Tag: ux

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to best address users from other cultures, and as she spends a few months working in India, some of my good friend Ali’s posts have been particularly thought-provoking.

Fantasy versus emotional marketing: The core of U.S. marketing – whether for a product or a mission – is trying to make something more emotional to “tug at the heart strings” and make you act (or buy)… But in India, some argue that people are consistently surrounded by emotion (or reality) such that escape is more attractive. One person told me that you only need to look at the movie industry to see this: Slumdog Millionaire was not as acclaimed in India as it was in the U.S., for example, as compared to the dramatic, dancing, singing Bollywood style of film.

It’s easy to think that users will all more or less act like Americans, but when your product is used in a different cultural context, is it still doing its job as well?

If you use an auto-complete or type-ahead-find feature in your input boxes, you should be considering accents. This has a nice overview and some sample code.

A very thorough guide to the new styleguide the BBC is using online, covering not only the results, but a bit of the process too. Jealous? I am.

Kontra, in a scathing review of Google’s strategy in Buzz:

Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice-president for search and user experience, says 60-80% of Google’s products may eventually fail. Unfortunately, the few that survive are neither all that inspiring nor market leaders. What Google lacks is not infrastructure, engineers, money, time or even great ideas. It’s the ability to delight users. What Google is missing, in other words, is strategic design.

I’ve been noticing similar things the last year or two, and seldom have I seen or heard much that would contradict it. Read the whole post. It’s spot-on.

The single most important skill a product manager/designer/guy/girl can have…

Borne from a hackathon project, Facebook’s engineering team is now throwing their PHP through their new HipHop framework, which effectively transforms the easy-to-write PHP they’ve always used into much faster C++.

This is pretty huge for a site like Facebook — it allows for the productivity of writing in a scripting language (PHP may not be quite as productive as Ruby or Python, but it’s miles better than Java), with the speed of a compiled language.

After all, for a site that relies on users viewing many dozens of pages per day, largely while procrastinating, speed is user experience priority number one.

Fantastic article on fidelity in interface design:

The trick is to figure out which details help users identify the UI element, and which details distract from its intended meaning. Some details help users figure out what they’re looking at and how they can interact with it; other details distract from the idea you’re trying to convey. They turn your interface element from a concept into a specific thing. Thus, if an interface element is too distinct from its real-life counterpart, it becomes too hard to recognize. On the other hand, if it is too realistic, people are unable to figure out that you’re trying to communicate an idea, and what idea that might be.

Phil Gyford:

For some time I’ve been meaning to test my small collection of PDA/smartphone gadgets to see which of their methods of input was quickest. The iPhone’s software keyboard? The Newton’s handwriting recognition? Palm’s Graffiti? With the possible imminent arrival of a tablet from Apple that will save the world, it seemed a good time to get round to the test.

John Siracusa looks at his reviews of the OS X preview releases and the first 10.0 release.

What’s most amazing is how gracefully things seem to have improved in those ten years. The old screenshots now look dated and sometimes downright ridiculous, and Siracusa’s evaluations were nothing short of dire in the beginning, but it’s slowly and steadily become the clear market leader.

One of the best things about Apple is their willingness to put something out that might be a bit of a reach, and then to go back and iterate and fill in the gaps. They pay a boatload of attention to making it a great experience in the first place, but they are always willing to acknowledge that improvements can be both subtle and major.

Dave McClure:

If investors don’t have operational backgrounds in design, development, or marketing from proven consumer internet companies, you probably don’t want their money.

Agreed.

Christina Wodtke on why she’s over wireframes:

I haven’t heard much lately about why wireframes are so awesome. I know they are incredibly useful as a thinking tool. I can’t work through an idea without getting out a pencil and scribbling out some wireframes on a pad of paper. I’m not sure they are good as a communicating tool.

The article itself has a reasonably articulated argument, but the discussion is probably more valuable.

Wireframes are just a tool, and all tools can be used inappropriately just as easily as they can be used well. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say that in certain situations, wireframes aren’t particularly valuable, and Christina may exist in one of them. I think most folks, however, find themselves in scenarios where there remains a legitimate need for the wireframe, both as a thought aid and as a communication tool.

The case also highlights the distinction between understanding and listening to customers. “Adrià’s idea is that if you listen to customers, what they tell you they want will be based on something they already know,” Norton observes. “If I like a good steak, you can serve that to me, and I’ll enjoy it. But it will never be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. To create those experiences, you almost can’t listen to the customer.”

Don’t take this the wrong way — Adrià most certainly pays a lot of attention to his customers. It’s at the core of what he does. But what he doesn’t do is listen to their input, he instead works to understand their needs and desires, and creates his own experience to satiate them.

You can listen to customer feedback all you want, and it might give you an okay product. It’s when you understand your customers and forge your own pathway based on that understanding that can lead to something really special.

There’s been an ongoing spat against Malcolm Gladwell by the scientific community:

To try my hand at Gladwell’s technique: Conventional wisdom suggests that if getting Gladwell’s level of popular traction means sacrificing aspects of both science and journalism, it might be better to have no Malcolm Gladwells at all.

Gladwell is great at communicating fairly complicated issues to normal people by simplifying, and it’s led to an incredible level of popularity for him. In the course of doing that, sometimes things can be over-simplified, much to the chagrin of the archetype scientist.

We often have the same issues on the web. The web is a complicated place, and there are lots of moving pieces, most which a given client has no chance of understanding. So clients often understand and rely on the simplest of rules, many of which simply aren’t sturdy enough to rely on. See Jakob Nielsen.

Seth Godin:

Put aside your need for a step-by-step manual and instead realize that analogies are your best friend. By the time there is a case study in your specific industry, it’s going to be way too late for you to catch up.

If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard a client ask who else in their space has used a specific design solution…

Ev Williams:

The larger point, though, is that this feature should make Twitter a more powerful system for helping people find out what’s happening now that they care about.

A good explanation behind a new feature that will quickly affect millions of people, especially important since the new retweet mechanism has a little quirks worth understanding.

Jakum Linowski has a pretty snifty system for annotating sketches to consider states and various sorts of interactions.

A little late to this, but the guys at Steepster, a tea review site, have a fantastic post about how they overhauled their ratings system:

It turns out that the average rating for products on sites with 5-star scales is around 4.3. To us, this says that we need to dive deeper — zoom in to a level where it’s clear what the difference is between a really great tea and the best tea you’ve ever had.

There’s a lot of great thinking here. Rating scales are like identity systems in apps — easy to overlook them, but it can have a huge impact on the final product.

When you give to someone via Kiva, you’re not actually giving directly to them. It’s more symbolic:

Thus, the direct person-to-person connection Kiva offered was in fact an illusion. Kiva’s lenders were actually backstopping microfinance institutions, and since Kiva and other online giving and lending models pride themselves on their transparency, Mr. Roodman and others suggested it might better explain what its lenders’ money — about $100 million over four years — was really doing.

Kiva does some really great work. This just goes to show that there’s a fine line between simplifying for marketing’s sake and misrepresenting a product. The former can be incredibly important, while the latter can lead to a major backlash, even if the end results are genuinely good, as they are with Kiva.

Dustin Curtis:

A FEW MONTHS AGO, I wrote an article expressing my displeasure with American Airlines‘ hideous online presence. I also spent some time mocking up a redesigned version of their website. To my surprise, the head of user experience at AA.com emailed me an amazing response describing some of the design problems faced in large corporations. You should read my original article here and the response from Mr. X here. An hour after I posted the response, American Airlines fired Mr. X.

One one hand, he violated his NDA, which is generally a bad thing and sometimes worth termination. On the other hand, the fact that what he said was even covered by an NDA is a bit absurd. The biggest secret he might have revealed was forthcoming transparency into fares and sales policies — and that’s only a shocking announcement if you often fly AA.

In any event, the firing of this guy is sure to hurt AA more than his post could have.

A quick post I wrote for the Viget UX blog on five major identity schemes, how they’re used effectively, and how to go about working out a scheme for your product:

The key to choosing a system is balancing the needs for the contributor’s privacy against the skepticism of the consumers. In Yelp’s case, a pseudonymous identity system might lead some to think that many reviews of local restaurants are being posted by the restaurant staff itself. That might still be the case, but at least it’s discouraged by the emphasis on abstracted real names. In Facebook’s case, privacy in terms of identity isn’t really necessary for people who are supposed to know each other anyway. For a forum dealing with sensitive topics like disgruntled workers, relationships, or medical issues, anonymity might be crucial to creating a safe haven for people to share their thoughts.

It’s easy to overlook, and can be tough to change later…

Nick Kallen, one of the Twitter Engineers:

Human beings need to understand one another in terms of primordial intimacies because man has no other tools for understanding the solicitations of man. But if the size of the world no is on longer amenable to intimacy technologies, then mankind must invent information technologies that rehumanize the world. Thus the proliferation of social software on the web. The reification of the social graph in Friendster; the Facebook Newsfeed and the Twitter; and the Foursquare all serve this one purpose: to rehumanize an inhumane world.

From CXPartners:

We can offer three design tips to ensure content below the fold is seen.

Less is more – don’t be tempted to cram everything above the fold. Good use of whitespace and imagery encourages exploration.

Stark, horizontal lines discourage scrolling - this doesn’t mean stop using horizontal full width elements. Have a small amount of content just visible, poking up above the fold to encourage scrolling.

Avoid the use of in-page scroll bars - the browser scrollbar is an indicator of the amount of content on the page. iFrames and other elements with scroll bars in the page can break this convention and may lead to content not being seen.

Nate Eagle on the PBS Design blog:

There’s nothing terribly difficult about hitting cmd+click for me: I’ve got two able arms with able fingers attached to the hands that join them, but Twitter’s completely right that I always want its links to open in new windows and that I appreciate not having to think about it. Twitter’s my base, man: I want to have my place saved while your picture of your adorable bull-dog loads in another window.

The answer? Inconclusive, but I can identify with Nate’s indecision.

Interesting concept screen from Larva Labs:

Larva Labs proposes an intelligent home screen that creates a meaningful hierarchy out of a user’s information. Designed for an Android-based handset, our home screen is intended to appeal to Blackberry owners and people struggling with information overload

Tom Watson on the value of taking outlier cases into account:

Now these things on their own are valuable, but the collateral benefits are why you should do them. If you were designing a car, worrying about extra leg room might make you rethink the entire console. Making a design polished isn’t achieved by making it work for your mom or the average user. You end up with something average.

Most content creation tools (think WordPress, MT, Blogger) relegate content creation to a secondary page. Adam Mathes argues that this is bass-ackwards, complete with examples:

Twitter gets it right. This is why anyone - even confused celebrities who barely comprehend technology - can actually use this product. You show up, there’s a box at the top, you type in it, and it shows up below with other people’s stuff you can read.

If content creation is the primary action, it should be presented that way.

Amy Hoy on interface patterns and pattern libraries:

Consider creative writing, which is a much better parallel to interface design than architecture. When you write, you can do anything. You choose words, rhythms and structure to communicate your ideas, not just what you say. You still need to hold up a coherent thread, and help the reader to follow along, just like with a good interface design. But you have, as it were, endless possibilities when you face the blank page.

I think Amy’s spot-on here. Patterns are the fallback for interactions when you don’t have anything better, but shouldn’t be the initial go-to.

Even if you don’t actually use many of these yourself, you should understand how each of these suggestions work.

It includes mostly developer-centric suggestions, like CSS optimizations and caching methodologies, but also includes some of the more design- and UX-related strategies for making sites appear faster:

When designing your website or web app, keep in mind that users come to your site with a purpose. The faster (and easier) they can accomplish what they came to do, the better. If users encounter a lot of difficulty in getting to your content, they will leave your site for one that lets them accomplish their goals faster.

An interesting comparison of the details between the iPhone’s keyboard, and the Android keyboard, as implemented on the HTC Magic:

A virtual keyboard lives and dies by the details. It’s not that there’s a single feature which makes the iPhone’s virtual keyboard better than Android’s; it’s death by a thousand cuts. A number of small differences end up making a huge difference.5 Apple obviously spent a lot of time getting every little detail just right (well, except for the ducking dictionary), while Google decided to go ahead with what they had – which is usable, but no match for what the iPhone offers.

The 10% difference in physical screen size (while still being equal in terms of pixels) probably reduces performance by well more than 10%

Mike Rundle has a pretty great post outlining the common types of iPhone application interfaces, major apps that use each type, and the advantages/disadvantages of each.

Brent Simmons, developer of NetNewsWire, talks a little bit about the seemingly-easy feature requests:

“Oh, it’s easy, just a quick http call. I could write a script to do it in like 20 seconds.”

But of course it’s not as simple as just writing a quick script. It’s tempting to think that adding a feature like this is just about adding the functionality — but there’s a bunch more to it than that.

The difference between highly-functional software no one likes to use and highly-functional software everyone likes to use lies in the thought process Brent goes through to implement this pretty simple little feature.

This is why it’s more than possible to release too early.

The headline says most of it, but here are a few interesting things:

Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10 year license to Yahoo!’s core search technologies, and Microsoft will have the ability to integrate Yahoo! search technologies into its existing web search platforms;

Microsoft’s Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo! sites. Yahoo! will continue to use its technology and data in other areas of its business such as enhancing display advertising technology.

Yahoo! will innovate and “own” the user experience on Yahoo! properties, including the user experience for search, even though it will be powered by Microsoft technology.

Maybe this is genuinely a good thing for users, too.

NPR made a great video tour of their soon-to-be-launched redesign of npr.org. NPR News’ Scott Simon shows off the features of the new site as he’s seeing them for the first time himself.

As a result, the site comes across as being really simple and friendly to use. Good move by NPR’s web team.

Oliver Reichenstein at Information Architects Japan seems to define the UX field as the generalist discipline I have been advocating.

Can’t say I’m necessarily inclined to disagree, but many of the UX professionals have a skillset in alignment with information architecture, which is more design-focused. In order to truly be at the center of the process, the person negotiating these concerns needs a background in all of them.

Still, in the end, Oliver takes a pragmatic approach:

On the other side, whether you perceive a job as dull or fun largely depends on your character. Some people love organizing, others, like me, love to create chaos. Some people, for instance, actually hate to think, and that doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily stupid. The trick is to create teams where everyone does what they like most. Making work fun seems to be the same challenge as making different people work together.

If ever there were a candidate for John Gruber‘s semi-annual User Interface of the Week, this would be it.

Clearly, this interface is modeled after the terminal interface that clerks in the Virginia government use internally, and they tried to take the interface onto the web as directly as possible. They completely ignored the notion that the web is a different medium from a VT100 terminal.

In one respect, you’ve gotta be impressed: it had to be much harder for them to actually emulate the terminal UI on the front-end than it would have been to build a more web-appropriate UI, even if it’s just simple links. It makes me wonder if the web app actually just passes data to the terminal UI on the back-end, rather than actually working against a database directly.

This may be my favorite A List Apart article ever. Patrick Lynch presents a thoughtful, well-argued position on behalf of visual design on the web:

Recent design writing and interface research illustrate how visual design and user research can work together to create better user experiences on the web: experiences that balance the practicalities of navigation with aesthetic interfaces that delight the eye and brain. In short: there’s lots of evidence that beauty enhances usability.

There’s not a whole lot that’s incredibly new here, but Lynch’s argument — which includes conscious and sub-conscious cognitive processing and a discussion of the difference in role between classical (clean) and expressive (Comm. Arts) aesthetics — brings a lot together quite nicely.

Hopefully the non-visual designers reading this appreciated it as much as I did, and the visual designers didn’t stop reading three paragraphs in due to the relative lack of graphics and long paragraphs :)

John Gruber, in his overall write-up on the new C&P functionality on the iPhone, summarizes Apple’s philosophy when it comes to releasing these types of features:

That we had to wait two years for the iPhone’s text selection and pasteboard is a good example of one aspect of the Apple way: better nothing at all than something less than great. That’s not to say Apple never releases anything less than great, but they try not to. This is contrary to the philosophy of most other tech companies — and diametrically opposed to the philosophy of Microsoft. And it is very much what drives some people crazy about Apple — it’s simply incomprehensible to some people that it might be better to have no text selection/pasteboard implementation while waiting for a great one than to have a poor implementation in the interim.

I tend to agree with the Apple stance. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of the great, but do let greatness be the enemy of the good/fair/poor.

Jim Dalrymple:

The answer seems quite simple: AT&T is afraid of what will happen to its network once millions of iPhone users start sending MMS and connecting their computer to the network.

I remember back in like 2002 hearing a Verizon Wireless employee warn a potential customer that they’re likely to use more minutes than usual with Verizon, since the network was much better than CellularOne’s.

This is much the same thing. Once you’ve made a phone that makes features easy to use, people are likely to start using them.

Joshua Porter posts a good reminder about how important even the smallest copy can be:

Microcopy is small yet powerful copy. It’s fast, light, and deadly. It’s a short sentence, a phrase, a few words. A single word. It’s the small copy that has the biggest impact. Don’t judge it on its size…judge it on its effectiveness.

It’s also some of the most fun copy to write, especially if your product has a really strong voice.

Jim Ray posits that the new AIR-based New York Times Reader app is destined for failure because it seems too much like a newspaper for its own good.

The premise is that the Times Reader mimics a newspaper because that’s what they’ve heard customers want in their research:

But those are technical problems, the real sin of Times Reader is that it’s attempting to give readers what they say they want instead of what they actually need. Henry Ford is said to have quipped that if he asked his customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse. The Times has said that they’ve listened to readers and have delivered a newspaper-like reading experience on their computers, but it isn’t what they need to be building. Face it, if any New York Times’ reader could tell the Times what they needed, instead of what they wanted, they’d be running the company.

Classic case of misusing user research

It’s an old standard that body copy should have a line length shorter than 75 characters per line. But on the web, the acceptable number is higher. From a post I did today at Viget, I cited research that demonstrated that users can easily handle 95 characters per line or higher:

What is the new standard? Tough to say, but 100cpl seems to be within the range of feasibility. There may be a good opportunity for some new and more thorough research in this area that could offer some valuable new insight.

I suspect this is due to print being a largely-vertical medium, and the web (especially since widescreen became prevalent) is more and more horizontal.

Steven Frank has a ponder on the state of UI metaphors and the obsolescence of the desktop. He contends that the real innovation is happening on mobile devices, with fewer standard conventions:

The benefit of pinch-to-zoom over previous zooming methods is so immediately apparent that it justifies the learning curve. That the learning curve is extremely small also helps. I find it fascinating that a huge portion of iPhone usability training is done via the TV ads, pre-sale. They’re both marketing and instruction.

And back to the desktop:

And this seems to me to be the barrier to moving forward to any sort of next generation of computer interface, whatever it might be. Numerous projects (Squeak comes to mind) have put forth ideas as to how we might interact with data in the future. As amazingly revolutionary and beneficial as your new idea may be, you can’t escape this albatross of legacy data.

Filesystems may come, but good, new metaphors seem to be few.

Mr. Spool has a term to codify our need to disorient ourselves when we’ve been neck-deep in solving a problem:

To us, it looked like he was daydreaming. He’d just finished leaning all the raw materials against the wall, basically in the positions they’ll occupy once the project was completed. Then he stepped back and stared at them, with this quizzical expression on his face. Apparently, this was hunkering.

Hunkering takes a bunch of forms, but it’s not always stepping back for three or four minutes. For me, it sometimes requires stepping not just back, but away from the problem, and coming back a bit later. It’s a necessary part of my toolkit if I expect (or my client expects) a quality solution.

Another perspective from Kevin Fox, a former Senior UX Design Lead at Google:

Also please keep in mind that everyone has opinions on design, and that your UX professional has devoted years of their life to learning to separate their subjective opinions from their objective understanding about how the larger audience will interpret an interface. It’s not as demonstrable as code that passes unit-tests, but trust in it anyhow.

and to the users:

Google could easily increase their revenue in the short term with just a few poor decisions, but they don’t. This philosophy of ‘put the user first and the money will follow’ is so ingrained into the Google culture that many designers and engineers for whom this is their first corporate job don’t even realize that this is unusual, and that is awesome.

There are two sides to every story. Good to hear Fox’s.

A nice post by Dan Lockton about the opposite of promoting ideal behavior in an interface: preventing errors from happening in the first place.

It’s often the view on influencing user behaviour found in health & safety-related design, medical device design and manufacturing engineering (as poka-yoke): where, as far as possible, one really doesn’t want errors to occur at all (Shingo’s zero defects). Learning through trial-and-error exploration of the interface might be great for, say, Kai’s Power Tools, but a bad idea for a dialysis machine or the control room of a nuclear power station.

+1 for the design patters, +5 for the Kai’s Power Tools reference.

Userfly tracks mouse motion, keystrokes, and clicks of your users so you can piece together their experience and see where your design might be falling flat. This looks disgustingly impressive.

Chris Fahey explores the question of whether or not designers need to be technical in order to be successful in interactive design.

Instead, I think a firm grounding in a broad range of designed experiences far outweighs any need for hands-on experience in the deepest challenges of technology implementation.

I agree with Chris to an extent, but think that the ability to understand obstacles toward implementing a given design is the difference between the designer who creates great stuff, and the designer who creates great stuff that you can actually use.

I’ve never seen a designer get any worse after spending mental effort becoming familiar with the more technical side of the web.

Andrew Chen has a great post about a common thread for me, the misuse of user research:

Ultimately, quantitative metrics are just another piece of data that can be used to guide decision-making for product design - you have to combine this with all the other bits of information to get it right.

Just like there’s no single risk-assessment equation in finance, there’s no single driving factor toward successful interface design. While user testing and research is an important factor in any significant design project, conclusions that are principally based on user research are incomplete and underdeveloped.

On the web, the little things can make a big difference. Jared Spool helped a major e-commerce site (anyone know which?) evaluate their checkout process, and found that one button was standing in the way of — get this— $300 million dollars per year of revenue.

The challenge is being able to find those same issues when you’re a site that can’t spend money and hire someone like Jared Spool for weeks or months.

Jared Spool posts an interesting set of conclusions about how design teams work.

At Viget, we tend to focus on the latter three: genius design, activity-focused design, and user-focused design. Of course, unintended design probably happens in all projects to one extent or another. How those three types fit into the projects really depends on the needs, timeline, and budget of the project.

On my own, I hope most of it falls into the genius and activity-focused categories. I don’t really do user research to any real extent for personal projects, except for informal bits here or there, and it’s certainly all low/no-budget.

My friend Will Evans is still putting the finishing touches on his blog, but there’s some great stuff on here now, including open-sourced templates he uses for deliverables and a few great articles to boot.