Interaction

I bought this multi-functional clock from Muji which features a fantastic gravity-operated design. You simply rotate the device the “Feature”-way-up to activate that mode. As you can see, it’s currently on Calendar mode. I rotate clockwise to get to the “Alarm” mode.

Very simple operation. A “beep” signals that the mode has changed. The settings are done via two buttons, located behind the device.

It’s price? £6.80.

With batteries included.

It did, however, spell “calendar” wrongly. A “calender” apparently means something else.

boon :: Jan.27.2009 :: innovation, interaction design, usability :: No Comments »

Change has come to America… and to the Whitehouse website too. It’s been, er, Web 2.0ized. Clean, frugal lines, punchy and concise content, navigatable – I like it. And of course, it has a blog. If this was a branding exercise, it’d definitely be on the ball (or “spot on”, as the Brits like to say).

Interestingly, the “main” navigation isn’t along sidebars, but at the top menu bar and bottom footer – keeping the body fairly open for content – divided mostly into a 3-column layout or 2-column layout (with a right sidebar). Even content on the whitehouse blog is kept terse. The first post gets an average readability score of 11.3, which is slightly above what a teenager would be comfortable reading. Firefox showed up multiple RSS feeds, which was a bit confusing, but the blog does have an RSS feed.

Comments are closed for now, but it would be interesting to see how the site will evolve.

Accessibility could be improved, I guess. There’s a link for “Accessibility” in super tiny font at the bottom. This opens a page that explains the government’s stand on accessibility, but it doesn’t have the common characteristics of a page designed for accessibility (large fonts, condensed text).

Navigational fonts could be a little bigger, at the bottom.

boon :: Jan.20.2009 :: usability, websites :: No Comments »

I was at a UXCorner meeting last night, and it was organized by the kind folks at UXMedia. They had some interesting speakers come share their experiences about mobile user experience.

Mobile Design

One of the speakers, Anthony Ribot, gave some insightful bits about user experience from a mobile perspective. Maybe it’s the fact that I haven’t spent that much work on developing real-world mobile applications – but he’s right in saying it’s really competitive to be in this space.

“A single early failure = non-returning user”

… it said on one of his slides. That’s enough to put shivers down a lot of developer’s spines.

“data snacking”

was another term he mentioned, referring to a common european trend for users to log-in to check for new messages, posts, news, updates. “simple but repetitive”.

Another 2 tips for mobile developers/designers:

• miniaturization != mobilization
• design reward-based exploration (he mentions Opera Mini a lot here) – using convenient keys to allow for more direct access (hotkey-like, almost) to useful functionality (e.g. tree menu traversal)

The slides are here.

UX in London vs. US

I was chatting with Scott Weiss from Human Factors International, who was also one of the speakers, about his experience between the UK and US user experience industries – which one did he think was more “ahead of the game”. To my surprise, he seemed to think that UK has it together a little more than in the US. And I think he may have been referring to how tons of companies still aren’t very into this kind of stuff, not counting most of the major cities.

In fact, speaking to one of the folks from UXmedia, I didn’t realize that they’re not based in London, although they do a lot of work in the city. The Southampton-based agency is certainly getting more active in London, but I was humbly surprised to find so many small but great agencies doing this kind of stuff around the country.

2009 – a UX year?

This is one of three UX events that area already taking place the first month of the year. Can’t wait to see what’s in store for the rest!

boon :: Jan.10.2009 :: events, interaction design, mobile, usability :: No Comments »

Double-clicking on my item on the ‘download’ bar on Mozilla Firefox forced the download to ‘pause’. Why did it do that? What made it so obvious to include such a feature? Was it obvious to Firefox users that double-clicking on the status bar most likely implies the download to pause?

For me, this discovery came as an accident. I had no idea that I had activated the pause feature by accidentally double-clicking the item I was downloading. I didn’t intend to pause the downloading. In fact, I couldn’t think of any reason why anyone would want to pause a download… unless I knew that pausing a download would provide some benefits, which I can only assume are:

• I have very little space left so I have to pause the download, clear up and organize my hard disk, and then resume it again later
• My internet bandwidth is so slow that I want to prioritize my downloads
• My download just stalled, and I think that by pausing it, and resuming it – it will send network packets to the server to ‘remind’ it, so that it will hopefully resume my download

These assumptions aren’t commonly made by non-technical users. But then, this is an ubiquitous web browser – shouldn’t it appeal to non-technical people as well?

Also, notice how small the pause button and the delete buttons are? How accurate does your mouse pointer have to be? What if you have a really small monitor? What if you have a really dirty non-optical mouse? What if you’re using a touchpad?

And why is the pause button so close to the delete button? What if you accidentally hit the delete button instead of the pause? Firefox doesn’t ask you for confirmation – which may lead users to accidentally cancel a download, although there are many examples of annoying confirmation dialog boxes out there already.

Does it sound reasonable to make sure that users don’t cancel a download accidentally? How often does that happen? Would it better to have the download button placed in a different way?

I’m currently using Firefox 3.0.4, which is currently the latest version at this point I’m writing.

boon :: Dec.01.2008 :: interaction design, usability :: 1 Comment »

After the changes in Gmail a few days ago, I noticed a similar ad hoc behavior with YouTube today. And I meant ad hoc as in while I was using the website it was still using the old interface, and then after I clicked on a few pages, the layout changed instantly.

Witnessing an interface change before your eyes

The change is pretty evident – videos are now shown in wide-screen format and are noticably larger than before. It’s confirmed on the YouTube blog, and it may be that they are slowly rolling it out to certain people at a time since I only noticed the change a few minutes ago. I recall someone saying that Gmail themes had a same effect – some people noticed the new themes feature while others didn’t, and it was because Google was rolling them out to users in phases (presumably).

A more ‘immersive’ YouTube?

I actually like the wide-screen format and the larger view, because the videos do look and feel bigger. Despite its popularity and ubiquity, YouTube’s overall experience isn’t all that ‘immersive’ (Vimeo comes to mind). I think with the new format, it’s a step closer in that direction.

Judging from the comments from the blog post, not all users are happy with it, though. Some users prefer the screen to adapt to the original video size – which means some pages may look different than others. It’s important to note that YouTube doesn’t stretch uploaded videos, but pads the borders with black. This means that the majority of videos that use the 4:3 format will have black rectangles on the left and right.

Interestingly, though – the thumbnails are cropped to fit the whole area. So 4:3 videos will have the top and bottom parts clipped in the thumbnail (which sort of makes sense, since keeping the black rectangles might make it look ugly).

The clipping thing wasn’t very obvious to me as I was in the middle of trying to look for cooking videos. If my goal ultimately is to watch videos, a larger view of the video gives me more of what I want. I could care less about videos being cropped or ratios, unless it negatively impacted my viewing.

Introducing interface changes as a usability topic

This brings me back to the usability aspect of websites – this kind of change is a fairly straightforward one. Not much else has changed, but even then – having a wider, larger player has a dramatic impact on the way users experience the site.

Also, I don’t know if there were any formal studies done on the design of the new layout and screen. It almost seems as if this was a simple case of understanding what users want and trying to give users the kind of experience they prefer.

And often times, this is the case with websites, especially ones with any element of social networking. Users grow with the site. As initial users, who were novices at first, turn into regular/intermediate users – their goals also ‘evolve’. And thus, the site has to adapt to the changing needs of the community.

This is particularly difficult for any site that needs to appeal to a wide spectrum of users. Recent interfaces changes in Flickr (video in Flickr) and Facebook (major facelift) drew a lot of criticism as much as it did praise.

Who’s responsible?

Does this fall under the responsibility of interaction designers and usability practitioners, whose goal is to place users before all things, to address the often conflicting reactions of real users when faced with upgraded layouts and new features?

It would be interesting to see find out how the industry deals with this sort of ‘user politics’ when it comes to the increasingly ubiquitous use of technology.

boon :: Nov.28.2008 :: interaction design, usability, websites :: No Comments »

Create with Context did a study on iphone usability by “regular” users, new users, and non-users. There were some interesting things I observed from the presentation:

• touchscreen interfaces really benefit from good feedback and good button placement
• visual trims like shadows, bevels, icon quality and transparency can help communicate affordance
• smartphones can get overly complicated due to inconsistencies like modes
• iphones use good metaphors (natural-feel scrolling) but it can be implemented in a way that confuses people
• you just can’t assume anything about users, sometimes

Take a look at the presentation below:

boon :: Nov.26.2008 :: interaction design, mobile, usability :: No Comments »

Why?

Because they send your passwords to your email address, when you register on the site. This is despite the fact that if you forget your password, they can reset them and send you a new one to your email.

For a website to send passwords to your email upon registration is a dangerous thing because people typically re-use old passwords for website registration, so copies of their passwords on emails can be found in inboxes – and they typically only get there because of registration sites. I can’t think of any other way in which a password would get sent to an email, but you can help me here.

This is a good thing for identity thieves, bad for most other people.

I also don’t understand why new members to the Ergonomics Society aren’t automatically registered to the website and are sent an introductory email. I’ve had to register on the website separately. That’s just dumb.

boon :: Nov.17.2008 :: usability, websites :: No Comments »

Today is World Usability Day. I attended an event hosted by UPA at LBi, on Baker Street. The usual light refreshments were served, and the talks were interesting – on the topic on transportation. There was another event going on at System Concepts where talks addressed the topic of Global Positioning Systems, which had a more ergonomic slant.

In conjunction with the UPA event, Aquent launched a directory for User Experience practitioners. I picked up a copy and there were a lot of interesting articles contributed by UPA professionals and other practitioners. The topics seemed to be cover a lot of trends that have been impacting the usability industry lately, such as the poor economic situation, advancing mobile devices, and employable skills. There’s a lot of subjectivity with a lot of usability topics, but the articles are mostly relevant and useful, if not timely. You might be able to get a copy from Human Factors International, UPA, or Aquent as they were the main sponsors.

I couldn’t remember all the names of the speakers featured today. Scott Weiss from Human Factors International opened up the session with a brief introduction to the transportation topic by sharing his own gripes about the TfL website and how challenging it was from a usability perspective for him to get from his home to the UPA event. He made an interesting point that the exemplar bus service routes displayed prominently on bus stands should be reproduced on their online variants for the same visual clarity. It was meant to be lighthearted, but it caused a bit of stir in the crowd as it was only scratching at the surface of both the merits and the pitfalls of the complex government-linked organization and its services.

Nevertheless, it got us thinking about transportation.

The next speaker then got us thinking about online airline ticketing websites, and how that has fundamentally changed the way people travel. A bit of historical backdrop reveals how the early ticketing websites were a far cry from the large computers that were used in traditional ticketing systems – surfacing from three months’ worth of three guys hacking away at computers in a garage, and ended up being sold for millions of dollars. There were references to EasyJet’s online ticketing system, which led to the next talk about a prototype future ticketing system, presented by Peter Otto from Flow Interactive.

The exciting part about this “EasyJet 2.0″ system was about how it also deals with users’ questions of “I want to go somewhere but I’m not sure when” and “I’m not sure where I want to go” – rather than the buyer’s method of dealing with flight tickets. EasyJet 2.0 identifies pricing options for tickets on various dates in the year, giving users some idea of planning for a trip.

Also, for the case where users wasn’t sure where they wanted to go – they could browse major destinations from their home starting point, based on a specific budget. This was produced on a slick visual interface using charts and maps, that showed immediately which slots in the month were most cost-effective, and which places were best to visit at a certain price.

There’s an interactive page that shows how the whole thing works.

I’ll be attending the last UPA event for the year in a few weeks, hopefully.

boon :: Nov.13.2008 :: usability, websites :: No Comments »

I was attending a UPA talk yesterday, and although I came in toward the end of the session, managed to catch a glimpse of what was about to turn into a flame war about how companies aren’t really innovating to their fullest potential. The speaker also apparently implied that usability is becoming less effective a tool in making great innovation happen, to which some people clearly disagreed.

It’s interesting to note that Martyn Perks has mentioned these things before, in a similar way a few years ago, also at another UPA event, so it seems he’s making a name for himself on this.

I’m setting aside the obvious flame baits here, because innovation and usability can too often be defined in ways that mean lots of things depending on what you’re talking about. Maybe what Perks was referring to reads something along the lines of this research article, which evaluates how (occasionally rigorous or ’standardized’) usability work can hinder the creative progression that may be essential to produce effective innovation (whatever that innovation means).

I feel this comparison is partly pointless already, but I am summarizing my reasons as to why I feel this is so.

1. inevitably, all solutions are aimed at the long term and the wider good

Cast the net, aim for the greater good – let’s make both the usability and innovation folks happy. Let’s make them celebrate why they believe usability and innovation are so deeply connected to one another, it would be ridiculous to separate them – even if there are differences between the two.

2. don’t be afraid to use the P word

Politics are an obvious reason why we often do any innovating or usabilit-izing(?), or not. It may not have to be the case of the-bad-boss, since even small groups at peer level suffer from organizational behaviour influences. One case study I learnt this week revealed how a information architecture project failed because some people were afraid they would lose their jobs to an effectively redesigned website. This is one reason why I don’t think we’ll be seeing robots more than we’ll be seeing secretaries over the next 100 years (secretaries always do a better job).

3. many different people are good. many different people are bad.

Information architects. Brand strategists. Marketers. Usability testers. Users. Organizational psychologists. How many terms do we need for people who get paid to solve “new” problems for old and clueless people who can’t understand it anyway? And it seems that everyone has a specific trait, formed quite commonly by a shared interest in being really creative, solving real problems, and making real users happy. So why is there such an internal confusion? Let’s be nice to one another, since the future is inevitably ours since old people die anyway, and the clueless move on.

4. So what if the word usability and innovation has been overused?

Everyone knows what it sort of means, just work around it. We’ve beaten this to death.

I’ll do my best to attend the next and final UPA talk in London before 2009 comes around. Hopefully with less flame baits.

boon :: Nov.01.2008 :: innovation, usability :: No Comments »

We had a field trip to Serco Usability Labs today. We were hosted by Andrew Swartz, who was very friendly and helpful in talking to us about the company and giving us a brief overview of the lab and even getting us involved in some usability activities.

It was great that they brought out a whole table full of snacks – grapes, corn chips, mini pretzels, twinkies,… the works. We were sheepishly holding ourselves back while Andrew was talking us through the slides, but we had our fill during the minute break though.

We didn’t get to visit the offices, which were located upstairs. We hung around the reception area and were brought to one of the testing labs, which is quite a comfy room with a large TV screen and a computer inside. The place was set up well for observation, with a huge glass window-mirror to the observation room.

This lab was a lot more customer-facing than the BT lab I visited a few years back. I just remember walking through a series of store rooms in a building in Adastral Park, before I got to the nicely decorated BT usability labs. The Serco one was conveniently located just after the reception room past a set of doors.

Although we were there for over 2 hours, it didn’t feel all that long. I was surprised at how fast time passed, and it could’ve been the fault of the snacks but Andrew did a really good job of grabbing our interest and creating some good interactions in the room.

We got a feel of how it’s like to do a usability test when a few of us tried walking through introductions for users who come into the labs. I volunteered to facilitate one of the sessions with a ‘fake’ user, who was one of the Serco staff, and it went really well and we had good things to talk about. My classmates heard me say “this sucks” from the observation room, which is really funny. I felt like I was being observed more than playing the part of the observer (of the user).

One key thing that was repeated a lot was to avoid our tendency to help the user during the think-aloud process, which I thought was a valid point to make, because the user does seem like they need help a lot sometimes. But facilitation requires a kind of real-time observation and curiousity, and sort of being in two places at once – an observer as well as a host.

If this is a taste of what the usability industry is like, then I am sold. I absolutely love interacting with users and learning how they make use of systems, and being part of the process of providing solutions that can help both companies and users build better products.

boon :: Oct.28.2008 :: uclic, usability :: No Comments »