Apropos of nothing much, I was reading this rather controversial bit of research from Baymard today. It’s pretty good, as most Baymard pieces are (although why should I care what percentage of sites do what?), and it contains this example of what it says is bad practice:

Continue reading Baymard’s Compulsory Fields Controversy →

Gosh, WordPress 3.9 sure broke a lot of things on my blog so I’ve had to replace the theme and disable a few plugins. This is test post.

Quantitative research and design make uneasy bedfellows at the best of times, but a recent Microsoft blog post shows just how uneasy this relationship can become. Trying to do design for a massive corporation in which design comes a distant third behind the business model and engineering is plainly maddening.
Continue reading Research, Design and Windows Explorer →

New in Google’s live testing is what Jef Raskin described as “incremental search” (also jokingly referring to the dominant search pattern as “excremental search”) about 10 years ago. He predicted it would be usually the best way to perform free-text queries like this. At the time, few systems were really able to implement it, so it was hard to say for sure.

Continue reading Google’s Incremental Search Results →

What a beautiful mess. Your mission is to work out how to unsubscribe from one of the mailing lists in the “Newsletter Subscription” section. A lot of work went in to avoiding having check boxes in this design.

I have a 12 month subscription to Britannica Online. This was advertised as a way of letting me link to full Britannica articles free of charge from my blog, should I so wish. Indeed, have a read of this entry, which you would not have been able to see unless you had been a subscriber (try linking to it directly – clever, eh?).

I assume this is an Old Media marketing ploy to get me to buy a real subscription once my free 12 months is up, or at least a tactic to fight back against Wikipedia or something, but that doesn’t concern me here. Instead, I couldn’t resist the temptation to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Continue reading The User Experience of Britannica Online →

At last, people are openly acknowledging that persona development, or at least the dogma that comes with it, is weird. I’ve been rude about Alan Cooper before, but this is another chance to stick the boot in.

I blame Cooper for coming up with the wonderful idea of personas. They’re great for summarising research. They help people – anyone really – get closer to design solutions when things get complicated. In my opinion, however, the problem space needs to be complex or personas are more trouble than they’re worth. Well, that’s one of their problems anyway (a bit like use cases really).

Continue reading Persona Insight? You Decide →

Yahoo! has a “dashboard” to let you track the progress of the various candidates in the US presidential race (at http://news.yahoo.com/election/2008/dashboard). Since I’m currently working on a dashboard myself, I thought I’d have a go at improving it from the point of view of information design.

Continue reading Yahoo! Political Dashboard Redesign →

Only just discovered Vimeo.com. I like the overall design very much. It’s pushing the the stereotypical “web 2.0” conventions on rather well: desaturated colours, rounded corners, etc., but it’s very well thought out – everything is there for a reason. I also note some interesting things going on: no scroll bars (just up/down arrows), no “handles” for users – it’s Facebook-style real names.

Continue reading Vimeo.com – Nice Design →

I was in Spain last week, on the Vodafone ES network, and dialled a wrongly-constructed number. The call didn’t connect (just went dead, no ringing) and I got this message. That number at the bottom is the number I was calling, properly formatted. If the system knows how to format the number – why not just dial it and not pester me?

The notion of “service design” can’t come on these companies too soon if you ask me.

Eric Reiss mentioned that at conferences in the States you have pre-conference workshops, whereas in Europe you just have lots of drinking. At the start of Day Two of Euro IA – I’m feeling rather sleepy after the cumulative effects of the the pre-conference party, and all the tappas last night. Hope I can hold out for the rest of the proceedings today!

It’s been great to meet lots of people I’ve been corresponding with – and so many people with whom I’ve not but who know my name from my various rantings. So far, everyone’s been kind about me, which is nice – despite my hogging the mic on the floor on most sessions. I realise I abandoned my post somewhat at the poster session to talk to others about theirs, and take some of the 500+ photos that I’ve got to edit down when I get back…
So far my notes are full of things like sentiment analysis techniques (Peter Van Dijk), cognitive organisation of requirements (Wiebe & Confer) and the incredible amount of data that Yahoo! Spain crunches per week (Ricardo Baeza-Yates) among other things. Today there’s service design and cross-context IA and other stuff – but it’s a two-tracker so I can’t have all of it (and we leave early for the airport later this afternoon).
No doubt I’ll be expanding on some of these things in later posts (although I may do this on Stream since this is in fact an expensed trip) – there’s a lot to digest – and it’s all been top-flight stuff.

I was thinking about how much I like using OpenID. I’m registered with myopenid.com, who could do with ironing out some kinks in their user experience, but it’s good enough.

One thing struck me after reading Tomas Baekdal’s excellent blog post on the subject of privacy policies. I summarised this in my comment on his post, but to cut to the chase:

“… statement of intent is all very well, [but] the practical reality of the situation is that data leaks. No matter how much you “respect” the people that gave you their data, respect alone won’t stop you leaving 10,000 names and addresses on a laptop in the local KFC.

This is why the real battleground needs to shift to putting users in control of how much data they release – regardless of privacy policies.

I would like to see, for example, the introduction of revocable keys for personal data. Have my name and address, but only in a form encrypted to you, with a key I can revoke at any time.”

Continue reading Putting People in Control of Personal Data →

I submitted an idea for a talk at this year’s Euro IA in Barcelona a few weeks ago (just met the deadline). The anonymous review process has now taken place and the results are out: they’d like me to do it as a poster.

While I would have preferred a talk to be able to do it justice, I am of course grateful to have been accepted. So, it’s off to Barcelona in September with my rolled-up poster under my arm. Let’s see if anyone understands what they hell I’m on about there.

I’m not obsessed with tag clouds, really I’m not, but I think they are the single most useful, yet criminally misunderstood and mis-applied UI device out there. I’ve written about tag clouds before, but this time I’m turning up the heat.

Controversy time: writing about “best practice” for tag clouds in terms of what fonts to use and other minutiae is the hallmark of the usability nerd. The other hallmark is forgetting – in this case utterly – to consider context. Whether or not a tag cloud is useful at all is 100% down to the context it’s in. Everything else is as near as dammit to irrelevant. The fact that few things in information architecture are as clear cut as this is particularly damning here. The one thing you have to understand in user experience design is context.
Continue reading The Rights and Wrongs of Tag Clouds →

Here’s an idea for a Euro IA submission I was thinking about (eh Barcelooona!) to fulfil one of my annual HR objectives: the one that says I need to ramp up my public profile to attain the status of European Experience Emperor.

Some prodding about seems to indicate that people do see this as a problem worth addressing, so I’ve finished filling out the submissions form today. Just got under the deadline too, which closes today. See what you think:

Continue reading Submission to Euro IA 2007 →

From time to time it’s fun to think things through using the “what/how analysis.” This can be summarised by the statement “One man’s ‘what?’ is another man’s ‘how?’” and it can be applied to lots of things in order to work out where you are in a set of processes and how, or whether, some things have a natural relationship or hierarchy to describe.

I’ve been trying to apply this technique to the process of persona development, because in particular this seems to me to cut the designer off at the point where they actually need to design the end product (the UI of the system in most cases). In short, I wanted to know whether performing a thought experiment like this would reveal whether modelling users necessarily supports the design of a better system for them or not.

Continue reading Persona Development What/How Thoughts →