What Makes a Good Autocomplete?

A thoughtful discussion about what to consider for an optimal autocomplete ...

"We've been working on a problem for the past couple of weeks: an optimal autocomplete algorithm.

Many of our users have said that while Enso is great, it requires a bit too much typing. We're inclined to agree. Yet, figuring out the best solution is tricky: there are more autocomplete algorithms than bones in a school of lionfish. There are straightforward algorithms, too-clever-for-their-own-good algorithms, standard command-line-style autocomplete algorithms, and the list goes on. A lot of the algorithms seem to go down fairly easily when you first start playing with them, but they end up getting stuck in your throat due to some unforeseen edge-case. This post explains our thought process in evaluating the algorithms given the (g)astronomical number of possibilities.

The Problem
Let's start by defining the problem. Autocomplete asks the question of how ones maps a series of user keystrokes to one command name among a thousand possibilities.
Enso currently uses a slightly modified version of the "Obvious Solution". The obvious solution requires that the keystrokes entered match the beginning of the command name, then picks the alphabetically first among all such command names. This is exactly what the Windows command prompt uses (at least the NT prompt; the old DOS prompt doesn't have this autocomplete feature). Other systems use variations of this; most URL bars, for instance, require that what is typed be the beginning of some URL (not including the http:// bit). Enso improves on the obvious solution by allowing the user to entirely skip words during entry. Thus, Enso lets "open firefox" complete to "open mozilla firefox".

Unfortunately, this solution has much more typing than necessary. In Enso, typing "open " before typing the name of the application is frustrating; especially since there are keystroke launchers out there that don't have any such requirement. However, Enso can do a whole lot more than launching — and in the future Enso will do vastly more than it does today — so we can't simply drop the prefix. The prefix is what makes it clear that the user is launching something rather than any of the hundred other things they could possibility be doing (like printing it, deleting it, compressing it, or sending it as an attachment). The number of commands that Enso might have is just too large to eliminate the need for verb prefixes and structured name spaces.

So we come to the question: how can we implement an autocomplete solution that allows Enso users to use fewer keystrokes, without losing the memorability of semantic language that makes Enso powerful?"    (Continued via Humanized)    [Usability Resources]

Where Do You Want To Spell Today?

Dealing with misspelling when designing forms ...

"I grew up in upstate NY, where summer is just three weeks of bad skating. It’s also the land of hard-to-spell locations, due to the influence of both Dutch Settlers and Native American naming schemes. For example, I lived in Schenectady county in a town named Niskayuna (which, I was told, is the Iroquois word for “high taxes”).

Hard-to-spell locations are the bane of the travel web site developer. The traditional approach to a free-form type-in box puts a burden on spelling-correction technology, which needs to match a user’s notion of an unfamiliar destination to the actually venue.

In the hotel industry, this is even more difficult, since someone may want to plan a business trip to Gloucester, MA (which is pronounced “glosster”), but the nearest hotel property is in Peabody (which sounds more like “P. Diddy” than the more expected “Pea Body”). Not only do they have to correct for all the cities they have properties in, but all of the surrounding destinations someone might want to visit. With the free-form type-in approach, a missed spelling correction results in a “Sorry, we didn’t find any hotels near Glosster” error message, possibly losing a sale to a competitor.

Over at Southwest.com, they replaced the free-form type-in box with auto-filled pull-downs. Using pull-downs works fine for Southwest because they support only 63 airports, but this method would become quickly cumbersome for a larger airline, such as United or American, which services hundreds of destinations across the globe."    (Continued via UIE Brain Sparks)    [Usability Resources]

Southwest Auto-Filled Pull-Down

25 excellent usability/UX articles and resources

Several good articles listed in one place ...

"Today I thought I’d share some of the most valuable usability and user experience articles and resources I currently know, in a somewhat wild mix. Since there’s presumably enough to read and talk about later, please welcome some great articles and research papers you hopefully enjoy that much as I do (though you’ll certainly know several of them):

• Apple: User Experience Guides
• Calabria: An Introduction to Personas and How To Create Them
• Cameron: Why People Don’t Read Online and What to do About It
• Crescimanno: Sensible Forms: A Form Usability Checklist
• Garrett: The Elements of User Experience (PDF, 17 KB)
• Hadley: Clean, Cutting-Edge UI Design Cuts McAfee’s Support Calls By 90 %
• Hawdale: The Vision of Good User Experience (PDF, 1,115 KB)"    (Continued via Jens Meiert)    [Usability Resources]

Warning over car indicator lights

Safety vs. aesthetics in turn signal design ...

"Modern car indicators could be compromising drivers' safety, a study by the University of Wales, Bangor, has claimed.

Many new designs position indicators within car headlamps - rather than a separate flashing light to the side.

But Bangor researcher Dr Andrew Bayliss said tests showed people took longer to react to the new-style lights.

A spokesman for the UK's Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) described the findings as "very interesting".

Dr Bayliss decided to carry out the research after noticing the new indicator lights as he travelled around Bangor.

When looking at the new-style lights, he said it took a few seconds longer for peoples' brains to "interpret" what they saw.

Several modern car makers position the indicators on the inside edge of the headlights and this study shows that this design feature could reduce their safety," he added.

Two groups, with 15 young adults in each, took part in the study at the university's School of Psychology.

They were shown pictures of the fronts of cars and asked to press a left or right hand button as quickly as they could when corresponding indicators flashed.

Dr Bayliss said students responded "significantly faster" to cars where the indicator lights were outside the headlight."    (Continued via BBC NEWS)    [Usability Resources]

Turn Signal Design

ZenZui and the Art of Mobile Web Surfing

An interesting new UI ...

"In the battle to create a better mobile Internet experience, a small start-up company and offspring of Microsoft Corp., is taking a game-like approach to browsing the Web on a cellphone. The Wall Street Journal reports.

"Split off from Microsoft's research labs, the new venture, ZenZui today will announce plans for a downloadable application that allows users to browse through mobile content such as sports scores, recipes and movie times, navigating through icons with their handset keys. After a trial phase, it will be available for the majority of the U.S. cellphone market by the end of the year."

Picture left is a a view of the ZenZui interface, which allows users to zoom in on Web content from their cellphones.

"Seattle-based ZenZui thinks it has a user-friendly approach. Its design allows users to zoom in and out of different clusters of icons, and even swap new icons in and out of the application through a Web site or their mobile phone.

In its current test phase, users will be limited to using 16 icons, sponsored and created by a handful of companies, including travel search site Kayak.com and Traffic.com, a real-time traffic service.

Eventually, ZenZui will publish the tools to allow any brand to create an icon, and the company expects to offer about 1,000 icons by year end."    (Continued via textually.org)    [Usability Resources]

ZenZui

Lazy Thumb, Voice Activated Phone

A voice activated phone interface ...

"It is primarily voice-activated, has only three buttons, and minimal function: send/receive calls and text messages. To send text, Speech to Text Transcription system is used. The three sliding buttons are made of Polycarbonate plates with OLED screens, and an LCD screen under the buttons shows detailed messages and directions. Users slide the plate with a shown indicator upward. The outer screen communicates between users, while the inner screen communicates between user and phone system."    (Continued via Yanko Design)    [Usability Resources]

Lazy Thumb Cellphone

Does usability stifle innovation?

Getting stuck in our own habits ...

"I'm not generally one of those usability people who grabs whatever Jakob Nielsen writes and links to it. It's not that I have a problem with Dr. Nielsen's work, but I generally think that, if you're going to take the time to read my blog, then the least I can do is to take the time to have an occasional original thought. This week's Alertbox got me thinking, though, and it's a subject I find I keep coming back to, so pardon me while I think out loud.

In a piece about user annoyance, Dr. Nielsen suggests that we should stop using drop-down menus for state lists (on shopping carts, in particular) and go back to straight text fields. Now, I'm not debating his data; I've been amazed more than once at how many people still have no idea how a drop-down menu works. What bothers me is a much broader question: when does usability risk giving into user habits so much that we stifle innovation?

Let me give an example that might help illustrate the point. You may be aware of the origins of the keyboard. The original mechanical typewriter had to be designed in such a way that it wouldn't jam, and this led to the QWERTY configuration. The key layout that we still use to this day is thought by many to be inefficient and suffers from usability problems. If, however, you were to test users on their current keyboard and an entirely new configuration (even if that configuration was more efficient, cognitively and mechanically), they would undoubtedly perform much better on the original keyboard. Why? Simply because that's what they're already used to. Of course, the switching cost (both in time and dollars) of moving to an entirely new keyboard might be high, but what if that new product really were better? By relying solely on our current habits and even testing data, we'd never know."    (Continued via debabblog)    [Usability Resources]

ZenZui's Zoomspace - the latest GUI

New UI introduced with ZenZui ...

"Open for business for the first time this week, Microsoft spin-off, ZenZui, is to launch a new interface that uses a grid-like display of 'tiles' to help consumers find and buy content. The UI maps the nine number keys on a phone to these tiles which serve as navigational bookmarks to regularly visited sites. Users navigate by zooming in through the number keys, or a touch screen on compatible handsets.

The idea is that consumers will download the ZenZui application and then be free to populate it with up to 36 tiles, creating their personalised 'Zoomspace'.

ZenZui believes its unique UI scores over existing methods because it's more intuitive – users simply press the 1, 3, 7 or 9 keys to scroll around the grid and the 5 key to click into a tile. This means they can be inside a tile in two clicks. Also, because the tiles are selected by the consumer the system is spam-free."    (Continued via Usability News)    [Usability Resources]

ZenZui

How to Improve It? Ask Those Who Use It

Citizen product design as a method for creating new products ...

"Dr. Nathaniel Sims, an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, has figured out a few ways to help save patients’ lives.

In doing so, he also represents a significant untapped vein of innovation for companies.

Dr. Sims has picked up more than 10 patents for medical devices over his career. He ginned up a way to more easily shuttle around the dozen or more monitors and drug-delivery devices attached to any cardiac patient after surgery, with a device known around the hospital as the “Nat Rack.”

His best innovation to date, he says, involved modifying a drug infusion pump routinely used in hospitals to dispense the proper doses of medicine. Dr. Sims, an accomplished pilot, noticed in the mid-1980s that he could obtain navigation information from regularly updated databases. He wondered why doctors couldn’t use a device preprogrammed with the necessary data to figure out dosages themselves. From 1987 to 1992, he and a small team built an electronic device that worked with an existing pump to provide patients with the correct does of the proper drug. Alaris Medical Systems was the first established medical supply firm to use the technology.

David L. Schlotterbeck, the chief executive of Alaris, bet the company on the device. It was a good wager. The smart pump now brings in $700 million in sales — more than Alaris’s overall revenue of $534 million in 2003, the year before the company was sold to Cardinal Health.

What Dr. Sims did is called user-driven innovation by Eric von Hippel, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. Mr. von Hippel is the leading advocate of the value of letting users of products modify them or improve them, because they may come up with changes that manufacturers never considered. He thinks that this could help companies develop products more quickly and inexpensively than with their internal design teams.

“It could drive manufacturers out of the design space,” Mr. von Hippel says."    (Continued via New York Times)    [Usability Resources]

User Influenced Design

Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data

Getting to the bottom of content strategy ...

"Not that familiar with “content strategy?” That’s ok. It’s in my job title, and I struggle every time I’m asked what I do for a living. Many people have no idea what it means, but even more people bring their own (wrong) assumptions to the conversation. Usually they think it has something to do with writing copy. That’s not entirely false, but it’s kind of misleading.

The analogy I’ve been using recently is that content strategy is to copywriting as information architecture is to design. I find this analogy to be especially encouraging because six years ago, as the crest of the first wave of the web was about to break, people had no idea what “information architecture” meant either.

The irony of this communication challenge is that the main goal of content strategy is to use words and data to create unambiguous content that supports meaningful, interactive experiences. We have to be experts in all aspects of communication in order to do this effectively.

So, why has it been so hard for us to communicate what we do?

Perhaps the problem is that, because content is so pervasive, everyone thinks they know all there is to know about it. If you can read and write, you can make content, right? (Nearly 60 million blogs may prove that.) But the fact is, as interactive experiences become more complex, so does the nature of content. A superficial understanding of content isn’t going to cut it anymore. Content strategists in the digital age need to become data philosophers and explore the metaphysics of content, starting with the question “What is content?”

Everything is content

When we were developing a deep metadata system for the website of a national entertainment magazine, my colleague and friend, Chris Sizemore, would say, “Everything is content.” And I tend to agree.

Everything is content? What about design? Yes, it’s content. Structure? Content. Metadata? Also content. You probably expected a more incisive analysis than that. Well, how about, “Literally, everything is content.”

How did the need for detailed focus on content emerge in the heavily visually oriented field of web design? As website functionality has increased and web users have become savvier, sites have had to meet the demand for sophisticated interaction and more content to support it. But simply more content won’t do; it has to be accurate and relevant. It has to be meaningful."    (Continued via Boxes and Arrows)    [Usability Resources]

Organizing Content

An Interview with Ralph Baer, the Father of Video Games

Interesting to see how interface design decisions were derived in the past ...

"RB: Well, it's different fun, but it's a lot of fun. And to think about ping pong, one more digression. One of the complaints that his highness Nolan Bushnell had was "Well, you didn't have any scoring on screen." To which I respond: well, it's kinda funny, you know. We've been playing real ping pong for the last hundred years, right? And tennis. And guess how you score tennis and ping pong? You call out the score, you know, nice and loud, right? Nobody needed any scores on the screen.

That was a real iffy addition. I had no way of doing it with the technology available to us for a price in 1966-67. But it was not necessary to play an interesting tennis game. You just call it out -- who needs scoring?

What was stupid on our part -- and I couldn't believe in retrospect -- was that we didn't have any sound. Yeah, that was the big attraction, addition, that made it much more lively a game that Alan Alcorn and Bushnell came up with, adding a "pong" sound when you hit the ball. Why we didn't think of that, in retrospect? I can't believe we didn't do that. Part of it was that I wasn't really a game person, ever. It only grew as I worked with the stuff."    (Continued via Confusability)    [Usability Resources]

Setting Up Business Stakeholder Interviews, Part 1

Interviewing techniques for getting clear business requirements ...

"For those who build websites and applications for a living, it is important to understand the realities of how clients work in order to guide effective strategy, IA, and user research aligned with business goals. Interviewing different people who deal with a company’s website will help you simplify complex strategic directions, create appropriate research plans, develop information architecture, and design interactions for great user experiences.

Interviewing is both art and science, and it is something that any UE practitioner with a little additional time and moderation skills can employ to extract clear business requirements. Without this foundation, business requirements can be unclear and deadlines for launching new sites, features, and content can be unrealistic. Worse, companies may launch features that users do not really want. Early and effectively gathered stakeholder input is also valuable for determining directions for user research during new site and product design.

It’s not necessary to be an MBA-level strategist or have a background in user research to be an effective business stakeholder interviewer. Those with these backgrounds will find their research skills can come in handy, but some of the best stakeholder questions I’ve witnessed have been posed by visual designers and developers.

It is also important to understand how company politics can negatively impact your work. Your clients are only human, and they are as subject to company turf wars and coworker fatigue as anyone: “Oh, I guess you’ll have to speak with Bob, too…he heads up such-and-such, but he doesn’t know what he’s doing”. As an interviewer, you may find that Bob may know exactly what he’s doing and have some really great ideas. How you manage company politics can contribute to achieving—or completely unraveling—a good user experience."    (Continued via Boxes and Arrows)    [Usability Resources]

Cogito Ergo Nomics

Needing a car that is easy to use ...

"How easy is your car to use? I'm not talking about acceleration, steering or cornering. I'm talking about the mental effort required to successfully interact with your car’s secondary features, such as in-car entertainment or the trip computer. While controls like steering (the brilliant simplicity of a wheel), throttle (foot pedal farthest to the right) and braking (second-to-right pedal) are standardized for most vehicles certified for use on a public road, the majority of other controls are confusing enough to plunge an automotive reviewer (or a Hertz Platinum Club member) into RTFM rage.

Sometimes it’s a simple matter of old habits dying hard: in many ways the best interface is one you don't have to re-learn. If you're used to having to jab at a button several times to adjust the temperature several degrees while surveying the change on a display that’s located on the opposite hemisphere of the dash, that may be the best user interface—for you.

But that’s not the whole story when something as basic as starting the car has now taken on innumerous forms. Do you A) insert the key in a slot (to the right or left of the steering wheel or in the center console) and turn it or B) insert the key in a hole and push it or C) insert the key into a slot and push a start button or D) ignore the key altogether as long as it's on your person and then either push a button or twist a piece of plastic adjacent to the steering wheel? Each of these methods are used by at least one current production car—and I’m sure I’ve missed at least one type of ignition sequence.

Changing gears is a similar issue. If you want to upshift using an automatic transmission with a shift-it-yourself mode, do you tap the shifter forward, backward or to the right? Or do you use buttons on the steering wheel? If you use steering wheel buttons, do you push the button on the right to upshift or on the back to downshift and the front to upshift? Or does the car instead use paddles behind the steering wheel? Which paddle do you use? Do you push or pull? And in case you want to shift while turning, do the paddles rotate with the steering wheel or are they stationary?

Even something as simple as automatic door locks come complete with their own set of usability issues. Do they lock when you put the car in Drive or when you reach a preset speed? Do they automatically unlock when you put the car back in Park? Do they automatically unlock when you pull the interior door handle, and if so, in the back seat or just the front? How do you disable them? Can you disable them? Can you even answer these questions about your own car?

Clearly, usability and interface design principles are taking a backseat to aesthetics and automakers’ oddly conflicting compulsions to be both trendy and unique. The problem is compounded by the unprecedented numbers of features being added to new cars, such as satellite radio and navigation, iPod integration, DVD players, Bluetooth cell phone connections, four-zone climate control, OnStar, heated and cooled massaging memory seats, etc. Without well-thought-out ways of interacting with these new features, the result is anarchy. I’d like to know how many times BMW Assist has been summoned by X5 drivers who thought they were opening their sunroofs, since the corresponding buttons are poorly marked, nearly identical, and adjacent to each other in matching wells, for no apparent reason other than BMW’s ever-questionable ideas regarding aesthetics."    (Continued via The Truth About Cars)    [Usability Resources]

Power Switch

Worldmapper

An interesting way to display world events ...

"Worldmapper features world maps re-sized according to different values, like wealth, carbon emissions, population, etc."    (Continued via 37signals)    [Usability Resources]

Worldmapper

Technology's next big thing

Several new products with new interface designs plus a video ...

"It is never easy to guess which technology is going to be a soar away success and which is going to sink without trace.
The Future Parc at the Cebit trade fair in Hanover is designed to showcase breakthrough technologies and we have asked a number of outfits to pitch their new bright idea to you.

All you need to do is vote on which one you think has what it takes to make it big and the winning prototype will be awarded a special Click start-up bursary of - a Click USB keyring.

Read the desciption below or see the products in question in our video.

Tobii Technology's eye catching mouse trap

This eye tracking system allows people with limited use of their hands to move a cursor around a computer screen just by looking at it.

The inventors believe the system could potentially kill off the computer mouse as navigating with your eyes is far quicker than using our familiar furry friend."    (Continued via BBC NEWS)    [Usability Resources]

Tobii No Mouse Solution

Interview: Persuasion Guru BJ Fogg

An informative interview about capitology ...

"BJ Fogg directs research and design at Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab , and is pretty much The Don of captology - the study of how computers can be used to influence people's behaviour.

We asked him a few questions about how internet marketers could be using persuasion techniques more effectively, as well as some of the more scary implications for individual web users.

In a nutshell, what is captology?

Captology is the study of how computers can change people’s beliefs and behaviours. By saying computers, that includes everything from websites to mobile phones to video games. Basically, how can machines shape humans’ behaviours.

Your research into captology included training your dog using clickers. What did you learn?

Yes, I used clicker training to train my German Shepherd - which was fun, but also a way for me to understand better how computers use reinforcement to change our behaviour. It was so interesting.

I went in with the premise that you can read about how reinforcement can shape animals’ behaviour, but you don’t really understand it until you do it, and that’s true.

One of the big surprises was how much timing matters. If the timing of the reinforcer is a fraction off, you reinforce the wrong thing – which is actually good for computers as they are very responsive and accurate. You can tell the computer that this is the exact moment to do the reinforcement.

Also, I learned how easily behaviour is shaped. I taught my dog how to pick up some toys and put them into a basket, from scratch, in ten minutes."    (Continued via E-consultancy)    [Usability Resources]

Does User Annoyance Matter?

Nielsen on making it easy on the user ...

"Making users suffer a drop-down menu to enter state abbreviations is one of many small annoyances that add up to a less efficient, less pleasant user experience. It's worth fixing as many of these usability irritants as you can.

So far this year, we've watched users shop on about 50 e-commerce sites. All but one of the sites violated a documented guideline for checkout design: they required users to manipulate a drop-down menu to enter their state abbreviations, rather than simply let them type in the two characters.

The exception was Amazon.com, which offered the faster and more pleasant typing option. Amazon thus confirmed that even though the average e-commerce site should not copy its overall design it continues to be the leader in complying with usability guidelines for individual design elements.

Knowing a better design exists made it painful to sit, day after day, and watch users fight with the mouse to scroll through the huge menu. Sometimes users selected the wrong menu option and then had to waste even more time with the drop-down. And, in this study, we mainly tested young, able-bodied users; the situation is even worse for elderly users, who have more difficulty with extensive, fine-tuned mouse manipulations. And it's worse yet for users with disabilities.

We observed the same problem again earlier this month when watching Chinese users shop on international sites: users suffered a lot of needless interaction overhead when trying to select "Hong Kong" from immense drop-downs containing hundreds of countries and territories.

Sites offer drop-downs for state abbreviations under the theory that doing so prevents input errors. But that's not true: menus are more error prone than typing because the mouse scroll wheel often makes users inadvertently change the state field's content after they've moved their gaze elsewhere on the screen. In contrast, everybody knows how to type their own state's two letters, and it's always faster to enter this information through the keyboard than the mouse.

(Regarding input errors: whatever the input method, sites should validate that the ZIP code/postal code corresponds to the state, province, or other locality entered by the user. Because postal codes are more error prone, you must use validation code on the backend, regardless of whether or not you use a drop-down for the state.)"    (Continued via Alertbox)    [Usability Resources]

IBM tool 'reads' Web video for blind

A new technology for helping blind read Web pages ...

"IBM has made a tool for Web browsers that will help the blind and visually impaired access streaming multimedia on the Web.

The tool, which works with Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Mozilla's Firefox Web browser, is designed to handle any file that is embedded in a Web site, including Adobe Flash or Windows Media files.

"Just because someone is blind, it doesn't mean they shouldn't be enjoying YouTube or MySpace or anything else like that," said Frances West, director of the Worldwide Accessibility Center for IBM.

The prevalence of audio on the Web seems like it would be an ideal addition for those with visual impairments, but it's not. Screen readers and talking Web browsers were designed mainly for translating text to voice and have yet to adjust functions to fully support multimedia, according to West.

When streaming audio or video requires users to click a Play button using their mouse, there is usually no keystroke alternative, and the controls are randomly placed on the screen, West said. If they can't press Play, they can't experience the multimedia.

In cases where the audio or video streams automatically once a page loads, the Web page's audio often interferes with a user's audio aids.

The multimedia browsing accessibility tool from IBM's Tokyo Research Laboratory will provide predefined shortcut keys to control multimedia on any given Web site. In addition to functions like Play and Rewind, users can control the volume and replay speed.

The tool will also read metadata, if the video creator includes it, that plays a screen narrative to describe what's going on in a given video. The function offers the same control as movies for the visually impaired. A person can select to listen to the original audio only or turn on the screen narration, according to West."    (Continued via ZDNet)    [Usability Resources]

When words are not enough

Sun has new comics site.. This article discusses the successful use of those comics ...

"Today I wanted to share with you an interesting experience about using comics to help students with their first login to our e-classroom. Let me do by explaining a bit of background to the story. Many of the courses at out faculty are in some way or another supported by our e-classroom (based on Moodle) and so most of our students need the access to our e-classroom to get study materials or participate in other study activities. For their first login students are asked to enter their unique student number as their username and password (which they can of course change later). This works for most of the students, though some students (like those that enrolled after the official beginning of the study year) don't yet have an account created, because they weren't included in the transmission of student data from the faculty's information system. Yes sure, we could figure out a better way to automatically create student accounts, but the current system works well for most students.

Now, all I've just described above was clearly explained to our students on the first page of our e-classroom. We provided students with short and concise instructions on what they should do on their first login and what they should do (email our Center for e-learning) if that didn't work. We thought the instructions were clear enough, but a great number of students disagreed. We were getting a dozen mails per day by confused or frustrated students that couldn't get in the e-classroom and were asking for help. Many mails did not include the information we asked students to include when asking for help. And we saw that as a big problem. Clearly, too many students were not able to properly understand (decode) the given instructions. Also, they were experiencing confusion and frustration, which is definitely not something you'd want students to experience when first meeting a new technology. First impressions matter, right?

This problem has troubled me for some time. I was trying to think of better ways to explain the login procedure to students and the solution that helped to solve at least a bit of the problem was found almost by chance. I almost accidentally stumbled upon the post Design Comics Templates 1.0, Part I on Martin Hardee's blog, which provided wonderfully illustrated characters and scenes that can be used for comic storyboards. I immediately fell in love with the pictures and started thinking about ways in which I could use them. At first it was almost a joke, but I decided to make a short comic explaining the login process of our e-classroom. The pictures were perfect for this. I used Comic Life (the basic version comes free with Mac OS X) to create the comic and we decided to put them on the first page of our e-classroom, above the written instructions. The login page of our e-classroom now looks like this:"    (Continued via iAlja)    [Usability Resources]

Application of Comics

Word 2007: Lessons on usability

Discussing Word2007 usability ...

"Much ink and many bytes have been consumed in the debate of Office 2007's new interface.

Everyone agrees that the new look and feel of Office is a radical departure from the interface that Office has been using since its inception. From Office 2000 through Office 2003, the interface has been nearly untouched, other than some gradients and other beautification. Just what was the thinking behind the new interface?

It is no secret that Office (particularly Word) has been an application that users love to hate. You could often spend more time and effort trying to figure out how to format a block of text than writing the block of text. Word is the application that gets most of the attention, with Excel coming in a distant second. There is a good reason for this: Everyone uses Word and Outlook, many people use Excel, and far fewer people use Access, Publisher, etc. On top of that, the assumption is that Word should require little training or sophistication to use, since it is "simply" a word processor. Conversely, it's assumed that Access requires a trained or technically savvy user; it is a database, after all.

Except for Word, Outlook, and Excel, the Office suite applications are all special-purpose applications that users would need training or experience to use, regardless of their software choice. Excel often gets a free pass, because while a billion people use it as an ad hoc database, people tend to do a bit less with Excel than they attempt to do with Word. When they go for the advanced features, they expect it to be difficult. Outlook actually has always been fairly easy to use, except for the Word-powered e-mail editor and the initial configuration, which is no worse than any other e-mail client, due to the complexities of setting up e-mail. So today, I will take a look at Word 2007 and try to make sense of the usability decisions that went into it, and how the changes relate to usability in general."    (Continued via ZDNet Asia)    [Usability Resources]

Mouse Hover Shows Attributes

The Mind-Bending New World Of Work

Motion-capture going mainstream ...

"Motion-capture technology has burst out of Hollywood and into businesses from aerospace to advertising.

In a darkened loft in the industrial district of downtown Los Angeles, Gesture Studios CEO Kevin Parent slips on a pair of black gloves studded with iridescent white, purple, and yellow dots. Standing about 10 feet from a wall-size screen, he lifts his hands like a conductor. With a series of precise gestures, he calls up photos and videos of urban Los Angeles. Raising his thumbs and pointing his index fingers toward the screen as if miming a cowboy with two guns, he swiftly sorts the images, zooming in on certain buildings and playing snips of films depicting various street scenes. To pause the film, he extends one hand like a traffic cop. With other crisp movements, he can spin 3D objects in space or snatch a bullet point of text and drag it across the screen. "You just put on the gloves and go," Parent explains. "Think turbo PowerPoint."

The technology preview Parent arranged for BusinessWeek bears an eerie resemblance to a famous scene in Minority Report, Steven Spielberg's 2002 film featuring Tom Cruise as a cop under investigation for murder. Techies still talk about the wireless data gloves and clipped hand signals Cruise uses to sort through evidence on a giant screen at police headquarters. That interface is just what Gesture is selling to companies that create presentations at the 14,000 trade shows and conferences in the U.S. each year. The hardware and software will be priced from a few thousand dollars and up. Soon, anyone making a PowerPoint presentation to colleagues or business partners could operate the same setup, which uses cameras to track hand movements and translate them into computer instructions. The similarities to Minority Report are no coincidence: Gesture Studios is the brainchild of Massachusetts Institute of Technology wunderkind John UnderKoffler, who helped Spielberg's production team design the scene in the movie."    (Continued via Business Week)    [Usability Resources]

Does Online Video Give Us a New User Interface?

Getting a handle on video search interface ...

"In Wednesday's SearchInsider, Aaron Goldberg looked at video search and what's going to be required for it to truly become an interesting advertising vehicle. Some of the speculation comes from Aaron’s musing about what might happen if Google purchased Blinkx.

To me, video search is one of the more interesting growth areas for search in the future. Currently, there are some restrictions on video search that are imposed by the current state of technology. Our ability to index video is restricted to the addition of metadata. For each video clip, someone must take the time to include the tags indicating what the video is about. As long as video search relies on this, the opportunities for advancement are extremely limited. But right now we’re advancing on several technical fronts to be able to index content and not rely on metadata. Several organizations, including Microsoft, are working on visual recognition algorithms that allow for true indexing of video content. Advancements in computing horsepower will soon give us the sheer muscle required for the gargantuan indexing task. Once we remove humans from the equation, allowing for automated indexing video content, the world of video search suddenly becomes much more promising.

When this happens, we move accessing information in a video from being a linear experience to being a nonlinear experience. Suddenly we have random-access to information embedded within the video. As mentioned, the technology is being developed to enable this, but the question is, will we as viewers be able to adapt to this paradigm shift? The evolution of video has been one that is coming from a linear, storytelling experience. Every video is generally a self-contained story with a distinct beginning, middle and end. This is how we're used to looking at video.

But when video search makes it possible to access information at any point in the video, how will that impact our engagement with that video? In the last 10 years, we've seen some fairly dramatic shifts in how we assimilate written information. We have moved from our past experience, where information was presented in very much a linear fashion in novels or books, to the way we currently assimilate information on websites. When we interact with websites, we "berry pick", hunting in various places on the page for information cues that seemed to offer what we are looking for. Assimilation of the written word is much more erratic experience right now. We move in a nonlinear fashion through websites, picking up information and navigating based solely on our intent and the paths we choose for ourselves. One of the greatest revelations in website design was that we can not restrict users to a linear progression through our site, much as we might want to control their experience."    (Continued via OutofMyGord)    [Usability Resources]

Microsoft's PhotoSynth

Nokia attempts to patent rotating numeric pad

Getting clever with small devices ...

"Nokia has filed for a US patent for a mobile phone with a rotating numeric keyboard. No, we don't mean an old-style dial lookalike, but a numeric pad that can turn round to retain the correct orientation when the handset it flipped into landscape mode.

The application details what looks like a standard candybar handset. The clever bit comes when you rotate it through 90°: the screen slides up to reveal a QWERTY keyboard. We've seen this sort of thing before, but the novel component is the really clever bit: the numeric pad also rotates so that it's now in the same orientation as the QWERTY layout. Thus:"    (Continued via Reg Hardware)    [Usability Resources]

Nokia Keypad

Minuscule computers present a big problem for interface designers

Looking for the sweet spot ...

"Watching users fumble and nearly drop an early version of the FlipStart compact PC practically gave Robin Budd a heart attack. The culprit was the three-key sequence, Control-Alt-Delete, required to log off or reboot a Windows PC.

"They would be holding the device in one hand, and they would try to get their three fingers on the keys at one time," said Budd, senior director at FlipStart Labs, a venture backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. "You can do it if you're fairly nimble with your fingers, but it's sort of a tippy, precarious thing."

When the shrunken-down laptop goes on sale later this month, early adopters might get a kick out of FlipStart's solution: a dedicated key marked "Ctrl Alt Del."

The FlipStart, like other so-called ultra-mobile PCs, may give workers tools to do more from the road. At the same time, the Control-Alt-Delete problem is a reminder to electronics makers that the human body is not keeping up with ever-shrinking gadgets.

Manufacturers have not found "the sweet spot between small enough for portability and big enough to use and interact with," said Gregg Davis, a principal at Design Central, an industrial design company in Columbus, Ohio.

The FlipStart has a laptop-esque clamshell design, so that users tired of thumb-typing can set it on a desk and peck away and still see the screen."    (Continued via smh.com.au)    [Usability Resources]

Flipstart

Information Expert Edward Tufte

Tufte called Leonardo da Vinci of data, the Strunk and White of graphic design, the George Orwell of the digital age ...

"When information needs to be communicated, Edward Tufte demands both truth and beauty.

... Tufte has demonstrated how confusing medical charts can lead to mistakes in treatment and how corporate reports that highlight years of rising revenue without adjusting for inflation can mislead investors. He has shown how a lawyer used a simple spreadsheet to defend mobster John Gotti and how 19th-century physician John Snow used detailed maps of London to pinpoint the cause of a cholera outbreak. Tufte is credited with turning chart-making into a discipline with intellectual credibility and moral weight. His course attracts not only visual professionals but also scientists, engineers, journalists, doctors, attorneys and financial analysts—pretty much anyone who analyzes and presents data.

In his lectures and books, Tufte invokes a variety of thinkers who have been models of precision, withering analysis and clarity. But his hero, “the master,’’ is Galileo, the mathematician and astronomer who challenged fiercely held misconceptions about the world by the simple, unprecedented act of looking at the sky through a telescope and drawing what he saw.

Beautiful Evidence opens with the words of a Galileo friend and patron, who wrote that those drawings “delight by the wonder of the spectacle and the accuracy of expression.’’ Tufte returns to the images again and again: sunspots, Jupiter’s moons, meticulously annotated diagrams of planets and stars. He says Galileo’s first published observations of Saturn’s rings, with word-sized sketches inserted mid-sentence (see below), “may be the best piece of analytic design ever done."

... “We adore him, says Nicolas Bissantz, managing director of Bissantz & Company, a software firm in Nuremberg, Germany. Bissantz stumbled onto Tufte’s books (in English—they’ve not been published in translation), and got so excited he developed software that makes Tufteizing a chart almost as easy as, well, creating a PowerPoint show. The software uses a Tufte idea for compressing huge amounts of data—say, the fluctuations of the exchange rate over several years—into a word-sized graphic called a sparkline."    (Continued via STANFORD Magazine)    [Usability Resources]

Sparklines

Design starts with Proposition (ergo Usability)

Designing from the proposition down ...

"Here’s a typical story.

A project is in its final phases when it gets to the part of the Gant chart that says ‘usability testing’, and so they do.

People come in and are asked to perform tasks, and so they do, with greater or lesser degrees of difficulty. And yet, something else is wrong.

It’s not so much that they *can’t* use your website, it’s just that they don’t want to.

People ask me all kinds of questions about usability. What are the most common usability problems? What’s the best way to make sure our site/application/system is usable? That kind of thing.

It’s pretty clear when they ask these questions that they’re thinking on the presentation layer. Is that button in the right place? Is it big enough? Has it got the right label.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the presentation layer is important, but it’s not the biggest usability problem I see in my work. The biggest problem is that you’re designing something that people don’t care about. You’ve got your proposition wrong.

What’s your proposition? Well, basically it’s the value you’re offering to your customer. Are you offering something they want? Are you solving *real* problems for them? You’d be amazed how often this is not the case, and how often people don’t know about this until they’re about to launch their product or, worse still, once it has launched and is failing."    (Continued via disambiguity)    [Usability Resources]

Designing From The Proposition Down

Who needs a virtual keyboard?

Using new mthods and materials for UI ...

"Usability experts have long held that it's important to give users a familiar interface when you introduce a new product. This month Peter argues in favor of exploring the unique potential of the Web medium, rather than reproducing the limitations of physical objects in hyperspace.

During a recent snowstorm, the two largest Denver newspapers, the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post, gave readers free access to their respective electronic editions. As is still true of many primarily print media sources, the electronic edition of each paper is essentially a careful facsimile of the print edition, but delivered as a Web page. The decision makes sense in terms of giving users a familiar interface, but in practice this approach doesn't always work as it should.

For starters, what font size should such a display use? A font size that can capture the contents of a full-size newspaper on a 12-inch laptop screen will be illegible, but a larger font size will force the user to scroll in two directions to see all the content. Worse, the online edition has to make extra room for advertisements. I'm on a huge widescreen display, so the largest allowed size for the Rocky Mountain News came out to roughly a third of my display. Still, when I view an article, even on a fully maximized browser window, I get a left-right scrollbar for reasons unknown.

I've seen other interfaces run into similar issues, and I've come to the general conclusion that trying to imitate the functionality of a physical object on a Web page (or in any other user interface) can be more annoying than pleasant. This month, I'll look at the pitfalls of familiarity as a basis for Web design.

Familiarity breeds what?

Usability people love to harp on the value of using familiar interfaces to help users adapt to new products. While good in theory, in practice this approach sometimes does little more than breathe new life into bad ideas. Just because I've seen something before does not mean I want to see it again -- ever!

QuickTime's thumb-wheel interface to control volume, for instance, was abysmal, not because I couldn't figure out how to use it, but because using it was awkward and inconvenient. Thumb wheels are great for objects that you adjust with your hands, but they're horrible as a GUI element. QuickTime has since lost that particular element, to Apple Inc.'s credit.

Another example is the virtual keyboard. Used for input, these elements are consistently hated. The entire point of a keyboard is that you type on it. A virtual keyboard that requires you to type with a mouse is a poor substitute. Even the most untrained typist can type with more than one finger, and real fingers are much easier to aim than mice."    (Continued via IBM: The cranky user)    [Usability Resources]

The semantic web comes to cars

Peer-to-peer communications from your car ...

"In-car navigation systems exist for some time now. But BBC News reports that a new German project, dubbed SmartWeb, will use the semantic web and peer-to-peer networks to interact with drivers. This system, which is currently in its development phase, will use speech recognition and human gestures as interfaces. And it will warn drivers about jams and dangers. For example, a car detecting slippery conditions will pass the information wirelessly to all the vehicles following it. The drivers will be informed via their dashboard screen or a GPS-equipped mobile device. But the SmartWeb will also transmit other kinds of information to drivers, such as parking availability or speed traps.

Before going further, below is a picture showing how a motorbike driver would be informed of a danger ahead by a car in front of him (Credit: Wolfgang Wahlster). This picture has been picked on page 31 of a presentation given by Wahlster at the "50 Years Artificial Intelligence Symposium" held in Bremen, Germany, in July 2006, "Three Decades of Human Language Technology in Germany" (PDF format, 36 pages, 1.72 MB). You also should take a look at page 28 for a picture describing a dashboard interface telling a driver where the next speed traps are."    (Continued via Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends)    [Usability Resources]

Peer-To-Peer Connection

Colorblindness - A Usability Guide for Commercial Applications, Part 2

Selecting colors that everyone can see ...

"There are restrictions against colorblind people holding certain positions in our society, but colorblind people sometimes get around those restrictions. Low and no-cost common-sense modifications can be made, and should be made, to reduce the impacts on society from a minor handicap that is often no more than a fashion inconvenience for those afflicted with it.

Colorblind people represent a significant but often neglected talent pool and consumer segment. Ten percent of Caucasian American men but less than one percent of women are estimated to have some form of colorblindness. Identifying opportunities to make products usable by as many people as possible, without degrading overall quality or performance, is a quality assurance function that is not always well understood or practiced.

Part 1 of this two-part series looks at increasing the usability of products and the communication of information. The second part of this guide concludes with an example of potential impacts if colorblindness is ignored.

The Trouble With Blue
The use of blue fonts is widespread, particularly online, where links to other Web pages are usually rendered in blue. Fonts in light shades of blue have the effect of reducing background contrast. The lighter the font, the harder it is for colorblind people to read.

Even subtle changes in blue can have major impacts on the levels of eye strain experienced by even moderately colorblind people. The landing pages of Craigslist.org, for example, are rendered almost entirely in light blue.

Yahoo's online e-mail service relies heavily on blue fonts. However, these fonts are a little darker and often bolder than the blue fonts on Craigslist, making Yahoo more attractive and easier to use.

Displaying Icons
Contrast issues extend to program icons, which are designed with the intention of making them stand out -- especially when used in program start menus, system trays, quick launch bars, desktops and other environments where easily recognized icons may enjoy higher click rates than ones that are difficult to distinguish from background colors.

The reliance on blue backgrounds in graphical user interfaces (GUIs) creates challenges for icon designers who seek to use blue in their icon designs. Blue is the default color scheme in Windows XP and is a popular color scheme in GNU/Linux desktop distributions."    (Continued via Technology News)    [Usability Resources]

Wireframing With Patterns

The benefit of wire framing with patterns ...

"When you’re starting out as an information architect (IA), being part of a strong community of fellow practitioners helps immensely. A little over a year ago, on Sunday, February 22, 2006, I participated in an informal workshop on wireframing techniques that took place here in Toronto. Bryce Johnson, Director of User Experience Design at Navantis Inc., facilitated and hosted the workshop at his workplace. The knowledge sharing and the wireframing best practices that emerged from the workshop, plus the sense of community I experienced there, helped me build a foundation as an information architect and got me started on developing my own design workflow. Now, I’d like to share the techniques I’ve learned with a broader community of information architects.

... "A strong sense of community among IA practitioners was the most significant thing that emerged from the workshop. People shared some wireframing techniques and tricks that I’ll discuss in more detail later. First, here are some highlights from the wireframing workshop:

Distinguish the role of wireframes early in a project. Who is your audience? Who will see and use the wireframes and how? Are they a client deliverable or solely for use in an internal design process?

Use high-fidelity wireframes to provide precise design direction; low-fidelity wireframes to allow more design interpretation. When there is the opportunity to collaborate with a design team, it is wise to create low-fidelity wireframes that designers can interpret and easily modify as work progresses.

To maintain consistency, create a branded Visio stencil for a project that you can use for all wireframes. Use the same shapes to communicate common interactions across wireframes and across different projects for the same client.

Visio offers lots of shortcuts—use them. At the beginning of our wireframe workshop, the facilitator handed out a tip-sheet of Visio shortcuts.

A year has passed since our wireframing workshop, and I have developed many a wireframe since then. With the foundation I gained during the workshop, I was able to build my own wireframing model. Because I needed both flexibility in design and the ability to reuse interactions across many different projects, I have developed the beginnings of a pattern-based design system. I started to see that I could use patterns many times over with just simple modifications. Wireframing in patterns does away with the necessity of reinventing the wheel each time and brings greater consistency to our designs. Thus, I began to understand the role of wireframes in the larger design process, which Figures 1–5 depict."    (Continued via UXmatters)    [Usability Resources]

A Design Workflow

NEC's "Latticekey" concept keypad for mobiles

A new interface concept for mobil devices ...

"NEC was showing off some conceptual stuff at CeBIT this year and when we caught sight of what looked like a mobile phone, we hustled over to get a look. Upon closer inspection what they were actually demonstrating was an keypad interface for a mobile phone. Labelled the "Latticekey Interface," the idea is fairly straightforward: none of the keys on the handset have labels of any type, but once you place you fingers on them, the screen will help guide you to use them for whatever task is at hand. This is actually a pretty slick concept, but sadly it was only that – no hands-on here, folks. We included a pic of the text in the display, as NEC worded it in such a dreamy, Utopian voice."    (Continued via Engadget)    [Usability Resources]

NEC Concept Phone

Handling URL entries

Usability of entering a link in a form ...

"In Dashboard HQ Bookmarks, we came across an interesting, and very common, design problem: how to handle the entry of URLs.

The idea behind Dashboard HQ Bookmarks is to give people a way to get all their bookmarks out of their browsers and into a web page. It’s not social, and it’s not glamorous. It’s just a great way to keep a grip on all the bookmarks you need when moving between the two or three (or more!) different computers you use on a daily basis (work, home, laptop).

To facilitate this, obviously, users need to be able to create new bookmarks, and this is a potential error just waiting to happen. You can ether paste an address into the Address field, or you can type in an address manually. When an address is pasted in, it usually includes the “http://”. When it’s typed in manually, it often does not. But we have to use the entered address to create a link regardless of how it’s entered.

To handle this, we considered adding the “http://” as the default value in the Address field.

Seems obvious enough, right? It’s a standard solution, so we could have left it at that. But this solution meant forcing the user to make a choice every time he created a bookmark. He could either keep the “http://” and start typing the rest of the address afterwards, or he could erase the “http://” and paste in a URL copied from somewhere else.

And with this in mind, do do we highlight the “http://” automatically when the field gains focus, or not?"    (Continued via Robert Hoekman, jr.)    [Usability Resources]

URL Entry

Evaluating organizations by their customer experiences

Making it easy on your customers ...

"You can tell a lot about an organization by looking at its customer experience. Digital user interfaces like websites and kiosks are especially telling, because they combine many aspects of the company - marketing, technology, branding, and the service value itself - into a small area of on-screen real estate. Customer-centered home pages tend to be made by the most customer-centered organizations.

For example, consider the major elements of the check-in kiosks of the two airlines I flew last week. These are the first screens, or "home pages," of the touchscreens.

Here's JetBlue... "Touch screen to begin.", "hi there", "start".

JetBlue Check-in

...and here's American: "Self-Service Check-In", "Check-in now available for domestic and INTERNATIONAL flights.", "Check-In Without Bags (carry-on only)", "Lost Boarding Pass? Reprint Boarding Pass(es)"."    (Continued via Good Experience)    [Usability Resources]

American Check-in

Google, Yahoo not so 'user-friendly' in India

Looking at popular sites with the User-Friendliness Index ...

"Google and Yahoo may be popular amongst Internet users in India but both Web sites rank low in terms of usability, according to a study released by online research group JuxtConsult.

In a usability study of 121 most frequented local and international Web sites by online users in India, JuxtConsult discovered that only 26--or 20 percent--of the top sites ranked high in its User-Friendliness Index (UFI).

The UFI measures Web sites based on six different usability aspects, including branding, navigation structure and value added features, site design, company and contact information, contact responsiveness and technical parameters. Based on their UFI percentile scores, Web sites are divided into four groups: Best Practice (sites that scored 95 percent or higher), User-Friendly (between 85 and 94 percent), Just About Satisfactory (50 to 84 percent), and Need Definite Improvement (below 50 percent).

Based on JuxtConsult's findings, e-commerce portals were deemed the most user-friendly by Indian surfers and accounted for most of the Web sites listed in the Best Practice and User-Friendly categories. These include banking sites HSBC.com and Citibank.com, as well as online retail portals Amazon.com and Shopping.com.

In comparison, most of the free content usage Web sites such as e-mail and social networking sites scored low in terms of user-friendliness. For example, Yahoo, which was touted as one of the most user-friendly sites by usability guru Jakob Nielsen, only managed a score of between 50 and 84 percent with a Just About Satisfactory ranking, despite the popularity of its instant messaging and e-mail service amongst India Internet users.

The study also identified Google as the most heavily utilized English-language search engine in India. However, the search giant could only muster a place in JuxtConsult's Just About Satisfactory category."    (Continued via ZDNet Asia)    [Usability Resources]

Research is a Method, Not a Methodology

Using scientific methodology in the design process ...

All projects should include research.

That’s the current thinking in design research and user-centered design. Indeed, many of my Adaptive Path colleagues won’t do a project unless it includes some research to uncover the goals, motivations and needs of potential users. More and more, however, I’ve found my views about the importance of research have become less dogmatic. On several recent projects, I’ve conducted no research at all — or at least very little of it — and those products seem to have turned out fine and are well liked by users. Luck? I’m not sure.

What I am sure of is that there’s only a loose correlation between research and the final outcome of a product. Microsoft spent at least two years researching Vista; Apple did no research that I know of on Mac OS X. Now, obviously there are many factors (technology, business, marketing, etc.) that go into the creation of a product or service, and it’s probably unfair to judge products in this way, but there are few other ways for designers to evaluate the value of research except through the success of the final product. Brilliant insights into users’ needs are effectively useless — just proverbial trees falling in an empty forest — unless they reach those users in the form of a successful product.

And what about projects that build upon other projects — which is to say, most projects? Is it necessary to conduct research simply to add a feature to an existing piece of software, or a new section to a website? Perhaps. Or, just as likely, perhaps not.

Making Magic
In Jesse James Garrett’s seminal essay ia/recon, he admits that, in the end, he follows his hunches: “Guesswork is an inescapable part of our work. More importantly, the quality of guesswork is what differentiates a good architect from a bad one.” And Michael Bierut reveals the same in a recent essay: “Somewhere along the way an idea for the design pops into my head from out of the blue. I can’t really explain that part; it’s like magic.”

One of the reasons designers are hired is their expertise — those “good guesses” — part of which comes from knowing what works in most situations, and what doesn’t. It could be argued that this expertise (which is made up of intuition, experience, understanding and taste) is more important than an understanding of users. I’m not sure I want to go that far, but I have decided that there is a more reasonable approach than the dogma that research has to be included on every project. Evidence that is all around us, from the humble fork to the lauded iPod, proves that this dogma simply is not true."    (Continued via adaptive path)    [Usability Resources]

User Research Doesn’t Prove Anything

Using scientific methodology in user research ...

"Recently, I was reading through a sample chapter of a soon-to-be-published book. The book and author shall remain nameless, as shall the book’s topic. However, I was disappointed to read, in what otherwise appeared at first glance to be an interesting publication, a very general, sweeping statement to the effect that qualitative research doesn’t prove anything and, if you want proof, you should perform quantitative research. The author’s basic assumption was that qualitative research can’t prove anything, as it is based on small sample sizes, but quantitative research, using large sample sizes, does provide proof.

This may come as a shock to everyone, but quantitative research does not provide proof of anything either.

Here, I’m using the word proof in the mathematical sense, because that is the context within which the author made those statements. In mathematics, a proof is a demonstration that, given certain axioms, some statement of interest is necessarily true. The important distinction here is the use of the word necessarily. In user research, as with all avenues of statistical inquiry, we’re able to demonstrate only that a hypothesis is probably true—or untrue—with some specific degree of certainty.

Granted, I’m being pedantic; and you might think this just an interesting exercise in semantics. But let me take you through a brief survey of this topic, then perhaps you’ll appreciate the importance of this distinction.

Statistical Sampling
In general, our user research activities involve working with a small subset of our overall audience of users, to

• gather information about a particular topic
• test users’ response to some feature of our design solution
• measure an increase or decrease in the efficiency of performing a certain task
• or some other similar goal

The size of the entire audience prohibits us from involving all of our users in our research activities.

Our first step is to select our sample from the total population of users. If we’ve done that successfully, our sample should reflect, as closely as possible, the composition of the full user population in the user characteristics that matter for our research."    (Continued via UXmatters)    [Usability Resources]

Helping users "feel the fear and do it anyway"

We've said before that reducing fear might be a killer app... making something users were previously afraid of feel less threatening. Wesabe does this for personal finances. Dr. Laurie Kemet does this for a trip to the dentist. And Electric Rain does this for 3D. Our books try to do this for programming. But what about a step beyond that... where you help them do something that just IS really, seriously, scary? Making only things which are friendly and easy is not the holy grail of design.

Reduce my fear or guilt, and I'll be grateful. Help me do something that really IS scary, and I'll be grateful and exhilarated. I'll be forever changed, and your company, product, or service will be linked to that change. To reduce fear means taking something perceived as scary and showing users that it's not. But not everything can be made to appear friendly and easy and safe. Like Apple's Logic. The learning curve is steep, it looks overwhelming and intimidating, but the payoff can be high. What if instead of removing advanced features that make a product inherently daunting, it's OK to say to users, "This IS hard. Really, frickin' hard. But we'll get you through it."

Sometimes, with some products, it's OK to say, "We can't make this any easier or less scary, but we can help you come out the other side."    (Continued via Creating Passionate Users)    [Usability Resources]

Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway

Are Designers The Enemy Of Design?

A controversial idea. See the next article ...

In the name of provocation, let me start by saying that DESIGNERS SUCK. I’m sorry. It’s true. DESIGNERS SUCK. There’s a big backlash against design going on today and it’s because designers suck.

So let me tell you why. Designers suck because they are arrogant. The blogs and websites are full of designers shouting how awful it is that now, thanks to Macs, Web 2.0, even YouTube, EVERYONE is a designer. Core 77 recently ran an article on this backlash and so did we on our Innovation & Design site. Designers are saying that Design is everywhere, done by everyone. So Design is debased, eroded, insulted. The subtext, of course, is that Real design can only be done by great star designers.

This is simply not true. Design Democracy is the wave of the future. Exceptional design may only be done by great star designers. But the design of our music experiences, the design of our MySpace pages, the design of our blogs, the design of our clothes, the design of our online community chats, the design of our Class of ’95 brochures, the design of our screens, the design of the designs on our bodies—We are all designing more of our lives. And with more and more tools, we, the masses, want to design anything that touches us on the journey, the big journey through life. People want to participate in the design of their lives. They insist on being part of the conversation about their lives.

So Lesson One here is that the process of design, the management of the design process, is changing radically. Egos and silos are coming down, participation is expanding, tools are widespread and everyone wants to play. People want to be in the design sandbox so you have to figure out how to get them in and do design with them. This is a huge challenge.

Let’s talk about the arrogance of architects. When I began covering architecture a decade ago for Business Week, we launched an annual contest with Architectural Record. When we were about to publish pictures of the first winners, I looked at all the fancy architecture magazines. None had any pictures of people inside buildings. The buildings were all devoid of people. And most still are. We put people inside the spaces they inhabit. We inserted people into the conversation of their lives. Now, smart architects engage the masses in their designs. They hire firms who do social geography, showing how people really interact in organizations, not what their titles suggest. Informed with this information, they design spaces.

So one Big Design Management Challenge is how do you switch gears from designing for to designing with? Maybe the object of design is not a finished product but a set of tools that allow people to design their experiences for themselves. Think iPod and iTunes. Think TiVo. Starbucks. Fortunately, design has tremendous tools. In fact, design has evolved from a simple practice to a powerful methodology of Design Thinking that, I believe, can transform society. By that I mean Design, with a capital D, can move beyond fashion, graphics, products, services into education, transportation, economics and politics. Design can become powerful enough to be an approach to life, a philosophy of life. But it can do so only when Design by Ego ends and Design by Conversation begins. More on that later."    (Continued via BusinessWeek)    [Usability Resources]

Designers Are The Enemy of Design

A response to the BusinessWeek article abobe ...

Bruce Nussbaum of BusinessWeek has written what I consider to be a near-manifesto which challenges our assumptions of what design is, who designers are—and how this all impacts the business world as we move into the next generation (and yes, it's relevant to brands). The piece is a bold form of communication, and I think comes from the heart. Bruce shares a bit of personal experience in how he is trying to shape his own teams and working process. He's also a little "politically incorrect" calling out Al Gore for his own hefty carbon footprint. And Bruce uses Mink fur coats to illustrate the idea of sustainability—a risky analogy, but when you read it in context, makes perfect sense. Personally for me—this is one of the more refreshing reads I've seen from a mainstream business journalist in a while. He almost sounds like a "blogger". You got a problem with that? :)

Check out the post and do so with an open mind. Let it simmer a bit. Then think about it as you start your day on Monday morning. Below are some choice bits—I added some of my own visuals where it seemed like there was a fit. Enjoy.

"Are Designers The Enemy of Design?

In the name of provocation, let me start by saying that DESIGNERS SUCK. I’m sorry. It’s true. DESIGNERS SUCK. There’s a big backlash against design going on today and it’s because designers suck.

So let me tell you why. Designers suck because they are arrogant. The blogs and websites are full of designers shouting how awful it is that now, thanks to Macs, Web 2.0, even YouTube, EVERYONE is a designer. Core 77 recently ran an article on this backlash and so did we on our Innovation & Design site. Designers are saying that Design is everywhere, done by everyone. So Design is debased, eroded, insulted. The subtext, of course, is that Real design can only be done by great star designers."

"This is simply not true. Design Democracy is the wave of the future."    (Continued via Logic+Emotion)    [Usability Resources]

Eyetracking and Gender

I didn't expect this outcome ...

"Conyne recommends designers avoid the generic pictures that are often used just for the sake of having a picture.

"For example," she said, "if an article is about a signature meal at a restaurant, say a tuna dish, display a scrumptious-looking picture of the plate of food. Don't show a generic picture of a spoon and fork, as many sites do."

When photos do contain people related to the task at hand, or the content users are exploring, they do get fixations. However, gender makes a distinct difference on what parts of the photo are stared at the longest. Take a look at the hotspot below.

Although both men and women look at the image of George Brett when directed to find out information about his sport and position, men tend to focus on private anatomy as well as the face. For the women, the face is the only place they viewed."    (Continued via Confusability)    [Usability Resources]

George Brett Eyetracking

No Accounting For Design?

The ROI for design ...

"It's the design world's dirty little secret. Despite the growing consensus that "good design is good business," most companies lack objective financial metrics to help them calculate whether increased investment in design will, in fact, generate increased profits. Does it matter? Chuck Jones, Whirlpool's (NYSE:WHR) design chief, certainly thinks so.

Two years ago, Jones made a pitch to add some injection-molded ornamentation to a KitchenAid refrigerator's redesign, which would have added about $5 to the per-unit cost. The company's resource-allocation team asked him to estimate the return on investment, but Jones couldn't produce the numbers to make such a forecast. As a result, he was forced to fall back on a rationale that was simultaneously elitist and lame: Trust me. I'm a designer.

That argument didn't fly.

Defeated, Jones resolved to improve on what he dubbed his "Las Vegas approach" to investing in design, "where you're basically asking people to roll the dice and hope for the best." As a first step, he surveyed 15 "design-centric" companies, including BMW, Nike (NYSE:NKE), and Nokia (NYSE:NOK). To his surprise, few had a system for forecasting return on design. Most simply based future investments on past performance. "No one," Jones says, "had really figured this stuff out."

The reasons are twofold, according to two Northeastern University accounting professors, Julie Hertenstein and Marjorie Platt, who described the phenomenon in a Journal of Product Innovation Management article. First, it's incredibly difficult to untangle design's contribution from all of the business drivers--engineering, manufacturing, distribution, marketing--that ultimately fuel a product's performance in the marketplace. Then there's the accounting problem: Design investments are immediately written off as expenses. Months (or years) later, when a product finally hits shelves, companies are loath to retrieve the data necessary to calculate returns.

Beyond those issues, designers themselves can't agree on how to approach return on design--or even whether to. One camp argues that the surest way for designers to make manifest their capacity to drive corporate success is to bring objective business measurements into the process. A design solution might be technically masterful and aesthetically pleasing, but if you can't quantitatively calculate its clout, you can't claim its success. "If we don't sort out the ROI, design will continue to be viewed with skepticism in many corners," warns Rob Wallace, managing partner of Wallace Church Inc., a brand-identity consultancy."    (Continued via Fast Company)    [Usability Resources]

Design and Business at Whirlpool

Scientists Show Thought-Controlled Computer at Cebit

In case you missed this new interface opportunity ...

"Forget speech-recognition software: How about typing a letter just by thinking it?

In a quiet corner of the Cebit trade show a small Austrian company is showing a "brain-computer interface," a technology that could one day transform how we use computers, play video games and even talk to each other.

It sounds like science fiction but is a clever application of science and technology. The system does not really read thoughts; rather, it measures fluctuations in electrical voltage in the brain and translates them into commands on a computer screen.


The system consists of a cap that fits over the user's head, with a few dozen holes through which electrodes are attached so they rest on the scalp. The electrodes are connected via thin cables to a "biosignal amplifier," which transmits the signals from the brain to a computer.

Different parts of the brain are used to process different types of thoughts. Vertical and horizontal hand movements are handled in an area called the sensory motor cortex, for example, said Christoph Guger, CEO of g.tec, which built the BCI system shown here at the giant Cebit technology show.

To use a BCI to move a computer cursor, the electrodes are placed over the corresponding part of the brain, where they read tiny fluctuations in voltage and feed them into a software program that analyzes them to figure out what the person is thinking.

The software needs to be trained to read the signals, which takes several hours to do properly. The subject responds to commands on a computer screen, thinking "left" and "right" when they are instructed to do so, for example. Another test involves looking at a series of blinking letters, and thinking of a letter when it appears.

The software "learns" what the brain's voltage fluctuations look like when those directions or letters are thought of, Guger said."    (Continued via Yahoo! News)    [Usability Resources]

The Difference Between Usability and User Experience

A clear distinction between Usability and UX ...

"The customer, looking for a new digital camera, goes to the large electronic retailer’s website. She quickly finds the camera she wants, puts it in the cart, and without incident, pays for it using the option to pick it up at the store that same day. Quick, easy — she is pleased and excited to receive her camera.

When she arrives at the store, she initially doesn’t know where to go, as no visual clues present themselves. After a ten-minute wait at the customer service desk, she’s told she’s in the wrong place and needs to find another desk, this one labeled “Online Receiving”. Once she finds that desk, the clerk, who obviously can’t wait for his shift to end, sighs and says the camera she’s purchased is out of stock. She can buy a different camera at this point, but to receive a credit for her original online purchase, she needs to call an 800 number. She ends up leaving the store without a camera and a charge on her credit card she needs to resolve.

This scenario highlights the difference between usability and user experience — a question I get quite frequently these days."    (Continued via UIE Brain Sparks)    [Usability Resources]

Sign language for your cellphone

Sign language UI for cell phones ...

"If you live in the UK, you now have an access to a dictionary of 5,000 words in British Sign Language (BSL) and their accompanying downloadable videos for your cellphones. The interface of this video dictionary, available at Mobilesign.org is even more Spartan than Google's home page. But it's very easy to use: you either search for a word to know if a language sign is associated with it or browse an alphabetical list. Then you download the compact video for your phone. The Centre for Deaf Studies (CDS) of the University of Bristol has released this free tool for everyone who works with deaf people, has deaf customers or just want to learn the BSL signs. Their next step will be to provide users with a phrasebook.

... The approach of these researchers is pretty refreshing. While I was searching for some of them on the CDS website, I was welcomed by a short video — with sound — but in sign language.

For example, watch Jim Kyle, the Harry Crook Professor of Deaf Studies. About this new service, he said that "this is a first step to providing support to hearing people’s communication with Deaf people — anywhere and at any time. From our research, we have identified this point of contact as a major issue for Deaf people in shops and daily life. The next step for us will be to construct a phrasebook in order that more extensive interaction can be supported."

Linda Day, Sign Language Lecturer at the Centre, added: "Apart from the obvious use to access signs when you need to meet a Deaf person, it will be of great value to students of sign language and to parents — who just need that sign at that moment in time."    (Continued via ZDNet.com)    [Usability Resources]

Sign Language Cellphone

Text Clouds: A New Form of Tag Cloud?

Text Clouds making print media ...

"During 2006, tag clouds moved beyond their well-known role as navigation mechanisms and indicators of activity within social media experiences, emerging as a standard visualization technique for texts and textual data in general.

This use of tag clouds does not commonly involve tags, social networks, emergent architectures, folksonomies, or metadata.

"Text cloud" might be a more accurate label for these visualizations than tag cloud. In addition to recognizing fundamental differences - text clouds differ from tag clouds in composition (no tags at all) and purpose (predominantly comprehension, rather than access or navigation) - distinguishing the two types of clouds will make it much easier to assess their abilities to support user experience needs and business goals.

The emergence of this new form of text cloud looks like a good example of speciation in action (though it's too early to tell whether the end result will be cladogenesis or anagenesis).

Major and minor publications feature(d) text clouds as visualizations in 2006, both permanently and temporarily:

• The New York Times cloud of most searched items
• The Economist topics cloud
• The Vancouver Sun feature on real estate prices by neighborhood
• discussion on Read/Write Web
• even a book in progress"    (Continued via Joe Lamantia.com)    [Usability Resources]

Economist Text Cloud

Microsoft Buys TellMe, Voice-Activated Mobile Search Provider

UX the reason Microsoft bought TellMe ...

"Microsoft finalized a deal Wednesday to purchase TellMe, a directory assistance provider and voice-activated mobile search firm, giving Redmond a possible edge in the race to develop a better mobile search tool.

Greg Sterling, principal of Sterling Marketing Intelligence, said that despite the manual dexterity mobile search users are developing, using a tiny keyboard still offers a sub-par user experience.

"There's still usability problems that are pretty significant," he said. "Keying in search queries is awkward. This is really about improving usability, and driving consumer adoption."

... "It's about creating a better mobile search user experience, and then hopefully gaining loyalty, but I don't know that'll necessarily translate to the desktop. It'll depend on how much better it is and how much integration there is on the desktop," he said. "It would certainly boost Microsoft's fortunes if they had runaway success in mobile with this."    (Continued via Online Media Daily)    [Usability Resources]

Information Technology in 2010

Prognosis for 2010 includes user interface design ...

"I was asked by a major IT magazine how I thought Information Technology would be different in the 2010. Bill Gates said in the Road Ahead, “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10.” He’s right, but this is on the cusp of being in between, it’s only 3 years away. I would actually prefer to describe further in the future with my promised write-up of the Davos Connected User in 2015 session.

Here are my prognostications:

Storage and the network bandwidth to store and access information is growing much faster than computing causing an explosion in content creation. This will make content management one of the most important information technologies and new technologies will emerge to automatically find, organize, verify and visualize content.

Content and content management will increasingly be delivered in two main forms - appliances and on-line services. Extremely simple, purpose-built physical appliances for household and office use will capture and organize documents, photos, music and video. Software appliances, configured as virtual machines for specific tasks, will be downloaded from the internet to generic hardware that will come in sizes Small, Medium or Large.

... A new revolution in user interface design is just beginning as designers move from physical to soft design. Gesture control will make its way into handheld and notepad devices. User interfaces will move from 2D to 3D as gamers influence work habits and we may see the first holographic interfaces. Avatars will begin to replace dialogs as the request-response metaphor and we may see practical voice recognition and language understanding."    (Continued via Content Log)    [Usability Resources]

Nokia's Design Research for Everyone

An interview with Jan Chipchase of the Nokia Research Center on design strategies ...

"British interface designer and user anthropologist Jan Chipchase spent several months last year thinking about how the human race shares things. He's an exploratory human behavioral field researcher at the Nokia (NOK) Research Center based in Tokyo. Chipchase tries to help multidisciplinary researchers understand how the world will be in the future. On Mar. 9, he spoke at the TED conference in Monterey.

His talk, which he called "Always On: An Introduction to Design Research for Everyone," quickly became a hot topic of discussion among conference goers. BusinessWeek.com Innovation Editor Jessi Hempel sat down with him there to discuss what an anthropologist is doing working for a cell-phone company. Edited excerpts from their conversation follow:

What exactly do you do, Jan?

I work for Nokia Design. It's a group of 250 people worldwide in Nokia that includes psychologists, industrial designers, materials experts, and people like me, anthropologists. We use human-behavioral research to think about how the future might turn out.

Help me understand better.

At Nokia, we have an internal market for ideas. There could be someone in Nokia who wants research, and they will come to us. You might have people in the company who want questions answered. A simple example would be: How are early adopters of mobile TV using mobile TV? That's about current behaviors. We would go to the place where the technology is being rolled out, South Korea, and we would look at that. We would take the core lessons of that and think about the further, future place.

Then there are areas where growth is likely in five years because of demographics or price points but we don't fundamentally know too much about this area beyond analyst reports and the research.

Can you give me an example of some work you've done?

Let's talk about a study we did last year on how people share objects. You can relate this to mobile phones. They're basically designed as personal objects. But if you look at usage in Africa, increasingly the phone is shared. A family might have one. A village might have one, or someone who runs a phone kiosk in a village might have one. We're thinking about how we could redesign the mobile phone and the communication experience to be more suitable for sharing.

We picked two cultures, Indonesia and Uganda. Cultural comparisons are good because they can tell you about what's similar, but also sometimes they make it easier to see obvious differences. We need a month's lead time to plan for a study. I prefer something like three or four months, but we can move quite swiftly if we need to."    (Continued via BusinessWeek)    [Usability Resources]

Customisable UI’s

Creating a flexible UI for everyone ...

"Generally, most UI’s tend to embody specific characteristics which make the chosen design solution better suited to some users and contexts than others. However, it is often the case that during the design process a range of different designs will have been considered to match the diversity of user populations and contexts-of-use. The real problem, however, is that users can often vary so greatly in terms of their knowledge, experience, social and cultural background (this is particularly the case in sovereign posture type apps). They often exhibit a wide variety of cognitive characteristics and affective traits. These characteristics are interrelated and shaped by context. Even when such variety is constrained by the nature of the work, and systems can be carefully designed and constructed to meet a well-defined need, the users will continue to learn and develop both through organisational changes and through individual users changing over time. So how can we design a system that is everything to everybody? Well we can’t, all we can do is design a system that works well for the majority of users in the majority of contexts. However, by designing in a degree of customisability and/or personalisation into the system we can offer a decent halfway house solution to some of these problems.

Customisable systems have a built in flexibility that can accommodate many of the different characteristics user may have; they are designed to accommodate a wider range of interactions than systems with a single fixed design. For example, successful interaction between a human and car is facilitated by the ability of the car to be tailored to our needs. We can adjust the height of the seat or the position of the steering wheel. The wealth of options on our computer systems allows us to adapt the systems to better suit our needs, habits, preferences and purposes. I can remove various parts of the functionality of a UI, for example by having ’short menus’, in order to make it more appropriate to my purpose. I can alter short cuts, command keys to make often used functions easier and quicker to accomplish. By allowing the user to make the UI their own, and customise it to suit their particular needs we can increase their efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction with the system. The alternative is to place some “intelligence” within the UI. This intelligence, can lead to the interface altering its form or presentation to suit the context of the task and the characteristics of the user. Adaptive UI’s haven’t really taken off, as users are not always comfortable sacrificing the locus of control to the machine, and may often be frustrated that the UI has altered it’s form without their consent."    (Continued via Chris Khalil’s Musings)    [Usability Resources]

Colorblindness - A Usability Guide for Commercial Applications, Part 2

Designing for colorblind users ...

"There are restrictions against colorblind people holding certain positions in our society, but colorblind people sometimes get around those restrictions. Low and no-cost common-sense modifications can be made, and should be made, to reduce the impacts on society from a minor handicap that is often no more than a fashion inconvenience for those afflicted with it.

Colorblind people represent a significant but often neglected talent pool and consumer segment. Ten percent of Caucasian American men but less than one percent of women are estimated to have some form of colorblindness. Identifying opportunities to make products usable by as many people as possible, without degrading overall quality or performance, is a quality assurance function that is not always well understood or practiced.

Part 1 of this two-part series looks at increasing the usability of products and the communication of information. The second part of this guide concludes with an example of potential impacts if colorblindness is ignored.

The Trouble With Blue
The use of blue fonts is widespread, particularly online, where links to other Web pages are usually rendered in blue. Fonts in light shades of blue have the effect of reducing background contrast. The lighter the font, the harder it is for colorblind people to read.

Even subtle changes in blue can have major impacts on the levels of eye strain experienced by even moderately colorblind people. The landing pages of Craigslist.org, for example, are rendered almost entirely in light blue.

Yahoo's online e-mail service relies heavily on blue fonts. However, these fonts are a little darker and often bolder than the blue fonts on Craigslist, making Yahoo more attractive and easier to use."    (Continued via TechNewsWorld)    [Usability Resources]

Newspapers and web design

A look at newspaper design compared to web design ...

"Good newspaper design is all about effectively presenting large quantities of text/information in a usable, straightforward way. That’s got a lot more in common with good web design than most of the sexy print pieces you find in design magazines/annuals. Some places to check out winning newspaper design:

Best Front Design picks out a noteworthy newspaper cover each day and analyzes why the design works."    (Continued via Signal vs. Noise)    [Usability Resources]

Newspaper Design

The Death of the Desktop

An overview of several talks at SxSW by LukeW. Death of the Desktop is one example ...

"Aza Raskin discussed and demoed reasons behind the Death of the Desktop at South by Southwest 2007. In particular he focused on why the application model was broken and how zooming interfaces and the Web could move us forward.

• Certain fundamental truths about how people work are called cognetics. We need to design interfaces that work according to cognetics (the ergonomics of the brain). Example: can’t hold more than 7+- 2 things in short term memory
• Designers need to learn what it is that users are capable of.
• GOMs modeling: How fast an interface is. Lets you take an interface and determine how long it will take a user to use an it.
• Information efficiency: how much information do you need to put into a system vs. how much is actually needed.
• An Interface is the way you accomplish tasks with a product and how it responds. To the user, the interface is the product.
• We spend a lot of time fiddling with our computers. Instead we should be getting things done.
• Litmus test for a good interface: how long is the manual? When you set out to design an interface, write the manual first.
• The Problem lies with Applications. They have been with us for so long that we don’t think about why they are bad.
• Get a lot of system bloat because all applications try to subsume all features (photo editing, document editing, etc.) Each application has a dictionary.
• What does an interface allow you to do: Create content, Navigate content, Select content, Transform content
• When designing always return to these four things. Think of an interface in these four blocks."    (Continued via Functioning Form)    [Usability Resources]

Field Studies: The Best Tool to Discover User Needs

How field studies are used in the design process ...

"The most valuable asset of a successful design team is the information they have about their users. When teams have the right information, the job of designing a powerful, intuitive, easy-to-use interface becomes tremendously easier. When they don't, every little design decision becomes a struggle.

While techniques, such as focus groups, usability tests, and surveys, can lead to valuable insights, the most powerful tool in the toolbox is the 'field study'. Field studies get the team immersed in the environment of their users and allow them to observe critical details for which there is no other way of discovering.

Field Studies in Action
Over the years, we've conducted many field studies for our clients. In each study, we've learned amazing things about how people behave, giving us incredible insight into how we should design interfaces for use.

• We've watched people shopping in malls, giving us insight into how they manage shopping lists and purchase items on impulse. From this we've learned a lot to guide successful e-commerce designs.

• We've spent weeks sitting alongside system administrators, watching how they interact with software documentation as they solve problems and maintain systems. We garnered new perspectives on the roles of printed and online documentation, helping us understand the unique problems that each medium favors.

• We've followed paperwork through large manufacturing facilities, seeing who touched it and what they needed from it. From this, we learned the subtleties of the manufacturing information and how the seemingly minor actions of one person in the factory (such as leaving an 'unimportant' field blank) can have dramatic affects on the efficiency of other people later on. Seeing how people interacted with each other using the paperwork gave us a greater understanding of the intricacies of implementing enterprise-wide information systems.

While field studies are one of the most expensive techniques to implement, the value they return is tremendous. We've never come back from a study thinking we've wasted our time and resources. A quality 6-day study can produce enough information to keep a team busy for months."    (Continued via UIE)    [Usability Resources]

Mobil users frustrated with complexity, usability

New report shows usability problems with mobile devices ...

"The initial findings of a new report, "The Global Mobile Mindset Audit," from the CMO Council shows that North American and Western European mobile device users are very concerned about irritations and frustrations at the point of sale while also being worried about device loss and theft, as well as mobile data protection.

Funded by the CMO Council's FAME (Forum to Advance the Mobile Experience) Group and sponsored by Palm, the survey of 15,000 mobile consumers in 37 countries was conducted by GMI. With an estimated 1 billion cell phones being shipped in 2006 (according to IDC data) and an estimated 2.5 billion cell phones in use worldwide right now, the subject matter coming from the study is of importance to the industry and the mobile user community around the world, said Dave Murray, director of the CMO Council's FAME Group.

"There is significant frustration around the world around complexity and usability in mobile technology," Murray said.

Overall, the number one problem end-users have is what the study dubbed "function fatigue." Handsets tend to have too many features that consumers either don't use or don't know how to use, which is a problem that has been exacerbated at the point of sale, Murray said. The report found that consumers are frustrated by the lack of product demonstrations and hands-on use of devices at the point of sale, but they're also irritated by a lack of knowledgeable sales staff and slow service, he said.

"I think the key finding is they're leaving the store with very little understanding in how to use the technology, which is adding to this frustration of having too many features," Murray said.

The irony is the vast amount of purchases are being made directly from the carriers or through retail outlets owned by the carriers, which is exactly where you'd expect to find a high level of knowledge and expertise, Murray said."    (Continued via eChannelLine)    [Usability Resources]

Matching Page Real Estate to Likelihood-Of-Need

Getting the most needed information up front...

"Sometimes, we forget what the probabilities tell us about design. We design pages where the things users need most get the least amount of real estate.

.. When we look at the page, we see that those more important links are only 13% of the real estate:

... I like to think in terms of probabilities. What are the chances someone who ends up on this page wants one of these manuals? Greater than one in seven? Most likely. I’d say that it’s probably in the 80% case.

Yet, most of the page is occupied by things the user has already told us they are not interested in: Accessories, Networks, Video Adapters, Digital Music Players.

Let’s say the designers decided to make 80% of the page contain the gallery for the manuals, instead of the current 13%. What would they put in the extra space?

First, I’d recommend they put in any information that may help a user decide which Workgroup Laser Printer they might want, such as pictures and other identifying information. The current design presumes the user knows the exact model number. Maybe they know they have a Dell Color Laser Printer 3010cn, or was it a Dell Color Laser Printer 3110cn, or, maybe, the Dell Laser Multi-Function Printer 3015cn? Any info helping users choose the right printer is going to be beneficial."    (Continued via UIE Brain Sparks)    [Usability Resources]

Dell Real Estate

Content Analysis Heuristics

Organizing content for website design ...

"Most website designers are aware that an important part of understanding the background of any website redesign project is performing a content inventory as well as a content analysis.

After all, authorities Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville include this famous Venn diagram in their classic Information Architecture for the World Wide Web:

Clearly, we are supposed to understand the current website content before we begin the process of redefining and reorganizing the website.

So we all dutifully go through the website and prepare a content inventory spreadsheet capturing page titles, details of page content, and so on.

Each content inventory contains a different set of columns and fields; each has a purpose specific to the needs of the particular site being analyzed. Sarah Rice has developed another example that’s available as part of the IAInstitute’s tools project.

Sarah’s version captures additional information from the site, uses an indented format for capturing the page titles at different hierarchical levels and uses color coding to indicate content types, external links and open questions.

So doing a content inventory is all well and good, but what exactly is it about the content that we are supposed to understand? What are we supposed to tell our client, other than that the website has 4,321 pages, of which 358 are dead-ends, 427 have no page titles, 27 have content that has expired, there are 432 different document templates in use, and there are 17 distinct document types?

In her 2002 article on rearchitecting the PeopleSoft website1, Chiara Fox noted that document inventories and analyses form part of bottom-up IA. “It deals with the individual documents and files that make up the site, or in the case of a portal, the individual sub-sites. Bottom-up methods look for the relationships between the different pieces of content, and uses metadata to describe the attributes found. They allow multiple paths to the content to be built.”

Certainly content relationships are important, as is the development of appropriate metadata to describe content, but are there specific things we can look for during a content inventory? In the remainder of this article, I hope to show that the answer is a resounding “Yes."    (Continued via Boxes and Arrows)    [Usability Resources]

Content Diagram

Deep Context

Understanding context in design ...

"Let me share a silly joke with you:

Q: Why did Lieutenant Worf change his hair color?
A: Because it was a good day to dye.[1]

Do you get it? If so, you understand who Worf is and what his character is like. For this joke to make any sense, you need to be part of a clique—Star Trek fans, in this case—with a shared base of understanding. In other words, the joke relies on context for its effectiveness.

Context is the frame of reference that gives meaning and proper perspective to a communication. Pervasive and inescapable, its importance to information architecture is evident in it being one of the three circles in the oft-referenced “Scope of IA” Venn diagram from the Polar Bear Book. While users and content (the other two circles in the diagram) are intensely scrutinized by information architects (most tools and methodologies we employ seem to reside in these two fields), the profession has developed few techniques to deal methodically with the “soft” issues addressed by context (business models, politics, culture, social dynamics, etc.). Context is deeply ingrained in us, so we tend to relegate the issues it raises to a set of background assumptions that we believe to be shared by all parties involved in a project or organization.

This belief may not always be accurate; people have differing assumptions and expectations that affect how they relate to the people and the world around them. While ignoring these differences can obviously cause problems when we’re designing sites targeted at people from other cultures, it may also lead to miscommunication with folks in our own culture or organization. On the other hand, information architectures that take these differences into consideration can help express these unspoken assumptions in meaningful ways, allowing the sites we produce to communicate more effectively."    (Continued via Boxes and Arrows)    [Usability Resources]

Context Diagram

Sociology at Microsoft

Microsoft looking at how people interact on Internet ...

"Marc Smith, the senior research sociologist at Microsoft Research, believes that now is a good time to practice his trade. Thanks to the Internet, there is unprecedented access to sociological data. And thanks to computers, sociologists are better able to sift through that data, find trends, and test models.

At Microsoft, Smith uses public Internet data to look at the social phenomenon of online communities, and he tries to make them better for people and better for business. He recently gave a presentation regarding his work at Microsoft's TechFest in Redmond, WA, an annual event at which Microsoft researchers from around the world share their latest work. Technology Review caught up with Smith to ask him about the field of cybersociology.

Technology Review: What's your background, and why does it make you a good sociologist for Microsoft?

Marc Smith: I was trained in collective action dilemma theory--the study of how we all get along. I looked at all the problems and opportunities that occur when groups of people get together to get things done. It really appealed to me because I wondered what the Internet would do to human societies. If you look out on the Net, almost all of the interesting phenomena is the result of groups of people coming together: news groups, e-mail, blogs--people coming together to answer questions and to create software and huge collections of photography. But it doesn't always work. The question becomes, What makes some collective actions more successful than others?

TR: What sort of projects do you work on at Microsoft?

MS: It could be anything. What I've made it about is tool building and data analysis; the effort is largely around making better tools for seeing online communities. We've gathered a lot of public behavioral data from online communities and analyze it to find patterns that we can associate with interesting social-science phenomena and that are relevant to business."    (Continued via Technology Review)    [Usability Resources]

Six techniques for advocating design in your organization

Selling design to your company ...

"Are you trying to incorporate a new design process into your organisation and facing challenges? Paul Sherman in this article talked about how User Experience Practitioners are natural "change agents". We could not agree with him more.

This article discusses some techniques to help overcome challenges incorporating design into your product development process.

Changing a company’s product development process is not something we can do alone. The key to our success is in effectively collaborating with people from different perspectives: marketing, sales, development and other business entities in our companies. It can be demoralizing when the speed at which our processes are adapted by our organizations is not what we expect. Many of us shared this frustration at User Friendly 2006 in Hangzhou.

We suggest using these six techniques to help you become more strategic in gaining acceptance to your design process.

1. Discover opportunities through building relationships

Your ethnographic research skills can help you find ways to relate to your collaborators. Have conversations with peers and teams leads that you collaborate with about their struggles towards their product creation process. Talk to your stakeholders about what is not working in their product development process.

Actively listen to them to help understand:

• What are their goals for the company, their teams and the product?
• What communication breakdowns do they experience?
• What concerns do they have?
• What is the biggest issue the organization has with its product development process?
• Do peers, leads and stakeholders have the same goals or do they conflict?
• How do they interact with each other?
• In what ways can a better design process help them fix their problems?"    (Continued via Apogee    [Usability Resources]

Connecting Your Brain to the Game

A new set of variables for interface design ...

"Emotiv Systems, an electronic-game company from San Francisco, wants people to play with the power of the mind. Starting tomorrow, video-game makers will be able to buy Emotiv's electro-encephalograph (EEG) caps and software developer's tool kits so that they can build games that use the electrical signals from a player's brain to control the on-screen action.

Emotiv's system has three different applications. One is designed to sense facial expressions such as winks, grimaces, and smiles and transfer them, in real time, to an avatar. This could be useful in virtual-world games, such as Second Life, in which it takes a fair amount of training to learn how to express emotions and actions through a keyboard. Another application detects two emotional states, such as excitement and calm. Emotiv's chief product officer, Randy Breen, says that these unconscious cues could be used to modify a game's soundtrack or to affect the way that virtual characters interact with a player. The third set of software can detect a handful of conscious intentions that can be used to push, pull, rotate, and lift objects in a virtual world.

The notion of using brain activity to interact with computers isn't new. A number of schools--such as the University of Minnesota; University of California, San Diego; and Purdue--have research labs devoted to decoding thoughts from the brain and manipulating cursors on a screen, which is especially useful for disabled people. In addition, companies have cropped up in the past couple of years claiming to offer an effective brain-computer interface for video games or for biofeedback purposes. For instance, S.M.A.R.T. BrainGames, a company based in San Marcos, CA, sells games and EEG caps designed to treat people with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder."    (Continued via Technology Review)    [Usability Resources]

Electro-encephalograph Cap

10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities

Tips for increasing sales and loyalty ...

"Several usability findings lead directly to higher sales and increased customer loyalty. These design tactics should be your first priority when updating your website.

I often write about the top mistakes in Web design, but what are the top things you can do to make more money? Following here are 10 Internet tactics with a particularly high return on investment (ROI).

1. Email Newsletters
Email newsletters let you maintain a relationship with your customers that lasts beyond their visits to your site. The newsletter is the perfect website companion because it answers a different user need: newsletters keep customers informed and in touch with the company; websites give customers detailed information and let them perform business transactions.
Newsletters are fairly cheap. They require little technology and mustn't be published too frequently. If you don't have a newsletter, then publishing one is probably the single-highest ROI action you can take to improve your Internet presence. If you do have a newsletter, then improving it according to research findings will likely make it several times more valuable to your organization. (Most of the newsletters we've tested failed to meet users' expressed desire for good communication.)

Newsletters have one more benefit: they are the primary way to liberate your site from dependence on search engines. In the long run, achieving this liberation is one of the most important strategic challenges facing Internet managers.

2. Informative Product Pages
The product pages on e-commerce sites, marketing sites, and B2B sites all suffer from information deficit. It's rare to see product descriptions that tell prospects everything they need to know to make a purchasing decision.
In my recent book, I present data showing that poor product information accounted for 8% of the usability problems on the websites we tested. Even worse, poor product information accounted for 10% of the user failures (that is, cases where users gave up, as opposed to "just" being delayed or annoyed). Designing product pages according to user needs is a highly targeted way to encourage sales at a point where users have already indicated interest by virtue of visiting the page.

You need detailed product information, but it must be written in a way that makes sense to people who aren't experts in your field. For example, on the product page for a laptop, don't be like Dell and tell people that the screen is "WSXGA+." Tell them it's 1680 x 1050 pixels. (Be honest: did you know this? And you're probably five times as geeky as a normal person.) Or, better yet, be like Apple and show different screen resolutions next to each other so users can see how much data is visible with each."    (Continued via Alertbox)    [Usability Resources]

Ajax and the Old World

Tips for improving UX with new interface methods ...

"Most of us know that HTML was designed in such a way that it would enable one to (single) click on certain underlined words in a text, that would link to another page. Initially, these hyperlinks were the only clickable items on web pages. Soon enough, besides using hyperlinks in an inline fashion, they would be grouped on pages so they would form a menu which would help people to navigate between pages that belonged to a certain group of pages. The web site was born.

Today, complex layout methods have made it possible to borrow from interaction patterns of desktop applications, including drop down menu bars, expanding trees and tabs. It's this exact inevitable shift of desktop application design patterns to the page metaphor that has more than often led to confusion amongst both web designers and end users. In this era of AJAX and RIAs, the possibilities for user interface designers have become infinite. Hence the question arises: Have all of these developments actually led to an improved user experience?

By means of a small number of examples will I try to give some convenient rules of thumb to all of the disciplines mentioned above and challenge you to join the community in standardising new patterns for some of the open ends."    (Continued via cornae.org)    [Usability Resources]

Ajax Commits Suicide

BayCHI Tuesday, March 13, 2007

BayCHI monthly program 7:30 pm Palo Alto, CA ...

"Active Listening: Social Identity in the New Music Economy
Gideon D'Arcangelo, ESI Design, New York, and Lecturer, New York University


The line between music consumer and music maker is blurring; in this middle space are design opportunities to improve the ways we discover, share, and use music in our day-to-day lives. The practice of call and response between audience and performer, long an attribute of musical experience, is finding its way back into our interactions with digital music. Gideon will discuss the impact new music technologies are having on the role of the listener. Drawing on documentary fieldwork tracking the behavior and attitudes of music consumers, the presentation will outline a continuum of active musical experience, and suggest how new interfaces for music fans and music makers are helping bridge the gap between these two groups. From the music fan perspective, the presentation will cover "walkman busting" and "podjacking" as forms of public broadcasting and social experiments seeding CD mix clubs on among public radio listeners. From the music-maker perspective, the talk will cover work from the New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) community. The presentation will discuss how trends in music listening, sharing, and making point to the rising value of taste in the new economy of music.

... Pandora's Experience: Learning from Users, Designing for Users
Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora, and Dan Lythcott-Haims, Pandora's Creative Director

In 1999, Tim Westergren launched Savage Beast Technologies, an internet-based music recommendation technology based on a new approach called the Music Genome Project. He raised seed financing from several Silicon Valley investors and, along with two co-founders, grew the company to 50 employees and released a commercial product in the beginning of 2001. Tim developed the original Music Genome product, working closely with a technical lead, and hired, trained and managed a team of 40 professional music analysts to build the database. The company eventually signed licensing agreements with AOL, Best Buy, Tower Records, Barnes&Noble, Borders and several other online businesses.

Midway through 2001, they exhausted their seed capital and began seeking additional financing. Tim took over the role of CEO, while also handling the Business Development, and the Sales and Marketing role at the company. Over the next three years, Tim pitched the company more than 300 times to prospective investors, while also serving as the company's business development lead, manager and internal/external evangelist. In the worst funding environment in many decades, Tim secured enough bridge financing to last until March of 2004. He recruited a new management team and in concert with the new group, completely overhauled the company strategy and launched the business into online radio. The new entity was renamed Pandora. Since 2004, Tim and the team have built and launched a very successful consumer product, Pandora. Since the free service was opened in November, 2005, Pandora has become the world's third largest online radio broadcaster, with more than 5 million registered listeners and a staff of 100 employees."    (Continued via BayCHI)    [Usability Resources]

BayCHI

Improving the User Experience with In-page Navigation

How to design in-page navigation ...

"In-page navigation techniques are used to layout web content on a page. When used properly they improve the user experience. But when misused they just add to the anxiety. This article chalks out the different in-page navigation options available to us and offers some tips on using them effectively.

What is in-page navigation?
In-page navigation is navigation to content that exits within the same page. The table of contents (TOC) links on a Wikipedia article is the most basic example of in-page navigation. The links take you to the relevant text on the same page.

Example: Wikipedia entry for Market Research.

In the example above, the TOC helps the reader to quickly make sense of the article. It aids scanning and encourages satisficing—both of which enhance the reading experience.

I will bring out the relationship between in-page navigation and Ajax a little later, but if you're in a hurry, you can read it now!

Same code, different layouts
The TOC-based navigation is the most primitive form of in-page navigation and is still used extensively and in different variations—a frequently asked questions (FAQs) list and an A-Z index are some common examples.

With the maturing of browsers, web standards and especially JavaScript, different layouts can be built on top of the basic TOC format. Here are some samples that use the same basic TOC markup but are styled and scripted differently."    (Continued via PebbleRoad)    [Usability Resources]

In-page Layouts

Colorblindness - A Usability Guide for Commercial Applications, Part 1

Practical tips for designing with color on websites ...

"Ten percent of Caucasian American men but less than one percent of women are estimated to have some form of colorblindness. Colorblind people represent a significant but often neglected talent pool and consumer segment. Identifying opportunities to make products usable by as many people as possible, without degrading overall quality or performance, is a quality assurance function that is not always well understood or practiced.

Here is a guide for increasing the usability of products and the communication of information. It contains need-to-know information for anyone engaged in software and hardware product design, quality assurance or business communication. We begin with a few simple tips.

Two principal tips for usability are to avoid using color alone as a sole distinguishing element or functional indicator, and to emphasize highly contrasting brightness, hues and saturations in adjacent colors. In emphasizing a hyperlink, for example, not only can a dark blue font be used against a white background, but the hyperlink can be underlined to indicate its function.

Avoid using colors together that are distinguishable solely by the amount of red or green in them.

In presenting text, colored letters work best when they are in bold fonts and have high-contrast backgrounds. The easiest text to read is in strong black fonts on white backgrounds. Dark fonts and busy or dark backgrounds do not work well together, nor do light fonts on light backgrounds. Avoid yellow or light green letters on white backgrounds.

Information should never be distinguished by color only, but should be combined with bolder fonts, underlining, dashes, italics, or other typographical features. This is particularly important when information is being presented in graphs and maps."    (Continued via TechNewsWorld)    [Usability Resources]

Feature Explosion!

Feature glut has been evolving for centuries ...

"There is a sea change taking place right now. People are becoming more aware of the poorly made electronic gadgets around them and realizing they can choose something better. This is a great shift in a new direction, making people stop blaming themselves and start rising up against the real problem. However, there is a long road ahead as people shift from the old way of thinking.

A shining example is an article that was recently published in The Guardian titled “My new mobile is lumbered with a bewildering array of unnecessary features aimed at idiots“. The protagonist launches into an array of annoying qualities about his phone that render it nearly unusable. In the event that he does manage to squeeze out a phone call, the process of fighting his way there leaves him flustered and angered. This experience has affected him so much that it has changed the way he looks at phones, and he is spreading the word.

This is a huge step forward from the days where someone would be confused by a horribly designed device and chalk it up to themselves being too stupid to understand it. This particular scenario happens regularly with elders and computers when they hear about all that can be done with a computer. Because they’ve never had a good experience to compare to, the arcane methods used to navigate these little boxes appear overwhelmingly daunting and complex. When it comes down to it, there is a very good reason that elders typically feel this way.

Computers are overwhelmingly daunting and complex.

Not without good reason, mind you. The amount that these little boxes can accomplish is quite impressive, and with a great amount of options comes an equal or greater amount of methods to use those options. These options, in modern day parlance, have come to be known as “features”. It becomes easy to forget that the more features a device has, the more difficult it is to operate. This is why it takes multiple people with years of training to operate the dizzying array of knobs, switches, levers, and dials on a Boeing 747."    (Continued via The Usability of Things)    [Usability Resources]

747 Cockpit

Designing with Vision

The effect of product vision on design ...

"This week I caught a talk by Philip Haine from Obvious Design about Designing with Vision. Philip outlined how some products that seem to ignore the "best practices" of design turn out to be breakthroughs, while others that are designed by the book suffer from mediocrity. He also addressed why product design processes often suffer from have radically shifting requirements. According to Philip the answers lie in understanding product vision:

• Product vision is the missing discipline (marketing, design, development, etc.) in the product creation process. It has a profound effect on the outcome, is a source of innovation, and can override design quality.

• A solid product vision makes requirement gathering easy and gives clear guidance to design decisions.

Defining Vision
• Vision is a loose term but its outcomes are quite tangible: better designs, smoother process, and break through products
• Vision is a high-level requirement
• Vision is the selection of which problem to solve. It means making a choice
• Vision is a way to define a problem as a set of needs you are trying to address
• Creating a vision is a design process
• Every product has a vision whether implicitly or explicitly stated"    (Continued via Functioning Form)    [Usability Resources]

Design Pyramid

Conference Review: UIE Web App Summit 2007: Part I, II, III

Parts I, II, and III of UIE's Web App Summit ...

"Jared Spool’s User Interface Engineering (UIE) thought the time had come for a UX conference focusing on Web applications and thus produced the first UIE Web App Summit. This conference definitely filled what formerly was an unmet need. The UIE Web App Summit took place at the Monterey Marriott, in Monterey, California, U.S.A., on January 21st through 23rd, 2007. It drew a capacity crowd of 218 people, who had traveled from far and wide to attend the event. While most attendees came from the United States and Canada, nine came from the UK and Europe and four hailed from Oceania and Asia.

Like other conferences not sponsored by professional associations, the UIE Web App Summit was a fairly pricey event—$1999 for advance registration for all three days—so I was interested in finding out whether attendees felt they got value for their money. Everyone I spoke with was enthusiastic about their conference experience and felt that the content was valuable to them.

This was an excellent conference! The best I’ve attended in the last three years since starting to write conference reviews for UXmatters. And its content focused on a topic that’s highly relevant to the work of the majority of UX professionals today: Web applications.

Organization

With the User Interface (UI) 11 Conference already behind it, UIE has had considerable experience organizing conferences, and it shows. In producing the UIE Web App Summit, the organizers brought us a great conference experience. UIE planned the conference with great attention to every detail.

Day 1: Tutorials
The first day of this 3-day event comprised full-day tutorials on quite diverse aspects of Web application user experience:

• Deconstructing Web Applications—Hagan Rivers
• Designing Web Applications Using RIAs and Ajax—David Malouf and Bill Scott
• Usage-Centered Application Design—Larry Constantine
• Measure Twice, Cut Once: Product Strategy and Planning Tools for Web Applications—Peter Merholz and Brandon Schauer

People registered in advance for the tutorial of their choice, and according to demand, the tutorials were held in meeting rooms that were configured to accommodate the registered attendees."    (Continued via UXmatters)    [Usability Resources]

Marc Hassenzahl on User Experience

A great interview on UX ...

"... Interviewer: Sascha Mahlke

[I: ] You were one of the first researchers who studied qualities of interactive systems that go beyond instrumental aspects (the accomplishment of action goals). In the last few years a lot of research has been published in this area and various aspects of non-instrumental qualities have been discussed. You started with the idea of hedonic quality and then differentiated the aspects of identification and stimulation. What dimensions of non-instrumental quality seem to be important from your point of view today?

[Hassenzahl: ] At first, I introduced pragmatic and hedonic aspects to make people in Human-Computer Interaction aware of the fact that there is more to product use than the mere accomplishment of action goals. Hedonic quality was then further specified as stimulation, identification and evocation. ‘Stimulation' is a product's perceived ability to surprise, to be novel. ‘Identification' is about a product's ability to communicate a favorable identity relevant others. And ‘evocation' is about the memories attached to a product. I've selected these four aspects (one pragmatic, three hedonic) because I believe them to be the most important sources of acceptance, usage, liking, and positive emotions. Accordingly, all should remain in our focus as researchers or practitioners.

As a first step, the broad distinction between pragmatic and hedonic helps to bridge gaps between ergonomists, usability engineers, marketers, and designers by providing a vocabulary to talk about the different implications of both aspects. The further specification of hedonic qualities helps to better understand the multilayered nature of product use and liking. It provides categories for analysis.

To give an example, I heard a talk by a researcher, who ran interviews with laypeople about their favorite product. She showed an example interview of an old man talking about the features of his favorite tool. For the inattentive listener, this man talked about the tool solely in terms of its utility and usability. The interview could even be taken as an example of how important those aspects are to people. However, the man introduced the tool by remarking that it was already used by his father, which made it special to him, before going on with details on its particular advantages.

This is clearly about evocation, but it is only because I have the according category that I am able to understand this ‘quality' aspect of the tool. This example also shows a particular difficulty with hedonic qualities. It is hard to talk about them and, thus, they are easily missed in user research."    (Continued via HOT Topics)    [Usability Resources]

Usability, Aesthetics, Emotions and the User Experience

A scholarly paper on measuring aesthetics, emotions, and user experience ...

"To date, approaches to the evaluation of interactive systems have mainly focused on tasks and goals, their efficient achievement, and the cognitive information processing involved. In the past few years, various ideas have been discussed that go beyond the notion of efficiency and that aim to better understand how people experience technology. In this regard, two important concepts have been explored: non-instrumental qualities and emotions (Hassenzahl & Tractinsky, 2006).

Non-instrumental qualities can be described as quality aspects that address user needs that go beyond tasks, goals and their efficient achievement. Different approaches to non-instrumental qualities can be found in the literature. Jordan (2000) argued for a hierarchical organization of user needs and claimed that along with the functionality and usability of the product, different aspects of pleasure are important to enhance the user's interaction with it. Further analyses studied selected non-instrumental quality aspects of interactive systems in detail, such as hedonic quality (Hassenzahl, 2004) and visual aesthetics (Lavie & Tractinsky, 2004).

Recently, the term emotional design (Norman, 2004) has received significant attention. Desmet & Hekkert (2004) went a step further by presenting an explicit model of emotions according to product perceptions. Zhang & Li (2005) studied the concept of affective quality as the ability of interactive systems to cause changes in the user's affective state. In this way non-instrumental quality aspects and the role of emotions were studied individually for a more in-depth understanding. However, to assess interactive systems regarding the user experience as a whole these various aspects have to be integrated to fully understand and compare users' experiences of interaction with different systems.

Although various studies were reported that contribute to a better understanding of the role of non-instrumental qualities or emotional user reactions as part of the user experience, only a few approaches exist that integrate instrumental and non-instrumental qualities as well as emotional user reactions into one framework. Rafaeli & Vilnai-Yavetz (2004) studied the interrelations between instrumental and non-instrumental quality aspects as well as emotions in a non-interactive domain. Tractinsky & Zmiri (2005) transferred this approach to the area of websites. My PhD project aims to carry on these first steps and aims to lay a more elaborate theoretical basis, use a broader methodological approach and provide further empirical results on this research problem. For pursuing this approach, three building blocks are addressed:

• a model specifying the major components of user experience and their possible interrelations,
• a set of methods to measure these components, and
• a number of empirical studies applying these methods to test the model by analyzing which factors influence the relevant aspects of the user experience."    (Continued via HOT Topics)    [Usability Resources]

Better Content Management through Information Architecture

"Everyone understands the business case for Content Management: Organizations drowning in information can’t learn from, act on, or leverage knowledge and resources trapped in assets that already exist. You lose the content’s value if you can’t find it to use it.

To solve problems like these, business often purchases a technology, assuming the former is a feature of the latter. In the content management world, we hear the same kinds of promises from IT stakeholders, again and again:

• Our developers will provide forms that authors will use to update content online (and every one will live happily ever after).

• We will use XML (and every one will live happily ever after).

• We will buy This software from That vendor—off the shelf—and authors will use this to update content. We will customize These options to match our requirements. (And every one will live happily ever after.)

Unfortunately, business often confuses technology for the solution. Forms, XML, and software won’t manage your content. Neither will they help authors create content, nor do they help you leverage content for later use. When Content Management Systems go wrong – and they frequently do – you can end up with terrible nightmare scenarios:

• Authors write content, and try unsuccessfully to use the CMS.

• IT updates content in relevant format and uploads for authors to review. The authors make power point presentations with changes and mail them to IT.

• IT reviews the PowerPoints and uploads the changes.

Authors approve the changes, and IT uploads the final version to the site.

To prevent these kinds of scenarios, we try to customize off-the-shelf systems or develop our own, but… IT and business, focused on issues with technology and business process neglect the system-wide ecology that governs how those technologies and processes will be used."    (Continued via Boxes and Arrows:)    [Usability Resources]

Web Standards: it's about quality, not compliance

Web standards and graphics design are compatible ...

"In spite of the widespread acceptance of Web standards by a specific segment of the design and development community, hosts of professionals – those out there right now creating the Web – are working in direct opposition to these standards. A significant reason for why this is happening and how those not working with Web standards justify their activity boils down, I believe, to something regrettably simple: nomenclature.

So far as I can tell, “Web standards” and “standards compliancy” are exactly the wrong names and terminology for the worthy ideals and purposes that these terms embody. The Web standards movement faces widespread resistance and apathy, in part, for the most ridiculous of reasons. These reasons are unnecessarily supported by poorly chosen terminology and how the message is being communicated.

This is unfortunate, because when you examine the fullness of the technical and experiential results of crafting websites and web applications according to Web standards, and compare the results with efforts not crafted according to these standards, what you’re confronted with is a stark contrast in what really matters: quality. It is the idea of quality, not standardization, which provides the compelling argument for the Web Standards Project and for the W3C. It is unfortunate, however, that they’re not effectively seizing on this important fact and are not appropriately crafting their message for the intended audience. Regardless of what WaSP and W3C are putting out into the community, the proper argument is not being heard and the message is not nearly as compelling as it needs to be.

It is not going off on a tangent to also observe that the fundamental structure and approach exemplified by poorly crafted websites and applications perverts certain foundational elements of the Internet environment; namely, search engines. For unfortunate but understandable reasons, there are too many who view search engines as little more than obstacles or instruments of commerce – something to be exploited and mislead for selfish or competitive purposes.

To conceive of search engines only in this way is to ignore or distort the actual, useful, incredibly necessary purpose of search engines: to index and catalog a vast amount of information, in the proper context, so that it can later be found and accessed according to some fundamentally sound, standardized models. It is irresponsible to hinder this worthy task or to disrupt the related, necessary standards."    (Continued via Design View)    [Usability Resources]

Web 2.0: What Is It Really?

The real scoop on Web 2.0 ...

"The biggest mistake most of the tech press, Web 2.0 boosters, cyber pundits, and digital hipsters make is to confuse Web 2.0 products with the root changes that made them happen. Social networking, crowd-sourced content, blogs, and the like are the result of an ongoing mind shift that's been happening for the past couple of years. Web 2.0 is real, but it's not something you can define by tossing out examples or buzzwords.

So what is Web 2.0? Here are six elements that define the change in how we all think about and use the Web:

1. Web 2.0 is about data abstraction.
All those Web 2.0 functions people love to talk about, such as tagging, sharing, XML, open APIs (define), and mashups, only became possible because we now understand how to free information from containers. Though the Web credo "information wants to be free" has been around for a while, we've only recently been able to make it happen. Pulling information out of proprietary containers allows you to do pretty much whatever you want with it, whether driving collaborative sites, interfacing with mobile devices, or something else.

2. Web 2.0 takes broadband and Moore's Law for granted.
Sites like YouTube and Google Docs & Spreadsheets wouldn't be possible in a non-broadband world populated by powerful computers. All Web 2.0's multimedia features, especially video, start with the assumption bandwidth is basically free and readily accessible.

3. Web 2.0 is about connections.
Connections between people, between sites, between the Web and mobile worlds, between buyers and sellers. Web 2.0 includes all of them. At its heart, the new Web is about moving from a one-to-many publishing model to a many-to-many one."    (Continued via Usability News)    [Usability Resources]

Instructional Text in the User Interface: Some Counterintuitive Implications of User Behaviors

How people use instructional text ...

"Introducing User Assistance

User assistance occurs within an action context—the user doing something with an application—and should appear in close proximity to the focus of that action—that is, the application it supports. The optimal placement of user assistance, space permitting, is in the user interface itself. We typically call that kind of user assistance instructional text. But when placing user assistance within an application as instructional text, we must modify conventional principles of good information design to accommodate certain forces within an interactive user interface. This column, User Assistance, talks about how the rules for effective instruction change when creating instructional text for display within the context of a user interface.

User Behaviors and Their Implications for Instructional Text

When designing user assistance—particularly instructional text within the context of an application—we should keep the following typical user behaviors in mind:

• When users are processing information on a computer screen, their flow of focus is the same as when they process information on a printed page. For example, in English, readers scan from the upper left to the lower right and read from left to right and top to bottom; in Arabic, people read from right to left and top to bottom.

• When using an application, users are motivated to take action, and their focus is easily drawn to action objects such as menus, buttons, and text fields.

• Once an action object or other visual element on a page has drawn a user’s focus downstream in the focus flow, it is difficult to redirect it back upstream. In other words, if something initially draws a user’s attention to the middle of a page, it is far more likely that the user will continue across and down as opposed to going back up the page. This is especially true if there are additional action objects downstream.
While we intuitively expect such behaviors on the part of users, I have, in fact, observed them time and time again in usability testing. However, these user behaviors lead to some implications for user assistance design that might seem counterintuitive, as follows:

• Do not introduce required conceptual information before a user engages in activities that require those concepts.

• Do not explain business rules or constraints before the user encounters their constraining effects."    (Continued via UXmatters)    [Usability Resources]

Amazon.com’s Social Design

A new way to visualize how Amazon is going social ...

"Every day now it seems that another web site “Goes Social”, which means they add social features like those found on social networking sites MySpace, Facebook, and Digg. The latest example is the national news site USAToday, which recently redesigned and added several social features including the ability to comment on stories, rate stories, and recommend stories to others. Here is a full list of the new features as described by the design team.

At UIE we’ve been watching social sites for a while now, and we’ve seen many social features, including the ones added by USAToday, become commonplace over the last few years. It comes as no surprise that large organizations are seeing the value of connecting their users in ever-beneficial ways like they’re trying to do at USAToday.

But even though big sites adding many social features at a time draws lots of attention, there is one site that is way ahead of everyone else, offering a myriad of social features that eclipses the field, hands down. That site is Amazon.com. Now, we’re not feature counters by any means, but we have seen the features on Amazon provide a tremendous amount of value to users during testing of the site. The product reviews, for example, are a huge advantage Amazon holds over other e-commerce sites…people really trust the reviews there compared to everywhere else. I wrote about this phenomenon in The Amazon Effect."    (Continued via UIE Brain Sparks)    [Usability Resources]

Amazon's Social Features

Are Adaptive Interfaces the Answer?

The problems with adaptive interfaces ...

"Once upon a time, Microsoft had an idea: Why not have the most-often used menu items rise to the top of the menu, and have seldom-used items hide below a fold. In one fell swoop, Microsoft provided a solution to the problem of a single interface needing to meet the needs of many different users, from many different walks of life.

Great idea, right?

Wrong!

The idea hasn't worked out so well in practice. Many users turn off adaptive menus in Office because they find the feature extremely frustrating. Even Microsoft's own designers have admitted that adaptive menus didn't work out the way they hoped. The feature has been removed quietly from the latest versions of Microsoft Office.

What was the problem? Adaptive interfaces have several drawbacks, and the big one is that they're intrinsically hard to learn. If you're trying to learn an adaptive interface, you have to chase after a moving target: "Where did that menu item go? It was here yesterday...". Even a user experienced with the interface will have a hard time habituating to it, since the locations of commands are not consistent. It's an interface that moves in the night.

Adaptive interfaces are a strange and awkward dance: a computer program trying to adapt to a human's behavior, while the human tries to adapt to the computer program's behavior. Of the two, which one do you think is better equipped for the job? Until we have an artificial intelligence good enough to read the user's mind, the human is always going to be better at learning. A computer that's clever--but not clever enough--is simply dumb. Even if it works 75% of the time, its going to really throw you a quarter of the times you try to use it. So rather than trying to make the interface more clever at outguessing humans, we'd prefer to put our effort into making the interface easier for humans to learn."    (Continued via Humanized)    [Usability Resources]

Is there a generation gap for user experience?

Younger people may need different UI's ...

"I saw this post by Robert Scoble that got me thinking about user experience and the different expectations that seem to come with different generations. In this case it was Joost. Robert hated the fact that Joost took up the whole screen and made it difficult to find the off button; all things that usability gurus would deplore. But Patrick, Robert's 13 year old son, loved it and thought it was cool and interesting.

Just take a look at sites like Zelda's Minish Cap or Harry Potter. Mostly built in Flash, these sites that the next generation flocks to seem to follow none of the usability guidelines that have helped steer the web and applications. There is a big difference between a website designed to market and a spreadsheet application, but for a younger generation, the web is fun. It's about exploring hidden parts of a website or thinking about things in new ways.

As Rich Internet Applications move into the realm of marketing, and the blurring between "productivity application" and "rich media" application becomes more fuzzy, we're going to need to rethink what usability really means. Increasingly, as today's web-enabled generation grows up, the old definitions aren't going to hold. With RIAs, we have a chance to let our creative side rethink the usability of our applications. Being able to differentiate the experience, as Joost does, will attract a valuable segment of the population. Applications based on the browser don't give us that ability, and while that may be fine for this generation, the tech savvy youngsters are going to seek out more advanced user interfaces and create new definitions of usability."    (Continued via ZDNet.com)    [Usability Resources]

Susan Kare - design icon

Making icons count ...

"Seems like we're always mentioning the inappropriate use of iconography in our usability inspections at the moment, so we thought we'd publish a pointer to the master of icon design, Susan Kare. Susan designed the original set of icons for the Mac, before developing the "nearly-3D" (2.5D) user interface for Microsoft's Windows 3.0.

"My work has continued to be motivated by respect for, and empathy with, users of software. I believe that good icons are more akin to road signs rather than illustrations, and ideally should present an idea in a clear, concise, and memorable way."

Descendants of her groundbreaking work can still be seen in many of today's graphics applications - like the Lasso, Grabber and Paint Bucket, for example. Kare's Chicago typeface lives on as part of the iPod's UI."    (Continued via Etre)    [Usability Resources]

Susan Kare Icons

Five Principles to Design

Design principles that we should all pay attention to ...

"Technology Serves Humans.
Too often people blame themselves for the shortcomings of technology. When their computer crashes, they say “I must have done something dumb”. If a web site is poorly designed, they say “I must be stupid. I can’t find it”. They might even turn to a book for Dummies to get it right.

This is horrible! People should never feel like a failure when using technology. Like the customer, the user is always right. If software crashes, it is the software designer’s fault. If someone can’t find something on a web site, it is the web designer’s fault. This doesn’t mean that the designer has to hang their head in shame…they should see this as a learning opportunity! The big difference between good and bad designers is how they handle people struggling with their design.

Technology serves humans. Humans do not serve technology.

Design is not Art.
Art is about personal expression. It is about the life, the emotions, the thoughts and ideas of the artist. It matters very little what observers do, their activity is not required, only their appreciation. The practice of Art doesn’t require them. It is a necessary activity for the artist, and the artist alone.

Design, on the other hand, is about use. The designer needs someone to use (not only appreciate) what they create. Design doesn’t serve its purpose without people to use it. Design helps solve human problems. The highest accolade we can bestow on a design is not that it is beautiful, as we do in Art, but that it is well-used."    (Continued via Bokardo)    [Usability Resources]

What comes after usability?

Getting at a design hierarchy ...

"The software development process usually drives what users get. In the beginning, there was the Waterfall model based on a world where everything is known in advance and specs don't change (i.e. a figment). Users got something functional, just not what they wanted or needed by the time the software shipped. Then came various spiral flavors: Iterative, Agile, XP. Unlike waterfalls (which run in one direction and don't back up), spirals can produce software much more likely to match what users want. Spirals support usability, and usability drives the need for spiral development. But what comes after usability? And will new development approaches emerge to support it?

So, I guess I'm really asking two somewhat-related questions. This is just a first crack very rough look for me, so please feel free to hack away, remix, rearrange, and add your own more credible (or just as wild-ass as mine) ideas.

After Usability comes Flow
"Thanks for giving me something useable, well-designed, and useful. Now, can you make it as engaging as a game or sport? Can you keep me so immersed that time and all the clutter of daily existence drops away? Where I'm under a spell that's never broken by an intrusion from the software itself? Where the challenge is NOT in using the software, but in what I'm using the software TO DO?"

Even if users don't start demanding Flow... it's a huge opportunity and advantage for those whose products support it. (And one of the key attributes of products with passionate users)."    (Continued via uiGarden)    [Usability Resources]

Hierarchy of Needs

More Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture

Where is information architecture going? ...

"How “information architecture” is defined much too broadly, frames design in the wrong way, and suffers from infoprefixation.

One of the more insightful social design books of the last decade is John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid’s The Social Life of Information (ch. 1), in which the authors suggest that we suffer from “tunnel vision” caused by an over-focus on technology. Certainly, the technological explosion of the Web has brought about huge changes, as Brown and Duguid should know: Brown works at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and Duguid works at UC Berkeley, two of the most distinguished technology havens on Earth.

Infoprefixation
One emergent problem Brown and Duguid describe is called “infoprefixation”, or being over-fixated on information instead of focusing on the people who use it to enrich their lives. Here’s how they explain it:

“…you don’t need to look far these days to find much that is familiar in the world redefined as information. Books are portrayed as information containers, libraries as information warehouses, universities as information providers, and learning as information absorption. Organizations are depicted as information coordinators, meetings as information consolidators, talk as information exchange, markets as information-driven stimulus and response”

This tendency to reframe things in terms of information echoes my frustrations with “information architecture”. Whereas “architecture” started off in the physical world, we now have to imagine (after merely placing “information” in front of it) what it means in the conceptual world. The once solid word “architecture” is now unclear."    (Continued via Bokardo)    [Usability Resources]

Does The Mobile Browser Have A Future?

How mobile browsers will be used in the future ...

"Many wireless industry insiders question the future of the mobile Web browser. While mobile browsers have been around since the first iteration of WAP in the late 1990s, there still aren't that many people surfing the Web on their cell phones. Personally, I don't think cell phones are the best medium for browsing. And for applications, I think the future of the mobile Web lies in clients, not browsers.

And what about clients. By clients I mean plugged in applications with just one or possibly two clearly defined serial applications (like push e-mail or chat) rather than a variety of tasks, like a browser.

To date, the real success stories of the mobile Web -- BlackBerry push e-mail and text messaging -- are handled through clients, not browsers. And most forms of mobile IM are also done through clients (either SMS or through an installed mobile IM app).

Why do I think clients trump browsers in the mobile Web? The biggest reason is their serial functionality. I think Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney recently hit this nail on the head. By serial functionality, I mean mobile devices are good at one-on-one linear communication -- voice conversations, e-mail exchanges, text messaging, and even IM. They are not well suited to exploration, i.e. browsing or search. Or at least not in their current iteration. The iPhone may change this, but we'll have a better sense of that when it hits the market."    (Continued via InformationWeek)    [Usability Resources]

The Quiet Usability Heurisitcs

Adding variables to usability heuristics ...

"We are all familiar with a variety of common heuristics which we can use to measure, test and design interfaces. However, there are a few that tend to get overlooked, but like all good children they deserve their day in the sun! In this post I’ll just touch on some of the key aspects of these. A quick search on the web will give whole reams of further information should you be interested.

Window Organisation: By decreasing the time the user spends adjusting, moving and re-sizing windows, we can increase the amount of time they spend concentrating on their real goal, and consequently increase user-satisfaction. By observing the relative locations and size of spawned windows in relation to the parent window and other related windows one can judge whether the placement is optimal. If a certain task requires the user to move windows around, and re-size them to achieve their goal, this is a sure-fire indication of bad usability.

Some key characteristics of good window organization are
- simple user navigation
- minimal and simple user window management

Readability: The textual aspect of interfaces is very important. Much of the information imparted by a UI is textual, therefore the layout and form of the text has a significant impact on the ease with which the user assimilates information. Since text is one of the primary sources of information for users it is important how it is worded. If the text is worded poorly then the users will perceive the interface poorly. Certain standards do exist for text size, labelling, fonts and formatting."    (Continued via Chris Khalil’s Musings)    [Usability Resources]

An Alternative to the Computer Mouse

A new interface using eye tracking rather than a mouse ...

"A researcher at Stanford has created an alternative to the mouse that allows a person using a computer to click links, highlight text, and scroll simply by looking at the screen and tapping a key on the keyboard. By using standard eye-tracking hardware--a specialized computer screen with a high-definition camera and infrared lights--Manu Kumar, a doctoral student who works with computer-science professor Terry Winograd, has developed a novel user interface that is easy to operate.

"Eye-tracking technology was developed for disabled users," Kumar explains, "but the work that we're doing here is trying to get it to a point where it becomes more useful for able-bodied users." He says that nondisabled users tend to have a higher standard for easy-to-use interfaces, and previously, eye-tracking technology that disabled people use hasn't appealed to them.

At the heart of Kumar's technology is software called EyePoint that works with standard eye-tracking hardware. The software uses an approach that requires that a person look at a Web link, for instance, and hold a "hot key" on the keyboard (usually found on the number pad on the right) as she is looking. The area of the screen that's being looked at becomes magnified. Then, the person pinpoints her focus within the magnified region and releases the hot key, effectively clicking through to the link.

Kumar's approach could take eye-tracking user interfaces in the right direction. Instead of designing a common type of gaze-based interface that is controlled completely by the eyes--for instance, a system in which a user gazes at a given link, then blinks in order to click through--he has involved the hand, which makes the interaction more natural. "He's got the right idea to let the eye augment the hand," says Robert Jacob, professor of computer science at Tufts University, in Medford, MA."    (Continued via Technology Review)    [Usability Resources]

Puttings small screens next to keys

Does this key layout work? ...

"I’m not sure whether to be excited or terrified by NeoKeys. They’ve removed the labels from the keypad and placed several rows of LCDs above an enlarged keyset. The benefit is that the key behaviors can adapt to context through very specific labeling (fantastic!). The problem is that the keypad layout is fixed for every interaction, and is severely lacking in visual cues to help interpret the context and controls. Looking at some of the product shots and demos makes me feel like I’m looking at an ATM on steroids; there’s just so much to process and so little helping me focus.

The only benefit NeoKeys offers above a dual screen configuration is the haptic response of the keys and the ability to easier target the buttons (but haptic technology is not far away from becoming a reality on touchscreen consumer goods). They’ve done a good job showcasing the invention on the site that boldly claims the system is “a new way to do everything."    (Continued via Small Surfaces)    [Usability Resources]

NeoKeys

How to write good FAQs

Writing usable FAQs ...

"FAQs don’t have that great a reputation, but recently, I’ve been working on FAQs for a client. Their computer help desk was annoyed about answering the same things again and again. Why not divert potential callers to a FAQ instead?

Sounded reasonable, so we did the usual: created a prototype, ran some usability tests, did the necessary pile of changes and launched the revised version, rather quietly. And bingo: a modest success. Calls to the help desk are down 10% and users are rating the FAQ answers highly, on the whole.

So what distinguishes a good set of FAQs from a dreadful set?

FREQUENTLY ASKED, NOT EASILY ANSWERED
I’ve seen many sites where they fall into the trap of providing a set of easily answered questions (EAQ) rather than frequently asked questions (FAQ). For example, The Undevelopment Blog has a typical one at http://blog.phpbb.cc/2006/11/23/bad-faq/ “Q: How can I use Glorbosoft XYZ to maximize team productivity?”.

No-one asks that type of question. You have to do the hard work: find out what questions really are frequently asked. And by your customers – not by insiders.

Try all of these:
- listening to calls to your help desk
- reviewing search logs to see what people are searching for
- reading emails

You don’t have to look back very far. If the question is genuinely frequent, it will come up at least once a day. But I think it’s worth reviewing a month’s worth of data just to be sure you’ve covered things that only happen at specific times e.g. at month end."    (Continued via Usability News)    [Usability Resources]

Internationalisation

Designing the interface for international use ...

"International users of computer software have come to expect their software to “talk” to them in their own language. In many cases language barriers and nationalism preclude end-users from utilising English-language software. This is only part of the problem though, even for those that understand English, a major issue is productivity. Users who understand a product fully will be more skilled in handling it and avoiding mistakes. On a purely financial level, globalised software will lead to greater potential for the introduction of products, both in terms of penetration of new emerging markets, and by allowing greater reach to users in existing areas.

The value of internationalising software and user interfaces for the international market is no longer in question and in my opinion over the next few years, markets will be divided between those players who succeed by understand the importance of fast globalisation i.e. simultaneous localization of their products into all markets in all languages, and those that fail. A successful global product or service is not made only for a single language group, it is made for a global community of users. The price of not understanding this can be pretty high, according to the U.S. State Department, U.S. firms alone lose $50 billion in potential sales each year because of problems with translation and localization."    (Continued via Chris Khalil’s Musings)    [Usability Resources]

The Face of the $100 Laptop

Usability testing needed for $100 laptop user interface design ...

"The so-called $100 laptop that's being designed for school children in developing nations is known for its bright green and white plastic shell, its power-generating hand crank, and for Nicholas Negroponte, the technology futurist who dreamed it up and who tirelessly promotes it everywhere from Bangkok to Brasilia. What has not received much attention is the graphical user interface—the software that will be the face of the machine for the millions of children who will own it. In fact, the user interface, called Sugar, may turn out to be one of the more innovative aspects of a project that has already made breakthroughs in mesh networking and battery charging since Negroponte unveiled the concept two years ago.

... Child-centric
It's the first complete rethinking of the computer user interface in more than 30 years. "We're building something that's right for the audience," says Chris Blizzard, the engineering project leader for Sugar. "We don't just take what's already there and say it's good enough. You can do better."

The audience he and his colleagues have in mind is the hundreds of millions of poor kids all over the world. Negroponte came up with the nonprofit "one laptop per child" idea when he was chairman of the MIT Media Lab and observed the failure of standard attempts to use computers in education to improve the lives of underprivileged children. Typically, a handful of computers, designed for business applications, are installed in schools; students only use them in special computer classes and are forced to share. Negroponte's idea was to give a laptop to each student that he or she could take to every class and bring home at the end of the day. "OLPC is child-centric, designed to be a seamless part of their lives at home, at school, and in play," he says.

... While XO has been greeted warmly by many, some technologists criticize Negroponte and his colleagues for not testing out their new ideas on underprivileged school children earlier in the process. And that goes for the user interface as well. Jakob Nielsen, a user interface designer and principal in the consulting firm Nielsen Norman Group, falls into the critical group. While familiar with the design of Sugar, Nielsen’s criticisms focus on the process. It’s only in the coming weeks that they’ll begin to get feedback from kids. “It’s always dangerous to release any product without the safeguard of user testing,” says Nielsen. “But it’s outright reckless in a case like this.”

But XO developers defend their approach, which grew out of a core philosophy of the MIT Media Lab known as "demo or die." Researchers are encouraged to build new things, critique them, and then make improvements—rather than doing a lot of concept-testing up front. They're backed up by John Maeda, a user-interface design guru from the Media Lab who has been watching the XO development process from its beginnings. "They're using the Steve Jobs method," he says, referring to Apple's famous chief executive and design whiz. "You don't use focus groups. You just do it right."    (Continued via Business Week)    [Usability Resources]

$100 Laptop

Doing Today's Job with Yesterday's Tools

The usability problem with various file systems ...

"Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m hopelessly disorganized in my digital life. My inbox is overflowing with email. My documents are scattered across a half dozen hard drives, none of them backed up. When I recently needed an up-to-date resume, I had to write it from scratch, because I couldn’t find a copy anywhere.

Most people would say that it’s my own fault. It’s true; I should take greater care in organizing my data. But honestly, I’m just too lazy to spend the time to sort all my files into the proper folders. And I’d like to think that I have more important things to worry about than when I ran my last backup.

... There are plenty of great information management tools out there. Certainly, iPhoto has made it easier to organize my digital photos. Flickr and Del.icio.us have popularized tagging—organizing items by simply marking them with keywords—and created a new way to navigate large amounts of data. And iTunes is a definite improvement over manually organizing MP3s into folders.

But as helpful as these applications are, they can be frustrating to use, because each one implements a slightly different set of features, even though they are basically solving the same information management problems. For example, iPhoto allows you to tag a photo with keywords, but iTunes doesn’t allow you to do the same thing for a song. Subtle incompatibilities like this can contribute to a frustrating user experience, because the interface doesn’t behave like you expect it to.

... This balkanization of our data also makes it more difficult to find things. Before being able to search for something, you have to know what form the data is in, so that you can search in the right application. Did I store it as a Del.icio.us bookmark? Did someone email it to me, or was it in an instant message? Applications like Google Desktop and Apple’s Spotlight help address this problem, but they support a limited number of data formats, and they aren’t able to search across multiple machines."    (Continued via Boxes and Arrows)    [Usability Resources]

Flickr Freeform Tagging

Yahoo rubbishes Google usability

Google Apps usability called to task ...

"Poor usability is the main reason behind the limited adoption of Google's services such as Gmail and Google Talk, according to Jeff Bonforte, senior director of real-time communications at Yahoo.

"[Google] definitely is lacking in usability," Bonforte said in a meeting with reporters at Yahoo's corporate headquarters.

"They don't have this intimate connection in usability with consumers that Yahoo has had for 10 years. When it comes to consumer applications, no-one is more successful than Yahoo hands down.

"And it happens over and over and over again. In every application, we are number one or two."

December market share data from comScore puts the number of worldwide Gmail users at 60 million. Yahoo is the world's largest web mail provider with 249 million users.

A similar picture is shown in the instant messaging market, where last May Google Talk accounted for 3.4 million users. Yahoo's 77.9 million users makes the company trail behind only MSN Messenger with 181 million users.

Google is receiving a lot of attention from technical users, but its search engine and online maps services are the only examples where the company has been successful in appealing to a wide audience, Bonforte argued."    (Continued via Computing)    [Usability Resources]