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…
Category: User Experience
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…
…s with a sub-optimal experience that effects everyone, because you’re making your experience worse for most people. As an aside, I think the Baymard article is a good example of why usability research should not be left to researchers to interpret. Research and design are very different skills, yet far too often I see reports where people who are obviously not used to thinking about the overall UX of the system make questionable design conclusio…
…ion of hitting a button is that it will trigger an action (like “Save” or “Search”). So hitting the above toggle “button” will show interesting things in the same way as hitting “Search” shows matches. After duly responding to this call to action, the “button” then shows that you have clicked it (nice clear feedback!) You are now allowing interesting things to happen. How Bad Can It Be? As with many other documented cases of mode error, I’ve see…
…ering (if possible) to use those assumptions to come up with hypotheses to test. Do those tests and feed the results back into the assumptions, modifying, removing or enhancing the assumptions over time. The goal being that they (and not the research data that supports them) become both the store and the engine of our product and UX knowledge, learning and designing activity. Some design theory Let’s imagine we know nothing about job seekers or em…
…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. I think this is a pretty interesting episode in the social anthropology of digital systems (if that’s a thing). The CUI was the first, and let’s hope therefore also the worst, attempt at addressing some obvious problems i…
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…
…ick a link that takes them away from the page instead. But their intent to complete their initial task may still there, so they return later and complete it. That is, unless you think that people can be made to act against their will. So the immediate rate of abandonment is not a holistic measure of the effect because the impact of a Jail can be measured in a number of ways: Rate of simple abandonment from the checkout process i.e. what % started…
…n fail to point out that simple words and short sentences aren’t enough to write well for the web and mobile. You have to convey meaning efficiently. Fail to do that and the meaning will be lost by being ignored. And if the meaning is lost, there’s no point in having the copy there in the first place. So most guides to writing for the web are the wrong way around. This is a good this example from Bulb’s style guide: “Simplicity is the key to Bulb….
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.
…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 facet for “red”. There is only green, black and pink. At stage 4, the facet for “red” is removed from view. I assume they do in fact have red cups, j…
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 hardly anything to do with “replying”, these items are also half-duplicated elsewhere. Another design-free zone…
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 get an airing in the context in which they were intended. After all, I might be wrong in my comment, or misunderstood something and stand to…
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…
…oogle Calendar for work and personal use, and I’d love to take the time to write about all its flaws. It’s meeting page is not as bad as this, though. Jonathan Baker-Bates Agree I may have been too brutal in removing rather than demoting a lot of the noise. Also, I didn’t address the ribbon since that’s usability problem all of its own. And yes, there is such as a thing as “complex simplicity” in UX :-) One thing I missed from the original rant wa…
…logue, yesterday. See also the Jef Raskin adage, “Whenever you sit down to write a message, consider first whether the system can be designed such that the message isn’t necessary” And see also Bruce Tognazzini’s advocation “Always have an undo“, partly for this reason. There are of course other considerations in all this, because it’s UX after all. But as a principle I think it’s worth noting. The fewer the warning dialogue you permit to exist in…
…dlines, and with the encouragement of the then Technical Director, we were free to conduct a “grass roots” investigation into what journalists wanted. And with no specification beyond the functionality of the current system, were able to test and observe the impact of new features on a gradually increasing number journalists. In doing so, we incremented through a process of “continuous beta” – effectively using an informal RITE method. I invited a…
…f it’s bad, you hope it will improve. Aside from the digital equivalent of cloud seeding (buying more traffic) you don’t think you can actually change it though. Perhaps the unspoken but obvious reason for this is that quantitative measures cannot, without a lot of luck and deductive effort, tell you why something happened. Consequently, you are almost always better off consulting your own judgement about what might change the weather rather than…
…refore symmetrical around a target value. Obviously, the way the target is computed isn’t clear, but I’m trusting we can come up with a useful measure for that. An example might be a median for all articles in that category for the time period, perhaps weighted by something like page position or age. The bounds indicated could be computed from the target (eg a standard deviation away) or simply be to aid in spotting outliers (eg just marking out q…
…y talk – how we came to a way of responding to the results of quantitative testing without compromising our UX design ideals. “Urgency messaging” involves various forms of UI that essentially nag or bully the customer into buying by instilling a sense of urgency in them. “Only 2 rooms left!”, “4 people booked this hotel in the last hour!”, and so on. We weren’t the first to do this – we saw it on our rivals’ sites and so decided to copy them. Sure…
…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…
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…
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…
…ng to earn a crust. Were it not for some hard sell, a lot of the erstwhile free services (like Scribd.com) would simply no longer exit. Only the likes of Google can spin out a product on good will alone. At some point, the investors will want their pound of flesh, and, as the cliché has it, if you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product. I hope it’s not stooping too low into a patronising quagmire to say that I don’t expect a caree…
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…
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…
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:
…tively mature content to have a heads-up display make compelling sense. In comparison, things like gesture interfaces or speech recognition were essentially solutions needing problems. With Glass, the content and capabilities have come first – and that, if nothing else, is new. Anyone who has used Google Now will know where the basic Glass experience is going to start. A lot of the debate about whether Glass will take off is about privacy. The fac…
…ng rapidly in the US. I thought a lot about where I should go after hotels.com, including a return to competitive figure skating. But those who know me will understand my interest in news publishing, being as I am very interested in the role of media in the digital age. So this is also about the possible future of networks, information and culture. It’s about copyright and community, which things are close to my heart. Many of those things converg…
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…
…ill has to interpret the data as we do today (even if that data is pitiful compared to the coming tsunami). You have to be deeply familiar with the domain and what you understand about the people in it before you can find a new way of brokering insurance claims, let alone anything like having the next Facebook on your hands. Personally, I find that in the course of design, the more quantifiable data you have about something, the harder it is to ma…
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…
…bought about by single-tasking. This, closely followed by the absence of a file system. At a stroke, two of the most problematic issues in personal computing disappeared. No more having to worry about herding windows. With the iPod it was simply one screen at a time. This, I realised, is how most people actually want to use a desktop computer with a WIMP-based OS. Very, very occasionally you might have two documents open and arrange them in a way…
…gle’s A/B testing platform. However, anyone who has any understanding of research methods or scientific inquiry would not be satisfied by the conclusion she cites at all without corroboration of the latency finding. That is, you would need to test the same number of results with several different latency times to test whether latency causes lack of searching. Even then, you’d need to design a third test to make sure that the higher numbers of resu…
How about that for a boring title? But it’s something that bothers me quite regularly. Why is it that “asymmetric encryption” appears to be fundamentally beyond the understanding of anyone who doesn’t work directly with computers? It’s now become such an issue for me that I’ve written to my MP about it. But before you…
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.…
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…
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!!
…book when in fact they would have done so had they not been exposed to the urgency messages (“1 room left!” might cause some people to decide to leave the site for another that has more rooms left, for instance). A footnote: it’s suprisingly hard to explain to people how to come up with testable hypotheses. This leads to a lot of A/B testing being wasted on poorly stated aims, or simply made useless by not helping us get any closer to why somethin…
It seems like not too long ago, many IA/UX designers fought endless battles on mailing lists and Usenet about whether Visio was better than Freehand which was better than Omnigraffle which was better than Excel (no, really, I’ve seen people use Excel to express UI ideas). There was always some software or other that totally…
(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…
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…
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.
…used to help this problem. But Thota isn’t using them. So The Dealmap (in common with many other such mashups) shows you where a bunch of nearly anonymous things are relative to quite a lot of irrelevant data, through which you have to dig before you find anything of interest. Put that way, it’s a rather underwhelming proposition. Might there might be a better method of allowing people to discover simple things that have a fixed position in space…
…es where roles cannot specialise. In a typical start-up, there’s no money for somebody to think through the IA and perform useful customer research because it’s more important to think about what the icons should look like and whether or not they can float over the home screen on Android devices. Specialisation therefore gets a bad name as being “inefficient”. However, what I would like to see more evidence of is what “inefficient” means. I suspec…
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…
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…
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…
Agile development is a process (nay, a “culture”) that amongst other things has a number of revolutionist slogans attached to it. One of these is “fail fast” – sometimes boosted by the rejoinder “fail often”. My relationship with Agile has been a bumpy one, but I think I’m qualified to at least understand the basics…
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…
…e on specifics, technologists can advise on feasibility, and things just become more comfortable overall. None of this proves that collaboration is bad, I’m setting up a straw man here after all. But I do think it deserves examination. Of course, it’s next to impossible to compare the difference between one design technique and another in anything like a controlled manner. Nevertheless, my suspicion is that collaboration works best when you have a…
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…
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…
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…
…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 noticed, but I’ve not done much research into it), he suggests a two-stage button instead. Of course, we’d really need to use a prototype to get a firm idea, but I’m really not sure that something as subtle as a two-stage button in the context of a hand-held device will work very…
…t arrogance? Laziness? Or simply lack of education? I don’t know. Jonathan Compromise extends to not being able to communicate the design to those that may need to know about it before its implemented. It also extends to not having the ability to test or iterate on the design, and it extends to not knowing that a technical limitation exists. So I agree with you when you characterise design as compromise. There are many reasons for this, and I woul…
Not that I expect truth in advertising, but this is a nice example of an abuse of statistical graphics. In this case, a bar chart from Debenhams in Oxford Circus. You could be excused for thinking that Debanhams travel services are offering TWICE as many Euro for the same price as you’d get from their…
…hnology, like a chair or a bottle opener. In contrast, the iPad is a sleek computer. It’s also married to the utter abomination of iTunes, the experience of which you cannot avoid when thinking about the use of the device overall. Computers are of course wonderfully engaging things that provide infinite possibilities for everyone. Just ask Stephen Fry. They’re multi-faceted fun when they’re being good, but run out of power, depend on the net too m…
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…
…the conclusion made in the study is unsafe. Try it for yourself at http://www.prconline.com/education/tools/statsignificance/index.asp. Again, the study may in fact be accurate, but we have no way of knowing that until it’s supported by another study into the same thing (one with a bigger sample size, for one thing). With all due respect to the author, anyone can cite a research study to support a hypothesis. The trouble is, we’re not supposed to…
Ryan Carson is funny :-)
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…
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…
I admit it, I’m on Facebook. I know they’re selling my information. They probably have a whole team of people called something like “Personal Data Merchandising” thinking up new and ever more devious ways to trick me in to giving away just that little bit more. I sort of know I’ll regret it. A bit…
…indicated state?” not “How can I make the rest of the interactive universe comply to this device’s unnecessary shortcomings?” I’m pretty tolerant of Apple fanboys in general, but there are limits! The obvious solution to the lack of an indicated state on the iPhone and iPad is to introduce an indicator in the form of a scroll wheel. This would solve both the “on hover” problem and the occlusion problem. But Apple’s obsession with “simplicity” in t…
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…
With the launch of the Apple iPad just days away in the UK, I’ve been reading reviews of the device in the popular press (a typical article here). First let me state that I probably will never buy an iPad unless I’m forced to do so. But one good thing it’s done already is apparently…
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…
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.…
…cs take up so much space, it’s hard to display any other information. – No comparative data is visible. I spent a lot on home improvements last month, but nothing the month before that. Without comparative data being shown, dashboards are mostly useless, I’m afraid. On page two: a mockup of an alternative. I’ve spent about 30 mins on it, and I’d have lots of improvements in a couple of hours I’m sure. But this should give you a general idea. Note…
(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…
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…
…the VV was launched. So with hindsight – was the VV basically a problem in search of a solution? Compared to the alternative of knocking up a simple screen-by-screen prototype, what do these diagrams (18K PDF) really bring to anyone’s party? Even assuming the syntax was understood, at the level of granularity we’re dealing with, I think most stake holders could be forgiven for saying “OK, now show me the screen designs, please.” Developers, if the…
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…
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…
…tomatically good at explaining things. In this respect they are similar to tag clouds: got a lot of “key words”? Dude – you need a tag cloud! Need to show some geographically-related things? Fire up the Google Maps API! But like tag clouds, pie charts, and other things that seem to be obvious solutions to information visualisation, their use is often ill-considered. It’s easy to get them into a state where it’s completely unclear what their value…
…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 point of utter meaninglessness in a great many contexts. While I don’t think there was any researched intention behind their fir…
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…
…vidual conviction and practical experimentation. When attending detailed presentations of some or other “artefact” or “key method” in the formulation of a design, I often found myself muttering “Don’t forget to build the site!” On a related topic, I see there is a rather revealing first comment to Morville’s User Experience Treasure Map. That first comment (and surprisingly, his reply!) neatly sums up a rather obvious problem with the type of “del…
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…
…ers-Lee on the semantic web in 1999: “I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analysing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have to…
…have been painfully bad. Not just run-of-the-mill poor like Amazon or Buy.com, but wilfully, painfully, awful. While most sites merely ignore user experience, eBay positively buries it. With the new item page design, you have at last discovered the use of typography and colour to aid the presentation, and tabs to remove much of the initial distraction. You seem to have actually produced a design based on some kind of imagination of how your custo…
Here’s a fun, and quite interesting, post-launch “movie” of the changes made in the new delicious UI. You have to be fairly familiar with the old one to appreciate the differences, of course. Oddest thing I’ve noticed with the new design so far: in common with the old design, they seemed obsessed with limiting the…
In many cases, the design and content of a “home page” – the first page you see when you view a web site from its document root – owes its existence more to tradition than sense. Perhaps a home page speaks to the idea of a “cover” in the same way as a cover for…
…umbers supplemented by colours and perhaps one other indicator before it becomes saturated. Past a certain size, it also becomes hard to acquire the right dates on the grid with the mouse (and seldom are logical tab orders built in). Calendars aren’t good at being small. The final problem is that most calendars used in this way deal with months only, regardless of what the date range might typically be in the context of use. If you want to set a r…
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.
…rience that time forgot. Let me demonstrate with the following two links for the phrase “dead tree”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_tree http://www.britannica.com/search?query=dead+tree&ct=&searchSubmit.x=0&searchSubmit.y=0 I think you know what I’m sayin’….
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…
…to sort by money raised, you would need to click on that one of the two available sorts in that column. UPDATE: Here’s another tack on it (and with some graphic design bits to make it closer to the original). This time, by narrowing the rows, I was thinking it might make comparison easier. I would also show all candidates (maybe using in-page scrolling) if I could since sorting in reverse order is interesting too. I’d do the per-state view differ…
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…
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…
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…
…ssible: I would upload my public key to a key server (operated by myopenid.com, for example). This could of course be trusted in whatever mechanism is appropriate. When asking for data, sites would allow me to encrypt this to them (and perhaps together with any third parties) using this key plus a “modifier.” This modifier would make my key unique to them (ie I would be “spawning” many public keys). The encryption would be performed as part of the…
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…
…xtual information as a necessary user experience element of any successful tag cloud – in the collection of essays available from my blog here: http://www.joelamantia.com/blog/archives/cat_tag_clouds.html In this larger context, the role of the posting on usability best practices for tag clouds was to answer specific questions from the community, and set the stage for the necessary and ongoing discussion about how to construct tag clouds. The impo…
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…
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…
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.
…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 synopsis. Through the power of user-generated tags, I can also get clues about the film I would not otherwise obtain (eg lots of users tagging a film as “boring” or “left wing”). The del.icio.us tag cloud is a lesser example, but still good: The clo…
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…
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…
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…
…th have power in the right context. Chas Jonathan Perhaps I should define “tag cloud” as a list of tags where the relative visual size of each tag represents how many items of content have that tag. Chinwag doesn’t use tag clouds (at least not that I can see, please clarify if they do). It uses simple tag lists. My objection to the Yahoo! Tech use of the tag cloud is not a question of Berkshire vs Sussex as in your example. Maybe I didn’t explain…
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…
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.
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…
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…)
…e nature of the sites under test was that they are all predicated on quite complex search forms. Most, including our clients, have about ten to twelve pretty heterogeneous input fields (dates, ranges, etc. using dropdowns, checkboxes, and other things) that the user has the option to fill out to get the product they want to look at, and hopefully buy. One of the things that really stood out was how few people actually found what they wanted. In fa…
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 others, as per the methodology handed down by the great man. HP then ditched that design for a solidly features-based Endeca boilerplate a couple of years later. Oddly, the only thing Cooper says about the project in terms of results is that most users would have recommend the site to others. The lack of any reference to sales, or even traffic, speaks volumes to me about Cooper and their work for HP.
…(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 media in the States and Asia. This is surely a tectonic event. Hot on the heels of the merger barely a year ago of Framfab UK with Oyster Partners Ltd (the last of the UK’s bi…
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 card sorting in the context of “validating” an information architecture. I’d been thinking about this and the wider issue of whether related techniques might be better or worse, and under which circumstances.
…somebody does design it. Getting second-class treatment from their parent company in the States, probably. Lumbered with godawful in-house development (the site search! the forums!); tied up in knots by internal fiefdoms and big advertisers calling the shots – it’s all so obvious when you look at it. Poor bastards. Still, I’ve got some great info there, and even bought some of the products their advertisers are selling (although I transferred my…
I just spend my life specifying stuff. There’s just no time for anything else. Creativity, research, even design (always an afterthought…) is pretty much a covert activity when you’ve got the offshore crews to keep happy. But once in a while I feel I’ve made some headway somewhere, however microscopic.
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.
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 words “awful” in large red ink next to them. Two months later, and after much fruitless experiment, the same interaction he so abhorred has now been deployed. The belief that there’s a mythical “true way” promotes the idea that the one who puts their idea across with enough force wins. We’re no worse than cowboy builders or politicians. Oh, and Euro IA rejected my application to give a presentation. Bastards.
…registering your phone. To start managing your account please click ‘ok’.” So I do. But then I need to “add a new account” before I can see my balance, etc. Dear god! Did I not do that before? So I enter my phone number and it set it up. Time to completion: almost three hours. Nice. And now I’m done but I can’t be arsed to explore the may other links on the nav bar….
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.
…t. No further information on the service. Dead end. Next I Google and find www.parcelflight.co.uk. Looks good! Looks perfect, although the form on the home page (they’ve got the right idea!) assumes you’re sending to UK only. Never mind, click on the image next to it that says “Europe from £19.99” – this’ll do me! They’ve got my money already! Yes? No. It takes me to another form. Another form that also assumes I’m sending to the UK. But something…
…es had been “completed” for one half of the project, I opened the relevant file only to find 85 pages of expertly crafted pages almost completely unannotated. Just pictures of pages in space. At that point, I knew I had my work cut out. The 37 Signals position is also coloured by the the fact they’re consultants, and don’t have to deal with history, politics or even much economics. Reading many case studies in which they and people like Adaptive P…
Had an informal presentation today about folksonomies. A lot has been said about them recently, and I don’t think anyone’s thinking of them as really serious tools to rival more traditional systems or techniques, but some things that came to mind about the long term future started with that Killing Joke track.
The content mapping monster has started its onslaught, and mother I can feel the soil falling over my head.
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 content management software industry it’s not a problem that exists if you use a CMS. How could it, since such software “manages” content! And who indeed could possibly have a problem with managing content after they’d spent half a million bucks on the latest enterprise XML format-agnostic end-to-end solution?
Back at the grindstone this week with an interesting foray into card sorting, but this time using a web application while facilitating users (one to one) over conference calls. It’s thrown up some issues, and almost fallen apart at the seams at one point, but I think it’s going to be helpful in the next stage of working out the site’s taxonomy.
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 really terrible though.
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.
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, luckily). All we need now is some site map psychosis and the madness will be complete. Still – if the client’s paying, I’m all for it. And I’m sure it’s good for me to do this… somehow (grits teeth…).
…h, and that’s for sure. If I get time, I’ll post some examples by way of a comparison to show you what I mean. — some days later — Here’s an A/B comparison. It’s not a very good example since both are pretty ropey. They’re not my work (I’m to busy to think up examples, dammit!), but if I’d written the textual example I’d have done it differently. It’s in the right ball park though. Similarly with the flow diagram. They both say roughly the same th…
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 citations worth following.
Then there’s some page-scrolling stuff that’s good to counter the nay-sayers.
…ght mean that you’re simply designing the interface for the last person to test it. You have to keep your user testing quite firmly fixed on; taking suggestions for new features, etc. with a pinch of salt rather than diving in and implementing changes immediately. Hope to be able to post more about this if I get the chance. I know it’s not exactly cutting-edge, but real-world reports of the use of paper-prototyping in an agency/client context is s…
…system and is frustrated I can’t deliver the answer to that question. I wish I had the guts to ask them why they want to know that, but I’m taking their money, so I won’t. I am the Gutless Wonder of the web. ————– * I wish Microsoft had come up with a better name though. Phone calls after my mum got her new computer went something like: “Just save it in My Documents”, “Your documents, darling?” “No, My Documents… er. No, the place that’s called My…
…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 with the results in. 4. Then you get YET ANOTHER popup with the article in. 5. And when you try to scroll down through the article in that popup… you can’t. It’s fix…