Redesigning the iPhone's Buttons

Design recommendations for the iPhone ...

"... There are three possible positions that the iPhone can be in: Portrait mode, landscape mode with volume bottoms on top (BoT), and landscape mode with volume buttons on bottom (BoB). The first two positions have good natural mappings, meaning that the position of the volume buttons map well to their meaning.

When the phone is in the the portrait position, the mapping between the volume buttons and volume is clear: You press up to increase the volume and down to decrease the volume.

When the iPhone is in the BoT landscape mode, pressing right increases the volume. Is this mapping natural? It might not need to be — the relationship between volume increase/decrease and left/right is certainly weaker than with up/down. But, there is a convention held by everything from stove knobs to number lines that right means "increasing". On the iPhone, this mapping is further strengthened by the on-screen display. When you press the right button, the volume indicator moves to the right. So yes, the mapping is natural.

However, when the iPhone is in BoB landscape mode, pressing right decreases the volume. This mapping is not natural because contradicts both our conventions and (more importantly) the on-screen display. When you press the right button, the volume indicator moves to the left! You can't get much more reversed than pressing one way and having the iPhone's volume go the other."    (Continued via Humanized)    [Usability Resources]

Depending on orientation, pressing right can mean either increase or decrease the volume.

Gerry McGovern Interviewed by Jared Spool

Gerry McGovern on designing for the customer - a podcast ...

"In today’s SpoolCast, I had the opportunity to speak with Gerry McGovern. Gerry is a widely-acclaimed speaker author and consultant on the topic of web content. Gerry is known for his insights on writing and laying out content for the Web, information architecture design, and development of content management strategy. Gerry has a new book out that we think is just great, called Killer Web Content.

In this podcast, we discuss how Gerry recommends:

» Frequent and small design refinements to please your customers
» Use click stream analysis wisely and eliminate clicks to improve experience
» Studying your most popular search queries to tune the top results

Gerry also makes the point of putting your customers in the center of your universe by concentrating on the things they want to accomplish. Help them accomplish certain things fast by putting their needs ahead of yours. The reality of the web is, ‘if you waste their time, they’re gone.’

There’s a lot of great information here, and I think you’ll enjoy it. As always, we welcome your feedback in the comments."    (Continued via UIE Brain Sparks)    [Usability Resources]

The book you ought to buy (even if you think you don't need it)

Writing is part of usability - two chapters for download ...

"This month, I'm enthusing about Ginny Redish's new book "Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works" (Morgan Kaufmann). If you write, or your clients write, then you'll learn from it. If you're working on a content-rich web site: you'll learn from it.

But hang on, I can hear you say: we can all write. Our bookshelves are all groaning with stuff that we've not quite got round to reading yet. Why is this book different?

One easy answer is that it's got enthusiastic reviews from Steve Krug, Jakob Nielsen and Lou Rosenfeld. Not yet convinced? OK, I'll dig a little deeper.

WRITING IS EASY. GOOD WRITING IS HARDER
It's simple enough to type in a few words and spaces. Or, in my case, being a wordy person: far more words and spaces than anyone might reasonably want to read, then spend ages trying to cut them back into something that might hit the mark.

And I think that's the difficult bit: achieving crisp, clear sentences that accurately convey the right message and grab an audience.

HOW GINNY'S BOOK HELPS YOU TO WRITE BETTER
Ginny has been improving documents (on and off the web) forever. As Steve Krug puts it; "She's forgotten more about writing and reading than most people will ever know". But the point about Ginny is the way that she shares her knowledge: crisp, clear sentences that gently explain what to do - and why. Plentiful examples. Before-and-after case studies."    (Continued via Caroline's Corner, Usability News)    [Usability Resources]

Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works



Check-out more books at Usernomics.

Web's Wonders Still Elude Many Users

Usability still an issue with many web-based applications ...

"A study that indicates that lack of awareness and poor usability are the key barriers to a user's adoption of Internet services from ISPs may provide some relevance to IT managers.

The survey was commissioned by Montreal-based Radialpoint, a provider of managed Internet services to ISPs, and found that nearly half of polled Internet users were unaware of the online security services provided by their ISP. Additionally, almost 70 percent did not know if their ISP provided music or gaming services, and about one third did not know if their ISP provided any services beside Internet access and e-mail.

Scott Plewes, founding partner of usability consulting firm Maskery, said the results of the study are unsurprising. He said that IT managers who create Web-based systems or applications often hear similar feedback from their customers.

"There are usability issues across the board, whether it's with PDAs, Web applications, or other high-tech services," Plewes said. "We see issues with Web applications all the time, partly because it is still a fairly new field from the user interface point-of-view."

Plewes said that while Web applications are becoming more standardized with clear rules on how they are supposed to behave, there are still a lot of aspects where "people are making it up as they go along."

Plewes also stressed the need for IT managers to hire the right personnel when trying to develop user-friendly applications.

"Engineers are great at engineering and developers are great at developing because that is what they're trained to do," Plewes said. "But, if you want a good user-interface, you need somebody that's trained in it."    (Continued via PC World)    [Usability Resources]

Bill Gates on natural user interfaces

Bill Gates hints at "natural user interfaces" ...

"In an article in today’s New York Times about how Bill Gates is planning his leave from Microsoft to devote himself to his $33 billion foundation, a great deal of attention goes to Gates’ decade-long agenda for the company.

According to the article, Gates described at the company’s annual financial meeting last week “a world in which the widespread availability of broadband networks would reshape computing, giving rise to what he said would be “natural user interfaces” like pen, voice and touch, replacing many functions of keyboards and mice.”

“Ubiquitous broadband networks and high speed wireless networks have for the first time given rise to meaningful alternatives to bulky and costly personal computers. In their place are a proliferating collection of smart connected devices that are tied together by a vast array of Internet-based information services based in centralized data centers.

The industry is rushing to “software as a service” models ranging from Salesforce.com, a San Francisco company that sells business contact software delivered via Web browsers, to Apple’s iPhone, which is designed as a classic “thin client,” a computer that requires the Internet for many of its capabilities.

It iss a vision that Microsoft itself has at least partially embraced. Microsoft, in contrast, is calling its strategy “software plus services,” an approach that is intended to protect the company’s existing installed base.

During the interview, all three executives indicated that Microsoft is now moving quickly to offer new Internet services for personal computer users. Centralized data storage will make it possible for PC users to gain access to most or all of their information from all of the different types of computers they use, whether they are desktops, laptops or smartphones, and wherever they are located.”

The article raises more questions than providing answers, leaving in the middle how such interfaces could become “natural”, what it might mean for people to have all this information always available (the issue of “presence” comes to mind), and how to make that experience seamless across devices."    (Continued via Putting people first)    [Usability Resources]

Web design is the design of words

Less is often more in website design ...

"Functionality and usefulness are far more important to the success of your website than how nice and elegant it looks.

... The things we think are the most beautiful are often the least useful in a practical and functional sense. Mount Everest is beautiful. Gold, jewellery and diamond rings are beautiful. Do certain things increase in beauty as they lose practical function?

There is no question that certain designs can be made both beautiful and functional. But for other design challenges, the more beautiful the design is made, the less functional and easy to use it becomes. This is particularly true for websites.

Ryanair, eBay, Amazon, Google, Craig's List, My Space, and YouTube are ugly websites. They are also hugely successful websites. When I show audiences the Ryanair website, there are audible gasps. I see people recoil from its sheer ugliness. Yet last year, Ryanair flew 42 million passengers, and the vast majority of them booked their flights through Ryanair.com.

Have you noticed that the Web has started to grey? There is a severe outbreak of grey text syndrome, particularly in blogs. Web design is falling into the trap of caring more about how a page looks than how it reads. So, why do an increasing number of websites today use small font sizes and grey text? The answer is simple: small fonts and grey text look better. They blend into the overall design of the page. They are more elegant and visually appealing."    (Continued via Gerry McGovern)    [Usability Resources]

In a Highly Complex World, Innovation From the Top Down

Top down innovation ...

"User-generated content — from Wikipedia to YouTube to open-source software — is generating waves of excitement. But the opening of innovation to wider numbers of people obscures another trend: many of the most popular new products, like the iPod, are dominated by a top-down, elite innovation model that doesn’t allow for customization.

“New technologies are becoming so complex that many are beyond the possibility of democracy playing a role in their development,” said Thomas P. Hughes, a science and technology professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Consider: Electronic implants into human bodies; gene-splicing as common as cosmetic surgery; computer networks mining vast databases to discern consumer preferences. All of these innovations are the result of corporate or government initiatives overseen by elites.

“The process of innovation leaves out a huge proportion of the population,” said Daniel Sarewitz, director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University.

To be sure, experts like Eric von Hippel, a management professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argue that the proliferation of “user-generated” designs signals the “democratizing” of innovation. Armed with inexpensive digital tools and networks, ordinary people, he says, can band together to push their own innovations. They also can hijack existing technologies, taking them in directions only dimly envisioned by the original creators.

One example is an electronic community called Instructables whose participants share methods for customizing standard products in unpredictable ways. The chief of Instructables, Eric J. Wilhelm, who earned his doctorate at M.I.T., where he was inspired by Mr. von Hippel, has posted a clever means of turning a white Asics Gel-Foundation 7 running shoe into a purple model. (The $90 official version comes only in a white-black-and-blue combination.)

Today’s Web-savvy consumers “expect innovations to meet their needs,” Mr. Wilhelm says. “If innovation isn’t tailored to them, they expect to be able to tailor it to themselves. That is a big change.”

But does this really mean that elites no longer sit at the top of the innovation food chain?"    (Continued via New York Times)    [Usability Resources]

Instructables

What makes design seem intuitive?

Jared Spool on inntuitive design ...

"The always entertaining & insightful, Jared Spool- founder & principal of User Interface Engineering- spoke at Yahoo! Design Week about what makes designs intuitive? Some of my notes from his talk:

• A design itself doesn’t intuit anything. People intuit what is required of them from a design. Individual users may perceive something as intuitive if they can interact with it right away with no learning curve.
• Designs are perceived as not intuitive when they take too much time to figure out. This often causes people to become frustrated.
• Things that are innate come from an understanding you are born with. Intuitive is something you learn. For example, once you learn how one scrollbar works, you expect the same elsewhere.
• As soon as one element of design is unintuitive, the rest falls apart with it.
• Personal perspective: what people currently know & their previous experience. Intuitive designs are not purely based on previous understanding but also on personal interpretation.
• Designs seem intuitive to designers because they know how they work because of their involvement.
• Intuitive Design is evolutionary. It’s part of a path we go through when designing things. First, products and services tend to focus on technology, then we add features that ultimately overwhelm our users. As a result, we have to focus on intuitiveness to help people manage all the features we’ve added.
• There is a knowledge continuum. People with all the knowledge about a product or service are on one end of the continuum (typically product developers). On the other and of the continuum are people with no knowledge (essentially novice users).
• There are two points of interest on this knowledge continuum. Current knowledge is what people already know –what they bring to a product or service. Target knowledge is the information they need to complete a task.
• The “gap” between current knowledge and target knowledge is where design happens."    (Continued via Functioning Form)    [Usability Resources]

Custo-consum-user-people

On the use of the term "user" ...

"Here we go again. Can't we just call people PEOPLE? This time it's Josh Bernoff of Forrester. He says:

"When I started in the business twenty-mumble years ago, writing software manuals, people who used software were unusual (and had to be masochists). We spent a lot of time talking about users. The word user was helpful -- it helped us to keep in mind that there was a poor slob on the other end of what we were building.

Those times are long gone. We know users are important now. Disappoint them and you lose. So why do we still have to call them "users," which puts the emphasis on the technology they are using?

Yes, I know "users are people, too." But you know what? All people are users now! (With nearly 80% Net penetration in the US this is pretty close to true.) Users put up with computers. People just do stuff.

Nobody talks about users of dishwashers, or users of retail stores, or users of telephones. So why are we talking about "users" of computers, browsers, and software?"

I'm all for "humanizing the experience"—but guess what? Sometimes labels help us to design better solutions, products and experiences for the PEOPLE who we serve who USE the stuff we develop for them. USERS."    (Continued via Logic+Emotion)    [Usability Resources]

Custo-consum-user-people

Where did all our knobs go?

The merits of an anolog knob ...

"This weekend our 5-year-old decided to eat a screw. That meant I got to catch up on my Golf Digest and Popular Mechanics reading while spending a Saturday in the waiting room of urgent care.

As such, I ran across this article in Popular Mechanics: Bring Back Our Knobs: Analog vs. Digital. (* warning…audio plays on page load)

In reading it, I’ve realized that this has been perhaps one of the biggest subliminal complaints I’ve had with devices in general over the years. Most everything today is button-centric. Buttons, buttons, buttons. My car stereo, my TV/DVD/Satellite box, my cell phone, even our oven. Interfaces have become increasingly more tedious to use and the lack of the good, ol analog knob is likely the biggest culprit.

The article mentions that one of the reasons people like the iPod is that Apple, rightfully so, embraced the analog knob. The scroll wheel is a classic bit of interface design that people just intuitively like.

To take it a step further, I finally got to play with an iPhone yesterday. The appeal of the phone is that even though it’s entirely digital, the interface is highly analog. You slide your fingers across the screen to physically move the interface.

This, of course, can’t translate directly to web sites, as web sites are rarely interacted with directly. You typically are using an intermediary device such as a mouse or keyboard which can make using direct analog interface more of a chore.

That said, as devices get smaller and more ‘touchable’ let’s hope that other’s catch on to Apple’s ability to understand the power of analog in a digital world."    (Continued via MNteractive)    [Usability Resources]

Debunking the Myths of Innovation: An Interview with Scott Berkun

Creating a conducive environment for creativity and innovation ...

"In his research, Scott Berkun, the author of the popular new book, "The Myths of Innovation," has done a fantastic job of demystifying innovation and debunking dangerous assumptions about how breakthroughs happen. UIE's Christine Perfetti recently had the chance to talk with Scott about his new book and his research in the area of innovation.

UIE: In your book, you discuss the misconceptions about many of the biggest innovations in history. For example, you mention that Newton didn't discover gravity by watching apples and Thomas Edison didn't invent the light bulb. Why do you think these false beliefs are still so popular and memorable?

Scott Berkun: One of the biggest reasons is that the myths are fun. We all love stories that entertain or mystify us, and it's natural that given the choice between a dull story for how something happened, and an odd, curious or funny one, we'll tend to want to hear, and tell, the latter.

There's nothing wrong with this, unless you actually want to learn how to innovate: in which case we have to dig deeper and find out the truth. That was the primary goal of my book.

When you use the word "Innovation," what do you mean?

It's funny, I spent a great deal of time looking at different definitions of the word, but in the end decided not to bother with a long-winded exploration of what the word means.

In my book, I'm deliberately sloppy with the definition. Invention, discovery, innovation, creative thinking, and progress are all in the same ballpark and that's the field of myths the book explores.

In your research on Innovation, you debunked the myth that the best ideas win if the design is better than its competitors. Can you give an example of the best idea failing to win?

I think it's pretty rare that "the best" idea among experts in any field becomes the dominant, mass popular leader. HTML is not the "best" programming language. Certainly few computer scientists believe Microsoft Windows is the best operating system, and very few doctors believe Airborne is the best cold remedy. In my research, I've explored all the factors that contribute to innovation adoption, and surprisingly only a few of them have to do with the abstract quality of the idea behind the innovation itself."    (Continued via UIE)    [Usability Resources]

What Apple copied from Microsoft

The importance of seamless operation ...

"... My iPhone has made me stop using calendar, contact, and e-mail applications I’ve used day and night for over a decade, and switch to the free—and in some ways less capable—applications that come bundled with Macintosh OS X.

Changing years of work habits is not easy. Migrating data, in some cases by hand, takes time I don’t have to spare. Yet I’m making these changes of my own will, and happily.

In short, Apple has finally copied something from Microsoft. Or, if you prefer, Apple has learned the marketing psychology lesson that Microsoft got first. For many consumers, convenience is of greater value than choice. A platform built of parts that work together seamlessly beats a self-curated collection of apps that don’t.

That syncing feeling
Microsoft knows this, Adobe knows it, and Apple had learned it by the time they launched the iTunes/iPod cartel. The iPhone creates a similar value proposition for OS X’s bundled communication, contact, and calendar apps.

Maybe all Windows users won’t switch to Macs, but many Mac users will dump Entourage, Eudora, and the like once they sync an iPhone to their computers. What “free” wasn’t enough to achieve, “seamless” just might be. If I can change work habits, anyone can."    (Continued via Jeffrey Zeldman)    [Usability Resources]

Better "Usability" Isn't Always the Answer

Sometimes you have to consider variables other than usability ...

"About a month ago, I had the opportunity to speak to a group of Usability professionals. The theme of my talk was getting them to raise the bar within their industry; to become true advocates for consumers like they should be. Yes, consumers, not "users". B2B, b2C, self-service, e-commerce, video, web2.0, no matter the focus of your site, or whether a nickel changes hands, your audience consumes the content you provide and engages with the experience you've planned.

Perhaps the grandfather of Usability, Frederick Winslow Taylor, could have called his audience such a thing — they were factory line workers, using a tool to do their job — but today's consumers are anything but "users". They're volunteers, and they're empowered; they do what they want, when they want because, most importantly, they want to. The "why" is up to them, not you.

I often challenge people to come up with positive associations with the term user. I'm still waiting for one positive response. Sure, I've heard "Mac user" and even that falls flat given the very real problems with technology — yes, even with Macs — that rear their ugly head at the most inopportune of times.

While at the event, my favorite Usability-pro-at-sea, Todd Follansbee, offered one of the best jokes I've heard in the industry about a man and woman on a first date. The punchline from the woman, upon hearing that the man was a Usability Engineer, was that she hoped he knew sometimes "task completion" and "time spent on task" weren't the best measures of success! PG-13 material to be sure, but you can see why we like Todd so much.

I digress. Haven't we all walked past a homeless person, panhandling for change and not reached into our pockets and given a buck or two? Perhaps in your town it's students asking for donations for new uniforms. Surely not everyone who walks by contributes, or they wouldn't have to stand out there for weeks on end! Is anyone willing to offer their reason for not supporting either the cause, or the homeless man's jones for a slice of pizza — at least in NY — that they simply didn't know how to complete the task successfully? If the task got easier, without him removing the change from your pocket himself, would the conversion rate magically go up? Of course not, because the choice not to give was explicitly made — or implicitly, but it was a decision nonetheless — and was based upon an individual's motivations.

Contrived example? Maybe. But it's important to note, without the desire to take action — something your audience controls 100% — it doesn't matter how easy the task is to complete, or how efficient a process it is.

So, here's my advice should you find yourself in the unenviable — but let's face it, all too common — position of trying to determine the best course of action for improving your business online: Stop. Take a step back. Consider that while you want more revenue, more revenue requires more people taking action. But people only do what they want to do."    (Continued via grokdotcom)    [Usability Resources]

Qualitative Research

Two online papers referenced about qualitative research ...

"Leisa Reichelt, over at Disambiguity, is writing a 3-part series on accepting the unscientific qualities of qualitative research, and using qualitative research as a flexible way to gather rich and insightful information about your intended audience.

In each part (part 3 is in the works,) Leisa states a way you might make qualitative research “look more scientific,” and then discusses some reasons why trying to make qualitative research more quantitative is a waste of time, money, and energy.

1) Use a relatively large sample size

The richness of the information and insight you receive even from this small sample size makes the return on investment enormous - and the small sample size makes it an activity that almost any project can incorporate into their timeline and budget. At the end of the day - those things are far more important than scientific validity.

2) Ensure that your test environment doesn’t change

If you want to quickly weed out problems with your site/application/prototype - then I recommend that you fix the problem and move on to spend your valuable research time learning about things you don’t already know about. It will certainly keep you awake as you’re researching, you’ll get rapid return on investment and excellent bang for buck as far as research techniques go.

3) Ensure that your test approach doesn’t change (don’t change the script, and stick to it)

Perhaps you can use her arguments when someone asks you about the validity of your qualitative research."    (Continued via UIE Brain Sparks)    [Usability Resources]

Google Testing New Homepage Design in Taiwan, Hong Kong

Google's new design in Asia ...

"Google Inc. is testing a new homepage design in Taiwan and Hong Kong that takes advantage of faster broadband speeds in those markets, one of the company's founders said Thursday.

"We're actually now experimenting with trying new kinds of homepages, for example in Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, that are a completely different type than we've tried before on our U.S. site as well as our European sites," Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google and the company's president of technology, speaking to investors during a conference call.

Google announced the new design for its South Korean Web site in May, during a keynote speech by Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt at the Seoul Digital Forum. The site's new design ditches Google's famously clean homepage design, adding a row of icons above the search bar and a row of animated icons below it.

In Hong Kong and Taiwan, Google is experimenting with a new design for its iGoogle personalized homepage service.

... "We think [the new design] will be more appropriate for the local cultures, and their context, and their broadband connections, which, for example in Korea, are extraordinarily fast," Brin said, adding that response to the new site designs had been "quite positive."    (Continued via PC World)    [Usability Resources]

Google Taiwan

Yahoo! Design Week: Product Design at Apple and Beyond

Bob Brunner on product design ...

"Former Director of Industrial Design at Apple Inc. and Pentagram partner, Bob Brunner, spoke at Yahoo! Design Week about his experiences with and perspective on product design principles and deliverables. Though most of Brunner’s talk was a walk through of product design examples, he also offered the following insights:

• Clients are what is going to help you be successful. You need to work with people you who believe what you believe in.
• There’s a lot of subjectivity in product design. People can produce a million reasons on a spreadsheet for why not to do something. Having someone (or a culture) that supports you is very important.
• A lot of the best clients are the ones that are in trouble. They need to change and therefore try something different or take risks.
• The Apple Powerbook design was not tested with customers –it just felt right. Some usability testing was done to ensure it could be used accurately. Virtually every notebook computer is modeled off the original Powerbook design.
• Brunner’s focus at Apple was developing a design language –a physical vocabulary of objects- across all products. Apple’s language was rooted in the desktop or office. They wanted to make it more personal: part of you vs. part of your desk.
• The design team needed to own design language and educate the rest of the company about it."    (Continued via Functioning Form)    [Usability Resources]

Web Usability

Balancing usability and accessibility ...

"The dividing line between web accessibility and web usability is often blurred and difficult to distinguish. Whilst there is no doubt that the two topics do overlap to a significant degree, it is important to differentiate between them. Unlike web accessibility which impacts directly upon disabled users, web usability affects all users, and can be defined as a measure of how easy it is for a generic site visitor to carry out a task such as finding a given piece of information or buying a certain product. However, there are accessibility benefits to be gained from applying web usability principles to your designs. So let’s take a few simply usability concepts, look at why they are important and see what effect they may have on overall accessibility.

Take any prolonged discussion on web accessibility and there will come a point when someone mutters the phrase

“That’s not an accessibility problem. That’s a usability issue.”

As was demonstrated by The Great Accessibility Camp-Out, even very experienced developers have different ideas as to where accessibility stops and usability begins. But where do we draw the line? And can incorporating a few usability principles improve a site’s overall accessibility?

For a start, I think we need to understand, once and for all, that usability is not the same thing as accessibility.Web usability affects all users and , generally speaking, can be sub-divided into five core components:

Learnability - How easy it is for visitors to find their way around the site during their first visit?
Effectivity - How quickly and easily can they perform tasks?
Memorability - When visitors return to the site after a period of time, how quickly do they recall how to use the site?
Reliability - How many errors do visitors make, how severe are those errors and how easily do they adjust?
Enjoyability - How pleasant is the site to use?

So how do we turn these components into something practical we can use?"    (Continued via Accessites.org)    [Usability Resources]

User Experience Strategy

User Experience consulting strategy ...

"In recent years, my consulting process has become T-shaped, in part due to the gentle jabs of Peter Boersma, but mostly as a result of the fit between my expertise and the needs of my clients.

In the first phase, I conduct research (the three circles) and work with my clients to define a user experience strategy. This narrative expression provides a necessary but insufficient platform for design.

In the second phase, I develop the information architecture, which requires specifying the structure and behavior of a web site, software product, or interactive service, so that users can achieve goals, complete tasks, and find what they need.

And, it’s this tangible expression of strategy, in the form of wireframes, sketches, and prototypes, that reliably translates an abstract vision into a well-grounded, actionable blueprint for design. Without that structural foundation, the strategy just hangs in space.

Frame Analysis
But this article is not about information architecture. Rather, it’s an investigation of user experience strategy, a novel phrase that’s crept into our vocabulary and is shaping our future. Let me explain.

The words we use to describe or frame our roles, our teams, and ourselves influence our own perceptions and the ways we are perceived by others. As George Lakoff explains in Don’t Think of an Elephant:

Frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world. As a result, they shape the goals we seek, the plans we make, the way we act, and what counts as a good or bad outcome of our actions...Because language activates frames, new language is required for new frames. Thinking differently requires speaking differently.

In other words, user experience strategy is a term whose time has come, and while it leads us to better design, it also obscures our vision."    (Continued via Semantic Studios)    [Usability Resources]

T-Shaped Consulting Framework

Blasting the Myth of the Fold

Above the fold rule is changing rapidly ...

"We are all well aware that web design is not an easy task. There are many variables to consider, some of them technical, some of them human. The technical considerations of designing for the web can (and do) change quite regularly, but the human variables change at a slower rate. Sometimes the human variables change at such a slow rate that we have a hard time believing that it happens.

This is happening right now in web design. There is an astonishing amount of disbelief that the users of web pages have learned to scroll and that they do so regularly. Holding on to this disbelief – this myth that users won’t scroll to see anything below the fold – is doing everyone a great disservice, most of all our users.

First, a definition: The word “fold” means a great many things, even within the discipline of design. The most common use of the term “fold” is perhaps used in reference to newspaper layout. Because of the physical dimensions of the printed page of a broadsheet newspaper, it is folded. The first page of a newspaper is where the “big” stories of the issue are because it is the best possible placement. Readers have to flip the paper over (or unfold it) to see what else is in the issue, therefore there is a chance that someone will miss it. In web design, the term “fold” means the line beyond which a user must scroll to see more contents of a page (if it exists) after the page displays within their browser. It is also referred to as a “scroll-line.”

Screen performance data and new research indicate that users will scroll to find information and items below the fold. There are established design best practices to ensure that users recognize when a fold exists and that content extends below it1. Yet during requirements gathering for design projects designers are inundated with requests to cram as much information above the fold as possible, which complicates the information design. Why does the myth continue, when we have documented evidence that the fold really doesn’t matter in certain contexts?

Once upon a time, page-level vertical scrolling was not permitted on AOL. Articles, lists and other content that would have to scroll were presented in scrolling text fields or list boxes, which our users easily used. Our pages, which used proprietary technology, were designed to fit inside a client application, and the strictest of guidelines ensured that the application desktop itself did not scroll. The content pages floated in the center of the application interface and were too far removed from the scrollbar location for users to notice if a scrollbar appeared. Even if the page appeared to be cut off, as current best practices dictate, it proved to be such an unusual experience to our users that they assumed that the application was “broken.” We had to instill incredible discipline in all areas of the organization that produced these pages – content creation, design and development – to make sure our content fit on these little pages."    (Continued via Boxes and Arrows)    [Usability Resources]

AOL Page With Scrolling

Introduction to the Building Blocks

An introduction to the building block system ...

"Part 1 of this series “The Challenge of Dashboards and Portals” discussed the difficulties of creating effective information architectures for portals, dashboards, and tile-based information environments using only flat portlets, and introduced the idea of a system of standardized building blocks that can effectively support growth in content, functionality, and users over time. In enterprise and other large scale social settings, using standardized components allows for the creation of a library of tiles that can be shared across communities of users.

Part two now outlines the design principles underlying the building block system, and the simple guidelines for combining blocks together to create any type of tile-based environment.

Overview

The building block system is a packaged toolkit that offers standardization across several layers of an information environment, including the information architecture, the user experience, the functionality, and the metadata. As a potential framework for standardization, it is most important to understand that the building blocks are inclusive rather than exclusive, and that they are neutral with regard to any specific software solution, vendor, package, programming language, system architecture, development platform, business rules, enterprise environment, or user experience design guidelines.
Consequently, adopting the building block system and approach – at the right level of formality for a particular set of business, technology, and information architecture needs – can help resolve some of the many problems inherent in flat portlet-only design approaches (the box of chocolates model) regardless of the context. Potential applications or contexts of use for the building blocks include:

• Any experience defined by stock portlets
• Any environment assembled from custom built or customized off the shelf [COTS] tiles
• Intranets and extranets
• Content aggregators
• Collaboration environments and solutions such as SharePoint, eRooms, etc.
• Personal publishing platforms and group authoring solutions
• Wikis and other collaboratively authored knowledge organization structures
• Web-based personal desktop services such as Google and Netvibes
• Mashups services and platforms such as Yahoo Pipes and Google Gears
• Social networking platforms such as Facebook, Myspace, etc.
• The rapidly expanding collections of public domain widgets

The building block system defines two types of information architecture components in detail – building blocks (or Containers), and navigation components (or Connectors) – as well as the supporting rules and guidelines that make it possible to assemble complex user experience architectures quickly and effectively. The block system is not a pre-packaged dashboard or portal design. Instead, it offers modular components you can rely on to work together and grow coherently as the pieces making up a finished dashboard or enterprise portal. Using the blocks will help focus design efforts on the important questions of what content to provide, how to present it to users, and how to manage it effectively.
The complete package includes:

1. Basic principles and assumptions underlying the block system, and how it can complement other design approaches.
2. Assembly guidelines and stacking hierarchy which shows how to combine blocks into larger units while ensuring a sound and consistent information architecture.
3. Modular building blocks of all sizes (Containers)
4. Modular navigation components (Connectors)
5. Standardized Convenience Functionality for blocks, which recommends a baseline set of common capabilities such as export of building block content, printing Tiles, etc.
6. Common Utility Functionality which captures common productivity enhancements and capabilities linking the block-based system to other enterprise systems such as calendars and document repositories.
7. Suggested metadata attributes for blocks that support administration and management needs, as well as important classes of utility functionality including alerting, syndication, searching, collaboration, and system administration."    (Continued via Boxes and Arrows)    [Usability Resources]

Openess Principle

User Assistance Walkthroughs: Helping Best Practices Emerge

The use and benefits of walkthroughs ...

"In my previous job as a UX designer, I learned the value of collaborative design walkthroughs. During walkthroughs, the UX designer would step through a user scenario—using the wireframes or mid-fidelity prototypes—with a cross-disciplinary team comprising product management, other UX designers, business analysts, developers, product testers, and technical communicators. The motivation for doing these walkthroughs was to reduce the amount of churn around product requirements that was occurring during coding and testing. No matter how well-written a requirement or use case was, it wasn’t until stakeholders could interact with a design within a tangible context that the full implications of a requirement or its lack of sufficient specificity became evident.

Beyond the benefit of clarifying requirements and gaining agreement among the team that a design met the requirements, I have found that walkthroughs have a deeper, even more valuable impact as a social mechanism for creating and distributing organizational knowledge. Walkthroughs

• let designers share the rationale for design decisions they make
• identify common design approaches—across designers and even across design teams
• enable the development of consistent methods
• subject design approaches to collective scrutiny, honing them into best practices
• get organizational buy-in for those best practices

My current focus on user assistance as a component of the user experience has reinforced my respect for the walkthrough as an essential design activity—this time for information designers and information developers. Although the lessons I’ve learned from doing UX design walkthroughs apply to user assistance, user assistance has some unique requirements and dynamics that warrant this article’s special focus."    (Continued via UXmatters)    [Usability Resources]

Defeated By a Dialog Box

The need to retain design conventions ...

"Interaction techniques that deviate from common GUI standards can create usability catastrophes that make applications impossible to use.

I can operate almost any user interface. After all, I have 33 years' experience using computers and 25 years' professional experience analyzing bad designs: I know most of the ways interaction designers can confuse or annoy users. I've seen it all before. Or so I thought.

Despite my prowess at defeating complicated user interfaces, I was recently stumped by a simple dialog box. I simply couldn't figure out how to proceed, so I had to close the application and use another program to achieve my goal.

The offending software shall remain nameless; it's a nice piece of shareware that I enjoy enough to have paid the fee. Also, a single developer serves as both the programmer and interface designer on the application, so it would be unfair to pick on him.

Where's the OK Button?
The usability problem appeared after I upgraded to the application's newest release and wanted to save a file in a new image format. As the following screenshots show, this brought up the expected "Save As" dialog box, along with a smaller, overlaid dialog box containing a property sheet with the image format's special options.

The options window should have included a Help feature, because many of its options were rather obscure. As is typical of users who don't understand their options, I left the settings at the default values, particularly since I was satisfied with the defaults for those settings that I did understand. This is as it should be: if you pick good defaults, most users can ignore any advanced options and simply proceed.

My obvious next step was to accept the default options by clicking the OK button to dismiss the options box. Surprise: there was no such button!

However hard I tried, I couldn't get the application to show me an OK button. I tried saving in another format. I tried rebooting first the app, and then the entire computer. Nothing worked.

It was impossible for me to get rid of the active dialog box and get back to my "Save As" dialog box. I gave up. Defeated by a dialog box."    (Continued via Alertbox)    [Usability Resources]

Problem Dialog Box

Need help with Accessible User Experience Design? Just Ask.

Free accessible UX book available for download ...

"Many websites have accessibility barriers that make it difficult or impossible for people with disabilities to use them. And most web software tools are not sufficiently accessible to people with disabilities, making it difficult or impossible for them to contribute to the Web. This is a very big deal. Many millions of people have disabilities that affect their use of the Web. Web accessibility is about removing those barriers so that people with disabilities can use and contribute to the Web.

Designing for accessibility doesn't require a whole new design process; it generally involves only minor adjustments to your existing design process. For example, accessible design techniques fit well into User-Centered Design (UCD) processes. This book tells you how to integrate accessibility throughout design.

- Part I: The Basics is for anyone wanting to include people with disabilities in their design process, even at an informal level.
- Part II: Accessibility in the User-Centered Design Process focuses on helping usability professionals incorporate accessible design practices into a User-Centered Design process.

Even if your organization doesn't use a robust UCD process, you can still use many of the tips and techniques described in Part II to incorporate accessibility in your designs, however formal or informal your process."    (Continued via Usability News)    [Usability Resources]

There Is No Grand Theory of Usability

UI needs may be different after you gain experience ...

"People working with Apple computers are used to a very consistent user experience. For a large part this stems from the fact that the Lisa type of GUI does not have the fight between MDI and SDI. The question simply never arises, because the Lisa type of GUI does not offer the choice to create either of both; it's something different all along. I usually think of it as 'MDI on steroids unified with a window manager'. It virtually includes all benefits of a SDI and and the benefits of an MDI." Read on for how I feel about this age-old discussion.

We have touched on this discussion a couple of times before on OSNews, most notably when we ran a poll on whether or not GNOME should include a patch to enable a global application menubar. The 175 comments to that story provided us with some very valuable insights concerning the matter; most importantly, it illustrated how hard it actually is to make a case for any (G)UI related standpoint, probably because in contrast to many other computing related issues, you cannot benchmark usability. There is no 'UsabilityMark2001' you can run on your Mac and Windows machine, and then compare the results in order to come up with a grand theory of usability which will predict users' behaviour.

The author of the article writes:

"First of all, it saves a lot of screen space. Because the additional menubars are no more than optical bloat. 'But,' you may say, 'screen estate is not so important anymore. Screens get bigger and bigger, with higher resolutions and stuff.' Well, yes. But the human visual sensory equipment has limits. There is a limit of how much information you can get on an area of a certain size. And there is a limit to the area the human eye can usefully overview."

While this makes a lot of sense, the article author fails to realise that this is why menubars ought to be standardised; the order of menubar entries should be the same across all the applications, reducing the amount of new information the eyes and brain must process in order to use the menubar. On top of that, the author also fails to mention that no matter how many windows of, say, Firefox you have open, the menubars in all those instances are exactly the same. In other words, the eyes and brain only have to process that menubar once, since it will know that that menubar will be the same in any instance of Firefox.

In addition, the author's argument does not take training into account. Because I use Firefox so often, I know its structure for the menubar from the top of my head. I do not need to process the menubar at all, simply because it is imprinted in my spatial memory. In other words, the brain has processes in place to minimise the amount of information it needs to actively process."    (Continued via OSNews)    [Usability Resources]

IDEA ‘07 Winners Selected

Usability featured as design criteria for IDEA winners ...

"Some of the world’s hottest designs, innovative problem-solvers and coolest concepts were among the winners of the 2007 International Design Excellence Awards (IDEASM) (formerly the Industrial Design Excellence Awards), a celebration of the best product designs of the year. Breathtaking aesthetics, rugged engineering and enhanced usability characterized the 1,691 entries in categories as diverse as consumer electronics, housewares, transportation, sporting goods, furniture, and medical and scientific equipment and eco-design. The IDEA Jury – a carefully selected group of 18 leading thinkers in the design world – chose 20 entries to receive the coveted Gold award, 19 entries for the Silver award and 42 for the Bronze award.

Co-sponsored by BusinessWeek magazine and the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), the IDEA program fosters business and public understanding of the impact of industrial design excellence on the quality of life and the economy. Winners enjoy broad exposure through multiple media, beginning with BusinessWeek’s announcement and in-depth analysis of the winners in the July 30 issue, which hits newsstands July 20. IDSA’s quarterly magazine, Innovation, will publish information on the Gold, Bronze and Silver winners in its annual Yearbook this fall. All 81 winners will be featured on IDSA’s web site (http://www.idsa.org/) with descriptions, photos and contact information. Many will also display their award-winning projects in the Design Gallery of CONNECTING’07, the upcoming Icsid/IDSA World Design Congress in San Francisco, October 17-20.

According to IDEA jurors, this year’s entries merged aesthetic excellence with strategic business development. “The products looked very good,” said juror Michael Schrage, one of the world’s leading experts on the economics of innovation. “They showed a healthy interaction between the designer and business interests."    (Continued via Designophy)    [Usability Resources]

LCD Monitor Mobius SyncMaster

Bad UI of the Week: The Mitten Mouse

Apple's one button mouse did work well ...

"Jef Raskin, user interface pioneer and father of the Macintosh UI, insisted that the Apple mouse only have one button because more than one would confuse the user. Anyone who has worked tech support and had to explain the concept of "right-clicking" will agree that this is, in many cases, valid.

In later years, he decided that humans had more than one finger, and so could deal with a multi-button mouse. He did place a conditional on this, however, saying that the buttons should be labeled with their use. Systems like RiscOS, where the left button was for selection, the middle for menu, and the right for alternative selection (typically rectangular rather than line-based) have borne this out.

So was the single-button mouse a mistake for the Macintosh? The single-button mouse certainly hasn’t harmed the machine’s market share to a noticeable degree. While it is still a minority platform, it is doing far better than most of the other systems dating from the same era that went for the multi-button approach.

Most power users, over the years, have bought third-party mice with multiple buttons. Even Apple now ships a multi-button mouse with the pro machines, but keeps the single button for the consumer line. What effect does this have on Mac software?

Mac users can right-click by holding Ctrl while they click, but this is not easy for all users. Left-handed users of Apple laptops, for example, have to cross their hands in a particularly uncomfortable way if they wish to press the Ctrl key with their right hand while using the trackpad with their left.

The biggest outcome has been that Mac software has all been designed on the assumption that there is only one button available. Over the years, the one niche which has always been faithful to the Mac interface has been the artist segment of the market. Is this because Macs foster creativity? Perhaps because you can’t be an artist with a PC? Or is it that a lot of artists favor a graphics tablet interface over a mouse, and a tablet only really allows one-button clicking ergonomically? Tapping the pen on the tablet simulates a click. Tapping while holding a button can be used for a right-click, but this is not particularly easy compared to using the left button.

The mouse, it turns out, is fairly rare among pointing devices in that access to both (or all) buttons is almost equally easy. This is not even true of the most common mouse replacements such as trackpads. Typically, the thumb rests on one button with these devices. Clicking the other requires moving it, sometimes even looking (moving your attention away from the screen) to check you are pressing the right one.

It is not surprising, then, that Apple has started to do well now that laptop sales are beginning to pass desktop sales; they get an interface that is easy to use with a single-button trackpad for free. The ultimate irony? The latest MacBooks have the first ergonomic mechanism for right-clicking I have found on a trackpad—holding down two fingers on the pad while clicking the button."    (Continued via Informit)    [Usability Resources]

Super Techies: Larry Tesler–the trail from Xerox PARC to Yahoo

Video interview with Larry Tesler - first in a series ...

"We’ve started a new video program, Super Techies, where I interview some of the people who are major impact on the past and future of computing. First up is Larry Tesler, currently Yahoo’s vice president of user experience and design.

Tesler’s career is a roadmap of innovation in user interface design, from the early days of personal computing to the Web. From 1973 to 1980, he was at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where he helped to develop “cut and paste, “modeless editing” and other features that are core to the graphical user interface.

From 1980 to 1997, Tesler was at Apple, serving as chief scientist, vice president of engineering, and vice president of the advanced technology group, and played a key role in the development of the Lisa and Macintosh in user interfaces, object-oriented programming, and multimedia technologies.

From October 2001 to April 2005 he was vice president of shopping experience at Amazon, the pioneering ecommerce and personalization Web site.

In the interview, Tesler discusses his early work in coming up with the graphical user interface at Xerox PARC and his subsequent role in evolving the human-computer interaction at Apple, Amazon and Yahoo. He also explains his “Law of Conservation of Complexity."    (Continued via ZDNet.com)    [Usability Resources]

Lisa