Do web demos help people use interfaces?

Someone suggested to me recently that we should ship web demos with our products, as part of the user assistance offering. Since then, I've been trying to find evidence either for or against using web demos to help people understand interfaces, and I've come up with absolutely nothing.

There seem to be a couple of ways that web demos are used:

• to show a product to potential customers, particularly if the product is not yet available. Madcap Flare and AuthorIT are a couple I've recently watched.
• in an e-learning context

My gut reaction is that web demos are not likely to be particularly useful for providing interface and system assistance. We know that e-learning is a very different usability challenge from task-based interfaces (I saw this convincing presentation (pdf), by Florence Dujardin, on this subject at the Tekom conference last autumn), and while marketing people might think it's a great idea to ship marketing information with the product, users generally disagree.

We also know that users generally try and discover how things work by experimenting in the interface, and then resort to other sources of information when they get stuck. This implies we should (a) have more self-revealing interfaces, and (b) provide contextual assistance at the point of use.

When they do try and access assistance, they generally have very low tolerance for contextual information – they want to jump straight to their answer, and frequently scan text rather than reading it. This implies that we need to concentrate on providing and highlighting answers to common questions.

So how do web demos fit into this? It seems to me that people need to make a (relatively) big investment in learning about your interface to find them useful. Most people don't care about your interface – they care about getting this report done so they can go home, or getting the answer they need to impress their boss. Maybe in some marginal cases, they want to sit down and be guided through a demonstration/illustration of some complex tasks, but I'm not convinced it's a very compelling need.

What I would love is to find some real facts on this, rather than what I have now – mildly informed opinion. If anyone could point me in the right direction, I'd appreciate it.

Presentations are not reading material

The PowerPoint presentation is an endemic part of corporate culture in the Western (and, as far as I know, Eastern) world.

I probably see ten presentations a week, and if you're like me, you'll see about the same. Oddly enough, of those presentations, I probably see the speaker about twice. And of those speakers I do see, I remember nothing of what they said.

So, you say, we've all got problems. What does this have to do with user experience, with interaction design, with information architecture? Because it's a great example of how easy it is to get into a rut of:

• using the same technological solution over and over again
• trying to make one interface fit two (or more) purposes
• not adjusting structure and layout to address your audience
• always using bullet points (I'm kidding here...)

Presentations are often misused as reference material for people who couldn't attend a meeting, or as something to look back on afterwards. This is not what a presentation is for. A presentation is for you to clearly communicate something, in person, to people who are watching you speak.

Reference material for people who couldn't attend a meeting (this is the other eight presentations I see each week) should be proper reference material – a textual summary of the points perhaps, and a paragraph on the general principle or suggestion. The number of presentations I read and think, "This is great reference material" is precisely none.

For people who can attend the meeting, don't give them half-baked reference material. We've all seen these slides a million times – bullet point, bullet point, nested bullet point, bullet point. Do you have a great experience with these presentations? Do you listen to what the speaker actually says, or do you attempt to read the slide?

And why are we using PowerPoint? Not that there's anything wrong with PowerPoint, but has the presenter thought about whether this is the best way to get her message across, or has she just fallen back on a technological solution she knows?

This is why it's relevant to user experience. Most presenters haven't considered their audience: what their audience want to get out of it; what information they want their audience to access. They've provided one PowerPoint interface to fit two completely different needs, and neither of their user groups is going to be happy. They haven't considered all the methods that might be available to help them communicate most effectively, but have instead implemented a technical solution they know they can deliver.

PowerPoint presentations needn't be bad, but because the audience (aka user) is disregarded, and the presenter (aka designer/developer) doesn't have clear vision, they mostly are.

A mini-book PDF on Really Bad PowerPoint, by Seth Godin

An excellent post on Garr Reynolds' Presentation Zen blog, comparing recent presentations by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates

Something we should all do more often

Vista Help – Can Microsoft see the future?

Microsoft are providing a new sort of Help for Vista. Not just for Windows (a la MS Help 2, the current Help engine for Microsoft programs) but for everybody (a la HTML Help 1.x, the current Help engine for most others).

Now, unlike HTML Help, and WinHelp before it, Vista Help will allow application developers to integrate their help with that of Windows, Microsoft programs, and indeed every other application on the PC. All of the help for the system will be accessed through a single (undockable) pane, at the right of the screen. "Allow" might not be the right word here: "force" might be better.

Vista Help will be based on MAML (Microsoft Assistance Markup Language), an XML-based language that uses pre-defined schemas to describe various types of content – FAQ, concept, glossary, and so on – and that will separate content from presentation, to allow consistency across applications.

It will also provide support for active content: the help system will be able to communicate with the PC and provide help that's relevant to your system state (do you have a printer connected? are you a local administrator?).

Additionally, it has built-in support for partial and pushed updates, so you can get some updated user assistance without needing to replace your whole help system, and as a user you don't need to know anything about it.

So is Microsoft's vision right here? They say that they have worked intensively with the Help-authoring community to provide what authors want, and I have no reason to disbelieve them. From speaking to other authors over the past few months though, I'm not sure that they've come up with answer.

• Do users want all their help (for Word, PhotoShop, Norton AntiVirus, Freeware text editor, ADSL modem, etc ...) to be in one single pane? Will this make it easier for them to find what they want?
• As an information developer, is it desirable to target content at MAML if you ever want to use the content for anything else? Is there a need for a proprietary format here?
• Are Microsoft really capable of mapping every possible document format in their schemas? Can developers and authors not be trusted to understand the structure of their information better than Microsoft?
• Are the new features (active content, and so on) compelling enough to encourage developers to switch to Vista Help?

The way I've phrased this is all quite negative, but the truth is that I don't know. I'm dubious about whether lumping all the help together – without allowing individual software development teams to decide if that is desirable or not – is going to do more good than harm. I'm unconvinced on the benefits of MAML, of the restricted schemas, and of the USP of Vista Help, but as nobody has seen it yet (and MS are keeping pretty schtum) it's really too early to comment.

The rigid structure that seems to underlie Vista Help does concern me though – there's a lot of "Microsoft decides", which experience tells me is likely to cause difficulty and frustration sooner rather than later.

I guess the biggest disappointment is that this was an opportunity to do something really great and push the whole sphere of user assistance onto another plane, and it doesn't seem to have been taken. In my view, user assistance should be moving ever more in the direction of providing guidance at the point of need, through dynamic embedded help, and I don't see how Vista Help fits into this picture.

I've heard people be negative about Vista Help, and I've heard them be guarded. I haven't heard anyone be enthusiastic yet. I'd love to know what people think, hope, and fear.

It's surprisingly hard to find information on Vista Help, but here are some links I know of – if you know of more, I'd like to hear about those too.

An introduction to 'Longhorn' Help, by Tony Self
Microsoft's introduction to Vista Help (still called Longhorn here)
Microsoft Assistance Platform blog
A post on the CherryLeaf blog, with a brief description of Vista Help, and a screenshot

Do you want to do something? Concentrating on users' goals

I've heard and seen a couple of things over the past few weeks about visual design. About visual design being more important to experience than usability.

The first thing was a fascinating talk I attended at a meeting of UPA North at Manchester University back in November. The talk was given by Alistair Sutcliffe, leader of the HCI group at the university. The talk explained how a number of studies had been done to try and understand how people's reactions to visual design (use of colour, design elements, interactivity, and so on) affect their perceptions of the interfaces.

The studies covered a number of different types of interface – airline websites, teaching sites, university sites. The goals differed from site to site – book a ticket, learn about the planets, choose a school for an internship or a PhD.

The overall conclusion from all this (or at least how I took it, Prof. Sutcliffe would no doubt put it more accurately than I do) is that visual design can be a crucial differentiator between sites. In fact, the more usable sites, (by measuring errors, success in achieving goals, time taken) were perceived as less usable by the participants if their visual design was not as striking or unusual, or if they were less interactive.

(Caveats: Prof. Sutcliffe made it clear that there was more work to do in this area, and that some of the results may have been affected by the young demographic of his test participants. I in no way wish to misrepresent him. While you can quote me, don't quote him from what I've said above - I'm sure if you contact him he'll be happy to set me straight!)

The second thing was an article from November 2004 that I've only just seen. The article is called "The End of Usability Culture", by Dirk Knemeyer. It argues that a focus on usability – in a Jacob Nielsen kind of way – has made the web boring, lacking in creativity, and monochrome. Dirk wants exciting new designers to (cough) push the envelope. The example he gives in his article is bank websites: from a distance, they all look exactly the same.

Now, I think Prof. Sutcliffe's research is really interesting, and it got me thinking: thinking about how good, strong visual design could make a real difference to people's experience of interfaces. I enjoyed Dirk Knemeyer's article too, and I agree that designers should be bold enough to do what they think is right, not just design to "1001 rules for a home page". But I think in both cases there's a fundamental distinction:

• Does the user want to get something done, or are they here for fun?

Coz if they're here for fun, let's give them challenging design, let's give them interactivity, let's give them ways of customising their space and linking with other users. Let's give them mechanisms to explore to random places, controls that they can play with and be delighted by, animations and metaphors.

If they're here to pay their electricity bill, make it boring and plain and standard. Let them do what they want to do quickly, so they can go somewhere else to have fun. Let them not get any errors, let buttons do what they expect them to do, let them not have noticed one thing about the design the whole time they were there.

I'd love to see the test on airline websites done again. I'd like to see the users set the task of really buying ticket, all the way through to payment and arranging ticket delivery. I'd like them to do this boring task once a week for a couple of months. Then I'd like them to be asked – if you had to book an airline ticket every week for the rest of your life, which site would you use? I'll bet a hundred two pounds that they'll have got over the visual design by then, and will take the reliable, error-free, 'usable' website every time.

I'm definitely not saying that we should try to make things that are visually, aesthetically, unpleasant, but I am saying that we should focus our efforts on helping people achieve their goals, whatever those goals might be.

Quite a long, and very interesting, essay by Don Norman on how attractive things work better (which, to be clear, I'm only partly in agreement with).