtering
The user interface design of Amazon’s Diamond Search uses click-and-drag sliders to allow users to broaden and narrow a wide range of filtering criteria. The page then automatically updates to show how many results conform to the users’ selected criteria.

This can be used to create an intuitive and informative interface, making it easy for users to search through a large data set:"    (Continued via uiGarden)    [Usability Resources]

Amazon Diamond Search

Hyper-Reality Head-Dome Projector

Interesting new display concept ...

"Toshiba has unveiled a new head-mounted display - the "Hyper-Reality Head-Dome Projector" that allows the wearer to experience a full 360-degree view on a 40 centimetre dome-shaped screen... here are some technical details (from SID2006)

... "the system consists of a compact dome-shaped screen with a radius of 40 cm, a mobile projector with ultra-wide projection lens, and LED light sources. The system exhibits a wide viewing angle of 120° horizontally by 70° vertically without head tracking, and 360° × 360° with head tracking."    (Continued via Positive Technology Journal )    [Usability Resources]

360 Degree Display

Interview with Jan Chipchase, Nokia

HCI research at Nokia ...

"The discipline under the spotlight this month is Research, and the first guest is Jan Chipchase, Principal Researcher at Nokia, whose personal insights can be found on Future Perfect, Jan’s wonderful photo-intensive weblog. As he says: “… if I do my job right you’ll be using it 3 to 15 years from now.”

Hello Jan, thanks for taking the time from your busy schedule to participate… and for being the first one too.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you found your current professional path?

I’m a member of the Mobile HCI Group in Nokia Research and have been living in and working from Tokyo for the last 5 and half years.

Soon after graduating I joined a team developing teaching software and pretty swiftly realized the limits of my design skills. That prompted me to sign up for a Masters in User Interface Design at London Guildhall University which led to a UI development job at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology before joining Nokia’s Usability Group and from there to my current position.

About 50% of my time is spent on field study related activities and 50% is spent on concept development.

Along the way there have been stints living in London, Berlin, Brighton and Bristol, a fair bit of travel and managing a small design company.
The general direction has been influenced by Guenter Wallraff, Weegee and Larry Clark.

A common experience with User Researchers is that they seem to be “always on”, detecting patterns and/or documenting all they see to fit it into existing research domains… or creating new ones on the go. If Future Perfect, your blog, is any indication you seem to confirm this impression.

Is this a natural trait needed for any effective (and passionate) researcher, or is it one of those “professional compulsory habits”?

This work certainly benefits from an element of continuous observation and assessment, but I don’t think being “always on” is particularly unique.

It’s common to meet researchers that are passionate about what they do, that don’t stop thinking about an issue just because they’re not sitting at a desk or in the lab.
I imagine you’d get a similar answer from an architect or fiction writer.

But if the opposite of being “always on” is “switching off”, how important is it to take time off? To understand and design for life it helps to have one yourself."    (Continued via Convivio Network)    [Usability Resources]