Interactive is a meaningless word

Making websites more useful, not just interactive ...

"Making your websites more interactive is a meaningless strategy. Make your website more useful instead.

Picture this scene. You are sitting in a meeting with some very cool people. These cool people think that, when it comes to the Web, they totally get it. They're very smart people and they're so important that they have to leave their mobile phones on during meetings.

They like to talk about things like color and mood and corporate identity. They want customers to have an enhanced brand experience. These people have moved way beyond Web 2.0. On their skateboard attention spans they have arrived at Web 5.0 and are moving beyond that too. One of their favorite phrases is: "I think the website needs to become more interactive."

I have never quite understood what the word 'interactive' means in the context of the Web. The Web is inherently active in that its corner stone is the link. The link is a call to action. We go to the Web to act, to do. Saying that a website needs to become more interactive is like saying that a football game needs more football.

In a Web context, 'interactive' is thus a meaningless word and it tends to be used by cool, meaningless people. In fact, the objective of making a website 'more' interactive is often absolutely not what the customer wants.

Customers don't want interactivity from your website. They want results. They want to do what they came to do as quickly as possible. You have to interact with a hotel booking process in order to book a room, but you want that interaction to be as fast and painless as possible.

Do you think that Google designers sit around drinking lattes and mouthing meaningless statements about more interactivity? Here is one of Google's key design principles: "Every millisecond counts."

"Nothing is more valuable than people's time", it goes on to state. "Google pages load quickly, thanks to slim code and carefully selected image files. The most essential features and text are placed in the easiest-to-find locations. Unnecessary clicks, typing, steps, and other actions are eliminated. Google products ask for information only once and include smart defaults. Tasks are streamlined.

"Speed is a boon to users. It is also a competitive advantage that Google doesn't sacrifice without good reason."

A core objective of Google is to get you off its website as quickly as possible. It has a relentless focus on making the first result the right result so that you will leave its website in the shortest time possible. Google makes most of its money from advertising.

Many traditional media websites are now measuring success based on how long they can keep people on their websites. They obviously have lots of people employed trying to make their websites more interactive.

'Save people time' should be written in 10 foot letters across the walls of every web design team's office. Do not listen to the fools who talk about more interactivity. It is from the minds of these fools that the truly awful Flash Intros crawled out. Focus all your energy on saving your customers time. Be useful. Be functional. Be brief."    (Continued via Usability News, Gerry McGovern)    [Usability Resources]

Multitouch, New Taskbar in Motion

The Windows 7 Taskbar ...

"Yesterday, during the opening hours of the D6 conference, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher jointly interviewed Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates. While the interview dealt mostly with the past, Yahoo, and a bit of Vista, by far the most interesting part was the first ever public appearance of Vista's successor: Windows 7. Earlier today, the team behind D6 posted a video of the demonstration, which was conducted by Microsoft's Julie Larson-Green. From a graphical user interface point of view, there were some interesting things in there.

The video shows Larson-Green talking us through the various touch features while answering questions from Mossberg and Swisher.

Let me give you a little history on Julie Larson-Green first. She joined Microsoft back in 1993, and throughout her career at the company she focused on user interface design. Her most important responsibility was the user interface design of Office XP, Office 2003, and most recently, Office 2007. Larson-Green led the massive interface redesign of Office 2007, a bold redesign that led to a completely new and - yes - innovative user interface. She was brought onboard the Windows 7 GUI team almost a year ago.

The demonstration obviously focused on the various multitouch features built right into Windows 7 - they will be available system-wide. Larson-Green called it an "evolution of Surface", and they're of course working together with the Surface team itself. The multitouch features require a digitiser built into the display, which is already shipping on various displays today. So obviously, you're going to need a new monitor.

To me, it seemed as if Larson-Green and the rest of the GUI team realise fully well that multitouch is not an answer to everything, but that it is "much faster to do certain tasks". As Larson-Green explained: "Use touch when it makes sense, use the mouse when it makes sense, use the keyboard when it makes sense." I believe it is indeed wise not to focus all efforts on multitouch as if it is the only sensible input method, but rather see it as an additional input method, that make sense for certain tasks. Larson-Green confirmed Microsoft is working on adding gestures for things like window management.

The applications that were part of the demonstration will not necessarily be part of Windows 7; they are applications written to demonstrate what can be done with the multitouch features in Windows 7. Interestingly, the Concierge application made use of circular menus, a user interface element frequently appearing in mockups lately. As we know, circular menus are potentially easier to use thanks to - dead horse alert - Fitts' Law.

The final interesting part was the rather odd-looking taskbar - assuming it even was a taskbar. The bar was twice as high as an ordinary taskbar, and lacked text, using what looked like icons or thumbnails instead. It reminded me of the RISC OS icon bar, mostly. Apparently, Larson-Green was not at liberty to discuss it, because when Mossberg asked her about it, she replied: "It's something we're working on for Windows 7 and I'm not supposed to talk about right now, today..."

While all we received was a small glimpse, I'm excited about everything that's going on behind the scenes. Larson-Green and Steven Sinofsky have delivered a truly innovative product with Office 2007, and as a GUI enthusiast, I'm excited to see them working on the Windows interface in quite a - for Microsoft - secretive manner. Some people are extremely cynical, and that's fine - I'm more of an optimist and await more information from Redmond."    (Continued via OS News)    [Usability Resources]

30 Beautiful And Original Product Designs

Interesting and unique product designs ...

"Successful product design manages to reveal useful functionality beyond its appealing form. No matter how excellent a design looks like, most customers aren’t likely to spend money on something they won’t be able to use. On the other hand, most people are likely to buy something useful despite the design it has.

Yet the key to a truly successful product design lies in designer’s ability to combine both beautiful design and functionality making it obvious to the customers how the product can be used and which benefits it delivers. However, one can combine the beauty of design with the utility it is supposed to provide.

Most products fail to pass this test and never reach the production stage; some products do manage to get to the stores. In the overview below you’ll find an overview of some beautiful and original product designs which will hopefully make the cut and will be available in the next years. Some of them are already available today.
Way Out Fridge Magnet

Way Out Fridge Magnet
Way Out magnet is an original imitation of the standard exit sign illustrating a run to the fridge for a midnight snack. We, however, are not sure why this sign should actually be placed on the fridge."    (Continued via The Best Article Every day, Smashing Magazine)    [Usability Resources]

Fridge Magnet

Fridge With Magnet

Microsoft Is Officially Out of Ideas

Microsoft borrowing UI design for Windows 7 ...

"Windows Vista has sold 140 million copies, but it's such a resource hog with unreliable hardware drivers that users keep asking Redmond to extend the support for Windows XP. Many corporations refuse to upgrade their server farms and cubicle-bound desktops at all. It's not often that 140 million copies of a software package that costs hundreds of dollars can be called a disappointment, but this one seems to fit that bill.

Vowing to release a new operating system every three years, the company now has about 20 months until the supposed release date for Windows 7. The tight-lipped mastodon has just started to let a trickle of feature details slip out, and I have to say that the early glimpses have not been very impressive.

The big news!
You know how the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch have these cool screens where you drag stuff around with your fingertips? Yeah, Microsoft will do that, too. Great, huh?

OK, so this version will do a bit more. Drag five fingers across the screen in a painting program, and you could leave five colorful glowworms in their wake. Play 10-finger chords on an on-screen piano, and resize photos by dragging the corners apart with two fingers. Wow, that's neato!

Yeah, so I lied. That's not really an update over the iPhone at all, save for the larger screens you'd see on a Dell desktop screen or a Hewlett-Packard laptop. The iPhone screen can do all of these tricks already, and I'm not really sure what the big innovation is here. At least Microsoft seems to be imitating an established leader in user interface design this time.

I understand that it's early in the game, but if the best Microsoft's army of engineers can come up with is a simple update to the touchscreen technology you see on nearly every ATM today, then the company is in trouble. There may not be much of a reason for anybody to migrate to Windows Vista 360, Windows You, or whatever they'll call this one.

All quiet on the Pacific Northwestern front
More troubling than the lack of major feature upgrades is the insistence on sticking to Vista's bloated core with similar minimum hardware requirements. Most people tend to use their computers for simple tasks like Web browsing, typing up the occasional text document, and maybe organizing their digital photos. This audience isn't all that interested in a bucketload of memory-sucking extras and a desktop environment that requires high-end graphics processors. Keep it simple, silly.

The exceptions include graphic designers (who have been Mac users for years), hardcore gamers (who are doing just fine with a Sony (NYSE: SNE) PlayStation 3 or Microsoft's own Xbox 360), and early adopters who just like to play with new technology. Fine, go for the niche audiences if you must. But at least make the bloat optional rather than turned on by default.

There's an alternative core technology by the name of MinWin deep inside Redmond's shops, and it's supposed to take the fatness out of the Vista experience. But management is saying that the next Windows will not be a dramatic departure from Vista, and the underpinnings will remain the same. That's a huge mistake. Don't these guys listen to user input anymore?"    (Continued via The Motley Fool)    [Usability Resources]

Early Windows 7 screenshots

Usability of new Windows 7 questioned - see gallery of screen shots ...

"So, word on the street is that part of the first day of the All Things D conference tonight will be the unveiling of the first time of the Windows 7 operating system by Microsoft. To be clear, we shouldn’t expect Windows 7 any sooner than 2010. That said, what is shown is very much a work in progress. If you can’t wait for the video footage, which we are sure is soon to come, we also have a bunch of Windows 7 screenshots in our gallery.

We see a lot of concepts in these images. An expanded bar at the bottom of the screen, an OS X-like dock, some sort of disc-based nav system that reminds of the OLPC OS, etc. Still, nice to see that things are progressing."    (Continued via Gear Live)    [Usability Resources]

Windows 7

Design Thinking

An interview with Tim Brown, IDEO CEO ...

"Thinking like a designer can transform the way you develop products, services, processes—and even strategy.

Thomas Edison created the electric lightbulb and then wrapped an entire industry around it. The lightbulb is most often thought of as his signature invention, but Edison understood that the bulb was little more than a parlor trick without a system of electric power generation and transmission to make it truly useful. So he created that, too.

Thus Edison’s genius lay in his ability to conceive of a fully developed marketplace, not simply a discrete device. He was able to envision how people would want to use what he made, and he engineered toward that insight. He wasn’t always prescient (he originally believed the phonograph would be used mainly as a business machine for recording and replaying dictation), but he invariably gave great consideration to users’ needs and preferences.

Edison’s approach was an early example of what is now called “design thinking”—a methodology that imbues the full spectrum of innovation activities with a human-centered design ethos. By this I mean that innovation is powered by a thorough understanding, through direct observation, of what people want and need in their lives and what they like or dislike about the way particular products are made, packaged, marketed, sold, and supported.

Many people believe that Edison’s greatest invention was the modern R&D laboratory and methods of experimental investigation. Edison wasn’t a narrowly specialized scientist but a broad generalist with a shrewd business sense. In his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory he surrounded himself with gifted tinkerers, improvisers, and experimenters. Indeed, he broke the mold of the “lone genius inventor” by creating a team-based approach to innovation. Although Edison biographers write of the camaraderie enjoyed by this merry band, the process also featured endless rounds of trial and error—the “99% perspiration” in Edison’s famous definition of genius. His approach was intended not to validate preconceived hypotheses but to help experimenters learn something new from each iterative stab. Innovation is hard work; Edison made it a profession that blended art, craft, science, business savvy, and an astute understanding of customers and markets.

Design thinking is a lineal descendant of that tradition. Put simply, it is a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity. Like Edison’s painstaking innovation process, it often entails a great deal of perspiration.

I believe that design thinking has much to offer a business world in which most management ideas and best practices are freely available to be copied and exploited. Leaders now look to innovation as a principal source of differentiation and competitive advantage; they would do well to incorporate design thinking into all phases of the process."    (Continued via putting people first, Harvard Business Review, Tim Brown)    [Usability Resources]

The Future of Usability Testing

Incorporating usability into an IT Department ...

"I recently chaired a round table on the Future of Usability Testing. It was sponsored by Techsmith who supply the Usability Testing Tool Morae (see my earlier article).

The invited attendees included developers, usability experts, an internet psychologist, and journalists all with considerably understanding and strong opinions about usability. I came with a strong interest in accessibility, which to a great extent can be seen as a subset of the usability requirements.

The aim of the roundtable was to better understand how to make usability design and testing business as usual in IT systems. This big question was approached by looking at several more specific questions:

* Why is usability important?
* What are the barriers to usability design and testing?
* How should it be imbedded into all phases of development?

Importance
Usability is important because:

* It drives down production costs. There should be fewer calls to the help desk for assistance in using the system. Customers will complete more transactions without having to turn to call centre staff to process the transaction for them. Internal users will complete tasks faster and more accurately, so increasing their efficiency.

* It improves sales. If a system is easy to use a customer is more likely to complete a transaction, so increasing conversion rates. If it is too hard the user will turn to another supplier, with the short-term loss of this sale and the probability of the long-term loss of future sales.

* It enhances brand loyalty. If a system is easy to use then the client should be delighted by the experience. This will add to their positive feelings about the quality of the brand. This is becoming more important as users are being exposed to best-of-breed systems which shows what is possible.

* In the public sector it provides access for all. Government bodies have an obligation to provide services to all members of the community; this should be true of the private sector as well but in reality they can decide not to service some groups. A system that is usable and accessible will reach a very large percentage of the population.

Barriers
Usability design and testing is not imbedded into the development cycle because:

* The benefits of good usability are not recognised by commissioners of the system. Advocates of usability in IT systems have not been sufficiently vocal. It is assumed that systems will be usable by default. This is in contrast to the effort that is put into the usability of the physical environment such as shop layouts or car design.

* The concepts of usability are not understood by the IT industry. Usability has not been a key part of IT education. IT developers are experts in IT and the technology and do not understand the difficulty many users have.

* The cost and benefits are not visible until a system is in production. When problems are discovered the best solutions may not be obvious and the cost of remedial action may be considered too high, so the system remains less usable than it should be.

* Extra design and testing seen as a cost. Development is driven by budgets and deadlines; if usability is not included explicitly in the requirements then any usability improvements that could lead to overruns will be shelved until a version 2 fix cycle."    (Continued via Usability News, IT-Director.com)    [Usability Resources]

OK-Cancel or Cancel-OK?

Small UI issues ...

"Should the OK button come before or after the Cancel button? Following platform conventions is more important than suboptimizing an individual dialog box.

We get countless questions about small details in UI design that don't matter much to the overall user experience. One classic is the order of buttons in dialog boxes:

* OK/Cancel
* Cancel/OK

Both are reasonable choices, and people can argue for hours about their preferences:

* Listing OK first supports the natural reading order in English and other languages that read left-to-right. Many other button sets have a natural progression (say, Yes/No or Previous/Next). You should always list these so that the reading order matches the logical order — in this case, OK/Cancel. Further, assuming users need OK much more frequently than Cancel, it's better to place this option first so that keyboard-driven users who tab to the buttons can get to their preferred choice with one less keystroke.
* Listing OK last improves the flow, because the dialog box "ends" with its conclusion. Also, as with Previous/Next, you could argue that OK is the choice that moves the user forward, whereas Cancel moves the user back. Thus, OK should be in the same location as Next: on the right.

In cases like this, it often doesn't matter what you do. Either choice has good arguments in its favor, and no choice is likely to cause usability catastrophes. It might save some users 0.1 seconds if you pick the "right" choice for certain circumstances, but it's simply not worth it to conduct sufficiently elaborate research to find out what that choice is. Better to spend your usability resources on those things that can change your key performance indicators by 83% or more.

So, to make this specific choice — as well as many other small choices in application design — it's best to follow the platform GUI standard. Applying consistent design that follows user expectations saves people much more time (and many more mistakes) than doing something that might be a tiny bit more optimal for your application, but introduces an inconsistency.
Inconsistency Costs More Time than It Saves
Deviate from the standard, and you'll easily cost users several minutes — or possibly hours — as they overlook or misuse UI elements. The time people spend pondering inconsistencies typically sums to much more than the small savings you'll hypothetically derive from a specialized design.

Sadly, the Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines differ from the Apple Human Interface Guidelines when it comes to the sequence of OK/Cancel buttons:

* Windows puts OK first
* Apple puts OK last

If you're designing a desktop application for one of these two personal computer platforms, your choice is easy: Do what the platform owner tells you to do.
Dialog Buttons for Web-Based Apps
If you're designing a Web-based application, the decision is harder, but you should probably go with the platform preferred by most of your users. Your server logs will show you the percentage of Windows vs. Mac users for your specific website or intranet. Of course, Windows generally has many more users, so if you can't be bothered to check the logs, then the guideline that will apply to most situations is:

* OK first, Cancel last, as in this screenshot from Office 2007: (below)

Should the OK button come before or after the Cancel button? Following platform conventions is more important than suboptimizing an individual dialog box.

We get countless questions about small details in UI design that don't matter much to the overall user experience. One classic is the order of buttons in dialog boxes:

* OK/Cancel
* Cancel/OK

Both are reasonable choices, and people can argue for hours about their preferences:

* Listing OK first supports the natural reading order in English and other languages that read left-to-right. Many other button sets have a natural progression (say, Yes/No or Previous/Next). You should always list these so that the reading order matches the logical order — in this case, OK/Cancel. Further, assuming users need OK much more frequently than Cancel, it's better to place this option first so that keyboard-driven users who tab to the buttons can get to their preferred choice with one less keystroke.
* Listing OK last improves the flow, because the dialog box "ends" with its conclusion. Also, as with Previous/Next, you could argue that OK is the choice that moves the user forward, whereas Cancel moves the user back. Thus, OK should be in the same location as Next: on the right.

In cases like this, it often doesn't matter what you do. Either choice has good arguments in its favor, and no choice is likely to cause usability catastrophes. It might save some users 0.1 seconds if you pick the "right" choice for certain circumstances, but it's simply not worth it to conduct sufficiently elaborate research to find out what that choice is. Better to spend your usability resources on those things that can change your key performance indicators by 83% or more.

So, to make this specific choice — as well as many other small choices in application design — it's best to follow the platform GUI standard. Applying consistent design that follows user expectations saves people much more time (and many more mistakes) than doing something that might be a tiny bit more optimal for your application, but introduces an inconsistency.
Inconsistency Costs More Time than It Saves
Deviate from the standard, and you'll easily cost users several minutes — or possibly hours — as they overlook or misuse UI elements. The time people spend pondering inconsistencies typically sums to much more than the small savings you'll hypothetically derive from a specialized design.

Sadly, the Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines differ from the Apple Human Interface Guidelines when it comes to the sequence of OK/Cancel buttons:

* Windows puts OK first
* Apple puts OK last

If you're designing a desktop application for one of these two personal computer platforms, your choice is easy: Do what the platform owner tells you to do.

Dialog Buttons for Web-Based Apps

If you're designing a Web-based application, the decision is harder, but you should probably go with the platform preferred by most of your users. Your server logs will show you the percentage of Windows vs. Mac users for your specific website or intranet. Of course, Windows generally has many more users, so if you can't be bothered to check the logs, then the guideline that will apply to most situations is:

* OK first, Cancel last, as in this screenshot from Office 2007: (below)
The screenshot illustrates two additional guidelines for dialog box buttons:

* It's often better to name a button to explain what it does than to use a generic label (like "OK"). An explicit label serves as "just-in-time help," giving users more confidence in selecting the correct action.

* Make the most commonly selected button the default and highlight it (except if its action is particularly dangerous; in those cases, you want users to explicitly select the button rather than accidentally activating it by hitting Enter)."    (Continued via Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)    [Usability Resources]

OK/Cancel

Google's 'Analytics Evangelist' Explains Why Websites 'Suck'

HIPPO - Highest Paid Person's Opinion ...

"Avinash Kaushik thinks one of the reasons why so many websites "suck" today is because of the hippo -- as in the "highest paid person's opinion."

And, yes, you're likely a hippo -- a successful advertising executive, CMO or brand manager, pulling in a six-figure income, often found pontificating about what does and doesn't work online. You use tried-and-true metrics such as unique visitors and click-through rates to decide on the best design for your landing page or what content is best suited on your product site.

'Least closest'
Yet, despite your mounds of data, Mr. Kaushik thinks you are the "least closest to the customer."

It was a blunt indictment, considering Mr. Kaushik offered it during a talk before roughly 200, well, hippos -- marketing executives from Procter & Gamble, Victoria's Secret, Coca-Cola and Timberland -- at an invite-only client conference held by Resource Interactive, a Columbus-based digital agency.

Mr. Kaushik is the "analytics evangelist" at Google, a new post created after his one-year consulting gig with the search giant expired. (Mr. Kaushik was previously director of research and analytics at Intuit, the personal-finance software company, and he is also the author of "Web Analytics: An Hour a Day" and web analytics blog Occam's Razor.)

Mr. Kaushik employed the word "sucks" frequently when he talked about the traditional metrics used for measuring online marketing. And as far as online marketing goes, it sucks too. He likened it to a "faith-based initiative."

Getting the 'why'
The point of Mr. Kaushik's candor is that he wants marketers to start thinking more about the "why." To get at that, he espoused the use of more online surveys of site visitors to find "segments of discontent."

He advised marketers to create conversations with consumers using a simple, short and free online survey created by Iperceptions.com, an online research firm. The survey asks: Who is coming to your website? Why are they there? How are you doing? What do you need to fix?

The surveys "get customers involved in fixing things," he said."    (Continued via Advertising Age, Livepath)    [Usability Resources]

High vs. Low Design

Simple vs. complex UI ...

"I recently did a phone interview for the User Interface Resource center which is sponsored by the folks at Adobe, Microsoft and Effective UI. The folks at Effective UI were interested in having an informal discussion around the concepts of "high design vs. low design" that is, highly-designed "experiential" applications that push the limits of technology and human interaction (Think slick desktop applications) vs. solutions that don't quite push as hard on (think Craigslist, Flickr, or Twitter). Any insights I maye have provided may be rooted in common sense. We use philips screwdrivers for cross head screws and regular screwdrivers for regular screws. Skilled practitioners know they should carry both and really skilled practitioners build homes that people actually want to live in.

Below are a few highlights:

Tim Wood:
That’s a great segue into the context of today’s discussion. I want to get your take on two contemporary user experience trends that we see on the Web today — that in many ways seem contradictory or divergent. That is, simple design versus complex design. On one hand we have sites like Delicious, Google Apps and Craigslist, all of which have a very minimal hypertext-based UI presentation. On the other hand we are seeing a strong emergence of RIAs of various flavors — in Flex, Silverlight and AJAX — that support a very rich presentation of user interface elements, as well as very dynamic interaction. Do you see these two trends as being contradictory or do you see them as complementary?

David Armano:
That’s a really big question without a black-and-white answer. Way back in 2003, Kevin Mullet wrote a Macromedia white paper titled The Essence of Effective Rich Internet Applications which was a precursor to what we’re talking about today regarding high and low design. He made a great case for rich design. In hindsight, I would have thought that was where everything was going because it just made so much sense.

Mullet proposed that when you take something with function and value, which most applications have whether they’re Web-based or desktop-based, you should create a really engaging experience around it using the “breaking the page” metaphor. That makes total sense because when we interact with the Web, it’s not natural to wait for a page to load. Back then, it was safe to assume that everything was going to move in the rich direction. But then the curveball got thrown, as you mentioned, with the popularity of simple HTML sites like Delicious, Flicker, Twitter and Google Apps. Why are they gaining so much steam?

Tim Wood:
Are you saying that people are more willing to accept experiential failings as a trade-off for successful utility?

David Armano:
I think it’s a reality. Whether we’re developing using a high-end design or a low-end technique, we need to focus on what the project does and what kinds of needs it actually fulfills at the end of the day. We should think about usability as a continual process."

...In the white paper that I referenced earlier, Mullet talks about this idea of fitness to purpose. A basic example that he gives is: you shouldn’t use a mallet to try to drive a nail and you shouldn’t use a hammer to pound in something that could break. In our discussion today, the same holds true; you really have to think about when to go with a rich Internet application and when not to."    (Continued via Logic+Emotion, userinterface)    [Usability Resources]

Apple to 'rule the home' by 2013

Future developments will require new UI's ...

"Apple is poised to become the hub of the digital home by 2013, according to a new study from Forrester Research.

The analyst firm's 'Future of Apple' report examines how Apple's product strategy will evolve over the next five years.

Forrester predicts that Apple will offer eight key products and services to connect PCs and digital content to the TV-stereo infrastructure in consumers' homes.

A "re-engineered" Apple Store will expand into in-home installation services to deliver what Forrester describes as a "fully integrated digital experience".

Companies likely to be hardest hit by Apple's consolidated drive are PC makers like Microsoft and HP, which are going after the same consumer markets.

Apple's predicted dominance will also affect service providers that deliver broadcast content and broadband, retailers that provide in-home installation services and consumer electronics device makers like Sony and LG.

"Consumer product strategists frequently ask Forrester how Apple's product strategy will evolve," said J P Gownder, principal analyst for Forrester Research, and lead author of the report.

"We do not possess any secret knowledge of Apple's product roadmap, but we want consumer product strategists to consider this highly likely vision of the Apple digital home offering."

To back up its claims, Forrester highlights a "mishmash" of audio-visual and IT technologies and products, including TVs, stereos, set-top boxes, DVD players, PCs, home networks and game consoles, which remain isolated products in most homes.

Gownder believes that, although a few 'bridge' products exist, the AV/IT divide remains and that there is a clear gap for an industry player to unite these systems and make in-home installation easier for consumers.

The eight essential pillars on which Apple will deliver this platform, based on four existing offerings and four new product concepts, are expected to be:

* Apple Macintosh home PC
* Apple TV digital media extender
* Apple Store
* iTunes and its successors
* Apple home server product
* AppleSound universal music controller
* Network-enabled gadgets
* In-home installation services

However, the analyst warned that the move into the completely connected digital home will not be plain sailing for Apple."    (Continued via vnunet.com)    [Usability Resources]

Interview: Simplifying Web app design

An interview with Robert Hoekman Jr. ...


"If we make the application too simple is there a risk the user will get bored of it?

You don't get bored with the hammer, you get bored with the hammering.

Web applications are tools. They enable people to perform activities, get things done, organise information, and so on. As long as the need exists to perform these activities, the need for the Web app will persist as well. And since we're all busy, frantic people who are constantly inundated by the business of our lives, we appreciate simple solutions that enable us to do what we need to do in a quick and effective manner.

I doubt that many people have wished for a more complicated hammer. And despite that so many of us make purchasing decisions based on feature lists, we really don't end up using more of a particular than we need. The average cell phone, for example, comes loaded with features, and many people never even tap into half of what it can do. In the end, we use only what we need to use.

If a hammer is all you need, a hammer is what you'll use. And every time you use the hammer, you'll appreciate how simple it was to get the job done.

What are some of the most important Web usability issues to consider?

I wish it was as easy as writing a list, but in reality, the most important issues to consider all relate to whether or not we're communicating the right things to our users.

Our sites and applications communicate things to users all the time. Our job is to ensure we're communicating the right information, the right cues about how something works, and so on. Regardless of whether you're working on a drag-and-drop interaction or a registration form, the key to a good design is making sure the user will have the information and clues she needs to succeed with the design.

What is the biggest challenge of designing usable Web applications?

Sadly, the biggest challenge seems to be getting buy-in and support for design. As a consultant, I don't encounter this problem much -- when companies come to me, they've already decided they need design work -- but I've experienced this often with in-house positions, and it's the number one thing I'm asked about by the community.

Every situation is different, and each person struggling to get buy-in for design has to navigate the internal politics in a way that's appropriate for that organisation, but there are a few things I've seen work well in a myriad of circumstances."    (Continued via Builder AU)    [Usability Resources]

Web users 'getting more selfish'

Jakob Nielsen on how the web is being used ...

"Web users are getting more ruthless and selfish when they go online, reveals research.

The annual report into web habits by usability guru Jakob Nielsen shows people are becoming much less patient when they go online.

Instead of dawdling on websites many users want simply to reach a site quickly, complete a task and leave.

Most ignore efforts to make them linger and are suspicious of promotions designed to hold their attention.

Search rules

Instead, many are "hot potato" driven and just want to get a specific task completed.

Success rates measuring whether people achieve what they set out to do online are now about 75%, said Dr Nielsen. In 1999 this figure stood at 60%.

There were two reasons for this, he said.

"The designs have become better but also users have become accustomed to that interactive environment," Dr Nielsen told BBC News.

Now, when people go online they know what they want and how to do it, he said.

This makes them very resistant to highlighted promotions or other editorial choices that try to distract them.

"Web users have always been ruthless and now are even more so," said Dr Nielsen.

"People want sites to get to the point, they have very little patience," he said.

"I do not think sites appreciate that yet," he added. "They still feel that their site is interesting and special and people will be happy about what they are throwing at them."

Web users were also getting very frustrated with all the extras, such as widgets and applications, being added to sites to make them more friendly.

Such extras are only serving to make pages take longer to load, said Dr Nielsen."    (Continued via BBC NEWS)    [Usability Resources]

Beating Google requires someone to do search better.

Is Universal Design Really Universal?

What universal design really means ...

"In 1988, Ron Mace, Ruth Lusher, and I authored an article that I believe was the first published reference to the concept of Universal Design. Our purpose was to promote the positive side of a design concept that had previously been associated with eliminating poor design (barrier-free) for a limited population (handicap accessibility) and to emphasize the positive aspects of designing for all people. In 1992 when the first issue of Universal Design Newsletter was published, we conducted a search of the internet to identify potential copyright infringement. We found no (0) references to the term Universal Design. Today, as I write this article, my Google search found “about 13,200,000” references. There is no denying that the concept of Universal Design has gained widespread use. But what does it really mean?

At the February 2008 International Conference on Aging, Disability and Independence (ICADI) in St. Petersburg, FL, one track investigated the meaning and future of Universal Design. While international gathering of attendees generally agreed that Universal Design incorporates designs that are inclusive and provide choice, there are many definitions. My currently favorite definition emphasizes the process rather than the end product:

Universal Design: The process of imbedding choice for all people in the things we design.

Each of the following) terms in this simple statement has important meaning.

* Process implies a methodology rather than a product
* Choice involves flexibility, and multiple alternative means of use and/or interface
* All People includes the full range of people regardless of age, ability, gender, economic status, etc.
* Things include spaces, products, information systems and any other things that humans manipulate or create.

I have watched an evolution in the thinking of what is Universal Design over the last 20 years. My involvement in this area has taught me that as we learn more and more about the people for whom we are designing (best provided though user input and involvement in the design process) our designs change and improve. This brings me to the inevitable conclusion that Universal Design is not static. Universal Design changes, mimicking the needs of the users as they differ over time and in different places. Universal Design in Chicago in 1990 was and should be different from Universal Design in Nairobi in 2008. The key is understanding what is the best fit of the environment to the users."    (Continued via uiGarden.net)    [Usability Resources]

Measuring the Online Customer Experience

Getting the consumers' view ...

"Epitiro, a company offering expertise in comparative broadband benchmarking, has just announced ISP-I™ Reportal, a new website testing enhancement to the company’s portfolio of broadband benchmarking solutions. Businesses that depend on their websites for effective communication and e-commerce will now be able to fully understand the true online customer experience and address performance issues.

Epitiro provides broadband performance and customer experience benchmarking data to ISPs, media providers, multi-national corporations and government regulators. ISP-I™ Reportal is the first website testing solution to be located on multiple consumer broadband (DSL, Cable, Wireless, WiFi) networks thus enabling a true and accurate analysis of a website’s performance from the end user perspective. ISP-I™ Reportal conducts testing via the leading ISPs worldwide and uses popular browsers, including Internet Explorer and Firefox, to measure response times, security levels, page flows and other transactions that affect the customer experience. The comprehensive analysis is performed using Epitiro’s extensive deployment of edge-based agents.

"In order to get a consumer view, it is essential that customer experience testing is performed at real end-user locations and not some technically or logistically convenient mid-point sited within the carrier network or data centre," said JP Curley, Technical Director, Epitiro. "On-line experience is dependent on both the website design as well as variables beyond the control of a business such as an ISP’s traffic management policies, the browser a customer uses, and of course, the customer’s location. With ISP-I™ Reportal, businesses will now have visibility of their customer’s on-line experience and be able to make immediate improvements."    (Continued via Usability News, Epitiro)    [Usability Resources]

Speed Dialing (1939)

In simpler days ...

"A blast from the past. “Finger” Speeds Dialing (1939).

Easily attached to the top of a dial-telephone receiver, a metal finger now on the market fits snugly into the dial holes, helps prevent inaccurate dialing, eliminates the danger of broken finger nails, and speeds up the dialing process by about ten percent."    (Continued via textually.org, Modern Mechanix)    [Usability Resources]

Finger Speed

Design anthropology: What can it add to your design practice?

Design anthropology

Designers primarily concern themselves with how to create a "successful" communication, product, or experience. But with the past 10 years of globalization, digitalization, and ever increasing design complexity, designers have come to realize that to answer the question of design "success" requires that they answer that question of how the processes and artifacts of design help define what it means to be human. This "humanness" can range from how humans control the environment through tools (homo faber); how high-heeled shoes affect natural ways of walking; to moral issues of how participation in the design process empowers marginalized communities. In this space, the practice and theory of design anthropology has emerged.
Design anthropology: What is it?

Design anthropology is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to understand the role of design artifacts and processes in defining what it means to be human (e.g., human nature). It is more than lists of user requirements in a design brief, which makes it different from contextual inquiry, some forms of design research, and qualitative focus groups. Design anthropology offers challenges to existing ideas about human experiences and values.

For example, I conducted a project for a large retail company in which I was expected to deliver an information architecture for the website. The method used was a standard card sorting exercise, but I also did research into how humans classify information. In addition to the information architecture, I delivered statements about the continued meaning of gender classifications. In the course of conducting the card sort, I learned that men and women continued to classify domestic products based on stereotypical gendered spaces of male equals outside/garage, and female equals inside. This was in spite of their lived gendered roles where the women where the heavy power-tool users and the men used blenders to make smoothies for the kids. My colleagues pointed out that my anthropological perspective produced insights beyond what the card-sort could deliver. The fact that the classification of consumer products lagged behind contemporary gender roles had strategic implication for how the client should and should not arrange the website site or retail spaces."    (Continued via Putting people first, Adobe - Design Center, Dori Tunstall)    [Usability Resources]

Gendered classification of consumer products.

The Psychology of Time Perception in Software

Expressing time in the UI ...

"How you express time in the user interface (UI) can determine how your user experiences and perceives your solution. This chapter discusses when and how you should express time in the UI of your solution and introduces the use of time anchors.

In many instances, especially in progress indications, you need to communicate to your user some aspect of time, such as remaining time or estimated completion time. Although it may seem trivial and superficial, how you express time in the user interface (UI) can determine how your user experiences and perceives your solution. Simple words—for good or bad—can alter perception and affect tolerance. This chapter discusses when and how you should express time in the UI of your solution and introduces the use of time anchors.
The Timing of Time: Past, Present, Future

Besides what you express (phrases, time units, etc.) and how you express it (text, graphical, etc.), you also need to consider when you provide timing information to your user. For example, telling a person who is about to stand in line how long it will take to get to the front of the line has a different effect and serves a different purpose than informing the person who is already standing halfway in the line. Simply put, when you release information can make or break an experience. We all have our share of horror stories of how the mistiming of some information, sometimes by a matter of mere seconds, changed the course of events.

Users will use any information revealed by the UI—by design or otherwise—to form a perception of an interaction or process. This shouldn't be a surprise because we all do something similar every day. We make predictions based on patterns we see (long lines equal long wait), evaluate the quality of things based on signs and symptoms (blemishes equal carelessness), and form theories about why things happen the way they did (broken because of poor-quality parts). Likewise, users will use any timing information to help them understand and decide how they feel about and respond to the duration of an interaction.

Consider the following questions:

* How long will this take?
* How much longer will this take?
* How much time did that take?

Each of these three questions relates to a different temporal perspective; that is, where you are in temporal relation to some event. We can perceive durations from three basic temporal perspectives. First, we can anticipate, set expectations, or predict the duration of an event before it begins. Because the event has not happened, we'll describe this as prospective. In the UI, informing users how long a download will take, for example, is giving users a prospective estimate of the duration of the download. Second, we assess the duration of an event in real time while it is transpiring. A great example is reporting remaining time as the download is progressing. Finally, we can also evaluate the duration after event has transpired. We describe this last one as retrospective. Telling users how much time the download took after it has completed is an example. As mentioned, when you provide information about the duration of some event can influence user perception and shape user experience. Let's take a closer look at each of the perspectives."    (Continued via Usability News, InformIT)    [Usability Resources]

22-23 inch monitors

The usability of new monitors ...

"As monitors get bigger, are they also getting better? Or are designer features taking the place of ease of use and performance?

This year, 22in is the new 20in, and panels are bigger and sometimes brighter. The new standard resolution stands at 1680 x 1050 – it’s wide enough for HD video, while still being small enough not to take over all of the available space on a typical desk. It’s also nearly wide enough to squeeze in a couple of applications on the same screen – although you’ll find that you’ll get a lot more done with the next size up, at 1920 x 1200.

But there’s more to a monitor than panel size, and it’s here that design is lagging behind what is possible. It is not an exaggeration to say that monitor design has become very conservative and unadventurous. Panels get cheaper and bigger, designer touches are added, but there’s been little progress on usability. It might not seem like a lot is needed – most people plug in, power up, and go – but getting the best from a monitor means using the on-screen display (OSD) to set the best operating mode, and it’s here that user-friendliness hasn’t caught up with user needs.

Historically, only NEC made the effort to replace OSDs with a remote control, and that attempt was short-lived and only available on PCs. We’d like to see more development in this area, with monitors being given a full-featured Mac-based control panel, perhaps with different presets assignable to different applications. Imagine how useful it would be to be able to flip between web browsing, word processing and photo editing without having to keep flipping OSD presets manually.

We’d also like to see better colour management. Colour control remains a high-end feature, but it’s something that could surely appeal to non-professionals who want to be sure that the photos they see on their monitor are an accurate representation of the files copied from their camera. There’s no good technical reason why this has to remain expensive, and in an ideal world reasonable colour accuracy is something users should be able to take for granted.

But manufacturers seem to be taking a different approach, either paring essentials such as stands to a bare minimum, or pushing the benefits of designer stylings for home use. So we’ve collected a representative mix of monitors, from plastic panels to the latest in interior chic. You should find something to match your needs here – but some of our conclusions may surprise you."    (Continued via Macworld UK)    [Usability Resources]

A robotic brain-computer interface

New UI methods will be needed ...

"California Institute of Technology (Caltech) engineers have developed a robotic device able to act as a brain-computer interface. This is the 'first robotic approach to establishing an interface between computers and the brain by positioning electrodes in neural tissue.' According to the researchers, their approach 'could enhance the performance and longevity of emerging neural prosthetics, which allow paralyzed people to operate computers and robots with their minds.'

You can see above an earlier version of a prototype of such a system. It "is designed to fit inside a standard laboratory cranial chamber, used for acute experiments in non-human primates, to allow semi-chronic operation. A semi-chronic design has the advantage that the device can be repositioned over a different region with minimal effort and without need for additional surgeries." The device "is capable of positioning four neural electrodes to optimize recordings of action potentials." (Credit: Caltech)

This research work has been conducted at the Caltech Robotics Burdick Group by a team of engineers led by Michael Wolf, Joel Burdick, his mentor, Jorge Cham and Edward Branchaud.

Here is how Wolf describes the project. "Our approach consists of implanting a small robotic device (and accompanying control algorithm) with many individually-motorized electrodes that each autonomously locate, isolate, and track a neuron for long periods of time. To further complicate matters, we wish to find signals only from neurons dedicated ('tuned') to a particular task, say controlling an 'arm reach.' While the primary aim of such technology is for a neural interface for neuroprostheses, such a device may also advance the state-of-the-art experimental techniques for electrophysiology."    (Continued via Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends)    [Usability Resources]

A robotic brain-computer interface

Thoughts on Interaction Design

Paper available for PDF download ...

"Interaction Designers are the shapers of behavior. Behavior is a large idea, and may, at first blush, seem too large to warrant a single profession. But a profession has emerged nonetheless. This professional category includes the complexity of information architecture, the anthropologic desire to understand humanity, the altruistic nature of usability engineering, and the creation of dialogue. These topics are discussed in the four sections of this text.

Section One explores the foundation of the rich field of Interaction Design.

In Chapter One (Multiple Roots, and an Uncertain Future), the historic roots of this field are described, and the relationship between engineering and business is explored. Additionally, the future is painted as an unknown field of potential for this field, as the study of human behavior has become of a primary interest to the worlds of business and marketing in recent years.

Chapter Two (Computing and Human Computer Interaction) describes how Human Computer Interaction arose as a field advocating for usability and efficiency. This is paralleled by a similar growth in the field of Industrial Design, with emphasis placed on human factors and anthropometrics. Both fields have evolved as user-centered professions, laying the groundwork for the field of Interaction Design (which, as practiced presently, seems to combine both physical and digital design into artifacts, services or systems).

Section One is concluded with a contributed article by Chris Connors, entitled Interaction Design in an Engineering Centric World.

Section Two describes the three facets of Interaction Design as related to Usable, Useful and Desirable, and the Interaction Design Process that is used in creating designed artifacts.

Chapter Three (A Process for Thinking About People) discusses the procedural focus of Interaction Design as it pertains to designing what people want and need. The role of intuition is examined as compared to the necessity for ethnographic user research.

Chapter Four (Managing Complexity) examines the role technology plays in the development of Interaction Design solutions, with attention placed on the relatively new subfield of Information Architecture as applied to the design of technology-driven products.

Chapter Five (Shaping Aesthetics to Inform Experience) investigates the role aesthetics play in the development of Interaction Design solutions, specifically with regard to brand and identity.

Section Two is concluded with a contributed article by Justin Petro, entitled Interaction Design as Business Lubricant."    (Continued via Thoughts on Interaction Design)    [Usability Resources]

Breaking Down the Silos: Usability Practitioners Meet Marketing Researchers

Overlap between marketing and UX ...

"Being a consultant with experience in both traditional marketing research and user experience and usability gives me a unique perspective on a broad range of issues relating to customer experience. Not only do I have a good idea of what the other discipline does, I am a practitioner of the other discipline. However, in attempting to play both roles at once, I often find that client companies keep these two disciplines locked up in separate silos—usability research within IT and marketing research within the Marketing Services department. This can have a serious impact on the sharing of information relating to customer experience.

To help demonstrate my point, here is a brief quiz for UX professionals and other members of your product team:

1. When building personas for use in your UI evaluations what role did your Marketing or Marketing Research department play in helping you build those personas?
2. When was the last time you or your CIO read the results of a customer marketing research or branding study that your marketing team conducted?
3. If you wanted to get your hands on such a study, how easy would it be?
4. Your company’s ad agency has spent numerous billable hours writing a detailed advertising and communications plan for your product, service, or brand. Tell me some details about these four key components: ad strategy, brand definition, brand positioning, and intended customer communications take-aways.
5. When was the last time you attended a meeting in which someone from senior management or marketing discussed goals for satisfying customer experiences—both online and offline—across a broad range of communications channels?

If you had trouble answering the above questions, you are not alone."    (Continued via UXmatters, David Kozatch)    [Usability Resources]

The Nature of Design Practice and Implications for Interaction Design Research

A paper on research behind user interface design ...

"Introduction

Dealing with a design task in an unknown or only partially known situation, with demanding and stressed clients and users, with insufficient information, with new technology and new materials, with limited time and resources, with limited knowledge and skill, and with inappropriate tools, is a common situation for any interaction designer. Dealing with such messy and “wicked” situations constitutes the normal and everyday context of any design practice (Alexander, 1964; Dunne, 1993; Cross, 2001; Schön, 1983; Pye, 1995; Heskett, 2002; Rove, 1987; Lawson, 2005; Thackara, 2005).

Research about design practice has shown that designers who successfully can handle complex design situations use an approach sometimes labeled as a designerly way of thinking and acting (Cross, 2001; Buxton, 2007; Moggridge, 2007). There has also lately been a more general and growing interest in what is seen as an increasing complexity in our society and how to deal with it (Castells, 1996; Coburn, 2006; Friedman, 2005; Gladwell, 2005; Pink, 2005).

A substantial part of interaction design research has for some decades developed theoretical approaches, methods, tools, and techniques aimed at supporting interaction designers in their practice. This research has showed significant progress, and the field is today rich with a diverse set of approaches, methods, and techniques. Some of these approaches are new constructs, but many of them have intellectual roots in other academic areas, such as science, engineering, social science, humanities, and in the traditional art and design disciplines (Carroll, 2003; Rogers, 2004). (In this paper, the terms Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research and interaction design research are used interchangeably).

Over the last few years, criticism has been raised concerning the success of some of these contributions. It has been argued that the results are not always useful for practitioners, and that the developed approaches are too time-consuming, too difficult to learn, too abstract and theoretical, or that they do not lead to desired results when used in practice. An excellent overview and formulation of this critique is found in Rogers (2004). Rogers presents a thorough analysis of the state of the major theoretical approaches in HCI in relation to practice. She also presents empirical results that confirm her theoretical analysis. Rogers’ analysis shows quite convincingly that if the measure of success for this kind of research is that it is understood and actually used in practice then the results are minor.

One assumption in this paper is that the critique presented by Rogers is valid and that it constitutes a serious and real problem for the interaction research community. Based on that assumption, I will examine why it seems so difficult for HCI research to produce results that are appreciated and useful within interaction design practice.

It is important to recognize that there exist many examples of successful HCI research reaching and influencing a large population of practitioners. This is also recognized by Rogers, and is something I will discuss later in this paper. It is also important to recognize that this paper is not about all forms of HCI research. It is only about research aimed at improving interaction design practice.

My main argument is that one reason why HCI research (aimed at supporting design practice) has not (always) been successful is that it has not been grounded in and guided by a sufficient understanding and acceptance of the nature of design practice. As a consequence, HCI research has developed and/or borrowed approaches and methods not always appropriate for interaction design practice, even though they may be successful in their respective “home” fields or in research settings."    (Continued via International Journal of Design)    [Usability Resources]

Study: Business software apps complex and hurt productivity

Business applications lack usability ...

"A recent survey found that the majority of end users (60 percent) find enterprise applications somewhat difficult, very difficult or almost impossible to use, hampering employee productivity.

The study was conducted by IFS, a business software vendor based in Sweden, with customers in 23 countries. The company polled more than a 1000 end users at mid-market companies (companies with revenue ranging from US$100 million to $1 billion). While many were users of IFS software, the company reported some had not used it before.

The study sought to define what the word usability meant to end users. Nearly 50 percent said usability means software that helps them do their job better and faster. Others said usability means "no need to read the manual" (24 percent), "looks like familiar products" (13 percent), and "fits the way I work" (14 percent).

"The trick for us vendors is to make applications that live up to these expectations," says Rick Veague, CTO for IFS North America. "It can't just look cute; it has to help them do their job."

The issue of usability has often caused end users to seek out technology in the consumer space. A recent CIO consumer technology survey found nine technologies in the consumer space that end users had gravitated towards, often in response to enterprise software failing them.

Of the time wasters presented by enterprise software, many different categories plagued end users: navigating between and around applications (11 percent), difficulties in searching and navigating through the application (19 percent), learning different modules (21 percent), transferring data between apps (14 percent), progressing via ungrouped functions (14 percent), application "doesn't work the way I'd like" (7 percent), and waiting/slow response (8 percent). Only 6 percent reported that their enterprise applications didn't waste any time.

Another category the study measured was what types of applications people found "most usable." Garnering the largest tally was Web-based applications (34 percent), while these categories trailed: PC/Outlook (27 percent), business applications (20 percent), word processors (17 percent), and "other" (2 percent)."    (Continued via IDG)    [Usability Resources]

Using Unified Separators and Containers to Draw a GUI

How would I describe today's GUIs? A mess. -- A mess that grew as new features were needed, with lack of proper design, with a desire to keep backward compatibility, and with tools from the past trying to achieve future needs. I propose a new design philosophy for GUIs. We'll call it Vermaden's GUI. Note: This is the latest entry in our 2008 article contest.

At the beginning they were designed, but as time passed by they just grew. Most of today's GUIs use a grid of dots on which other GUI elements are placed: menus, buttons, lists, draw areas, folder lists and everything that you can imagine. Today's GUIs, such as GTK or QT toolkits can do almost everything we could want from a classic GUI -- the problem is how all our wishes are realized under the hood of the interface. Speaking precisely, lots of different types of content, different combo boxes, different margins, borders ... Many widgets have a scrollbar included, some need external placing of the scrollbar, or even two of them if we also need to scroll horizontally, like Anjuta's IDE GUI for example, some scrollbars are outside widget content, some are placed inside content.

Displaying a lack of unification, today's GUIs are not coherent. They are like a big bag of tricks that try to get the job done. The Nautilus File Manager, which, similarily to Anjuta, uses the GTK toolkit, "prefers" putting scrollbars inside widget content area, where Anjuta puts them outside. Some of you may say "what about QT?" Well, things are not better here; let me tell you why with Konqueror as an example: a widget with folders on the right has a border, a tab with that widget also has border, which also includes a status bar in the bottom part of the window ... again with the border, don't you think that there are too many borders around there? Well, you are not alone. It's big waste of space and functionality (which border would you like to resize today?), not to mention ergonomics."    (Continued via OS News, vermaden)    [Usability Resources]

Nautilus vs. Konqueror File Browser

UX Design-Planning Not One-man Show

Experience planning teams needed? ...

"A lot of confusion and misunderstanding surrounds the term "user experience." The multitude of acitivities that can be labeled with these two words span a vast spectrum of people, skills and situations. If you ask for UX design (UXD), what exactly are you asking for? Similary, if someone tells you they are going to provide you with UXD for an application, website or intranet or extranet, what exactly are you going to get?

Is it just one person who is responsible or is it a team of people who are in charge of UXD? In this story I´ll sketch my ideas of UXD based on my experiences and at the end of this story I will give you my answer.

Let us start at the beginning – UXD starts with experience – experience of the users. And so I will talk about the users first.

UXD-P – every person is an individual

Every person is an individual. Every person is in possession of different roles. For each individual there will be many roles and each person adopts a different role depending on the circumstances.

User Roles

Sometimes the individual person holds one role, but mainly he will hold quite a few roles like consumer, customer, user, client, investor, producer, creator, participant, partner, part of a community, member, and so on."    (Continued via Boxes and Arrows, Holger Maassen)    [Usability Resources]

Every person is an individual.

Design Decisions vs. Audience Considerations

Designing for your target audience ...

"... Though interaction and conversion becomes a bit more complicated at the point the interface meets the visitor, though there are a few more shades of gray, in the end it comes down to the same thing: yes or no.

You will succeed in attracting and engaging your audience…or you won’t. Your audience will visit your site looking for information they want to find or a product they are interested in. If they don’t find it, or if you don’t otherwise engage them, they’ll leave.

We know this, and yet the attraction of designing for ourselves, because we know best, or simply giving the client what he or she wants, after all they are paying, tempt us regularly.

As web designers, we have a unique and thorny task. How do we present the information we most want a visitor to see while simultaneously serving the visitor the content they came for? The two may not be the same, so an awareness of who our audience is as well as why our audience is there should be considered before a single design decision is made.

If you know who your target audience is, you can tailor your site’s look and feel, content, and action areas to appeal to your audience and draw them in. If you know what your site visitors want, you can use that information to mutual benefit. Site visitors will leave having found what they came for, and—if you have done your homework—you will have gotten the response you wanted from them. This may be their contact information. It may be a product purchase. If you are really lucky, the site visitor will sign up to receive email and you will have a chance to forge an ongoing relationship.

We all know that site visitors prefer a site that is easier to use. An optimized site will have more traffic. A site that is cross-browser compatible will carry the same message and branding to everyone who looks at it, without unpleasant and unexpected behavior. Usability, Standards and Content Optimization are, at the end of the day, also audience considerations.

In this article, I’ll discuss the process of deciding or determining who your audience is, the basics of understanding audience motivation and response, the process of making design decisions based on audience considerations, and how to use what you know about your audience to influence behavior."    (Continued via Digital Web Magazine)    [Usability Resources]

The top 8 mistakes in usability (and companies investing in it)

Usability mistakes we should avoid ...

"I recently gave a talk to a company that is beginning to invest more in the customer experience of its website. They wanted to know: how do we avoid the errors of other teams making this investment? There are lots of gurus, blogs, and trade groups, all promoting their own tools and methods - usability, user experience, interaction design, information architecture, and so on. The team knows that they want "better usability" but aren't sure about the next step.

And this company is growing fast, so a lot is at stake in them getting it right. If they build the right processes in-house (or hire consultants that offer them), they'll reap the rewards.

I told them that when committing to customer-centered development (of a product, service, website, or whatever), it's important to stay strategic, always try to improve the business, and listen to customers (as human beings, not as users of a tool).

But in doing so, avoid the following:

1. Not conducting any customer research.

Some companies still don't conduct customer research, but instead rely on their best internal guesses as to what their customers want. Except in organizations where ESP is a common employee skill, this tends not to lead to healthy, customer-centered operations.

2. Conducting "pretend" research.

Let's pretend our user's name is Jane. Let's pretend she is 38 years old, drives a purple Prius, reads mystery novels, loves bulldogs, and likes to go sailing. Let's pretend she comes to our website and likes feature A but not feature B. Therefore, we should develop more things like feature A. See? We're very customer-centered.

This is the fun of creating a persona, which allows teams to make decisions based on fictional people, rather than doing the hard work of listening to real customers. (Yes, I'm being provocative; yes, personas can be useful in some cases - see more in this post.)

3. Conducting research, but the wrong type.

One of the most popular research methods in business today is the focus group: an individual moderator, typically a high-energy person, encourages a live panel of many respondents to give feedback on a product or service. This can be useful in some situations. But where customers interact individually with a company - say, on a website or in some other customer experience - the one-to-many method of focus groups doesn't yield very appropriate findings.

4. Conducting one-on-one research, but with tasks defined beforehand.

Traditional usability dictates that the moderator should write the test questions beforehand. But how can you know the right questions to ask before you've even met the customer? Task definition comes from the age of software, when the tool - a piece of software - was being optimized (thus the term "usability" refers to - and focuses on - a tool, not a human). Customer experience is concerned with the customer; their individual, real-life experience is what we're supposed to be observing. It's beyond presumptuous to think you can predict the appropriate tasks before the session starts. (Read more in this column.)"    (Continued via Good Experience)    [Usability Resources]

A Counter-Intuitive Approach to Evaluating Design Alternatives

Comparing design alternatives ...

"Last week, a client called looking for advice on their first usability study. The client is a large consumer information site with millions of visitors each month. (A similar site might be a large financial information site, with details of individual stocks, investment strategies, and "celebrity" investor/analysts that people like to follow.)

They are about to redesign their home page and navigation. They have three home page design alternatives and five navigation alternatives, created by an outside firm who didn't do any evaluations of the designs.

To help figure out which design to pick, the team has (finally!) received approval for their first usability testing study. While their site has been around for years, they've never watched visitors use it before now.

Up until now, management has perceived usability testing as a nice-to-have luxury they couldn't afford, primarily because of the time it takes. The team called us because they are very concerned everyone views their very first test as an overwhelming success.

They fought long and hard to get this project approved. If it's a success, it will be easier to approve future studies. If anyone thinks that it didn't help pick the right design, it will be a huge political challenge to convince management to conduct a second project.
The Challenges of Comparing Design Alternatives

When we started our conversation, the first thing the team members asked was how to compare the design alternatives. Ideally, they thought, we'd have each participant try each of the home page designs and each of the navigation designs, then, somehow render a decision on which one is "best." After two days of testing, we'd tally up the scores, declaring a winner.

Comparing designs is tricky under the best situations. First, you have to assume the alternatives are truly different from each other. If they aren't, all the alternatives may share a core assumption that could render each as a poor choice.

Assuming the team has done a good job creating the alternatives, the next problem is evaluating them with users. To do this, you'd need to run each alternative through a series of realistic tasks.

Choosing tasks is difficult in any study, but it's more complicated when the team has never really studied their users in the past. They've collected some data from market research and site analytics, but, as we talked to them, it was clear they weren't confident they understand why people came to the site.

If we think the team could come up with realistic tasks, there's still one more big challenge: evaluating all the alternatives. Since they wanted to test new designs, the best thing is to test against a benchmark.

A minimum study design would have each alternative (along with the current design) going first, to correct for "learning effects." (Learning effects happen in studies where the tasks and design alternatives are similar. How do you know if the second design succeeds because it's better or because the user learned something from the first design?)

For ratings, we wouldn't recommend less than four people evaluating each alternative in the first slot. That means, for six alternatives, we're talking a minimum of 24 users.

This presented the problem -- there's no effective way to test all these alternatives with 24 users in their allotted two days, within their budget. We needed to think creatively."    (Continued via UIE, Jared Spool)    [Usability Resources]

User Assistance: Writing for a High-Context Culture

Writing for a high-context culture ...

"Jean-Luc Dumont is a respected authority in international technical communications, but he is most renowned for a particularly entertaining presentation he gives about road signs. This genre of tight communications that are written for small spaces and meant to read by users in motion holds many lessons for those of us who write user assistance.

Especially enlightening is the distinction Jean-Luc makes between high-context cultures and low-context cultures and how that difference in cultures influences the language of road signs. While technical communicators tend to write in a low-context style, user assistance occurs in high-context situations. So, in this column, I’ll discuss the need to reexamine how we write user assistance in light of this cultural proclivity.
High Context and Low Context

Jean-Luc points out—nonjudgmentally—that the American culture is a low-context culture. Figure 1 shows one of Jean-Luc’s examples that makes his point most vividly. I see this kind of sign several times a week in my own neighborhood.

This is a typically American-style road sign, because in low-context cultures, the assumption is that people know only what you have explicitly told them, and anything that is not expressly prohibited is allowed. On the other hand, people in high-context cultures do not need to be told not to hit pedestrians, because not hurting people is part of the cultural value system, and the assumption is that this guideline applies to traffic scenarios as well. In a low-context culture, it is apparently not only necessary to state this rule, it needs the further status of being law—versus a general guideline for drivers to follow or ignore at their discretion.

The Culture of Technical Writing

What we consider to be good technical writing often reflects an American cultural perspective. One facet of this cultural orientation is that technical writing tends to use a low-context style. Most notably, we tend to write user assistance as if users have never seen the user interface we are explaining. Secondly, we tend to write user assistance as if users have never even used software before. But users rarely go to Help before they have tried to accomplish a task on their own first, and most users today have extensive experience using software and are familiar with the standard ways of interacting with user interfaces. So a user interface is a high-context artifact—one a user has already seen before reading our documentation and that uses rules and conventions the user already knows."    (Continued via UXmatters)    [Usability Resources]

A sign for a low-context culture.

Everything in Moderation: Using Content Units to Manage UX

Content can drive UX ...

"The Roman philosopher Cicero stated, “Never go to excess, but let moderation be your guide.” The trouble is, even though people have repeated this particular quotation over the past couple of millennia, our clients often push the limits excessively—beyond moderation—for both content and presentation.

As a UX professional, how do you demonstrate to your clients the benefits of moderation in user experience? You show them.

Stop Right There

You’re sitting in a meeting with a client and the first thing they say to you is: “We’d like the site to have some sort of movement on it. It has to be interactive, and it needs to include some Ajax, or whatever that’s called, and make sure people can see everything without scrolling….”

Rather than running from the room screaming, because your client has given you a hodgepodge of unworkable requirements, take a deep breath and respond to each and every one of the things your client has asked you to do. You could approach doing this in a couple of different ways, but I’ve found that separating client requests into content units removes uncertainty and offers clearer direction, while helping your client recognize each individual request as a deliverable, requiring assignments and responsibilities.

To do this, I follow a four-step process that helps delineate what content units each section of a Web site must cover—as opposed to content that acts as filler, or filler units. Before I outline this process, I’ll define these two main content types.
Content Units

Content units are any type of content that

* is sectional in nature
* is updated with some degree of frequency
* has a direct impact on the structure of a navigation tree or site map

Examples of content units might include client case studies, products or services, core offerings, and any application-related content such as Help files, a wiki, or a glossary.
Filler Units

Filler units are content that

* does not have a definite destination
* does not impact a Web site’s overall structure or linking strategy
* has a short life span
* you could remove without changing the integrity of a site’s navigation

Examples of filler units might include a video you intend for a single viewing, a news article, a signup form, a short-term promotion, or a contest."    (Continued via UXmatters)    [Usability Resources]

Good old Times

Displaying the data ...

"Many cut axes just because of Excel. And go to charting hell. Because when you cut you distort. And when you distort you lie. At least with your graph. The graphical change in your data is no longer proportional to the change in values. He explains it quite well with a demolished graph from the SportAuto magazine. Here is a positive example. From the German newspaper “Die ZEIT”. This newspaper is off the mark sometimes, too.

Die ZEIT, 2008–04–30, p. 37, market share of Deutsche Post (left) and number of letters in Germany in billions (right)

All my rules are observed. Time runs from left to right. Scale starts at zero. The graph is proportional to its values. No exaggeration. No gadgets. No unnecessary percentage signs. Letters in billions, not in single pieces.

In the same issue another good graph. Structure is shown top-down. Labeling where it belongs: next to the columns. At least for the values. I would have left out the series “andere” (“others”). The dots, too."    (Continued via Bella consults)    [Usability Resources]

Die Nachfrage Steigt

Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks

Free PDF download ...

"My new book, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks is now available for purchase in both paperback and digital editions.

Description
Forms make or break the most crucial online interactions: checkout (commerce), registration (community), data input (participation and sharing), and any task requiring information entry. In Web Form Design, Luke Wroblewski draws on original research, his considerable experience at Yahoo! and eBay, and the perspectives of many of the field's leading designers to show you everything you need to know about designing effective and engaging Web forms. See Complete Description."    (Continued via Functioning Form)    [Usability Resources]

Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks

Touch Usability: Samsung SDI laptop concept

New form factor with touch keyboard ...

"Engadget writes about this Samsung laptop concept design: Samsung's 12.1-inch OLED concept makes us swoon.

Are we ready for touch panel keyboards? Probably not quite, though the trend in laptop design does seem to be towards flatter and flatter keyboards with less travel distance, and people seem to like them. Apple too has moved in this direction with their latest keyboard, on which I'm typing this. So it may just be a short leap to totally flat keyboards. Add some high-fidelity tactile feedback and they might work quite well.

Presumably the touchpad for this computer would be overlaid on the keyboard and accessible with some sort of mode switch."    (Continued via Engadget, Touch Usability)    [Usability Resources]

Samsung SDI laptop

Considering the User Perspective: Research into Usage and Communication of Digital Information

Research paper on use of digital media ...

"Abstract

In this article we present the methodology and initial results from qualitative research into the usage and communication of digital information. It considers the motivation for the research and the methodologies adopted, including Contextual Design and Cultural Probes. The article describes the preliminary studies conducted to test the approach, highlighting the strengths and limitations of the techniques applied. Finally, it outlines proposals for refinement in subsequent iterations and the future research activities planned. The research is carried out as part of the Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access through NETworked Services) project.

1 Introduction and Background

As the digital evolution becomes infused into everyday life, the ways in which society communicates and uses information are changing. New processes are emerging that were inconceivable in a solely analogue world. National libraries and archives, as the custodians of a society's information, have the responsibility to safeguard these records and to provide sustained access to digital cultural and scientific knowledge. If these organisations are to fulfil these responsibilities, as a community of practitioners we must understand the nature of new communication and usage processes, both to ensure the appraisal process captures the right material and to guarantee that the new kinds of emerging working procedures are supported by the institutions.

Since the 1980's, there has been an ever increasing focus on user studies within the fields of both archives (Duff 2002; Anderson 2004; Harris 2005; Sundqvist 2007) and libraries (Siatri 1999 and Carr 2006). The first user studies in archives focused on evaluating the performance of services (Conway 1986). Since then archivists, librarians and social scientists have extended the range of user-focused research (Wildemuth 2003). Many studies have focused on quantitative analysis of usage statistics to improve the usability of a specific service or class of services, including nation-wide studies with performance rankings (PSQG 2006). At the same time an alternative method has been to use ethnographically based studies to contribute to the design of appropriate services (Nardi and O'Day 1998, Seadle 2000, Akselbo et al. 2006). The idea behind this approach is that only by understanding users can one develop new and innovative services to meet the needs of the users themselves; put more simply, 'the people involved must be understood before services can be assessed' (Seadle 2000).

The primary aim of user and usage studies is to improve the quality of service. Knowledge about the wants, needs and activities of customers can be employed to change, adapt or update services, or to prioritize management and implementation decisions. A recent trend of user-centred research in archives and libraries has been to focus on two general issues, namely typologies of users, or user groups, and search strategies and techniques, essentially user behaviour (Sundqvist 2007). Introduction of new technologies has accelerated the process of including user studies as one of the basic elements in an overall program of customer service. The sophistication and richness of our understanding of the issues surrounding usage of digital objects and consequent implications for digital preservation requires more research.

Libraries and archives have traditionally been the guardians of analogue communication channels, whether these are scholarly publications housed in a library, or records preserved by an archive. The usual communication channel for scholarly research results, the journal article, has remained a relatively unchanged and consistent form, even with the arrival of digital e-journal versions (Lynch 2007). The digital evolution has since enabled the evolution of whole new processes and techniques for communicating and disseminating results. The emergence of e-government has created new communication channels affecting the business processes between government departments and between them and citizens. Scholarly communication itself is undergoing a transformation, with 'the nature of engagement with and use of scientific literature becoming more complex and diverse, and taking on novel dimensions' (Lynch 2007). Both the social activities of scholarly communication and the unit of information itself have been altered, with data sets, simulations and social networking venues all becoming accepted ways to share and disseminate research (Van de Sompel and Lagoze 2007). These recent transformations have affected the objects libraries and archives have a responsibility for preserving, and in turn affect even what we perceive to be a 'digital object'. Further investigations of these issues are therefore required."    (Continued via D-Lib Magazine)    [Usability Resources]

Psychology Behind Usability

The application of psychology principles to usability ...

"Eye-Tracking
Eye tracking is the process of measuring either the point of gaze (”where we are looking”) or the motion of an eye relative to the head. eye tracking monitor records every eye movement and highlights the most active areas on the site visually. Eye-tracking studies can help to estimate how comfortable web users are with the web-site they’re browsing through and how quickly they can understand the structure and system behind it. You can find some interesting usability findings from recent eye-tracking study.

Fold
The fold is defined as the lowest point where a web-site is no longer visible on the screen. The position of the fold is, of course, defined by the screen resolution of your visitor. The region above the fold (also called screenful) describes the region of a page that is visible without scrolling. Since the fold is seen directly without scrolling, it is often considered as the area which guarantees the highest possible ad click rates and revenues. However, Fold area isn’t that important.

Foveal viewport (Foveal area)
The fovea, a part of human’s eye, is responsible for sharp central vision, which is necessary in humans for reading, watching television or movies, driving, and any activity where visual detail is of primary importance. Foveal area is a small wide space area where your eyes are aimed at and it is the only area where you can perceive the maximum level of detail. Foveal area is a tight area of about two degrees of visual field or two thumbnails held in front of your eyes. This is the place where you’d like to deliver the most important messages of your visitors.

Foveal viewport is important, because outside of this wide screen area how your visitors see your web-pages change dramatically. Inside this area is the only part of your vision with the maximal resolution - only here no eye scanning is necessary.

Gloss
Gloss is an automated action that provides hints and summary information on where the link refers to and where it will take the user once it’s clicked. Hints can be provided via title-attribute of links. From the usability point of view users want to have the full control over everything what is happening on a web-site; clear and precise explanations of internal and outgoing links, supported by sound anchor text, can improve the usability of a web-site.

Graceful Degradation (Fault-tolerance)
Graceful Degradation is the property of a web-site to present its content and its basic features even if some of its components (partly or at all) can’t be displayed or used. In practice it means that web-sites display their content in every possible “fault” scenario and can be used in every configuration (browser, plug-ins, connection, OS etc.) the visitor might have. “Power-users” are still offered a full, enhanced version of the page. For instance, it’s typical to offer alternatives for Multimedia-content (for instance image) to ensure that the content can be perceived if images can’t be displayed.

Granularity
Granularity is the degree to which a large, usually complex data set or information has been broken down into smaller units.

Hotspot
Hotspots are clickable site areas which change their form or/and outer appearance once they are clicked. This is typical for :focus-effects when a link or any other site element is clicked."    (Continued via Web 3.0)    [Usability Resources]

Best Practices of Touch Screen Interface Design

A list of best design practices ...

"Touch screen interface design is a tricky thing for some people who’ve been designing for a mouse-bound audience. But with the coming of the iPhone and a host of other touch-screen equipped smart phones at attractive price points (Like the Palm Centro and HTC Touch) I’m thinking about touch screen interfaces more and more. Maybe you should be, too…

1. Response speed should be of utmost importance. (I know, I know… making response speed a priority is a staple of user interface programmers and designers, but it’s even more important in touch screen world.) The speed and ease with which a human can interact is increased within the touch screen interface environment. Therefore, the interface’s responsiveness must increase as well. If your hardware/software’s response time is slow, you’ll find your user’s aggravation increasing proportionally faster than it would if they were using a less intuitive system, such as a mouse or trackball. (It’s not as if a using a mouse makes us all plodding computer operators, but no matter how seasoned you are with the click-able rodent, it will never come as naturally as reaching out and touching something to interact with it.) So be lightweight.

2. More space comes in at a close second to speed. A cursor is small and a stylus may be even smaller. However, it’s a good idea to design your interface with fat fingers in mind, even if a stylus is expected to be present some of the time. This will increase the overall usability and flexibility of your system. When designing Poptakeout.com (An iPhone/iPod Touch social news aggregator) I made all the buttons 106px by 110px. Considering the Mobile Safari platform is displayed (exclusively, as far as I know) on iPhones and iPod Touches, whose displays pack 160dpi, I ended up with buttons almost 1/2″ square: plenty of room for an accurate poke.

3. Intuitiveness of your design also becomes a heightened concern. This is the same situation as number one, in the touch screen environment non-intuitive information architecture will be even more frustrating to your users. When all they have to do to is reach out and touch something, it becomes a larger source of frustration when this simple action does not deliver as expected.

4. Ambidextrous design must come into consideration in the touch screen world. Both lefties and righties will be using your interface, so plan accordingly. Delivering the same experience to all users means either vertically symmetrical navigation or an option to flip your layout. I prefer the former, it will take less development time (in general) and simplifies your interface.

5. Bright background colors or patterns can hide glare and reduce fingerprints. Solid black is the worst possible choice. (I’m looking at you, iPhone)

6. Touch screen interfaces are more suited to information retrieval than data entry."    (Continued via Voltage Blog)    [Usability Resources]

Touch Computing

OXPC? Thoughts on Windows XP on the OLPC

A bad fit? ...

"If you’ve been around Techmeme in the last few hours you probably read about the agreement between Microsoft and One Laptop Per Child about making Windows XP available on the project’s computers. I personally believe it to be a bad decision from both ends, even though I admire both OLPC and Microsoft. Here’s why:

The goal of the OLPC is to create a computer that lets kids explore and be creative by themselves or with their friends. It is definitely not a computer to run Notepad, or Office, or play Solitaire and Minesweeper. It is not a computer for those who’ve been using Windows, OSX or Linux for years. By this I’m not saying that the OLPC needs a dumbed-down experience. It does need, however, to be designed in a way that fits with the needs of someone for whom a computer is a strange and alien object.

On the Sugar UI: If you’ve ever seen a OLPC device, you’ve seen Sugar. Sugar is the user interface that the computers use, and it has been designed with kids in mind. Now, if you’ve been reading this blog for a while you know I am critical of Sugar because it is confusing and abuses icons at the expense of usability. It is what you get by having a top graphical design firm work on a computing experience. But despite all this, it is still an experience you can make better and evolve.

On Windows: Windows on the other hand, is a controlled, fixed experience. It’s not like you can just go and change the whole UI to fit OLPC and kids. Or you can, by running apps on top of the OS (just like HTC does with their mobile Touch interface on top of WM6), but that’s just wrong and and a lousy experience for the user.

On the Sugar UI: If you’ve ever seen a OLPC device, you’ve seen Sugar. Sugar is the user interface that the computers use, and it has been designed with kids in mind. Now, if you’ve been reading this blog for a while you know I am critical of Sugar because it is confusing and abuses icons at the expense of usability. It is what you get by having a top graphical design firm work on a computing experience. But despite all this, it is still an experience you can make better and evolve.

On Windows: Windows on the other hand, is a controlled, fixed experience. It’s not like you can just go and change the whole UI to fit OLPC and kids. Or you can, by running apps on top of the OS (just like HTC does with their mobile Touch interface on top of WM6), but that’s just wrong and and a lousy experience for the user."    (Continued via Webreakstuff)    [Usability Resources]

OLPC

NAQ - Never Asked Questions

On writing an informative FAQ ...

"That's what most company FAQs really are. Easily answered questions that no one has ever asked.

These fake FAQs are useless. They are a turnoff to potential customers looking for reasons to buy, and an insult to existing customers troubleshooting. I now judge companies while shopping on how competent their FAQs are.

Most organizational FAQs are written by the marketing or PR arm. I think that is fine. It's actually okay to have the marketing folks write the answers. After all, why not have the organization present its best case? There might be nuances and selling points that should be covered. The problem is that the same folks make up the questions. The ones they make up are Easily Answered Questions that have never been asked. "Q: Is this the world's best product in this category? A: Why, yes!"

Behind that charade, real questions are being ignored. And if its a real problem, the real questions will be frequent, the same ones over and over. Ignoring FAQs is is dumb.

Answering real FAQs is smart for several reasons:

* It forces you to face the problem.
* It forces you to face your answer.
* It's an opportunity to sell (yes).
* It projects your character and brand.
* You can control the answer...

...because if you don't answer the FAQs, the internet tubes will. That's what forums are. Customers, both potential and present, bring their real questions to find real answers. Here people who don't work for the company will supply answers. Often these answers are good, but often the organization could supply a better answer, if it were really running a FAQ. Why not make it easy for everyone to find the best answer -- from the organization's point of view?

Sure, have an employee write the answers for FAQs. But keep the questions real. Need some real questions? Ask the help desk, or tech support, the mail room, or the receptionist!

You don't have to answer every question people will have. If you can answer the top 10 real FAQs (per subject) you can change the tenor of your feedback. One company claims that a decent FAQ (a half hour of work at most) can reduce calls to the help desk by 10%.

Real FAQs will often be difficult to answer. An answer may mean admitting mistakes, or acknowledge a weakness, or explaining something very complicated. It's okay. Take all the room and time you want. People WILL read it.

For maximizing the learning cycle let people also alert you if they feel you've answered the FAQ."    (Continued via Kevin Kelly)    [Usability Resources]

FAQ

Understanding Micro-Interactions and the New Brand Ecosystem

Will brands survive the new digital ecosystem? ...

"If I mention Apple, the first person that pops into most people’s minds is Steve Jobs. If I mention Microsoft it is Bill Gates. They are the force behind these larger than life brands. What happens when they leave (as Bill Gates has and Steve Jobs did for a while)? Will the brands survive? I would say yes, as their personalities have become synonymous with their brands.

In this age of digital socialism, putting a personality and face with your brand is key, otherwise you could be lost in the sea of logos and marketing slogans. Just having a good product is no longer enough. People need something to identify with on an emotional level.

Building a brand in our intertwined world can be a difficult feat. However, just throwing some social interactions on your web site is not enough. You have to think about how the interactions will resonate within your company. More than ever, companies need evangelists. These people are the ones that give your brand that sparkling personality. The face and personality of the brand does not need to rest on the head of the CEO. Look at Starbucks, the face of their brand is every barista that works in every Starbucks across the country. They are the company’s evangelists. They are the people behind the brand.

People have a hard time connecting with things; they work better at relating to other humans. Having a face on a brand makes the consumer feel connected in some small way with a larger entity. They are connecting to the person, not the brand. If a consumer calls or emails customer support and is not treated in a respectful manner then that is a negative reflection upon the company brand. Then that person will tell another person or post the experience on a blog, and just like that, your brand has lost some of its luster. Customer support representatives, sales people, the receptionist, every single one of these people are the part of the face of the company brand."    (Continued via Digital Design Blog)    [Usability Resources]

Brands

How can we improve mobile user experience?

A summary of a debate on mobile UX ...

A roundtable of forward thinkers convened in London last month to debate mobile user experience in advance of the forthcoming MEX conference. ME listened in…

The iPhone may not be the perfect device, but in one area it undoubtedly trumps everything that has come before it: user experience. Apple’s big gamble has thrown into sharp relief the shortcomings of most other devices.

Marek Pawlowski, PMN: User experience is suddenly at the fore of mobile thinking. Why is that?

Mike Short, 02: Three reasons. First, the mobile industry is now global, but we mustn’t forget local requirements. Second, many countries are heavily penetrated, so the only route to growth is through increased usage. Thirdly, people are using mobile devices in a broader range of contexts.

Steve Ives, Taptu: UE has become magnified because the complexity of services has escalated. The ‘soft key’ templates for calling and texting are no longer up to the job.

John West, Nuance: The key thing is making sure people can find content and services from the handset. In the PC world, apps like Google Desktop Search can find almost anything from one box. That’s the way mobile will have to go."    (Continued via UsabilityNews, Mobile Entertainment)    [Usability Resources]

iPhone Keyboard

The Rise of Contextual User Interfaces

Contextual user interface with Web 2.0 ...

"Web 2.0 has brought many wonderful innovations and ideas to the Internet. We can no longer imagine the web without a social dimension, and we can no longer imagine an online world that is read-only - it is now a read/write web full of user-generated content. But there is another fairly recent innovation, which might have just as profound implications. We're speaking of the contextual user interface.

Even five years ago we lived in the boxed world of Windows-dominated UIs. There were standard UI elements - menus, tabs, combo boxes, tables - and every single desktop application was full of these elements and nothing else. User interface was not the place to be innovative. It was considered unorthodox and even dangerous to present the interface in non-standard ways because everyone believed that users were, to be frank, stupid, and wouldn't want to deal with anything other than what they were used to.

Strikingly, the recent wave of UI innovation is proving exactly the opposite. Users are not stupid, and in fact, they were overwhelmed with choices presented in traditional UIs. The new interfaces are winning people over because they are based on usage patterns instead of choices. The key thing about new UIs is that they are contextual - presenting the user with minimal components and then changing in reaction to user gestures. Thanks to Apple, we have seen a liberating movement towards simplistic, contextual interfaces. But can these UIs become the norm? In this post we take a look at the rise of the contextual UI and ponder if they will cross the chasm.

Windows UI - The World Of Never-Ending Choices

Looking back at the years when Windows dominated our lives one can hardly believe what we put up with. These interfaces were massive and overwhelming. Each application was full of screens with huge numbers of options and settings.

Every imaginable choice was thrown at users at once and it was up to the poor user to figure out what to do. To cram more information onto the screen, the interfaces of that era used tabs. At some point Microsoft invented the ultimate UI element - a tab with a scroll button in the end which allowed the user to page through hidden tabs."    (Continued via ReadWriteWeb)    [Usability Resources]

Windows UI Choices

Doing More with Less: 4 Design Lessons from the Flip

In 2007, a company named Pure Digital released the Flip Video camera. It has quickly become the best selling video camera on Amazon.com. It has captured 13% of the video camera market in just a few months.

How does a product from an unheard-of company come to challenge an industry dominated by established big players, such as Sony, Panasonic, and Canon? It's simple. Create a better experience.
The Evolution of Camera Features

JVC and Sony manufactured the first camcorders in 1982, making low-cost video creation a possibility. Before the camcorder, you needed two devices to record: a video camera and a VCR. These combined devices opened up a new market. It was simple for anyone to point the camera, press the record button, and make a movie.

Over the years, the manufacturers have competed by adding new features, such as digital recording capabilities, longer battery life, and more compact form factors. Today's cameras can do a lot, but they are very complicated to operate. They have a bazillion buttons and a slew of settings, few of which users understand and only get in the way of using it.
Along Came the Flip

With the Flip Video camera, Pure Digital's designers have done something very interesting: they've reduced the functionality to just the useful subset of features. The camera has a simple set of buttons, just enough to control the operation. The built-in software works fast and only has the critical features.

The designers obviously thought about what is necessary to have a great camera experience and did the unthinkable: they trimmed every other bell and whistle out of the design. What's left is a barebones product that does exactly what most users want and need.

Let's look at some of the lessons we can learn from the Flip's design:
Lesson #1: Minimalist Controls

The latest Sony camcorders feature a Home Menu button, to bring you quickly to the camera's home menu. Arrow keys let you navigate quickly to the dozens of menu options and settings you'll need to operate the camera. These are just a few of the dozen or so buttons on the outside of the unit, needed to control the variety of available features.

The Flip doesn't have a Home Menu button. That's because it doesn't have a Home Menu (or any other menus).

Instead, the buttons are simple. There's a power button, a record button, a play button, and a delete button. There's a +/- toggle for adjusting the zoom when recording, which doubles as the volume control when playing back. And there's a left/right toggle for scrolling through the videos you've recorded, to select one for playing or deleting.

That's it: four buttons and two toggle sets. It's a very simple and elegant control system. The user can record movies, scroll through them, play them back, and delete them."    (Continued via UIE, Jared Spool)    [Usability Resources]

Designing for the Social Web: The Usage Lifecycle

Creating passionate users ...

"The Usage Lifecycle describes how far a person has progressed in using your web application, helping to identify the hurdles someone needs to overcome to become regular, passionate users.

Babycenter.com has a really great newsletter. Once you tell the site when you’re expecting, it sends you a weekly newsletter targeted at the specific stage of pregnancy you’re in. At 4.5 months, for example, it tells you that your baby weighs about 10.5 ounces and is 10 inches long. This information is timely and relevant…it knows exactly what stage you’re in and helps you deal with the stresses and questions at that point.

The key to babycenter’s ability to deliver a relevant newsletter is that they know your delivery date. Once they know that, they know *a lot* about what you’re going through, as pregnancy is a well-defined process that is mostly the same for everyone. Nine month cycle. Kid. Simple.

Can people designing products of all sorts take advantage of this lifecycle process? Yes, I think they can. One of the primary ideas in my new book, Designing for the Social Web is a similar kind of lifecycle, what I call the “Usage Lifecycle”. The usage lifecycle isn’t as clear cut as pregnancy is, but it recognizes that people go through a progression as they use software. They go from not knowing much at all (like parents early on in pregnancy) to feeling comfortable with the product (like, say, when parents become grandparents :D ) to finally being passionate users.

The Stages of the Usage Lifecycle

The stages of the lifecycle are straightforward and simple. You can dive into lots more depth as your application warrants, and you can add stages, but for the most part these five stages apply to almost all software.

* Unaware This isn’t so much a stage as it is a starting point. Most people are in this stage: completely unaware of your product.
* Interested These people are interested in your product, but are not yet users. They have lots of questions about how it works and what value it provides.
* First-time Use These people are using your software for the first time, a crucial moment in their progression.
* Regular Use These people are those who use your software regularly and perhaps pay for the privilege.
* Passionate Use These people are the ultimate goal: passionate users who spread their passion and build a community around your software

Note that each of these stages describes people, as opposed to a product or a market. It describes the different types of relationships people have with your software product. Have they used it yet? Have they even heard about it? What questions do they have?"    (Continued via Bokardo)    [Usability Resources]

Stages of User Lifecycle

An Interview with David Travis

Discussing the field of UX ...

"Not content to offer their skills to blue chip clients such as Barclays and eBay, Userfocus also provides training courses in areas including user experience design, intranet usability and usability testing. The person behind Userfocus is psychologist David Travis who shares his thoughts in this month’s interview.

How did you get into this field and what sorts of things had you done previously?

Between 1979 and 1986, I earned a degree and a Ph.D in psychology (from the universities of London and Cambridge) and then embarked on an academic career of post-doc research. My interest was in human colour vision and Andrew Monk at the University of York encouraged me to write a cross-over book to help HCI people use colour effectively on displays (called, predictably, “Effective Color Displays”). At the time, designing for colour displays was like designing for Web 2.0: it was seen as a real paradigm shift from the previous technology (even though, in reality, all the old rules still apply). The book got me on the agenda of some people at BT’s research labs in Ipswich who headhunted me for a job in their graphical user interfaces team in 1989 (sadly, it’s the only time I’ve ever been headhunted). I quickly realised that colour was just one element of interface design and BT gave me the opportunity to design usability labs and mock-up future HCI concepts, like telepresence. This gave me the urge to do more applied work, so in 1995 I moved to System Concepts and built up their practice in usability consultancy. I founded Userfocus in 2002.

What are some things (or people) that inspire how you think about and then develop digital experiences for users?

At the University of York in 1986 Andrew Monk introduced me to the Mac. Before that I’d been programming PDP-11s to support my research activities and this was the first graphical user interface I’d ever seen. It was an epiphany. Andrew had a post-doc working with him at the time who insisted on giving me a tutorial on how to use a Mac, as if this was some untamed beast I was about to be let loose on, but I was dying just to play with it. So I’d get into work at 8am before anyone else (this doesn’t seem early to me now but this was at a University) to spend time playing around with MacDraw and Cricket Graph, two wonderful Mac applications. I was blown away by the possibilities. It was like Adam’s first words to Eve: “Stand back, I don’t know how big this thing is going to get.”

From a practitioner’s perspective, the two biggest influences on me have been Bill Buxton and Tom Stewart. I’ve worked with both of them and learnt the importance of a pragmatic approach to design problems and to avoid “analysis paralysis”.

There are various definitions of UX out there depending on who you talk to… What does UX mean to you?

I like the quote from Whitney Quesenbery: “User Experience v. User Interaction v. User Interface v. Information Architecture v. Information Design v. Human Factors v. User-Centered Design v. Performance Centered Design v. … As far as I can tell, a choice of title says more about “where you got on the bus” than any real distinction of goals.”

To me, user centred design means three things: 1. Early and continual focus on users and their tasks. 2. Empirical measurement of user behaviour. 3. Iterative design. You may be doing design, but if you’re not doing all of these things then you’re not user centred."    (Continued via Userfocus)    [Usability Resources]

Link List Color on Intranets

Nielsen on the color of links ...

"Summary:
Lists of links are an intermediate case between content-embedded links and menu items. Showing listed links in blue or in the site's main link color is the recommended design — and the one most intranets follow.

Web Design vs. Intranet Design
Existing guidelines already tell us how to present regular links; these guidelines also say that link lists can work well without underlining the links. But what about the color of links in lists?

Of course, as a usability specialist, my first answer could be: go ahead and test this design with your own users. The design that provides the best usability is always contextual and determined by two factors: your users and their tasks.

Comparing these two factors in context shows why it's often a bad idea to determine your intranet design by looking at major websites.

First, the users are very different:

* On the public Web, the users are anybody who happens to come by. This is particularly true for the biggest and most famous websites, which must target a broad consumer audience to meet their traffic numbers. In fact, this bias toward the general public is one reason there are separate usability guidelines for B2B sites, which target a much narrower set of business experts.
* On your intranet, the users are your employees, a carefully vetted group of people who know more about your business than the general public and care more about your company (because they work there). Our testing shows, however, that it's a mistake to believe that employees know everything about the business or the company. Intranet designs often fail when they presume too much knowledge. Still, there's a big difference between employees and casual browsers who enter a website from search engines and typically leave within two minutes.

Second, the tasks are very different:

* On the public Web, potential customers compare your company to others they've found on the same SERP, trying to decide where to do business (or simply whom to contact for follow-up information on B2B sites that don't close the sale on the site itself).
* On intranets, employees do their jobs, using mission-critical applications and searching for either established company policy (say, the HR pages with maternity-leave rules) or information that's important to their current project (say, looking up a client's past purchase history).

The difference between random bozos on the Web and highly paid business professionals on your intranet is one reason that community features often work better within enterprise systems than on websites.

Given the differences in users and tasks, it's better to test your intranet than to draw lessons from even the biggest and most famous public websites.
Existing Intranet Guidelines
I realize that readers don't like it when I recommend that they test their own designs; people prefer to be told what works. So, let's try to find out as much as we can from existing research.

First, we have data from our tests of 27 company intranets. One of the resulting reports contains the usability guidelines for intranet navigation. As guideline #42 makes clear, it's essential to ensure a strong visual indication of where users can click. The report offers many screenshots of intranet designs that caused employees to miss features because they violated the guideline and didn't look clickable.

Given this first dip into the data, I'm tempted to recommend that you choose the color blue for list links. But, because no guideline states exactly that, we'll look deeper. The guideline simply says that clickability should be notable, and a heading might be enough to ensure this.

For more detail, let's look at our study of intranet information architecture (IA) , which includes detailed screenshots of 56 intranet navigation designs. The following pie chart shows how the 56 intranets colored their link lists:"    (Continued via Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)    [Usability Resources]

Link color in Lists

The Concept of Universal Design

Designing in a global economy ...

"The idea that environments can support human function is not new to designers. But, the perception that design can enable one’s abilities and participation in society is something relatively new from a consumer perspective. In a global economy driven by technology, the pace of life is making usability more important. The cost of low productivity, inconvenience and errors is simply too high. The aging of the population worldwide is another important driver, especially in the highly developed countries that are still the prime market for consumer products.

Norman (2004) illustrates how products that are functional create a positive emotional response but other factors also come into play in the realm of emotions. For example, if a product is associated with design for disability, it can become stigmatized and avoided, even though it may have significant functional benefits. Universal design seeks to provide the benefits of enabling design without the negative connotation of design for disability.

The contemporary model of disability explicitly recognizes that both the social and physical environment are factors in the disablement process (see, for example, World Health Organization, 2001; Brandt & Pope, 1997) and that the process is not a direct causal relationship but, rather, highly probabilistic, i.e. impairment may have different impacts depending on the person, the environment and the resources available. This model shifts the focus of rehabilitation more towards the social and physical environment as an enabling force. Even more important, it recognizes that the process of disablement is actually universal and highly variable. Environment, as in the case of any child who has no way of reaching a school, can create limitations on activity and participation, even without the presence of impairment. Furthermore, the impact on two people with the same impairment can be very different, depending on personal factors. For example, a family who can afford private transportation could bring their child to school if there was no accessible public transit, while a family without those means cannot.

Contemporary disablement theory, then, puts more emphasis on improving the general environment although it recognizes that there will always be a need for assistive technology like hearing aids and wheelchairs. ”Universal design”, “inclusive design” or “design for all” are all names for a similar concept. The goal is to provide benefits to everyone by making the physical environment more usable, for a broader range of people, in more situations. By producing an environment that is more inclusive, there will be less need for specialized products for people with disabilities. Moreover, the benefits for all will generate a larger constituency to support the provision of increased usability. Universal design proponents argue that if this new paradigm is widely adopted, people without “disabilities” will become more effective advocates for improving access for those who have “disabilities.” They also believe that the practice of universal design will lead to greater social integration of people with disabilities, which will address social participation outcomes more effectively."    (Continued via uiGarden)    [Usability Resources]

Designing is not a profession but an attitude

Many disciplines are considered designers ...

"Designing is not a profession but an attitude” is an excerpt from László Moholy-Nagy’s 1947 book “Vision in Motion.”

The designer must see the periphery as well as the core, the immediate and the ultimate, at least in the biological sense. He must anchor his special job in the complex whole. The designer must be trained not only in the use of materials and various skills, but also in appreciation of organic functions and planning. He must know that design is indivisible, that the internal and external characteristics of a dish, a chair, a table, a machine, painting, sculpture are not to be separated…

There is design in organization of emotional experiences, in family life, in labor relations, in city planning, in working together as civilized human beings. Ultimately all problems of design merge into one great problem: ‘design for life’.

We often put “designers” and “creatives” in special silos. But when you look at it from this “design for life” perspective, everyone is designing: writers, programmers, managers, CEOs, HR departments, parents, etc. Design and creativity don’t belong exclusively to people who use Photoshop."    (Continued via 37signals)    [Usability Resources]

Do You Have That Portable in a Midsize?

New form factors may require new UI's ...

"Thirty-six years ago, Alan Kay, a computer scientist, published a rough sketch of his Dynabook portable computer, establishing the ideal of ever more intimate personal computers.

During the next decade, Mr. Kay’s tablet design, at 9 inches by 12 inches by 3/4 inch, morphed into today’s ubiquitous laptop form-factor — a term used by consumer electronics specialists to describe the different sizes of various gadgets.

Since then, there has been a proliferation of gadgets of every size and shape, but to date only one other form-factor has established itself as a generic one: the palm-size or hand-held device that began as the Palm Pilot personal digital assistant designed by the Palm Computing co-founders Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky. An endless array of popular products, from BlackBerrys to iPhones, are descended from the Palm.

This portable world is now neatly broken into gadgets that fit comfortably in your pocket and devices that snuggle equally comfortably on your lap.

Is there room for a third category? Perhaps a new class of consumer gadgets that fits somewhere between hand-held and laptop?

For want of a better description, I propose that we label this jacket-pocket form-factor the iMoleskine, after the Hemingway-esque notebooks that writers favor.

To date, the best example of the proto-Moleskine future is the Amazon Kindle book reader, which is the size of a paperback book. A quirky first-generation effort, the device has been criticized as having an odd user interface design and a flickering display. Because of the company’s endless front-page promotional efforts on its Web store, however, the Kindle seems headed for nichedom.

Intel certainly wants us to believe that there is more room in the middle.

Last month, at a splashy forum in China for developers, the company initiated its effort to create a category for Mobile Internet Devices, or M.I.D.’s, for those of this middle size. If you remember Microsoft’s abortive effort around the Ultra Mobile PC brand in early 2006, you will have a good sense of the size of an M.I.D. (though it wasn’t called one). Introduced with a painfully hip viral marketing campaign called Oragami, the initial round of U.M.P.C.’s landed with a resounding thud. Entering text and moving the pointer on the screen were laborious, and text was so tiny as to be unreadable.

Still, Intel has persevered, arguing that there is a “use case” — the technology industry loves jargon — based on the intersection of increasingly accessible broadband wireless networks and the Web. We are going to want the Web wherever we are. Think location, location, location.

As a consequence, the Intel executives assert, the tiny cellphone display, which was ideal for viewing an 11-digit phone number or several lines of e-mail or text messaging, will be relentlessly stretched like taffy in all directions.

A cynic might argue that the real reason for Intel’s sudden enthusiasm for the M.I.D. stems from the reality that its recently introduced Atom microprocessor is stuck in a no man’s land between laptop and cellphone chips. It will be another two years before Intel has a chip that will bring the Windows-compatible world to the palm of your hand. So, what to do for now, if your chips are too power-hungry to squeeze into the cellphone market, currently dominated by microprocessor chips licensed from ARM, the British chip company? If you have lemons, make lemonade!"    (Continued via Yahoo! Finance)    [Usability Resources]

Self-service and the (possible?) recession

Usability may become one of those self-service outcomes ...

"Is this country teetering on the edge of a recession?

Depends on who you talk to, I guess. If you believe this doomsday YouTube rant by the always-animated Jim Cramer, host of MSNBC’s “Mad Money”, (and if I were you, I’d check it out because it’s pretty darn funny toward the end) then you’re probably ready to make a run on the bank and hide in your bomb shelter.

... What she worries about is a downturn in the quality of self-service deployments as companies eager to cut costs in a tight economy might decide to shortcut certain design processes and make a beeline straight for assembly and deployment. Design is something Bodine says some kiosk manufacturers have a hard enough time focusing on in a good economy – in a sub-standard one, she says it’s almost certain to suffer.

“I spend a lot of time looking at the kiosk industry, and compared with other self-service technology channels like the Web, the kiosk industry is really far behind in terms of understanding some of these design processes and methodologies,” she said.

Specifically, she’s referring to methodologies that focus on identifying and pleasing the prospective kiosk user, such as conducting ethnographic research, usability testing, focus groups and analytics. Unfortunately, she says some kiosk deployers and manufacturers have such a tenuous grasp of R&D that they don’t know which methodologies to use.

“If you want to know if your system is easy to use, you can’t run a focus group to find that out. That’s something that I do see in the kiosk industry a lot,” she said. “They use focus groups for everything because it’s really the one primary tool that they understand. Instead you should either be conducting an expert review…running a usability lab test – there are a lot of ways to evaluate usability, but not through a focus group.”

Bodine fears the economy may drive some companies to eliminate usability testing altogether and rush substandard deployments to market. She says this approach could seriously hurt the industry."    (Continued via Self-Service)    [Usability Resources]

Usability of Content is Plain Language

The importance of plain language ...

"An exciting thing happened in the USA on 14th April 2008. It didn't quite manage to make it onto the national news - that day, we were mostly hearing about the Pope's visit to the USA. Any ideas? Any clue from my title? Give up?

USA HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES PASSES PLAIN LANGUAGE ACT
The answer is that the USA House of Representatives passed the Plain Language in Government Communications Act of 2008. It achieved bipartisan support, passing with a massive majority of 376-1. The lone opponent, the aptly-named U. S. Congressman Flake, issued this commentary on the topic: “Bad bill. Voted no”.

It's not a long Act. Its key sentences are its purpose:

"The purpose of this Act is to improve the Federal Government's effectiveness and accountability to the public by promoting clear communication that the public can understand and use".

and the definition:

"The term `plain language' means language that the intended audience can readily understand and use because it is clear, concise, well-organized, and follows other best practices of plain language writing".

and the time requirement:

"Within one year after the date of the enactment of this Act, each agency -- (1) shall use plain language in any covered document of the agency issued or substantially revised after the date of the enactment of this Act"

OK, OK, it's not necessarily the easiest thing to read. (Plenty of in-jokes available here about the irony of a Plain Language Act itself having some obscure words in it). And it's not even really the law yet. The Senate has to have its go as well, and then the President. But the point is that Plain Language is back on the agenda of our sole super-power again.

PLAIN LANGUAGE MATTERS
Have a look at that 'purpose' sentence again: "that the intended audience can readily understand and use". Sounds very much like usability, doesn't it? And did you spot "clear, concise, well-organized"? Isn't that just what we strive for in our designs? That isn't a coincidence. There is a widely held misunderstanding that plain language is about following a specific set of rules for writing. It isn't."    (Continued via Usability News - Caroline's Corner)    [Usability Resources]

Design Strategies for Sustainable User Behaviour

A new journal and article ...

"User-Centred Design for Sustainable Behaviour
Time for a small celebration. A paper that Renee Wever (also from TU Delft), Casper Boks (NTNU Norway) and I wrote together has been accepted for the first issue of the new International Journal of Sustainable Engineering, published by Taylor and Francis. It is entitled 'User-centred Design for Sustainable Behaviour' and in it we explore the possibilities of using product design to nudge users towards more sustainable product use. Most 'traditiona'l eco-design approaches have focused on cleaner production and creating more efficient products (using less resources), but less attention has been paid at how to include the users in this picture.

Getting users to behave 'green'
Many modern cars prevent us from making mistakes that will cost us a lot of time and effort. For example, they make it impossible to lock the driver-seat door from the outside without using the key. This prevents you from leaving your keys inside the vehicle and locking yourself out. In other words: the car prevents you from producing unfavorable side-effects. In this paper we explore the possibility of influencing user-product interaction through the design of the product with the aim of improving the sustainability of product use.

Four design strategies
We provide a typology of four user-centered design strategies for inducing sustainable behavior.

* Functionality matching: adapt a product better to the actual use by consumers and thereby try to minimize negative side effects;
* Eco-feedback: the user is presented with specific information on the impact of his or her current behavior, and it is left to the user to relate this information to his or her own behaviour, and adapt this behaviour, or not;
* Scripting: creating obstacles for unsustainable use, or making sustainable behaviour so easy, it is performed almost without thinking about it;
* Forced functionality: making products adapt automatically to changing circumstances, or to design-in strong obstacles to prevent unsustainable behaviour.

The four strategies are supported with examples from packaging, automotive and consumer electronics."    (Continued via the product usability weblog)    [Usability Resources]

Sustainable User Behaviour

UPA 2008 (Baltimore, MD, USA)

Still time to sign-up ...

"The international UPA 2008 conference will be held in Baltimore on June 16-20, 2008.

This is a great conference for people new to usability as well as for experienced practitioners. You will meet wonderful people and get lots of practical tips and ideas. Monday June 16 and Tuesday June 17 are tutorials and workshops, while the main conference runs Wednesday June 18 through Friday June 20.

The theme of this year’s conference is “The Many Faces of User Experience: Usability through holistic practice.” Many types of professionals touch the user experience of a product. Marketing specialists, graphic designers, computer scientists, business analysts, psychologists, information architects, technical writers and others bring valuable perspectives to usability and user experience. UPA 2008 invites you to share perspectives and learn from the experiences of other practitioners.

This year’s conference will feature a special full-day program on usability in e-Government on Tuesday, June 17. There will be panel sessions on the status of usability in the U.S. Federal Government and in other governments around the world, small group discussions, and presentations and case studies on a wide range of topics.

UPA 2008 will also introduce a new topic called Managing User Experience. It includes sessions geared towards user experience managers, directors, or team leaders."    (Continued via User Experience Network)    [Usability Resources]

The Popup Scrollbar Concept

The usability of a popup scrollbar - a video ...

"As you may remember from our series on common usability terms, I have a lot of interest in graphical user interface concepts. In addition, I applaud anyone trying to improve existing concepts, people that try to think beyond set conventions to come up with an improved version of that concept, or a new concept altogether. Thorsten Wilms took on the well-established concept of the scrollbar, and came up with a few interesting tweaks.

His idea is one of those things that are hard to explain by textual means - hence the video he made, which he put on YouTube for us all to see.

While I applaud the efforts made by Wilms (I already noted his email to gnome-usability), I have difficulties seeing the exact problems this new type of scrollbar tries to resolve. When observing my friends, who are almost all decidedly not computer savvy, I see that they use the scroll wheel for minor scrolling, and the 'scroll blob', as I like to call it, for heavier scrolling (like jumping to specific sections of a page). Of course, this is completely unscientific, but I think it's rather representative for most people out there. I've never seen anyone frantically turning the scroll wheel, only to be amazed by being pointed to the scroll blob - or vice versa. In other words, what problem does this new type of scrollbar address?

The only thing I can see is that when the scroll blob becomes too small, the act of being able to click and drag in the entire scroll bar to scroll can be quite handy. However, I would argue that scroll blobs becoming too small is not an inherent problem of the current scroll bar concept itself, but of the underlying toolkit instead: scroll blobs should always remain big enough to remain an easy target: you know, usability's favourite dead horse, Fitts' Law. In other words: this is a low-level problem, that you really shouldn't try to fix with a high-level solution.

This leaves us with the ever important question of whether or not to embrace a new UI concept: is the problem that the new concept tries to address big enough to justify learning that new concept? Seeing the relative complexity of Wilms' scroll bar, I tend to answer that question with 'no'."    (Continued via OS News)    [Usability Resources]

The Popup Scrollbar

BayCHI Monthly Program

Tuesday, May 20, 2008: Monthly Program (BayCHI) ...

"7:30-9:30 pm
Information Visualization for Insight and Communication (Co-Sponsored with Stanford Symbolic Systems)
Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland HCI Lab

Information Visualization for Insight and Communication (Co-Sponsored with Stanford Symbolic Systems)
Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland HCI Lab

The rise of interactive information visualization tools provides researchers and analysts with remarkable capabilities to support discovery and communication. They begin with an overview, zoom in on areas of interest, filter out unwanted items, and then click for details-on-demand. The growing commercial success stories such as Spotfire, SmartMoney's Map of the Market, and The Hive Group are only the start. Research prototypes for large time series data are being applied to financial, medical, and genomic data. At the same time, data sharing web sites such as ManyEyes or Swivel and journalistic triumphs, such as the excellent interactive presentations of the New York Times, are helping to promote widespread interactive visual literacy.

This is the first of four lectures in the Stanford Symbolic Systems Distinguished Speaker series, with more lectures on May 21, 22, and 23.

Ben Shneiderman is a professor in the Department of Computer Science, founding director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, and member of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park.

He is a fellow of the ACM and received the ACM CHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001. His comprehensive text Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (Addison-Wesley) came out in its 4th edition in April 2004 with Catherine Plaisant as co-author.

Since 1991, his major focus has been information visualization, beginning with his dynamic queries and starfield display research that led to the development of Spotfire. Dr. Shneiderman developed the treemap concept in 1991 which continues to inspire research and commercial implementations. The University of Maryland’s Treemap 4.0, developed in cooperation with Catherine Plaisant, has been licensed by the HiveGroup and remains available for educational and research purposes. Later information visualization work includes the LifeLines project for exploring a patient history, and its successor project, PatternFinder, which enables search across electronic medical records. Searching for patterns in numerical time series data was enabled by three versions of TimeSearcher, which was applied for stock market, auction, genomic, weather, and other data."    (Continued via BayCHI)    [Usability Resources]

New report analyzes usability of personal navigation devices 45 products tested from 23 brands

A usability report of a different type ...

"Jakajima, an independent provider of business intelligence to the Telecom, IT and Consumer Electronics markets, today has announced the availability of a new report, “usability and performance benchmark for navigation devices”.

In this unique report, 45 Personal Navigation Devices (PNDs) from 23 manufacturers have been tested to benchmark their usability. Among others, the test protocol includes the number of button pressed before a route calculation starts, the speed of calculation for a destination and the speed of recalculation if a manoeuvre has been missed among others.

“There was a real lack of this kind of comprehensive benchmark on the market”, said Pieter Hermans, CEO at Jakajima. “Consumer and specialized media are doing testing of PNDs from time to time, but it has never been on such a scale with such precise test protocols. What is the difference between the usability of PND A and PND B; between brand Y and brand Z is really what this report is all about. We believe the whole navigation industry can benefit from it. Buyers in the retail can better understand what they sell and navigation manufacturers can see where they stand against each competitor and the market as a whole”.

All PNDs are not made equal
Along the 75 pages of this report, one true fact emerges, not all PNDs are made equal. There are many disparities. Average calculation times are spreading from 3.8 seconds for the fastest device to over 1 minute for the slowest. It is pretty much the same for the recalculation speed when you miss a turn. If you use a Becker Traffic Assist 7927 you have an average recalculation time of 8 seconds, while it is 20 seconds if you have a Medion GoPal P4425. With a 20 seconds re-calculation time, driving at 90km/h, means you will have covered half a kilometre before getting new instructions.

TomTom and Garmin
This report also highlights significant differences between the two leading PND brands, TomTom and Garmin. TomTom does a good job with its user interface with an average of 4 buttons less – to be pressed to launch a routing - than Garmin. Calculation time is also slightly quicker, around 3 seconds less for TomTom than for Garmin. However, Garmin does a better job for recalculation with 1 second less than TomTom. But many differences are also noticeable one a product basis; for example the Garmin Nuvi 250 and Nuvi 360 are quicker to calculate a route than the TomTom One XL and the TomTom One XL Europe."    (Continued via The Location Based Service)    [Usability Resources]

Circular Menus and Usability

Circular menus. Ever heard of them? I'm not sure if they have an "official" or "common" name, but this name is pretty descriptive.

Circular menus are superior in usability to the typical rectangular slide-out menu. Why? Because, ideally, each menu item is the same distance from the initial pointer position as each other item. Look at the iPod buttons, for example. Play/Pause, the most common function, is in the middle, and the other functions are equal distances from there.

Also check out the SecondLife context "spin menu". The pie pops up surrounding the cursor, and all the available options are an equal twitch away from the center.

Submenus? Just expand the circle. For example, here's a quick mockup I made converting much of my current FireFox context menu into a pie menu:"    (Continued via Tech Knack)    [Usability Resources]

Circular Menu

Luke Wroblewski on Form Design

A good audio discussion on forms design ...

"I recently had the pleasure of talking with Tom Crawford, CEO of VizThink, about my Web Form Design book and its relevance for the visual thinking community.

Check out the podcast with video on the VizThink site.
Download the audio as an mp3 (21.6 MB)

In the interview we discuss:

* Why web form design is important
* If form design is everywhere, why are there so many bad forms?
* What are some of the common mistakes web form designers make?
* What are the Top 3 tips for improving web forms?
* Why do good designers create bad forms?
* What is the disappearing form?
* How does web form design relate to visual thinking?"    (Continued via Functioning Form)    [Usability Resources]

Raising the standard of websites worldwide: BSI and Magus launch a new specification

New specs for corporate websites ...

"BSI British Standards and UK web compliance expert Magus, recently launched at Internet World a Publicly Available Specification (PAS) which aims to improve the effectiveness of corporate websites through a new best practice approach to the application and management of website standards. PAS 124: “Defining, implementing and managing website standards” is available for download from today from the link below.

Simon Lande, CEO of Magus, commented: “As the web continues to develop as a critical business medium, so does the importance of maximising website effectiveness. But our experience shows that businesses are actually reducing the impact and value of their web presence, despite the millions invested each year, because they are not implementing website standards successfully.”

The specification is organised around the three key processes of effective website management: defining, implementing and managing website standards. The standards definition process is supported by a detailed guide to the categories of website standards that organisations need to consider. The key business benefits for managing websites within the PAS 124 framework include:

- Brand protection: reinforcement of the brand online by ensuring consistency of brand presentation and messaging; protection of the brand and company reputation by ensuring a consistent, high quality user experience.
- Risk management: minimisation of online risk through compliance with legislative requirements; securing appropriate protection of intellectual property under a defined legal jurisdiction.
- Improved financial return: protection of investment in web-related projects by ensuring quality and performance is maintained; reduction of development and maintenance costs; provision of access to the widest possible market, by ensuring compliance with accessibility guidelines and compatibility with target user platforms; and optimisation for targeted customer acquisition due to the effective localisation of content.
- Improved workflow: reduction of time to market for web projects through streamlined development and maintenance processes; communication and enforcement of best practice across web teams and the organisation as a whole.
- Performance measurement: provision of objective targets against which performance can be tracked and measured."    (Continued via Usability News)    [Usability Resources]

Simplicity in Your Mind

There is increasing interest in the simplification of information technology (IT). The IT industry is recognizing the need to simplify software technology as businesses express their increased interest in governing the return on their IT investments. Two goals are surfacing as explicit mandates to which all software vendors are responding:

* lowering the skills required of software users
* increasing their productivity

Although this simplification mandate is most essential to small- and medium-sized businesses, where people with high-end technical skills may not be affordable, an awareness of the damage complexity inflicts on users is spreading to the enterprise market as well. Commoditization pressures make it necessary for the IT industry to reduce skills requirements as well as service and maintenance costs.

This article postulates that we cannot address the issue of simplification exclusively by analyzing the physical and computational parameters of technology. Instead, we must understand the goal of simplification in light of the knowledge, tasks, and processing-load demands on its users. We can approach simplicity as an engineering endeavor by controlling the impact on these three usage dimensions.

Software’s Complexity Complex

Software, like any other technology, has an intrinsic tendency to become more and more complex. In response to market forces, software developers struggle to differentiate products from those of their competitors by making them more and more functionally sophisticated. This has become a major problem for software vendors.

What are the dimensions of simplicity in software technology? Can those attributes be engineered? What do we mean by simplifying technology? What is simplicity?

Technology, unlike science, must be understood in light of its usage elements. To understand technology, we need to understand the individuals who use it. We cannot define complexity in technology solely in terms of objective physical parameters. If we accept the assumption that technology intrinsically involves human endeavor, we must accept the ergonomic, social, and mental agents that both build it and consume it. We must accept that its makers construct the complexity in technology.

The impact on technology of the physical and biomechanical properties of our bodies is well understood. The physical characteristics and limitations of our bodies constrain the optimization of users’ sitting postures and hand/arm alignment while physically interacting with hardware devices. For the most part, however, when it comes to information technology, complexity is in the mind."    (Continued via UXmatters, Lucinio Santos)    [Usability Resources]

Rubbing as a Zoom Gesture

New gestures just around the corner ...

"At Alex Olwal's web page you can watch video and download a CHI 2008 paper describing research on rubbing as a gesture for zooming. Rubbing up and to the right zooms in, up and to the left zooms out.

Their evaluation showed that it was better than other single-finger methods for zooming, though fatigue can be a problem if the screen surface isn't smooth.

They also tested two variations on combined two-handed tapping and zooming techniques (e.g. one hand points or zooms and the other can tap to select).

Their focus was on touchscreens that report only a single finger for applications like public kiosks.

The paper is "Rubbing and Tapping for Precise and Rapid Selection on Touch-Screen Displays" by Alex Olwal, Steven Feiner, and Sanna Heyman."    (Continued via Touch Usability)    [Usability Resources]

Rubbing Gestures

Bite-Sized UX Research

Best bang for buck with UX research ...

"It’s not uncommon for projects to lack the time, money, or resources to conduct ideal user research activities. There are many reasons why this occurs:

* Sometimes we’re brought onto a project late.
* Perhaps we’re new to an organization that doesn’t really get UX.
* Maybe a company is rushing to bring a product to market for some reason—and there are plenty of good and bad reasons this might be so—and there simply isn’t time to “go big”.
* Perhaps your client or organization is following an Agile development methodology.

At such times, it can be tempting to just throw up our hands in dismay and do nothing or lament the fact that everything isn’t perfect. But the simple fact is that, as UX professionals, we can always add value, at any stage in a project—even if a project team can’t act on our advice straight away.
Focus on Winning Small Victories Often

Regardless of the cause for your company’s resource crunch, focus on getting small wins as often as possible throughout your involvement in a project. This is a fairly common piece of advice that crops up time and time again, but it’s very much worth repeating. And it applies just as readily to both situations where time is short and those when there’s just not enough of you to go around.

This advice is equally valid for UX professionals who find themselves in new positions as the sole user experience person. It’s common for new hires to ask: “How do I sell the benefits of UX?” The answer is generally something along the lines of: “Focus on small wins.” In other words, don’t waste your energy putting together a series of case studies on how other people have created value at other organizations. Instead, do something positive and tangible—however small—and it’ll carry a lot more weight.
Go for Impact

Concentrate on getting bang for your buck. Depending on your circumstances, you may not get many opportunities to demonstrate the value of UX, and when time is short, there can be a tendency to just do something—anything. It’s an urge you should try to resist. If you want to have a greater impact, ask your project team—the project manager, the development team, and the business stakeholders—a few pointed questions before you get started:

* What are the critical features of the Web site or application?
* What features would be hardest for the developers to change once they’ve developed them?
* What are the areas of greatest ambiguity in terms of user requirements, audience groups, or competitive offerings?

And then ask a few more questions:

* How can I best document my user research findings, so the project team can used them?
* Do we have time for iterations? And if so, how many?

With this information, you can start planning some activities that focus on the most important elements of the project—the critical features for success; the features that are hardest to change; or the gray areas of the project—and deliver some real value.

It’s all very well to say “do something small,” but what, exactly, can you do?"    (Continued via UXmatters)    [Usability Resources]

How Little Do Users Read?

Webpage readers read very little ...

"Summary:
On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

We've known since our first studies of how users read on the Web that they typically don't read very much. Scanning text is an extremely common behavior for higher-literacy users; our recent eyetracking studies further validate this finding.

The only thing we've been missing is a mathematical formula to quantify exactly how much (or how little) people read online. Now, thanks to new data, we have this as well.
The Research Study
For full details, see the following academic paper:

Harald Weinreich, Hartmut Obendorf, Eelco Herder, and Matthias Mayer: "Not Quite the Average: An Empirical Study of Web Use," in the ACM Transactions on the Web, vol. 2, no. 1 (February 2008), article #5.

In the study, the authors instrumented 25 users' browsers and recorded extended information about everything they did as they went about their normal Web activities. What's important about this study is that it was completely naturalistic: the users didn't have to do anything special.

One downside of the study is that the users had above-average intelligence, with several being university employees. This might not be a problem in the long run, however. If, for example, we compare data we collected in 2008 for our Fundamental Guidelines for Web Usability seminar with a similar study we ran in 2004, we find that 2008's average behavior is close to that of 2004's higher-end users. Thus, even though Weinreich et al.'s data represents high-end users, it's likely to be fairly representative of broader user behavior in the future. In fact, the authors collected their data in 2005, so the recorded behaviors might already be fairly common.

In any case, the research yielded several interesting findings, and the full paper is well worth reading.

Among other things, the authors found that the Back button is now only the 3rd most-used feature on the Web. Clicking hypertext links remains the most-used feature, but clicking buttons (on the page) has now overtaken Back to become the second-most used feature. The reason for this change is the increased prevalence of applications and feature-rich Web pages that require users to click page buttons to access their functionality.

Of course, Back is still the user's lifeline and is so frequently used that supporting it remains a strong usability guideline.
Real-Life Reading Behavior
Harald Weinreich graciously provided me with the dataset detailing 59,573 page views.

From this data, I removed the following records:

* 10,163 page views (17%) that lasted less than 4 seconds. In such brief "visits," users clearly bounced right out without truly "using" the page.
* 2,615 page views (4%) that lasted more than 10 minutes. In these cases, users almost certainly left the browser open while doing something else.
* 1,558 page views (3%) with fewer than 20 words on them. Such pages are probably server errors or disrupted downloads.

After cleaning the dataset, I was left with 45,237 page views for my analysis."    (Continued via Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)    [Usability Resources]

How Nokia Users Drive Innovation

The site generates more than 1 million page views and about 200,000 downloads a month, according to Nokia. Thousands of users contribute comments. "We are having the positive problem of how to manage all the feedback," says Tommi Vilkamo, manager of Beta Labs, who also writes a blog in which he responds to reader comments.

Vilkamo's plan is to turn blogging responsibility over to software developers, so they have direct contact with customers. "Before, there were too many middlemen between developers and users," he says.

For Nokia, the benefit of free applications such as Sports Tracker is getting owners to take fuller advantage of the computing power of their handsets. Judging from the number of people who not only downloaded the program, but also uploaded routes and photos onto a sharing site, the strategy is a success.
Mapping Your Photo Diary

By monitoring the sharing site, Nokia developers have also been able to see how customers are actually using the software. One surprise is that some people used it just to record how they spent the day bumming around town, or skateboarding in the neighborhood. Recently, one user who identified himself as Ferdinandt shared live data of himself apparently traveling by boat off the coast of the Netherlands.

People are also taking advantage of the fact that the software records location information when users snap a photo with the handset camera. Users upload maps embedded with photos they took along their route to a sharing site Nokia established for the purpose, creating a multimedia diary of their day's voyage.

As a result, Nokia developers are realizing that aiming the application at amateur athletes was too narrow. They are thinking of rebranding the application as a kind of life-tracker. Based on the response to the software on Beta Labs, that may well help drive users to Nokia's Ovi Web portal (also in beta testing), which is the basis of Nokia's attempt to carve out a big piece of the evolving, mobile Internet. "It shows people they can do much more (with their handsets) than just make phone calls," says researcher Kaasinen."    (Continued via Business Week)    [Usability Resources]

Nokia Concept Phone

10 Tips to Increase Intranet Use

Making an intranet usable ...

"In addition to simply providing access to documents and procedural information, an intranet has the potential to unify a corporate culture, emphasize core company values, and develop a sense of community among employees. Unfortunately, some intranets have simply grown organically as a collection of disjointed web sites or departments and are only used as document repositories for the different groups. The value of the disjointed experience to users of the site is limited. As a result, fewer and fewer employees use the intranet and fall back on other modes of obtaining what they need to do their job.

Companies that are looking to fix this situation and improve their intranet face a fundamental problem – employees just aren’t use to going to the intranet. Even if the content is improved, usability is updated, and the intranet offers more value overall, if employees don’t visit the site, it’s like a tree falling in the woods. Our experience with a number of intranet re-design projects has revealed a set of best practices or features that drive interest and repeat visitors to the site. These best practices include a set of considerations for site navigation, features, functionality, content and style. Many of the features are appropriate for an intranet home page, but they can also be interspersed throughout the site. The key is to apply the strategies and variations that work best within the context of the site.

It’s Not All About the Firm
Employees have interests outside the company and want to feel connected with what’s going on in the community around them. If you don’t provide content that interests them on the intranet site, they will go elsewhere for it. Enable employees to stay up-to-date with their interests by incorporating regional news, stock tickers, sports scores and other news right on the intranet. Even silly features like quotes or photos of the day provide a quick diversion of interest and a draw to come back. Bulletin boards for employees to offer items for sale or trade are also popular.

Make the Mundane Great
There are basic tools that employees need all the time – conference room locators, people finders, printers, cafeteria menus, etc. If it is difficult to use the essential tools, employees are unlikely to give other features of the site a chance. Focus on the usability and experience of these tools. If they work great, employees will appreciate them and be forgiving with other sections of the site that may still be a work in progress.

Design It!
Looks are important. The visual design of an intranet should not interfere with the usability of the site and findability of content, but just because it’s an intranet doesn’t mean it has to be bland. In fact, during interviews with employees about out-dated intranet designs, they will often say that the design reflects poorly on the company as a whole. In addition, an out-of-date design gives a connotation that the content in the site is out of date as well. Evaluate several options for visual design, imagery and style for the site, hire designers if necessary, and re-evaluate the look on a regular basis.

Let Them Interact & Contribute
People find user-generated content valuable. On consumer sites for example, user ratings and reviews are often ranked as among the most valuable features. Similarly, on intranet sites, employees are interested in hearing about the opinions or experience of others. For example, how have others used a particular set of sales materials? Or, what kind of problems do customers run into during implementation? Even if a robust discussion option isn’t feasible, simple polls or quizzes are engaging and drive repeat visits. People want to see if their answer is the same as everyone else!

Offer An Easy Way Back
Employees may be wary of IT policies that dictate what their browser home page should be. In absence of such a policy, it is likely that browser home pages will vary widely. To remind employees that they can switch, provide an explicit link on the intranet that allows visitors to make the intranet their default browser page. Minimally, provide a link that allows employees to quickly bookmark the site for easy access.

Don’t Be Scared of Video
In today’s TV culture, people are used to watching video rather than reading. Leverage the inclination for this type of content by providing key messages using video or other dynamic multimedia. Keep bandwidth considerations in mind, however, so as not to overload the technical infrastructure. For bandwidth intensive content such as video, the best practice is to offer the content on-demand, requiring the user to press play to start the video if they are interested."    (Continued via TMCnet, Michael Hawley)    [Usability Resources]

The five tools of the professional software designer

A baseball analogy for designing software ...

"Any designer worth their salt knows that borrowing shamelessly or outright stealing are often touted as key skills. In the spirit of that concept (without outright endorsement) I'm going to apply that type of thinking to a post one of peers created recently. Which relates some of which we know about baseball and assessing skills to concepts around software architecture.

You can read this great post here and I'll pull Larry's concepts on baseball which are great guidance for anyone. (Well done Larry!).

From Larry's blog:

This series was inspired by the book Management by Baseball.

In baseball scouting one of the biggest compliments that a player can receive is to be called a "5 tool player". This is a reference to the skills that make up a good, all around baseball player:

1. Hitting for power: When at the plate the player can hit the ball with a lot of power, home runs and doubles are very common. Runs Batted In (RBI) and Total Bases (TB) are common stats to measure the power that a player shows.

2. Hitting for average: Hitting for power is only one dimension of the performance at the plate (sometimes a player that hits for power will strike out a lot). When a player hits for average, that means that they reach base more often when they have a plate appearance. Batting Average (BA) and On Base Percentage (OBP) are common stats to measure how well the player does in this skill.

3. Base running skills: How well does the player handle himself when they reach base. The obvious thought is how fast the player is in running between bases, but many of the best base runners are not the fastest, they are smart about the leads they take and are effective at breaking up a double play. Stolen Bases (SB) is the most common stat for this skill.

4. Fielding: Good fielding is essential for a team to succeed. Sometimes players can be great at the plate, but will be called a "defensive liability" meaning their fielding is sub-par. Fielding Percentage and errors are 2 stats to measure this tool.

5. Throwing: how well does the player execute throws once they have fielded the ball. Double plays turned (for infielders) and Assists (for outfielders) are stats for this skill.

So...how can we apply this to the 'design' process of software or experiences? Here are the skills I think are important. Everyone can practice these skills but professional designers have had some kind of formal grounding or education and experience in these areas. I've got four. What do you think?"    (Continued via Design Thinking Digest, Larry's Blog)    [Usability Resources]

New Usability Guide: Time to tune up your Website?

Download paper on website usability ...

"This week digital marketing consultancy, Coast Digital, published a new 24-page guide on the subject of usability. The guide is designed to help businesses unlock their website’s commercial potential by resolving usability issues.

As increasing volumes of business move online there’s never been a better time to ensure your website is in good shape. Establishing good usability is a key success factor; it’s essential for achieving sales; conversions and positive branding; and represents a huge commercial opportunity.

Time to Tune Up your Website? offers advice to make websites work more efficiently and effectively. Packed with essential do’s and don’ts and guidance on selecting the right type of usability analysis, the publication also includes advice on how to drive up revenues without spending more on advertising.

Robin Moore, usability consultant at Coast Digital comments: “The internet is a highly competitive space. If you’re seeking to optimise website performance, usability should be a key consideration. Our guide will help businesses to understand its potential and assess the issues for themselves."    (Continued via Usability News)    [Usability Resources]

Joshua Porter on simplicity as a design goal

In case you missed this one ...

"Joshua Porter, a user interface designer, wonders whether simplicity is a bad design goal, and expresses his ideas in a thoughtful post.

Most designers place simplicity above all else. We value simple things because they do all the things we need easily and none of the things we don’t. Simplicity is harmonious. Even Leonardo Da Vinci said “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” This is one of my favorite quotes, and it plays on the idea that being simple isn’t banal, it’s elegant.

Don Norman recently ignited a discussion about simplicity in his piece Simplicity is Highly Overrated. He observes that although designers treat simplicity as the ultimate goal, many consumers, when faced with a purchase decision, choose complexity instead. He uses examples from shopping in South Korea: people there choose complex, feature-laden electronics and SUVs over simpler ones. Norman says that people choose complexity because they assume a complex product is more capable.

Porter rethinks the discussion as not one about simplicity but as one about the psychology of trade-offs:

Users face a trade-off when they must make a choice between a simple product or a complex product with more features. If they choose the product with fewer features and eventually need some functionality that is missing, they’ve made a bad choice. However, when users choose the complex product with more features, they don’t have to make this trade-off. The complex product is more likely to have the feature users may need in the future.

People are reluctant to make trade-offs because they can’t predict what functionality they will need in the future. Choosing a product with fewer features is a trade-off that could hurt them down the line. When users don’t understand the advantages of each feature, such as when a user is buying her first digital camera, they are much more likely to avoid making a trade-off by choosing the feature-laden product.

When users choose a feature-laden product, they may not be exhibiting a desire for complexity. Instead, users are anxious about predicting their future needs. The black/white distinction of “choosing complexity over simplicity” seems too blunt an instrument to describe the behavior we see from users. Schwartz’ theory suggests that people in this type of situation don’t know enough about the features of a product or their own needs. The result is that users avoid making a trade-off by choosing the one that looks like it has more features."    (Continued via Putting people first, UIE)    [Usability Resources]

Whole-Body Gaming

New software makes it easier to build games controlled by a user's body position ...

"The massive success of the Nintendo Wii proved the appeal of motion-controlled gaming. Now Softkinetic, a company based in Belgium, is working to let video-game players use a wider range of more-natural movements to control the on-screen action. Softkinetic's software is meant to work with depth-sensing cameras, which can be used to determine a player's body position and motions. "You don't need a controller in your hand," says CEO Michel Tombroff. "You don't need to wear a special outfit. You just come in front of the camera in your living room, and you start playing by moving your entire body."

Attempts to commercialize gestural interfaces date back to at least the late 1980s and the Power Glove, an accessory for the original Nintendo Entertainment System. Many such systems, however, have been defeated by the need for awkward, bulky accessories; others just didn't work that well.

The Wii controller was the field's first success. But the motions it requires can sometimes feel stiff and unnatural, and it's sensitive only to gestures made by the hand in which it's held. Depth-sensing cameras, on the other hand, can pick up gestures made by a variety of body parts, Tombroff says. They can also be tuned to pick up motions more precisely. Designing programs that work with the cameras, however, is difficult: translating depth measurements into a map of a human figure, and determining what motions that figure is making, are computationally daunting tasks. This is where Softkinetic comes in.

Softkinetic's technology started out as research at the University of Brussels, in Belgium, aimed at exploring the user interfaces made possible by stereoscopic cameras, which sense depth by using two input sources, in much the way that the human brain perceives depth by comparing data from two eyes. The group created Softkinetic in mid-2007 and has adapted its research to work with newer depth-sensing cameras as well. Tombroff explains that the newer cameras have better commercial prospects because they've done away with the need for two input sources. As a consequence, they're smaller, with cheaper parts, and easier to incorporate into existing devices such as laptops."    (Continued via Technology Review)    [Usability Resources]

Solid Motion

Simplicity: Functionally and Visually

Reducing buttons does not make product easier to use ...

"Simplicity is something to strive for apparently. Muji does it. Philips does it. Paris does it. It just might become the 'user-friendliness' of this decennium: an appealing, but somewhat vague notion of 'goodness' in interaction. We all agree: it should be there, but no-one is exactly sure what it is. Or is really sure, but everyone else disagrees. To some it means getting what you need, to others it means leaving out the frills.

So, time for some clarification. Or perhaps we should say diversification. In 'Simplicity, the Ultimate Sophistication' Joshua Porter brings a number of authors (gurus, blog-heads and indeed some actual designers) to the stage to speak their minds on simplicity, such as Don Norman, Mark Hurst, Scott Berkum and John Maeda. Porter himself adds some flavor to the subject by bringing out Barry Schwartz' paradox of choice and applying it to product design:

Users face a trade-off when they must make a choice between a simple product or a complex product with more features. If they choose the product with fewer features and eventually need some functionality that is missing, they've made a bad choice. However, when users choose the complex product with more features, they don't have to make this trade-off. The complex product is more likely to have the feature users may need in the future.

I usually call that the 'I-don't-know-what-that-feature-is-exactly-but-I-might-need-it-someday'-syndrome. Another worthwhile observation about simplicity can be found at GUUI.com, where Henrik Olsen points out the difference between avoiding visual complexity and providing true simplicity:

Usability is based on principles such as "Less is more" and "Keep it simple, stupid". But there is more to simplicity than meets the eye. By reducing visual complexity at the cost of structural simplicity, you will give your users a hard time understanding and navigating the content of a web site.

In other words: reducing the amount of buttons and adding a deep menu structure does not necessarily make a product easier to use. See also earlier uselog posts on expected usability. Meanwhile PresentationZen reviews John Maeda's book 'The Laws of Simplicity', and illustrates it (how appropriate) with some appealing visuals."    (Continued via the product usability weblog)    [Usability Resources]

Apple vs. Dell

User Interface Implementations of Faceted Browsing

Applying filters with enhanced asynchronous interactions of Ajax and Flash ...

"Just as it is important to choose the proper knife when slicing-n-dicing vegetables, it is critical to prescribe a suitable user interface to support faceted filtering. Faceted filtering allows you to narrow down a large list of objects to a manageable size by applying flexible combinations of attribute filters in any order. Rather than forcing you down fixed paths within a website’s information architecture, faceted filtering allows you to multi-dimensionally slice-n-dice the information in a manner that best accommodates your specific needs. A user interface that optimally supports faceted filtering must expose its robust functionality in a way that expresses affordances, controls complexity, and follows existing standards that have been pre-established across the web.

You Know What You Want

Traditional static information architecture (IA) makes up most of the fundamental structure of the web. Information architects responsible for individual websites supposedly reconciled user tasks with their respective information space (document and object relationships) to define how web pages should link to one another. This process presumes that users can be accurately represented as a single group and that the acting information architect optimally mapped the collective group’s needs to the information space to best prescribe the static information architecture. As anyone who has chosen to use a website’s search rather than browsing across its information architecture can tell you, this process is not always successful.

Along came faceted filtering to the rescue. If we define groups of adjectives (facets) that describe objects and allow users to filter with them, we could empower users to manipulate the information space themselves rather than oppressively imposing a fixed structure upon them. Users could flexibly select values across all facets, in any order, to view only those objects that could be described as such.

A few facet fundamentals to get us grounded. First, there are facets and facet values. A group of facet values make up a facet. For example, a facet could be color with facet values of red, white, and blue. When filtering, there are usually multiple facets each with multiple values. Balancing the user needs with the potential complexity of inter-facet and intra-facet selection is important in controlling the user interface complexity
Filtering Sequence

There are two primary methods for applying faceted filters:

* En masse—traditional form submission where multiple criteria are submitted at once
* On selection—Ajax-like technique where filtering criteria are submitted individually, sequentially upon each selection

Traditional object filtering has been done with full form submission—choose your criteria by filling out a form and submit. Yahoo’s stock screener is an example. The main drawback is you often end up with “No results found” and you are unsure which criteria or combination of criteria resulted in the null set.

More recently, with the advent of enhanced asynchronous interactions of Ajax and Flash, you can apply filter criteria individually and see how the resulting list updates. By doing so, you can progressively see the cause and effect of applying individual filters. This is more usable because it abets your browsing behavior by allowing you to actively whittle down your information space and process information along the way. It also opens up the possibility to use links instead of traditional form elements for filter selection. The functionality that progressive filtering affords is best exposed with a well planned UI."    (Continued via Digital Web Magazine)    [Usability Resources]

Bella Reporting Standards

More on graphic representation of data ...

"The day before yesterday Rolf and I raged again. We took apart annual reports of large corporate
groups. We made fun of tachometers. We showed how charts lie. We established rules. We defined standards. Some of the rules are in the example. Time runs from left to right. Only structure is shown top-down. We don’t use funny patterns. We label directly. We never label twice. We avoid legends and scales.

Charts show profits (Gewinne) of TUI AG, a major German company for tourism (Touristik, red), shipping (Schifffahrt, blue), and logistics."    (Continued via Bella consults)    [Usability Resources]

Reporting Standards

Checkboxes, Radio Buttons, and Drop Downs

Reviewing when to use checkboxes, radio buttons, and drop downs ...

"Incorrect usage of checkboxes, radio buttons, and drop downs is one of the most common mistakes I come across. They each have their advantages and disadvantages, and their usage should generally be governed by a few simple guidelines.

Checkboxes

Anytime you have 2 options where one selection implies that the other is not selected, a checkbox should be your first choice in order to consolidate and simplify. For instance, radio buttons with "Yes" and "No" as options are generally redundant and a waste of space when it can be replaced by a simple statement accompanied by a checkbox."    (Continued via YourTotalSite)    [Usability Resources]

Checkboxes

CHI 2008: a selection on product design

Several summaries by category from CHI 2008 ...

"Here is my selection on product design related papers presented at CHI 2008.

Case study: using online communities to drive commercial product development
Authors: Sheena Lewis (IBM)

Abstract: This paper demonstrates how human computer interaction (HCI) practitioners utilize an online community to drive commercial product innovation, definition, and development. Upper management’s increased interest in user feedback suggests that this development strategy promotes the case for stronger human-centered design processes to be included in corporate strategic planning.

Future Craft: how digital media is transforming product design

Authors: Leonardo Bonanni, Amanda Parkes, Hiroshi Ishii (MIT Media Lab)
Abstract: The open and collective traditions of the interaction community have created new opportunities for product designers to engage in the social issues around industrial production. This paper introduces Future Craft, a design methodology which applies emerging digital tools and processes to product design toward new objects that are socially and environmentally sustainable. We present the results of teaching the Future Craft curriculum at the MIT Media Lab including principal themes of public, local and personal design, resources, assignments and student work. Novel ethnographic methods are discussed with relevance to informing the design of physical products. We aim to create a dialogue around these themes for the product design and HCI communities.

“If you build it, they will come … if they can”: pitfalls of releasing the same product globally

Authors: Ann Hsieh, Todd Hausman, Nerija Titus and Jennifer Miller (Yahoo, Inc.)
Abstract: As companies based in the US launch more interactive, “Web 2.0”-style products, the rest of the world may not be moving at the same speed. This presentation will reveal the pitfalls of building the same product for all audiences across many countries, especially when it comes to economic, technological, and cultural disparities. This illustrates the point that even if global users want to access new products, they may not always have the means.

What about a ‘local’ wrapper around an ‘universal’ core?

Authors: Apala Lahiri Chavan (Human Factors International)
Abstract: In this paper, I examine the possibility of restructuring our premise about cross cultural design and explore a possible new way to look at how we can create products in one culture and yet have the whole ‘flat world’ use it!

Studying paper use to inform the design of personal and portable technology

Authors: Daniela Rosner, Lora Oehlberg and Kimiko Ryokai (UC Berkeley)
Abstract: This paper introduces design guidelines for new technology that leverage our understanding of traditional interactions with bound paper in the form of books and notebooks. Existing, physical interactions with books have evolved over hundreds of years, providing a rich history that we can use to inform our design of new computing technologies. In this paper, we initially survey existing paper technology and summarize previous historical and anthropological analyses of people’s interactions with bound paper. We then present our development of three design principles for personal and portable technologies based on these analyses. For each design guideline, we describe a design scenario illustrating these principles in action."    (Continued via Putting people first)    [Usability Resources]

Dell Vostro 1310 Screw-up

Small design decisions can cause big problems ...

"Looks normal, right? Look at your own keyboard... notice anything different? Okay, maybe you don't. But try actually typing on this and it all becomes far too apparent. The whole of the bottom row of letters (Z, X, C...) is one too far to the right. The Z should be below and between A and S, not S and D. You're looking at a brand new Dell Vostro 1310, ordered the day after its released, and delivered on 30th April 2008 in the UK. They keys are all there. Shift, \|, Z, X... its just that the left shift is too big, forcing everything over too far. The Z has to be between the A and S... look on ANY other keyboard and that's where it sits. This is not a US/UK layout issue, just a general monumental flaw."    (Continued via Usability Watch India )    [Usability Resources]

Abnormal Keyboard

Confusion rules in user experience of mobile web

Antidotal problems with mobile web UX ...

"The user experience of the mobile web is still a mess, as far as I can see it.

Italy, the country, where I live, is quite advanced in terms of mobile penetration and mobile services. But when it comes to going online on a mobile, confusion rules.

I just upgraded my phone and now have a model that allows everything and more, if only the operators would give a helping hand. They don’t.

This morning I went to my favourite Vodafone shop, where the staff is helpful, attentive to people’s needs, and very knowledgeable about mobile devices. It is always a delight going there. But they cannot do anything about the way rates and tariffs are set.

A true flat rate does not exist in Italy. Not with Vodafone, not with any of the other operators. They offer you something where you can go to the internet at a “flat rate”, as long as you do it via the operator’s portal. And that’s where the confusion starts.

The portal does include Google, so in theory you can access all the web within this flat rate? They confirm. Can you also put in another URL? Yes, you can (but they don’t seem entirely sure). The important thing they say is that you access via the operator’s wap address. So I can also use another browser (like Opera Mini) through that wap address? Well, no. What about applications installed by the manufacturer, such as maps or internet radio that all go via the same wap address? Probably not either. Definite no-no’s are IM, Skype, GPS-based mapping, widgets, Yahoo Go!, etc.

I can of course access all these services, I was told, and they will work, but I would have to pay a lot of data charges.

I got more and more confused. And so did they, when I started prodding. They had to admit that they didn’t know for sure either where the flat rate stopped and the data charges started. In the end, they recommended trying.

When I replied incredulously that this was unfair — I didn’t want to experiment with my money because the company was not able to be clear about pricing — they told me to come in at a quiet moment, and they would check things with a company SIM.

The staff was nice, it’s not their fault, but the lack of transparency about mobile pricing is such that the average user doesn’t want to take any risk and just doesn’t use anything at all which is not absolutely guaranteed within its flat rate.

Flat rates are what the mobile internet needs in order to provide a good, trusted and reliable user experience. I hope change is going to come very soon.

To be continued, for sure."    (Continued via Putting people first, Seeds of Growth)    [Usability Resources]

New Nokia Concepts

Nokia design concept phones ...

"Nokia has recently introduced a trio of concept phones at its first ever "Design Event" in Central London that might roll out within 3 to 5 years' time:

1. A "People First" concept that comprises of a list of people you communicate with based on your last interaction with said person.

2. The "Zero Waste Charger" that aims to minimize power consumption, having the device communicate with the charger to activate only when it needs power.

3. "Wears in, not out" concept as explained in their press release:

"As more services become available on our mobile devices this concept explores how people could potentially upgrade their devices digitally rather than physically in the future, giving people an additional choice on how they use and update their mobile phones."    (Continued via textually.org)    [Usability Resources]

Nokia Concept Phone

Persuading People To Buy: Key Principles To Put At Work

The outcome we want with good usability ...

"Persuading people to buy, to sign-up for your newsletter, or to download your supercool new PDF, it is much harder than internet marketers would have you believe, and to obtain tangible successes it is generally not enough to have a great product and to be able to sell it online.

Outside of the need to build expectation, interest and desire for anything you have to offer, what is critically important to make your readers act is HOW you communicate with them and what psychological triggers you gently touch to facilitate their ultimate choice.

There is nothing bad, unethical or mischievous with persuading people by using logic, information and full awareness of the human psychology to send messages in a way that makes them more interesting rather than in a way that makes them go unnoticed.

"Persuasion in its simplest form means giving users the information they need to make an informed choice, helping them to trust you and allaying any concerns they have."

In my humble opinion this stuff is worth as gold, and sooner or later you may really want to dig into it more seriously, if making your business rock online is what you are really after.

For now, I am very honored to host this simple guide by Lisa Halabi of Webcredible, which you can put to use right now to immediately boost your online selling potential. The advice she provides is sound, appropriate and it has my full endorsement.

It is time to think more about improving your marketing communication skills than about adding more content or advertising solutions.

Online Persuasion - 7 Ways to Persuade People to Buy

How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb? None, the light bulb has to want to change. So the joke goes. However, it's possible that the light bulb could be persuaded to change. Persuading people to buy online (from TVs to groceries, holidays to services) can be achieved with techniques that marketers and psychologists have known for years.

Persuasion isn't rocket science; it involves understanding aspects of human nature that are often automatic and work at a subconscious level.

Here are 7 ethical ways to persuade people.

1. Show What Others Are Doing

eople look to others and will often do what they're doing, especially when uncertain about something. This psychological phenomenon is called social proof. People feel reassured and often make decisions based upon what other people are up to - the assumption being that they possess more knowledge or are better informed than they are.

You can increase social proof online by showing:

* Most popular items

* ‘Customers who bought this also bought'

* Top sellers

* Testimonials

Additionally, people will do what people that they like do.

2. Show User-Generated Reviews

User-generated reviews can have a massive influence on peoples' buying decisions.

Fueled by the rapid growth of web 2.0 and social media they're becoming an essential part of website design.

Allow your site users to write reviews and express overall ratings for products and services on your site - after all, it's free content for your site.

Web users are more inclined to trust what people like themselves say, compared to marketers. Reviews are especially critical in sectors like travel and electrical goods, although they're rapidly being adopted across all areas.

People generally want user-generated reviews and if they can't find them on your site, they'll simply look elsewhere. There's no hiding online so you might as well keep them on your site. Sites like Figleaves and the UK Apple store website understand this and implement them really well.

Also, don't be scared of bad reviews - people can smell sites that have been 'edited' a mile away, forcing them to simply not trust anything you say. Instead, be prepared to act quickly on your customers' feedback."    (Continued via Robin Good, Lisa Halabi)    [Usability Resources]

User Generated Review

What SEO/SEM Professionals Should Know About Website Usability - Part 2

Jakob Nielsen's formula for website success ...

"In part 1 of What SEO/SEM Professionals Should Know About Website Usability, usability experts Peter Morville and Susan Weinschenk answered the question, "What should SEO professionals know about usability?" For this installment, website usability guru Jakob Nielsen and Kim Krause Berg share their observations and perspectives. Enjoy!

Jakob Nielsen's formula for website success

"The main thing SEO professionals should remember about Web usability is the formula for website success," said Jakob Nielsen, Principal at Nielsen Norman Group.

What's the formula?

B = V x C x L

Where:

* B = amount of business done by the site
* V = unique visitors coming to the site
* C = conversion rate (the percentage of visitors who become customers); note that the concept of conversion applies not only to ecommerce sites, but to any site where there is something you want users to do
* L = loyalty rate (the degree to which customers return to conduct repeat business)

"Narrowly considered, SEO might be thought of as the goal to rank as highly in SERPs for important keywords," Nielsen continued. "While important, these rankings are only half of the 'V' element of site success. Besides ranking high, you also need users to click the listing, so clickthrough provides the other half of 'V.' Clickthrough is determined by usability considerations; more specifically content usability, in form of the guidelines for writing for the Web."

"The page title is the most important: it must be written to provide strong information scent and to extrude usefulness," he said. "The article summary and the URL are viewed less, but are still important to help users determine whether to click a top search hit or to proceed to the next one."

"After V comes C: It does no good to drive traffic to the wrong page that doesn't convert visitors into customers," said Nielsen. "Conversion rate, of course, is determined by usability: do people understand the landing page, does it speak to their concerns, and can they find their way around the site to solve their problem and understand your product line?"

"Finally, I believe that L is the most important variable for long-term website strategy: It is imperative that websites liberate themselves from being overlydependent on search engines and regain the positioning as the place users turn for the type of problem they address," he said. "Right now, the best loyalty mechanism is the email newsletter, so it's important to balance the site design in such a way that it encourages newsletter sign-ups at the same time as it also drives conversions."    (Continued via Search Engine)    [Usability Resources]

Microsoft developing 'senior PC'

Microsoft working on Senior PC ...

"Microsoft UK is developing a "senior PC", which will have a simple interface and be aimed at older users.

The PC will come with software that allows users to manage prescriptions as well as simplified tools for everyday use, such as managing photos.

The machine, which it is developing in partnership with charities Age Concern and Help the Aged, is one of several projects the firm is working on.

The plans were unveiled at a Digital Inclusion conference in London.

Social software

In the UK alone, some 17 million citizens are described as "digitally excluded".

In the United States, Microsoft already offers a number of so-called senior PCs, in conjunction with HP computers. It is not clear if the UK project is identical to the one in the US.

Other projects Microsoft is working on include an ad-funded PC and one that uses what it describes as a "social software licensing model".

In partnership with Milton Keynes council, this machine will come preloaded with a "digital literacy curriculum" - a step by step guide to how to get online, be safe and perform simple computer tasks.

Initially it will be given to a thousand households and this will be gradually scaled up to 10,000.

Speaking at the National Digital Inclusion Conference in London, Microsoft's head of skills and economic affairs Stephen Uden laid out the firm's vision for closing the digital divide.

"Reaching most of the final third will mean that we have to throw out the rule book. We will only solve these issues by taking risks and trying new things," he said.

"Some of the projects we are working on will work. Others will fail," he said.

No further details were available on the senior PC at this stage although it will be ready within a year, said Mr Uden.

Mobile phones

He also said that the problem will not be solved by PC access alone.

"We have to get away form the idea that everyone is going to get a PC. It is simply not easy enough to use or cheap enough for everyone."    (Continued via BBC NEWS)    [Usability Resources]

Senior User

Can I Trust You? How Anticipating Problems Can Help Your Brand

More on the relationship between design and brand ...

"Strengthening the brand is a common objective of many of our clients. To help guide their design decisions, we've been measuring how designs can strengthen or weaken a person's engagement with a brand.

In our research, we often see designs that attempt to strengthen brand image through redesigned logos and more prominent messaging. However, we've consistently found that investments in the total user experience positively improve the users' brand engagement more than any new messaging campaign. Anticipating likely problems and communicating trust can go a long way to eliminate frustration and delight the users.

We have come across some examples that show positive results with our users. Here are a few of them.
FindTape.com's Automatic Order Cancellation Feature

For movie and audio professionals, gaffer's tape is a necessity of the job. Used in all different types of situations, it's most important function is to keep cables in place and safe in chaotic locales, like an on-location movie set. Like duct tape, it's wide and easy to apply, but, unlike duct tape, doesn't leave a residue when removed -- important when you're filming at a fancy hotel and don't want to wreck the carpets or wallpaper.

Running out of gaffer's tape is a serious problem, especially on location, but you can't just walk into your local hardware store to pick some up -- it's a real specialty item. Therefore, ordering it is your only option. The problem is that it can take several days to get to you and, if you're only on location for a short period, you could be done before it arrives.

FindTape.com has solved this problem for their customers with a very simple enhancement to their e-commerce checkout: an automatic cancellation date. Shoppers can enter a date to cancel their order if FindTape can't arrange for delivery before the requested date. As FindTape processes the order, they keep careful look at the delivery schedule. If they can't ensure they'll deliver it on time, they automatically cancel the order before it heads out the door.

Shoppers, knowing that FindTape is looking out for them, not only felt more secure about placing their immediate order, but thought FindTape understood them better and would take care of other likely problems that might come up. The feature had both short-term and long-term benefits for the organization's relationship with their customers.
DVD Problems at Netflix

Disc damage is an unpleasant fact in the DVD rental business. People drop the discs, put things on them, or accidentally slide them along a rough surface, only to make the disc unplayable. It doesn't take a lot, because the information density on today's DVDs is so packed. A small nick can stop a player in its tracks and render a key scene unviewable.

While the vast majority of Netflix's customers take good care of their disks, accidents do happen. Netflix, without realizing it, could easily send a damaged disk to the next customer. That customer, finding the disk unviewable, would have every right to be frustrated.

On the Netflix site, next the video's listing in the queue, is a very prominent "Report Problem" link. When the customer selects this for a specific title, they can choose "The DVD is damaged, scratched or unplayable" from the menu."    (Continued via UIE, Jared Spool)    [Usability Resources]

Omnigraffle Wireframe Stencil for the iPhone

iPhone developers might find this useful ...

"Theresa Neil has recently been designing an iPhone application. In the process she created a wireframe stencil for OmniGraffle to make her life easier. Thought I would pass along."    (Continued via Looks Good Works Well)    [Usability Resources]

iPhone Wireframe

Client-Centred Research

Is UCD critical to design success? ...

"Word on the street is that the benefit of User Centred Design is hard to prove… I’m a fan of UCD as a process and I think that it is difficult to measure where process has been central to outcome, but today that’s a tangent. Part of the argument that is made is that a good designer can do almost as much by applying their design experience and expertise as what can be achieved through a UCD approach. In many cases, I heartily agree. Sometimes the process is more about the client than it is about the end users.

A project I’ve been working on recently is a case in point. This project is a pretty big deal - a lot of time and effort and, of course, money, have been ploughed into it already and there is plenty more to follow. Stakeholders have already been working on this project for ages when I get the call to come in and do my thing.

From a quick look at the proposed designs it is clear that there are some fairly significant issues that need to be resolved - both at the proposition level and at a more tactical, executional level. I don’t need research to tell me that and, because of my experience, I have a pretty good idea of what we need to do to fix this.

There is no WAY that I am going to be able to persuade all of the stakeholders who have invested so much in their current approach that they need to make the changes I’m suggesting… after all - I’m just one voice. One subjective, lonely voice… with my opinion alone, I have a long, lonely and difficult path ahead to try to get my clients to make the right decisions. Chances are, I’ll not be successful.

Cue user research. By conducting a quick round of user research I develop astounding powers of persuasion, because it is no longer my subjective, individual opinion that I am asking people to trust. Through the access I have to data accumulated in the course of research, I am able to validate my opinion with something much more substantial - the voices of the end users, the stories of my interactions with those end users, anecdotes, examples, tangible stuff.

Is this just a waste of project resource? Should I spend more time on trying to be more persuasive and less time on research? I think not."    (Continued via disambiguity)    [Usability Resources]