User-centred design and information architecture

Barcodes, and optimism

2007-06-06T21:44:00.000+01:00

I just wanted to briefly update yesterday's entry. Firstly, I've been reading a lot today about Microsoft's Surface interface. There are a good number of interaction designers being pretty negative about it's usefulness, and Chris Bernard (one of Microsoft's User Experience Evangelists) responding to that negativity by suggesting that there should be a bit more vision, creativity, and enthusiasm.

I think they're both right—we need enthusiasm and openness to new ideas, and some blue sky thinking. We need people putting technology out there and encouraging people to create. But part of the job of a user experience/usability/interaction design professional is to look at how things might actually work in the real world. How people could use them. How technology could fit into their life. Why it solves a problem for humanity, or enhances the experience of life.

All this just made me think that I didn't want to appear too negative about Semipedia yesterday: I think the idea's interesting and exciting, and I want to think of, or find out about, a really great way to use it.

Chris Bernard's blog

Applying a use case to a technology

2007-06-05T21:39:00.000+01:00

I came across something today called Semipedia. This is a "community-driven project" that enables barcodes to be printed out and stuck to stuff. Someone can then come along with a barcode-reading enabled mobile phone, read the barcode, and be automatically forwarded to a mobile-ready web page related to it. Their website has lots of information on how this works.

Can you actually think of a useful application of it though? I tried. I really did. I love the idea of embedding links to information in the physical environment—it seems to have so many useful applications. I just can't think of one . . .

There are a few limitations to think about:

You need a barcode-reading mobile phone (maybe these will become ubiquitous)
You need a web-enabled mobile phone, and a live connection (maybe these will become ubiquitous too)
It costs money to download the data the barcode points you too (maybe the flat-rate data payment model will become pervasive, so there'll be no marginal cost)
You need web pages suitable for mobiles (maybe mobile will handle a greater range of pages; maybe more providers will produce mobile content)
Someone needs to have the motivation to produce barcodes and stick them to things (maybe there'll be a good commercial reason to do so)

These are the limitations that sprang to my mind. At the moment, enthusiasts are sticking them to tourist sites, famous buildings, neighbourhood shops, and so on. Other enthusiasts (presumably) and general early-adopting types are getting thrills out of how cool the technology is (and it is!).

But what's an actual real use case . . . . My problem with it, from reading what I've read, is that they don't have one—maybe they're hoping that by putting it out there, people will use their imagination and come up with some great application for it, and maybe they're right.

But if you already have a web-enabled mobile phone, and there's mobile content to look at, why do you need a barcode? You could just type a URL that someone stuck on the wall. And why would you even need a URL—unless you don't know where you are (possible).

I keep thinking of a warehousing or logistics environment: wouldn't it be neat to barcode everything automatically, and then warehouse staff could scan the item to see what it was, or how to pack it or, er . . something? There must be a use. There just must be. But the struggle I'm having here—and the issue that is not addressed at all on Semipedia's website, so far as I can see—is the "why". It's technology for technology's sake, in the way that much of Ajax and web 2.0 is. It's technology-centred not user-centred, and while there's definitely room for that free experimentation in the world, I really hope someone thinks of a good use case soon...

Thin-slicing – the rest of the world catches up!

2007-05-02T22:30:00.000+01:00

I just received the most recent Human Factors UI Design Newsletter. It's about thin-slicing, and how the perception of your user interface or application (but particularly websites, where people don't hang around) could be fixed in the first few moments.

I blogged about this just over a year ago – it's good to see the curve's only that far behind...;-)

Institution-focussed design - the follow up

2007-04-26T20:40:00.000+01:00

I've moved house. That's my excuse. Let's move on.

Last time I blogged, all those weeks ago, I'd had a rough couple of days interacting with a world based on insitutions, rather than on users.

Example 1 - A simple game of squash

I live near the borough of Stockport (south-east Manchester) and I fancied a game of squash. Now, in the UK, there are lots of public leisure centres where you can swim, play racquet sports, and so on. These are run by councils, so I went to the website of the council (http://www.stockport.gov.uk/) to find out where I go to play squash.

This will be easier to understand if you go along with me. Go on — open up Stockport's website. (Hopefuly, but the time you read this, they'll have fixed all this and you'll have to guess what it was once like. As of today, it's still the same).

Now - what would you click to find out the location of squash courts? I clicked "Leisure and Culture". And fantastic — "Stockport has an abundance of leisure and culture activities. Discover what's on offer from the categories below." — I'm a couple of clicks away from squash.

Right, what next — "Parks and recreation"? Or "Sports". Let's go with "Parks and recreation". Then "Where to Play". Going well! Next, choose from:

Bowling (No)
Skate parks (No)
Basketball (No)
Tennis courts (Close, but no)
Other sports (Let's try)

Other sports leads me to 5-a-side, Archery, Netball, Orienteering, and Petanque. Petanque! But, thankfully, this text is at the bottom: "If you cannot find what you are looking for please contact Parks and Recreation - see 'Related Contacts' located on the right." And if you click this? You get an address, phone number, and e-mail address. Sheesh! I only want to play squash!

To cut a long story short, I needed to click "Sports". And then "Health and Exercise". Erm . .no, sorry, "Sports Facilities". Here, finally, you get a list of leisure centres. But, crucially, no indication of whether you can play squash there. And why? Because "these premises are run and managed by Stockport Sport Trust for Stockport Council." And Stockport Sport Trust have their own website (http://www.sportinstockport.com/)!

But once you find there website it's easy to find where you can play squash, right? Alas, no. But it is possible.

The problems here are twofold:

Too many links that are ambiguous from the user's point of view but lead to different, discrete places, without enough context to choose between them.
The council have separated some activities from the main organisation, which has resulted in apparent inconsistencies (tennis vs. squash?). There may be good business reasons for doing so, but it is both confusing and inconsequential to users.

It seems to me that Stockport Council, in common with many organisations, have structured their website not according to user needs, but according to internal bureaucratic structures. This is not good enough.

Example 2 - Attending a hospital appointment

This was a really good information design, information architecture, and taxonomy case study. It would have been better if I didn't have to try and make it to the right place at the right time, but there you go.

I was invited to the "TDC" reception area, via the "Main Outpatients". Fair enough. This is what I do:

Arrive at the hospital site, with 20 minutes to go till my appointment
Look at a map near the site entrance to find "Main Outpatients"
Walk from my current location to Main Outpatients.
Follow the signs for "TDC".
Check-in for my appointment 10 minutes in advance.

But obviously, because I'm writing this, that's not what happened. Steps 1 and 2 go to plan. Unfortunately, "Main Outpatients" does not appear on the map. The areas of the hospital are usefully colour-coded, but I do not have any information about the colour of Main Outpatients.

Instead, I look for a large entrance and walk there. This turns out to be quite a long walk, all round the outside of the hospital. At A&E (our version of ER) I go in and ask. I'm told to enter at the next external door along. Entering there, I see an enormous signpost board. Neither Main Outpatients nor TDC appear on the board. I ask again, and am told to enter at a further external door.

Entering there, I follow signs for Main Outpatients. Hooray!! Then, the signs run out. So I ask at a desk. The man there confirms that I'm in Main Outpatients, but does not know the location of TDC. His colleague, when she becomes free, does, and directs me about 10 metres around the corner. There is never a sign saying "TDC".

I arrive, very annoyed and a little sweaty, five minutes late for my appointment.

Interestingly, the next appointment card I receive gives me instructions to follow the red line on the floor. Alas, although there was a red line at the time of my first appointment, re-laying of the floor has since occurred, removing the red line...

More interestingly, I spotted a sign behind the final enquiry desk that I'd visited. The hospital were undergoing a review of the names of departments — acknowledging that the names used within the hospital did not always match the "official" names, and further that patients understanding of their conditions often matched neither, making it very difficult for them to find their way. I, in case you're wondering, was going for a consultation on wisdom teeth.

This example, to me, shares much with that of the council. Again, the structure of the organisation is dictating the user's experience. The naming of areas within the hospital suits the hospital and not the patients. And crucially, the names used in departments of the hospital do not match those used by the organisation as a whole — which is the probable cause of my appointment card giving instructions that were virtually impossible to follow.

A cause for optimism is that it's clear that this problem — which no doubt manifests itself in many ways — has been identified and is being addressed.

Conclusion

Organisations need to focus on what their users are trying to do, and the language they speak, not on internal departments and structures.

Frustration at the hand of institution-focussed design

2007-03-07T22:12:00.000Z

I've had a most annoying few days: first when trying to play squash, and then attempting to keep a hospital appointment. It all comes down to way-finding in the real world (discussed in the context of roads before) and the design of things being based on internal institutional constraints, rather than user needs.

Once I've calmed down just a little bit, I'll post in detail.....

Slaughtering the holy cow - greatness is not forever

2006-11-29T20:36:00.000Z

A couple of weeks ago, on World Usability Day, I met up with a couple of people in a Manchester pub to talk usability. Our consensus had been that going to the pub was definitely the right thing to do (is this the reason Silicon Valley didn't happen in northern England?) but to keep on message we each had to bring an example of bad design that we thought could be improved.

The first thing that popped into my head was Google. Something I use every day, and that generally makes me very happy, but that I've becoming more frustrated with in recent months. The primary reason for this is that Google lets you search the web, or it lets you search news, or it lets you search images. It even lets you search blogs and video.

My problem is that sometimes I want to search the web and images. Sometimes I'd like to search news and blogs, or perhaps news and video. I can't even find Google's own blog and video search engines without Googling them!

Also, I quite often want to do what Google consider advanced searches. Now, if I was a good geek I'd remember all the syntax to do this in the front page search box, but I'm not. I've only just nailed that it's "-" to exclude a word, not "NOT". And I'm fairly sure I don't use some of the advanced options that I might, because I need to remember they're there - the options aren't available for recall.

So, my solution is to keep the Google page nice and simple - indeed to enhance the simplicity of the page up at the business-end: the text box. But then to add options to search across different types of content directly on that front page.

I'd also like to bring some of the advanced options up to the front page - if I worked at Google, I'd find out what the most popular types of advanced searches were (perhaps they vary by location?) and put these on the front page. As I don't, I've just selected a few at random for the effect.

So, what do you reckon? Do you think this is an improvement?

(Click for a bigger version)

Navigating in the real world

2006-11-08T20:21:00.000Z

I've been thinking recently about road signs. The long winter evenings really do fly by...

Navigating your way through a city is a complicated problem. There are many thousands of potential routes, many things to find. As a user (or, you might call it, driver) you usually have an idea of where you want to get to, but you need help to choose the right path out of the hundreds available.

You pass through many decision points, and it's important that it's clear to see which one to take. If you take the wrong one by mistake you need further help to get you back on track. And if you get really lost, you need a clear indication of where you are so you can find your way to the correct route.

This all sounds kind of familiar doesn't it? Sometimes, when driving a unknown route (particularly in a new city) you get hopelessly lost. Sometimes though, the signs make it easy to find your way. All of which got me thinking - how do the people designing signed pathways through cities go about it? What's their methodology? How do they work out optimal paths, and make sure they're properly signed? What can information architects and web designers learn from them?

I haven't found out yet, but I'm going to carry on looking. If anyone can point me in the right direction, I'd be very grateful.

Build it, and they will come

2006-10-09T19:57:00.000+01:00

I'm part of a circle of friends with a strong interest in music. Just over a year ago, four of us happened to be sitting in a bar (the rather atmospheric Cord) bemoaning the fact that we didn't listen to much new music. Then someone piped up with the idea of forming a new music club, which turned out to be titled (with tongues-in-cheeks) Cutting Edge Club.

The premise of Cutting Edge Club is that these four friends nominate three songs every month, and those songs have to have been released in the past year. There are couple more rules, but that's the basic idea.

After just over a year, it's turned out to be a great personal success for us: we've listened to loads of music that we wouldn't have listened to, bought some great albums as a result, and had some great evenings chatting and generally navel-gazing.

"Great", you're probably thinking, "what a fascinating slice of your life. But where's the user experience?". The user experience is in social networking, of community-building, and user contributed content: simply Web 2.0.

We already have a thrown-together and not very well maintained website (http://www.cuttingedgeclub.com/), but we were thinking about how we could enable other people to have the fun we've had. And, more than that, how we can have more fun by listening to more music we haven't heard before, and maybe learning about people we don't know.

The answer, it seemed to us, was to build a platform for a community: a platform because we wouldn't provide anything except:

some rules
an easy way to get started
some help with communication

This is in the same vein as one of my ultimate favourite sites: Last.fm. And, thinking about some of what I've recently be reading from the 37Signals book "Getting Real", we don't even need to worry about scalabilty. I'm not convinced how sound that proposition is for a commercial enterprise, but for an organic hobby enterprise it probably makes sense to not worry about having 100,000 users until you've got 1,000.

So what's the point? Maybe all you have to do is build an ideologically well-structured, solid, useful platform that your users can develop themselves, and everything else will fall into place...

The separation of the design from implementation - the age of the designer cometh?

2006-08-01T21:25:00.000+01:00

I've been learning a (very little) bit about the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) of late. WPF, for those who don't know, is the new foundation for Windows UI application development in Vista, replacing Windows Forms.

Now the exciting bit of this, as I see it (and I could be utterly wrong) is that the design of interfaces will be in an XML-like language: Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML). This enables, theoretically at least, an interface to be designed completely independently of an implementation, and then that XAML interface design to be used by one or more implementations.

For non-coding designers, like myself, this offers the possibility to use tools like Microsoft Expression (which I've not had time to download and play around with yet) to effectively produce interfaces and leave the implementation details to programmers. This sits perfectly with my philosophy of designers being architects (considering how buildings work to support people, and making them a pleasure to use) and developers being civil engineers (making sure the materials are right, the building stands up, and the heating works).

This framework releases both designers to design and software engineers to engineer, and has the potential to save much duplicated effort, a lot of wasted time, and to produce more useful, better engineered products than before. Whether it will work like this is another thing, but it's an exciting thing to contemplate.

Going all Gliffy - diagramming online, portable, and free

2006-07-06T22:37:00.000+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I found out about a thing called Gliffy. Can't quite remember where, otherwise I'd happily give them credit.

Gliffy is an online diagramming tool, in the style of Visio. Obviously it has nowhere near the feature set (and some quite annoying quirks - inability to set defaults, and no distribute option being top if my list) and it's not quite as reactive. But, and it's a big but, it's:

Free
Web-based
Easy to use

So, if like me, you use a number of different computers in different locations and getting things done quickly is sometimes more important than getting them perfect, I heartily recommend you roll on by and check it out.

Lost in the World Cup

2006-06-21T15:44:00.000+01:00

My online presence has diminished greatly over the last 12 days: this blog is not alone. It's all down to the festival of football™ that I am powerless to resist. Saudi Arabia vs. Tunisia was alright, believe me....

I do have some things to post though and will be back soon: the days of the designer cometh.

Are all your users right-handed? Or is it just you?

2006-05-11T18:39:00.000+01:00

I was reading an article on the BBC's website (again), about the new controller for Nintendo's forthcoming Wii console. It's being demoed at the E3 games expo in Los Angeles, and it seems like a real breakthrough in interaction.

There are two controllers: one for each hand. One of the controllers is long and thin, one round and curvy. The examples of the games on show at the Expo include a tennis game, a golf game, and a couple of shooting games. It sounds great for tennis: there's an avatar on the screen, and you swing your long thin controller as if it's a tennis racquet and your avatar hits the ball. This is so much more like playing tennis than playing with a normal controller - great innovative stuff.

The shooting game is apparently a bit more difficult to get used to, as you shoot with the long thing controller and use the curvy one to move around. The interesting thing though, is that throughout the article it's described that you hold the long thing controller in your right hand and the curvy one in your left hand. So you play tennis with your right hand, and you shoot your gun with your right hand.

The question is: can you switch hands? The Wikipedia article doesn't mention explicitly which hand you should use, but all the pictures show the long thin controller held in the right hand. This blog suggests right-handers only.

I hope you can use this controller in both hands: it's a really exciting development. I don't see why you wouldn't be able to switch hands, but if you can't then 10% of the population are going to be pretty disappointed (and 50% of chimpanzees). As a left-hander, I have my fingers crossed....

And the lesson to be learnt? Same old lesson: know your users. Think about who they are, what their characteristics are, and what they want to do.

If only I had a pistol . . why are you letting your users do things they're not allowed to do?

2006-04-18T19:03:00.000+01:00

I heard about a man in Colorado who shot his laptop because it kept crashing on him. This story, which is a couple of years old now, illustrates just how annoying computers can be.

My view is that computers should avoid being frustrating wherever possible. Or, rather, that designers and programmers should do everything they can to make their devices and software work for the user.

I've just had a very frustrating experience. It's frustrated me on a number of levels:

It's told me I've done something wrong, even though it could have stopped me from doing it.
It doesn't give me any assistance to solve the problem.
The only way I can tell if I've solved the problem is to keep on submitting the data, and be told over and over that I've done the same thing wrong.

This is the technological equivalent of someone pointing their finger at you and laughing. It's unforgivable. And what makes it worse is that it's the fault of one of my all time favourite organisations, and web sites, the BBC.

Here's what happened to me, after I'd written a well-balanced, witty, and dignified comment to a story on the 'drought' currently being suffered by the UK.

So why did you let me type 501 characters? Why not stop me at 500? Or, if you don't want to do that, why not tell me how many characters I've typed so far? Or if you don't want to do that, why not tell me, once you've rejected the message as too long, how many characters I did type?

My only option, as far as I can see, is either to delete the message bit by bit and keep on trying to submit it, or to manually count all the characters in the message. This is nuts, it's crazy, and it's the most infuriating piece of interaction design I've come across for a good little while.

Now, if only I had a pistol....

Is you interface or website already lost in the first blink?

2006-04-07T17:50:00.000+01:00

I've recently been reading a fascinating book. It's by Malcolm Gladwell, and it's called Blink.

The thrust of the book, if I've understood it correctly, is that your subconscious makes decisions very quickly, all by itself. This is absolutely vital for our survival - you couldn't for instance, make a rational decision about whether to step out of the way of a speeding car.

Your subconscious makes these decisions based on a number if things, including the experience you've had before (so if you learn about something for years you're likely to make better intuitive decisions), and things that have just happened to you (if you do an exercise with lots of 'polite' triggers, you'll be more polite straight afterwards). And, as people we can't even explain the decisions we've taken: we'll make up explanations that aren't, in fact, even true.

Now this is an interesting book in its own right, but it also got me thinking about how people's instinctive responses to interfaces and other interactive devices might affect what they think of them and how they use them. It took me back to the presentation I saw by Alastair Sutcliffe, described in an earlier post, that went into the ways in which people's views on aesthetics informed their decisions on how usable they thought products were.

The question I asked myself was: have users intuitively made decisions (right or wrong) about an interactive product before they start to use it?

'Blink' suggests that these first impressions can be very long-lasting and difficult to overturn. So how could an experiment be devised to test whether your products can be made more or less usable purely by manipulating the blink?

Perhaps you could show users a one or two second snapshot of a site and ask them to rate it, and then go through a normal usability test and ask them to rate it again. Would there be any correlation between these two ratings? Could that correlation be explained another way?

Perhaps you could perform this exact same experiment again, but this time switch the sites that the real usability test is performed on, so that the site you see for the snapshot is not the site that you do the test on. If there was still a correlation between the two ratings.....

I don't know. Maybe there's a much better experiment than this that could be devised (and, better, actually perform). But even as an idea to lodge in your mind, the idea that the first few moments of a users interaction could be fundamental to the rest of their experience is an interesting one.

Failing to meet your users' expectations – a case study

2006-02-27T22:07:00.000Z

Oh, dear. Updated at least once per week, it says in the header, and there's been no update for nearly a month. My only excuse, really, is that I don't think I have any users yet..;-)

I've started a further education course recently (and yes, I was thinking of using that as an excuse too). The course is an Open University course on Interaction Design, which I'm taking to formalise some of the experience I have, to broaden my theoretical knowledge, and hopefully learn some practical things I can use day-to-day too. It's based around the book "Interaction Design - beyond human-computer interaction", by Preece, Rogers, and Sharp (there's a good website accompanying this book at www.id-book.com).

One thing that was mentioned pretty briefly, and that really caught my interest, was in the section about why its important to involve users. Why is it important to involve users? The reason that probably jumps to your mind – and the one that jumped to mine – is that only by involving users do you really understand what they want and need, and how they think. However, two other reasons are introduced in the book:

expectation management
ownership

In short, the first of these is that by involving users they understand what it is they're going to get, and aren't disappointed by high expectations that aren't met. By involving them, they also gain an idea of what they can and can't do with the product before it actually goes live. This is linked to ownership: by feeling that they have been listened to and involved in the development, your users are more likely to feel that it's not something foisted upon them, but something they can be actively proud of. Note the interesting correlation, by the way, to the discussion on the change curve.

So (if I actually had any users) I would have done a poor job at this. I say that there will be an update every week, and then there is isn't. If I'd said there would be an update every month, would my users be delighted now? They'd probably be happier than they are religously searching for their nugget of wisdom once a week and finding nothing. So Jakob's advice (point seven) on telling people how often you'll be posting only really works if you keep it up.

I very much hope normal service will be resumed . . and I'm sure you all do to.

Do web demos help people use interfaces?

2006-01-27T15:54:00.000Z

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

2006-01-19T21:06:00.000Z

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?

2006-01-12T18:32:00.000Z

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

2006-01-04T19:29:00.000Z

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).

Ease of use (pt 2) – the role of interaction design in managing change

2005-12-28T19:46:00.000Z

Wow, some title eh? Quite pleased with myself - sounds more like an academic paper than a blog post. Jakob says the microcontent's important though, so I'll let it stand.

A couple of weeks ago I was driving back to Manchester from London with a friend of mine who's an IT management consultant. He works for the public sector (national and local government organisations) and one of the things he mentioned was the "change curve".

The change curve theory says that people (and organisations) go through a number of different stages when a change is introduced - shock/denial -> depression/anger -> hope/acceptance -> commitment/ownership. From his point of view, the important thing is to be aware of these stages, and put in place measures to minimise the depth of the curve (sometimes called the "valley of despair", apparently).

This got me thinking about how the perceived ease-of-use of new software systems could impact on this. More specifically, how when large new systems are being implemented, a system with a greater perceived ease-of-use could help to shallow the curve and speed participants through to stages three and four (acceptance and ownership) more quickly.

My follow-on thought from this was – in these situations, should perceived ease-of-use be given a higher priority than overall usability metrics? That is, could it actually be more efficient and effective overall for the organisation to have a smoother implementation of the new system, at the expense of efficiency and effectiveness of the software in isolation from its organisational context.

I don't know the answer to this – I guess some studies would need to be done (and I don't see then - please point them out to me if you know where they are), and a cost-benefit analysis done on a case-by-case basis.

I'd be interested to know what others think.

The change curve and organizational change

No scuffed shoes – Get what you know right

2005-12-20T18:57:00.000Z

When you're selling something, or promoting yourself somehow, I think it's pretty obvious that you should take special care to make sure that you present well.

For instance, if your company sells doors then it's a no-brainer that the door to your showroom should be of the best quality, well-fitted, and so on. If you sell shoes, your staff shouldn't be wearing old, scuffed brogues (unless that's the type you sell).

I received an e-mail from Userfocus the other day though, inviting me to a seminar on web usability. The seminar sounds great, and I receive the e-mails because I've signed up for them on Userfocus's well put-together and informative website.

I sounded so good that I clicked the link in the e-mail, for Brochure and more information (link working exactly as in the e-mail). So then I tried the other link, for Booking form. For the record, both of these links fail to work (due to a '>' being appended to the link in the e-mail, I think), and instead go to Userfocus's default error page.

For me, this is the usability equivalent of scuffed shoes.

This whole episode seemed particularly relevant to me as I had just read David Hawdale's post on companies spending money on Google advertising, getting people to their site, then not being able to deliver what their advert suggested. This is poor user (and in this case, customer) experience.

It also reminded me of a technical communications manager I talked to, who recounted his amazement at how few of the CVs (resumes) he received used proper styles, and were instead a hodge-podge of in-line Word formatting. In this case, your CV says enough about you before a word is even read.

Whatever you get wrong when you're selling your product or yourself, don't make a mess of your own profession. I'll accept spelling mistakes from a butcher, and a web editor who can't joint a chicken, but not the other way round.

David Hawdale's post on real availability not matching the advertising
A working link (as of today) to Userfocus's web usability seminar

Apologies for the interruption in service

2005-12-18T17:17:00.000Z

I've missed my schedule for posting this last week. This is for two reasons:

I've just had my broadband installed, and I've been working on getting my main website up and running.
It's Christmas, and parties are all over the place.

There'll be another, proper, post in a couple of days....

The ease of the common – "docking" toolbars

2005-12-06T17:17:00.000Z

I had an interesting experience the other day with, of all things, a toolbar.

I was using Adobe Framemaker - a publishing application I use quite a lot during my normal working day. I kind of knocked my mouse and clicked at the same time, and suddenly my editing toolbar (copy, paste, yadda yadda) was floating around instead of comfortably glued to the menu.

So, obviously, I tried to dock it. Gripping the top of the palleted toolbar and dragging into the corners, over the other toolbar: slowly, quickly, in little circles . . . Then I tried docking it somewhere else: the bottom, the top, the right-hand side. Anywhere so long as it wasn't drifting around in the middle of the page. No joy.

After about five minutes of this, I even resorted to the help. "Docking", I searched for. Nada. "Dock". Zilch. So I asked my colleagues – all experienced Framemaker users. One of them had had this happen before, but didn't know how to fix it. He'd given up – his toolbar was now floating. He suggested looking in the help . . .

So, does Framemaker have a crazy feature where you can un-dock a toolbar and then never re-dock it? Nope. It has a perfectly sensible system, and it's right in front of your eyes.

It has a button.

(c) 2002 Adobe

A button on the toolbar (second one along, if you haven't spotted it yet) that un-docks the toolbar, and a button on the pallet toolbar that re-docks it. And they call it "Vertical/Horizontal QuickAccess Bar", not docking.

And what did this tell me? That our current knowledge and ideas about the world are crucial in how we can learn and recall an interaction design. Docking is neither more "intuitive" (see my rant on that word) nor less. Docking is certainly more versatile, in that it has the potential to support many more locations for a toolbar, and it reduces button clutter. But having a button on the toolbar is pretty obvious isn't it?

The fact that it took me the best part of ten minutes constant effort, a couple of stabs at a help file (where I was using the "wrong" word, because that's what I'm familiar with), and two colleagues' efforts, tells us that it's not pretty obvious - how users understand their world is fundamental to successful design.

If a button was the best solution by far, and if you didn't have any casual users, you should probably still go for the button. In all other circumstances, you've got to do what everyone else does.

Jakob Neilsen on following convention on websites
Jared Spool on taking into account users' current knowledge before you start (this is very relevant - Framemaker is not a particularly modern product: was the docking concept firmly entrenched when they made this decision?)

Ease of use – to the detriment of user experience?

2005-11-29T17:19:00.000Z

User experience is, according to Wikipedia, "used to describe the overall experience and satisfaction a user has when using a product or system". I think this is a fairly decent definition, and will be the one I use for the purposes of this post.

Usability is, according a definition derived from Nigel Bevan,"the effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction with which specified users can achieve specified goals in a particular environment."

These two thing clearly overlap: a product or service with great usability is likely to translate into a good user experience. But what of sub-optimal outcomes – products or services that do not achieve perfect usability (that is, every product and service ever produced)? What are the trade-offs between usability/user experience, and ease-of-use?

The question can be more clearly phrased using an example. Imagine a complex software product, providing computational capabilities that no comparable software product can achieve. The managers of the company producing this product need to provide an update to keep ahead of their competitors. They have limited resources. Should they:

(a) apply all their resources to enhancing the algorithms to provide better results, or
(b) apply some of their resources to enhancing the algorithms and some to making the product quicker and easier to use

Easy, right? (b)? I guess that's what many people would say. Making a complicated, difficult, unwieldy product will increase support costs, put some people off buying the software, make the documentation more difficult and expensive to write, and so on. All of this is true. It's also true that if the developers think with more of a user-focus at the outset, then the product will be better to use without any additional resource.

But still, from a user experience point of view, (a) might be better than (b). It all depends on your user. If your users are all (or mostly) demanding better computational results over all others, then their user experience – their overall experience and satisfaction when using the product – is likely to be better with the more functional product than with a slightly less functional product that they can learn and use faster. Of course, if they can't get the results that the product is capable of, their user experience will be poor whatever.

The conclusion of this, I think, is that "satisfaction" is the key word in both the definitions. Something cannot be usable unless it satisfies the needs of its users, and neither can it provide a good user experience. And in order to provide satisfaction, we must "know our users". A product that's nasty to use will depress and upset most user experience professionals, but on a given day it may still be the best experience we can deliver.

User Experience definition
A paper by Nigel Bevan (discussing how usability can be approached from a quality perspective, but discussing how user satisfaction can be considered, measured, and tested)

User testing - is it worth it, and should we tell anyone if it's not?

2005-11-22T17:19:00.000Z

I was sent an interesting article today, written in 1998 by Jacobsen, Hertzum, and John. It's hardly brand new, but it addresses something that doesn't seem to be addressed often elsewhere.

Their thesis, based on an experiment they carried out, is that the number of evaluators you have of the evidence collected from a user test is (at least) as important as the number of users. That is, more evaluators will find many more issues from exactly the same evidence, and the way they classify the issues they find is very varied. Evaluating, they suggest, is a very subjective process.

Taking into account other evidence that calls into question the classic '5 users = 80% of issues' equation (one study found issues being reported at the same rate at the 16th user), is user testing a valid, cost-effective thing to be doing? Will we really gain wisdom this way? And, if not, what are the consequences of telling those decision-makers not sold on usability that the most high-profile method is dogged with difficulty?

From looking at the evidence, it seems to me that there a few factors still supporting user testing:

Nielsen's quote that "The most striking truth . . . is that zero users give zero insights."
Most of the problems reported are down to loose definitions.
Evidence still suggests that properly organised and controlled user testing yields great results.

So the challenge seems to be:

define the study properly
choose your users carefully
brief your evaluators comprehensively (and use more than 1)

If we do these things, I think user testing still has a central important role to play in improving user experience.

Jacobsen, Hertzum, and John's paper
Jakob Nielsen on 5 users
CHI 2003, a panel discussion on the number-of-users problem

Intuitive - a word much abused?

2005-11-15T13:02:00.000Z

'Intuitive' is a word you hear a lot. Sometimes it's users telling you that they think something is, or isn't, intuitive, sometimes it's people on the fringes of usability endeavours suggesting ways that interfaces could work more intuitively.

More often than I can believe, it's skilled and experienced usability professionals.

It is, in many ways, a holy grail to produce 'intuitive' interfaces and experiences - that is, interfaces that require no reasoning or learning through observation. Whether there is, or ever can be, an 'intuitive' interface is a point for discussion.

This is not merely semantics though - it is not merely that the word is used without proper reference to its meaning that I object to. It is that it gives the impression that interfaces, and interaction in general, can be designed in such a way as not to require:

Learning
Reasoning

This is problematic in that it leads designers to overlook the need to understand people's mental models - the things they've already learnt during their lives, the way they make sense of the world.

It is through understanding how people's minds work that we can best work towards 'intuitive' interfaces. And people's minds work differently across education groups, skill sets, cultures, experience, and so on. By using the word intuitive, we overlook the need to understand our users, and mistakenly assume that an interface is, or is not, intuitive.

I therefore suggest that the word is hereby banned from use in a user experience context, and that, instead, professionals describe what they actually mean.

Who's with me?

A couple of interesting links on this:

http://www.uie.com/articles/design_intuitive/
http://www.usabilityfirst.com/glossary/term_444.txl
http://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html

Welcome

2005-11-15T00:52:00.000Z

Welcome to my blog.

This site will contain information (and, most probably, links to information) relevant to the fields of user-centred design and information architecture.

It'll be based on the things I'm working on (as a usability lead in technical communications) and things I'm thinking about (as a 'normal' guy, interested in how we use things and access information).

It won't be the most authoritative source on the web, by any means, but it might just link to some really great stuff.

I also hope to get into some interesting discussions with folks a bit brighter than my self too....