I worked for the UX department at Sainsbury’s between 2020-2024, and was peripherally involved in the evolution of their design system over that time. While I was there, I wrote the following document (which I have abridged here).
Category: User Experience
As a designer, using Notion is a great opportunity to critique a complex interface. Yes, it’s unfair on the XDs at Notion (if indeed there are any, and I have my doubts…) for all the reasons that I’d hate some outsider dumping on my stuff without them knowing the constraints I was under. But it’s…
The latest versions of Chrome have been showing a “dial” icon for a while, accompanied by a completely unnecessary corruption of the favicons in the tabs: Hover over it, and a tool tip says “Tab active again“. You can only see the icon (and thereby read that message) by clicking on the tab. And that…
There’s a belief close to dogma in UX design and product management: that examining data will reveal something that will improve the UX or the product in some way. Some even refuse to do any design until they have done “research” or have access to web analytics, customer feedback, or some such. There is nothing…
I am suspicious of designers who use the first person in the explanations of their designs. Why should we care what they personally like or want? What makes their opinion any better than anyone else’s? Those who state an idea about a design on the basis of even a handful of data points, a thought…
A recent conversation I had about UX research centred on whether such research is to help designers predict eventual outcomes of design interventions, or whether its role is to “de-risk” UX or business ideas. They were keen to frame research as a way of lowering risk to the business. This applied both to design validation…
Over the last couple of years, I’ve been helping out with our corporate blog, a Medium publication. Medium is utterly awful for the purpose of corporate blogging. Disclaimer: Some of the things described here are so molar-crushingly bad that I suspect they are in fact not true. Perhaps it’s the lack of any detailed documentation…
On my LinkedIn profile, I say the following: I predict the future. Not flying cars or robot pets, but whether any given design intervention will raise, lower or have no effect on your KPI. I do this through researched hypotheses and experimentation to become progressively less wrong. By understanding people’s behaviour and what motivates them…
It’s unfortunately true that whenever you research a list of “pain points” from customer feedback, those pain points will mysteriously turn out to be mostly – if not entirely – previously known to the business. And they’ve probably known about them for a surprisingly long time. That sound you hear is the researchers’ crests falling…
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:
The use of “toggle” switch UI in place of check boxes has been growing in popularity over recent years, and is approaching a convention in some contexts (particularly mobile). But there is a problem with them that designers should bear in mind:
What is design? How do we make the most of research? These are two questions that seem at first unrelated, but are in fact strongly connected. The following thoughts came from trying to make sure research activity is used, appreciated, and understood. Along the way, it revealed an approach to design that may help solve…
I see that Matt Edgar, Head of Design at the NHS, has announced the withdrawal of the NHS Common User Interface (CUI). The reason given is that the CUI had not “changed with the times” following the closure of NHS Connecting for Health in 2013.
It seems sensible to say that not involving engineers early on in the project discovery process is risky. And at the very least it’s demoralising for the engineers. The primary advantage of getting engineers involved at the start is seen as lowering risk by allowing them to advise on feasibility, make early decisions about the…
Ever since Amazon removed their navigation from their checkout screen, it has been said that transactions (or other critical tasks the business would prefer the customer to complete) should not have “distracting” navigational elements on the screen. This is because those elements could take people away from the task at hand and erode conversion. Not…
The state of copy writing on most websites appears to me mostly to be good in terms of tone, but rubbish in terms of length and structure. I also notice that just about all “style guides” for tone of voice don’t address this issue either. It’s not very hard to explain the concept of precis,…
Why is it that so far no web application platform, framework or content management “solution” seems to care about the UX of the applications they are responsible for creating? Systems such as React, node.js, Zend, Drupal, Rails, etc. allow for the debugging of code, the optimisation of resources, ease of configuration and deployment. But they…
The reasons why confirmation dialogues are inferior to “undo” (perhaps better termed “delayed triggering”) are pretty clear, well understood, and accepted by anyone who has taken the time to read something about HCI. Undo has also featured in usability heuristics since time immemorial.
While reviewing a site last week, I noticed the following behaviour in a faceted search UI: Search for something as free text (eg “cups”); get a big list of cups and related items. Use filters to narrow down the list by selecting a search facet (eg “plastic”) Select another facet (eg “colour”). I then see there is no…
At the trainspotting end of the UX spectrum of activity lie articles like this, from Information Architects Inc., which for some reason I find myself reading. While IA’s article is far too long and badly needs editing, the following occurs to me:
Having re-designed the UI for MailOnline’s content publishing systems (currently producing close to 1,000 stories daily), my work there is now done. I’ve always been interested in how organisations work, and it was a great experience doing UX at the world’s biggest news site. I worked daily with journalists and editors of all kinds to understand how…
In a further instalment of Google-bashing, here’s something that’s been bothering me for a while about Google Contacts on Android:
I’ve been using Gmail for years, yet I still sometimes have to think quite hard about which menu to use for lesser-used things. While I can see the logic in having a “More” menu where such things can go, I can’t understand why they can’t just all go in there. Why is an additional menu needed, and with…
This is a sensitive topic: I’m often aware that comments I make on blogs aren’t published if they contradict the point the blogger is making. Usually I just let it go. It’s their blog, they can choose to defend their opinions or not. But sometimes I think it’s worth publishing my thoughts here if they don’t…
Designing and building software is at least as complex and demanding of intellectual labour as the building of ships, large buildings or suspension bridges. If the number of failed software projects is anything to go by, perhaps it’s is even more difficult than these. In modern history at least, the underlying assumption when performing complex…
I feel the need for some cathartic adjustment of one of the more annoying interfaces I have to look at most days: the Outlook Meeting Invitation. Outlook’s current offering is full of annoyingly confusing clutter. So here – more for my benefit than yours – is my re-take. The current UI is mostly irrelevant noise:
Appprops of the work I’m doing on the MailOnline CMS, I think the following is a thing. And I’m going to call it a theory: The probability of reading a warning dialogue decreases by the square of the number of other warning dialogues you have seen before in that session.
A few months ago, the New York Times wrote about “Scoop”, their new publishing system. Scoop, they point out, is more than just a means of facilitating their editorial processes. They see it as “…central to our ambitions to innovate on all platforms”. They also point out that the capabilities, ease of use, and competitive edge of content management systems is an increasingly important part of media publishing in the digital age. The fact that Goo…
I was interested to read this article the other day about using web analytics. While pretty inconclusive (it’s a PR piece after all), it got me thinking. Are web analytics useful in UX design?
I often complain that infoviz for web stats is poor if you’re not an analyst by trade. Now that I’m working for one of the most popular websites in the world, I should at least come up with a device that could be used to answer the fundamental questions we have when looking at real-time analysis of a news article: Is this article doing well? Is it likely to do better or worse from now on? Should we replace this article with another one? Obviously…
… Mon I came across this article when researching about data led designs, which has been a big focus of mine in the last year. Enjoyed your article. I would be interested in hearing more about your experience and recommendations with building testing strategy, team and a strong testing culture in the company. What are the do’s and don’ts when setting up a UX design team? Perhaps next article? Thanks, Mon…
… 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. …
(This post implements my new year’s resolution of sub-titling my sections so as to make me look like I know what I’m talking about.) At MailOnline, we have no development process. Well, that’s not entirely true, we use Programmer Anarchy. The developers decide for themselves which “table” they want to work on, and can then leave to join another table at any time. A table is roughly aligned to one or more projects. But the main thing as far as I’m…
The story – now passed into minor Internet legend – of Marissa Mayer’s testing of 41 shades of blue in 2009 (and the resignation of Google’s Visual Design Lead, partially because of this) has been referred to again this week. The Guardian reports that Google UK’s managing director Dan Cobley says that the winning shade of blue made Google £200 million. The story touches on several interesting topics. The first is the idea that Google, and potenti…
Sometimes, what seems the obvious way of dealing with a problem may not be the best solution. For example, it turns out that if you remove traffic controls from busy city centres and rely on peoples’ instinct for self-preservation, you may get better road safety than if you imposed traditional control interventions (see also “shared spaces“). There may be a lesson here in the design of online account registration and log in for web sites. Most UX…
Harry Brignull’s “Dark Pattern Library” pops up from time to time on various news feeds (today on Business Insider, for their mutual SEO benefit). We hired Harry when I was at Hotels.com to do some customer research work in 2009. I recall we got along OK. The fact that he later included us in his Library was somewhat surprising, but I suppose not altogether shocking. We were at the time showing headline prices exclusive of taxes and fees (scroll …
The question of “fat finger” mistakes on touch screens came up in conversation the other day, together with the idea of making targets large to avoid this. At first, it seems sensible to make hit areas for controls on mobile devices as large as possible. But it was pointed out that, counter-intuitively, smaller hit areas can decrease fat finger errors. That is true to an extent, but as with all things HCI, it’s only a part of the picture. So I th…
When multiple designers work on multiple assets or across multiple projects, it gets very difficult to manage files over time. Which files are the latest versions? Which files are even relevant any more? Which files contain things that may be affected by the contents of other files? Yet with a few short-term exceptions, I have yet to see any reliable method of version control and general asset management in use in either agency or in-house digita…
There’s some debate about the utility of “high-fidelity wireframes” at work at the moment. It’s a reasonably common topic in the UX chattersphere too, so I thought I’d expand on it here. Firstly, to avoid some potential misunderstandings – let’s make some assumptions about the domain we’re in: 1. There are two main roles on the UX team: visual designer and non-visual designer (the latter is my currently preferred internal term for what is often e…
… Kaoru I do think that the fact that Scoble posted himself naked in the shower waring them is a big minus point. I mean really big. I want an Oculus Rift. But that’s because I still want the future to be Snow Crash….
… Dom Collier Good luck! mdja Good luck! I imagine key skills include the ability to write TWO WORDS out of EVERY TEN in capital letters. Ben Good luck Jonathan!…
I dislike pie charts. I may even dislike people who use them. But even worse than a pie chart is a quite recent device that doesn’t (I don’t think) have a name. These are the circles that appear mostly in newspapers and magazines to illustrate some quantitative comparison – here’s an example of what I mean. This technique has perhaps been legitimised by the likes of David McCandless, who appears obsessed by both circles and the using of areas to …
I’ve been lurking, and recently posting, on Edd Dumbill‘s Google+ “community” discussion about “big data” since he set it up a few weeks ago (dunno if it’s a public group – G+ is opaque about these things – and I’m too lazy to find out). Dumbill works for O’Reilly Media, and helped popularise the term “big data” to describe a rather nebulous phenomenon of corporations and other entities using (some would say abusing) very large amounts data so as…
I was having a look at the state of Japanese web design today (we’re doing some customer research there at the moment) and saw this towards the bottom of the home page of the Yomiuri Shinbun site. For those who don’t know, the Yomiuri is the world’s largest newspaper by circulation. I would imagine their website is also read by Japanese from a wide variety of demographics. At first glance, the object looks like an oddly-arranged table of news sto…
Until iOS came along on Apple’s touch screen devices, having a windowing operating system was de rigour for any sophisticated computing experience. Nobody really asked why – it just seemed good. Have a video playing in one window, your email in another, have your spreadsheet in another one and, I dunno, move them all around with your mouse. For fun. What’s not to like? Until iOS, the idea of a major market player releasing an operating system tha…
I was having a look today at this question posted on Quora: “What are the most unexpected things people have learned from A/B tests?“. The writer clearly expects answers on specific tests, but a couple of people have referred to the surprising behaviour of people who run or react to the tests themselves. I think it is notable that people conducting A/B or MVT very often don’t seem to understand what to do with the results they get. Results are of…
… Jonathan Let the record show that Mike Freer MP (Finchley and Golders Green) never bothered to reply to my letter. No surprise really….
I’ve been using Ubuntu Precise Pangolin’s HUD feature, which is now included with Ubuntu’s Unity desktop. You may recall I went a little crazy about this feature when it came out of beta. So after a few months of using it, what are my experiences? Firstly, it’s clear that the HUD needs a speedy machine. My first use of the system was disappointing because I’d hit the HUD key (more on which later) only to have to wait about 350ms before anything h…
A recent post on 37Signals’s blog is interesting. Jason wants somebody to help them with customer conversion and retention. One of the reasons why I like 37Signals is that they truly subscribe to the model laid out by the Cluetrain Mainfesto. 37Signals have without doubt turned their organisation “inside out”, as the Manifesto predicts modern firms will. They have even taken this one step further with the publication of Getting Real – The smarter…
Yes! Break out the bubbly and scream! The first actual innovation in WIMP interface design since about 1985 has finally made it into the mainstream! As of this week, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) is shipping to desktops with the HUD!! The HUD seen here allowing command execution in the GIMP I cannot be too enthusiastic about this development. For years I have wanted somebody to give this idea a go, and now my favourite Linux distribution is…
At hotels.com we’re pretty test-driven. We’re testing stuff all the time on the site with multi-variate or A/B tests of various kinds. But as I always point out, doing tests (or indeed any kind of quantitative or qualitative research) is easy. It’s what you do with the results that count. So when I see a test proposal, I always ask myself “what if?” What if the result is X, what would that tell us? And if it is Y or Z? Could we use that informati…
… Jonathan Since I wrote this, the Folding Plug has done a pivot! They couldn’t get it past the 240V regulations, so they’ve turned it into a USB charger. Very nice. I take it all back (well, part from the fact that it still illustrates my point). https://www.themu.co.uk/ (and in tin-foil-hat HTTPS too!)…
(If you’ve come to this from Twitter, I’m just testing my new Twitter WP plugin with this article) Shortly after I wrote up some thoughts on test-driven UX, I happened to notice “Bridging User Research into Design” over on UX Matters. In the article, 11 of the great and the good offer their thoughts on essentially the same thing as I was thinking about in my post: how to use research to create something you think is better than if you hadn’t done…
At Hotels.com we’ve been doing multi-variate testing (“MVT”, or sometimes “A/B testing” if you’re variant challenged) for a while. This means we typically build a number of different designs, then let them duke it out on the live site to see which one performs the best. Recently, however, I’ve been increasingly aware that while we have a very powerful tool in MVT, power is nothing without control. When you can test anything you want, things can s…
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. Note first they need to defend themselves against the engineers: “…telemetry data indicates these add-ons and alternatives are mostly used …
Robert Scoble has an interesting interview with Chandu Thota about The Dealmap (recently bought by Google). Although I completely take Thota’s point about APIs and 3rd parties, what strikes me is the apparently automatic assumption that using a map (and the now nearly ubiquitous Google API mashup) is the best way to show his data. It’s as if we are now locked into the idea that if we want to use information visualisation to discover things that e…
To what extent should a designer specialise? Can somebody perform UX/IA design as well as graphic design as well as the craft of markup and styling? And does that increase their effectiveness? Is it in fact only possibly to span two of these areas? And what does “effectiveness” mean in this context? That last question makes me think that in fact it’s probably all just boring old capitalist economics. If you look at the history of other industries…
If you put something up on the web, you need to give it a date stamp. Not doing so makes you look like Squidoo. So I’m shocked (no, actually, I am quite surprised!) that parliament.uk thinks it’s acceptable to leave them off. Maybe it means they just don’t care about things like accuracy. I guess it’s easier than simply saying so on their home page. “This is the website of the UK parliament. We don’t care about our content or whether or not you f…
I see that Stephen Few has now encountered the work of David McCandless and, as I expected, has rather a lot to say about how bad it is. He’s not alone in thinking that McCandless’s work as minimally informative, often unclear, and sometimes downright misleading. Like Few, I have yet to see McCandless create an effective data visualisation. What I find more interesting though is why so many people think such statistical graphics are worthwhile. A…
It’s not often you get a radical change in the WIMP model, but the mighty Christian Giordano has tried just that with the introduction of “overlay scrollbars” in Ubuntu 11.04. Unfortunately, I think this is what might be called a “misfire”. The main problem is that in hiding the thumb of the scroll bar by default, you are immediately up against Fitts’s Law because the reduced size of the target will slow its acquisition. That’s an HCI fail – and …
… axel bb poo…
Saying that hoards of my friends like Wired’s website is just a lie. Or at least implying that they do is disingenuous as I’m pretty sure that none of them have liked it. And is that huge number just made up? Who cares? This sort of casual fakery (which Facebook thinks nothing of, regardless of how underhand) is I suppose just part of Internet life now, but it’s annoying at best, and in aggregate, morally corroding. It’s almost as bad as neglecti…
It has become a shibboleth of the UX and Agile communities that “collaborative design” is the best way of designing things. Or if not the best way, it is at least better than leaving people to come up with solutions on their own. Regular readers of Webtorque will know that if there’s one thing I like to do, it’s to question things that appear to be received wisdom. The usually unchallenged assertion that collaboration in design is always good is …
I’ve been wondering whether using Chernoff faces might be a good variation of the “advanced search” pattern in the context of finding a hotel to stay in. Choosing the right hotel requires a number of quite complicated things to be considered. But which things you place the most emphasis on depends very much on the context of why you are booking a hotel in a given location or time. If price is the only consideration you have, then you’re lucky. Th…
I’ve had a bit of a realisation about the way I come up with design ideas that I’d not considered before (see below), but first, an important aside. Many people in my field mistake the activity of discovering and refining their own design processes as being a signal that they should recommend these processes noisily to everyone else. However, just because I think that a certain technique or principle works for me, it doesn’t mean that it will wor…
Several months ago, we made some changes to the search results of hotels.com, and among these was the creation of a “pinned header”. As you scroll down through the list of results, a portion of the page header stays with you. Here’s the UI before scrolling. And here it is with the header pinning (linking to screenshots for archival purposes). The rationale for this change was that the business wanted us to shout as loudly as possible about our lo…
Ah, synchronicity. No, not the 80’s album by The Police, but the fact that I was recently thinking about “back” buttons and software states in the design of our forthcoming Android and iPhone app. And so was Aza Raskin. Raskin suggests an improvement to the much-improvable experience of using the Apple iPhone’s ultra-simple, yet rather confusing “home” button. To cure what he says is a big problem on the phone (albeit not one I have myself notice…
I think I’ve been a user experience designer for about 10 years now. I say “I think”, because I regularly read descriptions of methods of working and relationships between people in multi-disciplined web and software development teams that I don’t recognise. It is of course with great interest that I like to find out about these, but I often get the impression that either the proponents of these methods must be working in situations fundamentally…
… mdja It’s still a significant difference in offering. Actually the figures themselves give by far the clearest (and most compelling) indication of the offer. (530 vs 510 or less). Jonathan Yes, it’s (I think) about 4% more. There are probably many other ways you might be able to impress this offer on people without implying that they’d get double the value. What, for example, can you buy with 20 Euro? Something fairly decent I would imagine….
So I bought a Kindle the other day, and have been thinking whether I should have bought an iPad instead. But the more I use the Kindle, the more that seems like an irrelevant question, despite all the debates that rage around it. For example, somebody I know recently mused that “… in some way the Kindle is like a crippled iPad: only monochrome, poor browser, etc.” His point was that if you look at the technology, the Kindle appears to exhibit a r…
Last year, our fearless team of interaction designers, creative designers and interface engineers (about 20 of us at the time) took the decision to embrace Scrum, the “agile” methodology for project management. We were all given training courses to attend, and I myself volunteered (along with several others) to become a certified Scrum Master. As we began on sprints, attended sprint planning and reviews, and got together for sprint retrospectives…
Lately I’ve been rather depressed about the state of user experience design. Both my own (management overheads, inability to sweat the details, lack of self-belief…) and that of the wider community. So it didn’t help that one Cameron Chapman delivered a further kick in the teeth the other day with 10 Usability Tips Based on Research Studies. This is a truly awful article and a good example of some of the things I feel are eroding the field of UX …
… Somebody called Ryan Carson recently caused a stink in the UX world by saying that people like me are useless. It appears he holds this view because people like us don’t do HTML and CSS. When you’re bored or under-appreciated, it’s easy to think that the grass is greener. All I can say to Mr Carson is: be careful what you wish for. …
… Phil Grisier Two years later, incremental search *is* the norm. JBB Yes, albeit mostly in the form of “auto-suggest” and not really the full strength version described by Raskin. But still, happy days, eh?…
Examples of good functional design in the digital space (as opposed to good ways of making existing ideas look nicer), are so damn hard to find these days. It follows that good designers are also very rare. So thank heaven for Aza Raskin, scion of the late great Jeff Raskin, designer of Firefox mobile, and Creative Lead for Firefox. Aza consistently produces real, solidly innovative, and actually useful designs that solve problems. Here he is wit…
… mdja Isn’t the Friend Finder just what was there before they called it the Friend Finder? Jonathan Yes, I think so. They’re just giving it another airing….
Every time I decide to pen a rant about some user experience issue or other, I feel a bit guilty. Guilty because I know it’s hard to be positive, easy to be cynical, and makes me look nasty. But I’m going to justify this one on the grounds that if countless hoards of designers are bleating about how good something is even if it’s objectively full of holes, I have a duty to counter-balance the situation by pointing out this fact. Apple’s dominance…
David McCandless is an interesting person doing interesting things. Interesting to me, that is, because his work exemplifies something I find deeply mysterious in the way people regard information visualisation. His pursuit of “beauty” seems to be a licence to override clarity, truth, and even common sense. Yet he is widely lauded (here he is writing on the Guardian’s Data Blog). In this, he is surely the anti-Tufte. McCandless’s current pièce de…
… eikoku kopistropi Nothing like the smell of a new book. Jonathan Addict!…
It looks like my wife will be stranded in Japan this week following the Icelandic volcano eruption. I thought I’d better look at her travel insurance provider’s website (a company I’d not heard of called Holiday Extras), prior to playing the inevitable game of IVR over the phone. Frankly, I wasn’t holding out much hope for any actual customer service from the site (it’s Sunday in the UK after all), but I was pleasantly surprised to see their CEO …
Here’s a fascinating incident. In a nutshell: net news site readwriteweb.com posts a news article about some Facebook business development with AOL. Nothing remarkable about that. But then something strange starts to happen. Hundreds of people start posting comments complaining about how their beloved Facebook has changed and they can’t log in … to readwriteweb.com. The article has since been updated to point out to people that they’re not on Fac…
Lovemoney.com has a free personal finance dashboard that I thought I’d have a look at. It’s really an early beta, and they’ve been soliciting feedback and generally being very receptive. So, I’ve just sent them the following email. By the way, I’ve decided that OpenOffice Presentation, with which I did the mockup, is rubbish. Apologies in advance. Hi. Sorry about this. You need to stop using a stupid piechart on the dashboard. See the attached f…
(Apologies to Mike Elgan for the headline on this one) Those in the UK who want to use Google Power Meter can do so using a wireless doobrie from AlertMe Energy. Nothing wrong with that, but words fail me at the staggeringly bad information visualisation on their site. I hardly know where to begin with this: You’d think that people involved in making us aware of energy consumption would have some clue about how to actually present the data. But l…
Robert Clayton Miller‘s 10/GUI desktop multi-touch idea wafted out of the ether towards me last week, and I’ve been giving it some thought after watching the video a few times. 10/GUI is unusual in that Miller describes himself as a graphic designer. Unlike people such as as Jeff Han, he is not approaching the issues from a traditional HCI-led, computer scientific, or industrial design perspective. I think that’s a good thing in some ways. Multi-…
For no apparent reason, I suddenly remembered Jesse James Garrett’s Visual Vocabulary today, which he promulgated almost 9 years ago this October. I recall at the time that there were a number of people hailing it as the first true user experience documentation standard, and I saw no reason to disagree with them. Yet after a couple of years, I hadn’t really heard of anyone using it for real. Indeed, when it came to visual languages and UX, it was…
This has been a pet peeve of mine for a long, long time: if you’re going to put information about something on the web, PUT A DATE ON IT. It’s not hard – it can be automated, fun even. As it is, I have to ignore stuff like this because I don’t know if it was posted yesterday, last year, or 10 years ago. What was the author thinking? For all I know, the article is completely irrelevant. Breathtaking. Somebody is now going to point out that there i…
I’ve just been mailed by a company called Zetetic about their mobile password storage application called Strip. Zetetic are interesting in that they are a small, cutting-edge software development house specialising in RoR and .NET. They appear to be principally a consultancy, but also develop and and sell their own applications. This is very similar to that other noo-tech (and intensely American) poster child, 37Signals. Have a look at Zetetic’s …
I remember an English teacher asking us what, in our opinion, was the most useless thing we would have to learn at school. I replied that I thought it was the capital cities of the world. What possible advantage could you have over anything with the knowledge that the capital of Peru is Lima? I was somewhat surprised that he agreed with me – although I later found it would be a trick question. He was making the point that education itself is usel…
Regular readers of Webtorque will know that I’ve droned on about tag clouds several times. Here I go again, but this time, it’s final. I promise. It comes of a brief discussion about our opinions about tag clouds at work this week, which was a good opportunity to summarise what I thought about them – and over a nice cheese sandwich, as it happened. Tag clouds are good at doing a very specific task very well, but are also hideously misused to the …
Quoting a single statistic to support an argument is rarely very impressive, regardless whether the numbers themselves are right or wrong. I would say that most statistics are nothing without context. Context is the air that statistics breathe and the engine which powers them to make a point. Yet far too many people simply pluck them off a tree and offer them up as withered, emasculated and pale. Here’s an example: the famous statement, “Half the…
Peter Morville has put together a list of twenty user experience deliverables with links to relevant resources and examples. This is certainly interesting, and Morville is an interesting cove, not least because he’s been on the scene for so long. However, I can’t help reflecting on the fact that he is a consultant. Seen in that light, the “deliverables” culture he presents takes on a rather different hue, and I wonder how many of his admirers ful…
I’ve blogged before about how I think calendars are to dates what pie charts are to numbers, but recently I’ve been thinking a bit more about this issue. The background to this was a discussion I had several months ago around the pros and cons of using calendars for date range selection, for example in booking a hotel. As with many design issues, this is one heavily encrusted with tradition and gripped by the dead hand of the “design pattern.” In…
… Jonathan Just noticed that the above comment is referral spam, but I’ve let it through as it’s pretty ironic given the subject matter of this post!…
… DJ Hi JJB They made the entire UX team at ebay UK (and Germany I think) redundant soon after you posted that. http://uk.techcrunch.com/2008/10/06/ebay-uk-puts-staff-on-notice-as-the-us-mothership-cuts-jobs-and-spends-big/ Typical! DJ…
… Tim “Incidentally, my favourite change is the fact that they’ve finally got delicious.com and not that damn domain I could never remember.” I though that was just *me* :)…
… Eikoku Downloaded big buck bunny but real player, wmp etc won’t play it in synch. You had any luck? Jonathan Video formats are, as I have sometimes mentioned, one of the bigger SNAFUs of the 21st century – have you tried playing it with VLC?…
One thing that bothers me about “design patterns” is that they don’t always seem to be the best method of solving a design problem. In many cases, patterns are patterns simply because they are popular. This of course is a phenomenon not limited to design (music, for example, is another case in point). However, it becomes particularly frustrating for designers when a sub-optimal pattern then gets in the way of better designs because the pattern be…
… 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. …
… Jonathan Hm. Since I wrote this, Britannica seems to have re-designed into some multi-media Encarta-alike. It’s a slightly better experience I suppose. Still won’t be buying a subscription though. 英国 You can’t see the Britannica page to see what’s going on unfortunately. Jonathan Really? I can. It’s a huge great “rich application” which crashes most browsers, mind you….
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 spac…
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. Firstly though, a critique of the current Yahoo! design, in order of importance: The division between Democrats and Republicans seems unnecessary. Since…
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. It’s also the first site I’ve been on in ages which hand…
… 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. …
… 英国 But I thought you were just sending a poster or something like that. How did you go from poster sender to participant? Jonathan Part of the punishment for being accepted to display a poster is to present it at the conference….
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 l…
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…
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 …
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:…
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 particula…
… Originally uploaded by Gilgongo. I don’t often travel on the tubes, but this must confuse the hell out of tourists! I wonder why they did it like this? Seems to be the case all along the line – well, as far as Camden anyway I think. …
Just posted this to Sig-IA in reply to somebody wanting some examples of good tag clouds (see also my earlier venture). I’m sure the following will be wonderfully arcane in about 10 years time. I was looking at movietally.com the other day. While it’s not exactly a shining example of good design overall, the use of the tag cloud struck me as particularly good when applied to the movie pages. The cloud here is much more effective than reading a sy…
This graphic “explaining” what the BBC’s honeypot might have been employed to do had it been hijacked (which I assume it wasn’t – how boring) is all but pointless. While rather an extreme example, I think it highlights rather well what I’ve realised recently is the biggest single problem I have with graphical representations of things like this: relevance. For example, how relevant, if at all, are the pictures of “Net routers” in order to underst…
… Originally uploaded by Gilgongo. I’ve been at User Experience 2006 (London). Don Norman looks even more like Capt. Birdseye than normal, but he had some good things to say along with bashing Microsoft and spending rather too long talking about cars. A good day out I think – and one that also might need to see me revise my attitude to Alan Cooper. …
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 was released in August 2001. This week, one of the biggest and most damaging private monopolies in human history relented, and fully five years after, we now have their MSIE 7. I installed it today. Coincidentally, a couple of days before I heard that the 7 was out, I happend to read an interview with Jakob Nielsen (Interaction Design, Reece, Rogers and Sharp, 2002) in which he says: “My prediction has been that Expl…
I’ve become a bit of a tag cloud hawk recently, looking for examples of their use and what I think is abuse, or just plain old misunderstanding. My definition of a useful tag cloud is something that allows you to get a feel for the “mood” of the information tagged on a site. On the web, it’s traditionally been hard to communicate this in any other way apart from using numbers (for example with faceted navigation) or worse, plain old lists. So I q…
When designing an e-commerce site, it’s hard to avoid the payment form. For an industry barely a decade old, the payment page has a powerful mystique – associated as it is with high technology like i-frames, fraud, mysterious loss of life savings, and alien invasion. I was thinking about this last week after reviewing some work that the mighty Ash Gupta, interaction designer of repute, had done for us last month. His design eschewed the tradition…
I’d hate to be responsible for a website like World Usability Day, but since I’m not – I can’t resist a cheap shot. It happens at all browser and text sizes in Firefox. We were trying to analyse this at work and we think that it’s something to do with some irregular text sizing issue. Works OK on MSIE, although if you reduce the text size you see the text in the effected panel first go smaller then briefly bigger for some reason. Odd. Probably fi…
I’m sure there’s a wittier subject line for this, but it’s hardly worth the effort. The project I’m currently working on has some “wizzy” interactivity planned, and verges on being a proper “rich Internet application” sometimes. As mentioned here before though, people like me working in the stultifying confines of a web development agency are sometimes wary of RIAs because there’s no accepted method of communicating their design to the Mongolian …
… I’ve been keeping half an eye on Slashdot’s tagging beta since they gave me access to it a few months ago. Despite reading the explanation, I’m rather unsure as to where it’s going to go: (Good opportunity for me to try this new image-popping WordPress plugin…) …
Golly – it’s about time I wrote down something about user experience design, seeing as this is what this blog is suppose to be about. I’ve been doing some work for a site re-design, starting with user testing 24 people over two weeks. We asked them (a wide demographic) to use some currently live sites to see how they got on with them. Some people tested the client’s current site, others one of their competitors. There was only one task in the hal…
Alan Cooper: feted genius, father of Visual Basic and giant of user-centred design. Jonathan Baker-Bates: pitiful, microscopic nobody. But at least I’ve designed a few websites… I assume Alan Cooper hasn’t designed any significant web sites because Cooper Interaction Design only lists one in its case studies, and that is HP Shopping. Cooper (or more likely his acolytes) identified a needs-based persona and presumably designed for that and not any…
Any normal person will of course have heard nothing about the recent merger between LBIcon (business consulting, branding, communication and technology services) with Framfab (web marketing, design and production) into the largest digital design, marcomms, branding and technology firm in Europe. Indeed, the newly-merged entity will rival that of the super giants of Digitas, Omincom and others that currently graze among the lush forests of digital…
I know the phrase “card sorting” either baffles, bores or does something else beginning with ‘b’ to almost everyone that hears it. Perhaps the most vocal source of information and critique of card sorting techniques recently has been the force that is Maadmob’s Donna Maurer. I recently caught her attention on this subject via comments on the blog of another Australian IA, Leisa Reichelt. Leisa had been blogging about her negative experience of ca…
I’ve just posted a rant on www.fool.co.uk about their awful site design. Hm. Feel a bit guilty. A bit soiled to be honest… I actually think the site’s content is fantastic. But the form of that content really, really stinks. The last straw was their announcement of some forthcoming “layout changes” which (I assume) have now gone live. In classic 1995 style, they’ve just made things worse. The site needs major surgery. I can imagine what it must b…
… Found a pic Found a picture of that wheel (vidcap – hence poor quality)…
I’ve always thought that everyone should nurse at least one heresy, and mine is that visual communications of complex ideas are almost always a load of cock. In the field of IA, this is most noticeable in the production of sitemaps, but it can be just as bankrupt for other artefacts as well. Here’s an example that flashed by me on my current project recently. Part of the design of an application called for the description of a “select tool” – muc…
This blog post shows how chaotic the discipline of IA is (see the comments in particular). There’s not even a pretense of union, agreement or even polite tolerance of divergent views amongst the practitioners. I look at designs by other people and I feel almost bound by duty to pepper them with criticism. I even expect it in others: a senior colleague recently reviewed some work I’d done and drew large rings around some elements, writing the word…
For too long, login, registration and online point of sale processes have been designed either by IT business analysts who see users as UML symbols, or worse, by developers who don’t want to think about users at all. More often than not, information architects get frozen out. I’ve worked on loads of sites that had ecommerce or registration processes that for some reason were deemed out of scope for us. So we deliver a great experience up until th…
I bumped into SphereXP yesterday, which is one of the experiments in desktop management that’s been going on for a while (well, ever since Xerox PARC I suppose). Here it is running on my machine. If you have an interest in this sort of thing, I can reccommend you have a look. Whether it’s the future of OS interfaces I doubt, but it does give you the illusion of a larger monitor, and in the process shows you that perhaps trackerballs are the way a…
I’m selling a shower rail on eBay, and a bidder has asked me how much it might be send to Germany. That should be easy to find out (indeed, why don’t they look it up themselves the lazy buggers?) I’ve got a vision of a nice form to fill out: dimensions, weight, destination, insurance, etc. And with this in mind I go to the Royal Mail. I go to City Link. I Google. The Royal Mail. One of those “stick a million links on every page” site. But “Send a…
I’m three weeks into a brand new project, and my mind is on requirements and specifications. Like every project I’ve ever worked on, this is unique. This time, it’s unique because it was half documented and thought about, and was then mothballed. Now it’s back from the dead a year later, and I’m on the case trying to make sense of what was done. There’s one person in my department who worked on it before it was frozen, but the others (who wrote m…
… Banjo A surprising number of people (well, two) have got back to me on the banjo reference above. If you play banjo, or are learning this wonderful instrument, you might like to know that there are MP3 lessons available, and the authors will only post another one once five people have sent them MP3 recordings of them playing the last lesson….
The content mapping monster has started its onslaught, and mother I can feel the soil falling over my head. This week, I have been doing what must rank as (I hope) the most uninteresting task of my career ever. Well, there have been others like it but I’ve erased them from memory leaving only some familiar brain patterns behind: an urge to read Das Kapital, clock watching, tea-making fixations and suicidal thoughts. For almost three days solid, s…
Sometimes I think I’m the only person who lies awake at night worrying about content. Well, I don’t literally do that, but it feels like I might be sometimes. I’m certainly gaining broken record status on the issue and thinking crying-in-the-wilderness thoughts at times. Part of the problem is that it’s hard to articulate what the problem exactly is (well, I find it hard at least). It’s certainly made harder by the fact that according to the cont…
… Jono Thanks for sharing your experiences. The practical details were helpful for me. I’d love to hear your updated experience – different tools etc., do you still card sort remotely or have you moved on? Anyway, thanks….
When I started this blog I told myself it would be a good place to critique online experiences of various kinds. I’ve actually done very little of this, mainly because it’s unexpectedly difficult: you only realise you’ve got a badly designed experience on your hands when you’re some way into the journey, and back-tracking to record the process is usually not possible. I’ve half caputured this mess of a customer registration journey though – it’s …
Although I yield to no man in my respect for the rigour that David Danielson brings to IA research, at times I can’t help wondering if either I’ve got the wrong end of the stick, or he’s up his own a*se. This time, I’ve been reading Web navigation and the behavioral effects of constantly visible site maps: This study examines user movement through hierarchically structured Web sites and the behavioral effects of a constantly visible, textual cont…
Busy this last week doing “pixel-perfect wireframes” (don’t ask). I dunno. With seemingly the whole world going with Jakob on this one: low-fidelity, fast iteration prototyping with rapid whatnots; we’re plodding away with Freehand documents and hardly even a whiteboard sketch between them and the A3 colour printer that lovingly prints them out. All this after Visio purgatory and the dreaded “user journeys” as well (the latter not done by me, luc…
For the past couple of weeks, I have been doing flow diagrams in Visio. These are supposed to describe the “flow” of pages that a user goes through when ordering certain things on our client’s site. They are exhaustive representations of every permutation of that journey, showing the exceptions, error screens, diversions, etc. that are encountered. And sweet Jesus are they boring to do. Not only that, but they’re frustrating, confusing, relentles…
There’s some interesting stuff here, including summary of some research showing that changing navigation in subtle ways actually helps users navigate (and aids their understanding of the depth of the site), thereby seeming to contradict the standard guideline that navigation should be kept consistent. Also talks about other things such as classifying information toward the end of the process, not the beginning. It’s a presentation but has some ci…
We did a paper-prototyping dry run the other day in preparation for some similar sessions for a client (not involving me, unfortunately). It was the first time I’d done it hands-on, having only read about the theory before. Here we were basically evaluating the technique. We played the roles of “stakeholders” from diverse parts of the business (the real thing will be properly diverse: marketing, management, legal, or whatever) and collaboratively…
User testing in London and Milan last week. The scripts we’re using for this are pretty complicated, and the client wants us to cover off a lot of very specific questions about the system, which was pretty tough to do while making sure the user was relaxed enough to give us reasonably truthful answers. This has led to some complaints from the client that I’ve been asking users the dreaded “leading questions.” On at least one of the sessions, I di…
Two blog posts in one day. A record! In what I think may become a bit of a regular feature of this blog, here’s a site that in my opinion has awful usability. Well, it pops up windows like they were going out of fashion. Try this: 1. Go to www.timesonline.co.uk and search for something in the search box in TLHC. 2. First you get a popup asking if you want to search the whole net (using eSpotting – eurgh) or the site. 3. Then you get ANOTHER popup…